Shamrock Alley (9 page)

“They’re ugly and pitted,” Katie said.

“What are?” He’d hardly heard her.

“The fixtures.”

“They’re not pitted.” Were they? He didn’t know.

“And a skylight,” Katie continued, whispering in his ear. “A big one, right over the toilet.”

“We’re on the second floor. You’d be looking at the bathroom in the apartment upstairs.”

“I know. Wouldn’t that be fun?” She kissed his cheek and examined his face. He felt her eyes on him for what seemed like an eternity, as if she were trying to learn something new about him just by forcing her eyes into his skin. Visual osmosis. He thought of her as the Country Girl just then, as she had been once before, now seemingly so long ago: she the Country Girl from a farm upstate, and he the City Boy who fell hopelessly in love with her. He recalled the first time he’d kissed her and could remember wondering what she thought of him even as their lips were pressed together. Did she like him? Did she
love
him? So long ago, it seemed like someone else’s life.

Finally, dejectedly, she stood, the swell of her belly nearly at his eye level. “I’m going to bed,” she said, examining her fingernails. “I’ve got class tomorrow.”

“I’ll be in soon.”

She whispered something in return, but he couldn’t make out what it was.

After some time, he pushed himself away from the kitchen table and stared at the walls around him. The place was slowly becoming home. It was rare he found the time to consider things besides his job, but when he did—like now—all the thoughts seemed to rush at him at once, bombarding him until his mind was exhausted by the sheer savagery of the onslaught. He thought of his wife and what it would be like to be a father. Then he thought of his
own
father, and of the cancer that was slowly eating him alive.

There was a small room with an ugly shag carpet at the other end of the hall, mostly crammed with boxes and other displaced items from the move. A sofa was propped up against one wall. An old television set sat on the floor, its screen dusty, with a VCR—a gift from Katie’s parents—on the floor next to it. He moved around some the boxes, considering how comfortable it felt to be out of their old apartment.

He examined most of the boxes without opening them, tipping them over to see what was written on their sides. Most of them were filled with Katie’s stuff—junk she’d accumulated over time, and more junk accumulated by her parents and passed on to her as if in tradition.

In the bedroom, Katie’s breathing was soft and on the surface. He peeled off his clothes and slipped into bed beside her. She muttered something beneath her breath, rolled over, her breathing suddenly deeper.

“You asleep?” he whispered. She was.

When he finally fell asleep, his dreams were a patchwork of irrational sounds and images: off-key overtures and badly performed one-act plays comprised of unskilled actors and illogical symbolism. Somewhere in all the confusion, he dreamt of his father.

When the phone rang later that evening, he awoke slick with sweat, his heart trip-hammering in his chest. Sitting up in the darkness, eyes unfocused, he grabbed his cell phone off the nightstand. Beside him, Katie stirred but did not awake.

“Yeah, hello?”

“Is this John?” A woman’s voice.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Tressa Walker. John?”

“It’s me.” It took a moment for the sleep to disperse and for reality to take over. “Tressa, what is it? Is something wrong?”

“I …” She was breathing heavy. “John, could you … meet me?”

Squinting, he made out the glowing emerald numbers of his alarm clock: 1:15. “Yeah, okay. I’ll be at your apartment in—”

“No.” Her voice sounded awkward and far away. “Not here. I think … I can …” She paused, caught her breath. “I know a place. McGinty’s, over on Ninth Avenue. It’s a small place, stays open real late. I’ll go there now. Will you come?”

“McGinty’s,” he mused. “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

After he hung up, he found himself crouched over the edge of the bed, his eyes staring off into the darkness of the bedroom while the fingers of his right hand traced the faint scar along his forehead.

