“What happened to Brennan?”
“He had some kind of burn or injury to his chest. Nothing serious. That boy’s parents, Stan’s, my God.” Tears sprang into her eyes. “I have two sons. In the Navy. I heard the boy’s father died not long after the fire, and he wasn’t old. Their only son, a talented kid. That was the end of their child.”
“So Brennan was in there with you and this other woman while his buddy was dying downstairs. Hard to come to terms with a thing like that.”
“Yeah, but it would have been the same thing for Brennan if he’d been in the middle of a poker hand, or watching a football game. It wasn’t what he was doing, it was that he didn’t bother to get up. I don’t imagine he blames it on sex, if that’s what you’re driving at. He didn’t have any hangups on that score.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “That was the last I ever saw of him.”
I had to ask the kind of question I don’t like to ask, especially about somebody I know, but these were unusual circumstances. And Doreen wasn’t shy.
“His sexual inclinations... Was he into anything rough, or —”
“Whoa! This is getting more interesting by the minute. I don’t know what this has to do with the fire, but no. Nothing rough with Brennan. Vigorous, maybe! Hot-blooded Irishman and all that.”
“Did the matter of religion ever come up in a sexual context?”
“No way! What did he do, set fire to a church and then bring some babe along to watch the guys with the big hose?”
“Nothing like that. Did he have a temper? Did you ever see him angry?”
“Come on, ‘fess up. What did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything. He’s a priest and choirmaster.”
“If you say so. I never saw him lose his temper. Though, who knows, with the unnatural life he’s leading now.” She shuddered.
“Doreen, thanks. Can I get you anything before I go?”
She reached over and stroked the palm of my left hand with a finger. “A cute guy is always welcome to give me somethin’ before he goes. Are you sure you don’t want to hang around for a while, maybe go to my place? I can tell my roomie to buzz off.”
“Thanks, Doreen, but I’m meeting my wife back at the hotel.”
“That’s funny. I don’t see a ring.”
“I’m not much for jewelry.”
“Yeah, you and Brennan. Unadorned. My ex used to wear this big diamond pinky ring. Tacky as hell. But, takes all kinds. See y’ around, Babyface.”
III
I returned to my hotel so I could call Rowan in Halifax. He assured me there was no sign of the police moving in on our client. “Anything at your end?” he asked.
“Not really. Our man seems to have had more wine, women, and song than you or I might have had on any one occasion. Of course, I can’t speak for you, Rowan.”
“You weren’t in wartime London, my dear fellow. But do go on.”
“I heard a bit about that house fire. Our boy was having a party of his own upstairs at the time. Tried, but too late, to rescue his friend.”
“Not much then. Ring me if you hear anything more. Hope you’re having a spot of fun yourself while you’re there, Monty.” “Baseball tonight, I hope. Mets home game.”
“Splendid.”
As soon as I hung up, I got a call from Burke in the lobby, so I headed down to meet him. It was a bit unsettling to see him in his black clerical suit and Roman collar. I had been hearing so much — too much — about his younger self that I would not have been surprised to see him as a twenty-year-old reprobate wearing nothing but
a boozy grin. Not for the first time, I had to adjust to his presence. “You’re all dressed up, Brennan.”
“I didn’t wear this for you, Collins. It’s for my mother. If you’ve a son who’s a priest, he should look like a priest!” He declined my invitation to the Mets game because his parents were expecting him for dinner, but we made plans to go out the following night. Meanwhile he had time for a quick drink in the hotel bar. His mood had lightened since I had spoken to him last, the result, no doubt, of being home and out of a country where murder charges might be laid against him at any moment.
I know for certain the one I love.
I’m thru with flirtin, it’s just you Im thinkin of,
Ain’t misbehavin, I’m savin my love for you.
— Thomas “Fats” Waller, Harry Brooks, Andy Razaf, “Ain’t Misbehavin’”
I
The last thing I expected the next morning was a call from Sandra Worthington. “There’s something else I feel I should tell you. Can you come by around five-thirty or six?”
So, once again, I was on Sandra’s doorstep in the East seventies. She came out to meet me and gave me a direct look. “It occurs to me now, Monty, that I’ve been a little too melodramatic getting you over here again. This seemed significant in the dark hours before dawn, but in the light of day maybe it isn’t. I don’t know what kind of trouble he’s in so I don’t know whether this is important or not. It’s just that Brennan and I started seeing each other again after we broke up.”
