Irish Eyes (36 page)

“T
his is strictly against departmental policy,” Lloyd Mackey said, coming into the interview room. He closed the door behind him. Went to the plate-glass window at the front of the room, twisted the blinds open. On the other side of the oneway glass, Lisa Dugan was seated at a table with a black detective I’d never seen before. She was still wearing the green blazer and the little plaid kilt. There was a long run in one black stocking, and she kept running her fingers through her short hair, staring at the window, then looking away.

“Who’s that?” I asked Mackey.

“Prentiss. Internal affairs. A real prick.”

“This is a waste of time,” Lisa was telling the detective. “I want to see my lawyer.”

“He’s on the way,” Prentiss said. He picked up a file folder, skimmed through some papers inside.

“Say, Captain Dugan,” he said. “This here paper says you recently put a down-payment on a house on Valley Road. In Buckhead. Pretty nice neighborhood for a cop. Sale price six hundred thousand dollars. The chief of police, she don’t live in a neighborhood that nice.”

“I’m good at investments,” Lisa said. She clasped her hands, stretched them out on the table. Bored.

“She told me Bucky was working all those extra jobs because they wanted to buy a house together,” I told Mackey. “So her kid could go to a nice school.”

“We’re waiting on a court order, see what’s in her safe deposit box,” Mackey said. “Viatkos had eighty thousand dollars in cash when we picked him up. Of course, he claims it was receipts from the liquor store. That he was on the way to the bank to deposit.”

“Your boyfriend know how good you were at investments?” Prentiss asked, looking up from the file. “Detective Deavers? He have anything to do with any of these ATM robberies you set up?”

“I don’t know anything about any robberies,” Dugan said. She was twisting the claddagh around and around. I would have liked to rip it off her hand.

“What about Detective Deavers? What did he know about the robberies?” Prentiss asked. “You and Pete Viatkos recruit him?”

“What?” I exclaimed, looking over at Mackey. “You people are still trying to prove Bucky had something to do with this crap? This is unbelievable.”

“Not me,” Mackey said mildly. “This is Prentiss’s show.”

“You’ll have to ask Detective Deavers about these so-called robberies,” Lisa said wearily. “He’s the one who introduced me to Detective Boylan.”

“Shit,” I said, pounding the table with my fist. “She’s going to put it all on Bucky. While we were waiting for you to show up? She admitted that she killed Ragan. To avenge Bucky.”

Mackey nodded. “We’ve already asked her about that. She denies it. Denies everything.”

He got up and closed the blinds, and flipped a switch shutting off the microphone from Lisa Dugan’s interview room.

“Let’s go back to my office,” he said. “It makes me feel slimy, being this close to that conniving bitch.”

I followed him back down the carpeted hallway. We went into his outer office. “No calls,” he told the secretary.

He closed the door between the connecting offices. The videotape I’d given him was in the middle of his desk. It was a very neat desk for the commander of Atlanta’s homicide division. Especially considering how busy he’d been for the past few days. There was a television and a VCR on a stand in the corner of the office.

We watched the video all the way through. He made the occasional note on a yellow legal pad, his felt-tip pen making scratching noises. When the video was over, he put the pen down.

“Your proverbial smoking gun,” he said, gesturing toward the TV. “Of course, it doesn’t do us much good, does it? Ragan’s dead. Deavers is a vegetable. Boylan, if he makes it, probably won’t spend a day in prison.”

“What’s the word on the bastard?” I asked.

“I doubt he’ll feel like parading again anytime soon. Unless it’s in the wheelchair division. The bullet’s lodged so close to his spine, the docs say it’s too risky to remove. As soon as he’s stable, he’ll be moved over to the Shepherd Spinal Center, to start rehab.”

“The man’s a murderer,” I started.

“Doesn’t matter. He’s covered under the city hospitalization plan. Believe me, I don’t like it any better than you do. My premiums will probably get jacked up to pay for this shithead’s medical treatment. You know what I think? Corky Hanlon coulda saved the city a hell of a lot of time and money if he’d taught his wife how to aim a gun.”

“I’ve got a feeling that was the first time in her life Marie Hanlon ever fired a gun,” I said. “Last time, too. So what happens now?”

“I hear some people are trying to raise Marie Hanlon’s bond money,” Mackey said. “You know anything about that?”

