Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (20 page)

Pamela nodded her head, aware that she was flushed with humiliation.

“You an’ me, lady, we’re just two sides of the same coin, got the same name though. Now I think if you heard what you need to, it’s time for you to go.”

Pamela nodded, then stood. A movement near the bedroom door caught her eye.

She stopped breathing, fear making her entire body tingle. Was Love here? Could he have driven here and beat her to her destination? Then her heart resumed its job. The movement was that of a little boy, trailing a worn blanket, thumb stuck solidly in his mouth.

“Jakey,” Emma stood abruptly, voice sharp with panic, “you come here to mama.”

The child obeyed, still half asleep, coming to lean into his mother’s thin comfort.

He peeked shyly out from beneath Emma’s bruised elbow, sleepy cobalt eyes still dreaming, jet hair ruffled, a mangy teddy bear with round bandages for eyes clutched tightly to his chest. Pamela smiled at him but knew the gesture didn’t reach her eyes.

Emma caught the look and pulled the boy closer to her side.

Pamela met her eyes, managing to keep her smile in place, despite the cold ball of fear that had settled in her stomach, “You said it yourself, Emma, blue eyes and black hair aren’t so uncommon in this neighborhood.”

Emma nodded, bones sharp against her pale skin, “Maybe they ain’t so common, either. I think you better get going now, lady.” The woman’s eyes had gone opaque, as still as amber in an ancient forest.

Pamela opened the door, the reek of the hallway hitting her in the face instantly. Emma’s voice, soft and flat, halted her momentarily.

“I’ll pray for you, lady,” Emma said, a sobriety in her tone that made the hairs go up on the back of Pamela’s neck. “Pray that the bastard doesn’t make a fist before you manage to get out of his palm.”

NORTH PHOTOGRAPHY WAS A HOLE in the wall establishment that sat above an old-world cobbler’s shop in Boston’s North End. The proprietor was a man by the name of Lucas North, who just happened to be an old friend of Jamie Kirkpatrick’s.

Pamela had met him when she lived in Jamie’s home and Lucas had been passing through on his way back from France where he’d been photographing the student riots in Paris. The majority of his time was spent now in Vietnam where he was often months in country, following the baby-faced soldiers as they fought to survive a jungle and a culture that was completely foreign to their innocent American psyches. He strung for the big dailies:
The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle
as well as occasionally having his work featured in
Time
and
Life.

When his last assistant had left for New York, Lucas contacted Pamela, stating that Jamie thought she might be interested in helping him out, at least short term. He was on one of his brief furloughs and it was either close up shop or find someone to replace the lost assistant immediately.

Lucas North wasn’t long on charm. He was terse, didn’t tolerate fools gladly, and was the best damn photographer that Pamela had ever seen. She learned more in the rare hour he could spare for her when in Boston than she ever would have in school. She had spent three days with him the first time and done two weddings and a bar mitzvah under his supervision. She had also attended two crime scenes, as Lucas had connections within the force and had done a lot of homicide scene photos during the early 60s. Back then, he told her, it had been mostly mob hits. There had been twenty-four factions of the mob in Boston and they had kept both the police and Lucas fairly busy. He had also attended a few of the Strangler scenes.

“It was unbearable in the city when the Strangler was on the loose. Women were afraid of their own shadows, and rightly so, for months. It’s frightening how one man can hold so many people hostage for such a long period of time.”

Lucas and she had developed the photos from each event together, and he’d looked them over with a critical eye afterwards. Then he had merely said, “You have the eye.”

She had floated on air for a week after. Those few words were as good as a shower of praise from another person.

Despite his words, she didn’t fool herself, knowing that it was geographical proximity more than any God given talent that had landed her the job. But she was willing to work hard, and the focus that photography required allowed her to immerse herself within its colors and nuances, its elusive and frustrating compositions, its art and workmanship. And then she could forget about the other parts of her life, even if the relief was only temporary.

On weekends she hovered and arranged and smiled, and shuffled youthful wedding parties. Searching for that grace note in the faces of red-nosed uncles who’d had too much to drink, harassed fathers who wondered how much her services were costing them, and the slightly disillusioned faces of married women who were taking bets in the kitchen on how long the union would last. She loved the weddings herself, though she knew many photographers considered them one of the lesser circles of hell.

She loved the gauzy-netted butterfly bridesmaids and the queen bee bride decked out in tulle and taffeta. She loved the uncertain grooms and beer-drinking ushers. Her favorite pictures were the ones she took in the evening, as the reception wound down and the cake had been cut and crumbled, when the bride was swoony in her new husband’s arms and he wore a look of protective possession that was aeons old. She loved the old grandmas in their net stockings and flowered dresses. The rough talk of the men out back of the hall in the harsh sodium lights, shirt cuffs rolled up and ties abandoned. The sleepy children collapsed on relative laps, faces sticky with sugar and heat. In all these faces, she saw the promise America had always held for the Irish. In the broad faces and curly hair, the quick wit and rough camaraderie. Not the streets of milk and honey some had believed they would find, but the America they had hewn out with their own hands and spirits. An America that was now post-Camelot, without the gilded prince at its head. In these moments, it was tempting to wander the forbidden territory of what ‘might have been.’ What if Kennedy hadn’t been killed at the peak of his powers? What if America’s Camelot had not been sacked in the hour when her flags were about to fly golden and glorious above the world, a beacon of idealized pragmatism led by a man whose grandfather had sold dried goods in the streets of Boston?

