The Color of Blood

Four

DAVID BRADY HAD AN ADDRESS IN THE SEAFIELD WATERFRONT apartments. I stood outside the security door to the complex with my car keys in one hand and my phone in my ear, nodding and saying “absolutely” and “no problem” and “Monday at the latest” until a short man with his hair gelled into the spiky fin that for some reason was the current style of choice for young male estate agents appeared in the lobby, a sheaf of apartment specifications under his arm. The Waterfront had sold off the plans eighteen months before; now that the complex was finally open, half the apartments were on the market again as investors sold up for sixty or seventy grand more than they had paid. I pointed at the door, still nodding into the phone, and Spiky Fin, who I noticed had acne, and possibly short trousers, opened it and extended an apartment spec to me. I waved my keys at him, too busy by far, and slipped around to the elevators.

As the elevator rose, I inspected myself in the mirrored walls. I wore a black suit, a white shirt and black shoes. I wore a black overcoat in deference to the season. I had a black knit tie in my pocket, but it was rarely necessary these days. I had fallen into dressing like this partly by accident: I got off the plane from L.A. in a black suit and the airline promptly lost the rest of my luggage. I couldn’t think of anything else to wear, so I simply bought more of the same. It meant I rarely had trouble with a doorman, a maître d’ or a corporate PA, quite the opposite in fact. And if it also meant in certain situations I was a shade conspicuous, well, that can work to your advantage too, provided you don’t mind leading with your chin. After an October off the booze and working hard at the gym, I was a few pounds below fighting weight, loose-limbed and ready for action. I went for a reassuring smile. Then a look of reliable authority. Neither worked. The darkness in my eyes and the drawn clefts in my cheeks seemed to anticipate what I would find in David Brady’s apartment. I was trying to sell my reflection an impression of life, but it was no good. I was calling on death, and my face knew it before I did.

I knocked on the door and it gave against my fist; it had been left on the latch. The apartment was eight floors up and looked out over Seafield Harbour through one wall of glass; if the mist hadn’t been so thick, you’d have seen right across the bay to Howth; as it was, you could see about as much as David Brady, who was lying on his tiled kitchen floor with a halo of blood around his head and a Sabatier carving knife stuck in his chest. He had been stabbed a number of times in the stomach and chest, and the back of his head looked like it had been smashed repeatedly on the glazed terra-cotta tiles. I took a pair of surgical gloves from my coat pocket, put them on and gave the body a quick once-over. Brady’s flesh was still warm to the touch, even around the hands: there was no visible lividity, no evidence of early rigor in the eyelids or the jaw; he could have been killed ten minutes ago.

I looked at the photograph Jessica Howard had given me, of Emily and her boyfriend David Brady. It must have been after a match; Brady jubilant, red-faced and mud-smeared in a striped rugby shirt; Emily, all blond highlights and orange tan, gazing adoringly at her prince. My tongue felt swollen and dry in my mouth, and sweat suddenly sparked in my hair and on my brow. I crossed to the glass wall and slid the balcony door open and stepped out into the clammy cold air. Petrol fumes mingled with the salt tang from the sea; behind the roar of buses and trucks, a foghorn sounded, a dark bass note of mourning beneath the traffic’s metallic clamor.

I went back in and began to search the apartment. The living room/kitchen/dining area was one open-plan space; off the kitchen ran a short passage with doors to a small bathroom and the only bedroom. Neither of the porn shoots had taken place here. There was a white G5 iMac on a desk in the living room. I booted it up and went into the bedroom. There were two televisions; the one in the bedroom was cabled for PlayStation, and games lay in piles on the floor. There were other gadgets: Game Boys and mp3 players, and a mini hi-fi system on the ledge behind the bed; no sign of camera equipment. There was nothing else of interest, except to note that David Brady had a mirror on the ceiling over his bed and a bunch of sex toys and a stack of porn DVDs in his bedside locker. A man who brought his work home with him.

