Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (20 page)

“He had to tell, Kevin, Mom. It was the right thing to do.”

“Well, Detective Hanson should have been a bit more diligent in his questioning earlier, don’t you think?” she asked, her beautiful face hard, unyielding.

I don’t know how this had become my fault, but it had. I decided not to argue with her and to just give her the facts. “He wants a lawyer and a ham sandwich. I’ll handle the ham sandwich. Can you handle the lawyer?” I asked.

She looked at my father. “Call Arney.”

“Not Arney. A different lawyer,” I said. “You can ask Arney for a recommendation, but he doesn’t want his brother there.”

That seemed to incense Mom more than anything. “I am not going to pay good money to someone else when we have a lawyer in the family. Someone who, I might remind you, nearly bankrupted this family by attending law school for far longer than any law student should.”

“And how is
that
my fault?” I asked. Yes, I had a list of transgressions that were kept in my mother’s brain—the time I knocked Feeney’s front teeth out accidentally with a golf club at the top of the list—but Arney attending law school for an extra year should not have been one of them. “Listen, if you want to consult with Arney McGrath, attorney-at-law, I can’t stop you, but Cargan asked specifically that he not be involved.”

Dad stood, coming back to life. “I’ll call Paul Grant.”

I had known “Paul” when I was in high school; he was two years behind me and named “Philip” at the time. He was one of the few WASP kids among a bunch of blue-collar Irish and Italian spawn and his sister had graduated with Arney and gone on to Harvard, something that no one before in Foster’s Landing had seemed to aspire to or really given much thought to pursuing. Philip was a nerdy kid who had been the belittled and abused water boy for the basketball team and the football team, never having made either team himself, but he seemed to be having the last laugh: he had married Jackie O’Leary of the Society Lane O’Learys, a gorgeous girl who had long legs and was rumored to have had the same breast implant surgeon as Kim Kardashian. He had three whip-smart kids, from what I understood, one of whom Mom said had competed on
Jeopardy!,
during “that infernal kids’ week,” she had said, a
Jeopardy!
purist at heart. I had seen Paul Grant’s signs around town; his office was conveniently located next to the one building that had medical offices. “Slip and fall? Call Paul!” were some of the witty bon mots to adorn his ads. Rumor had it that he had changed his name to Paul because it rhymed with “fall” and that since Paul was an apostle, the Irish in town might be more inclined to hire him. It was a stretch, in my opinion, because Foster’s Landing only had one attorney prior to Philip/Paul’s hanging out a shingle and that had been Philip Grant, Sr. It wasn’t a stretch to think that Philip Jr. would follow his dad into the family business. I just hoped Paul was a better attorney than he was an ad mastermind. I remembered that as a kid he wore far too much Old Spice cologne for anyone, let alone a fifteen-year-old boy, and called everyone, girls included, “son,” in some attempt to sound hip.

Mom stood up behind the desk, leaning forward. “And why does Cargan need a lawyer?” she asked. “Let’s start at the beginning.”

I had asked Kevin that exact question, but he had been vague. He said my brother felt more comfortable with someone in the legal profession in the room, that Kevin’s questions were making him “nervous.” Any questions made Cargan nervous and he was always stubbornly obtuse. Obviously, this had to do with the types of questions Kevin was asking and Cargan was afraid to screw things up even more than I had to this point. “I’m not sure, Mom. Let’s let Paul handle it with Kevin. I’m sure everything is fine. You know how Car gets when there are too many questions thrown at him.”

She narrowed her eyes, keeping them trained on me. “This is not how I expected this day to go, Belfast.”

Yes, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being that your business was going under and 1 the crate of eggs never being delivered from the local farm, this was about a 22. Sorry I ruined your middle-aged foreplay, otherwise known as a “foot massage.”

My father stood stock still by the door, not saying a word. A mad Oona was not a good thing, and while Mom’s ill wind only blew through every so often, everyone took cover when it did.

“Me either, Mom, but now that it’s going this way, I’ll leave the attorney issue to you and I’ll make Cargan a ham sandwich.” When no one moved, I said, “Agreed?”

