The Color of Blood

Ten

I DROVE BACK ALONG THE COAST ROADS AND TRIED NOT to think about Brock Taylor and Tommy Owens and my father. By the time I pulled into my drive, I had succeeded: I was thinking about a cold Jameson and a warm bed when my phone rang. It was Shane Howard, and he didn’t sound good.

“I’m here,” he said. “The Guards will need to be called.”

“Why is that, Shane?” I said.

“Because Jessica…my wife is dead. I think she’s been stabbed. I’m here.”

“You think she’s been stabbed?”

“Yes. I need to call the Guards.”

“Just, before you do, Shane, tell me where ‘here’ is. Are you at home?”

“No. I’m at the…house. The show house. I don’t know the address. Somewhere in Bayview.”

Jessica Howard had been on her way to show a house when we parted. I rolled down the window. The night smelled of sulfur and the ooze of rotting leaves. I tossed the Reillys’ Sig Sauer into a holly bush at the side of my house, pulled out of the drive and headed south toward Bayview.

“All right Shane, look around the room, Jessica’s bag, there’ll be a prospectus, a leaflet with pictures of the house somewhere, can you have a look for that?”

I heard some background sounds, and then Shane’s voice again.

“I have it,” he said, his voice cracking. He made a long, low sound, a sigh, or a moan, then he said, “There’s hardly any blood. I’ll have to ask the Guards about that.”

“Just read out the address, Shane.”

He gave me the address of a house in a cul-de-sac off Rathdown Road.

“I’m nearly there, Shane; just sit tight till I reach you.”

“I have to call the Guards,” he said again.

“I’ll call them for you,” I said.

I owed Dave Donnelly a phone call anyway.

I parked on the road and walked carefully through the darkened cul-de-sac: nine detached seventies bungalows in a U shape set around a raised oval of well-maintained green space. The show house was fourth on the left. I didn’t have to count; Shane Howard had parked his Merc right up on the pavement, so the neighbors could take note of the registration; already someone had left a pink slip of paper beneath the windscreen. It read: This is not a public car park. Residents’ cars only. Please do not park here again.

The smart play would have been not to disturb the crime scene. But Shane was already in there. And besides, being a real estate agent was as smart a play as you could make in Dublin these days, and all it got Jessica Howard was dead. She lay on the maple floor of the large living room with two puncture wounds beneath her left breast. There was very little blood, the merest filigree on her blouse; rather more on her hands, where she must have tried to defend herself. Her legs were twisted and splayed, and her skirt was up around her thighs, but her stockings and underwear were intact; there were no obvious signs of sexual assault. Livid patches stretched across her chest and face; they were turning purple, which meant she probably had been dead for six hours or more. Around the time when Shane Howard claimed he had been rambling around the pine forest in Castlehill. I thought of Jessica Howard’s beautiful, sad face that morning. “I’m beyond therapy,” she had said. “I’m out the other side.”

“Where’s all her blood?” Shane said.

Last time I’d seen him, he’d been hunched in a ball on the floor in Rowan House; now he was sitting crouched on the steps that led from the hall down into the living room; it seemed like his great frame was buckling under the strain, like the earth was dragging him down.

“It looks like she was stabbed in the heart. When that happens, the bleeding is mostly internal. It probably means she died quickly, and without much pain,” I said, the latter without much conviction: I couldn’t imagine any pain greater than knowing you were about to die.

Shane nodded blankly at me, then attempted a brave smile. I couldn’t hold his gaze.

“We were about to separate. Already separated, really, about to start the old divorce thing. I held out. Hoped she’d come back. But she wanted to be free. Always did. No one could ever capture her.”

“Shane, why are you here?”

“She always told me where she was showing a house. In case she got into trouble. There was that one, in England, years ago, young one, just vanished, showing someone a house. And Jessica’s on her own, no backup, no office. Even though we were separated, I’d still look out for her. She’d call, or text, to say she was home. It was how we started really, she was always ending up in a jam with some lad, out on the street, or a gang of fellas at a party. Shane to the rescue. That’s how she…then throughout the marriage, she’d go off on a wander…lost weekend with some actor who’d end up thumping her…or some situation in a hotel, she crying down the phone…Shane to the rescue. Each time I’d forgive her. She made an awful fucking clown of me, I know that. But sure, what can you do?”

“Tell me you didn’t kill her.”

“I didn’t kill her. I remembered, up at Rowan House, that I hadn’t heard from her. So I drove down to check. This is what I found.”

