The Death of an Irish Tinker (14 page)

Having to pry his eyes from hers as he closed the door, Ward felt as if it were.

BY HALF PAST twelve in the afternoon Peter McGarr was ensconced in Ryan’s Pub not far from Garda headquarters in Phoenix Park. It was a handsome old bar made of mahogany and rosewood with tall Victorian mirrors and frosted glass in the doors of its several snugs.

The one McGarr chose was at the very back of the pub, and he positioned himself on a banquette where there was no possible mirrored view of him. Ordering three large whiskeys and three larger glasses of iced water, he waited as the popular pub filled up with a lunchtime crowd, loud talk, laughter, and scurrying barmen.

More than a few times the intricately paneled door swung open and a head appeared. But seeing McGarr and the other glasses on the table, each invariably muttered, “Sorry,” and departed.

At length an older woman peeked in and, seeing McGarr, entered. “Ah, so there yeh are, and in the usual company I see. Is it for me you bought one o’ them?”

McGarr shrugged. “All of them, if you like. As I remember, it’s what you drank the last time we met here.”

“All of a dozen years gone January and on the very same matter, it turns out.”

McGarr’s head came up. She had something for him. Pauline Honan was in charge of Administrative Services, and the last time they met it was to discuss how the Toddler could have obtained official Garda uniforms, badges, and even handguns. For the Bookends, whom he had just murdered.

“But I have me knittin’ to do this after’. Not like some. Johnny!” she called to a barman, who had only to see her to know what was wanted: a large pot of tea and a plate of salad sandwiches.

“What about you?” she asked.

McGarr flicked a finger at his glass. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not, silly man. Didn’t I predict you’d end up like this? All glass, no food—it’ll be the death of you yet.” She carried the pot of tea over to the table, then returned for the plate.

Pauline Honan was a thin, diminutive woman in her early sixties. With a round face, large brown eyes, and an aquiline nose, she looked not a little bit the way McGarr himself had before his own nose had been broken and canted off to the side. In fact, she and he had been an item, once upon a time some twenty years earlier, before McGarr had met his wife.

“So, how’s the child bride?” Like a slap, her eyes met McGarr’s once, hard, before angling off. She set down the tray and sat. “And now the child. It must be grand being a daddy.”

McGarr knew better than to reply.

Her age, which was ten years greater than his, had always been a sore point for her. Somehow she blamed him for the difference, as though they should have met or he should have been born earlier in life, and he could have made it happen.

Which was the problem between them. There always seemed to be something about him that she found wanting in an essential way and she could correct, according to her
agenda. McGarr had stopped seeing Pauline Honan when, one day over a quiet drink, he realized that she simply did not approve of him. He now reached for his glass.

As though having read his thoughts, she seemed to collapse against the cushions of the banquette. “Ah, Peter, I don’t mean to seem so bitter, here not seeing you for all this time. But it’s just every time I do, I’m reminded.”

Of how she had thrown her life away on him? Hardly. She was fully forty years old when he met her.

“Do we get this thing over with, over so I can enjoy me lunch?” “Now that you find me useful again after a dozen bloody years,” went unsaid.

And how to reply? McGarr held out his hand. When she took it, her body shook with a sob, and tears burst from her eyes.

McGarr moved closer and wrapped an arm around her. Pulling her close, he held her until she stopped crying.

The barman, passing to the kitchen, stopped. “Are yiz right?”

Well, they weren’t wrong.

“Pauline?”

“Thank you, Johnny.”

After a while she pushed herself away from McGarr and turned to a wall mirror. “Will you look at me?” She reached for a serviette. “Just a bitter old bitch, when what I wanted to say was different.”

McGarr poured her a cup of tea and added milk and two sugars. He placed the cup in front of her.

“You remembered.” But she reached instead for one of the whiskeys.

“Is it here I’m supposed to say, ‘I’ll never forget’?”

She waited a long moment, regarding him. Then: “I ought to get up and walk out.”

But she knew he had meant it, which was enough.

She blew her nose so violently and at such length that even the barman reappeared.

