Dead Irish

Chapter Thirty

THE FIRST message on his machine said: “Dismas. Jim Cavanaugh. Just calling to find out how it all turned out, see if you’d like to have a drink. Give me a call when you can. 661-5081. Thank you.”

The second was from Jane. “I’m just thinking about you. Maybe Thursday instead of Friday? Maybe tonight?”

The last was from Moses, who wanted to know how he was getting along and when and if he was coming back to work.

Hardy threw darts while he listened to the messages. His aim was off. Not that he ever missed the general pie he was half going for, but occasionally he’d miss his number two out of three. It didn’t bother him. He was only throwing to be doing something. If he kept hard liquor in his house, he’d be drinking. Too wired to sleep, he threw darts.

After a while he went around to his desk, two of his three tungsten darts embedded in the I to the left of 20, the last one stuck in the 5 to its right. He’d missed 20 for two whole rounds, something he hadn’t done in five years.

He rewound his machine. Since he didn’t have hard liquor at home, he’d go and have some in a bar. It wasn’t all that late, and Cavanaugh had offered. He didn’t want to go to the Shamrock and have to answer questions from Moses about his progress. He got to the number, switched off the machine, wrote it down and dialed.

A woman’s voice answered. “St. Elizabeth’s.”

“Hello, is Father Cavanaugh in?”

“Just a moment, I’ll get him. Can I tell him who’s calling?”

When Hardy told her, she paused, then said, “Did Father tell you? Oh, I’d better let him tell you.”

Cavanaugh, now at the phone: “Dismas. Good of you to call.”

“Okay, I’m curious. What were you going to tell me?”

“When?”

“Your housekeeper just now asked me if you’d told me something, then said you’d better tell me.”

The priest paused, chuckled tolerantly. “I don’t know, tell the truth. I’ll have to ask her. How’s your case coming?”

“That’s kind of why I hoped you had something for me. There isn’t any case anymore. It’s gone south.”

There was a longish pause. “What do you mean?”

“You mentioned a drink, and I could use one. Can I meet you somewhere? Tell you all about it then.”

“You want to come over here?” Cavanaugh asked.

“Anywhere’s fine.”

“No, forget here. We might keep someone up.”

“You name it.”

Cavanaugh took a minute, then named a fern bar on Irving about midway between them. Hardy knew the place. He could get there in ten minutes.

These drugs were funny. One minute it’d be as though you were dead-no dreams, no memory of sleep even. And then, bingo, you were wide awake. Then you had somewhere between a half hour and an hour before the pain got you again.

The foot was the worst. It felt as though it was continually being crushed in a car door. Steven had done that the summer before with his thumb. He couldn’t believe the next day how bad it had felt. It had affected his whole body, with a headache and throwing up and everything. He’d lost the nail.

But that was nothing next to now when the painkiller wore off. He had tried toughing it out this afternoon. He hadn’t wanted to sleep anymore. There were too many things to think about- Eddie and the investigation.

But it hadn’t worked. The foot had been the worst, but he was already beginning to feel his collarbone, and his head was throbbing. He hadn’t been able to keep the tears back when Mom had come in. It was just from the pain, the water forming in his eyes and falling out over his cheeks.

The bad thing about the painkiller was you woke up so thirsty every time, which made you drink a lot of water, which then meant you had to pee like crazy, and since you couldn’t move, that meant Mom had to come in with the bedpan.

You think crying’s embarrassing, try a bedpan.

But this night it was Pop. He took care of it with a minimum of hassle, then poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the table by the bed and sat down right up next to him, hip to hip. He reached out his rough hand and touched Steven’s forehead where it wasn’t bandaged, very businesslike. He nodded to himself.

“So how’s my boy?”

“Okay.” That was always the answer. Now Pop would say “Good” and go out to the garage and do something.

But instead he said, “Really? Really okay?” Steven blinked a couple of times, and his dad continued, “ ’cause that’d make you the only one.”

