Ice Blues

TWENTY-THREE

At ten till five in the afternoon the two of them drove into the parking lot beside the building. Joan was at the wheel, Gail seated beside her. I thought they might enter a side door and get away from me, so I trotted through the spray of the lawn sprinklers and met them as they stepped out of the car in their shiny whites. To Joan Lenihan I said, "We need to talk."

"Do we? I don't think so."

"We thought you went back east," Gail said, looking powerfully ambivalent about my presence. "Why are you- didn't you go back to Albany?"

"The men who killed Jack are in jail on both murder and narcotics charges.

I thought you would want to know that, Joan. Or has Corrine called?"

Her face froze in fright and confusion, and she said, "Who is it?"

"An ex-con, a car thief, by the name of Mack Fay. He had two accomplices, Terry and Kevin Clert. The Clerts are the sons of the nurse who looks after your father-in-law. They were after the two and a half million, but Jack got to it first and they killed him. One of the remaining unanswered questions is, where did that money come from? Apparently it was kept in Pug Lenihan's house and he considered it his, but where did it come from originally? You know, don't you, Joan?"

'Where is it? Where is the money now?" She was trembling with rage. Gail Tesney stood stricken, looking at Joan, then at me, then at Joan again.

"The money is safe. I have it."

"With you?"

"In Albany."

"It's not yours. You have no right."

"Whose it is then?"

"Give it to me."

"Is it yours?"

"Just give it to me. It doesn't belong to you. You have to give it to me."

"You're going to turn it over to Pug Lenihan, aren't you? That's what you would do if you had it. Are you going to tell me why, or am I going to tell you?"

She paled and began to blink, panic rising. "Gail, why don't you go on up.

I'll be up in a little while."

"Joan, what is wrong? What is he talking about?"

"She'll be all right," I said. "Go ahead. We'll come up to the apartment in a few minutes."

Joan waved her away. "It's okay. I'll be okay. Go ahead. You go ahead."

Gail stared at us both for a long moment, looking hurt and abandoned, then turned and walked quickly into the building. Joan and I found a dry patch of grass under some eucalyptus trees and sat on it. I said, "I'm offering you a proposition. Either you tell Gail or I'll tell her."

She fumbled in her big leather bag, found a pack of cigarettes, and lit one.

"Tell her what? What is it that I'm supposed to tell Gail? You go around telling people how to run their lives. Tell me what I'm supposed to tell her."

"That you killed your husband, Dan Lenihan, eighteen years ago this month."

She didn't flinch. Drawing on the cigarette, she leaned back against the tree trunk, then exhaled mightily. She looked at me and said, "Yes, I killed Danny. Did Pug tell you?'

"No."

"Who did?"

"You did-with your irrational fear of Pug Lenihan, who's nothing but a vicious, cracked old blowhard. He's been holding this over you for eighteen years, making your life miserable every time the subject of Albany came up, threatening you, extorting cash to pay for his nursing care, using you as a lever against Jack after Jack made off with the famous two and a half million last October. You're so scared of Pug you can't even let him find out you're gay, for fear of the bigoted browbeating you think you'll have to take from him. The truth is, for eighteen years Pug Lenihan has been blackmailing you with his knowledge of your husband's death. Except, I don't quite believe it. What happened?"

"What happened? Danny died, that's what happened. I killed him." She dragged on the cigarette and gazed toward the setting sun, which was huge and lovely in the smog above the horizon.

"How did you go about that? I'm told Dan Lenihan was drunk and passed out in the street, where he froze to death in the middle of the January night."

A slight shake of the head. "No. Not on the street."

"Where?"

"On the front porch."

"That's not murder. That is horrible bad luck."

"No."

"He had gone out drinking, to Mike Shea's on Broadway. As he did-every night?"

"Every night. Yes, every single solitary night of the nineteen years of our marriage. Before Corrine was born, I went with him. Every night."

"And he left Shea's-when?"

"At three. He always left at three because Mike knew when to shut him off and Danny would still have enough strength left to make it home on his own steam. Mike would call me at three-wake me up-every night at three in the morning for nineteen years. And I would go down and unlock the door so Danny could get in. Danny never carried his own key because he'd lose it. So I'd go down and let him in-open the door. Every night."

"And Mike called that last night, as usual?"

"Of course."

"And what did you do?"

"I went back to sleep."

"You mean you were exhausted and you dozed off."

"No. I mean I went back to sleep. I said to myself, maybe if I go back to sleep Dan will pass out on the front porch and freeze to death. It was the deepest, most restful sleep I'd had in years."

"Had he beaten you?"

"Every night."

"Before he went out?"

"No. When he came home. Every night at three in the morning I'd let him in and he'd hit me. He never hurt me much. He couldn't-he was too drunk. He could barely walk."

"According to the police report, Dan's body was found on the sidewalk near Sacred Heart Church, not on your front porch. He never even made it home that night."

Now she looked at me with no expression I could identify. Her face was set and grim but her eyes were full of tender sadness. "Early that morning someone found Dan on the porch and dragged his body down by the church. That's where they discovered him, but that's not where he died."

