Tell Them I'll Be There (20 page)

The trial, well attended by crime writers and movie people, attracted enormous publicity. Ruth Snyder was now a media phenomenon. The tall blonde was a source of endless
speculation
. Was she really to blame? Surely she won't go to the chair! Across the country her story had gripped the attention of the ghoulish. She had also become an accidental icon for oppressed women.

The ill-thought-out murder plot had so obviously little chance of success Damon Runyon labelled it ‘The Dumbell Murder'. Asked why, he said, ‘Because the whole thing is just so dumb.'

Snyder and Gray were sentenced to death and, as the date of their execution drew near, and opinions divided on whether or not a woman should go to the chair, the radio and the press went into a frenzy. If Ruth Snyder was executed she would be the first woman, apart from a few black women who didn't seem to count, to die in the chair since 1899.

There was little interest and no space in the press for the plight of an unfortunate kid like Tony O'Reilly.

Dan looked at his brother curiously. ‘You didn't know about Michael, so why
did
you come here tonight?'

‘I had to see you,' Tim said. ‘It's Ma. Father Pat got a phone call from the bishop's office. She was taken ill last Wednesday. She's in the Cottage Hospital. Sounds pretty serious.'

‘Did they say what it is, what's wrong?'

‘Father Pat tried to make a transatlantic call but he couldn't get through. Seems there's a letter from Aunt Molly on the way with more details. But that'll take ages.'

Dan didn't know what to say.

‘If she's really bad,' Tim said, ‘maybe one of us should go home.'

‘Take a couple of weeks at least,' Dan told him, ‘and it would have to be you or me. Way things are we can't even let Michael know.'

Tim smiled wryly. ‘Have to be you, I guess. I couldn't afford it.' He was waiting for a lead from Dan who was usually quick to make decisions but for once Dan seemed unsure. ‘You can't go, is that it?' 

‘Well,' Dan said, ‘Mr Baker is in hospital. In for a couple of days. I had to see him about something today so I went over there. He said he was just in for an annual check-up but it turned out it was a cancer hospital. He wouldn't tell me why he was there. He said he'll tell me tomorrow when he gets home.'

‘He may need you here in the business.'

Dan shrugged. ‘If Ma's ill one of us should be there.'

‘Well, you know how it is. I would go, but it's the money.'

Everything seemed to be happening at once. Dan needed to know exactly what, if anything, was wrong with Joe Baker. He wanted to be in town if Michael tried to contact him and he wanted to be in on any arrangements Joe might make to deal with O'Hara.

‘How are things in the parish?' he asked. ‘Does Father Pat need you?' There was a look on Tim's face he hadn't seen before. ‘Tim?'

‘The Church,' Tim said disparagingly. ‘Useless. Waste of time, Dan. Tony O'Reilly is locked up in a cell on Death Row and what is the Church doing? What is the Holy Catholic Church doing for its ex-altar boy framed for a murder he didn't commit? Absolutely nothing. And take me. What am I doing? I'm not a priest. They can't make up their minds if they need me or not. Well, I'm beginning to wonder if I need them.'

‘Hey, come on!' Dan said. ‘Ma wouldn't want to hear you talk like that. And you can't blame the Church over Tony. What can they do? No witnesses for the defence and a couple of cops who say they actually saw your man holding the gun.' They were quiet for a moment then Dan said, ‘Maybe you need to get away for a while, go home, see Ma. Things might look different from a distance. What do you say? I find the money, you go see Ma.'

Vin O'Hara was in one of his frequent rages, the kind that came when things were not going exactly the way he wanted. Find Dolan by tonight or else, he bellowed at Jimmy Pickles. But Pickles didn't know where to start. Then it occurred to him that 
if Michael Dolan had gone, the girl, Annie, was probably with him and if so it might be worth grilling her girlfriends, especially the blonde dame who always had a lot to say. He went at once to the Vaudeville Theatre. The girls, he knew, were part way through a four-week booking.