“Well, you know,” Steven said.

“No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

There was a small light on by the door and another out in the hallway, but Steven could tell it was pretty late. Everybody else was probably asleep. His dad loomed up in front of him, blocking out most of everything else. No wonder they called him Big Ed.

Steven had no idea how to answer. “I don’t know. Not great, I guess.”

“Me neither. Just general?”

Steven tried to shrug, but wound up making a face. Shrugging with a broken collarbone wasn’t recommended. “You know. Eddie, I guess, mostly. Mom, a little.”

Big Ed lifted a leg onto the bed and shifted to face him more.

“You know,” he said, “I can’t say a damn thing.” He put his hand out, resting it heavily on Steven’s chest, and just sat there.

“What do you want to say?”

“I really don’t even know that.”

Well, that was okay, but it got uncomfortable. Steven, to say something, asked for another sip of water.

“How’s the pain?” Big Ed asked. “You need some more pills?”

“No, okay?”

“You’re the boss.”

The room got blurred up slightly. He leaned his head back against the pillow. “What’s in those things? The pills, I mean.”

Ed picked up the little brown plastic bottle. He said: “It’s called Percodan. ‘Extremely addictive. Use only under the direction of a physician.’ Well, we’re doing that.”

Steven said: “I don’t think I’m addicted. I really don’t want it, except for the pain. It makes me too tired.”

Ed put the bottle back down. “Well, that’s what it’s for.” He shifted again on the bed, as though he were thinking about getting up. But this was one of the longest conversations Steven had ever had with him, and he wanted to keep him there without being too nerdy about it.

“You know, drugs aren’t that cool,” he said, then blurted ahead. “I smoked some weed with the guys that beat me up.”

His dad simply nodded, taking it in. “How’d you like it?”

“You’re not mad?”

“I’ll get mad later. Right now I’m still just glad you’re alive. You mind if I have some of your water?” He poured half a glass and downed it in a gulp. “The pitcher’s almost empty,” he said.

He got up, blocking the light from the door as he passed through it, and left Steven alone. He heard a clock ticking somewhere, then some water running in the bathroom down the hall. He looked around the dark room at the rock-and-roll posters. Suddenly he didn’t like them very much. They seemed kind of phony and stupid. They were one of the few things he and Eddie hadn’t agreed on, but Steven had always felt that he had to have something that set him apart at home so they’d know he was alive.

His father returned with the pitcher filled up and sat back down where he’d been, on the side of the bed. Steven’s foot was beginning to throb slightly.

“You want to do me a favor?” his dad asked.

“Sure.”

“You want to try those things, try ’em at home.”

“I don’t think I-”

But Big Ed interrupted. “Look, there’s going to be lots of things like marijuana. Beer, for example. Or maybe cigarettes or cigars or something, although God forbid you get into that. Sex…”

Steven almost jumped at the word.

“Sex, no, don’t bring that home.”

Was Pop, grinning at him like they were friends, saying this stuff out loud to him? It blew him away. “But the other stuff- you want to experiment, even with some other guys, you bring ’em around and go out to the garage and check it out. But do it here, okay? So we can be sure you’re all right.”

“You’d let me smoke weed?”

“I wouldn’t be too thrilled about it. I wouldn’t want it to become a habit, but it probably wouldn’t kill you. It didn’t last weekend, did it?”

“Almost.”

Steven hung his chin down to the cast, but Big Ed lifted his head with a finger. “You’re gonna do things we don’t like. Hell, I’m sure we do things you hate. But we’re living together here, and everybody cuts everybody else a little slack so we can get along. The main thing is we’re a family, we stick together. Sound like a deal?” He punched him lightly under the chin.

That hurt a little, jerking the collarbone around, but obviously Big Ed hadn’t meant it and Steven would take a lot more physical pain than that if his dad would talk to him like this once in a while.

“But what about Mom?” Steven asked.

