The Death of an Irish Lover (15 page)

McGarr waited.

Carson’s pale blue eyes flashed up at him. “Because they can give birth, they think life is the answer, while men know that death is the only truth.”

They held each other’s gaze for a moment or two, before McGarr asked, “How can I get to Tallon’s office
in the inn? Through there?” McGarr pointed to the small door behind the desk.

Carson shook his head. “Unfortunately for you—one way and one way only: through the pub, across the courtyard, and in through the inn. It’s down in the cellar.”

“What’s behind the door?”

“Storage.”

Stepping back into the bar, McGarr found at least a dozen faces glaring at him.

Master stonemasons must have built the premises, McGarr decided, as he descended the long flight of wide stairs into the basement of the inn.

It was cool there, but dry, the grain of the blocks of gray stone having been selected in such a way that moisture was carried out of the building, he assumed.

The ceilings of each of the small rooms that he was passing were vaulted and made of brick, like the magazines in a fort, and it occurred to McGarr that the first use of the structure might have been military, given its position of command above the river.

Finding Tim Tallon in one of the larger rooms, he paused in the doorway and looked around: a computer, faxes, and several telephones on one long table; rows of filing cabinets; and one cushioned reading chair with a light behind it.

On the phone, Tallon was sitting at a large oak desk; behind him was a sizable and ornate safe with gilded scrollwork on the door, which was open. Seeing McGarr, Tallon raised a finger, meaning he would be only a moment, then pointed to a chair near the desk, before the hand descended. It closed the safe door and spun the combination lock.

“Ah, good, Hans…great…wonderful…grand. We’ll see you, Britta, and the family on the tenth then. I’ll have the car waiting at the airport. No problem, none at all. My pleasure. G’luck to you, too.”

Hanging up, Tallon glanced at McGarr and smiled. “Peter, lad, how goes the sleuthing?” He picked up some papers on his desk and shuffled them. “What can I do you for? The Frakes, now, have you nabbed their sorry arses yet?”

McGarr wondered why even those few remarks set his teeth on edge. Was it their past history? Or was Tallon so lacking in social skills that he struck everybody that way?

“Something in there you don’t want me to see?” McGarr asked.

“What? No, of course not. Your walking in only reminded me that it was open. And let me assure you—
friend
—had the bloody Pope himself walked in, I would have closed it—as a matter of habit. But you didn’t search me out to discuss my finances.”

“But I did. Benny Carson tells me that you’re going to sell him the pub half of the inn, building and all.”

Tallon’s brow was now a field of furrows.

“Is that true?”

Tallon nodded.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you selling it to him?”

“Because it makes good sense, business-wise.”

“Aren’t you making money there?”

Tallon stood and moved away from the desk. “I am, yah—but not enough. Can I tell you the history of the pub?”

McGarr nodded, noting the MacDonald-plaid twill
shirt that wrapped Tallon’s paunch, the tight blue jeans, the tooled-leather cowboy boots that rather accentuated his curious shamble. His belt buckle was made of silver with a large turquoise stone in the shape of the head of a longhorn steer.

“We’re open now six year come Christmas, and, as I think I’ve told you, it’s taken that long to get the inn half of the operation off the ground.

“Oh, I know, I know.” Both fidgety and demonstrative, Tallon flapped a hand, “people will tell you, I tried to make a go of the pub, too. But, the plain truth is”—he stopped his strange perambulation, turned and faced McGarr—“I’m not much of a publican. People don’t like me very much.”

He paused, his dark eyes searching McGarr’s face, as though for a denial. “You don’t yourself.”

Another pause.

“You didn’t when we were kids, you don’t now.”

Tallon waited further, before dipping his head and shoulders and continuing to pace. “And the pub was a bust.

“Then along comes Benny Carson—ex-convict and murderer—asking me…no,
begging
me to give him a chance to pump up business.

“Says I to him, not a chance. Don’t even think about it, until Dermot Finn—his brother-in-law and a man of his word—comes by and says he’ll cover any losses. ‘Just give Benny a chance to get on his feet. You won’t be sorry.’”

“Nor was I. Because—who do the Culchie pricks in these parts think is so brilliant beyond words that they’re willing to splash out their last pound come-day-go-day as long as he’s there behind the bar, like…like some fallen priest in a public confes
sional? Benny effing Carson, is who. I tell you it’s hard to fathom.”