Flanked as usual by two gorillas, he burst into an office on the mezzanine floor where the far from young theatre manager was startled out of a midday clinch with his very young and innocent-looking secretary.

‘Dancer called Annie,' Pickles demanded, straight to the point. ‘Michael Dolan's girlfriend, no less. Where's she from?'

Flustered and anxious to adjust his clothing, the man blinked at Pickles, clearly aware of who he was and what he
represented
. ‘They all stay at the Lennox. It's a rooming-house on Third.'

‘Her home address, dumb-head.'

His hands shaking, the manager took a ledger from a shelf and said doubtfully, ‘I don't think we have—'

‘Well, look,' Pickles ordered, ‘and make it snappy.' He looked at the girl. ‘You know this Annie?'

Terrified, the girl shook her head.

‘We don't have any other address,' the theatre manager said, equally scared. ‘They come and go all the time.'

‘Yeah, yeah,' Pickles said, and he turned to his two men. ‘Do we know this Lennox joint?'

The one called Bluey nodded, the other was leering at the girl. With a flick of his head Pickles indicated they were leaving. From the doorway he looked back at the girl. ‘Keep your pants on, kid,' he said. ‘With this old ram around you'll be taking home more than your pay check.'

Bluey drove over to the rooming-house on Third Avenue. It was where theatre people and others in the business stayed anything from a week to a year depending on how long a project lasted.

A well-upholstered German lady intercepted them in the hallway. ‘You bring the rent?'

‘What rent would that be?' Pickles asked. 

‘Das little dame, Annie. She one of yours, ain't she? Vell she skip out vid'out paying up for the last three veek.'

‘She ain't one of ours, no,' Pickles told her, ‘but we want her and when we find her she'll pay up in more ways than one.'

The woman looked worried. ‘She do something wrong?'

‘Where do we find her pal? Susie or Sue, something like that. Blonde dame, thin.'

Sue, the girl in question, was part way down the stairs. ‘Don't you mean
slim
, Mr Pickles?' she asked coyly.

‘We're looking for your sidekick,' Pickles told her.

‘Annie?' she said, biting her lower lip. ‘She went home.'

Pickles advanced up the stairs and his men followed. ‘If you don't mind,' he said, ‘we'd like for us to have a little talk.'

The German landlady turned to Bluey and opened her mouth, but he gave her a look that said clearly: Keep out of this.

They came up the stairs slowly and with measured steps and Sue was forced to back into the room she had shared with Annie and another girl. The other girl was still in bed but she sat up now and pulled the bedclothes up to her neck.

Pickles focused on Sue ‘What do they call you? Susie?' She nodded. ‘Well, Susie,' he said quietly. ‘You're Annie's pal and Annie's gone home.' She nodded again. ‘And you're going to tell us where home is. We need an address, Susie.'

Sue shook her head. ‘I don't know, Mr Pickles. Honest. She left in a hurry and she just said she would be in touch.'

Pickles looked back at Bluey and indicated he should step forward. Bluey stepped forward, put an arm around Sue's neck and held a narrow bladed switch knife to her face. The girl in the bed stifled a scream.

‘Please, Mr Pickles,' Sue whimpered. ‘I don't know where she's from. Honest. If I did I'd tell you.'

Bluey held the knife against her cheek so she could feel the smooth cold blade that was ready to mark her for life.

‘Please,' she begged ‘Not my face. I'd never work again …'

‘Where did you say she came from?' he demanded.

‘It's somewhere near Chicago,' the girl in the bed said. 

Pickles put his face close to Sue's. ‘If we hear she's been in touch and you haven't told us we'll be back. Understand?'

Sue nodded, her eyes wide and fearful, and she collapsed into a chair as they left.

At the foot of the stairs the German landlady was waiting. ‘Vat about the rent? The boss vill stop it from my vages.'

Pickles smiled sweetly. ‘If he gives you a hard time, Mama, just call us. We'll take care of him.'