“People in her parish,” I said, shrugging. “Former neighbors.” They’d charged Marie with aggravated assault. Set bond at five hundred thousand dollars. Edna had started manning the phone the minute she’d gotten the news. I’d kicked in five hundred dollars myself. After all, Marie had been my Confirmation sponsor.

“What about the tape?” I asked. “What happens with it?”

“Out of my hands,” Mackey said. “For once, I’ll be happy to pass the buck on this thing.”

“It doesn’t look good for anybody, does it?” I asked. “You’ve only got Ragan and Boylan on tape. You know Viatkos and Dugan were running things. Who else?”

“Stay tuned,” Mackey said. “It looks as if Antjuan Wayne is going to be the key to all this. He’s singing like a bird to the feds right now. He’s afraid if Boylan survives, he and Viatkos will try and pin everything on him. So Wayne’s ready to name names. The feds won’t tell me squat, but I think there’ll be more arrests. They’re especially interested in finding the gunman who wore the FBI Academy ring.”

I blushed a little. “You know something? For a while there, I thought it might be you. You’re an academy guy.”

“But you ruled me out,” Mackey said. He raised an eyebrow. “Or did you?”

“I brought the tape to you,” I pointed out. “I could have handed it over to that FBI guy. Halstead. That counts for something.”

“I guess,” Mackey said. “Maybe if I’d listened to you earlier, we wouldn’t have this high a body count. Christ. A damn burglary ring. Nobody comes out looking good on this thing.”

“I’m the one who got Deecie killed,” I said. “I saw his car in her neighborhood, you know, but I didn’t recognize him. I still don’t understand how he tracked her down there.”

Mackey squirmed in his chair, fidgeted with the pen, taking the cap on, putting it back on again.

“What?”

“She got herself killed. Face it. She wasn’t the total innocent you thought she was. She stole that money. But it wasn’t enough. She got greedy. She decided to blackmail Viatkos. When she left her kid at that hospital yesterday, she called the liquor store, told Viatkos she’d sell him the videotape of the robbery. For ten thousand dollars.”

“I don’t believe you. If Viatkos told you that, he lied. How could you know something like that?”

“You weren’t the only one who was suspicious of Viatkos. After the second cop who worked for him was shot, we put a wiretap on the phone at the Budget Bottle Shop. But he was careful. Up until that moment, we never heard him discussing anything useful. Not until yesterday, when Deecie Styles called, offering to sell him that tape.”

“No,” I said flatly. “You knew? Why didn’t you do something? You must have known they’d kill her.”

“It didn’t go down the way they set it up,” Mackey said, dull-eyed. “The exchange was supposed to take place later that night. At the store. We had the tap on the phone at the store, but we didn’t know where the girl was calling from. We had no way to know he already had Corky Hanlon out looking for her. Hanlon found her before we could.”

“And slit her throat.” I got up and stood at the window. Mackey’s office had a good view of Midtown. I wondered if it had once been an assistant buyer’s office, when the building had been a Sears store. I could see out across the city. The dogwoods along Ponce de Leon were fully budded out. A homeless woman waddled down the street pushing a rusty shopping cart full of soda cans. She had a lime green bath towel wrapped around her head, turban style. Three long-legged men in nylon shorts and racing singlets cruised past her on their late-afternoon run. She tried to ram one of them with her cart, then stood there calling after them, shaking her fist at her fleeing enemies.

“Well,” I said, putting Midtown behind me. “Looks like there’s blame enough to go around. You, me, Deecie, Lisa. Even poor old Marie Hanlon. Everybody. Except Bucky. He didn’t deserve this, Major Mackey. He really didn’t.”

“I know,” Mackey said. “I’m sorry.”

April followed March, but I didn’t seem to notice. A chill gray haze draped itself over my soul and I couldn’t seem to care. Right before Easter we went to Nashville, Mac and I, and found a bungalow for him to rent in a close-in neighborhood. It had hideous orange shag carpet and smoked glass mirrors, but there was a big fenced backyard for the dogs, so we took it. We found a new favorite restaurant there, made love on a box spring in the new bedroom, listened to the Dixie Chicks.

Edna came up too. She found a grocery store that sold Dukes Mayonnaise and Luzianne tea, and set about making a garden in the sideyard.

Edna loved Nashville. She pointed out the daffodils waving from the roadside ditches, the pennants of white, pink, fuchsia, and crimson azaleas beckoning from every yard along every street. Nashville dogwoods where whiter, more robust than Georgia dogwoods, she insisted.

Every other weekend, Mac came home to us. We made a routine, but somehow failed to find a rhythm to life.

