The Price of Blood (7 page)

"F. X. Tyrrell’s wife. All very cozy."

"His ex-wife. They parted amicably, there were no children. Why is it so cozy?"

"The person who hired me to find Patrick Hutton was Father Vincent Tyrrell."

It was as if someone had flicked a switch, or pulled a cord, in Miranda Hart’s back: her shoulders slumped and her head dropped and something like a howl came from deep inside her. When she turned her face to me, I saw black eyes stained red and soaked with the black mess her tears had made of her makeup. She was shaking her head now, opening her mouth and trying to get the words out; I could see red lipstick stains on her teeth. Finally, she managed to coordinate palate and lips and tongue long enough to be understood.

"Get out of here," she said. "Get the fuck out of here, or I’ll call the police."

   I sat in the car and tried to work out what I had seen in Miranda Hart’s eyes when she heard Vincent Tyrrell’s name, the split second before she fell apart on me: what combination of fear, anger, shame or guilt. The tears were real, the emotion convulsive, hysterical even, but Miranda Hart looked like she was capable of putting on quite a show if she put her mind to it. At least, that was what I figured by the end of our encounter, once my entire system had gotten the message loud and clear that she was not in fact my ex-wife.

Next, I listened to the message my ex-wife had left on my phone, and then I did something I hadn’t done for maybe three years: I called her, and asked how she was, and how her little boy was doing; I spoke to her like I should have a long time ago. She told me she still felt bad about Lily, our little girl, especially at Christmas, thinking how she might have turned out, and I told her so did I, and she said every year on a Saturday a couple of weeks before Christmas she went to the Third Street Mall and bought all the gifts Santa would have brought and then on the Sunday she went to seven forty-five mass at St. Clement’s and donated the toys to the church’s Angel Toy Drive for needy children and orphans. She started to cry then, and I sat and listened, and wondered whether remembering our dead child by giving toys to poor kids at Christmas was better than remembering her by getting drunk and feeling sorry for yourself and trying to blame other people for pain that was nobody’s but your own. I decided that it was.

We sat on the phone for a long while after that, after she had stopped crying, not saying very much, until she said the call must be costing me a fortune, and I said there was no need to worry, because I was a millionaire, a line we used to use before any of this had happened, and she laughed then, and told me she missed me, and I thought that was a good time to send her my love and wish her a Merry Christmas and end the call.

I sat for another long while then, until I was able to catch my breath, and I could see straight. I wiped my face with a handkerchief and got out of the car and walked along the path by the Dodder River toward Londonbridge Road and smoked a cigarette and breathed in the cold winter air. Every so often I had the sense that I was being followed, but the only people I spotted were shoppers trudging home laden with bags. In any case, if Leo Halligan wanted to take me, he would, and there wasn’t an awful lot I could do about it.

When I got back to my car, a taxi was pulling away from outside Miranda Hart’s house. I hadn’t spotted her getting in, but I didn’t have time to think, so I followed it down into Ringsend toward the city. I kept close, reasoning that she might not be in it anyway, and even if she was, she probably wouldn’t expect to be followed. In any case, the traffic was so thick that I couldn’t afford to let the cab out of my sight. Town was seething with drunks and merrymakers, shoppers and gawkers, young and old spilling off the pavements and jostling in the streets. We passed Trinity College and headed up George’s Street and around onto Stephen’s Green and in fits and starts rolled along until I saw the cab pull in outside the Shelbourne Hotel. I passed it and looked back to see Miranda Hart, wearing something shiny and black over something shiny and silver, clip up the hotel steps and flash a smile at the doorman. A car horn honked behind me; I cut down Merrion Street and found a parking space on Merrion Square. There was a brusque voice-mail message from Dave Donnelly on my phone, and I called him immediately, ready to take my medicine: I was on bad terms with too many Guards to fall out with Dave; he probably figured out I had examined the body in the woods, and wanted to bawl me out over it.

He didn’t.

"Ed, I want to talk to you."

"Sure, Dave. Harcourt Square?"

Harcourt Square was where the elite National Bureau of Criminal Investigation was based. DI Donnelly wanted to be seen with me there like he wanted to be caught drunk driving.