Mom shuddered as if to shake off the cobweb of disappointment that had enveloped her, and picked up the phone. She was yelling at my dad to find Paul’s number so that they could get him over to the station.

As I assembled a sandwich for my brother, I thought about just what he could possibly need a lawyer for. I hoped it was just standard Cargan overreaction to a simple situation. He watched a lot of television at night in the bedroom that he had once shared with Feeney and still resided in and a lot of his viewing, when it wasn’t
fútbol,
of course, was related to detective shows, various iterations of the
Law & Order
franchise
,
which seemed to be on every channel, every day, at every hour. Maybe he had watched one too many episodes and decided that no one should talk to the police without a lawyer. Maybe that was it.

I could only hope. I cut the crusts off his sandwich, sliced it diagonally, and wrapped it in foil, grabbing a piece of leftover cake from the O’Donnell wedding and adding that to the haul that I was bringing back to the police station.

Dad cornered me in the foyer, just as I was about to leave. “This was a bad idea, Belfast,” he said.

I went for broke. “You know what’s an even worse idea, Dad?” I said. “Keeping a bunch of guns in your studio.”

I could see the wheels turning in his head, practically see smoke coming out of his ears as he thought up a response. “Ah, Belfast,” was all he could muster.

“Dad,” I said, trying to keep my voice at a whisper. “Why? Is Uncle Eugene still involved in bad stuff? Are you trying to cover for him?” A more sinister thought floated through my head. “You? Are you doing—”

My questioning had given him enough time to come up with an answer, the lightbulb going off over his head, so to speak, and he cut me off. “An installation!”

I studied his face for some indication that he would change his answer and tell me the truth, but all that was transmitted was his pleasure at coming up with a lie on short notice. When it was clear that that was his story and he was sticking to it, I left.

I trudged back down the hill away from the Manor, needing the bucolic surroundings of the Manor’s grounds to help me get into a better head space over this whole thing, my role in it. I wondered just what it was that made my brother “lawyer up,” as they say.

CHAPTER
Twenty-six

I delivered the sandwich and was told to wait at the front of the station, having tried to get a look at Cargan in the conference room and failed. Lieutenant D’Amato blustered by, gave a couple of orders that sounded fake—just what was a “forty-seven-sixty-nine?”—and went into his office. The cop whom he told to patrol the perimeter of the village pool—a “three-ten-ninety-two” in progress—a place where no one went because of the drought, a place that was gated at night according to Brendan, looked just as confused as I did at the order. Something told me that the Lieutenant was just a wee bit uncomfortable with today’s turn of events, the son of Oona McGrath, a woman everyone knew the widowed Lieutenant was sweet on despite the ring on her finger and faithful husband, in police custody. Who could blame the guy? Mom was a flirt, plain and simple. And everyone knew it.

Except for Dad.

Maybe she could flirt Cargan out of an obstruction of justice charge. Or worse. She was that good.

The Lieutenant nodded at me as he passed to go into his office. “Belfast.”

“Lieutenant.” I looked down at my lap so as not to make eye contact with anyone else in the office. Mom and Dad still hadn’t shown up and I could imagine them frantically calling Paul Grant, telling him the story in that back-and-forth style that they used—Dad starting a sentence and Mom finishing it—and probably confusing the hell out of the attorney, our only hope.

Mom was usually the cool customer, leaving the emotional outbursts and carrying on to Dad. I thought back to the day of the wedding, thinking about whether anything seemed out of the ordinary with them, if having a wedding crasher had dampened her spirits at all, knowing, as I did, that everyone seemed rather chummy with Declan Morrison prior to his untimely demise. But all I could think of was Mom in that impeccably cut dress, the high heels, her smile as she went round and round during the spinning portion of the Siege of Ennis, literally kicking up her heels. There hadn’t been a trace of discomfort on her face, in her demeanor. It had been the usual Oona McGrath hostess show, the lady of the Manor, the iron maiden, running the place with her usual aplomb and strictness.

“She raised four sons,” the women at the wedding had whispered, “and look at her.”

Yes, there was a daughter, too, but apparently that didn’t count, especially when you spoke of how wonderful an Irishwoman—an Irish
mother
—in her sixties looked after breeding and bringing up four rapscallions, one more trouble than the next.