None of the porn was homemade; the DVD collection outside was all store-bought, action adventures and teen comedies, horror and sports. There didn’t appear to be any books in the apartment at all. I sat in front of the computer and searched for any file containing the words “emily,” “howard,” “threesome” or “porn.” As I did, I heard sirens outside. There was a folder with some photographs of Emily as she used to look; that was all. I tried searching for Brian Taylor under his own name and the nickname “Brock”-nothing. I opened Entourage and sorted the “Sent Items” folder by “Attachments”-and finally came up with it. It was called “emho” and it had been sent as an attachment to the e-mail address “maul@2ndphase.ie.” There was nothing in the subject line or body of the mail to indicate who it was being sent to. I found the original “emho” and opened it. Inside were the photographs of Emily’s threesome. I gave the rest of the room a quick trawl to see if there was anything I had missed. The sirens reached a crescendo and stopped. I looked out quickly over the balcony. Two white Garda cars with blue and yellow markings were outside. I didn’t have much time. I deleted the e-mail, then deleted the contents of the Deleted Items folder, trashed the “emho” folder, emptied the trash and shut the Mac down. I finished back at David Brady’s body for one last look. He had patch pockets on his shirt, but they were soaked in blood; the pockets to his low-slung jeans were easier to get to; one had a handful of change, which was no use; the other had a mobile phone, which was. The light by the side of the elevator showed the Guards were on the fourth floor; I reckoned there’d be four of them, two in the lift, a uniform to watch the foyer, another for the fire stairs; I jammed the apartment door wide open and made it to the stairs as the elevator left seven. There was no sign of a Guard on eight or seven; I flashed a look over the balcony and saw him about a third of the way up; I went down to six and ducked inside. I summoned the elevator and went down to the first floor, then got off, sent it down, and made for the stairs again. The Guard above me had vanished: checking one of the upper floors, I guessed. On the ground floor, I took a squint through the small window into the foyer. The uniform, a blonde with hair cropped short and long legs, was looking into the empty lift. She looked toward the fire door and I pulled back. I didn’t want to go through the back exit into the yard in case it tripped the alarms. I looked back: the elevator doors were closing, the uniform presumably inside. I kept my head down and pushed fast through the door and along the foyer onto the street.

I sat on a stool in the Anchor bar for a while going through the text messages on David Brady’s phone and savoring my first alcohol in a month. Strictly speaking, I should have waited until midnight, but since I had never before interfered with and altered a crime scene, or tampered with and stolen vital evidence, I figured I was entitled to an early drink. Two actually, a double Jameson and a pint of Guinness. The Anchor was its usual hushed, devotional lunchtime self. No food was served, or even contemplated; men did their dreaming and praying over pints and shorts, working their newspapers like beads; Silent John, the barman, kept a gruff distance. Hard to blame him: the Anchor was full of people who started drinking at ten thirty in the morning; when I wasn’t working, I was sometimes one of them; why would a barman want to be friends with a bunch of alcoholics? On the other hand, why run a pub like the Anchor if you didn’t want to spend your life among drunks?

It didn’t take me long to find the message I was looking for: 452 Pearse Avenue, Honeypark, plain and simple. Not a rugby-playing address, but not far from Seafield Rugby Club. I thought about David Brady, dead at twenty, and wondered what had taken him from the Waterfront Apartments to Honeypark Estate, and finished my drinks and went to see if I could find out.

Honeypark and Woodpark are sprawling local authority estates on the southern borders of Castlehill and Seafield. Woodpark dates back to the forties, and many of the houses have been bought out by their tenants and subsequently sold on to young middle-class families; most have been through the three generations they say it takes for a council estate to be tamed. Although it still has an edge, the estate no longer possesses the fearsome reputation it had in my youth, when news that the Woodpark lads were on the prowl gave the dullest of evenings out a sense of danger, often realized. That honor now belongs to Honeypark, built during the eighties in the expansive grounds of a tumbledown Anglo-Irish “Big House” south across the main road. Someone told me they took all the tenants who’d been evicted for antisocial behavior for ten miles around and dumped them in the improbably named Honeypark. The buses had stopped going in early on, not only because they’d attack and rob the drivers, but because they’d tear down the bus stops and attack the buses with them. You could find any drugs you liked in Honeypark, but no one wanted to go in there to get them, so the dealers drifted up into Woodpark in grey hoodies and Burberry baseball caps, frightening the mothers with the three-wheel buggies and the old ladies with the two-wheel shopping trolleys alike. It’s not as bad as it used to be either, but no one could say Honeypark had been tamed.

I stopped off at the Woodpark Inn to check the list of bands scheduled to play there that night. Workers from the nearby industrial estates and retail warehouses were sitting down to soup and sandwiches and carvery lunches; balloons that looked like Halloween pumpkins and luminous plastic skeletons hung above their heads. The smell of food made me queasy; I wanted another drink, but I had work to do first. I found the posters advertising the night’s lineup: The Golgotha Pyre, Emily Howard’s boyfriend Jerry’s band, were third on the bill.