“The Guards will make you chief suspect, you know that.”

Shane looked at his dead wife and nodded.

“Sure I have you, don’t I? You can find the fucker who did this to her.”

“I can try.”

“Good man,” he said. “And there’s Dinny Finnegan. Let Dinny earn his fucking money for a change, the fat bastard.”

With that, he let his head sink back onto his chest.

I couldn’t raise Dave Donnelly on his phone, so I rang him at home and got his wife, Carmel.

“Hey gorgeous. He can’t talk to you. He’s asleep.”

“It’s only half-ten. What is he, getting old?”

There was a muffled growl and a shriek of laughter, and a crash, as if the phone had fallen on the floor. Carmel came back on the phone, her voice hoarse and breathy.

“For fuck’s sake, Ed, it’s a date night, our first in ages: now kindly fuck off and call him in the morning.”

“I’m sorry, Carmel darlin’, but it can’t wait. Tell Dave Shane Howard’s wife is dead, and I’m here with Howard at the crime scene.”

My voice must have carried across the bed. Dave came on the phone immediately. As I gave him the address, I could hear Carmel wailing in frustration in the background. I ended the call and we went outside and sat in Shane Howard’s Mercedes until the cops arrived.

Superintendent Fiona Reed got the case. She was a hard-bodied woman in her thirties with short red hair and a constant air of irritated disapproval which I had never managed to dispel. She took a quick look at the body, and then, as the crime scene examination team from the Garda Technical Bureau went to work, with photographers and fingerprint and mapping and forensics officers in their white protective suits streaming under the blue and white tape that secured the house, and the State Pathologist expected, Fiona Reed leant in through the car window and told me to get out.

“I want to talk to Mr. Howard. And Dave Donnelly wants to talk to you. Seafield Station.”

I was distracted by a camera strobe, and turned to see a press photographer across the road and a camera crew arriving. I turned back to Superintendent Reed, but before I had time to formulate the thought, she had a defensive finger in my face.

“I don’t know where the fuck the leak is, but it’s not coming out of Seafield. It could be the Technical Bureau, it could be the NBCI, but when I find the fucker, I’ll have him gutted and spayed. Answer your question?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, grinning at what I took to be a minor victory.

She turned to summon a couple of uniforms to deal with Shane Howard, then turned back and gave me a big grin.

“By the way, you’re fucked, Loy. And Dave agrees. This time, you’re fucked, once and for all. And not before time.”

As I walked down toward my car, Denis Finnegan was sailing up the cul-de-sac in another vast black Mercedes. The Howards must’ve bought them by the fleet.

In Seafield Station, I was led to a drafty interview room with faded yellow walls and threadbare grey carpet tiles. There were several televisions on the wall with VCRs and cameras, presumably for filming suspect interviews: new since the last time I’d been hauled in. I was expecting Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly; when Detective Sergeant Sean Forde came in, I knew Dave was really pissed off at me.

Forde was about thirty, with one of those fake country accents Guards from Dublin often affect; he had the grave dignity and self-importance and feeble wit of a provincial bishop; and since he had been appointed to the area, it appeared that he had taken it upon himself personally to give me a hard time, perhaps at Fiona Reed’s behest. In appearance, Forde was a red man; there was no way around it. He had the remnants of carrot-colored red hair tufted in a seemingly random arrangement on a small pink skull; his face was an alarmingly high shade of burgundy, like a whiskey tan, or severe sunburn; his hands were mottled with port blotches and spots.

“Well, Mr. Loy, in the wars again, hah? How’d you get that on your face, carving knife slip, did it?”

Carving knife. David Brady. They didn’t give that out on the news. This is a fishing expedition. Keep your cool, Loy.

And then Dave came in.

There was a book once about a guy who took to making every decision in his life on the throw of a dice. I never read the book, because I figured the idea was so brilliant that any mere recounting of it could only be a disappointment. But it haunted me down the years, and there were times in my life when it seemed to me that I might as well have been that guy. I thought those times were done. Not so, to judge from what emerged from my mouth next. Dave Donnelly sat down at an angle to Sean Forde, just as I leant across the table between us and told Forde to fuck himself.

“Ah, would you ever go fuck yourself,” I said.

The effect was, predictably, instantaneous: Sean Forde leapt up and came over the table at me, his astonished eyes burning with fury; I was on my feet when Dave flashed his great hand between us and brought Forde’s flight to an abrupt stop; he turned to me and yelled, “Sit down, Ed.”

