Dead Irish (13 page)

Clearly the thought had never occurred to the priest. “I was Eddie’s confessor, Dismas, and I’m not abusing the secrecy of the confessional when I tell you that he was faithful to Frannie. Completely. He was madly in love with her.”

Hardy thought he knew that, but it was still nice to hear it. “Okay,” he said, “so what about Polk’s wife?”

Cavanaugh was grappling with something. “All this, you understand, is just trying to get at the truth,” he said. “I don’t want to be saying things that may be scandalous if they’re irrelevant to what you’re doing.”

Jesus, Hardy thought, suddenly remembering all too clearly why he had left the Church. If you took it all seriously, as Jim Cavanaugh certainly did, the rules could bind you up ’til you couldn’t even think, much less take any action.

“Why don’t you let me decide? This is confession, remember. It ain’t going anywhere else.”

The priest considered a moment, then nodded. “Eddie thinks—thought—that Polk’s wife was in it for the money. And after the drop in business, when the company started losing money, suddenly maybe Mr. Polk wasn’t so attractive anymore.”

“Did he know this, or was it just a feeling?”

“He found out . . .” Again that hesitation, that slow decision to continue. “He found out something.”

Hardy couldn’t help himself. He stopped walking and laid a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “I said I’d tell you if you’re boring me.”

Cavanaugh grinned back, self-conscious. “It’s like I can’t just keep talking. Every single further step seems like a separate decision.”

“In high school,” Hardy said, “I’d make out with somebody and wonder if the kissing and petting were all separate sins. Finally I decided no. If it was a sin, it was just one of ’em. Same thing here. You’ve made the commitment, so let’s get it out.”

Cavanaugh grinned his movie-star grin. “Maybe you would have made a good priest, after all.”

“I think my past was a little too checkered.”

The priest got a kick out of that. “You’d be surprised. Quite a lot of priests have, as you put it, checkered pasts. I didn’t find my vocation ’til after high school myself.”

That was interesting, Hardy thought, but it didn’t get any closer to Nika Polk.

“So Mrs. Polk . . . what did Eddie find out?”

“Polk was in a hurry for money. He laid off a lot of guys Eddie would have kept, and kept a couple Eddie would’ve let go. The staff was down to a few marginal workers. Anyway, one of those guys figured Eddie was in on it, too, and let it out that Polk was planning some drug deal.”

They’d arrived back at the Shamrock. Behind them an orange and pink dusk was settling onto the Pacific. The Friday-night traffic here on Lincoln was kicking into gear. The bar was hopping, jukebox blaring, Moses working the bar like the artist he was. He had Hardy’s Guinness and Cavanaugh’s Bushmills in front of them so fast he might have seen them coming up the street four blocks away.

The couch against the back wall was flanked by entrances to the bathrooms. Over it, a dirty stained-glass window let in a bit of the day’s last light. Patrons kept up a steady stream going by. In all, it was as private as any confessional Hardy could remember.

Cavanaugh had removed his collar. He sat hunched forward, shirt open, startlingly handsome, sipping slowly at the Irish. His reticence was gone. It had to come out.

“So here I am listening to a boy I could easily feel—hell, I do feel!—is my son, and he’s just burning, I tell you, Dismas, burning to do the right thing. He wants to confront Polk, somehow convince him that it can all work out with his wife, then go back to the publisher, take ’em all on one at a time and win them over just by the force of the argument. He really saw it so clearly. If everybody involved was fair and upstanding, it would all work out. The company would be saved, Polk could keep his wife happy, the whole megillah.”

Hardy sipped his Guinness. “That’s Eddie. Sure as shit, excuse me.” Although apologizing for swearing in front of this man was, upon reflection, unnecessary. “He really thought that way, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“And you tried to point out a little, uh, reality?”