“What about her?”

“What if she doesn’t, uh, want to let me do stuff? Or even want me around?”

Ed slumped. His face clouded over. “Of course your mother wants you around.”

Steven tried a response, but it didn’t work. Big Ed sighed deeply. “Your mother is having a hard time, Steven. We’re all having a hard time.”

“You don’t think I wish Eddie were still here?”

“No, I know you do. It’s not that. It’s just your mother… she’s…”

“She wishes it would have been me instead of Eddie.”

Ed shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. Not on any level. She loves you, too, just like she loved Eddie.”

There wasn’t any use arguing over that one.

“She’s just having a hard time accepting it. Her world’s all turned around, and maybe she’d doesn’t know where to put things so well for a while. Haven’t you ever felt like that?”

He nodded.

“So, what I was saying about giving people some slack, maybe you’ve gotta be the first one. Try and understand what she’s going through if you can.”

“I know what she’s going through. I miss Eddie too. So bad.”

Big Ed took a deep breath. He swallowed, then jerked his head around toward the hallway. Still looking away, he spoke hoarsely. “We’re all taking it differently, I suppose.”

Steven’s foot was really hurting now. He kept forgetting how bad it was, and hoping every time that it would let up the next time the pills wore off, but that wasn’t happening yet.

He let a long time go by, or what seemed a long time, with his dad staring off somewhere breathing hard every couple of seconds. Then he said, “Pop.”

Big Ed slowly came back around.

“I think I need one of those pills pretty soon. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

“Yeah there is, Pop. There really is.”

His dad reached for the medicine bottle, opened it and shook out two pills. “Well, let’s start fresh, then. We’ve got a hell of a family left here, okay?”

He popped the pills and drank a little of the water.

“Maybe Frannie’s kid will make up for Eddie a little. Mom might like that.”

Big Ed jerked again as though he’d been stung. “Frannie’s kid? What do you mean, Frannie’s kid?”

It frightened him, Ed almost yelling like that. “You know, the kid Frannie’s gonna have. Her and Eddie’s kid.”

“Frannie’s pregnant?”

He strained to remember. Who had told him that? Damn. The pills were working gangbusters already. His eyelids were lead.

Was it Jodie? He was sure it wasn’t Mom. No, it wasn’t her. Maybe Frannie while she’d been staying here?

He couldn’t put his finger on the exact time he found out. “I don’t know,” he said lamely, “maybe I just dreamed it. I don’t remember.” But he knew he hadn’t been dreaming at all. He couldn’t recall even a scene from one dream.

Big Ed seemed to calm down. He put his palm flat against Steven’s forehead again. “It’s okay,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll find out about that tomorrow.”

He felt his dad’s bulk get up from the bed. Big Ed’s hand went through his hair, surprisingly gentle, and he felt a kiss on his forehead.

Maybe Pop did love him. And if he could only do something so Mom might think he was okay, they could all live together, maybe someday be happy again.

But it was getting harder, almost impossible, to keep thinking. He was sure Frannie was pregnant, but if Jodie and Mom and Frannie hadn’t told him, who had? The only other people he’d talked to had been Father Jim last night and that guy Hardy today. And how would either of them know? Frannie would definitely have told Mom first, wouldn’t she?

The light faded, then was out completely. He forced his lids apart, and there was Eddie standing in front of one of his posters, just looking down at him, smiling. He went to reach out to him, but then he was asleep.

Hardy, slouched over the table, was looking into the priest’s face perhaps a foot from his. Something was there, still unsaid after a lot of talking, and the idea kept popping up between them like an insistent panhandler checking out the pickings at the late-night tables in near-empty bars.

Cavanaugh looked down through his Irish, Hardy thinking he might be trying to stare right through the table with his X-ray eyes. They’d been talking and drinking, starting with light stuff and getting heavier as things wore on, for the better part of three hours. Cavanaugh kept going in and out of focus.

