The Wrong Kind of Blood (3 page)

“And the gun, Tommy?”

“I’m getting to it, right? Anyway, I’m back from Birmingham last night, and Podge calls me, says, come up to the house. One of those new jobs the other side of Castlehill.”

“The golf club side?”

“Near the old golf club, yeah. Big redbrick things with swimming pools and hot tubs and all this. Some boy-band cunt owns one of them, George and Podge Halligan are next-door neighbors there. A million plus, they went for. Anyway, never been asked before, so up I go, and this big bolts-in-the-neck lad in a tracksuit shows me into the lounge, tells me they’re all in George’s having a party. He goes next door to get Podge, and I’m starting to get nervous, something’s up, something doesn’t feel right.”

“Were you raking off the top?”

“Not so’s you’d notice, Ed, I always replaced it with talc or whatever. Just enough for a few deals in Hennessy’s.”

“In Hennessy’s? And you thought the Halligans wouldn’t find out? Even when they lived in the Somerton flats, the Halligans used Hennessy’s as a second home.”

“I don’t know what I thought. But I’m telling you, I was thinkin’ now. Straight into the kitchen, out the back door, over the wall, and leg it through the golf club back to Castlehill Road. Only I didn’t, I waited, and in comes Podge, all smiles, a bit pissed, howya Tommy, welcome home, good man, all this. He gives me the shekels, then he opens a drawer and takes out one of those olive green canvas army bags, says I’m doing very well, and it’s about time I moved up the ranks. Bit pissed as I say, actin’ like the Boss, you know? I said nothing, he winks and taps his finger to his nose, says ‘Be in touch, Tommo,’ and off he goes.”

“And the gun was in the bag?”

“The gun and the spare clip.”

“The spare clip?”

I picked up the Glock and weighed it in my hand. It was loaded. I snapped the magazine out. Two rounds were missing.

“Have you any idea what it was used for?”

“No one’s been hit. At least, no one that I know of. But we may just be about to find out. Or it could’ve been used shootin’ rabbits.”

“But it could be you being set up.”

“Well, that’s the point. That’s why I’m here, case a corpse turns up and the cops get a tip-off.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. I mean, the cops get hold of you, you can take Podge Halligan down, what you know about him.”

“Unless the corpse is a civilian. In which case, the cops have me, they’ve a gun that matches, forget about the Halligans.”

“Or unless he meant what he said, that you’re rising up the ranks, and in a couple of days, you’ll get the nod to hit someone.”

Tommy shook his head, a forced smile on his face. He looked frightened.

“I don’t know which is worse, Ed, being set up for murder or being asked to commit one. I mean, I’m not a… I couldn’t fire a gun. Fuck sake.”

“So in case it’s a setup, you want me to hold it?” I said.

“Sure, ’cause it’s all very well, oh you can tell the cops all about Podge Halligan, but what about my old dear? My sister? My kid? If they can’t get at me in jail, they’ll get my family. And then they’ll get me eventually, Ed. No, the cops’ll hear nothin’ from me. But if you have the gun, all they have is a tip-off, nothin’ to back it up, and we’re grand.”

“Except you’ve got Podge Halligan on your trail. Maybe he knows you’ve been stealing from him, he’s out to close you down.”

Tommy leapt to his feet, too excited to stay in one place for long.

“Why hasn’t he just hit me? He could, any day, nothin’ I could do. So fuck that, I’m not gonna, what, bail out, go to England or whatever, never see my daughter, just on the off chance that… I mean, if he wants to, he will. Maybe he doesn’t know anything. Maybe he doesn’t have a plan. He’s just a drug dealer and a knacker, not… not fuckin’ Napoleon, you know?”

I looked at Tommy clumping around the room, a marked limp still from where his ankle had been smashed. Twenty-five years later, and the Halligans still weren’t done with him.

“Will you hold on to it, Ed? And we’ll see what happens.”

“And if he wants you to hit someone?”

“Maybe we can warn the target, get him out of the way. Then I’ll say I can’t find him.”

Running the length of one wall in the living room there was a sideboard, with ornamental plates and bowls, jugs, candlesticks and lamps piled on top. Below there were two cupboards flanking a chest of drawers. I opened one of the cupboard doors, took a pile of plates out, and pushed the gun and the two magazines into the back, then replaced the plates and shut the door.

