The Color of Blood

Three

TOMMY OWENS HAD GIVEN UP BOOZE AND DOPE AND coke and E because he was broke because he couldn’t hold down a job because of all the booze and dope and coke and E he’d been doing, and his ex refused to let him see his daughter until he cleaned up. Being sober all the time wasn’t easy for Tommy, and Tommy being sober wasn’t easy for me either, since he’d asked me to act informally as his sponsor. I explained that, since I had no intention of stopping drinking, that mightn’t be the wisest idea, but he insisted, maintaining that having to put up with some sanctimonious bastard thrilled with himself for having given up booze would drive him to drink. In practice, it didn’t mean a lot more than my letting Tommy hang out at my house, sleep on my floor and generally make himself at home whenever it suited him, as well as helping him out of whatever scrapes he inevitably found himself in. All of which I’d been doing anyway. The new development was Tommy wanting to be involved with the cases I worked, to talk them through and offer me advice. At first I resisted this because my work was complicated enough, and depended a lot on instinct and intuition, capacities that were easy to undermine, especially if exposed to the chaos of Tommy’s mind. Not to mention client confidentiality. But his thinning, wispy hair and tufty straggle of beard weren’t the only ways in which Tommy resembled a beady old lady: he knew everyone in Seafield, Bayview and Castlehill and outlying areas, and everything about them, always had, since we were kids, who lived where and who lived there before them; who was rising, who falling, everyone’s business but his own. So when I checked my phone and found three messages from Tommy asking what the deal was with Shane Howard, I called him and gave him the bare skeleton-it was always a fine line, because I had the persistent suspicion if he heard something juicy enough, he’d trade it in for a night in the pub and a gram of coke. Not this time though. Immediately he heard David Brady’s name and the word “porn,” he said I should meet him at once at my house in Quarry Fields.

Although I had grown up in the house, I hadn’t been back in it long enough to get used to calling it mine, despite a hefty standing order on my bank account reminding me that I was the only one paying the mortgage my mother had taken out to fund the retirement she didn’t live to see. A fifties semidetached, it had seen better days, and I had done nothing to the exterior to improve it, other than have the side garage demolished and a gated wall built to connect the back line of the house to the perimeter. The earth had been turned where the concrete was lifted, and I scattered some grass seed for want of any better idea of what to do with a space I still considered haunted. Tommy was outraged, and accused me of wanting “a businessman’s lawn, like a fuckin’ snooker table”; he had worked for my father once, and restored the Volvo in the garage, so he felt he had a claim on the space. He got busy with paving stones, cobbles, recycled tiles and anything else he could steal from the day laboring jobs he occasionally worked, laying them in a loose path and planting herbs and heathers in the gaps between them. The hedge at the front of the house was of holly, yew and cypress; Tommy flanked the path with these, adding bay to give richness; the result was a secluded, tranquil path running south toward a gate of spiked black palings that let in the afternoon light. It was a good job, and I was grateful to him.

Inside, I had done little other than sand, stain and varnish the floorboards and paint the walls and ceilings white. I didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but I bought a brown leather couch long enough to pass out drunk on without waking with a deformed spine. Tommy Owens was sitting on the couch now with two remote controls in his hands. I sat beside him and reached out a hand and he passed me the DVD remote.

“Why d’you still wear your wedding ring, Ed?” Tommy said.

It was a good question, one I’d been asking myself. My marriage had fallen apart after my daughter Lily died, days short of her second birthday; I have the vaguest memory of signing divorce papers, drunk, like everything else I did in the aftermath. My ex-wife had recently been in contact with me for the first time since then. She wanted to be the one to tell me that she was getting married to the man she had gone out with before she met me, the man she had never entirely gotten over or indeed separated from while we were married, although of course I didn’t know about that until it was too late. She wanted me to know that she would soon have this man’s child, and she wanted me to hear it from her, not someone else. I thought it unlikely in the extreme that anyone who knew me in L.A. would ever mention my ex-wife to me again, but maybe she was acting out of sensitivity. Maybe she wanted to tell me that she grieved too for what we had had, for what had been lost. It didn’t feel that way, however. The way it felt was that she had held our shared past, our child, our history, held it aloft in one hand, and then set fire to it, and she wanted to make sure that I had seen the flames. I didn’t say that though. I wished her luck, and hung up before I said anything else, before she could hear the bitterness and anger in my voice, the grief that had never entirely abated, and that felt sometimes like it never would. I still wore my wedding ring because I didn’t want to forget the flames that burned me, or the past that binds.

“Saves me beating them off with a stick,” I said. Tommy rolled his eyes.

I’m not sure if there are ideal conditions to watch porn, but sober before midday doesn’t even come close. On the screen, a blue-eyed blonde in her early twenties was going at it with a pale, blond-haired bloke about the same age or younger on someone’s living room floor. The woman wore a black satin eye mask, the man wore black wraparound shades. I looked at the photographs of Emily’s threesome. It looked like the same guy in the film. Something about the blonde looked familiar too. They were joined by a plumpish dark-haired woman wearing a lot of complicated black underwear, most of which she left on. There was no attempt at a story, no dialogue other than moans and groans; the camera work was shaky and amateurish and there was no lighting, so the action was enveloped in shadow and murk.

