Dead Irish

Chapter Fourteen

ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL day. This was getting weird, Hardy thought as he opened the window in his bedroom to let in the fragrant air.

Eddie Cochran and Jane Fowler were playing tag around in his mind.

If someone had told him he would make love to his ex-wife ever again in his lifetime, he would have bet the ranch against it.

So here he is last night, wandering this house from office at the back to living room up front, wondering how it could have happened. And at how he felt now.

That, he supposed, was the thing. How can someone who he’d been with so intimately seem like an entirely différent person? Had she changed that much? Had he? Or had they both just forgotten?

They’d met at a party her father had thrown for her graduation from Columbia, to celebrate her return to San Francisco. Hardy had been hired for the night as a rent-a-cop, moonlighting, finishing out his last few months on the force before starting law school.

There had been some good years, he admitted. Diz in law school, thinking he was coasting after Vietnam and police work, married to the beautiful daughter of a judge.

Yes, he remembered, thank you. The memories had kept him up until dawn, which was why, when he’d finally slept, it had been until noon.

Now sitting at the kitchen table, sipping espresso, when the telephone on the kitchen wall rang, he bolted up, knocking over his coffee cup. He hoped it was Jane, forgetting that his number was unlisted and he had, intentionally, not given it to her.

“I don’t know,” Glitsky was saying. “The more I think about it, the more it bothers me.”

“It bothered me the first time.”

“That’s ’cause you’re a genius, Diz. Me, I’m just a street cop.”

“So you are looking into it?” The pause was a little too long. “Hey, Abe. Yo!”

“Yeah, I’m here.” Glitsky let out a long breath. “I had a talk with Griffin this morning.”

“A rare pleasure.”

“All too.”

“And what did the talk encompass?”

Hardy could imagine Glitsky’s face, angles sharpened by intensity. “I don’t know, Diz. The more I think about it, the harder time I have with it. It’s like I’m being set up.”

“For what?”

“Remember the politics we talked about?”

“Is Griffin part of that?”

“We’re both up for lieutenant.” As though that might mean something to Hardy.

“So?”

“So it’s Griffin’s case, no matter how I feel about it.”

“But he’s wrong.”

“He’s not necessarily wrong. You don’t get to homicide being wrong a lot.”

Hardy waited.

“Maybe he wants me to make a wave, then wipe out on it.”

Hardy’s kitchen window faced across the Avenues in the direction of downtown. The top of the Pyramid and a couple of other skyscrapers floated over Pacific Heights like mirages, shimmering silver against the deep-blue sky. “So why are you calling me?” he finally asked.

“You got something at stake here. I don’t.”

“I got zip,” Hardy said. “This is mostly a favor I’m doing for Moses.” Even as he said it, it didn’t ring very true.

“Okay, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to get officially involved, be wrong, and look like a horse’s ass.”

Hardy played reasonable. “Abe, don’t you think the whole might of the force would have a better chance of finding something than me by myself?”

Glitsky snorted. “I’m a professional investigator. I’ll be around to bounce things off.”

“Okay.” Hardy took a breath. “How ”bout this-I found out why Cruz might have lied.“

He ran it down, though it, too, seemed somehow flimsier in the daylight. Glitsky evidently shared that feeling. “People lie, especially to cops. You know that. Doesn’t mean they kill.”

“I never said it did.”

Glitsky sighed again, loudly into Hardy’s ear. “You know Griffin’s report wasn’t completely worthless, don’t you?”

Hardy waited.

“I mean, we ran paraffin and Cochran did fire the gun. There weren’t anybody else’s latents on the weapon. No witnesses saw anybody else leave the area.”

“Yeah, he aced himself. I guess I’ll quit-”

“Hardy…”

“Motive, Glitz. I’ve got this old-fashioned idea that people don’t just yawn after dinner, get up and blow their brains out without some reason.”

“But in a week you haven’t found one?”

“Four days.”

“Okay.”

“Okay yourself.”

After he hung up he stared for another minute out the window. His job was simple. He didn’t have to find who’d killed Ed. He only had to come up with enough evidence to have the coroner conclude that there’d been a homicide-by person or persons unknown would be fine for his purposes.

He reached into his pocket, took a piece of yellow paper from his wallet and dialed again. No answer at Frannie’s. What he was lacking was a sense of the sequence of events. He wondered what time Ed and Frannie had finished dinner.

