The Death of Love (23 page)

“Brought up by you.”

She smiled, wondering if perchance Ward had been running some message in the village for Sonnie and had seen her and O’Suilleabhain, and she felt almost guilty. “In a roundabout way.”

“I’d be careful of him, were I you. Gladden’s no fool, and more dangerous than he appears. He’s bent, I’d say.” On his midday “break” of two hours Ward had skimmed Paddy Power’s note cards in McGarr’s room.

“Mossie Gladden? Come now, he attended at my birth.”

“Proof positive,” Ward continued in the same jocular vein.

“Anyhow—I’ve solved the case, and it wasn’t Mossie.”

Ward’s eyebrows arched.

She told him about the balance of her day—interviewing old cottiers and small farmers along the Waterville Road—and the description of the country gorsoon who climbed out of the car by the Rathfield ruin to doff greatcoat and hat. “A rough complexion and long gray-blond hair. Driving a new Audi with an Eire Bank bumper sticker. Sound familiar?”

“You mean Gretta Osbourne without any makeup on her face?”

“Precisely. She had every opportunity to steal the note cards and unlimited access to Power’s medical cabinet.”

“And she had a hell of a motive,” said Ward.

Bresnahan waited.

“I overheard Shane Frost…speaking to Nell Power about Osbourne inheriting Power’s share of Eire Bank.”

“
Voilà!
” She glanced down at the food, which smelled delicious. She lifted the cover off one of the oval plates. It was an entrecote of beef topped with a bordelaise sauce. Suddenly she was famished, and she thought briefly of ordering something from room service on the chance Ward could be sent on the delivery. But no. That would be wrong; she had her parents to think of.

“But why would she have delivered the cards to Nell Power dressed up like Gladden?”

“To cast suspicion on him, of course. How many men go around like he does, these days? And to rub the wife’s nose in Power’s poor opinion of his marriage and her. A woman’s thing altogether.”

Ward was glad she said that, not he.

“The giveaway was her expurgating any negative cards that Power might have written about herself, while including the full stack about Nell.”

“Where’d you learn all this?”

“After I found out about the Audi and the long blond hair, I phoned the Chief and got Noreen.”

Who, of course, provided Bresnahan with an inside scoop, woman to woman. “Why the cards to Gladden, then?”

“Don’t you see that she stole the cards before Power was actually murdered, most probably on Friday night or early Saturday morning when he went into the village for a session with his old friends at the Sneem Inn. She didn’t have much time, but the point was to make it appear as if Gladden had murdered Power to get ahold of the note cards that she knew he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from making public. It was just the chaff that he had been waiting for these last three years, what he could and would use to gain media attention and smear O’Duffy.

“But the photocopies took time. Editing the “Gladden” heading—there had to be one; every other important person in Power’s life is mentioned, and there Gladden was keeping Power alive—well, that was easy. All she had to do was grab the stack and chuck it into one of the fires
that’re burning in all the public rooms all the time. That way, if or when the cards
or
the photocopies were examined, no Gladden heading would be found, and further suspicion would be cast on the daft doctor. As I said, her removing the derogatory cards from her own stack was her mistake and probably an afterthought.”

“So the point was to pin it on Gladden.”

“Who better? Certainly not Frost, with whom Osbourne was—
is
, I’d hazard—having an affair.”

Why
is?
Ward wondered. Could a woman tell by looking at another woman?

“And not Nell Power, who is also a significant shareholder in Eire Bank, which Frost not more than a few hours ago sold to the Nomura Bank of Kyoto for—are you ready for this?—over four hundred and twenty million pounds.”

Ward’s head went back. It was obviously more sororal insider information that she had gleaned from Noreen. How could a lowly waiter compete?

“Paddy Power, you see, didn’t want to sell. Motive enough, I’d say.”

Ward nodded and struggled to hold his smile. But he could not keep himself from thinking about what he had just heard—Gretta Osbourne telling Shane Frost that she did not want to sell her majority share of Eire Bank to the Japanese.

Also, there was a reference in Paddy Power’s note cards—one of those that had been found beside his body—to Power’s having looked for and not found Gretta Osbourne’s red Audi in the Parknasilla car park. It was on Sunday morning, exactly at the time that the sack filled with the photocopies of the cards were being delivered to the Waterville Lake Hotel. But Gretta Osbourne was still at Parknasilla. Power had asked her for the keys and had then gone directly to the car.

But Ward said nothing. His last wish was to deflate her buoyant mood.

“And that’s all you want-ed?” She pulsed her eyes at him. “To know about my day? I’d ask you about yours, but I know you’re too considerate to bore me with all the
thrilling details of pouring whiskey and beer, And the point is now moot, is it not?”

