High Stakes (5 page)

Chapter Eleven

Doyle awakened to the inviting odor of frying bacon. For a brief, pleasant moment, he thought he was back in his childhood home on an early Saturday morning, awaiting his mother's call to breakfast. He rolled over in the rumpled queen-size bed to see that Nora was not there.

He found her in her kitchen, scrambling eggs. “Turn on the toaster now, will you Jack?” She looked over her shoulder to smile at him. She was already dressed in sweater and jeans. “I thought after your estimable efforts of last night, you'd need some caloric fortification.”

Doyle, wearing only his boxer shorts, nuzzled her neck as he stood behind her, laughed. “Caloric fortification? The striving journalist in you comes out early this morning.”

Their romp in the bed the night before had left them pleasured and ready for sleep. He had never been with a woman he found so sexually compatible. Their lovemaking the summer Nora had spent in the U.S. with Mickey had been great but never as enjoyable as last night, and Doyle told her so. “Ah, but now I'm operating on my home turf,” Nora said. She turned to kiss him. “Tend to your eggs and rashers, now.”

He'd always had trouble taking orders, especially from women. Sister Mary Margaret, his eighth grade teacher at St. James Parochial School, was one exception, being young, bright, and blessed with a sense of humor. Nora was another, but her commands were usually issued while naked in bed with him.

Doyle mopped the egg remnants on his plate with his final piece of brown bread. She looked at him admiringly. “I've never known a person to eat so rapidly and with such relish.”

“It's what keeps me energetic. Like, right now, I am completely revived and restored.” With a leering nod toward the nearby bedroom, he said, “I've got some time now before I have to leave.”

Nora said, “So you may. But you'll not be enticing me to share it with you in there. Not this morning, at least.” She began to gather and wash the dishes. Doyle went to get dressed.

“Is there anything I should know about your car?” he said when he emerged from the bedroom. Before finally going to sleep the night before, they had planned this day. Nora said she would be working from home, so Jack could borrow her five-year-old Peugeot to drive down to Kinsale. “It gets a bit temperamental sometimes,” Nora said, “especially when you do your shifting. Like me, it's not always an eager starter in the morning. Just be patient. And the steering sort of pulls to the right, I haven't had a chance to get that corrected. It uses regular petrol. Don't be afraid to top it up before you return tonight.” They kissed at her doorway before he walked down the block to the red two-door car. It was a 2007 model, the original gloss lost in the sixty or so rainy Irish months preceding this one, but still looking good.

The interior of this vehicle, like that of many busy journalists the world over, was a slum. Newspapers and folders were scattered over all the seats but the driver's. An assortment of used coffee containers and fast food wrappings littered the floors front and back. “How could a woman who's such a careful housekeeper live with this mess?” he muttered.

“GPS?” Nora had laughed the night before. “Not on this working girl's salary. You'll have to depend on that now-archaic traveler's aid, the map.”

Doyle reviewed the map he'd placed on the steering wheel before he turned on the ignition. The route looked fairly straightforward. “If I can remember to stay on the left side of the road, I'll be all right,” he said to himself.

This summer morning was a bright one and traffic moved steadily on M7-M8 toward Cork. Doyle broke up the three-hour journey by stopping for petrol before the turnoff onto N27 for Kinsale and his meeting with Hanratty. As he filled the Peugeot's tank, he watched with amusement as a young, red-haired woman, dressed in a midriff-revealing tee-shirt and tight shorts, stretched to clean the top of the back window of her dusty blue Golf. Like many of her sex and age, she was evidently either a regular patron of tanning bed salons or a user of the popular spray-on version of skin coloring. Probably the latter, Doyle thought, noticing white patches she'd obviously missed on the backs of her knees. She'd be noticeable in this country's predominantly pale-skinned populace.

Before returning to the highway, Doyle rummaged in Nora's music CDs in the left door pocket amidst used tissues and a variety of receipts. He smiled as he found one of his favorite Van Morrison song collections,
Irish Heartbeat
. He skipped ahead to track four,
“
The Star of the County Down.”

Listening appreciatively, Doyle thought of one of his college roommates, a budding musicologist named Billy Munger, who frequently declared at late night drinking sessions that “George Ivan Morrison is by far,
by
far,
the best bad-voiced singer ever.”

He turned the CD off when the song ended. “Mr. Morrison,” he said to himself, “your voice is a long way removed from golden, but you sure as hell have got some Hall of Fame chops.”