McGarr sought relief in his glass.

“Now—do we deal with Hannigan, yehr other bastard? And a
right
bastard, so. Look at this.” From her purse she removed some printouts.

“The computer with the search function only goes back seven years. But on every occasion—nine in all—that Hannigan was rung up by his ‘Uncle Bill,’ the voice calls himself, didn’t Hannigan bust some poor drugged-up divil and polish his reputation for clairvoyance.

“‘Not at-tall, not at-tall,’” she mimicked in an exaggerated Cork accent, “he’s only after saying to me yesterday when I congratulated him on the Raglan Road arrests, “‘’tis just plain, old, dogged police work, Pauline. I’m knackered from it, to tell you the truth. ’Bout ready to pack it in altogether.’ The gobshite.

“Now here’s what Uncle Bill had to say just before the Raglan Road bust.” She flipped to the last sheet and pointed to the transcription, which McGarr quickly read. “Odd, what? The voice is stranger still.”

Again she reached into her purse and pulled something out: a small tape recorder that she placed on the table. She picked up a glass and drank off a whiskey, before punching down the play button. “Sedative, don’t you know? For the ears. His
uncle
Bill! From the bleedin’ States no less.”

Said the voice,
“It’s your mother’s uncle Bill. I’m in a phone booth on a Callcard. Could you ring me back?”

And Hannigan,
“By all means, Uncle Bill. Good to hear your voice.”

“Do I give you the number?”

“No need, Bill b’y. Don’t I have it right here on me display?”

McGarr had to hear only two words to know who it was. “Desmond Bacon,” he said.

“The Toddler? Didn’t he just get shot in the laneway behind the house? It must have been slightly after. Not even an hour.”

McGarr nodded, pleased to learn somebody else read the dailies closely. And could think.

“And did you hear Hannigan’s happy, thievin’, treacherous reply? Could he have kissed Bacon’s arse right there and then, he would have. He should hang.” The recorded conversation was over; she punched off the machine. “Care to hear the earlier calls?”

McGarr shook his head; there was no need. “What about the number?”

“That the Toddler called from? Cell phone billed to a business on the quays that’s owned by another firm in the Liberties that has an address on the Isle of Jersey.”

With privacy laws more confidential than those of Switzerland, McGarr knew from other investigations.

“So, we have a dilemma,” Pauline Honan concluded, reaching for the last full glass. “There’s nothing in that conversation to incriminate Hannigan. Even if pressed to produce ‘Uncle Bill,’ he can always say he’s just a concerned private citizen who made Hannigan swear never to give up his name. And we both know Hannigan. He could retire and play the crusading but persecuted policeman right into the Dail. ‘Sure, Oi’ve busted too many drug dealers for the liking of’”—she swirled a hand—“‘Garda power brokers.’ That class of rot.

“But you know, I’ve given this some thought. There is something we
could
do. Hannigan, it seems, is a great one for the cell phone. Carries one with him wherever he goes. And his use of it? Shameless. He’s broadcasting most of the day.” Opening the sheaf of papers, she showed McGarr page after page of numbers called. “That’s just in one week.”

“Where’d you get that?”

Pauline Honan glanced up at McGarr; her smile was mirthless and predatory. “Where I could get his conversations were I of a mind. Easily and by meself on borrowed equipment. No risk, no worry.

“And you—let’s think of what you could do to like check and see if we’re right about this, and it
is
the Toddler who’s Uncle Bill. Done right, it might even make charges and tri
bunals and a court unnecessary. And punishment. I can imagine a scenario in which Hannigan could get the max, and you and I would know why.”

Turning to McGarr, she waited until their eyes met.

McGarr nodded.

“You’ll do that?”

He nodded again, and Pauline Honan’s hands jumped for his face, which she pulled toward her and kissed on the lips.

Releasing him, she blushed scarlet. “Now, leave me to my lunch. And I hope to see you again before I die. You’re a rare brave and foolish man.”