I braced myself for how much later, picturing them cuddled up in the Chester cottage in front of the fireplace, exchanging bodily fluids and fibres, then erupting into an operatic farewell scene two nights before the first murder. So it was a welcome anticlimax when I heard the relationship had resumed for a few months when he was in the seminary and she was studying at Barnard College. They carried on
what sounded like a torrid love affair — my description, not hers — then parted again. Painfully. This would not look great on his character card, Burke as a seminarian having a woman on the side, but it could have been a lot worse.
“That’s old news,” Sandra announced. “I have more immediate concerns now. I’m starving. And you?”
“I could eat a thin gruel if someone put a spoon to my lips.”
“There’s a place over on the West Side that’s unpretentious and has delectable food, in large quantities. Let’s take a stroll across the park.”
We walked to Fifth Avenue and down a few blocks to a path leading into Central Park. The park was filled with joggers and parents with their children. As we meandered along the pathways, I said lightly: “You may wind up as a character witness yet. Seems you couldn’t bear to stay apart from my client.”
“You could be forgiven for thinking so. We always ended up back together. The summer we were nineteen I was fed up with Brennan and started seeing a man a few years older. Wyndham was from an old New York family, the type of man I had been groomed to marry. One evening we attended a concert. I knew Brennan would be there because he was friendly with some of the musicians. I hoped to avoid him, but no such luck. Wyndham and I were in the lobby chatting with friends when in waltzed Brennan with an absolutely dazzling redhead on his arm. He was half-lit but looked quite dashing. As soon as he saw me, he sashayed over to show off the new Irish girlfriend. I tried to sound cool and sophisticated as I remarked: ‘You look as if you’ve met the love of your life, Brennan.’ He said: ‘I have, yes.’
“He introduced her to me. Ignored Wyndham altogether. She and I made phony small talk. Then, as they were leaving to find their seats, he leaned over and whispered in my ear: ‘And as soon as the love of my life decides to dump that Wall Street gombeen man, I’ll be sending Mavourneen back to Erin. And the flame of love will burn anew.’ But he didn’t stop there. He never does. I had on a pair of diamond cluster earrings, clip-ons, that Wyndham had given me. Bren pulled one of them off with his teeth, popped it over to the side of his mouth and made a big show of barely being able to talk. Because the stones were so enormous, you see. ‘If you want this back before anyone notices, meet me at intermission, by the box office.’ He nodded pleasantly,
returned to his date, and escorted her into the theatre.”
“And?”
“Yes, I made my excuses and went out to meet him. To my everlasting embarrassment.”
“What could be worse for a young daughter of privilege than the scourge of embarrassment?” I chided her.
“We met at the box office. He tucked my arm in his and we walked to the staircase like any two well-dressed, well-behaved people out for an evening of music. As soon as we got to the bottom of the stairs he started... well, it seemed important to him to know what my feelings were. ‘Sandy, do you love me? Tell me if you love me.’ Monty, I believe that what goes on, physically, between a man and a woman is private. So I normally wouldn’t say this. But the flame of love burning anew in the bowels of an old theatre building? When anyone might have come along and seen us? Anyway we ended up standing against a wall at the end of a dark corridor, and he... Or we, it wasn’t just him obviously —”
“I have to tell you, Sandra, there is something very fetching in the way you’re blushing.”
“Oh, don’t make it worse! Anyway, when we had finished our romantic little interlude, he said something like: ‘I can’t promise you diamonds but I can promise you a horizontal surface in the future.’ Of course my dress was wrinkled, my hair was all over the place, my makeup was smeared. I got my compact out and tried to fix myself up. He went to wipe the smudges of mascara off but he made it worse. So I tried that and he attempted to fix my hair into place. He had the comb and he said: ‘Do you want me to try to tease it —
taze
it, as he pronounced it — a bit at the top?’ He would have heard that from his sisters. It was so cute. ‘No thank you, I’ll do it, darling.’ Then we started snickering and making dumb jokes about it all, and finally had to hold each other up we were laughing so hard. I got back to my seat just as the curtain went up. Wyndham kept turning to look at me. I told him I had met an old friend in the washroom. I wished he would disappear. I wanted Brennan beside me. That was the longest ninety-six minutes of my life, sitting through the rest of the performance.”
“So? Did you get the earring back?”