Doyle switched to the radio and listened to a woman author described by the interviewer as “a great authority on the iconic Irish writer Brendan Behan.” The next few minutes were taken up by the guest's description of the late novelist/playwright's father, “…a wily but extremely lazy man. His wife was always after him to dig up their backyard so she could have a garden there. He never would. But after she had long hounded him, one day he dialed the local Garda station to report that he'd received a ‘disturbing phone message from an anonymous caller.' The message warned that some ‘IRA members had secretly planted explosives for use in bomb-making' on that part of the Behan property. The Garda sprang into action. They dug up the whole yard but of course did not find anything. That night, when Mrs. Behan returned home, her husband told her the garden was now ready for planting.”

***

Approaching Kinsale on N27, Doyle looked forward to again seeing Niall Hanratty, even though this meeting was sparked by Sheila Hanratty's concerns for her husband's safety. Doyle and the Irish bookmaker had become friends during an afternoon a few years before when they shared a box at the Curragh races. That friendship had solidified one night several weeks after that when Hanratty helped thwart a man intent on murder in a horse stall at Monee Park Racetrack south of Chicago.

During their initial meeting, the bookmaker had taken some pains to explain his first name. “Not a common name here, Jack. There was an Irish king named Niall centuries ago. He was called ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages' because he was in the business of ransoming people. A most industrious sort of fella back around 400 A.D. His best known captive was none other than St. Patrick. King Niall was said to have let him go free for nothing. And Patrick, of course, went on to become the patron saint of Ireland.”

Doyle smiled. “Wasn't St. Patrick supposed to have driven all the snakes out of Ireland?”

“Have you ever seen one here, Jack?”

Not wanting to rile his friend, Doyle answered, “Not in person, no.”

“And I doubt that you will,” Hanratty laughed.

Doyle said, “I assume the bookmaking business has been enough to keep you out of your predecessor's ransoming trade?”

“Indeed it has. Evidently, King Niall and I have only one thing in common. Now, this is Sheila's view, understand.”

“What's that?”

“The woman has long considered me to be a control freak, which I admit is somewhat the case. But not to the extent of old King Niall. Legend has it that, as he lay on his deathbed, he insisted his family and friends rehearse their planned spoken memorials to him. He was said to have done quite a bit of editing of these statements before he passed on.”

Chapter Twelve

Kinsale hadn't changed since Doyle's only previous visit more than two years earlier. Nor had it changed in the many years before that. This popular resort town, some twenty miles south of Cork City on the Celtic Sea, would see its small population of less than three thousand swell throughout the summer with tourists on holiday. Its harbor, from which thousands of Irish citizens had fled the Great Famine of the nineteenth century, featured a yacht marina that today was replete with expensive craft. Very visible in the harbor was the statue commemorating the dozens of survivors and hundreds of corpses brought to Kinsale in the spring of 1915, victims of the
Lusitania
's sinking.

He drove slowly down heavily trafficked Market Street, Kinsale's major thoroughfare, before spotting an open space. “Rarity of rarities,” he muttered as he quickly backed into it, barely beating a big, blue SUV whose driver reacted with a horn blast and fist shaken out of his window. Doyle waved cheerily to the man and locked Nora's car. He was only a block from the Shamrock Off-Course Wagering Shop.

***

Minutes earlier, seated at his desk in the second-floor office of his shop, Niall Hanratty had looked at the wall clock. He'd expected Doyle a half-hour before and was growing impatient. He said loudly, “Tony, bring in the prelim reports will you? I've got time to look at them.”

From the much smaller, adjacent office, Anthony X. Rourke, Hanratty's longtime genius number cruncher, corporation secretary, and minority owner if not close friend, came through the doorway. Rourke was a short, thin, middle-aged man who, as long as Niall had known him, and despite having had his salary steadily advanced over the years, still dressed like modern-day version of a Dickensian clerk. Rourke had recently developed a slight stoop to accentuate his already poor posture. In his quiet voice, he reported, “It's lookin' like a grand day for us so far, Niall.”

Niall nodded appreciatively as he quickly perused the columns of computer printout figures. “This should put a bit of a smile even on your serious visage,” he said to Rourke. “The favorite players have gone huge, and got stuffed so far. And the longshot punters, with rare exceptions, failed just as badly.”

He got to his feet, stretched his tall, physically fit frame, and reached for his suit jacket. “Remember Jack Doyle? The wild American boyo? He's due here soon to have lunch. Would you join us? These figures you've compiled, Tony,” he said, tapping the stack of printouts, “warrant a celebratory pint, yeah.”

Hanratty's jovial mood, as usually the case in the course of their long association, was not contagious. The soft-spoken Rourke shrugged and shook his head no. “You go on, then, Boss. I'll have the junior lads finish up for me and get a good early start for home.”

