Ice Blues

SIX

I had Timmy on the line.

"Is it okay to go back to the house yet? I'm bored and I need my toothbrush."

"Timothy, you're so easily entertained. No, don't go back there at all. I've arranged to confuse Hankie-mouth, and for the house not to get firebombed, but either of us showing up on Crow Street might still be risky.

Come on over to the Hilton and watch the soaps, pick up a bellhop, brush your teeth, whatever amuses you. Enjoy your day of character-building winter."

"Are you going to be there?"

"I have to go out for a while."

"Maybe I'll take the bus out to Macy's and shop around for a few things.

When are you getting your car back?"

"Tomorrow, I think, but I wouldn't drive either yours or mine around Albany for a few days. I'm picking up a rental and maybe you should too."

"Don, this is getting expensive. Who's going to finance all this anyway?

Your sort-of-client is dead, and I'm willing to bet you're not in his will."

"US bank notes are going to turn up soon. I can feel them getting closer and closer. Money is not going to be the problem, I think."

"What is?"

"Keeping it."

"But it's not yours. This has been pointed out."

"It's Jack Lenihan's money and should be disposed of as he would have liked."

"Except he obviously stole it from God-knows-who, and anyway you don't know what he would have liked. What he would have liked died with him."

"I don't think so."

"What do you know that you're not telling me? Spit it out."

"Not much. I'll know more by the end of the day-I thmk."

"Well, I'm going out to charge some underwear and socks and find something to read."

"You aren't enjoying Nanook?" He hung up.

I reached Warren Slonski at Schenectady General Electric and set up a meeting with him. He also provided me with the name and address of Jack Lenihan's sister in the North End. I phoned my service and was informed that the three pols who had tried to reach me earlier had been calling repeatedly and were becoming a nuisance. I left instructions on when and where they could meet me that evening.

Hankie-mouth had phoned, the service operator told me, but had declined to leave a number. I said if he called again to tell him yes, okay, I'd meet him that night at midnight at Clinton and Pearl. One other message had been left for me. The Greyhound station had called to notify me that my bags had arrived from Los Angeles and I could pick them up anytime. I rented a Hertz car and drove it south just four blocks.

The Greyhound station was the usual winter wonderland of wet footprints, cold drafts, college kids with backpacks, bag ladies dozing, and garbled announcements-"Bah number ploot now boarding at gay nake for Nansimer, Bumppo, Pootiton and Garkfark"-causing travelers throughout the waiting room to crane their necks and squint at the disembodied sounds futilely.

I showed my driver's license as an ID to the clerk at the freight window, and he called for a young lackey who trundled out five good-sized suitcases.

They were not chic and new but they looked sturdy enough. I signed for the bags, left three with the clerk while I carried two out and locked them in the trunk of the rental car, then made two more trips back for the remaining suitcases.

No one watched me or followed me, so far as I was aware, and I was plenty aware. As I eased the last bag into the car I noted on the waybill it had been sent from Los Angeles on Monday, January 14, the day Lenihan had mailed his letter to me. The return address was a street in West Hollywood, and the sender was J, Lenihan. I ripped the waybills off each of the bags and stuffed the papers in my coat pocket.

At the Hilton main entrance I left the bags with the bell captain-"My damn bags didn't make the connection in St. Louis"-and tipped him, with instructions to deposit the suitcases in room 1407. He barked for an underling and I drove off.

The old Irish North End of Albany is full of ghosts for the natives, but I'm from New Jersey, so the spirits kept mum as I headed up North Pearl. The snowplows were out in force now, tidying up the landscape for the electorate. Jefferson was right that compulsory free education is a bulwark of democratic civilization, ranking near the top of any list of essential institutions, not too far below snow removal. Albany city government understood this every four years.

I passed under I-90, which since the 1960s flew across the Hudson on concrete pillars and sliced up a valley separating the North End from the rest of the city. The old neighborhood of double-deckers and single-family frame houses set close together was not quite decrepit, but verging on it, despite obvious spunky efforts to patch, paint over, prop up, and adorn.

The parochial school was boarded up, but Sacred Heart Church looked humbly enduring behind a little plaza of snow-covered maples and oaks. A snowman wearing a red knit cap stood at the edge of the park, though I saw few children out. The sons and daughters of the old-neighborhood Irish had made it into Super America and gone off to the suburbs, except of course for those few who hadn't, and the old people who chose to stay behind or hadn't been invited anywhere else.

The home of Corrine and Ed McConkey on Walter Street was a two-story box with flaking tan shingles and dark-green wood trim. The front walk had not been shoveled, but what looked like a considerable amount of foot traffic had cleared a narrow path. I walked up it and onto the porch, where a chain swing suspended from the ceiling was coated with blown snow.

The wooden storm door had a plastic sheet stapled into the place where the glass used to be, and the only doorbell was a brass contraption, like an old faucet handle, which I twisted, causing a bell to rattle on the other side of the door. As Timmy had pointed out, the Lenihan clan had seen palmier days.

A lace curtain was jerked aside and a male face glared out at me. The door opened.

