The Death of an Irish Tinker (15 page)

Shiny and massive, it glistened against the dark cobblestones and sooty brick of the alley. But in reaching for the thing on the one leg, the other stretched stiff and bleeding, the Toddler lost his footing and fell heavily, his head striking the wall.

Hugh Ward had been surprised when he saw the Toddler appear in the alley. He had been following Biddy Nevins/ Beth Waters with his son, Lugh, now for several hours.

She had taken a taxi to a bank, then to an automobile dealer in Blackrock, where she bought a new Volvo, and finally she had driven here to the Royal Dublin.

Not finding a parking place, Ward had pulled his car up onto a footpath near the corner across the street where he could survey every exit of the hospital and still maintain radio contact with Murder Squad headquarters and the other surveillance cars that had been assigned the task of tailing the woman.

His first impulse was to follow her into the hospital, since he could think of only one reason why she had come here: to finish what she had attempted in the alley behind her house on Raglan Road. But he’d been told by Bresnahan that McGarr was presently in the Toddler’s room. Lowering the volume on the radio so Lugh and he could converse with some measure of privacy, Ward had settled back to wait.

Then suddenly there was McGarr, coming out of the main door of the hospital, and the Toddler with his nose bandaged and his eyes ringed with bruises was limping up the alley from the rear with Biddy behind him. Moving fast.

Before Ward could react even, she was upon the man. The Toddler’s kick was savage and practiced, like something out of a kung fu movie. As the Toddler began hobbling toward the gun, Ward threw open the door and hopped
out of the car, saying to Lugh, “Stay here. If there’s shooting, get down on the floor.”

“Be careful, please,” Lugh blurted out, scarcely able to speak the words. He was excited—no, astounded actually—to be along with his father on such an adventure involving a known criminal and the woman whose husband the man had murdered, Hugh had told him. And now her attacking him and the drawn gun. But at the same time he was shaking with fright, and he feared for Ward.

Pulling the gun from the holster under his jacket and holding up his laminated Garda ID to oncoming cars, Ward jinked through the traffic, hoping he could reach the alley before the Toddler could get to the gun, some large, nickel-plated weapon.

He arrived there just as the other man was lowering himself on his stiff leg toward the handgun. Blood was oozing through the bandage on his thigh. The hospital smock was carmine and wet.

But the Toddler went down, his forehead banging off the wall, his body now limp on the cobblestones. Staying well away from the man, who was obviously some sort of martial arts expert, Ward grasped his own Beretta in both hands and aimed it at the head. Behind him, he could sense that the woman was coming around, stirring, trying to raise her torso up.

“You!” he said to her. “You stay where you are, stay down. You’re a right bloody fool to go after him. He’s a trained killer. Why the Christ did you not pop him when you had the chance?”

“I want him to see me,” she managed to say. “I want him to know it’s me.”

“What?” Ward redirected his aim on the Toddler, who had stirred. His face was streaming with blood from the gash on his scalp. “How will that matter to him dead?”

She pulled herself to her feet. “To me it matters. It matters very much indeed. And I’ll be taking that now.” She pointed to the gun that Ward could see at a glance was a
.44 Magnum Dan Wesson with an eight-inch barrel. It was a huge thing, a veritable cannon.

“No, you won’t” Ward stepped by the Toddler and picked the gun up. He thumbed open the cylinder and shook out a cartridge that was jacketed, the bullets filed flat. They were Speer Gold-Dots packing a full three hundred grains of powder, announced an inscription on the case head.

Designer bullets and exactly the kind of round that could have punched through the floor of a Land Rover. Had one of them struck the Toddler’s leg directly, it would have taken it off.

The Toddler now pushed his back up against the wall, his face a ghastly wash of blood.

“Look, you’d be better served going home, where we can protect you. I can promise you that. You go back to Raglan Road, and I’ll see you’re looked after.”

Using the wall as a brace, the Toddler now got up in one smooth motion, his eyes moving from Ward and the guns to Biddy. Blood was dripping from his chin. “I’m going to leave now, Detective Ward. I think you know I was attacked by this woman. That—” he pointed to the weapon in Ward’s left hand—“is hers, not mine.”

Ward felt almost cheated, as though there had to be some way that he could turn the situation against the man, make him break a law or rush him so he might do what was necessary, which was to put the bastard down. Ward had been forced to kill before; it had not been easy. He suspected this would be different.