“Tommy, where are we going here?” I said.

“Hold on, hold on.”

Scowling, for Tommy had always been puritanical about anything to do with sex, he fast-forwarded until the scene cut to one where the threesome were shot against two full-length mirrors.

“Now, there.”

He froze the disc. Visible in one of the mirrors was the handheld camera, and the forearm, of the cameraman. On his wrist, the man wore an identity bracelet with a series of letters and numbers in relief where a name would usually go.

“That’s David Brady,” Tommy said.

“How can you tell?” I said.

“What can you see?”

“2 J S 2,” I said. “What’s that?”

“2JS2. When David Brady was at Castlehill, the school won the Junior Cup two years running, and then the Senior Cup the same. David Brady was the only one to play on all four teams.”

“Rugby, Tommy? It’ll be golf next.”

“Fuck off. There’s practically a fuckin’ shrine to the guy in the Castle Inn sure.”

“Since when do you go to the Castle Inn? Thought that was rugby all the way.”

“I get around man. I get around.”

I showed Tommy the photographs, and he quickly matched the skinny guy with the one in the film by means of an eagle tattoo on his left shoulder blade.

“The background’s the same too, carpet, cushions, sofa,” Tommy said, nodding seriously, thoughtfully, like we were partners. I wasn’t ungrateful for his help, but still.

“Where did you get this, Tommy?”

“This what?” he lied. His eyes flashed quickly to his end of the couch and back. Old Pokerface.

“This porno DVD we’re watching. Where did you get it?”

I got up and stood over him. I could see his green canvas backpack tucked away on the floor by the side of the couch. Tommy held my gaze, tapping with his right hand on the arm of the couch.

“I just picked it up, you know man?”

An I-can’t-think-of-a-lie lie.

“In actual fact, David Brady gave it to me himself,” Tommy said hopefully.

In actual fact. I hoped he wasn’t going to make a habit of using that expression. I made a move toward the bag. His right hand formed a fist, and he brought his left shoulder around, as if to say he was ready. I nodded and moved in just slowly enough to give him time to get out of the way. He got, sliding to his left with a hangdog expression on his flushed face.

There were about two hundred DVDs in cardboard sleeves, each one with the legend “Threesome Porno” written on it in Tommy’s surprisingly polished hand. Tommy wouldn’t meet my eyes. I was starting to get angry. I turned off the television and removed the disc from the DVD player and shut off the power and none of it made me feel any calmer.

“Tommy. Explain this to me,” I said.

“It’s nothing man, I’m just holding it, know I mean?”

The accent thickened the more he stalled, as if the right blend would be truly impenetrable.

“You’re going to sell them for what, a tenner a go? Two grand, door to door on the estates, in the right pubs. And what do you keep?”

“Three-quarters.”

“Bullshit. Two euro in ten.”

“Five.”

Spots of anger erupted all over Tommy’s taut rodent face.

“It’s all right for you, you have all these rich cunts paying you all the time,” he said.

“Yes, being paid money for work I do, it’s called my job.”

“Well how come I don’t have a job? Been clean three months now and I still can’t get regular work.”

What could I say? That it was going to take more than three months’ sobriety to convince garage owners to take a chance on a man who had proved himself a legendary fuck-up in substance abuse, work-rate and time-keeping terms? Not to mention everyone’s aversion to employing a former associate of the Halligan organized crime gang.

“You’re getting a few days a week on building sites.”

“Ah yeah, they put me with the Poles and the fuckin’ Latvians on piss money man. I mean, fair play, nice lads an’ all, even if I don’t know what the fuck they’re going on about half the time, but it’s easier for them, they don’t understand they’re being ripped off. I do.”

“Anyway, that’s not the point, the deal was, nothing dodgy if you’re hanging out here. I already have Dave Donnelly’s new sergeant popping in often enough to keep tabs on me. I don’t need any shit, Tommy.”

“There’s nothing illegal about this. Not really. I mean, it’s not like dealing, is it?”

“Homemade porn for sale door to door? It’s a church fund-raiser. Tommy, who did you get these from?”

Tommy looked like the bold child he had never entirely stopped being. It wasn’t a good look on a man in his forties. But what he said took me aback.

“Brock Taylor.”

“Brock Taylor? The guy who owns the Woodpark Inn?”

“Yeah. That shook you, didn’t it?”