Hugh Ward and his son, Lugh, were bench-testing the four-stroke 2.5-cubic-inch Saito engine Ward had bought him for the Blériot biplane he had built when a knock came to the door of the studio. Leah looked in on them, and Lugh had to shut down the roaring engine so she could speak.

“Sorry to disturb you. This could be nothing. But didn’t I read a piece in
The Times
today about a house being raided in Ballsbridge owned by a woman named Waters?”

Ward stood up.

“I think she’s out front, wanting to pawn an ancient tore with sapphires and rubies. She has a provenance in her name that’s legitimate. I just got off the phone to England. It’s worth”—Leah hunched her shoulders—“maybe fifty thousand quid, I’d hazard. At least I know I could sell it for that quickly. Says she needs forty and will be back soon to pick it up.

“We settled on thirty by my personal check, and the balance in hundred-pound notes.” Leah raised a large money bag. “Knowing about the check means she’s dealt with us before, which is probably why she’s here.”

Sigal & Son was probably the only jeweler in Dublin who would deal with an item so valuable, Ward knew.

“But I can’t place her. And she’s a Traveler, I’m sure, in spite of the way she looks, which is…chic. I can tell by the way she haggled. The patter. Like she was selling
swag.” Meaning the sewing needles, cheap jewelry, and trinkets that Traveling women used to sell door to door to farm wives.

“You can see her on the television monitor in the kitchen.”

Looking down at the screen, Ward saw a woman of size standing at one of the counters out front. She had dark hair cut short and was dressed in a rather formal-looking costume, like something she might wear to an opening. And dark glasses.

Also, many Travelers did not trust banks and might typically possess some object of value that could be pawned in an emergency. Or sold outright.

“She have an accent?”

“British, but she’s Irish too. Or was.”

“Is there a way I could get out front before she leaves?”

“You mean, you’re going?” Lugh was plainly disappointed.

Ward pointed at the screen. “Yesterday evening that woman shot the biggest drug dealer in the country, who twelve years ago murdered her husband. It was self-defense, we think. Actually he was trying to kill her too, and he will again if he gets the chance. Best case?”

Now Lugh was plainly impressed; his eyes were fixed on the monitor.

“We follow her until the Toddler—that’s his name—tries again. Then we lift him and put him away for a long time.”

“But how will you know he’s trying to kill her until he actually makes the attempt?”

Ward shrugged. “If she were worried about her safety, shouldn’t she have already contacted the police?”

“But don’t Travelers fear the police?”

Ward nodded; it was true. And in Biddy Nevins’s case for good reason. “But she’s made her choice, and think of the benefit to society if we could put the drug dealer away.”

“So, you’ll do what—follow her?”

“If you’re game.”

Lugh swung his head to his father. “You’re jokin’ me.”

“Not if your mother agrees.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Leah said, her brow suddenly wrinkled. “Will it be dangerous?”

Ward shook his head. “Car work mainly. If I have to get out, Lugh can handle the radio.”

They waited while she plainly struggled with the decision. “Well, all right. I trust you two. But you take every care and caution, now, and get back here safely. And phone if you’ll be late.”

“Take your time with her,” Ward advised. “Count out the money slowly or something. My car is a few streets away, and we’ll want to set up a few others.”

Plainly over the moon at the prospect of being out with his father on an actual murder investigation, Lugh Sigal/ Ward led his father down through the building to the yard and car park. Then out through the gate onto the street.

MCGARR FOUND THE Toddler standing by a window in his private room in the Royal Dublin Hospital, staring down at the traffic along busy Baggot Street two floors below.

There were crutches under his arm, a plaster across the bridge of his swollen nose, and both eyes were blackened, making him look owlish and haunting. He was holding a cellular phone to his ear.

A dozen years had changed him otherwise as well, McGarr judged. Desmond Bacon looked older, balder, smaller in height, larger in girth than when he had ruled Coolock. And—could it be?—a bit frightened? Or was he just wary? Back to the wall, he had placed himself between a large oak armoire and the door, where he could scarcely be seen.

