When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (5 page)

"Perhaps the lad dropped it on the stairs. If you hear anything, Matt,ye'll let us know?"

"Why not?"

"Are ye of Irish stock yourself, Matt?"

"No."

"I'd have thought maybe one of your forebears was from Kerry. TheKerryman is famous for answering a question with a question."

"I don't know who they were, Tim Pat."

"If you learn anything...

"If I learn anything."

"Ye'veno quarrel with the price? It's a fair price?"

"No quarrel," I said. "It's a very fair price."

IT was a good price, the fairness of it notwithstanding. I said as much to Skip the next time I saw him.

"He didn't want to hire me," I said. "He wanted to post a reward. Ten K to the man who tells him who they are and where he can lay his hands on them."

"Would you do it?"

"What, go hunting for them? I told you the other day I wouldn't take the job for a fee. I'm certainly not going to go nosing around on the come."

He shook his head. "Suppose you found out without trying. You walked around the corner on the way to buy a paper and there they were."

"How would I recognize them?"

"How often do you see two guys wearing red kerchiefs for masks? No, seriously, say you recognized them. Or you got hold of the information, the word got out and some contact of yours from the old days put a flea in your ear. You used to have stool pigeons, didn't you?"

"Snitches," I said. "Every cop had them, you couldn't get anywhere without them. Still, I-"

"Forget how you find out," he said. "Just suppose it happened. Would you?"

"Would I-"

"Sell 'emout. Collect the ten grand."

"I don't know anything about them."

"Fine, let's say you don't know whether they're assholes or altar boys. What's the difference? Either way it's blood money, right? TheMorrisseys find thosekids, theygotta be dead as Kelsey's nuts, right?"

"I don't suppose Tim Pat wants to send them an invitation to a christening."

"Or ask 'emto join the Holy Name Society. Could you do it?"

I shook my head. "I can't answer that," I said. "It would depend on who they were and how bad I needed the money."

"I don't think you'd do it."

"I don't think I would either."

"I sure as shit wouldn't," he said. He tapped the ashes from his cigarette. "There'senough people who would."

"There'speople who would kill for less than that."

"I was thinking that myself."

"There were a few cops in the room that night," I said. "You want to bet they'll know about the reward?"

"No bet."

"Say a cop finds out who the holdup men were. He can't make a collar. There's no crime, right? Nothing ever got reported, no witnesses, nothing. But he can turn the two bums over to Tim Pat and walk with half a year's pay."

"Knowing he's aided and abetted murder."

"I'm not saying everybody would do it. But you tell yourself the guys are scum, they've probably killed people themselves, they're a cinch to kill someone sooner or later, and it's not like you know for certain theMorrisseys are going to kill them. Maybe they'll just break a few bones, just scare 'ema little. Try to get their money back, something like that. You can tell yourself that."

"And believe it?"

"Most people believe what they want to believe."

"Yeah," he said."Can't argue with that."

YOU decide something in your mind and then your body goes and decides something else. I wasn't going to have anything to do with Tim Pat's problem, and then I kept finding myself sniffing around it like a dog at a lamppost. The same night I assured Skip I wasn't playing, I wound up onSeventy-secondStreet at a place calledPoogan's Pub, sitting at a rear table and buying iced Stolichnaya for a tiny albino Negro named Danny Boy Bell. Danny Boy was always interesting company, but he was also a prime snitch, an information broker who knew everyone and heard everything.

Of course he'd heard about the robbery at Morrissey's. He'd heard a wide range of figures quoted for the take, and for his own part guessed that the right number was somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars.

"Whoever took it," he said, "they're not spending it in the bars. My sense of it is that it's an Irish thing, Matthew. IrishIrish, not the local Harps. You know, it went down right in the middle ofWesty country, but I can't see theWesties taking off Tim Pat like that."

TheWesties are a loosely organized mob of toughs and killers, most of them Irish, and they've been operating in Hell's Kitchen since the turn of the century.Maybe longer, maybe since the Potato Famine.