Cavanaugh sat back now, the broad shoulders sagging. “There’s my sin, Dismas. That’s what I’ve been getting at.” The eyes lowered, matching the voice. “We talked a long time, Eddie and me. He was the most wonderful speaker, even one on one. Passionate, elegant, really convincing. He was the kind of kid could flatter you that he wanted your opinion.” He drained his drink. “So here I am, Father Cavanaugh, and I send this fine man off to slay the dragon. Do I think about the reality of it, about his pregnant wife, his real duties, whether he’s the man for the job? No way. Not me. The good holy Father Cavanaugh thinks about how right he is, what a wonderful notion it is, how everyone will be so proud.”

His eyes came up. “Pride, Dismas. My pride killed Eddie Cochran.”

15

SAM POLK STOOD in the upstairs bathroom, combing his hair. Out the window in the warm night he heard the bubble of the hot tub’s jets, the soft music his wife was listening to.

It was nice having a beautiful naked woman in your hot tub. Hell, it’s nice having a hot tub.

He took the tiny pair of scissors—he could barely get his thick fingers through the holes—and carefully snipped at the hair that persistently grew out of the top of his ears. His stomach tightened up on him again. Not now, he thought. Just think about Nika downstairs. Not the other stuff.

The hot tub was new. The whole house—after a lifetime in a flat in the Mission—was new. His life was good. Think about that. Don’t let the stomach betray you.

He opened the cabinet and popped two antacids.

“Sammy!”

He opened the window. The tub glowed in the surrounding darkness. Looking down from this height, he saw her body through the water—the patches of shadow, the curve of flesh.

“Be right down,” he yelled out the window.

He didn’t care what it took, he wasn’t giving this up. It was bad luck the way the business had gone just after the marriage, and sure, he should have thought more for the future during the good years, but he would be damned if he’d let anything interfere with this.

He’d worked his whole life, starting as a shoeshine boy downtown before he was ten, then selling peanuts at Seals games, finally getting a job with the old
Call-Bulletin
as a newspaper boy. And where the other kids his age had seen it as a part-time gig for spending money, he figured he could turn some decent bread by covering the same route, and then all the adjacent ones, for all four of the local papers. Those jobs had bought his first truck.

And now it was fifty years later, near what should have been his retirement, six months after buying his estate in Hillsborough, eight months into his marriage to the woman who’d made him remember what it was to be a man. Nosiree, he wasn’t going to get beaten at this stage.

But he was getting nervous.

The money had been in his safe at work all week. That had made everything suddenly seem very real. Before that, while not exactly a lark, it had had the quality of make-believe. He hadn’t yet done anything illegal. Or at least anything he could be caught for.

But then the call that the boat had arrived put everything into a new light. It was out in the Bay, waiting for the drop. Did he have the money? Where and when could he take delivery?

So Friday had been a scramble day, and though he’d prepared for it, he found there was no way to lessen the fear of carrying around over one hundred thousand dollars in cash.

He’d gone to different branches of his bank in the course of cleaning out his savings in the hopes that no one would review the account activity. And by the end of the week, he’d told himself, he’d been sure he’d have it all back reinvested and no one would be the wiser. And now it was the end of the week.

The problem with this drug thing was that nobody had ever written a book on how to do it. It was all seat-of-the-pants, and the cash aspect was a major problem. If they only took American Express.

And then there was the whole situation with the middlemen. His business acquaintance, his supplier, was one thing. They were exchanging product for money. But Alphonse Page, who worked for him at the shop, was another matter entirely. Young, black, street smart, neither intelligent nor creative, he was nevertheless the person Sam found himself depending on the most to pull the whole deal together. He had the connection to get rid of this stuff in town. He was important. He eliminated a whole layer of distribution. The problem was, after his years doing business, he didn’t like the fact that someone like Alphonse had become important. It made his stomach hurt.

He smiled at himself in the mirror, and his stomach answered him with a growling cramp.

He grabbed his robe from the bathroom door and padded out to the landing, down the stairs through the alcove by the front door, and into the living room.

“How are you doing, Sam?”

He nodded and swallowed. “Alphonse,” he said, and seeing his daughter now behind him, “Linda.” He tried to smile. “What’s going on?”