"This person who moved Dan's body must have been someone who understood what had happened and wanted to protect you. Who was it?"

Her expression did not change. "Hell will freeze over before I tell you that."

She flicked away the cigarette, which had burned down to the filter. "So now you know. Jack trusted you and now I've trusted you. Will you give me the money, please? So I can return it to Pug?"

"How did Pug know what really happened? How could he be sure?"

She shrugged. "Was there ever anything that went on in the North End that Pug didn't know about? I doubt it. He checked with Mike Shea, who told him I'd been called to let Dan in. He checked with everybody on Walter Street who he knew stayed up late or got up early and might have seen something. One of them had-Howie Fay, Mack's dad. He saw Dan's body being moved."

"And he never mentioned it to the police?"

"No, just to Pug. Pug told him to keep his mouth shut. Danny was already enough of an embarrassment to Pug, and to have word get out that his son had been murdered by his own family would have been the final humiliation."

"His own family?"

"Wife. His own wife."

I studied her, and she looked away. I said, "So that's why you can't cross Pug-and why you tried to stop Jack from crossing Pug. I take it Jack did not know the true circumstances of his father's death. Otherwise he'd have been more careful in his dealings with Pug."

She nodded, watching me.

"Where the hell did Pug Lenihan ever pick up two and a half million dollars anyway? Or might I guess without trying too hard?"

A grunt of sour laughter. "From 1926 until 1974 Pug handled the finances for the Boyle brothers. Kickbacks, bribes, loans, gifts-it was always 'one for the party, one for me.' The Boyles must have gotten theirs too. They didn't die in big fancy houses in Latham, so you can probably assume that there are suitcases full of money under three other beds in Albany-or were. That's where he kept it, you know, under his bed. Mrs. Clert must have known about it, and old Howie Fay. I found out from Danny, who worked for his dad when he was young, and Danny told me about it when he was drunk one time. And I made one terrible, terrible mistake." Her eyes were wet now.

I said, "You told Jack."

She nodded. "Last summer I told him. In October Jack took the money out of Pug's house when he was working out there. He was going to give it back, he told me. To the people of Albany."

"I'm sorry."

"When Jack was out here last week to pick up the laundered money, I removed the cash and stuffed newspapers into the suitcases Jack was sending to you, and I did what Pug told me to do on the phone, which was to send the money to Mack Fay, who was Pug's driver. Mack was supposed to deliver the money to Pug. If I had told Jack the truth about his father's death and what Pug was doing, he'd have killed Pug. I know he would have.

He hated him enough to do it. We all did. Don't you see now what an evil man Pug Lenihan is? And why you have to return the money to him?"

"No, I don't. What can he do?"

"Why, he can have us arrested! And charged with murder! There's no statute of limitations on homicide cases. Pug told me that and I know it's true. We could go to prison!"

"Joan, listen to me. The Albany police know the whole story. They figured it out an hour after your husband's body was found. Only by using the most tortured legal logic can you be charged with murder in any degree. No jury could be found that would convict you. And in any case, the cops knew

Dan Lenihan and are inclined to think of his death as a piece of ugly bad luck. It's just another sad story out of the old North End and not a police matter. Once in a while Irish fatalism has its uses, and this is one of them.

"Maybe you're going to feel just a little bit cheated by this, but Pug Lenihan has nothing on you or anyone else in your family. Nothing at all. I spoke with Ned Bowman about it, and he told me nothing Pug Lenihan says anymore is taken seriously by anybody downtown. He's a has-been, a relic, a fondly regarded old cipher. He'll get a big flowery tearful funeral, but in the meantime he has no appointments to make and presumably no cash that is legally disbursable, so he's just a revered shell, a monument for the pigeons to crap on. Why is he so hot to get the two and a half million back anyway? What could he possibly be planning to spend it on?"

She said, "On his deathbed he's going to hand it over to the archdiocese to reopen Immaculate Conception School."

"Ah. A benefactor of institutions of character building."

She was looking at me dazedly. "Are you telling me the truth? About-what the police said?"

"I am. I spoke with Ned Bowman about it this morning. You have nothing to worry about from the Albany police or DA. Nor does any other member of your family."

She quickly stood up and began to pace back and forth. She walked over to a car parked at the edge of the lot and suddenly pounded a fist on the hood. Trembling, she came back to where I was seated on the grass, and I was afraid for an instant that she was going to pound her fist on me.

Raging and weeping, she cried, "He raped me! Before I left, he raped me."

"Pug did?"

"He brags about it. On the phone he calls me a cheap slut-his last piece of ass but not his best. I let him do that. For eighteen years I've let him-" She collapsed.

After a long dinner, they drove me to the airport. At the boarding gate, Joan said, "I still don't think I want to go back to Albany for a while. Maybe never.

But Corrine is coming out here in two weeks for a long visit. I'm so happy that she's finally going to do it."

"It'll be good for both of you. She needs you. And there are some things she might need to talk about."

She looked at me evenly. "Oh, no," she said. "Corrine and I never talk about that."