The Death of an Irish Lover (19 page)

It was just after midnight by the time McGarr got back to the analysis lab. The chemist was waiting for him in the lobby, hat and coat on, ready to go home.

“There’s but the one match—the hair on the pillow matches the hair taken from Gertrude McGurk. But she wasn’t the party who had sex with Pascal Burke. In fact, none of the three samples of hair you gave me—McGurk’s, Grace O’Rourke’s or Sylvie Zeebruge’s—matches the DNA samples taken from the exterior of the condom.”

Which meant that none of the three women—Gertie McGurk, Grace O’Rourke, or Sylvie Zeebruge—had been in bed with Burke prior to his being shot through the temple.

Stumped by the news, McGarr climbed back into Noreen’s Rover and headed back to Leixleap, where he arrived at the inn nearly two hours later.

In the darkness of his room, McGarr placed the contents of his jacket and pockets on the dresser, as he did at home, and sat in the reading chair in order to untie his shoes….

Which was where Noreen found him the next morning.

“Peter,” she shook him gently, since he sometimes awoke with a start. “Where’d you get this?”

McGarr had been dreaming about New Orleans in such detail that he did indeed come to suddenly.

Although he’d never been to the American city, he dreamt he’d gorged on gumbo and jambalaya, listened to hours of great jazz in smoky cafés, danced to Cajun music, and even kissed some gorgeous woman who was dressed in a Mardi Gras costume that included the most bewitching mask…

And suddenly, there was Noreen.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Or you’ve had a guilty dream,” she remarked.

Bingo, without the
had
part.

“Do you know who this woman is?”

McGarr thought for a moment that she could read
his mind. Until she showed him the snapshot that he’d found among Pascal Burke’s correspondence.

McGarr shook his head.

“It’s Moira O’Rourke, the greengrocer. She chucked me out of her shop bodily yesterday evening when I told her about Grace being pregnant by Burke. With murder in her eyes.”

Which brought McGarr up from the chair. “We better get over there.”

“Why—do you think she might do something to Grace?”

“This Moira is probably the one who was sleeping with Burke when he was shot.”

“Hah! I knew it.”

McGarr made his way to the bathroom. “How did you know it?” he asked while applying shave cream to his face.

“Well—I wouldn’t call it a woman’s intuition in this day and age. It’s something more like—”

“Beginner’s luck.”

“Tut-tut—jealousy is unbecoming. And just think of the time you could have saved and the labor it took for you to reach the same conclusion.”

“Well, now we need proof.” McGarr reached for a towel.

“May I come along?”

“As an observer only—promise? Where’s Maddie?”

“More homework, sent by fax.”

“And the rest of the crew?”

“Downstairs, I should imagine. It’s nearly nine.”

Stopping at the door to the dining room, McGarr looked in and signaled the others to follow him.

It was a typical winter day, McGarr could see, as he stepped outside. Masses of dense clouds were racing
across the country from the west, and the air carried a sea tang that hinted at more rain. Or snow.

“Fresh day,” Noreen remarked, as a burst of chill wind nearly stopped them; ahead was the quaint-looking shop with “O’Rourke” in green Irish letters across the front. Stacked bins of fruit and vegetables lined the footpath. The door was standing open.

“It looks normal,” Noreen went on, having to run a bit to keep up with McGarr.

Bresnahan, Ward, and McKeon joined them at the door, and McGarr entered first to find the woman from the photo standing behind the counter. But it was a Moira O’Rourke far different from the person Noreen had encountered there twice before.

Gone was the bib apron and bandanna tied round her head. Today her hair was permed, her face made up, and she was wearing a plain navy blue suit that fit her snugly and made the most of her angular figure. Her hands were behind her back.

McGarr reached toward his belt, where he was carrying a handgun.

Through a dry laugh Moira O’Rourke said, “So, today you brought government reinforcements, Mrs. McGarr—the husband and his entourage. How like a Dub’ altogether.”

“Where’s Grace, your niece?” McGarr asked.

“She got a phone call from Belgium last night, and lit out for parts unknown, taking her love child with her, since she had no option.”

Surveying the blush in O’Rourke’s cheeks and her eyes that seemed overbright, McGarr suspected that the woman had been drinking.

“Here—she left a note.” It was what O’Rourke had been concealing behind her back.

“You must know where she went,” McGarr said, folding the document and putting it into a pocket.

“Nary a clue. To hell, for all I care.”