Maybe if Dave had worn clothes that fit him, he wouldn’t always have looked like he was about to explode in some awesome fit of rage. But for reasons best known to himself, and even when he hadn’t been dragged out of bed, he invariably dressed like he had tonight, in a pale blue shirt straining at the chest with its flaps hanging over his belt, flat-fronted grey trousers skintight on his huge thighs and a fawn sports coat that barely covered his waist. Still, he was right to be angry. Forde may have been on my case, but he was only Reed’s monkey; the fact that Dave Donnelly and I were friends rankled with her, and I knew she gave Dave a hard time over it too. And I was tired, and wondering whether I had treated Tommy too harshly, and my blood felt like there wasn’t a drop of alcohol left in it. Still, none of that was any excuse for behaving like a gobshite.

“Don’t be acting the bollocks now,” Dave said to me. Was it my imagination or did I see a flicker of amusement in his eyes? I knew he couldn’t stand the sight of Forde. If there had been a flicker, it was gone in an instant, replaced by a heavy-browed glare. I glared right back. Go in like a gobshite, maintain like a gobshite.

Forde was up and inserting a videocassette into one of the VCRs and turning on a TV and pressing a remote control. I arranged my face so it looked expressionless, which wasn’t easy, as the tape was showing CC footage of the foyer of the Waterfront apartment complex and the time was lunchtime of the day just gone. You could see the estate agent with his stupid spiked fin haircut opening the door. And then you could see me walk in, wave my keys and head straight for the elevator. Sean Forde freeze-framed it on me as the elevator doors opened and I stepped inside; then he turned around and set his boiled-lobster face in a victory leer.

“Would you like to explain what you were doing there, Mr. Loy?” Dave said.

I looked blankly at him. Maybe they had footage inside the elevator, or in the corridor outside David Brady’s room, in which case lying now would be a bad move. On the other hand, if they had anything better than this, Dave wouldn’t have been on a date night with Carmel; he would have had uniforms outside my house.

“Me? Doing where?”

“The Waterfront apartments. Where David Brady’s body was found today.”

I nodded, then looked puzzled.

“You think that’s me?” I said.

The camera must have been positioned inside the door, facing the elevator. Because the only visible part of me throughout the shot was of the back of my head.

“That is you,” Forde said.

I shrugged.

“It looks like a man in a dark coat. I know I look like a man in a dark coat too, but I’m not sure there aren’t a lot of us about. More and more as it gets into winter.”

“Your client, Shane Howard. Brady was his daughter’s ex-boyfriend. Did you find her?”

“I did.”

“Good for you. Now, what were you doing at the Waterfront apartments on the day he was murdered?”

I shook my head, as if there was nothing I could add to what I had already said. I was trying to work out whether the camera could have caught me in the corridor outside the apartment, or on my way down in the elevator. In theory, CCTV is an exact science, but in practice management companies install the equipment and then frequently skimp on running it properly by inserting tapes or discs only in random cameras, or by disabling the recording equipment altogether, in order to save money. Dave said nothing either. Silence wasn’t usually his interview technique of choice, but I got the feeling this interview was Fiona Reed’s setup; silence wasn’t often my favored option either, but after the day I’d had I was too wrecked to do much other than sit there. It might have helped if Sean Forde had something to offer. As it turned out, he had quite the opposite.

“The timing is twelve forty-five P.M.,” he announced excitedly. “Time of death has been confirmed as being no earlier than twelve fifty, and no later than one forty-five. This puts you securely in the frame for the murder, Loy. What do you have to say to that?” His voice had built to a shrill little toy-dog bark; his face was like a neon beet.

I looked at Dave, but he had found something of great interest to study on the floor by his chair. I could only assume Forde had dreamt this nonsense up himself, on the off chance half my brain had slipped out my ear at some point during the day.

“Is that all?” I said.

“You haven’t answered me,” Forde said.

“Of course I haven’t. A, I wasn’t there. B, if I had been, I wouldn’t have killed my client’s daughter’s boyfriend. C, even if I had, unless he was blown up, or shots or screams were heard, or the murderer broke the victim’s watch and you know for a fact he broke it in the act, you have no way of estimating time of death to that narrow a time slot-and no way of confirming it at all. We all know that, apart from the people who make the TV cop shows so we can all get a decent night’s sleep. Which is what I want to do, so can I go home now please?”