“Maybe anybody can do anything,” Hardy said, “you give ’em enough juice.”

“Anybody-anything,” Cavanaugh repeated.

“Not a priest, but-”

“Ha. The things I know priests have done, you wouldn’t believe.”

“I probably would. High school there were some guys like springs, they were so wound up. I’d hate to see what would happen if they let go.”

Hardy and Cavanaugh, slowing down, just a couple of guys, finishing their drinks, closing a place. Half hearing each other, half listening to Billy Joel doing “Piano Man,” that old bar-closer.

“You know what an incredible pain in the ass it is being a priest sometimes? That old turn the other cheek? Both my cheeks are callused turning them back and forth.”

“Yeah, but you do it anyway. You keep doing it. What I’m talking about is guys who snap. Zinc buildup or whatever.”

“Sex, you mean?”

Hardy nodded.

“Sex is easy. I mean, at least it’s tangible, or understandable. You either get the physical release somehow or you, as we say, offer it up. But either way, it’s out there and you can deal with it.”

“You saying sex doesn’t bother you guys?”

“What do you think? We cut our nuts off? I’m just saying that it’s not always the hardest thing.” He grabbed at his glass, swirled the ice and drained it.

As if by magic, Hardy thought, the waitress came around for last call. Cavanaugh ordered the round: “Give us a couple doubles.”

Hardy didn’t fight it. It was get-down time for him, too, that old “since we’ve already passed propriety time, let’s hang it out and see where it goes.”

“There’s just no release ever,” Cavanaugh was saying. “It’s not a job where some guy goes to work and gets off at five and then gets drunk or fights somebody. It’s like you can never ever”-he stabbed at the table-“ever do anything that really lets the valve loose. That’s the hardest part.”

“Hey, Jim, that’s just adulthood. Who ever really gets to blow it out anymore? And you think you’ve got it tough, try being a cop.”

Cavanaugh shook his head. The girl came back with the drinks. “Priests can make cops look like Boy Scouts.”

Hardy paid for the round. “Cops can’t let out a thing, Jim. They gotta keep it in control.”

“Yeah, but they also let out a lot. You get the adrenaline pumped up pretty good and you’re allowed-hell, you’re supposed-to do something, direct it to something. Shoot a guy, make an arrest, get in somebody’s way. I mean, there’s something there. You don’t go walking off-Mr. Mellow-and read your breviary.”

Hardy took a good swig of his own Irish. “Cops don’t let out near enough,” Hardy said, defensive. “Why you think you got drinking cops? You got cops on drugs? You got just plain mean motherfuckers?”

“What I’m saying is just multiply that by about twenty for priests.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“It isn’t. Maybe that’s where the sex comes in. Your cop at least has that option.”

“So why do you do it? Why do you guys keep at it?”

Cavanaugh drank again. “I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t know at all. You believe in the theory, I guess. You believe that the suffering is worth it.”

“You believe in God?”

“You had better do that. You sin and you sin and you sin again and you keep thinking maybe it’s going to get easier someday and you won’t have to feel like breaking out so often, that maybe God’s gonna give you a break. Take a doctor with a headache, he knows fifty ways it can be terminal. You, it’s a headache, it’ll probably go away. A doctor knows it could be a tumor, cancer, the beginning of a stroke, or whatever. Same with priests. We can’t even allow ourselves to think we’re going to be okay. If we do, that’s pride! The number-one sin. But if I think I’m a totally worthless piece of shit, then that’s false modesty, another sin. Everything’s a sin, Dismas. And if it’s not, it’s a near occasion. Being a little loaded right now-sure it’s a release, but it’s also one of the seven deadlies. Drunkenness. There’s no escape ever,” he concluded, reaching for his glass again, putting down half of what remained. “None. Ever.”

Hardy sat back, shaking his head. “All this from the perfect priest.”

“Who thinks that?”

“Erin Cochran.”