“Case closed, you mean?”

She nodded.

Even across the serving cart with its rapidly cooling edibles, Ward could catch the inviting scent of the distinctive and obviously priceless perfume that Gretta Osbourne also wore, which reminded him of the Merc and Bresnahan’s new designer costumes. His glowery mood threatened to return, but he fought it off. “Oh, I dunno—I just wanted to share a few words, I guess.” With his foot still in the door he pulled the cart onto the elevator.

“You mean, your sole reason in waylaying me, like this, was…communication?”

Ward hunched his shoulders and scanned the control panel for the Up button.
Waylaying
who?

“Nothing else?”

His mouth formed an inverted U; he shook his head.

Well now, thought Bresnahan, this was different. Perhaps something
had
changed or changed him. But what? The job of work here in the hotel? Had it given him a bit of perspective, such that he realized how lucky he was back in Dublin and
in love
with herself, though he couldn’t bring himself to form the words? Were they getting close and, once said, how would that change things? Ward was so…elusive—she believed the word was. Dodgy, skittish, particular—that she wondered if it needed to be said. Or should.

Bresnahan had been leaning against a jamb of the elevator, and she now straightened herself up from the cart and looked down on her small, square,
fine
man with his dark good looks. What she wouldn’t give to see him all done up, like one of the bankers, and part of a conference, such as this, where his quick mind could show. Maybe that was the problem he was having. Maybe he—or at least one of them—should now resign, and begin something else, like banking. It was the proper thing to do, now that they were semipublic knowledge.

“Look—I thought of trying to pull you away last night. For a drink. But I figured you would be—” She tried to find a word that would bruise his masculine pride least.

“Shattered,” he prompted.

What was this? Ego honesty? Once, after having sustained a concussion in the ring, Ward had admitted to being “a bit dizzy.”

“—from the work, and then a drink was probably the last thing you needed. Right?”

“Ask me the first thing.”

“And that too. Country people, as I told you, are keen observers. If I dragged you into a pub, they’d know. If we pretended to meet at the bar and then left together, they’d think even worse of me. If we even merely met on the road and somebody saw—” She shook her head. “And, trust me, people around here
see
. Think of Gretta Osbourne in the Rathfield ruin. Can’t we pretend we’re on holiday from each other? Surely you can get through a week.”

Ward canted his head and smiled at her, his eyes moving down her body and then up again. “It would be one thing, were we actually
on
holiday, but with you around and looking so…”

Bresnahan waited. “Go on. So—?”

“Do I have to say it?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Delectable. Sexy. Smart. Provocative.”

“That’s all?” She turned from the cart and began a model’s strut toward the stairs.

Seen from ward’s perspective, she was all long, shapely deep brown legs. The flared jacket. The nip of her waist. Those shoulders. The wild, unlikely hair. “What?” he asked. “No kiss?”

It was the same question that Rory O’Suilleabhain had asked, and Bresnahan wondered if they could be merely different, handsome forms of the same exploitive, machosexist personality. “Blow me a kiss from across the serving cart, Give me your service tux to cry on,” she sang, paraphrasing one of the pop records that her mother—a devoted country-and-western music fan, like so many farmers’ wives in the West of Ireland—had played over and over in their farmhouse kitchen before television had arrived in Sneem.

“You sound like Bernie,” Ward observed in a different, disconsolate-but-resigned tone.

At the stairs she waited.

“You know—life as a sudsy, sardonic, upbeat ditty.”

Bresnahan tilted her head, considering. Drop the sudsy, and there was little wrong in that. From all she could know, it was the way people were, at least in Ireland. And Ward usually as well. There was nobody more…buoyant, when he was in good form.

“Can I ask you something?” he went on, adjusting the fit of the serving cart in the elevator. He was behind it but still had managed to keep his foot in the door. “Is the vent of that jacket tacked or just, you know, open-to-hand?”

Bresnahan’s brow furrowed. She twisted around to see what he meant by open-to-hand, and out of the corner of her eye she saw him perform a remarkable feat. In one movement Ward vaulted over the height of the serving cart and pulled it forward, such that he landed squarely on the carpet out of the elevator, and the cart jammed between the closing door.

She knew what that meant and took two long, quick strides up the stairs, trying to flee, before she felt his hand snag her leg and she fell on the carpet of the landing. Ward was quick and deft, and she knew what he intended. She let out a squeal of delight, but of pique too. It was the game they sometimes played on the long staircase up to his loft on the quays in Dublin where you could be free and nothing mattered.