“What happened to the bag, Tommy?”

“What bag?”

“The olive green canvas bag the gun was in.”

“Oh, yeah. I got rid of it. Too conspicuous, swingin’ a bag around the street.”

“As opposed to swinging a gun around my head.”

“Ah, that was just a bit of crack, man.”

Tommy’s face creased into a smile.

“Listen, thanks for this, specially the day that’s in it and so on.”

“The day that was in it was yesterday. It’s three in the morning tomorrow now.”

Tommy looked hungrily at the whiskey bottle, then shook his head, as if thinking better of it.

“Are you sticking around, Ed?”

“I’ve to sort out the house. What to do about it.”

“But are you going back to the States?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Haven’t had time to think, Tommy. I’ve had the funeral all day, Linda Dawson all evening, and now you.”

“Linda Dawson? What did she want?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Don’t get hooked in there. Steer clear, man. Big trouble. Poor little rich girl, black widow spider.”

“I can look after myself.”

“All right. Friendly advice spurned, don’t blame me. One more thing. Let me see your garage, man.”

At this stage, it seemed easier to do what Tommy wanted than to ask him why he wanted it. I led him out through the kitchen, unlocked the back door, turned down the passage, and slid the bolt on the rear garage door.

Inside there was a car covered in dust-darkened tarpaulins. Tommy began to haul on the heavy old cloths, and together we got them off.

Beneath was an old saloon car, racing green with curved lines, tail fins and a tan leather interior.

“I knew she’d be here,” he said, a note of triumph in his voice. “Everything else is as it was, why shouldn’t this?”

“What is it?” I said.

“She’s an Amazon 122S. A Volvo, from the days when they weren’t built for mummies to fill full of kids and dogs and shopping and all. Nineteen sixty-five, I think. I worked on her with your old man.”

“It’s a beautiful car.”

“Your oul’ fella was no angel, but he had a lovely way with a motor.”

When Tommy Owens failed his Inter Cert, my father took him on as an apprentice in his garage. So while the rest of us were still slaving away in school, Tommy was earning money and buying a leather jacket and a motor-bike and getting the girls. But then my father ran into some money problems and his garage shut down. Not long after that, he walked out of the house one evening and was never heard of again. And not long after that, I found out that my mother was seeing another man, and that’s when I walked out. I took a flight to London, and then another to Los Angeles, where I stayed. Eventually, I paid for my mother to visit, and she told me that it was just one of those things, and I told her that it was none of my business, and she said that, given the way my father had abandoned her, she was entitled to whatever comfort she could find, and it was all over and done with now, and I agreed and apologized and that was the end of that. But I never went home. Every year, I’d arrange for her to come over. She was there when I got married, and she was there for the christening of my daughter, Lily, and she was there for the funeral. Lily, who had fair, tangled curls and the wrong kind of blood, died two weeks short of her second birthday. After that my marriage fell apart, and so did I, and the next time I saw my mother it was the day before yesterday, and she was lying in a coffin in the funeral home. I slipped her wedding ring from her cold hand and looked inside the rim. My father’s name, Eamonn, was engraved there. I pushed the ring back on her finger. When I kissed her forehead, it was like kissing a stone.

I suddenly felt very tired. Tommy was underneath the hood, muttering to himself. I said, “Tommy, I need to get some sleep.”

Tommy said, “This is in amazing nick, considering. Do you want me to bash her into shape for you?”

“Sure. If it means I can ditch the rental car, go ahead.”

I closed up the garage and saw Tommy out. He promised to return first thing in the morning to get going on the Volvo, so I gave him a key. I doubted whether Tommy’s first thing actually took place in the morning, but if it did, I didn’t want to be around for it. I locked doors and switched off lights and was climbing the stairs when the doorbell rang.

Fuck it. Whatever Tommy had forgotten, he could live without it for the time being. I continued upstairs, went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. But the ringing wouldn’t stop, and soon it was joined by a pounding on the door. I went downstairs, put on the hall light and opened the door, ready to reef Tommy out of it. But it wasn’t Tommy, it was Linda Dawson. Her hair shone bright in the moonlight, and her brown eyes glowed.