But traffic had stopped in the street, and he could now see faces in some of the hospital windows, watching the altercation.

The Toddler read his eyes. He pushed himself away from the wall and began hobbling toward the footpath. “It’s not my gun, and I can prove it. It’s hers. You must have seen her. She tried to kill me.”

“Did she shoot at you?”

The Toddler only continued to put distance between them.

“Will you swear out a complaint?”

The man stopped and turned his head back to Ward, a contemptuous broken-tooth smile flickering across his bloody face, as though to say he handled his own complaints. Then he was gone around the corner of the building.

Stepping to Ward, Biddy held out her hand. “Let me have it back. I think you know I need it.”

Ward did indeed. In fact, if she wouldn’t submit to being protected, he wanted her to have it and to continue to hunt the Toddler. Or he her. Eventually the man would make a second mistake, most likely in killing her, and then they would have him. At last. She was a fool to go after him; she wouldn’t be lucky a third time, he was sure. But it was her decision.

Still, Ward could not be seen simply handing it back. “You come with me.” He took her by the arm, but she pulled away.

“In jail I’m dead. Like Archie Carruthers. It’s what he wanted with the raid on my house.”

Ward took the arm again, this time more firmly with his thumb on the pressure point just up from the elbow.

She howled in pain and roared, “Yehr another fookin’ Hannigan!”

That interested Ward. “How long have you known about him?”

“Christ, doesn’t everybody? But not you, no. Being on the pad too.”

“Take it easy,” he said in an undertone. “You’ll get in the car with me. I’ll drive you around the square, and then it’s back to the Volvo
with
your gun. And come closer while I tell you and you’re to listen.” He pulled her into him, walking her to the curb. “You’re a right bloody fool to go after him. The man’s a killer.”

“Do
I
not know?”

“You’d be better off telling us about the man he put under the bus that night at the top of Grafton Street.”

“And then what? Get shot like the Bookends. Or spiked like Archie Carruthers?”

“Not if he’s in prison.”

“For how long? There’s no death penalty in this country. When he got out, I’d be dead. Or before. He has bags of money from the drugs. He’d pay somebody to kill me and my family. As a lesson. He’s big on lessons. And what if he gets off? Everyone else who was there that night is dead. My only chance is for him to not know where I am. And for
me
to jump
him.
”

Ward shook his head. She’d had her chance and blown it. If he knew anything about the Toddler, the man would now regroup, call in his markers, wage a kind of vicious war against her and her family. But plainly she had already decided what course to take.

Ward made it look official, as if he were arresting her. Lowering the tall woman into the back seat of the car, protecting her head, he muttered, “I won’t say this again: You can’t win this.”

“Then I’ll lose, but I’ll take him with me. Now give me me fookin’ gun.”

After Ward got in behind the wheel, he reached back and placed the immense pistol on her lap without letting it go. “Do me a favor. If you survive, you had two of these. This never happened. I never gave you this back.”

Their eyes met, and Biddy nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

Ward released the gun.

Said Lugh, after she had left the car, “Why’d you give her back the gun? She attacked the man; we saw it ourselves. And isn’t it illegal to own a handgun in Ireland?”

Ward nodded. “And what I did was illegal. But she poses a danger only to him, and that’s good. Without that gun she’s dead.” Although he suspected she was anyway.

“But what about…protective custody?”

Ward glanced over at his dark, young son who was nothing if not…“precocious” was a word he disliked, but certainly it fit. “For how long? It’s been twelve years since he
last tried to kill her. In twelve more, he’ll try again, I’ve no doubt.”

Lugh considered that for a moment, then said, “Isn’t there anything you can lift him for? Hasn’t he broken any law?”

“It’s a good bet all of them. But he’s careful. We’ve no proof.”

“But if he’s been dealing drugs for so many years, how careful can he be?”

“Well…practice makes perfect.” Ward was peering into the rearview mirror. Having pulled the unmarked Garda car into the curb, he was waiting for Biddy to wheel the Volvo out into traffic. Since she now knew his vehicle, he’d follow her for a while until some other car in the team picked her up, then make a point of turning off where she could see.

But as far as he could tell, now checking in both of the side mirrors as well, there was nobody in the Volvo and no sign of her on the footpath or in the road.