In a trice her little monkey of a man was upon her, and she couldn’t resist. She rolled him over and pinned his arms to the carpet. But, just as she was bending to give him the deepest, best kiss that he had ever received, she heard.

“Children?”

She looked up, and there stood McGarr, a bundle of what looked like photocopies under each arm. He had spent the last several hours making his own copy of Paddy Power’s note cards.

“Ah, Chief,” said Bresnahan, climbing off Ward. “Just the man I’ve been looking for.”

She saw McGarr’s eyes float toward Ward’s; he then continued his transit up the staircase.

Bresnahan picked herself up, straightened her
riding
—ahem!—jacket, and followed, saying, “Chief—one moment. It’s not been
all
fun and games. I’ve something further to tell you.”

Ward quickly descended the stairs toward the elevator and the now-cold food meant for Shane Frost, Eire Bank purveyor. The elevator door was opening and closing on the cart, making a racket that sounded like something from the “Anvil Chorus.”

“DIDN’T I KNOW it was her all along,” whispered Bernie McKeon, when shortly after nine the next morning McGarr, Bresnahan, O’Shaughnessy, and he had gathered in front of Gretta Osbourne’s suite.

McGarr knocked and turned an ear to the door; he had tried to reach her by telephone at 7:30, 8:00, 8:30, and 9:00
A.M.
He had arranged for the desk clerk at the Waterville Lake Hotel to meet them at the church in Sneem. Like most area residents, the clerk had said she would be attending Paddy Power’s funeral. Over his arm McGarr carried a greatcoat like Gladden’s; in that hand he held a farmer’s hat. He knocked again.

“Potato-puss hex complex,” McKeon went on. “Guilt written in lumps all over her face.”

O’Shaughnessy’s head turned to him.

“Consider the parallels. Power was old enough to be her father. They had carnal relations, or so I imagine, which in this country always results in guilt and a man paying, one way or another. Didn’t Power and her then attempt to purge themselves with fire? No luck. She survived and, worse, was disfigured. Power tried money next, whole gobs of it, to be paid at some time in her future, not his, which was his mistake. When he rejected her in the end, she did him dirty.” Unable to contain himself, McKeon began chuckling.

“Didn’t you see the play at the Abbey a coopl’ a years
back? Freudened the hell out of me with twelve ‘Jungans,’ not one of whom I named Eddie.”

Puffing his cheeks, O’Shaughnessy passed wind between his lips volubly.

“Twas the beginning of language, I’m told,” McKeon observed.

McGarr knocked once more and, still hearing nothing, turned to the hotel carpenter, who was standing behind them, holding a ladder and a toolbox.

Osbourne’s red Audi with the Eire Bank bumper sticker was still in the car park. None of the Parknasilla staff had seen her leave the hotel. Like Paddy Power’s room three days earlier, the door was locked from the inside, both door latch and dead bolt.

But not the night chain.

Gretta Osbourne was seated at the head of the conference table that filled the sitting room of her suite. She was wearing a black, patterned dressing gown. One arm was thrust out before her; on it rested her head. The bun at the back of her head had become undone, and her long gray-blond hair had spilled over the edge of the table.

The eye, which was visible, was open and staring down at the grain of the table as though trying to divine some mystery that was locked in the wood. Near the fingers of her right hand was a large black fountain pen, on the gold nib of which black ink had dried. The note card near it said:

There was no more.

“See what I told you? You never listen to me,” McKeon whispered to O’Shaughnessy. “Guilt rules all. It’s the reigning emotion, at least in this country.”

With weary eyes McGarr regarded McKeon, who tried to look guiltless.

A reach away from the woman was a champagne glass and a magnum of Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin: both empty.
Near the last was a small vial of pills, the label of which was turned toward the corpse and said:

M.J.P. Frost, Chemist
Sneem, Co. Kerry

From:
Dr. Maurice T. Gladden
For:
Miss G. Osbourne
Rx:
Phenobarbital to induce sleep:
100 mg. Max. dose 3 tablets.
DO NOT USE IN COMBINATION WITH ALCOHOL

“Tech Squad,” said McGarr, and McKeon immediately left. “And the door.” Bresnahan stepped to the open door, in which bankers, who had been passing in the hall, now stood. She asked them to move on.

McGarr raised himself up and looked around at the rest of the room, which, with copy and fax machines, a computer terminal, and three rows of filing cabinets, looked more like a tastefully decorated office than a hotel suite. On a sideboard sat a notebook, a kind of diary, that was written in longhand.

McGarr glanced at the note card and then walked over to the diary: same ink, same hand, it appeared, though an expert opinion would be required.