Glitsky’s call wasn’t any kind of help, but it made him feel better, as though he wasn’t in so much of a vacuum. Through Abe, he could (maybe) get his hands on lots of information if he could come up with the right questions. Just now, though, he didn’t have them.

His date with Jane was tomorrow night. He supposed that after most of a decade he ought to be able to wait another day to see her. So he went back to his office, sat at his desk, and started trying to figure out some areas where Glitsky might be able to help him. He then called the friend of Jane’s father-Matthew R. Brody, III, it turned out-and was told he could have an appointment on Monday morning.

He tried Arturo Cruz at his office and learned that the publisher had taken an early, and what was expected to be extended, lunch.

He listened to twelve rings at Army Distributing before deciding that Linda Polk probably wasn’t at her desk, and if she was, she was staring at the ringing thing there, either thinking it was really groovy or wondering what would make it stop.

Well, he thought, that killed fifteen minutes.

It was one-thirty. The Shamrock opened in a half hour. Maybe Moses and he could while away another few hours, so long as he was careful to omit any mention of Jane. The Mose had spent many hours reconciling Hardy to having put Jane out of his life. He might have a hard time accepting putting her back in.

“Well, wait, he’s here right now.”

Moses handed him the telephone and returned to preparing the bar for Friday night. He pulled the backup bottles from the cardboard boxes on the floor, humming off-key as he picked up the near-empties, dusted the shelf, and put the full new bottles behind him.

Hardy was the only customer and wasn’t yet halfway through his first Guinness in what seemed like a month. Although nobody knew for a fact that he was here, anyone who knew him at all knew they had a decent chance of finding him at the bar. He took the phone, spoke for a couple of minutes, and hung up.

Moses glanced over at him. “Getting born again doesn’t really make you younger, I don’t care what they say.”

“Just ’cause he’s a priest doesn’t mean he’s not a human being,” Hardy answered.

Cavanaugh drank Irish whiskey, but by the time he’d finished his first one, the bar had gotten crowded. Hardy suggested a walk, maybe through the park across the street.

“While we’re talking about reversing roles,” Hardy said, “you ought to be playing detective. How’d you locate me at the Shamrock?”

“I called Erin and she asked Frannie, who gave me your number at home, and then when you weren’t there she said to try calling her brother, that he might know where you’d gone. It was just luck you were there right then.”

“If you believe in luck.”

“Luck, faith, all those intangibles. They’re my stock in trade, Dismas.”

But something else struck Hardy. “How’d Erin get in touch with Frannie?”

“She just asked. Frannie’s at her house. She didn’t go home after the funeral yesterday.”

Hardy should have remembered that somewhere. He wasn’t thinking very well.

“Why do you want to know?” Cavanaugh asked.

Hardy shrugged. “Just something I wanted to remember to ask her.”

They had come up by a lake with lots of couples in paddleboats. It was a slow midafternoon, still and warm. They walked along a red cinder path, covered over closely with pines, dotted sporadically with horse dung. On the lake, swans floated among the paddleboats while, nearer the dock, a dozen ducks quacked for a young girl’s bread.

“Innocence,” the priest said. “What a beautiful thing.”

Hardy looked sideways at the priest, alert for a touch of the blarney, but Cavanaugh seemed genuinely moved. His eyes roved around, to the trees, the sky overhead. He seemed almost to be memorizing this moment, as though its innocence-if he wanted to call it that-were something he’d later need to draw on in a different life.

“I just couldn’t get going this morning,” Cavanaugh said enigmatically. Their steps crunched in the cinders. Hardy, hands in pockets, nodded. “I really appreciate this,” the priest repeated, apologizing for the third or fourth time.

Reversing roles. That’s what he’d said. There’d been a bond, he felt, with Hardy. Instant. Two guys, Catholic backgrounds. A lot in common there.

He needed to confess. No, more, he needed absolution. And not from another priest. He didn’t just need the form of forgiveness, but its substance-the understanding of one of his fellow men.

So sure, Hardy had said. Why not? He felt oddly drawn to the man himself-victimized perhaps by the charisma, but most of Hardy’s friendships had started like that. Some spark, something a ittle unusual, as long as there was that confident presence. And Jim Cavanaugh had presence to burn.