Never was a country so happy and so prosperous as America is today
. So claimed the newspaper and magazine advertisements. Successful businessmen were celebrities and there was no escaping the mass euphoria. Talking pictures had Movietone News, almost every household had a radio and newspaper boys yelled the latest developments daily through several editions.

Never before had the working man, the housewife, the man in the street taken such an interest in the day-to-day business of the Stock Exchange. And perhaps with good reason. Ten
thousand
dollars of stock held in General Motors in 1920 was now worth one and a half million.

Radio stock, along with General Motors, was one of the market leaders and Michael Meehan, the man mainly
responsible
for its rise in value now organized an ‘insider' group who collectively bought Radio to boost it still further. Investors, large and small, took note and so did the media. The impression was created that Radio stock was on the way up and the scramble was on to buy in. With a little help from Mr Meehan's friends, Radio stock had swiftly become the ‘in' thing. The smart investor bought Radio and, with so many outsiders eager to buy, Radio stock climbed more than twenty dollars in two days to a new high of $125.50 per share. The rise and rise of Radio soon became front-page news and within a few days Post 12 became the busiest spot on the floor of the Exchange.

Investors, large and small, were now fighting to invest in Radio. In just eight days the stock gained fifty dollars. Across the country, coast to coast, speculators were whipped into a frenzy of buying. Anyone and everyone, whether they could 
afford to gamble or not, wanted to be in on the bonanza and the myths grew daily. An elevator boy made half a million dollars; the girl in the office quadrupled her money in three days. The stories poured in and nobody wanted to check if they were true. At $195, Radio was now even higher than General Motors. In less than a month the price had doubled. And more than ever, organized crime barons, like Vincent O'Hara's Englishman, were eager to muscle in and manipulate the market. But the market had its own manipulators.

Dan Dolan was spending most of his days on the floor of the Exchange, alerting his boss to trends in the market, and despite his brief spell in hospital Joe Baker was as active as ever.

‘You realize we missed lunch?' he asked one day.

‘No time for lunch,' Dan said with a grin, as he followed him out to Broad Street. And this was true. There was so much going on people were reluctant to leave the floor.

‘Let's get a coffee and you can tell me what's bugging you.'

Dan raised his eyebrows in surprise, but he didn't speak as they walked up to Pine and the coffee shop.

Baker was looking at him knowingly. ‘Come on,' he said. ‘I know you. What's on your mind?'

‘Couple of things,' Dan told him. ‘First of all and most
important
, you said you would tell me why you were in a cancer hospital.'

Baker glanced at him sidelong. ‘I was there,' he said, ‘because it's a hospital for people with cancer.'

Dan gripped Baker's arm. ‘What is it, Pops?'

‘We all have to go some time,' Baker said without expression.

‘What is it?' Dan asked in alarm. ‘Tell me. What's going on? Come on. I need to know. We have to get you the best doctors, the experts.'

Baker smiled, his elfin, wise-old-man smile. ‘They're all the same, Dan. They know nothing. All they're expert at is writing out death certificates.' His expression softened. ‘Don't look like that. It won't happen for a while yet. So what was the other thing?'

Dan shook his head. ‘It's not important now.' 

‘What was the other thing?' Baker insisted.

‘I need a note from my employer to the bank,' Dan told him.

‘To say what?'

‘To say that I'm good for a loan. I need to borrow a couple of hundred dollars. There'll be no problem. They seem to be happy to lend money just now. All I need is a note from you.'

‘You going to tell me what the money's for?'

‘My brother Tim. He got a message through the Church to say Ma's been taken ill. Seems she's pretty bad and we reckon one of us should go home and see her before it's too late.'

‘You want to take some time off?'

‘No. Tim would go but he has no money and I don't have enough to give him.' He smiled. ‘The banks won't lend to a trainee priest.'

Baker laughed. ‘But they'll lend to the crooks on Wall Street.'

‘That's about it,' Dan agreed. ‘And, as I told you, Michael has gone missing, thanks to O'Hara.'