Ward appeared by his side bearing a tray with three cups that contained a small amount of coffee and a rather large splash of malt whiskey. McGarr poured McKeon’s measure into his own cup and handed the third to O’Shaughnessy, who drank his off quickly and replaced the cup on the tray.

McGarr turned to Ward. “Rut’ie told me you were on your way to Frost’s suite with that cart last night.”

Ward, giving his back to the crowd at the door, then told McGarr what he had seen and heard: Frost in his skivvies waving a champagne bottle; Osbourne saying that she had changed her mind and no longer wished to sell
her
shares to the Japanese; Sonnie delivering an unopened refill.

Later, when Ward arrived with the food, Osbourne was sitting on a couch, a full champagne glass on the table beside her. Frost was still nearly naked and very drunk. “He
gave me a tanner and the advice to go into business for myself, which was ‘the only way.’” Ward meant he was given a ten-pound note. “I had the feeling there was somebody else there, maybe in the bedroom. But the place was a mess from Frost’s afternoon party,” and perhaps it was only his imagination after what he had witnessed Frost engaged in earlier in the day.

McGarr glanced down at the bottle, then advanced on the small portable bar that had been pushed against a wall. No champagne there, and none of the glasses looked to have been used. More to the point, there were no champagne glasses, which suggested that Osbourne had taken the glass on the table from Frost’s room.

And the magnum as well, which was fifty ounces. With an alcohol percentage of—11 percent, that made 5.5 ounces. Not a whole lot, even if she had drunk it all, which was unlikely. But combined with the phenobarbital? Again, he would have to wait for a professional opinion.

One thing was certain. She had arrived at the room well enough to have thrown the dead bolt and perhaps written the beginning of the message on the note card in front of her. McGarr moved to the windows in the sitting room and then those in the bedroom and toilet—all locked from the inside. The bed had been unslept in, the costume that she had been wearing on the day before had been left out on a clothes horse for the morning maid to take to the laundry.

When McGarr returned to the sitting room, he found Frost standing by the table, looking down at Gretta Osbourne’s corpse. He was dressed all in black, and the skin of his long, handsome face was both flaccid and flushed. When his eyes rose to McGarr, they were netted with broken capillaries from his celebrations of the day and the night before. Clearly he was in pain; there was no faking the tremor in his right cheek. McGarr handed him his coffee cup, which he had not touched.

Frost looked down into the dark fluid, raised it to his nose, then smiled. “You’re a right man, McGarr.” He sipped, then drank. Straightening up, he tilted his head from side to side in a practiced manner, as though assaying the limber of his neck or easing the passage of the alcohol
into his system. He then looked back down on the woman who had been his colleague, and lover, McGarr supposed.

He cleared his throat and squared his shoulders before saying, “Gretta was one of those persons who kept everything inside. She was sensitive, but she made a point of never showing her emotions. You know, so as not to be branded a
typical
woman.”

He finished the coffee, then placed the cup on the tray that Ward was still holding. He touched a hand to his chest and waited until he could speak again. His bruised eyeballs were at once glassy, opaque, and swollen.

“I’d no idea Paddy’s death had affected her so. She’d had counseling, you know.”

McGarr waited, regarding him.

Out in the hall Bresnahan said, “Move on now. This is none of your concern.”

“For depressions. Years of it, after the fire.” He pointed to the scars on her face, which seemed more conspicuous now in death. “I can dig up her psychiatrists’ names, if you like. Perhaps they can explain…why, when she had so much to live for.”

Like 216 million pounds. McGarr stepped to the bar where he had seen a bottle of malt. Back in front of Ward and the tray, he poured two large dollops of malt into the coffee cups and reached one toward Frost, who looked down at it with fear and longing.

“Ah, no, Superintendent—I couldn’t. The first bit was enough. I’ve got Paddy’s funeral—”

Couldn’t miss that, McGarr thought. Sean Dermot O’Duffy and his entourage of movers and shakers would be there, and Frost—certainly a celebrity after the sale of Eire Bank that would also have enriched the “government insiders,” Gretta Osbourne had called them, who owned 10 percent of the shares. McGarr made mental note to obtain the list of Eire Bank stockholders, by court order if necessary.

“Well—one more can’t hurt.” With both hands Frost reached for the cup. “Set me up, don’t you know.”

McGarr was hoping. “Been celebrating?”

“A bit.”

McGarr waited, but Frost said no more. Again he had turned toward the figure at the table.

“Did you see her last night?”

Frost’s eyes shied to Ward, before he nodded.

“Where?”

“My room. It’s where she got the champagne.”

“For your celebration,” McGarr probed.

Frost only nodded. “I’d had a bit of a lead on her. She said she’d do me a favor and take the bottle with her.”