"Are you the undertaker?" His tone was surly, abrupt.

"I'm Don Strachey, a friend of Jack's. Is Corrine here? I'd like to say hello."

"Yeah, she's here. You're one of Jack's friends, you said?"

"I hadn't known him long, but we were close."

"Oh yeah? How close?"

A voice from within: "Ed, who is it? You're letting all the cold air in, Ed."

"A friend of Jackie's."

"Well, for heaven's sakes, Ed, ask him to come on in."

He gestured for me to enter, but he didn't look happy about it.

"You must be Ed McConkey, Jack's brother-in-law."

"Yeah."

As I shut the door behind me, a woman appeared, smiling feebly.

I said, "I'm Don Strachey, a friend of Jack's. I feel very bad about what happened to him."

"How do you do, Mr. Strachey, I'm Corrine. Yes, it's awful, isn't it? And so out of the blue. Jack had a troubled life, but I never dreamed.

… I just never dreamed…"

Both McConkeys were small thin people with a bruised look whose source seemed deeper than a recent death in the family. Corrine's eyes were red, and Ed's were dull from the kind of fatigue that comes not from exercise or passionate feeling but the lack of either. He wore khaki work clothes that were clean and freshly ironed, and Corrine had on powder-blue slacks and a white turtleneck sweater of a shiny fabric that only drew attention to the dark rings around her eyes. Her smile, though weak, was warm and natural.

I left my boots on a plastic mat in front of the leaky radiator in the front hall.

Corrine took my coat and draped it over the radiator itself. The odor of frying Orion mixed with the kitchen smells-meat loaf under a tomato sauce-as she led me into the dim, heavily knick-knacked living room. Ed remained standing in the archway, Corrine perched on a straight-backed chair next to the black-and-white TV, and I seated myself on an old brown 1930s davenport whose surface had the texture of a Nigerian's beard. I thought of a happy weekend I had once spent in Lagos and felt funny sitting on this thing.

"Could I get you a cup of hot coffee, Mr. Strachey? Ed's sister Patsy was here a little bit ago and she made enough for an army."

"No, thank you."

"People are so nice when tragedy strikes. Grace Toomey from next door made a wonderful meat loaf that's keeping warm for supper. It's big enough for ten people, and I know Grace lives on Social Security and can no more afford all that hamburg than she can afford to fly to the moon. It makes you thankful for what you've got."

"Mrs. McConkey, I'm a private investigator."

"Oh my goodness."

Ed, from the doorway: "You said you were a friend of Jackie's, I thought.

Huh?"

"We knew each other, and it was my car Jack's body was left in."

"Oh, that's awful!"

"Yeah, I thought I heard that name before. What do you know about all this bull, anyway?"

"Not much. That's one reason I came here. I'm as interested in finding Jack's killer as you and your wife are. I'm assisting the police with their inquiries."

"They didn't say nothin' about that to me and Corrine."

"That nice Mr. Bowman was out," Corrine said. "He's a gentleman of the old school."

"I know Ned well," I said. "We go way back."

"He asked all these questions about who Jack's friends were, and did Jack have a lot of money and give us presents. He was nice about it, but I'm sure he thought Jack was mixed up with drugs again. But I don't believe that for a minute. Jackie learned his lesson that other time, and I know he was staying out of trouble. Didn't he seem that way to you?"

"That's my impression."

"Anyhow, I know Mom asked Jack straight out if he was selling dope and he said no, absolutely not. Jack never lied to Mom, he just never could.

They've always been close. Even after Mom moved to California they'd gab on the phone all the time. Mom is so broken up over losing Jack, she doesn't even think she can come to the funeral. She's been in bed since yesterday, her friend Gail told me. It's a blow for all of us, believe me, it's a blow."

"When was it that Jack told your mother he wasn't dealing drugs?"

"Oh, I couldn't really say. He was out to see her in October, but like I say, they talked on the phone."

"Did your mother tell you what prompted her to ask Jack that question, about drugs?"

"Gosh, I don't know. Mom didn't say."

"Jackie's queer," McConkey said, glaring down at us. "Did you know that?"

"Yes, I knew that."

"Do you want my opinion? My opinion is Jackie picked up a hitchhiker and tried to get smart with him and the guy bashed his head in. That's my opinion."

"Oh, Ed, you don't know beans about Jack. You never did."

McConkey ignored this. "When I was in high school I was thumbing up 9W from Selkirk one time, and this guy gives me a lift and tries to get funny.

'You fool around?' he says. 'Hey, don't you like to fool around with the boys once in a while?' Well, hell, that guy got a split lip, that's the kind of foolin' around he got from me, I'll tell you. Big bruiser, too, he was. But I was so ticked he's lucky he didn't get worse, I'll tell you."

I said, "Couldn't you just have said, 'No, thank you'?"

McConkey looked at me as if I was a spaniel who had just peed on the rug.

"Ed, Jack didn't do that type of thing," Corrine said with an exasperated sigh. "I know, because I asked him one time, and he told me he never bothered school kids, he wasn't interested. In fact, he acted insulted that I should ask. What happened to you twenty-five years ago doesn't have anything to do with anything. Heavens, Ed!"