“I was kind of wondering the same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

Alphonse was taller—far taller—than Sam, but he had an economy of movement, a swift jagged way of acting that made him all the more of a force. He was absently cleaning his fingernails with a pocket file, and Sam saw the quick flick outward before he checked himself.

“Today’s payday, man.”

Linda popped in. “Remember? You were gonna come in to sign the checks. I mean, Alphonse really needed the money. . . .”

Alphonse smiled all around. “I don’t do charity, man,’cept my own.”

Sam, feeling the sweat start to run down under his arms, tried to sound calm. “Right. No problem there.”

“See, Daddy,” Linda was saying, “so I figured it would be cool if we just came by. I mean, I knew where you were, so—”

Sam held up a hand. Sure, Linda, he thought. Take the man I most want to avoid and walk him inside my face. His daughter, he thought, was hopeless.

“No, it’s a good idea. Why don’t you go make yourself a drink while Alphonse and I go in the office?”

She seemed to look to Alphonse for permission. He definitely gave her some message before she started moving back to the bar off the kitchen.

“Linda?”

She turned.

“Would you mind telling Nika I’ll be out in a minute? She’s in the hot tub.”

“Nice place,” Alphonse said as he entered the office. Then, as the door closed, “What the fuck’s going on, Sammy?”

Sam, his stomach now a jumbled mass of razor blades and ice picks, leaned against his desk. “I think we’d better leave it Mr. Polk, Alphonse. Okay?”

Reestablish that old authority, he thought. Alphonse took the knife, and before Sam had seen it move, his arm was bleeding through the slash in the white robe.

“We do business and it’s Mr. Polk,” Alphonse said most reasonably as Sam felt the blood draining out of his face. “You fuck with me and it’s whatever I want.”

Sam looked down at his arm, registering the blood as interesting. He felt no pain, except in his stomach.

“I’m not fucking with you.”

“You didn’t come to work today. Fact, you didn’t come to work this week.”

“I didn’t know Ed Cochran was going to get killed Monday night.”

“You didn’t?” Alphonse had turned around and was running his hand over the leather on the back of one of the chairs.

“No, of course not. Why would I?”

Sam considered getting to the desk drawer and pulling the gun on Alphonse, who was getting way ahead of himself, Sam thought, probably thinking about his future riches. But then he remembered that until the deal was done, he needed him.

Suddenly his arm throbbed, and he looked down to see the blood. He lifted a thigh over the corner of the desk and slumped against it.

“I feel bad about Ed,” Alphonse said. “I really do. I liked the guy.” He turned back to his boss. “But, like you and me, we had business. Hey, you all right?”

Sam was feeling himself going over. Alphonse snapped the knife closed and crossed to the front of the desk. He held Sam upright, pulled the arm of the robe up roughly. “Come on, man, get a grip. You ain’t hurt.”

“Let me get in my chair. Go ask Linda to get me a drink.”

Force of habit, Sam thought. Alphonse still obeyed orders when they were given like orders. That’s the way to keep control—never show your own weakness. He was in his chair, the terry cloth now pressed tightly against the wound.

“Nothing. We’re just talking,” he heard Alphonse say to Linda.

Then he had the drink, a water glass filled with bourbon. He drank off half of it. “All right,” he said.

“All right what?” Alphonse swung his legs, heels tapping the front of the cherry desk.

“What did you want me to do? The place was crawling with cops. Didn’t you tell that to your people?”

Alphonse sucked at his front teeth. “My friends, the time thing is, like . . . it’s like critical with them.”

“I understand that.” The booze was working. He took another drink. “What’s the matter, Alphonse? This got you nervous?”

The boy had evidently worked his way up and past his earlier bravado. Now the rush was wearing off. “I’m not nervous. My friends got contracts they gotta fill.”

Sam forced a cold smile at his employee. “Don’t give me any of this pseudobusiness bullshit, Alphonse. They got a buncha junkies they gotta keep high—squeeze all the money they can out of them before they die.”