I walked back out into the mist and fading light and drove down into the sprawl of Honeypark. Every house had been painted white twenty years ago, and very few of them had been painted since, so the whole estate had an eerie sheen to it; dirty and wan, and furled in white cloud, it resembled a grimy snowdrift. Pearse Avenue was a long, meandering road that twisted and forked like a maze; I got lost two or three times until I took my bearings from the three sets of lads who were building bonfires on the paltry scraps of green the council had allocated for the tenants’ recreation and parked not far from the biggest of the three. The boys building it were excited, throwing the occasional banger at each other as they piled car tires and burst mattresses on top of packing crates and builders’ pallets. Pearse Avenue curved in a horseshoe oval on the far side of the green, and 452 was the center house of the five houses that made up the oval. As I put my hand on the gate, someone threw a banger that exploded a few feet away from me. I twisted my head, startled by the explosion, and heard the baying laughter of the boys who had thrown it; when I turned back, there was a short fat man with greasy black hair and a black tracksuit and heavy black shoes standing in the doorway of 452, flanked by two lads of about twenty in grey hooded tops and grey track pants, one tall and bulky, one short and slight. The hoodies started to approach me. It looked like I was in the right place. I preferred not to carry a gun, but I was wondering whether I should have overcome my scruples for Honeypark’s sake. On the other hand, these boys did not exactly look officer class. I vaulted the gate, reached in my breast pocket and pulled out an ID card. No one reached for a weapon when it looked like that’s what I might have been doing.

“Seafield Garda,” I said in a very loud voice, moving toward them, “investigating the murder of David Brady.”

The two grey hoodies looked at each other, then back at me. I said David Brady’s name and the word “murder” again, and the hoodies turned and nodded and ran fast in separate directions, leaping over the walls of the neighboring houses; the greasy fat guy looked like he wished he could join them, but now I was standing in his way. He backed toward the house, but I moved quickly to put myself between him and the door.

“Is this your house, sir?” I said.

“No. Yes. No,” he said, his voice ragged with tension.

“Which is it?”

“Yes.”

“Name?”

“Sean Moon.”

“What can you tell me about David Brady’s murder, Mr. Moon? What do you know about the disappearance of Emily Howard?”

His pale green eyes burned red; I could smell the whiskey in his open pores; sweat coursed down his acne-ravaged brow.

“I don’t know, I…I don’t know anything.”

I heard muffled sounds from upstairs: thumping on a floor or a plasterboard wall, then a muffled scream.

“They made me, I didn’t have any choice,” Sean Moon said.

I pushed past him and went straight up the stairs. The back bedroom door was shut, but it wasn’t locked. I opened the door to find two people locked in a struggle on the bed. One was Emily Howard, and the other was the skinny blond boy who’d been in the film and in the photographs, the one with the eagle tattoo on his shoulder. I could see it now; he was bare-chested, wearing only a pair of jeans; Emily wore a short red kilt and a black bra. They didn’t notice me for a few seconds, and I didn’t announce myself. Their struggle wasn’t much more than a play fight; in fact, it looked like foreplay; either Emily was stronger than the boy, or he was letting her dominate; she had straddled his chest and pinned his arms behind his head when she saw me.

“Who the fuck are you?” she said.

“My name is Ed Loy,” I said. “Your father hired me to find you.”

Using a hand flat on the boy’s hairless chest for balance, she swung a bare leg over his head and stood in front of me, head back, chest thrust forward. Her pupils were dilated until they seemed to stain her brown eyes black; her lips were so engorged they hung open; I could feel her hot breath in my face.

“What are you, some kind of private dick?” she said, her voice a sustained jeer on the edge of a laugh. I nearly laughed myself, her derision was so incendiary.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well you’ve found me. Now fuck off. Oh, no, wait, there’s one message you can take back to Daddy: tell him his nephew Jonny is here.”

The boy flinched when she said this, and turned away toward the window. Emily either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. She didn’t look like she was on drugs; or rather, she did, but I didn’t believe she was. Her eyes had the recklessness I had seen in her mother’s, but none of the coldness; they were aflame with passion and young-girl bravado; something about them looked not entirely sane.

“That’s right, Mr. Loy. I’ve been fucking my cousin Jonathan, Aunt Sandra’s pride and joy. Tell Daddy, tell Jonny’s mummy. Let them incorporate that into the illustrious fucking chronicle of the Howard family. Maybe then they’ll leave us both the fuck alone.”

Emily’s voice was quite high by the end of this, teetering on hysterical. In the olden days, I suppose I would have slapped her across the face. It would probably’ve been easier for her than having to hear what I did say.

“Emily, I’ve got some bad news. Your ex-boyfriend David Brady was found dead this morning. He was murdered.”

Emily’s face went perfectly still, and her eyes rolled back in her head. The blood left her face, and she began to shake. I thought she was having a convulsion, so I reached my hands out to steady her. She slapped them away and began to pummel me with her fists, raining blows on my chest and face. I caught hold of her arms below the elbow until she stopped and stood still for a while, her breath coming in quick bursts until she went limp and dropped her head onto my shoulder and let the tears flow. Jonathan leapt to his feet and came around the bed toward us. I held out a hand to keep him at bay. In a voice that sounded like a shrill, highly strung version of Denis Finnegan’s, he screamed, “This is all your fault, you devious whore, you filthy fucked-up bitch!”