Irish Eyes (7 page)

“Woo-ooh,” Baby called out. “Look who come to pick us up in a fancy new truck.” She guided Sister by the elbow, gently inching her toward the door. I hopped out and ran around to open the back door of the van for them. “Hey, Miss Baby. Hey, Miss Sister.”

Sister grabbed me and hugged me around the neck. She smelled like lily of the valley and mentholatum cough drops. Her filmy brown eyes twinkled behind the Coke-bottle glasses, and she ran her fingers through my untidy curls in a vain attempt to straighten them. “How come we got the boss lady pickin’ us up today? Edna got too fancy for herself?”

“No. We had a big fight over who got to pick you up, and I won ‘cause I’m bigger and meaner,” I said.

Sister grinned. “I know that’s a lie. You might be younger and stronger, but ain’t nobody meaner than Edna Mae Garrity.”

When I had them safely buckled into the backseat of the van, I headed back toward Druid Hills and Bettye Bond’s house.

The girls were, as Edna had predicted, raring to go. They’ve been working for us ever since we bought the House Mouse, and the two of them, well into their eighties, we guessed, had been cleaning houses in and around Atlanta so long they still remembered streetcars, nickel Cokes, and the bad old days of Jim Crow.

Sister was the older of the two. She’d been legally blind for as long as I’d known her. Baby, the younger, was nearly stone-deaf. When they’d first come to work for us, Baby was still driving, counting on Sister to let her know if there was an ambulance or police car sneaking up on them, or if somebody was honking their horn if Baby lingered too long at a green light. We’d persuaded them to stop driving a couple years earlier, after Baby developed diabetes. Living in a church-run high-rise,
and savers their whole lives, neither of them really needed to work, but the Easterbrooks sisters had worked their whole lives, and they weren’t about to stop just because they’d already outlived most of their old clients.

Nowadays, we try to give them a job every week or two, and always send along somebody else to help out. Sister likes to polish silver, and Baby can still push a dust mop around, and the two of them are plainly everybody’s pets, and they know it.

Sister dug around in the plastic grocery sack. “Know what I got right here? Something special for Miss Bettye’s party.”

“What’s that?” Baby said. “You bring a sack lunch for us?”

“It’s something special for the party,” Sister said loudly.

“Hope it’s some Thunderbird wine,” Baby said, chortling and reaching for the bag. “Miss Bettye, she knows how to throw a wingding.”

Sister slapped Baby’s hand away.

“Thunderbird? Nasty wine for a fine lady’s party? You hear that, Callahan? Hear what Miss Baby Easterbrooks be thinkin’ about and it ain’t even noon? Call herself a Christian and she be wantin’ to drink liquor on the job?”

“You never drank no liquor on the job? What you call that little bitty bottle I seen in the bottom of your pocketbook there, Miss Thing?” Baby retorted.

“That’s my nerve medicine,” Sister said serenely.

“You got a nerve callin’ it medicine, and that’s a fact,” Baby said, getting huffy. She leaned forward in her seat and tapped me on the shoulder. “Callahan, sugar, ask Miss Thing how come her nerve medicine looks and tastes just like King Cotton Peach Brandy?”

“No, Callahan,” Sister said softly, whispering. “Ask Miss Baby Easterbrooks how come a girl got saved when she twelve years old knows so much about liquor and such like that. While you at it, why don’t you ask Miss High and Mighty what Mama saw that time she come home early from Wednesday night Junior Ambassadors meeting and caught Miss Baby in the parlor sittin’ in the pastor’s son’s lap, and I’m not talking like it was Santy Claus’s lap she was a-sittin’ on.”

“What you say?” Baby hollered. “What she say, Callahan?”

“Girls,” I said, stifling a laugh. “Come on, now. Be sweet. What’s in the bag, Miss Sister?”

Sister brought out a large doughnut-shaped item wrapped tightly in foil and topped with a red satin bow.

“This here is one of my coconut pound cakes. Miss Bettye, she’s a fool for pound cake. When me and Baby worked for her by ourselves, I used to bake her a pound cake every month. Got paid five dollars cash money for it, too. One time, Miss Bettye, she told me, she served that cake at bridge club, told them ladies she made it herself. That’s why she had me keep on makin’ ‘em, ‘cause them ladies loved that cake so good. When Edna called and said we was helpin’ Miss Bettye get ready for a big do, I got out my pan, and I said, ‘Sister, let’s bake a cake.’”