"I don't know," I said. "With that kind of money involved-"

"If those two wereWesties, if they were anybody from the neighborhood, it wouldn't be a secret for more than eight hours. Everybody onTenthAvenue'd know it."

"You're right."

"Some kind of Irish thing, that's my best guess. You were there, you'd know this. The masks were red?"

"Red handkerchiefs."

"A shame.If they were green or orange they'd be making some sort of political statement. I understand the brothers are offering a generous reward. Is that what brings you here, Matthew?"

"Oh, no," I said."Definitely not."

"Not doing a bit of exploratory work on speculation?"

"Absolutely not," I said.

FRIDAY afternoon I was drinking in Armstrong's and fell into conversation with a couple of nurses at the next table. They had tickets for an off-off-Broadway show that night. Dolores couldn't go, and Fran really wanted to but she wasn't sure she felt like going by herself, and besides they had the extra ticket.

And of course the show turned out to be TheQuare Fellow. It didn't relate in any way to the incident at Morrissey's, it was just coincidentally being performed downstairs of the after-hours joint, and it hadn't been my idea in the first place, but what was I doing there? I sat on a flimsy wooden folding chair and watched Behan's play about imprisoned criminals inDublin and wondered what the hell I was doing in the audience.

Afterward Fran and I wound up at Miss Kitty's with a group that included two of the members of the cast. One of them, a slim red-haired girl with enormous green eyes, was Fran's friend Mary Margaret, and the reason why Fran had been so anxious to go. That was Fran's reason, but what was mine?

There was talk at the table of the robbery. I didn't raise the subject or contribute much to the discussion, but I couldn't stay out of it altogether because Fran told the group I was a former police detective and asked for my professional opinion of the affair. My reply was as noncommittal as I could make it, and I avoided mentioning that I'd been an eyewitness to the holdup.

Skip was there, so busy behind the bar with the Friday-night crowd that I didn't bother to do more than wave hello at him. The place was mobbed and noisy, as it always was on weekends, but that was where everyone else had wanted to go, and I'd gone along.

Fran lived on Sixty-eighth betweenColumbus andAmsterdam. I walked her home, and at her door she said, "Matt, you were a sweetheart to keep me company. The play was okay, wasn't it?"

"It was fine."

"I thought Mary Margaret was good, anyway. Matt, would you mind awfully if I don't ask you to come up? I'm beat and I've got an early day tomorrow."

"That's okay," I said. "Now that you mention it, so do I."

"Being a detective?"

I shook my head."Being a father."

THE next morning Anita put the kids on theLong Island Rail Road and I picked them up at the station inCorona and took them to Shea and watched the Mets lose to theAstros. The boys would be going to camp for four weeks in August and they were excited about that. We ate hot dogs and peanuts and popcorn. They hadCokes, I had a couple of beers. There was some sort of special promotion that day, and the boys got free caps or pennants, I forgot which.

Afterward I took them back to the city on the subway and to a movie atLoew's 83rd. We had pizza on Broadway after the film let out and took a cab back to my hotel, where I'd rented a twin-bedded room for them a floor below mine. They went to bed and I went up to my own room. After an hour I checked their room. They were sleeping soundly. I locked their door again and went around the corner to Armstrong's. I didn't stay long, maybe an hour. Then I went back to my hotel, checked the boys again, and went upstairs and to bed.

In the morning we went out for a big breakfast, pancakes and bacon and sausages. I took them up to the Museum of the American Indian inWashingtonHeights. There are a couple dozen museums in the city ofNew York, and when you leave your wife you get to discover them all.

It felt strange being inWashingtonHeights. It was in that neighborhood a few years earlier that I'd been having a few off-duty drinks when a couple of punks held up the bar and shot the bartender dead on their way out.

I went out into the street after them. There are a lot of hills inWashingtonHeights. They ran down one of them and I had to shoot downhill. I brought them both down, but one shot went wide and ricocheted, and it killed a small child namedEstrellita Rivera.