“I’m sorry, Ed,” she said, her voice hoarse and cracking, “but I told you, I just couldn’t take another night alone.”

It turned out, neither could I. I took her hand and pulled her into the house. I pushed the door behind her, and shut out the light.

We clung to each other in the dark. At one point, thinking of all that had happened in the past few days, my eyes filled with hot tears. Linda held me until they passed, and then until I slept.

I woke just before dawn. She was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, naked, smoking a cigarette and staring at the moon. She turned to me and smiled, and said, “Go back to sleep.” So I did.

WHEN I AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, LINDA HAD GONE. I
washed and shaved, dressed in the black suit I had been wearing for the past three days and the last clean white shirt I owned. Then I called the airline to find out what had happened to my luggage. Between being put on hold several times and being passed to three different people, I was told variously that it had been found and would be couriered to me that day, that it had been mistakenly rerouted back to L.A., and that the person who deals with all this type of thing wouldn’t be in until later, and I should ring back then. Ireland hadn’t changed that much after all. I made some tea and toast and had it sitting outside beneath the pair of male and female apple trees in the back garden. They stretched out their branches toward each other, but never touched. They had been there as long as I could remember.

I went indoors and looked around the house. Nothing had changed from my childhood, and now everything was torn and frayed, chipped and stained and damp, and all over a smell of must and mold, a spoor of neglect, of decay. Tommy had been right: state of the place. I sat on the stairs and looked at the telephone. It was an old black Bakelite telephone with a brown cord that looked like a coarsely woven shoelace. Beside it on the cheap pine table there was a bowl of pinks and an address book. The pinks had a sweet, spicy smell that reminded me of summers long ago, and of my mother. The address book was open to my name. The woman who lives next door, a Mrs. Fallon, had found my mother collapsed on the porch and called an ambulance. Then she looked up “Loy” in the address book and called me in Los Angeles. By the time I got the message and rang St. Vincent’s Hospital, my mother was dead. On the evidence of these rooms, it felt like she had been waiting for that death for a long, long time.

The phone rang.

“I tried you earlier, but it was engaged. I didn’t want you to think I’d just ducked out on you,” Linda said. Her voice was husky, her tone a little too bright.

“It’s still too early to think anything much,” I said.

“I know what you mean. I have those papers you asked for. You know, Peter’s phone records and so on. Do you want to come over and get them?”

I told her I’d see her later and hung up. But I didn’t want to see her later. I wasn’t sorry we’d slept together, far from it, but I knew if I set out to find the husband of a woman who had just shared my bed, we would both be sorry soon enough. Besides, I had a train to catch.

The DART — Dublin Area Rapid Transit, as nobody calls it — shares thirty miles of the railway track that runs up the east coast of the country, from Rosslare in the south to Belfast in the north. I took a train to Pearse Station. I crossed Westland Row and followed the horde of office workers filing in the back gate of Trinity College. The campus doesn’t exactly provide a shortcut to the city center, but I guess a walk through an Elizabethan university first thing in the morning might not be the most stressful way to start your day. As I strolled through College Park, past the Old Library and across the cobbles toward Front Gate, I thought about what my life would be like if I had studied medicine here like I was supposed to, all those years ago. The road not taken.

On College Green, I turned south past the provost of Trinity’s house (dream address: number 1 Grafton Street) and walked through Dublin’s upmarket shopping quarter. It had a sleek sheen to it now, a brash, unapologetic confidence about itself that had been thin on the ground in Ireland twenty years before. It also had a derelict in every doorway: most stores hadn’t opened yet, but security personnel were beginning their patrols, so the homeless were gathering up their cardboard boxes and bedding, ready for another day of whatever you did when you had nowhere to go and nothing to do once you got there.

At the corner of South King Street and Stephen’s Green, I was expecting to see Sinnott’s, where Tommy Owens and I once drank, and which I had dreamt of over the years, but it had been replaced by a towering white shopping mall with fussy decorative work around the windows and roof that made it look like a giant wedding cake. Sinnott’s had migrated down the street, transforming itself during the journey from an atmospheric old Victorian pub with a long dark bar counter into a generic North American–style sports lounge.