‘Don't worry about it,' Baker told him. ‘You don't need a bank loan. We'll work something out.'

T
IM HAD NOT
expected to see the old country again so soon. But nothing, it seemed, had changed much. It was raining as they left and it was raining now, the clouds low and grey.

A loudspeaker on the quayside at Liverpool had summoned him to the office of the dock manager. He had been here before and he remembered that hectic day, the day Caitlin's mother died, her lifeless body in that narrow back room, the small black van that took her away, the lost little girl with Dan and Michael. The place was associated with death and loss then and it was now. The manager was waiting for him with a note, a message received by telephone.

Ma was dead. She had died before he left New York and all the time he was sitting patiently in the main cabin, gazing out at the dull, timeless Atlantic, she was lying dead. He was too late. He was even too late for the funeral. The funeral was yesterday and already she was underground, that lovely face he had known all his life was gone and gone forever.

The boat to Dublin had moved slowly, the bus had moved slowly, and the hours had only memories to pass the time. Then at last the bus dropped him at the crossroads and he began the half-mile walk, steadily, resolutely, his head and his shoulders wet with rain, to the house where he and his brothers had been born.

The cottage was as he knew it, as he had always known it, yet it was different. He had never realized how small it was until now. His mind's eye, filled with images of Manhattan 
skyscrapers, tall tenement buildings and majestic bridges, saw it now for what it was. A tiny house, scarcely big enough for two. A place where once his mother had presided over a noisy
household
.

She had them all in those days and somehow she kept them all under control A large amiable husband, three growing boys and much of the time their clumsy, beer-swilling Uncle Patrick. Sure and they must have all got in each other's way, he told himself with a smile, then a sadness in the knowledge that those days were gone, gone forever and now Ma had gone with them.

The front door, he noticed, was slightly open and, as he went down the uneven path, he could see through the window a fire was burning brightly. He had forgotten to bring the only key they had and he expected he would have to go down the road to Aunt Molly or Clare. But they were here already, waiting for him.

‘Will you look at him!' Aunt Clare said reproachfully as if it was his fault he was wet. ‘He's wet through, so he is. Come on now, take off that coat. And that shirt. And take a towel to your head.'

She was talking to him as if he had come in wet from school, as Ma did in the old days. But he held up his hands. ‘I need to go down there and see her.'

‘No, no, son, not now,' Aunt Molly said. ‘We have a hot drink for you. With a little something in it. And you must get yourself dry.'

The rain spattered the window. ‘You'll get yourself soaked to the skin,' Aunt Clare said, as he backed away.

‘I'm already soaked to the skin,' he said with a smile. ‘It'll only take a few minutes and I'll come straight back. I promise.'

They shrugged helplessly, accepting he was a man now with a will of his own. ‘We'll have something hot for you. So don't you be long.'

He dodged out the door and back into the rain and set off down the lane, skirting the Drummers'. The tavern was closed until 5.30 and he was glad. He didn't want to be dragged in there by well-meaning sympathizers. It was a place he hoped to 
avoid this trip. He couldn't face the commiserations and then the inevitable questions about New York City and all the blarney they would expect in return. Maybe tomorrow, he told himself.

He saw the newly formed grave at once. It was covered by flowers, the flowers pounded by the relentless rain. They were mostly wild flowers gathered for free from the hillsides and the edge of the woods. The newly turned soil was looser and blacker than the surrounding soil, crossed now by little rivulets of
rainwater
. The gravestone was a dull, worn grey. He would leave some money for the stone to be cleaned and for his mother's name to be added to those of his father, a baby girl his parents had lost and Uncle Pat.

He stood in silence for several minutes, thinking of this lovely selfless lady who now lay in peace, ready to meet her God. And if there is a God, he thought, he'll welcome her with open arms. That troublesome phrase brought his train of thought to a halt.
If there is a God
… It had rarely occurred to him that there might not be and he had always dismissed the possibility. Slowly, confused, he turned away and he saw the statue of the Virgin in her light blue robe. He had run to her that last night, the night before they left, when he was running from Kathy O'Donnell. He had escaped then yet he knew that now he was home and before he left again, though he didn't know why or what he wanted to say to her, he would have to, he
wanted
to see Kathy O'Donnell one more time.