“What time was that?”

Frost’s eyes floated up into his skull. He shook his head to say he could not remember.

“What sort of automobile did Ms. Osbourne drive?”

Frost had to think. “It’s a red Audi, I believe. New. I don’t think it has a thousand miles on it. She hated to drive and only brought it out with her this time because connections between here and Dublin are otherwise dreadful.”

“What would she have been doing on the Waterville Road on Sunday morning?”

“But she wasn’t. Sunday morning we went sailing bright and early. It was a glorious day, and, as perhaps you know, I have a house here in Sneem on the harbor. Sailing was one of the few ways Gretta could relax.” His eyes turned to the woman again. “You know, no phone, no computer, only the elements and the boat to contend with. She really worked too hard.”

“But she and her car were seen at the Rathfield ruin.”

Frost cocked his head. “The car, perhaps. But not Gretta.”

“Go on,” McGarr had to prompt.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at here, but Gretta had asked Mossie Gladden to stop by on Friday and take a look at Paddy when he arrived. She was worried about him, she said, his having seemed so peaked when she had last seen him in London. Gretta was the advance person—you know, to make sure everything was ready for the conference.” Frost flicked a wrist at the machines in the room.

“Anyhow, after examining Paddy, Mossie gave him a sedative and then prescribed an antibiotic that he said was only available in Kenmare. Nevertheless, I rang up my fa
ther, but sure enough, he didn’t have it. The old fella’s getting on now, and he doesn’t fancy splashing out for every new drug that comes on the market.

“By then it was midafternoon, but Mossie said he could get the stuff, could he get there in time. Problem was, he didn’t trust that old banger of his to transport them there and back. Gretta said, ‘Take my car. I won’t be needing it for the rest of the week.’ I don’t know when Mossie got back. I had other affairs to attend.”

All 423 million of them, McGarr thought. He also remembered that Kenmare and Waterville, while in different directions, were just about equidistant from Parknasilla. “Did he return with the antibiotic?”

Frost shook his head. “I don’t know, but I didn’t see any such thing in Paddy’s medicine cabinet when we—” When he and McGarr looked after Power’s death, he meant.

But Gladden had
not
been the country gorsoon who had dropped off the photocopies of the notecards at the Waterville Lake Hotel; the desk clerk knew Gladden and would have recognized him, had it been he. Could she have been lying? McGarr didn’t think so.

As though a sudden thought struck him, Frost’s head went back. “Why all the questions?”

McGarr hunched his shoulders. “Here we have a bottle of champagne, here a vial that says it contained phenobarbital, and here a dead woman. At the very least an autopsy is required.”

Whether from genuine grief or merely alcohol, Frost’s eyes suddenly filled with tears; one splatted on the surface of the table. Frost stepped back, reached inside his black topcoat, and removed a handkerchief. “I’d just come down to pick her up, and—”

They waited while Frost blew his nose. “Look—I’ll be right back to handle whatever has to be done. Gretta had no family that I know of, and I was both her friend and solicitor. I’ll see to the…arrangements. But right now I’ve got Paddy’s funeral.” He glanced at his watch then made for the door.

“Who inherits her fifty-one percent of Eire Bank that with power of attorney you’ll now sell to the Japanese?”

Frost neither turned nor stopped. “That, I’m afraid, is
privileged information. Or are you claiming this is murder too?” He pushed past Bresnahan, saying, “What—not going to Paddy’s funeral?”

“See you there, Mr. Frost.”

“Shane. I told you yesterday, it’s Shane.”

“The day before, I believe it was.”

“That’s right. How could I have forgotten?”

The funeral. It gave McGarr an idea. Gladden would not miss the opportunity for a confrontation with Sean Dermot O’Duffy, given all the media that would be present. Somehow McGarr was missing something, and he didn’t think he’d find it here in spite of the several anomalies that he could see before him.

If Gretta Osbourne had collapsed while writing the note card, why was the pen not still in her hand? Instead it was placed neatly, nearly lined up in the same plane as the note card. At the very least McGarr would have expected a scrawl or line or ink mark on the note card or the table. Or some ink on her right hand, which lay limp near the pen. There was none.

The bun at the back of her head. How had it become undone? Besides the pen, it was the only detail in the entire room that was out of place. McGarr moved toward the chair, over which he had placed the greatcoat that looked like Gladden’s. He removed the blond wig that Noreen had also purchased. Back at the table he compared it to the strands of Gretta Osbourne’s hair that were hanging over the edge. It was not a perfect match, but close enough, especially if the plan had been for it to be seen at a distance late in the afternoon.