McGinty’s of Ninth Avenue was dark and bleak and mildly populated. It possessed a dungeon-like quality, with its smoked brick walls and narrow, barred windows. A mahogany bar stood against the wall to the immediate right of the entranceway, behind which a severe-looking, mustachioed bartender cleaned glasses with a towel. To the right of the entranceway, a Naugahyde armchair and a few wooden folding chairs stood beneath framed prints by local painters. The tavern itself was small and boasted only a handful of round, wooden tables. Tonight, only two of these tables were occupied. Two bronze-skinned men in work clothes sat at one, quietly conversing in Spanish over dark beers with thick, foamy heads. They did not look up as John entered the tavern, and they hardly acknowledged the proximity with which John walked around them.

At the second table sat a thin, pale-faced man in a dark overcoat and rimless glasses. He sat
sans
beverage, scribbling something in a spiral-bound notebook with great intensity, his pointed nose only an inch and a half from the page. A constellation of angry scabs dotted the knuckles of his furious writing hand.

Taking such detailed inventory was not a habit he’d acquired from his time on the job. In fact, the tabulation of things—people, places, and all matters of circumstance alike—was a skill he’d honed during his adolescence. The Brooklyn neighborhood where he’d grown up had been no different than an unsupervised home for wayward boys. The gang in which he ran catered to neighborhood troublemakers, abused and neglected street thugs who carried Lucky Strikes in abundance and drank whenever they were able to swipe anything in a bottle. His father’s overbearingness had caused him to seek out solace from such gangs and enjoyment from guys who would all later grow up to become gas station attendants, wind up in various prisons, or die young.

Someone shifted in a corner booth toward the rear of the tavern, hidden in shadows. He caught a glimpse of nervous eyes and recognized Tressa Walker. She offered him a wan smile as he approached the booth and sat down.

“Thought you’d changed your mind.”

“Traffic on the bridge.” He pointed at the collection of empty Guinness bottles that were established in a half-circle in front of the girl. “You looking for a hangover or what?”

She smiled nervously, her eyes dead. From within her coat pocket, she produced a pack of Camels, shook one out, and stuffed the remaining cigarettes back into her coat. She put the smoke between her lips and lit it with the coconut-scented candle from the table. Her first inhalation was exaggerated, and she exhaled with her head nearly all the way back, pale throat exposed. A great plume of blue smoke filtered about her head. The following two inhalations were just the opposite—quick and insincere, as if she were afraid of getting caught doing something wrong and wanted to be done with it.

“What’s going on here, Tressa? You look terrible. Something’s wrong.”

“No, no.” She shook her head and actually managed to utter a convincing laugh. “No, it’s good. I’m good. I just …” Her eyes had yet to meet his. She looked strung-out, wired. John recalled the bruise on her arm from the other day and wondered if Deveneau or one of Deveneau’s thug friends had been at her again.

“Just chill out,” he soothed, turning and peering about the tavern. The bartender had disappeared, but the other patrons hadn’t moved. The scribbler’s nose was now just centimeters from his notebook. “Take some deep breaths.”

“No, I’m okay. I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s all right. Just relax.” He was trying to see where the bartender had drifted off to. After a few moments, the bartender returned, his dish towel slung casually over one broad shoulder.

“Yeah.” She puffed her smoke, her face cadaverous in the candlelight. “I been thinking about a few things past couple days, you know? Just … I don’t know … going over shit in my head. You don’t know, but my life ain’t been easy. I mean, I guess you know some of it.” She offered a nervous laugh. “I done a lot of things, got involved with a lot of bad guys. I been so fucked up on drugs before and … Christ, goddamn it …” Her hands trembled, the bones of her knuckles wanting to pushed up through the flesh of her hands. “My father used to kick the shit out of me when I was a kid. He was worthless, a piece of trash. My mother was always drunk, and didn’t even know what went on half the time. When I split from there, I just kept doing the same damn things … kept getting myself involved with these same damn people …” She suddenly looked as though she’d aged twenty years. “Christ, I’m rambling. I’m sorry—I don’t know why I started this way.”

He just sat in silence, watching her.

