Black Irish (7 page)

Now she knew that the tiny lakes were acid runoff from Bethlehem Steel, left behind even after the steel work went to China and India and the plants locked their enormous gates for good. The pools were now hidden by reeds that soughed in the wind whenever she stopped by to walk the paths.

In sixty seconds, Abbie was past the preserve. She drove to the Ryan house and parked out front. Someone had come by and shoveled the driveway, she saw. Patty Ryan would be the responsibility of the neighborhood now. In the County, if a loved one died of natural causes, you got hot food and sympathy. If they were murdered by persons unknown, you could expect months of complete attention. The kids would be invited over every afternoon to different houses. Meals would be prepared and dropped off around 4 p.m. (people in the County ate dinner early, still timed to the end of the shift at the steel plants). A friend would come by and hold your hand and when you came downstairs you’d find the air scented with Febreeze and the room cleaned down to the grouting. If you forgot to pay your bills, hands would sort through the mail and pay the overdue notices with checks from your checkbook, or from their own, without a second thought.

It was the other side of the County. Here, you were looked after. When you were weak or in pain, you could feel the pleasant crush of people who asked you no questions, who barely talked but who would stand outside your door day and night and guard your privacy, let you grieve and mend. It was invisible, unspoken, centuries deep.

Sometimes she missed it.

She rang the doorbell. Within ten seconds, the door was pulled open and an old woman with enormous round glasses was peering out at her.

“Who’re you then?”

“Good morning, ma’am. Detective Kearney, Buffalo Police.”

The door opened wide and the woman reached for the handle of the screen door.

“Ah, come in. Come in.”

The screen door screeched as Abbie pulled it open and followed the woman, dressed in faded jeans and a blue sweatshirt with an embroidered nativity scene on the front.

“I’m Jimmy’s mother,” the woman said as they sat.

“Mrs. Ryan,” Abbie said, startled. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

The woman ignored the words and tilted her head, her snow-white hair. She studied Abbie’s face, inch by inch, unembarrassed. Her face looked weathered, but the expression was serene.

“You’ve grown so, Abbie.”

“Excuse me?”

Mrs. Ryan smiled. “I used to be the crossing guard at McKinley and Red Jacket Parkway. I watched you go to Mount Mercy every morning and come home every day at 3:45 sharp. You had a backpack, green and pink.”

The memory of the backpack—a beloved JanSport that she’d kept through high school and then lost somewhere—shot through Abbie like an icicle. She smiled.

“I remember you, too,” Abbie said. “You had an orange slicker for rainy days. I always wondered why it wasn’t yellow like everyone else’s.”

“My husband worked for Harrison Radiator, he got it for me. It came from the plant. You’re not going to charge me with stealing it, are you?”

Abbie studied the old woman’s eyes, looming huge and cornflower blue behind her rimless glasses. Mrs. Ryan looked back expectantly, as if they were going to talk about Abbie’s classmates, what had become of Mary Beth Myers and that slut Kathleen Raftery, instead of her son, tied up and slaughtered in St. Teresa’s.

“I think the statute of limitations has passed. Mrs. Ryan, is Patty here?”

“Upstairs sleeping. The doctor gave her something.”

Abbie nodded.

“Then can you and I talk about Jimmy?”

Something darkened in the woman’s eyes, as if a few flecks of the blue irises had suddenly rotated and turned black.

“I suppose so. What do you want to know?”

Abbie shifted on the couch, pulled her white reporter’s notebook out of her lapel pocket and found her pen. “Did he have anyone who was angry with him?”

“Besides Patty? I suppose there were a few. See, Jimmy was my youngest, and the youngest is always the wildest. It was born in ’im. When he was fifteen, I’d hear a thump from his bedroom and know he’d fallen out of the top bunk he shared with his brother Michael.
Crash
, in the middle of the night. Stone drunk from hanging out on the street corners. Abbott Road, I’m sure you spent a few nights there yourself.”

Abbie nodded, smiling ruefully. Abbott Road had been the meeting place for high schoolers up and down the County. You would meet your friends in front of Abbott Pizza, buy a slice and a Coke, and then hang out on the corner for hours. The boys would have tallboy cans of beer in their pockets and would shyly offer you one like they were thin bars of gold.

