Everybody Dies (4 page)

"Mayhaps they didn't care for the taste of it."

"In some localities it's a violation to drive around with an opened bottle of liquor. But somehow I don't think that would have worried them. It's a gesture of contempt, isn't it? Smashing a bottle against the wall. Or maybe it's like tossing your glass in the fireplace after you drink a toast. Whatever the reason, it was a stupid thing to do."

"Why is that?"

"Because glass takes fingerprints beautifully, and there's a good chance one of those chunks of glass has a usable print on it. And God only knows what else a lab technician might find here." I turned to him. "You were careful not to disturb the integrity of the crime scene, but it's largely wasted if I'm the only one to see it. I haven't got the training or the resources to do a good job. But I don't suppose you want to call this in to the cops."

"I do not."

"No, I didn't think so. What happens next? Are you planning to move the bodies?"

"Well, now," he said. "I can't leave them here, can I?"

We laid the two bodies in the single grave we'd dug. We'd shrouded each in a pair of black plastic Hefty bags before loading them in the trunk, and we left the bags on when we transferred them to the grave.

"There ought to be a prayer over them," Mick said, standing awkwardly at the side of the grave. "Would you ever have a prayer you could say?"

I couldn't think of anything appropriate. I remained silent, as did Andy. Mick said, "John Kenny and Barry McCartney. Ah, you were good boys, and may God grant you glory. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, amen." He made the sign of the cross over the grave, then dropped his hands and shook his head. "You'd think I could think of a fucking prayer. They ought to have a priest, but that's the least of it. They ought to have a proper funeral. Ah, Jesus, they ought to have thirty more years of life, as far as that goes, and it's too fucking bad what they ought to have because this is all they're after getting, a hole in the ground and three men shaking their heads over it. The poor bastards, let's bury 'em and be done with it."

It took a lot less time to fill in the hole than it had taken to dig it. Still, it took awhile. We had only the one shovel and took turns with it, as we'd taken turns before. When we'd finished there was earth left over. Mick shoveled it into a wheelbarrow from the toolshed and dumped it fifty yards away, deep in the orchard. He brought the barrow back, returned it to the toolshed along with the shovel, and came back for another look at the grave.

He said, "Spot it a mile away, wouldn't you? Well, there'll be no one back here but O'Gara, and it won't be the first one he's seen. He's a good man, O'Gara. Knows when to turn a blind eye."

The light was still on in the farmhouse kitchen. I rinsed out the thermos and left it in the strainer, and Mick put back the unopened cans of ale and topped up his flask from the Jameson bottle. Then we all got back in the Cadillac and headed for home.

It was still dark when we left the farm, and there was less traffic than there'd been before, and no bodies in the trunk to hold us to the posted speed limit. Still, Andy didn't exceed it by more than five miles an hour. After a while I closed my eyes. I didn't drift off, but thought my own thoughts in the stillness. When I opened my eyes we were on the George Washington Bridge and the eastern sky was beginning to brighten.

So I'd had a white night, my first in a while. Sometimes Mick and I would sit up all night at Grogan's, with the door locked and all the lights off but the shaded bulb over our table, sharing stories and silence until the sun came up. Now and then we rounded off the night with the eight o'clock Mass at St. Bernard's, the Butchers' Mass, where Mick was just one of a whole crew of men in bloodstained white aprons.

As we came off the bridge and onto the West Side Drive, he said, "We're in good time for it, you know. Mass at St Bernard's."

"You read my mind," I said. "But I'm tired. I think I'll pass."

"I'm tired myself, but I feel the need for it this morning. They should have had a priest."

"Kenny and McCartney."

"The same. The one's family is all in Belfast. All they need to know is there was trouble and he died, the poor lad. John Kenny's mother died, but he had a sister as well, didn't he, Andy?"

"Two sisters," Andy said. "One's married and the other's a nun."

"Married to Our Lord," Mick said. It wasn't always clear to me where reverence left off and irony began. I'm not sure it was clear to him, either.