“I been arrested a couple of times, been in some pretty bad shape for a while. But now I got that apartment, and it ain’t much, but it’s mine, and I got it, and I’m payin’ rent best I can, and I got my daughter—”

“Don’t get upset—”

“Look …” And she began rummaging like a madwoman through her purse. “I guess what I’m trying to say is … I just…” Her chest hitched, and her voice caught in her throat. “Meghan—that’s my daughter, Meghan. I have a picture of her here somewhere. You should see her, John—she’s the one good thing I got. I ain’t all bad, John …”

He leaned over the table and pushed his hands down atop her purse, atop her own hands. She froze, looking straight down at the table.

“Take it easy, kid …”

Finally, smiling weakly, she just shook her head. “I don’t even know why I’m saying all this.”

“You in some kind of trouble here, Tressa? Francis been asking questions, giving you a hard time?”

She looked at him then. The faint odor of unwashed hair mingled with cigarette smoke struck him. At that moment, she looked like a portrait of herself painted by an angry and unskilled artist. “I want to help you,” she said flatly.

“Me? With what?”

“I know Frankie’s source. I know where he gets his money, who gives it to him.”

Cigarette smoke, blue and thick, hung in the air between their faces like gauze. There was a wall clock directly above Tressa’s head, green shamrocks in place of numbers, its second hand ticking like a pulse.

Tressa leaned across the table, her eyes collective and solemn, her skin gray through the smoke. When she spoke, she did so in a near whisper. “You ever heard of two guys named Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn?”

“No.”

“They’re a couple Irish guys from the West Side, run some underground gang. They got their hands in a little bit of everything that goes on around Hell’s Kitchen. Frankie got into ‘em from a friend of a friend, that sorta thing, and they been feedin’ him that fake money for months.”

“You said you didn’t know his source …”

“I lied.”

“These guys O’Shay and Kahn—they’re printing the stuff?”

“I don’t have the dirt on them—only met O’Shay a couple times. Mostly, I’m sayin’ this from what I heard from Frankie, and what I heard on the streets. You hang in the right places, and pretty soon you hear somebody whispering their names. They got Hell’s Kitchen petrified.”

“Over some counterfeit money?”

“You don’t know,” she insisted. “These guys are like no one you’ve ever seen.”

She paused, perhaps reconsidering her options. It suddenly occurred to John that Deveneau’s sources—O’Shay and Kahn—were the reason Tressa’s hands were quaking and her knees knocking together beneath the table. He realized something else at that moment as well: that Tressa, too, had taken inventory of the tavern’s occupants and had been keeping an eye on them for some time now.

“You want these animals,” she continued, “I can get you in. I’ll go over Frankie’s head, talk directly with Mickey O’Shay. He knows about what happened at the club the other night. I’ll tell him you’re the guy that was supposed to pick up the dough when everything went to shit and that you ain’t interested in dealing with Frankie no more, but still want the bills. But listen—these guys are real sharp. They don’t fuck around, in plain English. If they smell something rotten, they’ll kill you and me without question.”

He shifted in his seat, his eyes watching her eyes watching the tavern. “Why you doing this?”

“I’m still alive because of you,” she said. “Plus, you’re letting me walk. You’re letting me walk and now I still got that apartment, like I said. I still got my daughter. You know what I mean?” She seemed to reflect on something. “I ain’t all bad, like I said.”

“And you think you can get me into these guys, get me to meet with this guy O’Shay?”

“I’ll meet with him, see what he has to say. If he thinks you’re a mover and an earner, he’ll be interested.”

“And this Jimmy Kahn?”

“Never met him. Just know about him from what I heard, from what Frankie says and what I hear around the streets. He and Mickey, they run the show together. They’re a death wish. I heard stories about ‘em I wouldn’t believe about nobody. They’re insane. And as far as I know, Kahn tries to keep out of the picture.” She produced a second cigarette from her coat and lit it, sucked on it. “There’s one thing, though …”

“Yeah?”