“Safe home, then, Tony,” smiled Hanratty. Rourke lived in his native town of Cork City, a place from which he'd never moved. “Tony, on your way out tell Barry he can have the rest of the day, too.” Hoy, a one-time heavyweight boxing champion of Ireland, worked as Hanratty's driver, bodyguard, retriever of debts overdue, and, as Hanratty put it, “representative-in-waiting to some of our society's potentially disturbing elements.” Like Rourke, he had been with Shamrock from Hanratty's launch of the company fifteen years earlier, an enterprise that began in one modest Kinsale storefront and now extended to ten counties in the Republic and parts of the North. Hanratty often remarked to his wife, Sheila, “I've had two main men with me all the way. Tony looks like a barely nourished librarian. Hoy reminds me of Victor McLaughlin in that old John Wayne movie about Ireland. I've been lucky to have 'em.”

At the door, Rourke turned to say, “I'll tell Barry on my way out then.”

***

Doyle began to push open the Shamrock door just as it was jerked from the inside. He almost fell against the emerging Barry Hoy who laughed and said, “Heard you were coming, Jack.” They shook hands. Hoy said, “The Boss is waiting. Take those stairs to the right of the betting windows.”

At the top of the stairs, Doyle nearly bumped into the descending Rourke, who nodded a polite but unenthusiastic hello. The surprised accountant stumbled forward as his precariously perched bifocals fell off his nose. Doyle snatched them midway of their fall toward the stairs. “Och, Mr. Doyle, I didn't see you coming up. Those are some quick hands you've come equipped with. Thank you,” he added as Doyle handed him the eyeglasses. “You know the way to Niall's office? Good. Welcome back and good-bye to you for now.” He continued his careful descent, right hand tight on the banister.

Doyle gave a quick rap on Hanratty's door and entered. Niall, grinning, quickly came around the wide, paper-filled desk to reach for Doyle's hand saying, “Bless you, Jack, for coming down. You surely didn't have to. But you've pleased my dear Sheila by doing so. She's worried about me. She shouldn't be, of course, but she is. So I didn't put up too much of a protest when she told me she'd asked you to meet with me. Glad to see you again, my friend.”

Hanratty snatched his suit coat off the back of his chair and shrugged it on. “Because of our success together in the States, Sheila has enormous confidence in your assorted abilities that I described to her, probably with some degree of exaggeration. She's come, poor woman, to envision you as a master of not only deduction but arbitration and confrontation.”

He picked up a large thick brown envelope, moved to the door, and waved Jack through. “But let's talk from behind a pint or two and over a lovely little lunch. Are you with me?”

Chapter Thirteen

They slowly made their way the two blocks on tourist-crowded sidewalks to Hanratty's favorite Kinsale restaurant, McCann's Oyster House, a venerable local institution that overlooked the harbor. After they were seated at Hanratty's customary table near the wide front window, he introduced Jack to their smiling waitress. “Katie, meet Jack Doyle. He's come all the way from the States, Chicago exactly, to dine at Kinsale's most deservedly famous restaurant.” A few minutes later, Katie delivered pints of Smithwick's. “
Slainte,”
Hanratty said, and touched his glass to Doyle's. “Half-dozen fried oysters to start, then the grilled sole,” Hanratty said to Katie. “Double that, please,” said Doyle.

Hanratty took a long pull on his lager before opening the envelope he'd brought. “Now, I know Sheila's concerns about my safety have extended to you. She talked to you about it at the dinner last night, which is why you're here. Yes, there were a couple of minor traffic incidents. I wish to God I had never mentioned them to her, for she's magnified them way out of proportion.”

He paused to attend to the lager before saying, “But I want to show you some things that should flush your fears, Jack. You must understand that you can't be in a business like mine without making people unhappy, causing complaints. Not surprisingly, over the years I've gotten obscene phone calls and a drawer full of nasty, semi-literate letters from disappointed punters blaming me for their ineptitude.”

“Complaints about what?”

“Imagined harm that's been done them. They've lost money and they blame me. My odds were ‘off.' Or my clerks shortchanged them. Or the particular shop of mine they frequent wasn't open early enough for them to get a winning bet down before they went to work.
Always
a supposed winning wager, of course, never a loser. Or, the shop wasn't open
late
enough. The lines were too long. There weren't enough bet takers behind the wickets. Oh, numerous are the grievances abounding in the lives of these losers. Most of my customers, God love them, are quite aware I run an absolutely honest business. Always have. Always will. That's why they keep patronizing Shamrock Off-Course Wagering. Why my business has thrived and grown. But there's always an element of nutters roiling the shallow waters.

“It's the same old self-deceiving bullshit, year after year,” Hanratty continued. “There's a stream of it that pours through the bloodstreams of bad bettors everywhere. You probably know many of them back home that are eager to announce their big scores, right? Whether it's betting horses, dogs, football, baseball, or the stock markets. But how many ever report their far more numerous losing days?”