Andy let us out at Grogan's. Mick told him to drop the Cadillac at the garage. "I'll take a taxi to St. Bernard's," he said. "Or I might walk. I've time enough."

Burke had closed the place hours ago. Mick opened the steel accordion gates and unlocked the door. Inside, the lights were off, the chairs perched on top of the tables, so they'd be out of the way when the floor was mopped.

We went into the back room he uses for an office. He spun the dial of the huge old Mosler safe and drew out a sheaf of bills. "I want to hire you," he announced.

"You want to hire me?"

"As a detective. It's what you do, isn't it? Someone hires you and you undertake an investigation."

"It's what I do," I agreed.

"I want to know who did this."

I'd been thinking about it. "It could have been spur of the moment," I said. "Somebody with an adjoining cubicle sees two guys standing around and all that booze there for the taking. What did you say it ran to?"

"Fifty or sixty cases."

"Well, what's that worth? Twelve bottles to a case, and how much a bottle? Say ten dollars? Is that about right?"

Amusement showed in his eyes. "They've raised the price of the creature since the day you stopped drinking it."

"I'm surprised they're still in business."

"It's hard for them without your custom, but they manage. Say two hundred dollars a case."

I did the math. "Ten thousand dollars," I said, "in round numbers. That's enough to make it worth stealing."

"Indeed it is. Why do you think we stole it in the first place? Though we didn't feel the need to kill anyone."

"If it wasn't somebody who just happened to be there," I went on, "then either somebody followed McCartney and Kenny or else they had the place staked out and waited for somebody to come and open up. But what sense does that make?"

There was an opened bottle of whiskey on his desk. He uncapped it, looked around for a glass, then took a short drink straight from the bottle.

"I need to know," he said.

"And you want me to find out for you."

"I do. It's your line of work, and I'd be entirely useless at it myself."

"So it would be up to me to learn what happened, and who was responsible."

"It would."

"And then I would turn the information over to you."

"What are you getting at, man?"

"Well, I'd be delivering a death sentence, wouldn't I?"

"Ah," he said.

"Unless you're planning on bringing the police into it."

"No," he said. "No, I wouldn't regard it as a police matter."

"I didn't think so."

He put a hand on the bottle but left it where it stood. He said, "You saw what they did to those two lads. Not just the bullets but a beating as well. It's no more than justice for them to pay for it."

"Rough justice, when you mete it out yourself."

"And isn't most justice rough justice?"

I wondered if I believed that. I said, "My problem's not in the action you take. My problem's being a part of it."

"Ah," he said. "I can understand that."

"What you do is up to you," I said, "and I'd be hard put to recommend an alternative. You can't go to the cops, and it's late in life for you to start turning the other cheek."

"It would go against the grain," he allowed.

"And sometimes a person can't turn the other cheek," I said, "or walk away and leave it to the cops. I've been there myself."

"I know you have."

"And I'm not sure I chose the right course, but I seem to have been able to live with it. So I can't tell you not to pick up a gun, not when I might do the same thing myself in your position. But it's your position, not mine, and I don't want to be the one who points the gun for you."

He thought that over, nodded slowly. "I can see the sense in that," he said.

"Your friendship is important to me," I said, "and I'd bend what principles I have for the sake of it. But I don't think this situation calls for it."

His hand found the bottle again, and this time he drank from it. He said, "Something you said, that it might have been men acting on impulse. Lads with a storage bin of their own, seeing a chance for a fast dollar."

"It's certainly a possibility."

"Suppose you were to look into that side of it," he said evenly. "Suppose you did what you do, asked your questions and made your notes, and learned enough to rule that possibility in or out."

"I don't understand."

He went over to the wall and leaned against it, looking at one of the hand-colored steel engravings mounted there. He has two groups of them, three scenes of County Mayo in Ireland, where his mother was born, and three others showing his father's birthplace in the south of France. I don't know which ancestral home he was looking at now, and I doubt he was seeing it.