McGarr swept a hand, and the other staffers moved into the shop to search the premises. “I’d like to pluck a few hairs from your head with your permission.”

“Excuse me?”

McGarr pointed to her head. “Your hair—I need some.”

“Why?”

“To compare it to other evidence found beside Burke and on his person.”

“You mean, like fingerprints?”

“But more accurate. Did you murder Pascal Burke?”

The question caught O’Rourke, as McGarr had intended, off guard. “Of course not, you…But there’s no need for taking any hair.”

Drawing in a breath, she glanced over McGarr’s head, then back down at him. “It was me in bed with Pascal before he got shot. He”—she shook her head and clasped her hands before her—“rang me up that morning, telling me he was desperate to see me.

“‘You’ve got to come over now,’ says he. ‘I need you more than anytime in my life,’ he goes on. Can you imagine how long I had wanted to hear that from him? If I could cry now, I would. But that’s not like me. I got all my crying in when I saw him dead.

“So, that morning when Grace got back from her work in the inn, I asked her to take over here in the shop, telling her I had to put my car into the garage because it needed some attention.

“But,” Moira O’Rourke shook her head, “I never dreamed that Grace was being…serviced by the blighter as well. How could I? Janie—hadn’t I raised the calf myself, after my sister passed away? The ingratitude! It’s shocking.

“And him! When I got up to his room, didn’t he whisper every class of thing to me—how, when he got the rise in pay for having completed twenty years with the Fisheries Service and sold the flat in Dublin, then we’d elope and later find ourselves our own wee place somewhere here around Leixleap.

“And after it”—her eyes flashed up at McGarr—“the sex was over didn’t he promptly fall asleep as usual, snoring away like milord by the fire. So, not being sleepy, I thought I’d return here to the shop, since it wasn’t fair”—she shook her head—“to Grace to make her work both jobs in one day. Shame on me.”

Arms now folded, Moira O’Rourke looked down at her shoes and shifted from foot to foot. “And then, when I got into the loo, didn’t I discover that I was having my period, and I was bloody after all our…activity. It was even on the tiles.

“But I had only reached for the washcloth, when there was a terrific explosion in the bedroom that nearly stopped my heart, it was so loud. I was gripped
with fear and didn’t know what to do. And I can only believe that it was a fair piece of luck, considering what happened to poor Ellen Finn, that I didn’t go out there.

“I don’t know how much time passed with me just standing there frozen, like. But I heard the door open and close, and somehow I got the courage to look out. And I found what had been done to him. Ruined, he was, dead even then.

“I can’t remember everything that happened after, but I know I was worried about the blood—my blood—on the floor and about the scandal that I’d never live down, if it was found out that I’d been in bed with him when he’d been killed. Sure”—her eyes caromed off McGarr’s once again—“I’d be ruined. I’d never get a man.

“And in my haste, didn’t I drop the blessed bottle of cleanser that I’d found beneath the sink. It broke in a million pieces and took me forever to clean up.

“Somehow, I got it done, got my clothes back on and me to the door, thinking rapid-like, Shit—if I’m seen and anybody puts me together with him…Then the other worry was whoever had done it. Maybe they were out in the hall waiting for me. And which way should I go—down through the pub or cross over through the arch into the inn, which I could do since I’d copied Grace’s passkey…you know, without her knowledge, so I could visit Pascal.

“The pub, I decided. It was quicker, and if I kept my back to the bar, maybe nobody would notice. But the minute I got to the stairwell, I heard the door below open, and in steps Benny Carson, the barman.

“I don’t think he saw me—at least, he didn’t look up—so I ran down the hall to the archway door and
just nipped behind it when Carson appeared around the corner.

“But when I got into the inn proper, I heard loud voices coming from Madame Sylvie’s room, and before I could get through the hall and onto the main stairs, Mr. Tallon came out looking madder than a bear with a sore head. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked me.

“Not knowing how to reply, I said I was looking for Grace.

“‘She was just here looking for you,’ says he, which I thought strange since Grace should have been at the shop.” Yet again, O’Rourke glanced up at McGarr. “It was closed, when I got back. Locked tight.

“Later in the evening, when Grace got home, she said her doctor had a cancellation and could fit her in. And she had come to the inn to tell me she had closed up the shop. But she was crying at one moment and laughing at the next, not like her usual self, which is fierce quiet.