“Aren’t you making money?” McGarr asked again.

Tallon nodded. “Like I said, I am, yah—but not enough. First, there’s his salary, which we’ve negotiated and renegotiated thrice now, always up. And then he’s stealing, I’m sure he is, even with the new computer. But I don’t know how.

“And I dare not fire him. There isn’t a bar in these parts that wouldn’t hire him in a blink, and I’d be back where I was. Behind the bloody bar, and I don’t want that.

“So, here’s the deal,” he continued. “We own it together on a sliding scale, as he pays me the sum that we’ve agreed upon. If he misses a payment—a single payment—we go back to square one. I keep what he’s paid me, and he begins all over again.

“But if all goes according to form, I’m rid of the place with a handsome purchase price in me back pocket. And the pub is still there, perking along for my guests here in the inn. Some of them like consorting with the locals—the music, the
crac
. You know, the
wild
Irish thing.”

“How much?”

“Excuse me?”

“How much is Carson paying?”

Tallon laughed silently. “Now, answer me this—how smart would that be? Tell you, tell all. Only two days ago I asked you to keep a secret for me. And look what happened—we have press all over town.”

He paused, his eyes narrowing sagely. “But, I suppose, Peter, we all have our flaws, and I’m a big enough man not to blame you for yours.”

What was it about Tallon that was so off-putting,
McGarr asked himself again. His need to make the other person feel guilty in regard to him? Or, at least, indebted?

In Ireland, of course, guilt ruled all, but the entire
shtik,
if it was that, was an attempt at control. From schoolyard bully to emotional bully wasn’t a great leap, McGarr well knew, and he wondered at Tallon’s relations with those closer to him, like his wife and employees.

“Gertie McGurk—is she one of the wild Irish things your guests consort with?”

Tallon stepped back to his desk, where he sat. “It has been known to happen.”

“In the inn.”

“There’s no way I can keep her out, given what my guests pay. And can I say something off the record, Peter?”

“Trust me,” said McGarr, wryly.

“Where’s the harm? Great form, that girl, and a bit of a fling away from home can do a marriage a world of good, I’m told. Rumor has it, some of my guests come back just for her, not the fishing.”

Which makes you…? McGarr kept himself from asking. Instead he removed a slip of paper from his jacket and reached it to Tallon. “Recognize this number?”

“Of course—it’s one of the numbers here.”

“It’s also the number from which Ellen Finn was paged three times, shortly before she was murdered. She left her work on the river to find a phone to answer it.”

Like a large grizzled bird turning an ear to the ground—the hooded brow, pugged nose, and sunken cheeks, Tallon canted his head. “Impossible.”

McGarr only waited.

Tallon’s dark eyes rose and caromed off McGarr’s, fixing on a point on the vaulted ceiling. “Of course, we have phones in every room, several in the dining room, the bar, the kitchen, the maid’s closets, here.” He pointed to the phone on his desk. “The calls could have been made from any one of them, if what you say is true. But—”

“All dial out?”

Tallon nodded. “Those not in the rooms are restricted to local calls. Electronically.”

“No charge.”

“Not locally.”

“Who was about Friday afternoon?”

As though plainly disturbed by the news, Tallon wagged his head. “Perhaps several of the inn staff, surely the chef and his crew were in the kitchen preparing, since we have a good amount of transit trade Friday nights, in addition to the guests. And we were booked solid.”

“Was Grace O’Rourke about?”

Tallon had to think. “I think she might have been, although I couldn’t say for sure. If some of the guests are late rising, she hangs about to do up the rooms, when they leave or come down for a bite to eat.”

“Were you here?”

His bushy eyebrows knitted. “I don’t understand. What’s the purpose of that question? Surely, you don’t—”

Tired of his carry-on, McGarr asked again in a stronger voice. “Were. You. Here?”

“Not for most of the afternoon. I was fishing with the lads, I was.”

“What time did you return?”

“Oh—fourish, I’d say. To help with the setups, don’t you know.”

“Here in the inn.”

Tallon nodded.

“What about the pub? Did you go into the pub?”