Catching sight of McGarr, he switched off the phone and slid the antenna back into the body. “There’s Chief Superintendent McGarr,” he said as though speaking to a third party. But softly. His lips were split both upper and lower. He looked back down into the street. “Fancy the irony of his coming to see me in the hospital. With me the victim.
Is it
attempted
murders he’s doing these days? Or the old ounce of prevention routine?”

The
hospital and
routine
were Americanisms that rather revealed Bacon’s history. Pity McGarr had discovered it only after the man had dispatched the Bookend’s that night at the top of Grafton Street. Not that knowing about Bacon’s U.S. Marine sniper/scout background would have mattered, given his alibi of having been shooting skeet with Corny Duggan, the now-vanished solicitor. And his prowess with a weapon.

McGarr made a show of looking at the door to the room. “I beg the Toddler’s pardon. I must have the wrong number altogether. Sorry to give your Todship a fright in your reported distress. I was looking for Uncle Bill. Or, rather, your mother’s uncle Bill.”

He watched as the Toddler’s slight smile muted.

“No, that’s not how it goes. How is it now? You tell me where I’m wrong. Let’s see. Ring-ring, ring-ring. ‘Hah-low.’ That’s Hannigan. Cheery fella, what? Always up for whatever’s on. I’d say he’s a man who can take instruction and the odd backhander. Or do you have him on retainer?

“Now, this is you. ‘It’s your mother’s uncle Bill. I’m in a phone booth on a Callcard. Could you ring me back?’ Here’s Hannigan. ‘By all means, Uncle Bill. Good to hear your voice.’ ‘Do I give you the number?’ ‘No need. Bill b’y. Don’t I have it right here on me display?’

“You were calling from your cell phone in the Rover where you were parked on Raglan Road outside Biddy Nevins’s house. Oh, pardon me. I shouldn’t have divulged that. There I go, giving everything away. Poor Hannigan. Could he soon be dead because of me?

“Or was it the same cell phone that’s in your hand: four-four-eight-nine-five-one-six? Did you just get off the phone with him? We’re to see each other this evening. Some scoops, a little chat. Trust me to be wired. Oh, but now you’ll tell him that. My, but I’m careless.”

Slowly, calmly, with learned patience, the Toddler turned his head and looked back down into the street, where the more immediate threat might just have appeared. He had been in crisis before, and he knew how to act. Hannigan would be dealt with in due time. It was the woman who was the continuing problem, as she had been now for a dozen years. He’d been watching her for longer than he should—while she tried to park an obviously new green Volvo she was obviously not used to.

Finally she just quit a foot from the curb and got out: dark glasses, what looked like a babushka tied under her chin, a big spray of flowers in her right hand, and the same purse she’d had over her shoulder the afternoon before in the alley. The one with the large-caliber revolver in it that must be a magnum of some kind. The Toddler had only been nicked, but the chunk it had taken from him was as if he’d been gored by a bull.

What had changed her from the timid, terrified, illiterate, Tinker junkie that she’d been when she was shooting his gear? he wondered as she waited for traffic to pass before crossing the street to the hospital entrance. The success she’d had in London? The money? In his experience, people with something to lose were more cautious, not less. But here she was: a big, comfortable-looking woman, graceful even in the way she carried herself, now tripping through the slow-moving traffic in a kind of disguise, with the flowers and gun to kill him.

Cop or no cop, it was time for him to leave. But when he turned his head, he found himself alone. Why? Because the cop was just dropping the dime on Hannigan, as was said in the States, and wanted him dead too. He had his own plan and had already put it in motion. Reaching for his bloodied jacket, he let the crutches drop from under his arms. They clattered to the floor.

It wasn’t as though he could not walk without them, but that it was painful, which was good. He had used pain before to keep himself alive, when the VC, enraged by his
long-range assassinations, had tried to hunt him down. Pain had kept him alert and alive. Now he’d use it again.

By the time the Toddler fitted his jacket over his hospital smock and got to the hall, sweat was beading his brow, and he felt vaguely nauseated. And defenseless. Not wanting to be charged with a weapons violation, he had shoved the Beretta down the sewer in front of the hospital, never imagining she would come for him here.