Ward tugged open the door and again got out of the car. No. She was not in the car that was parked half out in the street. Nor anywhere that he could see. Back in his own vehicle he reached for the radio and punched up the volume. “She’s gone. Skipped. Tall woman, broad. In her thirties. She might be wearing dark glasses, a white sun hat. The dress is…”

But Biddy was already a quarter mile away, having walked right by the Volvo and boarded a bus that had come to a stop at the corner near the car. Once inside she had dropped a coin and pretended to search for it until they were well beyond the car of the guard who had saved her, God bless him.

And beyond the cars of any other guards who might have been with him. It was yet another lesson Biddy had learned as a child: how to avoid the police.

Later she’d send some of her cousins to collect the Volvo. The
shadogs
wouldn’t watch it forever.

“What now?” Lugh asked in the patrol car, plainly disappointed at how his father had performed the first time he had observed him in action.

Ward pulled out his billfold and handed the lad a five-pound note. “Can you find your way home?”

“What about you?”

Ward pointed to the Volvo. “The situation’s not as bad as it seems. She’ll send somebody to collect the car, and that person will lead us to her.”

Sooner rather than later, Ward hoped.

LIKE A POLITICIAN working a crowd of voters, Drug Squad Chief Superintendent Paul Hannigan began pressing the flesh from the moment he walked into the Horse & Hound, shaking hands with this one and that as he passed down the bar.

It was a neighborhood pub on the Merrion Road across from the Royal Dublin Society Horse Grounds in Sandy-mount, a much more acceptable section of Dublin than Rathmines, where McGarr lived.

Earlier McGarr had driven by Hannigan’s large Edwardian house with colored leaded glass windows and plenty of gingerbread molding that must have cost a “bomb,” as was said.

Which McGarr was about to drop on Hannigan, the house, his family, his life and prospects in a figurative way. And better by far than the punishment the Toddler would most likely dole out. Hannigan deserved at least a warning.

“How ya, Donal? How’s t’ings?” said Hannigan. Then: “There’s Jack. How’s Jack keepin’?” And “How yiz, gir-ills? Yeh’re in great form altogether. How long have I been
keepin’ yiz waitin’? And there yeh’ve bought me five drinks.”

When Hannigan reached for one of their drinks, he was smacked smartly on the hand. “Ooo, now, that’s the class of abuse I crave.” All was said with a rough, gravelly but infectious bonhomie, such that other patrons in the lounge turned to the man with the absurdly protuberant paunch, and they smiled.

Why? Because of his position, who he was. It was a small country, and people in his local had to know who Chief Superintendent Hannigan was in the way that McGarr was known to many as well. But it was the look of Hannigan too.

At once pigeon-toed and bow-legged, Hannigan moved with a quick, rolling gait that made his stomach sway. His face was saturnine, his complexion high, his dark hair flecked with gray, and his eyes were some deep shade of blue.

The suit he was wearing was costly and had been tailored to make the man look less comical. But there was nothing that could hide that belly. Shaking hands with McGarr, he eased himself down onto a stool across a low table, and his stomach—
THE STOMACH
—distended, like some third presence, between them.

McGarr averted his gaze, wondering how his own not inconsiderable belly appeared to some other party—namely, his wife, who was twelve years his junior and still looked like a comely adolescent, at least to his eyes.

But Hannigan’s position on the edge of the low stool said something else: that he would be staying for only a short wet, even though he was a fixture here. McGarr had spent the last few hours on the phone, learning everything he could about the man. Yes, the Toddler was a scourge; Hannigan was, on the other hand, an abomination, given how long he had abused his position while the Toddler’s gear had spread among the young and the foolish.

“Lawrence of Arsippe!” Hannigan bawled at a barman, then swirled a finger to mean another round, even though McGarr had a full glass before him. “Classical literature, it’s gas, what? Of all the shite we were made to read in Synge Street, wouldn’t I remember the one writer? It’s shameful.”

More so the ruse. The school in Synge Street that was famous for its rigid discipline had produced a good number of graduates more notable than McGarr, but Hannigan had not gone there. McGarr had checked.

“Well now, Peter—Jaysis, how long has it been since we had a wet together? One on one, like they say.”

An operative phrase, thought McGarr, smiling slightly. If he could frighten, then turn Hannigan into providing evidence, maybe a court might jail the Toddler for enough time to put him out of business. It would be a meager victory, given all the people he had killed. But gratifying nonetheless.

“What’s up?” Hannigan asked after the drinks had been placed on the table.

“The Raglan Road house. I’d like to go over that with you if I could.”