Without turning around he said, "I believe I have an enemy."

"An enemy?"

"The same. And I don't know who he is or what he wants."

"And you think this was his doing."

"I do. I believe he followed those boys to the storage shed, or got there first and lay in wait for them. I believe the whiskey he stole was the least of it. I believe he was more intent on shedding blood than in stealing ten thousand dollars' worth of stolen whiskey."

"There have been other incidents," I guessed.

"There have," he said, "unless it's my imagination. It could be I've turned into an old maid, checking the cupboards, looking under the bed. Perhaps that's all it is. That, or else I've an enemy and a spy."

I have a license now, issued by the State of New York. I got it awhile ago when one of my lawyer clients told me, not for the first time, that he'd be able to give me more work if I were licensed. I've worked a lot for lawyers lately, and more than ever since I picked up the license.

But I haven't always had a license, and I haven't worked exclusively for members of the legal profession. I had a pimp for a client once. Another time, I worked for a drug trafficker.

If I could work for them, why couldn't I work for Ballou? If he was good enough to be my friend, if he was good enough to sit up all night with, why couldn't he be my client?

I said, "You'd have to tell me how to find the place."

"And what place would that be?"

"E-Z Storage."

"We were just there."

"I wasn't paying attention once we got out of the tunnel. I'll need directions. And you'd better let me have a key for the padlock."

"When do you want to go? Andy can drive you."

"I'll go by myself," I said. "Just tell me how to get there."

I jotted down the directions in my notebook. He proffered the roll of bills, his eyebrows raised, and I told him to put his money away.

He said this was business, that he was a client like any other, that he expected to pay. I said I'd be spending a couple of hours asking questions that most likely wouldn't lead anywhere. When the job was done, when I'd done as much as I felt comfortable doing, I'd tell him what I'd learned and how much he owed me.

"And don't your clients usually pay you something in advance? Of course they do. Here's a thousand dollars. Take it, man, for Jesus' sake! It won't obligate you to do anything you don't want to do."

I knew that. How could money obligate me more than friendship had? I said, "You don't have to pay in advance. I probably won't earn all this."

"Little enough you'd have to do. My lawyer gets as much every time he picks up the telephone. Take it, put it in your pocket. What you don't earn you can always give back."

I put the bills in my wallet, wondering why I'd even bothered to argue. Years ago an old cop named Vince Mahaffey told me what to do when somebody gave me money. "Take it," he'd said, "and put it away, and say thank you. You could even touch your cap if you're wearing one."

"Thanks," I said.

"It's I should be thanking you. Are you certain you don't want someone to drive you?"

"I'm positive."

"Or I can let you have the use of a car, and you can drive yourself."

"I'll get there."

"Now I've hired you, I'd best leave you alone, eh? Just let me know if you need anything."

"I will."

"Or if you learn anything. Or if you determine there's nothing to be learned."

"Either way," I said, "it shouldn't take more than a day or two."

"Whatever it takes. I'm glad you took the money."

"Well, you pretty much insisted on it."

"Ah, we're a fine pair of old fools," he said. "You should have taken the money without an argument. And for my part, I should have let you refuse it. But how could I do that?" His eyes caught mine, held them. "Suppose some wee fucker kills me before you finish the job. How would I feel then? I'd hate to die owing you money."

I was up a little before noon, and by one o'clock I had picked up an Avis car and found my way to E-Z Storage. I spent the afternoon there. I talked to the man in charge, one Leon Kramer, who started out wary and turned into Chatty Cathy before he was done.

Elaine rents a storage cubicle in a warehouse a few blocks west of our apartment- she stores artwork and antiques there, the overflow from her shop- but the system at the E-Z facility in New Jersey was different, and a good deal more casual. We have to sign in and out whenever we visit our bin, but E-Z, unattended at night and offering twenty-four-hour access, can't attempt anything like that level of security. A sign over Kramer's desk insisted in large print that all storage was entirely at the customer's risk, and he made the point himself three times in the first five minutes I spent with him.