Cavanaugh sucked in a breath. “What does she know?”

“One would think she knows you.”

Cavanaugh sighed. “She’s God’s reminder to me that I’m not perfectible, much less perfect.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means, you’d think after twenty, thirty years, the old spell she throws would wear out.” He started to lift his glass, then put it back down carefully, as though afraid he might break it somehow, maybe squeezing it too hard. “Sometimes I still… I think I’ve been in love with her since the day I met her. And I wasn’t close to being a priest back then.”

Hardy wanted to ask, but Cavanaugh answered before he could get it out. “You don’t think I haven’t wanted to make love with her like any other man…?”

Hardy lifted his own glass and took a drink. He thought about Jane, about getting back with her, their hurried and aching coupling after the years apart. He said, “That must be very tough.”

The priest made some noise, like a laugh, but he wasn’t laughing. “They say love and hate are so close. Sometimes, I don’t know, I hate her, I hate ’em all…”

And there he was, unbidden, that old panhandler again, reaching out his hand. Hardy looked at the hand a minute, then flipped a quarter that fell into the middle of his palm.

“Yeah, I’ve been tempted to wipe out all the happiness I see there. Why should they get it all? You think that seems fair?” He stared at Hardy, not seeing him, looking inside himself. “There was a moment, God help me, when I was almost happy about it, about Eddie being dead. Let them feel what it’s like to have things go wrong, to have your love lost, the sum of your life reduced to zero. Erin thinks I’m perfect, huh?

“Not close, Dismas. Not even close. If I could feel like that, even for a second, when the boy was like my son, my only son…” He put a hand up to his face. “Going back to the Cochrans’, burying Eddie”-he shook his head again-“after feeling that, as a penance. You believe in a good God, you believe you’re doing something worthwhile, that being around someone you love, denying it, is strengthening you, making you a better priest, a better person. Your reward is in heaven, after all.” He tipped up his glass. “You go back. You keep going back. It’s like the old Augustine monks who slept in the same bed with their women every night to test their celibacy. The roots go way back. Deny, conquer, deny again, sin, conquer it again. That’s the road to salvation, right? Ain’t it a piece of cake?”

Hardy sat in the lengthening silence, sipping at his drink, shaken somewhere even through the booze. Cavanaugh was in such obvious pain he couldn’t believe he’d been blind to it before.

“Hey,” Hardy said. “Let’s quit bullshitting around and talk about something we really care about.”

Gradually, Cavanaugh’s face softened. He laughed quietly. “You’re okay, Dismas.”

“You’re not so bad yourself, Jim.”

Another pause, then Cavanaugh saying, “So how ’bout them Giants, huh?”

“Humm baby,” Hardy said.

Hardy switched on the light in his hallway, shivering slightly from driving home with the windows open in the light fog. He hadn’t worn a jacket. On the way home, really cold with the Seppuku’s top down, he’d bounced along singing a dirty country song about rodeos. A good song. Kept up his good mood.

Imagine feeling that a priest could be a regular friend of his, maybe even a close one. It was surprising, the charge Hardy got out of Cavanaugh’s company. Jim’s conversation was a soup, a stew, a goulash of politics, sports and what he called the “cheap m’s” of popular culture-music and movies-all seasoned-peppered more like it-with roughly equal parts vulgarity and poetry. Like, who else but Cavanaugh would have known off the top of his head that Linda Polk wasn’t, couldn’t have been, descended from James K. Polk, eleventh President of the United States? Because Polk had been childless.

He was also fun to hang with because you met a lot of women. Though the guy had to be close to sixty, he had three times Hardy’s hair, and all of it looked better. While they talked and drank (Cavanaugh in some baggy khakis and a loose blousy light-green thing with an open neck), three women had joked with them, butting in, leaving openings you could drive a truck through. But he’d closed the door on them all with a practiced grace that told Hardy this happened all the time.