Suddenly Hannigan’s smile seemed forced, and his eyes were wary. “Certainly. Surely. Christ, anny-thing for you, Peter. Still no luck running her down. And the bitch is big time, I tell yeh. Been into the gear since she was a wee lass, nine or ten. Can yeh imagine? Then twenty year ago or so they packed her off to a rehab—at our expense, mind—and didn’t she turn around and start peddlin’ the shit herself? To other kids. And her own people.” Hannigan drank from his glass.

McGarr waited, suspecting what was coming.

“Fookin’ Knackers, is what. Mickalou Maugham. The busker who was chained to the top of the Cliquot tree? But you’d know that, of course, having found him. She had a child by him. You’d think she would have learned from his example, where all this leads.” Another sucking swallow.

That was when Hannigan’s cell phone began bleating. “Ah, Jaysis, they never leave yeh alone.” He pulled the device from his suit coat and extended the aerial. “Now what?”

In the pause his eyes darted at McGarr. “Uncle Bill! Hasn’t it been a dog’s age. No, well, I’m rather in company at the moment with a colleague.” Another wait. “Yeh say ye’re on a Callcard, yeh haven’t much time.”

Hannigan cupped the receiver and raised himself off the low stool. “It’s me uncle Bill. Haven’t heard from him in a month of Sundays and probably won’t again. He’s up in years, yeh know. D’yeh mind, Peter? I’ll leave you to yehr drink. It won’t take but a sec’.”

McGarr nodded and reached for his glass, hoping Pauline Honan had already initiated the tap.

Hannigan was gone all of ten minutes and seemed less full of himself than he had been earlier. Knocking back what remained in his glass, he called to Lawrence of Arsippe for more. “Where were we?”

“Raglan Road. Biddy Nevins.”

“Or Beth Waters,” he put in with a knowing wink. “A slippery one, she is. All those years in England, the artist’s cover and all. The young lad from the North for a lover when she needed to get off with a man. And didn’t she have the old one, the Brit, when it was a woman’s touch she fancied?

“Know what? I’ve a feelin’ them two’ll walk. Both has sworn they knew nothing about the dope themselves, and they let us draw some blood. They’re clean, the both o’ them. And the gear and all was all found in her room—the Biddy’s.”

“In the house.”

Hannigan nodded.

“By you.”

Again. “I have a nose for the stuff, I swear. Like instinct or somethin’.”

Exactly, thought McGarr. Or somethin’.

More bleating broke in, this time from McGarr’s jacket pocket.

“Your turn,” said Hannigan. “It’s gettin’ fookin’ ridic’lous, so. You’d want to be on the moon to get shed a the thing.”

“And not even there,” said McGarr, hearing Pauline’s voice on the other end. He slid across the cushions of the banquette and stood. “Remember, ‘One small step for mankind’ and the golf and all? The only sound we missed was the club on the ball.”

“No word of lie in that.”

And therefore the first truth uttered between them. “It’s the missus,” said McGarr, adding to the plenum of falsehood. “Sure, I’ll have to take it outside.” He pointed to the cell phone. “Mine’s older than yours and not up to the walls of a lounge bar.”

Hannigan seemed relieved.

McGarr waited until he got out into the car park. “Fire away, Pauline.”

“You’re with him?”

“That’s right.”

“Think of that—why?”

“To turn him, of course.”

“You mean, you’ve already spoken to the Toddler?”

“Yah—this after’ at the Royal Dublin.” It was no time to tell her what Ward had witnessed in the alley behind the hospital, which she’d learn of in the morning, given her
connections.
“Before he checked out.”

“Good man. And thanks for the promotion.”

McGarr waited for the slag; after all, it was Pauline.

“To missus, or are yeh just rubbing it in?”

To which there could be no reply. Still, she sounded upbeat.

“So, mister—earlier in the day, when the Toddler was still in hospital, didn’t Hannigan ring him up? Says Hannigan, ‘The missing persons in the Mercedes from Raglan Road? They’re in Cork, in a Traveler campsite on the N-t
wenty-five between Midleton and Youghal. You can’t miss it, it’s the only Knacker lay-by between them two places.’ The Toddler thanked him and rang off.

“And just now it was Uncle Bill again. Same voice, same Toddler. After the initial hello, et cetera, they fell into an encrypted mode, but nothing that couldn’t be cracked.”

By the computers that had been acquired to defeat the scrambling and coding devices now being used by drug dealers, criminals, and the IRA, McGarr knew.