If they only knew.

The nicest one, the one all of the mothers thought would be perfect for their fair lasses, was sitting a few feet away from me in a conference room, probably near tears at this point, thinking that he was in some kind of major trouble he would never escape.

Paul Grant stormed into the station about a half hour later, his curly hair sticking up wildly, a Hawaiian shirt announcing that he hadn’t planned on working that evening. He greeted me like a long-lost friend. “Belfast!” he bellowed. “Great to see you!” He went into some stock small talk that didn’t apply to me. “How’s the hubs? Kids?”

“No ‘hubs’ and no kids, Philip,” I said. “Just me and my cat,” I added, taking ownership of a feral animal that wanted no part of me unless there was salmon in a pouch to be had.

“Cat?” he said, rubbing the beard he had grown to give him some gravitas, or so I suspected. That had been the one thing he had going for him in high school: the ability to grow facial hair in the course of a school day. I could see his mind working and reviewing the file in his brain of all things Belfast McGrath; clearly, he had a home subscription to the
Times,
because the look on his face told me that he knew what had happened. That and the fact that he took a step backward, bumping into Francie’s desk, led me to believe that he thought I might cut him at the slightest provocation.

“So, I’m going to see your brother now,” he said, backing up slowly and keeping an eye on me as he made his way to the conference room, feeling behind him for sharp objects while making sure I didn’t pull any out myself.

Kevin left the room a few seconds later to give the client and his attorney a chance to talk. He came over and took a seat next to me so that while we talked we didn’t have to look at each other.

“What’s going on in there?” I asked. Before he could answer, I held up a hand. “I know. You can’t say.”

“I can’t.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. “So, how’s Mary Ann?”

“She’s good,” he said, nodding. “She’s good.” As if saying it twice made it twice as true.

What I really wanted to ask him was how long he planned on dating her, if he ever planned on proposing. I could imagine Lieutenant D’Amato being pleased with the longest courtship on record for his only daughter. “And work?”

“Work’s good. It’s good.”

Francie clocked out for the night, making a great show of punching an actual time card into an actual time card machine. I hadn’t seen one of those since my stint working as a line cook at the BHJ convent, a place that housed three dozen nuns, all of whom took a turn at one point or another asking me if I had gotten “the call” or if God had sent me a private message to become a nun. He (or She) hadn’t. And if He (or She) had, I probably would have ignored it, my contrary nature having been set in stone at a young age. The universe didn’t have that good a sense of humor.

Francie now out of the picture, Kevin relaxed a bit. “I don’t know, Bel. Cargan seems mighty troubled by something.”

“Does he now?”

“Something about Declan Morrison being his ‘mate’ and how he wished he could change what happened that day.”

His mate? Really, I thought. Cargan had told me they had never met. I shifted uncomfortably in the molded-plastic chair. “That doesn’t sound terribly incriminating.” Behind the closed doors of the conference room I could hear Paul’s usually booming voice, now muffled, and the lower tones of my brother’s voice.

“It’s not. But he seems to know more than he’s saying and he’s being very tight-lipped.” Kevin pulled a piece of candy from his pocket, a caramel, and handed it to me. “And then there was the asking-for-a-lawyer-thing.”

“He watches a lot of
Law and Order,
” I said, by way of explanation. And there was the short-lived stint in the police academy a long time ago, a place he left and from where he took off to roam the land with his fiddle, law enforcement not for him.

Kevin gave a little chuckle. “Most of our ‘customers’ do. Not a lot of what they see on those shows is entirely accurate.”

“Don’t tell Cargan that,” I said. “Those are the only shows he watches.” I turned the caramel over in my hand, a memory seeping into my brain, Kevin slipping me candy during Geometry in sophomore year, Amy pegging the move as one designed to get Kevin into my good graces after a year of pining for me, not very discreetly. He had been smart enough to know even back then that the way to my heart was with food, and that much hadn’t changed, on either of our accounts. “Really, Kevin, I think you should let him go. Give him some time. I’ll talk to him, see what else he knows.”

Kevin shook his head. “You know I can’t do that, Bel.” He looked at me. “Have you given any more thought to the hypnotist?”