Shaking his head, McConkey said, "You've never been a man, Corrine, and you don't know. There's an awful lot that goes on out there that you just don't know about. You wait, the cops'll find out. It's either queers or drug pushers did it. You wait."

Her jaw tightened but she said nothing. McConkey threw up his hands and strode off toward the back of the house.

I said, "You seem to have known your brother pretty well, Mrs. McConkey.

Did you see a lot of each other?"

"Oh yes, Jack and I were close in our way too. Not like Jack and Ma, but close. Last fall, now that was real nice. Jack was over this way quite a bit helping Dad around the house, so we saw a lot of him back then. We sort of got to know each other all over again."

"I'm sorry, but I thought your father was dead."

"He is. No, that's Pa. Pa died in 1967 from an ailment. No, I meant Dad Lenihan, my grandfather, who lives a block over on Pearl Street. Jack did some cleaning and painting for Dad, and sometimes he'd stop afterwards at our place for supper. Jack quit over at Dad's, though, one day in October, and we didn't see much of him after that. But it was fun for a little while."

"I'd gotten the impression that Jack and his grandfather didn't get along. Is that not so?"

She tilted her head and let loose with a strange little half-smile. "Well, let's just say they didn't see eye to eye about a lot of things. But family is important to Jack, the way it is to Dad. They argued a lot, sure they did. The nurse who's with Dad during the day told me Jack and Dad went at it tooth and nail, and she was always surprised when Jack would show up again the next day. They got along in their fashion, I guess you could say."

"What kinds of things did they argue about?"

She smiled again, almost laughed. "Politics. Jack was a Lenihan, wasn't he?"

"It seems he was, at that. Why did Jack quit working for his grandfather in October? Did he say?"

"No, I guess they'd just had enough of each other for a while. It was around then that Jack dropped out of business school too. That was a big disappointment to all of us. Just when he seemed to be finding himself.

Jack said he didn't have the time, but I think that was just an excuse. What else did he have to do with his spare time? I think he just got in a mood. He was always like that."

"Jack's death must have hit Grandfather Lenihan hard. He's quite old, isn't he?"

"Ninety-six last month. When I told him-I had to tell him because he looks at the news on the TV-and when I went over and told Dad, he cried. He just looked out the window and cried like a baby. I never saw him do that before, even when Pa passed on. People think Dad's such a tough guy, but he's not such a toughie anymore, poor old thing."

"When did you last see Jack?"

"New Year's Day he dropped by. He watched the game with Ed for a while.

But he was in a mood and didn't have too much to say. Jack had been kind of quiet the last couple of times we saw him, as a matter of fact. Maybe he missed his friend Warren, I don't know. He and Warren were so close, and Warren had been so good for Jack, I thought. Warren is just so settled and considerate. Whatever was on Jack's mind, he didn't mention it. You know, I'm sure going to miss Jack. After all, he was my baby brother. Ed and I were never blessed, so Jack and Ma and Dad Lenihan were the only family I had left. Family's always been important to the Lenihans."

"It must be hard for you that your mother won't be able to come home for the funeral."

She forced a smile but couldn't keep it, and her chin wobbled. "Yes, if I could just-hug her. Just put my arms around Ma and hold on. That's what I keep feeling I want to do. Ma and I don't-we haven't been together since Pa passed on and Ma moved away. Ma tried to get Ed and I to move out there, but of course Ed has his ties here. And he takes good care and he doesn't go out. Ma's paying for the funeral, thank the Lord. Ed was laid off last spring out at Green Island Ford, so this hasn't been an easy year for Ed and I. I clerk out at Feigelbaums in ladies' undergarments, but you know how that is. You don't get rich slaving away for Hal and Bernice."

"Uh-huh."

"They gave me the rest of the week off with pay, though. That was real nice of them. The funeral's on Sunday."

The door bell rattled and Ed McConkey reappeared to usher in three heavily bundled elderly women bearing casserole dishes. I offered a few more lame expressions of condolence, excused myself, retrieved my mountaineering outfit from the hall radiator, and burned my fingers on the hot zipper. I went back and asked which house on Pearl was Dad Lenihan's and Corrine described it. "He won't let you in though," she said. "Dad's kind of crabby with people he doesn't know. To tell you the truth, he's kind of crabby with everybody. I guess it's all his aches and pains makes him that way. And now with Jack passing on, Dad's weaker than ever, poor old thing."

Pug Lenihan's place was a small 1920s brown brick bungalow across from the deserted Immaculate Conception School. The Lenihan homestead had a brightly painted front porch and looked well kept up. Parked in the narrow driveway was a maroon Pontiac Firebird, which I supposed belonged to Pug's nurse. I paused for a few seconds on the well-plowed street-Pearl was almost completely snowless here-then drove back toward the interstate.

My visit to the North End seemed not to have been illuminating, except in a general way, and I guessed I'd visit the neighborhood again once I figured out which questions to ask, and which house to ask them in. I now knew for certain only that something had happened to Jack Lenihan in October that had changed his life and three months later had ended it.