“So,” O’Rourke raised her hands and let them fall to her thighs, “that’s it. That’s what I know.”

“Why didn’t you come forward with this information earlier?”

“I told you—face is everything here, and I’d like to have a husband and family, just like every other woman. Also, I didn’t want to be blamed. And finally”—her eyes shied—“I thought Grace did it. Killed Pascal.”

“And you do now.”

She only stared at him.

“Why?”

“Because when Pascal first began staying at the inn after his mother died, Grace was always coming back
home with stories of how he was such a ‘whore,’ she called him. A ‘slut’ was another word she used. And I thought maybe she’d found out about us, and it pushed her over the edge. She can be violent, you know.

“Later, after your wife here told me about her being pregnant, I thought—and still do—she did it for that. That he made her pregnant, and, of course, he wouldn’t marry her. Never in a million years.”

“Why not?”

“Why marry a crazy woman, who could pass that on to the children, when you had the pick of the crop all along?”

“And would he marry you?” The pick of the crop, McGarr nearly added.

“Like I said, he told me he would that very afternoon.”

“Could you give me some idea of the time Burke was shot?”

She shook her head. “But by the time I got back to the shop it was nearly four.”

“Was the door locked, when the two of you were in bed?”

She had to think. “I think so. I had to let myself in with the key, and when the door closed, it must have locked itself.”

“I want you to think, now—can you remember any little detail, any one at all, about what went on in the bedroom while you were in the toilet? Or about the bedroom before you.”

O’Rourke thought for a moment, then glanced at McGarr and rolled her eyes, almost as though ashamed. “Well—it’s funny how the mind works. I can remember stepping out of the toilet and seeing that Pascal had been shot and—with eyes wide-open and
no breath coming from him—was surely dead. And me thinking, I never smelled the perfume that’s hanging in the air. And then, you know, feeling guilty about having a thought like that at a time like that.”

“You’re sure it was Carson coming up the stairs?”

She nodded. “He buys all the pub greens for salads and sandwiches from me, not a wholesaler. He’s a fine man entirely.”

“Where in the inn did you meet Tallon?”

“Coming out of Madame Sylvie’s quarters, like I said. And leaving her in tears, he was. I could hear her crying, sobbing even—until the door closed.”

Bresnahan, Ward, and McKeon had reappeared, not having found Grace O’Rourke or anything else, he could see from their expressions.

“How did you get up to Burke’s room, and what time was that?”

“Around one, I’d say. I came through the inn. That time of day there’s a lunch crowd in the dining room, but scarcely anybody in the halls.”

“But you met Madame Sylvie.”

“How do you know that?” she asked, before closing her eyes and nodding. “Oh—the bitch, of course. McGurk. Didn’t I see her slipping out of a room at the end of the hall when Sylvie and me were having it out.”

“Having it out about what?”

“Pascal, of course. Or, at least, my using the archway to be with him.”

“She and Pascal were…?”

Moira O’Rourke shook her head. “No more than nodding acquaintances, I’m sure, her being…fifty, if she’s a day. And—ask anyone—the woman’s a harridan at best.”

“How did she confront you? What did she say?”

“The key. She demanded I give back the key. Says I, ‘How can you take it back when it wasn’t yours in the first place? I had it made myself.’ ‘From Grace’s key no doubt,’ says she. Says I, ‘None of your bloody business from whose key, it’s my key and those blasted doors shouldn’t be locked anyhow. It’s against the fire code,’ And I left her.”

“Did you lock the doors after yourself?”

“Always.”

“Why
always
?”

“Don’t they provide a measure of privacy? You wouldn’t want every foreign yoke in search of the pub walking by your door, would you?”

“What about the fire code?”

“Ah, shit—I made that up. What do I know about fire codes?”

McGarr, who had interviewed literally thousands of suspects over the years, had an ear for the truth, and Moira O’Rourke’s tale sounded truthful. All the details about the bathroom were spot on, literally.

Yet it was also plain that she was a self-seeking woman who could think on her feet, and her having admitted to being with Burke when he was murdered certainly put her in the mix of suspects. And McGarr had been wrong before.

“Where did Gertie McGurk go after leaving the room?”

O’Rourke shook her head. “Sylvie dared to put a hand on my arm, and when I pulled it away, I must have moved. But she didn’t pass us by, I know that.”

Said McGarr, “I’d still like to take a bit of your hair.” Given Pascal Burke’s sexual proclivities, he could rule nothing out.