But this apologizing was getting a little old. “Hey, Father. You talk, I’ll listen. Then maybe you buy me a beer. If I get bored, I’ll let you know.”

“How about you call me Jim?”

“Okay, Jim, what’s the problem?”

Jim waited until a couple on horseback had passed. “I feel like…”He stopped, and Hardy had the sense he was going to apologize again, but he didn’t. “Nope. That’s not it,” he muttered to himself. Then he took a deep breath. “I am fairly certain that I sent Eddie to his death.”

The crunching sound of their footsteps suddenly sounded more loudly in Hardy’s ears.

“He came by last week. I’m kind of, I guess you’d say, the other father figure in that family.” He chuckled without any mirth. “I’ve always prided myself on my… how can I put this? My moral courage. It’s what people talk to priests for, I guess. What they want to hear.

“The rest of the world says to compromise and just get by, but I’ve always viewed our role-my role, the priest’s role, that is- as counseling that the hard choices, the right choices, get made.”

“And Eddie had some hard choice?”

“I’m sure it’s why he came to me. He wouldn’t have bothered if he didn’t want to hear it.”

“You’re sure of that? Maybe he just wanted to talk.”

Jim Cavanaugh shook his head. “No. He’d had a fight-more a disagreement really-with Big Ed… his dad. If he didn’t want to hear somebody else come up with his answer, he just would have driven home and forgotten about it.

“You can tell, Dismas. Our Jewish brethren have a saying, ‘If you’ve got to ask, it’s not kosher.’ This is a little the same thing. Ed felt he had to ask me.” He laughed again at himself. “He wanted to hear that the right thing to do was what he planned to do anyway. More, he wanted to see if he could get away with not doing it. And, moral authority that I am, I told him he couldn’t. Although his father had said he could.”

Suddenly the priest stopped up short. He kicked at the wooden border to the riding trail so violently that it broke. “Fuck!” he said. The wooden slat had splintered at the vicious kick. Cavanaugh stood shaking his head, the outburst over. He went down to a knee and tried to pat the border back in place. Then, still genuflecting, he made the sign of the cross. A few seconds later he stood and faced Hardy, shamefaced.

“I’m sorry.” That self-effacing chuckle. “Some priest I am, huh?”

Hardy shrugged. “Shit happens,” he said.

Cavanaugh hadn’t heard that one before. He laughed, looser now. “Well,” he said, “now you know why I didn’t want to go to regular confession.”

“So what was it Eddie had to know about?” They were walking again, turning down now through lengthening shadows onto the paved road again.

“You know about the troubles at Ed’s work?”

“The distribution thing? A little.”

“Well, that’s not all. I mean, it was bad for the company, all right, but Eddie thought they could just tighten belts and build up again within a year or so. He was talking to this new company -some other newspaper…”

“El Dia?”

“Yeah, El Dia, I think. Anyway, he was also trying to get back in touch with the guy who’d cut them off.” Cruz, Hardy thought.

The priest continued. “To make a long story short, it was just a matter of time before they were rolling again. At least that was Eddie’s opinion.”

“So what’s the moral dilemma there?”

“That’s not it. That’s background. The problem was that Eddie’s boss-Polk, I think his name is-he was having a hard time dealing with the long-term approach.”

“He didn’t want to rebuild the business?”

“Essentially, that’s right. He’d recently married a younger -woman-very much younger, evidently very beautiful.”

“She is.”

“You’ve seen her?”

Hardy nodded. “So have you. They were at the funeral.”

That stopped Cavanaugh. “Son of a bitch,” he said. Hardy was again surprised at the man’s flair for Anglo-Saxon.

“What?”

“I think if I’d known that, I might have… I don’t think I could’ve done the service.”

“Why’s that?”

“I think we’re going on the assumption that somebody killed Eddie, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t think he killed himself.”

“Well, if somebody did kill him, I’d just about bet my breviary that Polk was involved.”

“Don’t tell me Ed was sleeping with Polk’s wife.”

Dusk was catching up with them. They came out of the park halfway down to the ocean and turned back up toward the Shamrock.

Clearly the thought had never occurred to the priest. “I was Eddie’s confessor, Dismas, and I’m not abusing the secrecy of the confessional when I tell you that he was faithful to Frannie. Completely. He was madly in love with her.”