"That’s funny, Ed. I’m still out in fucking Wicklow here. How about your place? When can you make it?"

"I’m on something now, but I don’t know how long it’ll last."

"It’s seven now. Say eleven?"

"That should be fine. What’s it about, Dave?"

"It’s about those bodies."

"What bodies?"

"The one you found, and the one we found earlier."

"Are they connected?"

"I’ll see you at eleven."

The Shelbourne Hotel was built in 1824 and every so often they closed it and refurbished it and put a bar where a restaurant had been, but it was pretty much the same now as always, except smarter, although there was a tendency, if you got drunk here, to forget where the toilets were. Or so I was told; having left for L.A. when I was eighteen, I had only crossed the door for the first time a few months ago, to confirm to a Southside Lady Who Lunches that her suspicions about her errant husband were well founded. She took the photographs, wrote me a check and told me she’d double it if I joined her in a suite upstairs for the afternoon. Maybe I might have if she hadn’t offered to pay; she had gambler’s eyes, and a sense of humor, and a good head for drink. Next thing I knew, she had taken her husband for ten million and the family home in Blackrock and she was photographed on the back page of the
Sunday Independent
at an MS Charity Ball with new breasts spilling out of a dress twenty years too young for her getting very friendly with a member of the Irish rugby squad. Well done everybody. Another one for the PI scrapbook. Wonder what the Garda commissioner made of that.

I didn’t have to look too hard for Miranda Hart; her silver dress blazed like magnesium ribbon amid the deep red and dark wood tones of the Horseshoe Bar. She had piled her dark hair high on her head; her black eyes flickered and her lips were the color of blood. Six foot in heels, she wore her dress calf length and cut high on the thigh; one of her stockings was already laddered. I was trying to get a look at her companions before she saw me, but she was restless, laughing quickly and nodding impatiently and chewing her gum and smoking and drinking and casting her gaze about the bar as if she expected me.

When our eyes met, her face turned to stone for a second and I thought she would start to scream; instead she turned her lamps full on, mouthed "Darling" at me and beckoned me over with the hand she held her glass in, flicking some of its contents over a fat red-faced man of sixty or so with a wispy strawberry-blond comb-over who affected to find this as hilarious as he appeared to be finding everything else. A well-preserved, shrewd-looking blonde in her fifties turned around to take an appraising look at me as the barman brought me the pint of Guinness I’d ordered. I had to remind myself that none of them, and nobody else here in this opulent Christmas melee, none of the lush young women or their overweight, red-faced partners in candy-stripe shirts and blazers or the older horsey types in tweed and corduroy and their sleek beige-and-ivory women groomed within an inch of their lives, not one of them had paid a cent for me, and I owed them nothing in return.

I carried my pint across to Miranda. Her party had grabbed banquette seats around a small table. Miranda kissed me on both cheeks, and in the ear farthest from her friends, said, "Sorry about that earlier. I
do
want you to find Patrick. I can pay you."

"I’m already getting paid," I said. "But thank you."

We were cheek to cheek, the room a clamor of laughter and jostling voices. Her bathroom had been full of Chanel No. 5 and I could smell that on her now, but faintly; her own scent overpowered it. Deep salt with a tang like oranges, it had gotten under my skin in her house; now I almost felt like the sole reason I had trailed her here was to breathe it again. She smiled at me, and opened her mouth; she still had lipstick on her teeth and I could see her tongue shift her chewing gum to one side. I laughed, and took a drink of my beer.

"What’s so funny?" she said.

"You are," I said. "Is there any situation in which you don’t chew gum?"

"That would be for you to find out," she said. "Mr. Private Investigator."

The shrewd-looking blonde, who was wearing cream and gold and the slightest hint of leopardskin, said something pointed to the comb-over and he exploded in a fit of convulsive laughter, his hair slipping in a long unruly strand down his face. She looked at him pityingly, like a mother would glance at her obese child when no one else was looking, then raised an appraising gaze, and her glass, to me; I saluted her in the same fashion and we both drank.

"Jackie Tyrrell," Miranda said quietly. "It’s our works do. The fatso is Seán Proby."

"The bookie?"