Brian Taylor-nicknamed Brock (the Irish for badger) because of the lock of naturally growing white hair that flared in the midst of his luxuriant black bouffant-led a gang out of the north inner city in the nineties that pulled three of the biggest bank and security van jobs the country had seen. There was no forensic evidence, no witnesses, and none of his gang would give evidence against him. And he did himself no harm by continually lobbing hefty checks at local charities. Eventually, the Criminal Assets Bureau confiscated half a dozen houses and two pubs from him because he had no explanation for how he had paid for them; although they were worth a total of 5 million, Taylor’s sole declared income for the period was 80 pounds a week in social welfare. But no one ever got to his bank accounts. He did eighteen months for intimidation of a witness, then came out, spent a few quiet years laundering all his remaining cash through two betting shops and an amusement arcade and watching the value of the properties he had managed to hold on to soar, then emerged suddenly, living in a house in Fitzwilliam Square and as the new owner of the Woodpark Inn, a sprawling “car park pub” that stood at the junction of Seafield, Castlehill and the once notorious Woodpark Estate. He’d been busy with his checkbook as well, to drug rehab and homeless centers, charities for sick and disabled children and so on, and a couple of tame journalists had been enlisted to build a Robin Hood antihero image: the hood with the heart of gold who only did what, let’s face it, we’d all do given a chance: take back some of the money the banks robbed from us over the years. As a result, and because he was a hail-fellow-well-met type of guy and because he seemed to lack entirely the whiff of cordite, he was being made welcome in all sorts of places you wouldn’t have expected before, including Seafield Rugby Club, whose grounds lay adjacent to Woodpark.

Tommy looked at me with a defiant smile.

“All right, you took me by surprise, well done. What’s Brock Taylor doing peddling amateur porn?”

He shook his head, his expression contracting into its usual pasty combination of suspicion and anxiety.

“I think he’s after Brady in some way. I don’t know how. He told me to take the DVDs, but to wait for the word before I started hawking them. Said if I sold any before that, he’d want to talk to me.”

“Did he mention Brady by name?”

“No. It was all, a certain party this, a certain party that.”

“And was there a deadline? A cutoff point, after which you could go ahead?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

I could hear him say it, but there was a reverberation, a kind of psychic echo to it, as if I had heard it many times before. As of course I had: not this specific detail, but the connection, the way on a case, nothing is accidental, everything forms a pattern, and what you thought you were looking for marks only the first step along the path. Tomorrow was Thursday; the deadline for Shane Howard to pay his daughters’ kidnappers the ransom was midday Thursday; now a porn movie directed by her ex-boyfriend was ready to flood onto the market after that time-if the ransom wasn’t paid? Or despite that?

Not the detail, but the connection.

“He did say, one of the places to sell was outside Castlehill College. Which is where David Brady went to school. So that maybe says there’s some kind of threat going on.”

“And how did he hook up with you?”

“You mean, me being such a fucking loser an’ all?”

“If the cap fits. What I meant was, Brock having his own boys to do the necessary.”

“I don’t know that he does. Or at least, not on the street, you know? He doesn’t want to be associated with any of that now. He’s a member of Seafield Rugby Club and the Castlehill Lions Club and the fund-raising committee to buy a new dialysis machine for St. Anthony’s and all this.”

“And it didn’t occur to you to wonder about the wisdom of working for Brock Taylor? Did you not learn your lesson with Podge Halligan?”

“Ed, nobody knows what Brock is up to. I mean, he never dealt drugs, he’s not robbing, he owns the pub and a few houses and apartments scattered around. That’s all he looks like he’s doing, property development.”

“And a little hard-core porn.”

“All right, I don’t know why he called me, and I didn’t expect him to be into all this.”

Tommy gestured disgustedly at the TV and his bag of DVDs.

“He said there was some kind of underage scene going on, and he was trying to get to the people behind it.”

“Child porn?”

“Not children, young teenagers. Thirteen, fourteen.”

“Your daughter’s age.”

“I’m not the only one with a daughter. So I thought, if that’s what’s going on, and if Brady’s involved, and if Brock is after him-for whatever reason-and he can’t get the evidence, and he wants to shame him around town, and there’s a few bob in it for me, why not?”

I looked at Tommy, who was lying about at least some of it, of course, but who had worked himself into believing that he had told the whole truth and nothing but. The problem was, it didn’t add up.

“Shane Howard told me David Brady was one of the most promising fullbacks in the country. What’s he doing still playing club rugby for Seafield? The best players are all professional now, why isn’t he playing for Leinster, or any of the Celtic League sides? And what’s he doing making hard-core porn films and…I mean, if he shot the photographs of Emily, we have to assume he’s in on the blackmail attempt as well.”

Tommy looked at me and shrugged.

“That’s where you’d earn your money, by doing your job. Boss.”

If he had grinned, I might have slapped him, but his face was a mask of earnest and diligent apprenticeship. I gathered the DVDs together and put them in a paper carrier bag.

“I hope you’re being straight with me, Tommy. Because this is serious business, and if you’re fucking around, I won’t take it lightly.”

“On the level man, on the level,” Tommy said, as usual looking far from. “I swear on my daughter, on Naomi man.”

And held my gaze, and I felt he understood how serious it was, and I knew if anything had meaning for him, it was his child, and I believed him.

We all make mistakes.