“How nice,” I said. “Bettye Bond will be thrilled. You two are her favorites.”

As promised, Bettye Bond made a big fuss over the Easterbrookses. “Thank God,” she said when Sister handed her the cake. “I could eat this whole thing all by myself, Sister. But I won’t, ‘cause I want to save it for my guests.”

“Huh!” Baby said, glowering. “You wanna eat a cake cooked by an old blind lady? How you know she didn’t put soap powder ‘stead of flour in that cake, like she did last week when she thought she was cookin’ grits and instead fixed up a big ol’ pan of Comet Cleanser for breakfast?”

Sister ignored Baby. “You got plenty of silver polish for me, Miss Bettye? I hope so, ‘cause Baby over there, all she good for is runnin’ her mouth.”

I left them with Bettye, promising her reinforcements would be along soon.

It pissed me off, having to go through a metal detector before I could enter the new police headquarters at City Hall East. It pissed me off even more when the uniformed officer searched my purse for hidden knives, guns, or pipe bombs.

We’re bomb crazy in Atlanta now. All over the South too, I guess. Ever since some right-wing losers started blowing up abortion clinics and gay nightclubs and even Olympic Centennial Park, there’s not a government office in town you can enter
without being searched. I knew the reason behind it, but it still pissed me off.

I took the elevator up to the criminal investigation offices. A civilian secretary frowned when I told her, no, I didn’t have an appointment to see Major Mackey, and, no, he wasn’t expecting me. She smiled smugly when she looked up from the phone. “He can’t see you right now. He’s with the chief.”

There were two ugly orange plastic chairs pushed against the far wall of the office. I sat down on one of them. “Fine,” I said. “Could you call the major and tell him I said I’ll wait?”

She didn’t like it, but she did it. I’d brought some paperwork along, so I pulled it out of my purse, and started reading the computer printouts. Edna keeps the House Mouse books, and she’d been working on our taxes for the past several weeks. I winced when I saw the numbers. In my old liberal college days, I’d railed against capitalist pigs. Now I was one, although only a very small-potatoes capitalist pig. Still, I hated paying taxes as much as old John D. Rockefeller himself.

A door opened and a woman with blond upswept hair poked her head out. “Miss Garrity. Could you come back now?”

I stood up and followed her down the hall past a warren of small offices and smaller cubicles. She was in her early to mid-thirties, trim, with heavily muscled calves, like a runner or a career tennis player maybe. She wore a conservative navy suit that looked on the expensive side for somebody making a secretary’s salary at city hall. The skirt was a hair on the short side, but not aggressively so. She stopped at a door at the end of the hallway and gestured me to go inside. But nobody was behind the desk.

She stepped in behind me, closed the door, and sat down at the desk. That was when I noticed the nameplate on the battered city-issue metal desk.

“Capt. L. E. Dugan,” it said. Bucky’s new girl.

L
isa Dugan was not the kind of cupcake Bucky Deavers usually went in for. I’d never known Bucky to date a woman born in the same decade he was born. Hell, come to think of it, he’d never dated a woman before, just a series of girls. Cute, fun-loving, airheaded girls were the Deavers type.

Captain Dugan was beautiful, but she was no girl. There were fine worry lines at the corners of her hazel eyes, dark circles under those same eyes, and just a hint of sag to her chin. I couldn’t help it. What did he see in this chick? I wondered.

She sat back in her chair and watched me watching her. The office was nothing special, just a desk, two chairs, a computer, and a phone. There was a bank of file cabinets behind her desk. A green plant, maybe a philodendron, draped limp leaves over the edge of the cabinet. There were some framed photos, snapshots of Lisa Dugan holding a puppy, Lisa Dugan and a little boy, and another picture of just a little boy. No photos of Deavers. I felt glad about that. Finally the phone rang. She picked it up, listened, said, “Thanks,” and disconnected.

“That was the hospital,” she said. “There’s been no change.” She bit her lip. “Last night I talked to one of the doctors.
I guess he figured, since I’m a cop, I could take bad news. He said there isn’t going to be a change. Not unless Bucky gets an infection, or pneumonia, something like that.”