Not long after she was charged with everything from armed robbery to racketeering to the murder of Sean Ragan, I got a
jailhouse phone call from Lisa Dugan. “Come see me,” she begged.

“Why should I?”

She sighed. “We need to talk.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Would you like to see Bucky? I’m the only one who can make that happen, you know.”

I went.

Jailhouse blues weren’t especially flattering for Lisa Dugan’s coloring. The blond highlights were gone, the outdoorsy tan a thing of the past. Her skin was blotchy, her hair greasy. Her nails were ragged and bitten down to the cuticle. She sat across a glass partition from me, her arms folded across her chest.

“Here’s the thing,” she said. “Right now, my mother is living at the house, looking after Kyle. But if I don’t get out of here soon, my ex-husband is going to get custody of my kid. I can’t let that happen. My lawyers think they can get a judge to set bond, if certain people don’t oppose it.”

“Why would I want you out of jail?”

“Because you want to see Bucky. And you’re not going to do that unless I sign off on it. You sign a petition to the court, saying you don’t think I’m a threat to you or any other witnesses, and I’ll put your name on Bucky’s visitors’ list. Is it a deal?”

I nodded, got up to leave.

“You don’t get any of this, do you?” she called after me.

“No,” I said, not bothering to turn around.

“My ex stopped paying child support eight months ago,” Lisa said. “You try collecting money from a cop who lives out of state. It’s impossible. You know how much money we make. It’s nothing. I had to do something. Had to feed my kid, get him in a good, safe school.”

I turned around. “Wonder what kind of school Alexis Ragan’s kid will be able to go to? And how about Faheem Styles? His mama’s dead. What kind of a school will Faheem get to go to?”

It was all big talk and Lisa Dugan knew it. I kept my part of the bargain and Lisa kept hers. After that, the only constant in
my life was Bucky. Mondays and Thursdays, I went to see Bucky at the nursing home where he’d been transferred, after the hope ran out. I took the new Dixie Chicks CDs and some Shania Twain, and, of course, the old Buddy Holly stuff he loved. “Not Fade Away” had been our song when we were partners. I’d play music and read him the newspaper. I kept him up on all the machinations of the lawyers and defendants. Told him how Lisa had been suspended from the police department without pay and was out on bond pending her trial; how Pete Viatkos’s lawyers were asking for a change of venue; how Antjuan Wayne would be the fed’s star witness against both Dugan and Viatkos. I even filled him in on my efforts to make the city give the reward money to Deecie Styles’s heir, Faheem. At one point, when I told him John Boylan had filed a civil lawsuit against the city and the Hanlon family was seeking three million dollars in damages, I could have sworn I saw the ghost of a smile creep across his waxen face.

And then one Thursday morning in early May, I arrived and a nurse’s aide stopped me at the front desk to tell me Bucky was gone.

“He was having difficulty breathing last night, and around two this morning, he just slipped away,” she said. She patted my hand. “It’s for the best.”

I kept it all together until June, when the unexpected gift of a flower shattered my carefully wrought calm.

Neva Jean walked into the house that day right after lunch. She was holding an empty Coke bottle, with a single gardenia blossom poked into it. She held it out proudly. “Your neighbor, Mr. Byerly, he sent this over to you. He says it’s his first gardenia this year, and he wanted you to have it.”

Gardenia? Had summer come? I stroked the creamy white petals, buried my nose in the overwhelming sweetness, and when I looked up again, I was crying.

Neva Jean patted my shoulder awkwardly and backed away a little. “It’s okay, Callahan. You just go ahead and cry, hon.”

I walked out of the house and down the street without a word. The sun was blazing hot, and somebody was mowing a lawn and somebody else was running a power saw somewhere.
The soles of my feet burned against the concrete pavement, but I kept walking and crying and sniffing, a block at a time. Nobody looked at me funny, because of the neighborhood we live in.

When it felt like I’d cried myself dry, I put the gardenia, now limp and brown-tinged, back to my face, and watered it with yet some more tears.

Edna can’t stand my blubbering. The rare times in my life she’s caught me at it, she blames it on breeding. “Damn Irish. Just like your daddy. He’d cry if a traffic light turned red. Cried at birthdays, weddings, christenings. Hell, I caught him once bawling his eyes out at the breakfast table. When I asked him why, he said the picture on the oatmeal box reminded him of his grandmother, and she’d been dead almost forty years at that point.”