“At the last possible minute, on our way back to the auditorium.
And that wasn’t the last bit of theatre for the evening, either. When the concert was finally over, we found ourselves in the lobby. Brennan’s date had gone to make a call. So he took that opportunity to insinuate himself between me and Wyndham, glaring daggers at him with those black eyes of his until Wyndham shrugged and backed off; he wouldn’t cause a scene if his life depended on it. Brennan put his arm around my waist, bent me back so far that my foot was sticking up in the air, leaned over and kissed me for so long I nearly fainted. The spectacle brought wolf whistles from people all around the lobby. Then he set me upright and strode across the room, lit up a cigarette, and loitered casually against the wall until his date emerged. He nodded and said good night to Wyndham and me as they left. Is he still that much of an effing show-off?
“Wyndham didn’t allude to the incident. And he never called me again. The next morning, my father looked at me over the
Wall Street Journal.
‘You’re very chipper this morning, my dear. Has Wyndham livened up, or is that Burke fellow back in our lives again?’ Then he went back to reading the paper. Though, if my memory is not playing tricks on me, he started whistling ‘Some Enchanted Evening.’”
“So you were back together.”
“Yes. Till the final parting, engineered by God Almighty.” She snapped back to the present. “I’m famished.”
We walked to the West Side, where we had a bite to eat, split a bottle of red wine, and gabbed about work and kids. She told me she was widowed; I told her Maura and I were separated. We turned to the subject of music and I ended up scribbling a twelve-bar blues on her napkin. I sang it to her on the walk back home, and made her laugh:
Woke up this morning, got yo’ earring in my mouth. Said, woke up this morning, woman, got yo’ earring in my mouth.
You don’t give me nothin’ else, babe, I take yo’ diamonds and go south.
When we got to her front door she gave me a hug and a quick goodbye peck on the cheek. One of the strongest temptations I have ever faced, stronger even than the urge to stay and show Sandra I was
no boy soprano, was the temptation to cajole her into a cab with me, and take her across the bridge to Brennan’s. But I didn’t say a word about my destination. I felt like a sneak.
II
I rode in the cab alone to Sunnyside in Queens. Brennan’s family lived in a semi-detached, two-storey brick house with a steeply pitched roof; it had three windows up and two down on each side of a double doorway. The Burkes occupied the northern half of the house with a corner lot. Trees and hedges added a suburban touch to the neighbourhood.
I rang the bell and waited. I could see a small orange glow approaching the door window. The tip of a cigar preceded a full head of snowy white hair and two very cold blue eyes, which stared hard at me. Then the door opened and Burke Senior filled the entrance to the hall. A few inches shorter than Brennan, and stockier, the father struck me as an implacable force. The sense of power held in check was even stronger in the father than in the son. As was the clipped Irish accent. “Mr. Collins, is it?”
“Yes. Montague Collins. Good to meet you, Mr. Burke.”
He put his hand out. “Declan. Come in. What’s troubling my son?”
“I —”
“He tells me you’re a friend down from Halifax. If that’s the case, why aren’t you staying with us? Whatever the real story is, you more than likely know what’s eating him. His mother is worried. She finds him thin, and I find him a terrible card player. He’s losing his shirt in poker and that never happens. But when his mother took him aside he told her there’s nothing wrong. As usual, he’s keeping his gob clamped shut and not talking about his troubles.”
I could not imagine Declan Burke opening up about any troubles he might have — if he had troubles — and it was clear his son was made of the same stuff.
“Well, come in and have a drink. We’re all downstairs.”
I followed him past a pleasant, well-worn living room on the right to a set of stairs leading to a family room below. One corner of the
room was set up as a bar. The dark green walls were covered with framed photographs and posters, all on an Irish theme. There were comfy couches along two walls, and a card table in the centre of the room.
“Gentlemen. And lady. I give you Mr. Collins.”
There were five people around the table, and an empty chair where Declan had been. Brennan was in his clerical black but the collar had disappeared. He must have been on duty somewhere during the day. He and two of the other men had big stogies in their mouths. All had drinks, which appeared to be whiskey. The one lady at the table was sipping a glass of white wine, her cards in a tight pack in her left hand. Everybody rose. The woman was tall and elegant, her white hair pulled back in a chignon. She had an oval face and huge, dark eyes. She came over and took my hand warmly in hers. “Teresa Burke. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Collins.”