“Bullshit,” I said hotly. “He has no right to say something like that. There are other doctors in this town. This guy doesn’t know everything. Bucky talked to me last night, did you know that? He opened his eyes and looked at me and talked. So don’t tell me he’s brain dead. ‘Cause I was there. And I know Bucky. I know how goddamn stubborn he is.”

“Stubborn.” She said it with a sigh. Then she stuck out her hand and I shook it. “I’m Lisa,” she said. “Bucky told me all about you. He kept saying we had to get you over for dinner. Only I suck as a cook. And I felt sort of, I don’t know, funny, about meeting you.”

“He took me to that party last night so that we could meet,” I said. “He talked about you all night long. To tell you the truth, I was getting a little jealous.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“We were buddies. Pals. It’s just that I hadn’t seen much of him in the past few months. I had no idea he was seriously involved with somebody. But it’s not like I was his girlfriend or anything. I never slept with him. He told you that, didn’t he?”

“We didn’t talk a lot about who he had or hadn’t slept with in the past,” Lisa said. “We’re both adults. I knew he’d had a life before me, and I certainly had one before I met him. We didn’t talk about the past at all. But I figured you were special in a different way.”

She was trying to butter me up. Why?

“You said the doctor said there wasn’t going to be a change,” I said. “What’s the situation right now?”

She paused.

“Major Mackey said you’d talk to me,” I said. “I’m family, you know.”

“The bullet was a twenty-two, we think. At least, the entry wound is small, and the gunman left a twenty-two at the scene, so that’s what we’re assuming. It’s still in there, lodged in his brain. The doctor said it did a hell of a lot of damage.
He’s breathing on a respirator. And they’ve got him heavily sedated.”

I felt numb, thinking about Bucky, in a hospital bed, tethered to a lot of machines.

“What about the girl at the liquor store? I know she’s missing. Have they found her yet?”

The friendly look on Lisa Dugan’s face vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

“You know I can’t talk about that.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Who am I going to tell? Come on, Lisa. You say you know how Bucky felt about me. I’ve got a right to know what’s going on with the investigation.”

“You were a cop,” she said, emphasizing the past tense. “Now you’re a civilian. A civilian with a habit of butting her nose into police investigations. But that’s not going to happen this time. Major Mackey was very clear about that. And I’m very clear about it.” She gave me a level look. The hazel eyes could get very frosty. “Don’t fuck this up, Callahan. It’s too important. We’re gonna find the guy who shot Bucky, and when we do, we want everything right. You know the law. You know if the chain of evidence in this case gets messed with, it’s history. So be the friend you claim you are. Go home. Say a prayer for Bucky. Say one for me, too, if you would. And leave it alone.”

“I’m not fucking anything up, Lisa. But I’m watching. And I’m listening. I was there when it happened, so it happened to me, too. And I want to know why. Why’d this guy just walk in and put a couple bullets in Bucky’s head? He didn’t take anything, didn’t shoot the clerk, didn’t look around to see if there were any other witnesses. He just shoots Bucky and leaves? And half an hour later, the only witness to the shooting also disappears? I got questions, you better believe. Like right now, I’m wondering, why is the chief already calling in internal affairs on this? And what’s this bullshit about saying Bucky broke department policy working an unauthorized job?”

Dugan got out of her chair. “No comment,” she said.

“Since when do cops have to get the chief’s permission to
make a living?” I asked. “Cops have always worked second and third jobs.”

“No comment,” she said again. She opened the door and waited by it. I got up and stalked out of there, no wiser than I’d been when I went in.

A
t the hospital, they’d moved Bucky to the neuro ward. They wouldn’t let me see him, but a nurse there who recognized my name said she’d gone to school with my sister Maureen and worked with her in the ER.

“He’s stable,” said the nurse, whose name was Veneta. “There’s a waiting room over there,” she added, pointing down the hall. “His doctor makes rounds after lunch, maybe you could catch him then.”

I got a Diet Coke from a vending machine and went looking for the waiting room.

The room was small and nearly full. I almost turned around and left when I saw who was sitting in the middle of a green vinyl sofa. John Boylan. He looked up when I came in, gave me a weak wave. Sitting on one side of Boylan was a white guy I didn’t recognize, but he had that unmistakable cop look about him: the polished shoes, the erect posture and short hair. On the left of Boylan was C.W. Hunsecker.

He got up when he saw me, we hugged, sat back down.

“You hear anything?” C.W. asked, his voice low.

“He’s stable,” I said.