“That money’s your money.”

“A very small percentage, Alphonse. Very small.”

“But a nice package.”

Yeah, Sam thought. Four hundred twenty-five thousand dollars cash. A nice profit for his one-twenty investment. But only if it worked. If it didn’t, he was basically tapped out. He couldn’t think much about it if it didn’t work. Tapped out could be the least of it.

His stomach was arguing with the bourbon, but it felt so good everywhere else he ignored it. “My guys wouldn’t deliver. Not there, and not on that particular Tuesday. That’s all there was to it.”

“So where and when?”

Sam put his head back against the firm leather. This wasn’t going to fly very well, and he knew it. “They’re gonna let me know.”

“Shi—”

“What can I tell you? They said this weekend, tomorrow maybe. They want to find a better place.”

Alphonse pushed himself off the desk, walked nearly to the door, turned around. “So what do I do meanwhile?”

“What I’m doin’, Alphonse. You wait.”

He came right up under Sam’s nose, and Sam thought he could smell the fear. “I can’t wait, man, they’re on my ass. They been holdin’ their money a week now.”

Well, Sam thought, I know what a good time that is. “Couple more days. Tell ’em by Monday night.”

“I’m wrong again, they’ll cut my nuts off.”

Sam finished the bourbon. “Every business has its risks, Alphonse. Point is, you gotta trust me. ’Cause if I’m scamming you, you’re meat anyway. You’re the one sold me to them, remember?”

He’d been in distribution his whole life. Buy something from one source, move the merchandise, and sell it to another for profit. That was the American way.

The only hitch was, in this cocaine business, you had people who were not entirely trustworthy. That was fine, Sam knew, as far as it went. People cheated wherever they could, at solitaire even. But it would be especially stupid to forget it here.

And he had done that with Cruz—forgotten that cardinal rule. After playing straight for all those years, the bastard had just walked away from the deal. Keep Cruz in mind, Polk told himself, if ever again you’re tempted to trust somebody in business.

The arm had stopped bleeding. Alphonse had been right—it wasn’t a bad cut, maybe four inches down the front of his arm.

Since he wasn’t about to trust anybody on this deal, he thought he’d set it up smart. He still thought so. The connection had been from years before. An importer, a businessman. Never touched drugs himself. They’d talked at a party—it must have been the early seventies, when cocaine was just starting to catch on.

But at the time, Sam was doing fine with newspapers—who wouldn’t in San Francisco with the
Free Press, Rolling Stone
and the other hippie rags, to say nothing of the majors? He hadn’t needed to risk anything back then.

“Hey, anytime. I mean it. Seed money’s always in demand,” the connection had said.

So now the newspaper business had gone belly-up, and Cruz had hung him out to dry, cut off using him for distribution, just when he couldn’t afford to go broke. Nika wasn’t the kind of woman to go betting on the come. He’d promised it up front, had delivered up to now. That was their deal. If he broke it, he wouldn’t even blame her for walking.

Who could? A woman who looked like her, who could do what she did, she could have it all, and right now. She could demand it anywhere and get it, and he knew it. More important, she knew it.

So he’d made the call to the old connection. One hundred twenty would bring him between three fifty and five, or, if he wanted to step on it himself and peddle the street, maybe a million or two.

No, he didn’t want that. He wanted in and out. What he wanted was to put up the money to make delivery worthwhile. Then unload the stuff. Deal with buyers and sellers individually—to groups of guys who didn’t know each other, who wouldn’t be likely to get to each other and set him up. Everybody makes a profit and everybody needs the middleman, so he’s safe.

That was the theory.

The only problem was he had to take delivery himself. He needed Alphonse for when it was time to pass the trash and deliver him his money, but he didn’t want anybody else involved with the actual delivery. For that, the canal behind Cruz’s had been ideal. He’d gone down last weekend, cut the fence, set it all up perfectly. By all rights it should have been over already.

Goddamn Cochran, he thought. God damn Ed all to hell.

“Jesus, Sammy, no robe even?”