“A few nights. Was Jimmy getting in trouble then?”

“When was Jimmy not in trouble in high school? He would come home with his clothes torn or I would find him in the bushes in front of the house in the morning. He was too ashamed to ring the bell when he was in that state. He would be cut up, horrible-like.”

Mrs. Ryan turned to look at the fake fireplace, now switched off in the cold room.

“And—”

“Yes?”

Mrs. Ryan’s lips worked, but she said nothing.

“Mrs. Ryan,” Abbie said quietly, “everything you tell me can help me get to the person who did this.”

The woman looked stricken.

“Jimmy stole,” she whispered.

In the County, breaking someone’s orbital socket in a brawl, blackout drinking, and crashing cars into storefronts were only signposts on the way to manhood. But stealing was a terrible thing.

“What did he steal?”

“Money out of my purse, to begin with.” She let out a breath and it was as if she’d shrunk inside her weathered skin. “Then cars, money out of registers when the bartender wasn’t looking, bottles of liquor from the corner liquor store, anything he could get his hands on.”

“Was he arrested?”

“A couple of times. We told him if it happened again, we’d leave him to rot in jail with the coloreds.”

Abbie frowned. “What about drugs? Did Jimmy ever get involved with them?”

Mrs. Ryan’s cheerful mood seemed to be slowly disintegrating.

“Why would you ask me that?”

“I have to know what he was involved in. Who he associated with, who might want to harm him.”

Abbie stared at the old woman, and it was Mrs. Ryan who first looked away.

“I heard things, but I never saw him with drugs. Just the alcohol.”

“Where did he hang out at night?”

“Down on Chippewa, mostly. Then, later, the Gaelic Club.”

She knew it. It was a faux-grand building with two three-story-high Greek columns on the east end of Abbott Road. Irish immigrants had built the place, literally, with their own hands. Her father had been a member, and she’d swum in its pool. A memory of the locker room’s smell came back to her: chlorine and decay.

“What they did with Jimmy was nothing but a miracle,” Mrs. Ryan said proudly.

“He gave up stealing?”

Mrs. Ryan’s chin shot up as if she’d been slapped. “You wouldn’t have recognized him. Started going down to the Club, working the bingo nights. He’d put money in my purse for me to find when I was
out shopping, ’stead of taking it. Never said a word, he’d just put twenty or thirty dollars in for me to have something extra.”

The corners of her eyes filled with tears. For the first time, Abbie felt she was watching a woman mourn. She reached out and touched Mrs. Ryan’s knee.

“That must have been lovely.”

“It filled my heart with joy. Only those who have kids know the worry of one going wrong. Have you any?”

Abbie shook her head.

“You ought to. Our young are all leaving us. I thought when we left Ireland and came to America we were done with all that. The Irish haven’t any luck, Abbie, despite what you’ve heard. We came to Buffalo, thinking we’d be the first generation to watch our grandkids grow up, but now they’re scattered to the four winds, just like our parents.”

“I know.”

“Which is why it’s good you’ve come back.”

Abbie smiled despite herself. She knew there was no guile in the remark. Any son or daughter who came back to their parents was a hero in South Buffalo. If she’d been a black lesbian Communist sworn agent of the Devil, the simple fact that she’d returned and could be seen helping her father down the street would have outweighed all that. The County would have grudgingly welcomed her back. It had a value system all its own, and loyalty was near the top.

“What about Jimmy’s old crowd, after he straightened out?”

“They tried to come around and entice him back, but he wasn’t having any of it. And you can be sure”—Mrs. Ryan leaned in, tilting her forehead down as if she were about to impart a secret—“that if they darkened my stoop, I had something for them. Mr. Ryan’s old rabbit-hunting shotgun, brought straight from Connemara.”

Abbie let it pass.

“Did they make any threats to Jimmy? Sometimes when you break it off with people like that, they can have trouble accepting it.”

Mrs. Ryan looked down, considering.

“There was one. A character named …”

She searched for the name, her blue eyes scanning the ceiling.

“Walters, or Williams. Yes, that was it, Williams.”

“Was he white or black?”

“Black.”

“Do you remember a first name?”

“It began with a ‘G.’ Gerald? Gerard?”

She looked at the corner of the room and her lips moved.

“No, Gerald.”