Hardy thought he knew that, but it was still nice to hear it. “Okay,” he said, “so what about Polk’s wife?” Cavanaugh was grappling with something. “All this, you understand, is just trying to get at the truth,” he said. “I don’t want to be saying things that may be scandalous if they’re irrelevant to what you’re do-ing.”

Jesus, Hardy thought, suddenly remembering all too clearly why he had left the Church. If you took it all seriously, as Jim Cavanaugh certainly did, the rules could bind you up ’til you couldn’t even think, much less take any action.

“Why don’t you let me decide? This is confession, remember. It ain’t going anywhere else.”

The priest considered a moment, then nodded. “Eddie thinks -thought-that Polk’s wife was in it for the money. And after the drop in business, when the company started losing money, suddenly maybe Mr. Polk wasn’t so attractive anymore.”

“Did he know this, or was it just a feeling?”

“He found out…” Again that hesitation, that slow decision to continue. “He found out something.”

Hardy couldn’t help himself. He stopped walking and laid a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “I said I’d tell you if you’re boring me.”

Cavanaugh grinned back, self-conscious. “It’s like I can’t just keep talking. Every single further step seems like a separate decision.”

“In high school,” Hardy said, “I’d make out with somebody and wonder if the kissing and petting were all separate sins. Finally I decided no. If it was a sin, it was just one of ’em. Same thing here. You’ve made the commitment, so let’s get it out.”

Cavanaugh grinned his movie-star grin. “Maybe you would have made a good priest, after all.”

“I think my past was a little too checkered.”

The priest got a kick out of that. “You’d be surprised. Quite a lot of priests have, as you put it, checkered pasts. I didn’t find my vocation ’til after high school myself.”

That was interesting, Hardy thought, but it didn’t get any closer to Nika Polk.

“So Mrs. Polk… what did Eddie find out?”

“Polk was in a hurry for money. He laid off a lot of guys Eddie would have kept, and kept a couple Eddie would’ve let go. The staff was down to a few marginal workers. Anyway, one of those guys figured Eddie was in on it, too, and let it out that Polk was planning some drug deal.”

They’d arrived back at the Shamrock. Behind them an orange and pink dusk was settling onto the Pacific. The Friday-night traffic here on Lincoln was kicking into gear. The bar was hopping, juke-box blaring, Moses working the bar like the artist he was. He had Hardy’s Guinness and Cavanaugh’s Bushmills in front of them so fast he might have seen them coming up the street four blocks away.

The couch against the back wall was flanked by entrances to the bathrooms. Over it, a dirty stained-glass window let in a bit of the day’s last light. Patrons kept up a steady stream going by. In all, it was as private as any confessional Hardy could remember.

Cavanaugh had removed his collar. He sat hunched forward, shirt open, startlingly handsome, sipping slowly at the Irish. His reticence was gone. It had to come out.

“So here I am listening to a boy I could easily feel-hell, I do feel!-is my son, and he’s just burning, I tell you, Dismas, burning to do the right thing. He wants to confront Polk, somehow convince him that it can all work out with his wife, then go back to the publisher, take ’em all on one at a time and win them over just by the force of the argument. He really saw it so clearly. If everybody involved was fair and upstanding, it would all work out. The company would be saved, Polk could keep his wife happy, the whole magilla.”

Hardy sipped his Guinness. “That’s Eddie. Sure as shit, excuse me.” Although apologizing for swearing in front of this man was, upon reflection, unnecessary. “He really thought that way, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“And you tried to point out a little, uh, reality?”

Cavanaugh sat back now, the broad shoulders sagging. “There’s my sin, Dismas. That’s what I’ve been getting at.” The eyes lowered, matching the voice. “We talked a long time, Eddie and me. He was the most wonderful speaker, even one on one. Passionate, elegant, really convincing. He was the kind of kid could flatter you that he wanted your opinion.” He drained his drink. “So here I am, Father Cavanaugh, and I send this fine man off to slay the dragon. Do I think about the reality of it, about his pregnant wife, his real duties, whether he’s the man for the job? No way. Not me. The good holy Father Cavanaugh thinks about how right he is, what a wonderful notion it is, how everyone will be so proud.”

His eyes came up. “Pride, Dismas. My pride killed Eddie Cochran.”