“On came questions, the Toddler asking Hannigan about the two who were lifted in the Raglan Road raid.”

“Tag Barry and Cheri Cooke.”

“The same. He wanted to know who they were, how they related to Nevins. Hannigan had all the answers since he said he’d questioned them himself. Alone. No witnesses. The Toddler liked that.

“He said Barry was the lover and Cooke the lesbian lover. Both fairly well past tense, though she wouldn’t put them out on the street unless they did drugs.

“Hannigan laughed over that, but the Toddler cut him off, telling him to take them back to the Raglan house and put them in there. ‘You tell them it’s house arrest.’

“‘What?’ says Hannigan. ‘I can’t. Only a court can do that.’

“‘I don’t fuckin’ care about any fuckin’ court,’ says your man in a broad Yank accent. ‘Just fuckin’ do it. You tell them you made a mistake. You say they had nothing to do with her drug trade. They were—
are
—innocent houseguests. You fill in the blanks; it’s what I pay you for.’

“‘And another thing: If you find her and lift her, put her in there too.’

“‘What? The house?
Why
?’

“And here’s the truly curious part. He adds, ‘
With
the package I’m sending you. It should be at your house now. I want you to get it, place it in the freezer compartment of the fridge, and then go back to Mount Joy and get them released.

“‘Once they’re inside, you put a car in front and another out back in the alley.’

“There was a pause. Then Hannigan says in a low, like defeated voice, ‘What? Why? What will I tell my staff about that—that they’re waiting for her? Like that? Out in the open?’

“‘No, asshole—to keep them
in.
And when the woman, Biddy, shows up there, which she will some time or other, you’re to tell the men to let her in too. But anybody else, even McGarr or one of his staff, no. You’re to keep them out.’

“‘I can’t do that. What would I say?’ Then, ‘
Will
I say?’ You know, now with a bit of fear in Hannigan’s voice.

“‘Think of something: you’re staking them out again or protecting them or…it’s your bust, your territory, your turf. You’ll handle it yourself.’

“‘McGarr won’t believe any of that.’

“Then there was a pause before the Toddler says, ‘When I asked you along for the ride, Paul, what did I say?’

“‘Ah, er’—how many jars have yeh give in him, Peter?—‘that there might be a bump.’

“‘That’s right, but mainly we’d be cruising. Well, the cruising is over. This is the bump.’ He rang off.”

McGarr wondered what the Toddler had in mind with the package. A bomb perhaps? Did he intend to blow up the place when and if Biddy returned and blame it on Tag Barry, who was from Belfast and had a Republican connection through a half brother? McGarr had checked his background too.

With the allegation of drug dealing and then a bomb, people would assume it was some rogue, gangster element of the IRA that either blew themselves up or were blown up as an example to others who would deal drugs. To send a message.

But a bomb was not the kind of message that the Toddler had sent in the past. His had always been more inventive and personal than that.

“What will you do?” Pauline asked, now that turning Hannigan into a tout would prevent the Toddler from acting on whatever plot he had in mind.

Would the Toddler involve himself? was the question. It was the only sort of message that meant anything to him. Alone meant no witnesses. Look at the lengths he had gone to eliminate the only witness who could link him to a murder.

“Nothing. He decided to ‘cruise’ with the Toddler. Now we’ll let him feel the bump.”

“Good man. I knew you’d say that. Whatever he gets, he deserves all of it and more. What about the other bit—the three in the Mercedes down in Cork? Will the Toddler go for them?”

McGarr had no idea, but it was a possibility, either to use them as hostages to exchange for her life or to punish her indirectly for wounding him. The latter, McGarr decided. Hostages were again too complicated and messy for the Toddler.

“I’ve put out a cot to stay here overnight. If I hear more, I’ll be onto you.”

“Thank you, Pauline.”

Walking back into the lounge, McGarr again considered about Maggie Nevins, her husband, and their granddaughter down at the Traveler encampment in Midleton in Cork. And what the term “guard” should mean in the strict sense.

If the Toddler made a try for them and, being “guarded,” they escaped, he’d realize that Hannigan’s calls had been compromised. And the chance of trapping him would pass. But at least they’d be alive.

McGarr studied the dark, devious Hannigan, who was staring down into his whiskey, as though trying to divine some secret in the bottom of the glass. Flushed, sweating,
bumped
in every way.

He had chosen his path over at least the last dozen years, not just once but day in and day out, and McGarr would not keep him from his fate. He walked back toward the car park.