“And he threatened Jimmy?”

“It was all so long ago, Abbie.”

Nothing in the County was long ago. When no new blood flowed in, old animosities and feuds simmered for years, decades even.

“I’ll look into it anyway.”

Mrs. Ryan nodded.

Abbie let her eyes drift to the mantel. Mrs. Ryan’s gaze followed.

“There were some pictures of Jimmy there the other day.”

“Oh yes.” Mrs Ryan sprang up, agile despite her age. Abbie followed her to the mantel. There were six photos. The one that Patty Ryan had picked up yesterday hadn’t been returned.

“There was another one here,” Abbie said.

“Really?”

“Jimmy with some friends. I thought it was a good likeness.”

Mrs. Ryan began to look around the room in confusion. She went to the TV but on top there were only pictures of the children. Standing with her hands on her hips, she turned and surveyed the room.

Even she’s not that good an actress
, Abbie thought.

“I’ll have to ask Patty,” the old woman said, two fingers to her lips pensively, the hand shaking slightly.

Abbie touched her on the elbow and Mrs. Ryan turned.

“I think she has enough to deal with,” Abbie said quietly, inclining her head toward the stairs. “If you could just look around quietly, that might be better.”

“Course you’re right,” Mrs. Ryan said, almost in a whisper.

A
S SHE DROVE RUTTED SIDE STREETS TO THE
G
AELIC
C
LUB
, A
BBIE
’
S HEAD
throbbed. It was like black waves were washing at the base of her skull. Talking about the past always gave her a migraine-strength headache. She rubbed her neck as she navigated down Abbott Road. Then she called Z, still at the office, and told him to run the names Gerard and Gerald Williams.

As the cars wheels hummed on the road, she thought about Mrs. Ryan. How could a mother be so calm after her son’s death? She seemed more upset by the thought of him stealing a bottle of whiskey twenty years before than by the fact that he’d been tied to a chair, tortured, mutilated, and then strangled to death. What did she have inside her to counterbalance that image? A thing that made sense of the death, that transformed it into something … what? Noble? Inevitable?

Her father had liked to talk about his work. Ireland and cops. When she was growing up in the house off Abbott, those were the only two things he’d talk to her about. They’d be sitting at the kitchen table, with her dead stepmother’s yellow tablecloth on it and matching dish towels hung below the sink, and he’d say, “When all’s said and done, a cop’s an intruder. He shines a light on all the things you’re ashamed of in your life, and makes you face who you
really are. God forbid you have to own up to it yourself.” The job had exhausted him. Forty years on the force and all he wanted was someone to come up to him and say, “I killed the bitch because I’m a vindictive asshole—and, by the way, she wasn’t cheating on me, I was cheating on her. With her little sister.” Or, “The money’s taped behind the toilet. I stole it because I’m lazy and I like nice things.” He swore that the first time a criminal made a full confession right off, he’d let them go with a hundred-dollar bill slipped into their palms. As a tip. It never happened.

She stopped at a 7-Eleven for a black coffee to clear her head. She kicked the hard slush from behind all four tires, thinking about the Gaelic Club as she walked around the car. It was the next obvious stop. The place was like the mothership of the County. If you wanted to do anything in South Buffalo, if you wanted to get elected or laid or drunk or to show off your new car or to remember what it was like to be young, you went to the Gaelic Club. It was like walking into the lion’s mouth.

Z called back. No Gerald or Gerard Williams in the database. She told him to play around with the names.

Abbie angled her car against the Gaelic Club’s warm redbrick exterior and walked to the front. The Club had been a monument to Irish power in the city when the bricklayers and carpenters and construction workers who flocked to an empty lot after work to build it had been young, their backs strong, their hair still chestnut brown or flaming red. They’d still been able, after a full day’s work pouring concrete or laying brick, to come and do it again for a few hours while their families brought them ham sandwiches in cold wax paper and the officers of the Club ferried endless cups of beer. After it opened, the Club had been wall-to-wall with screaming kids running to the pool, the whole building resonating to the game of basketball in the gym, the sound of the ball like cannon shots, audible in every part of the building, while in the bar families ate their fish and chips and listened to the latest singer from Connemara or Dublin on the
foot-high stage in the corner of the bar, directly to the right as you entered.