Dave Donnelly rolled his eyes at Forde; it was quick, and easy to miss it, but I didn’t; neither did Sean Forde. It was hard to say whether he blushed or not, but he mopped his brow, and it wasn’t a hot night. He stood up and fumbled with the VCR and rewound the tape and played it from about an hour earlier that day. This time a large man with sandy-colored hair and an unmistakable lumbering gait plowed through the lobby. As if to ensure that there should be no doubt, when he reached the elevator doors, he turned around to see if anyone was following him. It was clear, even on the blurred CCTV image, that it was Shane Howard.

Someone once said about Hollywood that if you can fake sincerity there, you’ve got it made. I didn’t have to fake surprise after seeing the footage of Shane Howard on his way up to David Brady’s apartment; nor did I think anything other than that he could easily have been guilty-the body had been warm to the touch when I got there, no rigor, it all fitted. But what kind of day was he having, rushing out to murder David Brady, then dashing across town to kill his wife? What had possessed him? My brain wouldn’t process it. Dave Donnelly was saying something, but I didn’t hear what it was.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Can you help us with any of this?” he said.

“I cannot,” I said. “When I spoke to Shane Howard this morning, he identified his daughter splitting up with David Brady as one of the possible causes of what he saw as her personal decline. He seemed to hold Brady in high regard.”

“Maybe after you left, he got some news?”

“Maybe he did. After I spoke with him, I saw his wife for about an hour, then I came back up to his house to collect my car, and I saw him taking off at high speed. His receptionist said he didn’t come back all day.”

“You should have told us that before.” Dave stood up.

“I was busy with other things,” I said. It sounded lame, even to my ears. “Later on, I saw Shane Howard at his sister’s house. When he saw the news reports of David Brady’s murder, he was very upset.”

“Did he say where he had been in the interim?”

“He said he went for a walk, and had a few drinks in a pub. He said the stress of his daughter’s absence was getting to him.”

“Don’t talk to one of my officers like that again, Mr. Loy. Or things will get very complicated for you around here.”

“Are you-”

“We’re following a definite line of inquiry,” Dave said. “Sergeant Forde. Maybe best to employ language the man understands. Tell Mr. Loy to go and fuck himself.”

My car was parked on the street; I waited there in case Dave wanted to talk to me, or give me a full-scale bollocking; five minutes later I saw his car tearing out of the station at high speed. Maybe there’d been a third murder. Or maybe he was hoping Carmel might still be awake.

I had a brief phone conversation with Denis Finnegan. Shane was arrested under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act, which entitled the Guards to hold him for six hours. They could extend this by another six hours before any charges were brought, but Finnegan was hoping they could avoid this. He said he’d be in touch in the morning. There was a message from Sandra asking me to call her, but I didn’t. I’d had enough of the Howards for one day.

When I got home, I poured an absurdly large Jameson and opened a bottle of Guinness and drank them standing in the dark of my kitchen. The back garden was washed in the ghostly spray of a neighbor’s security light. The male and female apple trees were bent beneath their weight of ripe and rotting fruit. I knew how they felt. On the upside, I had found Emily, and I had identified at least some of Shane Howard’s blackmailers, even if one of them was a friend of mine; on the downside, my client was in police custody, being questioned over two murders, and I wasn’t at all sure he didn’t deserve to be charged with them. I wondered whether Shane Howard had suddenly discovered his wife had been having an affair with David Brady and killed them both. I wondered whom David Brady had e-mailed Emily’s sex film to. I wondered if Brock Taylor had anything to do with any of it, and if Sean Moon really had paid the Reillys, if he was a major player and not the overgrown child he appeared to be. And I wondered who had sent me the mass card for Stephen Casey, and who he was to the Howards, and how he had died.

I sent Dave Donnelly a text message reading: 1. Sorry about that, Chief. 2. Stephen Casey RIP All Souls’ Day 1985. Any bells? Loy.

There was a light blinking on my home phone. The message was from my ex-wife’s new husband. She wanted me to know she had gone into labor. She wanted me to hear the news before anyone else. I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to hear the news, and I didn’t drink to her or him or the child they would have together or the happiness I didn’t wish for them. I just drank, until finally the whiskey made me think there was almost something funny about it all. Then I almost laughed at it. Then I remembered I had tossed the Reilly brothers’ gun in a holly bush, and went outside and retrieved it. Then I lay on the living room couch that was long enough to pass out on without fucking up your back, kicked off my shoes and went to sleep.