Father Delaney was in the vestry. He knew Tim was home and he was ready with his condolences as he greeted him and led him through to the house that adjoined the church. It was a large house by local standards, on three floors with a
comfortable
sitting room, a large kitchen and a housekeeper, Bridie Friel, who as far as Tim could remember had always been there. She appeared to have no family of her own and seeing her now with her scrubbed moon face and her mouse-like, quietly
scurrying
manner he wondered why she wasn't a nun.

His mother, Father Delaney told him, had not suffered much, 
except perhaps for a day or two towards the end. A day or two? A minute is an eternity for someone in pain, Tim thought but he didn't say so. It was a carcinoma, the priest said and Tim merely nodded. Typically, without any frills, Aunt Molly had said it was breast cancer, so it was, a malignant tumour. It must have given her terrible pain, she said, and she never told anyone she had it until it was too late. Aunt Clare simply shook her head and with a doomsday frown said, ‘Ah 'tis always too late with the cancer.'

Father Delaney was droning on about the better place Tim's mother had gone to where there was sure to be a seat for her at the table of the Lord and other such platitudes. He was talking to Tim as if Tim was a small boy in one of his Saturday morning religious instruction lessons. But Tim was feeling sleepy, kept awake only by the angry buzz of a large bee as it rammed a window in a vain attempt to escape. If it only knew, he thought, it's far better inside than out. It was throwing it down outside and it was warm and dry in Father Delaney's sitting room.

It occurred to Tim that Father Delaney had known him all his life. He had been the parish priest here for more than thirty years and he had always seemed a towering presence in his flowing robes and the more colourful garments he wore at Mass or Benediction. Father Delaney had known Tim and his brothers since they were born, were baptized, made their first Confession and received their first Holy Communion, and he had known, too, that from an early age Tim Dolan was being groomed by his mother for the priesthood.

It was a process he had been subjected to himself and he was not sure he entirely approved. But this was Ireland and the mothers were Roman Catholic.

As the boys grew up Dan and Michael had become less close to the Church. But not Tim. He had served at the altar from eight to eighteen and it was only his recent departure that took him away. Fate had taken Tim across the Atlantic and now as Bridie brought in the tea and the little cakes she had made herself Father Delaney offered Tim ‘a drop of the hard stuff' to stiffen his tea. Like everyone else he wanted to hear all about New York. 

Father Delaney seemed to acknowledge now that Tim was already a man with a greater experience of the wider world than himself and he began to talk to him as an adult. Tim, sensing the subtle change, felt he could now tell Father Delaney about Father Pat, the Lower West Side and Father Pat's sometimes startling use of language. But first he told him about Michael's remarkable rise to fame.

‘Ah and he could always sing that one,' the priest said and he recalled the time they tried to get Michael, as a small boy, to sing solo in church one Easter Sunday. He was to sing
Ave Maria
but he refused point blank. He threatened if he was forced into it he would sing
Paddy McGinty's Goat
instead. ‘And the way that boy was,' Father Delaney said with a laugh, ‘we couldn't risk it.'

He listened carefully, nodding from time to time, as Tim told him of some of the problems that faced a parish priest in what New Yorkers called Hell's Kitchen. ‘You know how sometimes people say, “It would make a priest swear”? Well, Father Pat does. He swears all the time. He calls Jewish people Kikes and Italians Wops. He has a terrible tongue on him.'

Father Delaney laughed. ‘Ah, these are just words. 'Tis of no consequence. 'Tis how he deals with his people that matters. I'm sure he does what he can to guide them.'

Tim nodded. ‘They love him, Father,' he said. ‘They really do. But things go wrong.'