Another reason they probably got along, he told himself, was that they still had Eddie Cochran in common. Except for Jane, it was pretty much the only thing on Hardy’s mind, and once he’d started talking, Cavanaugh had seemed as obsessed with it as Hardy was himself. It didn’t get boring-at least going over it with Jim, who still leaned toward the late Sam Polk as the murderer even after Hardy said that he’d been visible that whole night at a party his wife had thrown.

That was the bitch of the whole thing-none of the suspects could have done it unless one of them had at least one accomplice. And there was no indication of that at all.

Back in his office, undressed for bed, Hardy saw the three darts stuck on either side of the 20. About five drinks (and one double) unsteady (which he thought wasn’t very), he pulled them from the board and went back to the line in front of his desk.

He took a deep breath and held it, then let it out slowly. He shook his head once quickly, then let fly the first dart, nodded as it plocked into the 20.

“Okay,” he said.

One thing was certain-neither he nor Cavanaugh accepted Ed’s death as a suicide, although Jim’s feeling seemed to be more visceral than Hardy’s. To Hardy, even forgetting the suspects and their alibis, the facts simply didn’t support that finding. With Jim it was more an article of faith. Eddie Cochran wouldn’t have done it-not that way, not any way.

Hardy’s second dart hit the tiny slice of triple 20, a good shot by any standards. He put the last dart down on the desk. Tonight, for a change of pace, he’d quit winners.

The wooden chair was cold against the skin of his butt and back, but he forced himself down into it. There were scraps of paper on the desk-dribs and drabs of ideas he’d entertained over the last week or so, and he wanted to clear the decks for the morning. He was damned glad he hadn’t seen Moses this afternoon. He probably wouldn’t have been able to have stopped himself from bragging that the case was solved, which it pretty emphatically was not.

Suddenly the drink-and-talk-inspired euphoria faded. Hardy looked at the scraps of paper in his hand and wondered what the hell any of them meant. Fancy theories and clever words.

Absently, he reached over to his phone machine. He wanted to hear Jane’s voice again, and he didn’t think he’d erased the messages. The last thing had been Jim’s phone number. There it was, in fact, on one of the pieces of paper.

He flicked the machine.

“Thank you,” he heard. The end of Jim’s earlier message.

Then Jane’s voice again. “I’m just thinking about…”

But then he stopped listening. Something jangled deep in his brain, and the hairs on his arms and legs stood up over the chicken flesh. He switched the machine back to reverse.

“… 5081. Thank you.”

He closed his eyes, rewound again, listened. “Thank you.” He played it over in his mind, hearing it fresh.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

He had put the police tape into the drawer down to his right. He held his breath, irrationally terrified that it wouldn’t be there anymore, but it was. He spun around on the chair and carefully placed the tape into the machine. It was short enough. “There is a body in the parking lot of the Cruz Publishing Company.” A tiny, strained pause, perhaps trying to think of something to add. Nope. Then just, “Thank you.”

Back at his desk, he lifted the phone machine and brought it over next to the tape recorder. He played the two “Thank you’s” one after the other, first one then the other, both ways.

Cavanaugh’s message of earlier that night. The formal, cultured, unaccented voice without a personality, a smile, an attitude to color it.

Put it together, Diz, he said to himself. That’s why the call had come from halfway across the city. Cavanaugh had been driving home. Or took a bus or a cab. Or got home and went out again, not wanting to call from the rectory, and maybe not knowing they had automatic tracing on 911 calls.

He played the police tape another time, hearing the voice he’d been listening to most of the night. The voice that had been telling him more than he’d been hearing. Jesus.

There was a safe in the room where he kept some papers and his guns. He opened it, took both tapes from their machines and put them inside, closing it then and spinning the combination.

Going back to his bedroom, he picked up the last dart. He put his weight on his left foot, feeling the tape with his toes. “Double bull’s eye,” he said out loud. He threw the dart.

Sure enough.