Those things happen. There was a departmental hearing, there always is when you kill someone, and I was found to have acted properly and with justification.

Shortly thereafter I put in my papers and left the police department.

I can't say that one event caused the other. I can only say that the one led to the other. I had been the unwitting instrument of a child's death, and after that something was different for me. The life I had been living without complaint no longer seemed to suit me. I suppose it had ceased to suit me before then. I suppose the child's death precipitated a life change that was long overdue. But I can't say that for certain, either. Just that one thing led to another.

WE took a train to Penn Station. I told the boys how good it had been to spend some time with them, and they told me what a good time they'd had. I put them on a train, made a phone call and told their mother what train they'd be on. She assured me she'd meet it,then mentioned hesitantly that it would be good if I sent money soon. Soon, I assured her.

I hung up and thought of the ten thousand dollars Tim Pat was offering.And shook my head, amused at the thought.

But that night I got restless and wound up down in the Village, stopping in a string of bars for one drink each. I took the A train toWest Fourth Street and started atMcBell's and worked my way west. Jimmy Day's, the 55, the Lion's Head, George Hertz's, the Corner Bistro. I told myself I was just having a couple of drinks, unwinding after the pressure of a weekend with my sons, settling myself down after awakening old memories with a visit toWashingtonHeights.

But I knew better. I was starting some half-assed purposeless investigation, trying to turn up a lead to the pair who'd hit Morrissey's.

I wound up in a gay bar calledSinthia's. Kenny, who owned the place, was minding the store, serving drinks to men in Levi's and ribbed tank tops. Kenny was slender, willowy, with dyed blond hair and a face that had been tucked and lifted enough to look no more than twenty-eight, which was about half as many years as Kenny had been on the planet.

"Matthew!" he called out. "You can all relax now, girls. Law and order has come toGrove Street."

Of course he didn't know anything about the robbery at Morrissey's. He didn't know Morrissey's to begin with; no gay man had to leave the Village to find a place where he could get a drink after closing. But the holdup men could have been gay as easily as not, and if they weren't spending their take elsewhere they might be spending it in the joints around Christopher Street, and anyhow that was the way you worked it, you nosed around, you worked all your sources, you put the word out and waited to see if anything came back to you.

But why was I doing this? Why was I wasting my time?

I don't know what would have happened- whether I would have kept at it or let go of it, whether I would have gotten someplace or ultimately turned away from a cold trail. I didn't seem to be getting anywhere, but that's often the way it is, and you go through the motions with no indication of progress until you get lucky and something breaks. Maybe something like that would have happened.Maybe not.

Instead, some other things happened to take my mind off Tim Pat Morrissey and his quest for vengeance.

For openers, somebody killed TommyTillary's wife.

Tuesday night I took Fran to dinner at the Thai restaurant SkipDevoe liked so much. Afterward I walked her home, with a stop for after-dinner drinks at Joey Farrell's. In front of her building she pleaded an early day again, and I left her there and walked back to Armstrong's with a stop or two en route. I was in a sour mood, and astomachful of unfamiliar food didn't help any. I probably hit the bourbon a little harder than usual, rolling out of there around one or two. I took the long way home, picked up the Daily News, and sat on the edge of my bed in my underwear taking a quick look at a couple of stories.

On one of the inside pages I read about aBrooklyn woman who'd been killed in the course of a burglary. I was tired and I'd had a lot to drink and the name didn't register.

But I woke up the next morning with something buzzing in my mind, half dream and half memory. I sat up and reached for the paper and found the story.

MargaretTillary, forty-seven, had been stabbed to death in the upstairs bedroom of her home onColonial Road, in the Bay Ridge section ofBrooklyn, evidently having awakened in the course of a burglary. Her husband, securities salesman Thomas J.Tillary, had become concerned when his wife failed to answer the telephone Tuesday afternoon. He called a relative living nearby who entered the house, finding the premises ransacked and the woman dead.