Doyle said, “Hardly any that I know. I guess it's the same all over.”

“Wherever men risk their money,” Hanratty said. He paused to fork up one of the plump oysters, gently dipped it in the cocktail sauce, chewed with evident satisfaction. Then his frown returned. He opened the eleven by thirteen brown envelope he'd brought and extracted several sheets of paper as well as a standard sized envelope. “This is just a sampling from my collection of loony letters I've received over the years. Please note the address on this one,” he said, handing a small envelope to Jack.

Hanratty's name and home address were centered in the proper place. In the upper left corner, however, where the return address should have been, was written in large, vivid purple letters:

HERPES TEST RESULTS
(Personal and Confidential)

“Oh, sure, you can laugh, Jack. So humorous, yeah? Well, maybe not so much the first time one of these envelopes arrives at my house to be retrieved from the mailbox by Sheila. With all three of our young sons looking on, only the older one hiding a grin, the rascal, his brothers horrified. And maybe not so humorous when such items started coming to my office here and the other offices around the country. After a while, it gets real damn old. I've heard the area postal workers find these mailings to be sources of considerable laughter. Well, they are not so to me.”

Doyle said, “I suppose you've no idea who sends these.”

“You're wrong there. Under the purple ‘Sincerely' at the bottom of each bitter letter there is indeed a signature in a bold hand. From some gobshite calling himself ‘Tim of Tipperary.' He's been lavish with his postage the last few months.”

“What is his message? Or messages?”

Hanratty said, “It's always some claim about how one of my shops has deprived him of some bonanza he had coming. His repeated charge is that when he wins a bet, the odds I've provided are, as he writes, ‘disgracefully feckin' low, you cheatin' bastard.' It's a sentence he tends to repeat. He's an expert at irritation.”

Doyle was puzzled. “I don't get it. Don't your bettors set the odds with their wagers?”

“No, no, not at all, Jack. In our betting shops over here,
we
determine the odds. We can raise or lower them to reflect supply and demand. I think your Las Vegas casinos do the same thing with bets on football and basketball games, maybe boxing, too, I don't know. The Vegas fellas, they employ—and so do we over here—a fluid process. Now, horse racing in the States is different. Your punters are betting
against each other
. That's your pari-mutuel system. There's not as much of that here as you have. And none in my shops.”

Doyle said, “I never knew that. Just as, I guess, many American racing bettors don't realize they are actually in direct competition with each other. I've often heard some satisfied guy say after a winning bet, ‘Well, I'm betting with “house money” from here on today.' He obviously was not aware that there
is
no such thing as ‘house money' at racetracks. Casinos, sure. But our U.S. tracks don't give a damn what a bettor does as long as he
bets
. They're taking out their percentage of every bet made, and so are the states in their taxes. Doesn't matter to the people who own Heartland Downs or Belmont Park or Santa Anita
who
wins or loses. What matters to them is the volume of bets placed, what they call the churn.”

Doyle paused as Katie deposited another pair of Smithwick's pints on their table. “Loonch will be right up,” she said. “The sole is grand today, Niall, I've tried it.”

Hanratty thanked Katie and turned to Jack. “Your pari-mutuel system, Jack, I don't see the joy in that,” he said. “I prefer our way. It's a contest. It takes brain work on our part, and on that of our customers. We can shift the odds lower if we have a great exposure. Bettors can shop the odds looking for what they think is their best advantage. Kind of an interesting, like, game, you know. A competition. Not just sitting back and slicing off a piece of every Euro passing through.”

Considering Hanratty's expanding empire of obviously profitable betting shops, Doyle could certainly understand his host's thinking. “Niall, what about competitors? Would any of them try to harm you?”

Hanratty smiled. “I seriously doubt it. True, we had some lively little turf wars, pardon the expression, some years back, when my business was just getting off the ground. But for the most part, things worked out peacefully. Especially after Barry Hoy and a couple of his similarly large cousins had serious talks with a few potential rivals that threatened to show up on the disruptive side. Barry and his lads brought them to their senses, if you know what I mean. It's rumored one of the real obstreperous fellas, up in Limerick, earned a trip to a hospital emergency room. I know nothing of the details of that, of course. Peace has been reigning for a long time now, I am happy to say.”

An hour later, they parted with a handshake outside the restaurant. Doyle walked to Nora's car for his drive back to Dublin. He'd have one more night at her place before his next day's return flight to Chicago. After his talk with Niall, he decided would phone the worried Sheila and reassure her that her worries were needless, that her husband was, as usual, in control of things.

He had another satisfying listen to the Van Morrison CD as he headed back up the N27, toward dinner with Nora, he hoped, if she wasn't working late.