"The father. The son, Jack, runs the day-to-day now. Seán is the figurehead, on TV telling war stories. He was a great comrade of F. X. Tyrrell’s. They made a lot of money for each other. Then they fell out."

"Over what?"

"Whatever came to hand. F.X. falls out with everyone sooner or later. You can be my date, if you like. We’re going to the Octagon for supper."

"Did you not have a date?"

"Are you worried he might show up and want to fight you?"

"I only like fighting in the morning. At least then there’s a chance the day might improve."

"Scaredy-cat."

"Are Proby and Jackie an item?"

They were cackling with each other on the banquette, hand in hand. Miranda did an eye-rolling silent laugh at my question and shook her head at me.

"Oh dear God no. Seán bats for the other side, darling."

"Despite being someone’s father. This is all getting a bit too sophisticated for me. Why did you go to pieces when you heard Father Vincent Tyrrell’s name?"

Jackie Tyrell, who had been giving a very good impression of a drunk, stood bolt upright and apparently sober.

"We can’t be late," she barked in a highly polished accent with a trace of Cork in it. "Gilles will sulk. What’s his name?" This last to Miranda of me.

"Ed Loy," I said, extending my hand.

"Ed’s writing a book," Miranda announced. "About horse racing and the Irish."

"Oh God no," Jackie Tyrrell said. "That book gets written every year. It’s always a fucking
bore. You’re
not going to be a fucking
bore,
are you?"

"Compared to you?" I said.

She looked me up and down as if she had been offered me for sale.

"At least he’s tall," she said to Miranda. "Not a skinny little boy. He’s actually like a man, Miranda."

"Thank you," I said.

"Don’t get smart with me," Jackie Tyrrell said. "I’m hungry."

On his feet now, Seán Proby was pumping my hand up and down and laughing uproariously; the more I tried to retrieve my hand the tighter he held it, and the harder I struggled the louder he laughed; there we were like two clowns in hell until Jackie Tyrrell punched him sharply in the arm and he came to and beamed genially at me, now apparently sober himself.

The Octagon was a converted meeting hall around the corner in a lane off Kildare Street that had been painted white and gussied up with a lot of stained glass and indoor trees hung with fairy lights and gauze. People sat at several different levels on a succession of balconies and mezzanines. The staff were Irish and French and they made a big fuss of Jackie and Miranda; I heard Jackie speaking in immaculate French to Gilles, the maître d’, and Gilles instructing a wine waiter to bring Mrs. Tyrrell "the usual." The restaurant was full of the same kind of people who had been in the Shelbourne, and I quickly discovered why: the prices were absurdly high, but the food was very straightforward: onion soup and egg mayonnaise, pork belly and Toulouse sausages, steak frîtes; none of your two-scallops-on-a-huge-white-plate nonsense. Thus Irish people could indulge their aspirational need to get all fancy and French, and sate their ferocious desire to spend as much money as possible, while getting a huge amount of meat inside them.

Jackie waved a hand at me.

"I’ll order, unless you have some particular preference." She said
preference
in the sense of "disease."

"Go ahead," I said.

The usual turned out to be two bottles of Sancerre and two bottles of Pinot Noir. Jackie ordered food for us all, and said, "Just pour," at the wine waiter.

I was trying to have a quiet word with Miranda, or maybe I was just trying to get as close to her as I physically could; I hadn’t had much to drink but I felt like half my brain had shut down, and the other half was focused only on her scented flesh. But Jackie was beady and restless and in need of entertainment.

"You’re very tall for a writer," she said. I shrugged. I was pretty sure that some writers had to be tall, and if so, that I could be one of them.

"How far are you into your book?" she said.

"I’m nearly finished," I said, wondering why Miranda had gifted me this spurious identity. When I tended bar in Santa Monica, I used to get a lot of writers. Some got paid for it, some were published, some were only writers in the sense that they didn’t have a job, or a job they wanted to own up to. And whenever I asked them how they were getting on, they all said they were nearly finished, even the ones who evidently had never written a word and never would. It struck me occasionally that it might have been better to wait until you
were
finished before you went out to a bar. But then I wasn’t a writer. And I had the sense that Jackie Tyrrell knew that.