Again, he had to think. “No, I don’t think so. Not that I can remember, although I do from time to time. To show the flag, so to speak.” Tallon twined his fingers across his chest and smiled woodenly, McGarr noticing for the first time that Tallon’s teeth were not good. “I hope you don’t think me a suspect in this?”

“You went nowhere near the pub?”

He shook his head. “Not that I can remember.”

“Not upstairs either?”

Tallon sat up suddenly. “Ach, sure—now that I remember—I was. Didn’t I check the work in the room we’re renovating over the pub.”

“The room where Manus Frakes and Quintan Finn laid the carpet that afternoon?”

“Aye.”

“What time was that?”

“Oh, I’d say it was teatime. Six or thereabouts. Peter, I hope you—”

“Were Frakes and Finn there?”

Tallon shook his head. “Long gone. Or, at least they weren’t in that room. I can remember speaking with a Dutchman—is that where you got this?—about the work, since they’d made a balls of the job and the whole thing would have to be torn up and begun again. Or trashed. It wasn’t right at all, you can see for yourself. It’s still there.”

“And where was your wife?”

“Sylvie? Why do you ask?”

“Please—just answer my questions.”

“In the inn, I suppose. Most Fridays she naps in the afternoon—to be fresh the night long, don’t you know. The first I saw her, I think, was in the dining room…no, she was behind the reception desk, I recall.”

“You don’t share the same quarters?”

“No—but don’t get the wrong idea. Like yourself, I smoke, and Sylvie gets headaches. The allergies, her doctor has told us. Otherwise, everything is…” Tallon winked. “No complaints, not a one.”

Apart from her own, McGarr recalled from his interview with the woman. “Is she about?”

“Who?”

McGarr stood. “The wife.”

Tallon was now leaning back in his chair with his hands around his head. “She’s not here.”

“When will she be back?”

“I’m not sure. Her mother took sick, and she’s over in Bruges.”

What?,
McGarr was tempted to ask. Instead he waited.

“It’s serious, she was told, and she left this morning. Only child—they’re very close.”

And was it a kind of glee that McGarr now read in Tallon’s eyes? He thought so. “Take me to her quarters.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d like to look around.”

“Why?”

McGarr’s hands shot out. Seizing Tallon by the front of his shirt, he pulled him across the desk. Buttons popped; the phone, a desk lamp, and a credenza crashed to the floor. They were face-to-face.

“Because I’m thinking of filing charges against you and your would-be wife.”

“Charges of what?” Tallon managed.

“Complicity in murder.”

“But they would be false charges. Now, take your hands off me, please.”

McGarr only stared into the man’s dark eyes. False or not, Tallon and his inn would be branded. And in a country where sin could be forgiven but was never forgotten, at the very least he would lose his Irish trade.

Dropping Tallon on the desk, he turned to the door.

Sylvie Zeebruge’s apartment was on the second floor. “So she can be close to the guests,” Tallon explained, using a key to let McGarr in. “She tells them, ‘You need anything at any hour, knock on my door.’ She caters to their least little whim.”

The apartment was even more completely furnished than the inn proper, if that was possible. In regard to walls or any flat surface, it was as if the woman exercised a form of horror vacui.

She had left in a hurry, it appeared, when McGarr stepped into her boudoir. Drawers in the chifforobe were ajar, and clothes lay on the bed. Her dresser was a chaos of cosmetics, the top, the drawers; it was a fragrant mess.

McGarr moved directly to the bathroom and the cabinets by the sink, which were filled out with more vials, jars, spray bottles of cold cream, deodorants, perfumes, and hair preparations than a well-stocked
perfumerie
.

He opened several of the drawers.

“What are you looking for?” Tallon asked. “Perhaps I can help you.”

“This.” McGarr held up a hairbrush with more than a few hairs snagged in the bristles. “I’m going to take this.”

“Why?”

McGarr only slid the object in a pocket. “Who was Tony Moran?”

It took Tallon a moment or two to speak, as though he was framing his response. “A local fella, older, a bachelor poof. He passed away a year ago…no, two, I believe.”

“Friend of your wife?”

Tallon shrugged. “She’s been known to have friends, and he could afford to come in here. He was into computers, and helped us with ours.”

“She cook for him?”