Anger, he knew, was bad. It blinded you, made you make mistakes, like the one in the alley that had landed him in this cockup. But the Toddler was angry now, all the more with the pain that was galling him. He’d make her pay in a way that would matter to her most—with the daughter first. “And then the whole fucking family,” he muttered, stumping down the hall. He’d wipe them out. “Every last lovely one.”

And his teeth were bloody ruined. Maybe that bothered him most, being something he’d never get back. Every time he spoke or took a sip of water, pain coursed through his cranium.

Biddy made straight for the reception desk, knowing he was still in the hospital. She had her own contacts, especially now that she’d returned to being Biddy Nevins, wife of Mickalou Maugham, who was still revered in the Traveling community. His music—on tapes and discs—was still played.

It hadn’t been hard finding the bastard since shot and bleeding, he’d had little choice but to get himself to a hospital nearby.

“I’ve flowers for Des Bacon,” she said in her best British accent.

The woman consulted a list before glancing up at her. “If you leave them here, I’ll see they’re taken to his room. He’s not allowed visitors.”

“Not even his sister? I’ve come all the way from London.”

The woman shook her head. “I’m sorry. Doctor’s orders. There’s nothing I can do. But I’ll see they’re delivered to his room.”

Biddy knew even then that she’d get at least part of what she wanted; she had not begged and survived all those years on the Dublin streets without learning her craft. “But can’t you just check? I’m next of kin. He has no wife, no children, no family but mother and me. Would it say that? Would it say no visitors apart from immediate family? Mother’s elderly and frail, and she’s worried sick. She made me promise to see him myself. Would the doctor be about? Might I have a word with him? Could you check and make certain. Please?”

Why not? she could almost hear the woman thinking.
Anything
to get rid of you.

The woman’s finger descended the patient list again, stopping at Bacon’s name and following it across the page to the number 117. She then referred to a clipboard that was thick with yellow copies of doctors’ orders. Pushing those back with the eraser of a pencil, she finally came to the instructions for patient Des Bacon. “No, I’m sorry. It says nothing here about next of—” She glanced up, but the tall woman with the sunglasses and scarf over her head was gone.

Biddy made for the stairs. Lifts took too long, and somebody might question her while she waited. Also, she had to dig the gun from her purse and conceal it in the paper wrap of the flowers. That was not easy, especially when she had to open the door onto the first floor.

After that it was two hands, and she felt her heart quicken at the prospect of finally settling with the bastard, of blowing him away right there in his bed. She’d fire the entire cylinder, reload, and fire again until she was stopped. And damn the consequences.

She’d tell the truth, all of it—about the gear and Mickalou and the others she knew he’d killed—every chance she got, and her people, the Travelers whose kids the son of a bitch
had preyed on, would make their voices heard. And at least good rough justice would be served. Whatever happened to her as Biddy Nevins or Beth Waters was unimportant. She could die even, happy.

She dropped the flowers as she entered the room, locked the pistol in both hands, pointed the barrel at the bed, then swept the room. “No!” she shouted. The fucker was gone. Utterly. No clothes, no shoes, no sign of him. Had he been watching? Had he seen her?

Biddy rushed over to the window and looked down into the street at her new car, the Volvo she bought with some of the money she’d got from pawning the torc. If he’d been here—she looked down at the crutches on the floor—he would have seen her. Spinning around, Biddy pulled the scarf off her head, wrapped it around the gun, and rushed back into the hall.

So, she’d come up the main stairs. Would he have taken the lift? It would have carried him right down to her. There had to be another way out.

“Nurse! Nurse!” she called to a woman in uniform walking up the hall. “I’m desperate, so. In a panic.” Now her voice was pure Tinker. “I’m after seein’ my da, who’s dyin’, and I’m like the black sheep o’ the family. They’re comin’ now.” She waved the scarf in the direction of the lift and the main stairs that were side by side. “And I’d rather not see them. Would there be another way out?”