He told Father Delaney about Tony O'Reilly and his response surprised him. Yet, he decided later, it was predictable.

‘It doesn't matter much how we die,' Father Delaney told him. ‘If they sit the boy in the electric chair and he's innocent the Lord will know he's innocent and he'll still be welcome upstairs.'

‘But the people he leaves behind … his mother, his little brother.'

‘Ah, the whole of life is a problem, Timothy,' he said. ‘It was never meant to be a bed of roses. Life on this earth has always been a mess and sure it always will be.'

There was to be a private family Mass for his mother before he returned to the US and he arranged for this now. Then, as if 
he was propelled by some inner force he set off down the lane to the house where several generations of O'Donnells had lived. Along the lane was the elementary school where Tim and his brothers and Kathy O'Donnell and most of the children of the village first grappled with the complexities of what Mrs Yeats, the seemingly ageless schoolmistress, called readin' an' writin'.

From somewhere at the back of the school came the sound of the school choir singing tunefully and for now the playground was deserted. Tim paused to gaze fondly at the playground. This was where Michael and a boy called Padraic Cleary came to blows at every opportunity from the age of seven to thirteen. Then when Padraic's family emigrated to Australia the two of them had clung to each other in a tearful farewell.

As with all the boys, as the brothers reached the age of
fourteen
, they went out to work. Michael in the fields. Tim himself at the General Post Office delivering mail, Dan in the estate office of the English Lord who, despite Independence and Partition, still owned and in all but law ruled the county.

Just a short distance from the school there was a narrow turning off to the right. It was almost hidden from the lane by the bushes that reached out as if wanting to embrace across the opening. Here there were fewer footprints in the mud and a stranger to the village might think the path led nowhere.

The O'Donnell house, a house Tim knew well, was one of three in a two-storey terrace of crofters' cottages. He stood quite still for a moment, again struck by how small the houses were. It was like coming to Toytown but it was not a pretty sight. There were too many overgrown bushes that should have been trimmed or cut back, there was a broken drain, rusty and leaking, and the thatch looked tired and black in patches.

The O'Donnells' was the first of the three, the front door closed, the windows grimy with neglect. Perhaps the family had moved but where would they go? They had always lived here. He knocked at the dingy front door. Kathy might not be here, of course. She had worked at the kitchens in the market hall but he felt sure she would have left that job by now. It was a job she 
had never enjoyed and she was always looking in the newspaper for something better.

Tim just wanted to know where she was working and he would go and see her. A little apprehensive now, he knocked again at the door. If Kathy was in what would he say to her? Why had he come? He couldn't answer that. He just knew he couldn't leave and go back to the States without seeing her.

He waited but no one came, He went down the side of the house and round to the back door. It was open. He knocked lightly then pushed the door inwards. Kathy's older sister, Bridget, was at the kitchen sink. She looked up at him sharply, her hands in water. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and what do
you
want?'

‘Hello, Bridget,' he said and he started to cross the threshold but she rounded on him, a large bread knife in her hand.

‘Don't you dare step foot in this house,' she warned him. ‘You are not wanted here.'

‘I just want to see Kathy.'

She looked at him curiously. ‘Is that right?' she said, her head on one side.

‘You will have heard we lost Ma. I came over soon as I could but I was too late.'

What he was saying didn't help. It sounded as if he had only called because he happened to be passing and he just thought he would look in on Kathy, see if she had got over the shock of losing him. At least, that was the way Bridget chose to see it.

Bridget was only two years older than Kathy but she had always seemed so much more. She had aged, too, and she looked far older than her years. She was notorious in the village for blaming all the troubles of the world on men and the fact that she had never married, never had a male friend, was not surprising. Her two brothers had gone off to Australia when Bridget and Kathy were still at school and when their mother fell ill with what the doctor called pleurisy their feckless father had gone off to God knows where with his fancy woman never to be seen nor heard from again. Times had been very hard and Bridget had left school a year 
early, the deed done before the school board found out, to work in a laundry.