The woman’s eyes swept Biddy, her nostrils flaring in contempt. A hand flicked out dismissively. “End of the hall, through the door, take a right.”

Biddy flew down the hall, thinking: He’s hurt, he must be limping, he dropped the crutches, his car was towed away by the police, and the “girlfriend,” who’s something like Cambodian—was out in the country where he was now getting the gear—and she did not drive. Biddy’d found out all that and more in Donabate last night, where she’d camped with some Traveler cousins who’d kept tabs on the Toddler. He had nearly destroyed their lives too with his dope.

I’ll never get this chance again, she kept telling herself, once he gets back to his place in Hacketstown, which was wired and guarded by dogs and like a fortress, one cousin had said. “Didn’t he put a bullet through me engine block when I tried to look in there with binos? Must’ve been a mile away. I didn’t even hear the shot.”

Lowering her shoulder, Biddy burst through the door, turned right, and took the stairs down two at a time, realizing—as she got to the ground floor—that she was following a small trail of blood, which gave her a thrill. The bastard was bleeding to death. It was his blood there at her feet.

Suddenly she was flooded with recollections of how the Toddler had sent some of his gearmen, as he called his stone-cold junkies, out to the dump in Ringsend where all the Traveler kids were camped and trying to live through the winter. Three that she knew of did not, because of the Toddler.

“Free dope for all. Weeks and weeks’ worth,” was the cry. “Sure, don’t all the rock stars shoot it? Ye’re not a man or a woman ’til yeh’ve tried. And come closer while I tell yeh: Get on it good, and you’ll lose the hunger.” At that time Biddy would try anything that was free and would rid her of the cramps she’d get when she had nothing in her stomach.

She became a woman fast: gang-raped by some friends of the gearmen when she was nodding off after her first injection, then living for years on heroin, sweets, and whatever money she could make turning tricks for old men in a quayside walk-up that the Toddler owned.

One dirty fucker knocked her out, then tied her facedown by the wrists and ankles to the four posts of the bed. She nearly died, hemorrhaging from the rectum. One of her friends was found floating in the Royal Canal, her body dumped there after her throat had been slashed during a snuff movie. The other two just died of the effects of little food, great cold, and bad gear.

And now here he was. The Toddler himself up ahead of her scarcely halfway down the alley—squat legs showing beneath the smock, flat-footed and gimpy, toddling toward Baggot Lane. Slow.

Biddy sprinted forward, wanting to catch him before he got to the end of the alley, eye to eye. It would be no good killing him from afar. She wanted him to know she was the one. She’d shoot him someplace foul—the cock, the balls. She’d shoot him up the hole, so he’d know how it had felt.

She was dizzy, heady, wild with her hatred of the man and the chance for the only revenge that mattered: a painful, ugly death. The pavement, the buildings, the cars passing at the end of the alley swam before her eyes. Bearing down on him and taller than he, Biddy raised herself up and, with the gun still wrapped in the scarf, slammed the butt down on his bald head.

But he didn’t go down right away. Staggering, he swung around in a piece and slammed his right leg into her stomach. It felt like the kick of a mule, and suddenly she was off her feet, on her back, the gun clattering over the cobblestones and bouncing into the wall.

Making for the weapon as well as he was able, the Toddler knew what it was even before he picked it up: a Dan Wesson .44 Magnum with an eight-inch barrel. He had one just like it back in his armory in Hacketstown, which he had concealed in a way that nobody would discover, the Cambodian mules who had built the magazine having died in defense of the secret.

Stumping painfully toward the revolver, the Toddler thought: Somebody in the cars that were stopped in the traffic at the end of the alley must have seen her attack him. He was obviously injured; he could pick up the piece, pretend to fall, and put a bullet through the side of her head, no problem. They were that close.

Maybe a few people would swear he’d been attacked by her, that he’d gone for the gun just to pick it up but had lost his footing and the gun had gone off. A firearms acci
dent, he—and some of the press, whom he could pay—would say. She having attacked him for the second time and provided the weapon.