John Kennedy’s death represented the end of an age and a chance to the Irish in America. As if there had been a moment when they might all, the entire country, have grasped that golden ring and held it for eternity. But it seemed as if the dream had slipped past, eluded all their hands by the merest slice of time, and now that dream was behind and they were pressing forward into unknown territory, with only some realization that Camelot lay back there on the dark continent, and was now irretrievable. It was both the sorrow of lost promise and the stubborn survival of a people who had known little peace that she saw in their faces.

It was after a wedding at St. Catherine’s one Saturday afternoon in late October that she spotted a man in the crowd of guests that was all too familiar. He was slim, red-haired and clad in a very expensive pale gray suit. She frowned, keeping him in her peripheral vision as she changed the film in the camera and pulled black netting over the lens, fastening it in place with a rubber band. It was a trick she used when photographing the older ladies in attendance, it softened all the lines and wrinkles and gave a soft glow to the picture that they always appreciated.

Inevitably at these events, she always attracted the attention of some young Turk that would follow her around for the afternoon and evening, packing her equipment, assessing whether she was a likely prospect. Some cleared off once she made it clear that she wasn’t available, but others would still hang about, chatting. These she put to work, which they always did with a good natured air, most of them slightly drunk by early evening, but perfectly amiable and still fit enough to pose in front of her camera as she adjusted the frame and focus on their black coats and then measured the light against their white shirts.

At this particular wedding, it was a young man named Charlie. He was twenty-eight and had done three tours of Vietnam, the most recent of which had left him with a leg full of shrapnel and hands that shook constantly. She had first met him at the O’Connell 25
^th
wedding anniversary five weeks previous. At first he had made her slightly nervous as he had stared at her throughout the festivities. Finally, though, he had approached her and apologized.

“Sorry, I know I’ve been staring all night. It’s just that I’ve seen a lot of ugliness these last few years and looking at you kind of makes me feel like I’m erasing some of that.” After that, his stare hadn’t bothered her. His presence also had the added bonus of keeping the ‘Hopefuls’ as Charlie had taken to calling the men, young and old, that inevitably clustered around her at these functions, at bay.

Southie’s social structure being what it was, she tended to see many of the same faces at the various social functions. Charlie seemed to be on everyone’s list, as this was the fourth wedding at which they’d found themselves together.

“What do you know about him?” she asked Charlie, nodding toward the agent. He was chatting with a group of men in the gathering dusk near the parked limousine that the bride and groom had arrived at the hall in. He stood with them, yet the men all held themselves warily; none were truly relaxed, which told her volumes about how well Mark Ryan was trusted within his old neighborhood.

Charlie looked over from his perch in front of a mostly naked cherub. “Mark Ryan—he’s from the neighborhood, moved back not too long ago. He’s a feeb.”

“Do he and Love Hagerty know one another?” she asked, striving for a casual tone.

He raised a thick, sandy brow. “Sure they do. Anyone who grew up in Southie knows that. Mark used to follow Love around like a pup on a leash for years. There’s ten years between them. Love tolerated him, gave him money for ice cream, things like that. He likes to have someone looking up to him; Mark fit the bill, so Love always treated him well. Twisted a few arms is what I heard to get Mark into the field office in Boston. Otherwise someone his age would be working out of Podunk, Idaho.”

She merely nodded and smiled, though a sick feeling rooted in her stomach. Charlie was absolutely right. If Mark Ryan knew Love Hagerty that well... if he still retained the old neighborhood ties, and it seemed he did as he’d moved back into his family home in the Old Colony projects, then it wasn’t likely he was protecting anyone other than Love Hagerty himself.

It was true that Love seemed all too charmed. Even armed with what Emma had told her there still didn’t seem to be a crack anywhere in the man’s life either professional or, unless she counted herself, personal. That neither he nor Blackie had ever been charged with any sort of crime, had never done time in prison, and in Love’s case had even managed to keep the whispers to a low enough level not to harm his political career, had the waft of a week old can of tuna. Unfortunately, these musings led to one conclusion—that Love had several well-placed contacts in all levels of law enforcement watching his back. This was something she had understood before, but now realized it reached into the echelons of the FBI. Which made her own current position even more of a tightrope act than it had previously been.

When she came up with the extra lens she’d been rooting for in her camera bag, Mark Ryan was standing right next to her, so close she could smell the harsh reek of his scotch and the starch in his shirt. Charlie had wandered off to find a drink and so she found herself alone with the agent.

“Pamela Riordan, I believe,” he said, though she knew he was fully aware of just who she was.

“Yes.” She adjusted the aperture on the lens, affecting a nonchalance she did not feel. This man put the fine hairs up on the back of her neck and she was quite certain he knew it.

“How’s that husband of yours?” he asked, leaning casually against a low stone wall that skirted the grassy area.

“He’s fine,” she said stiffly, “though I wasn’t aware you were acquainted with him.”

“I heard he’d gone out on a cod boat,” he said, eyes narrowed, assessing her reaction to his words.

“Yes, he did,” she said, as calmly as if they were engaged in an ordinary conversation.

“Dangerous occupation,” he said, swirling the ice cubes in his glass before taking a long swallow of the whisky. “Uncle of mine got gaffed on a boat, tore his arm right through. Died from the infection few weeks later. There are an awful lot of memorials up and down this coast to dead fishermen.”

She didn’t dare blink right now, nor swallow, nor show any weakness to this man. Even if he’d just voiced her very worst nightmare about what might happen to her husband out on the sea. Still she realized his words were meant more in the line of a threat. That anything could happen to Casey and she would be powerless to stop it. Only perhaps not as powerless as he believed.

The smell of crushed grass rose in her nose. Mark Ryan’s eye flickered the slightest bit, and she knew Charlie had moved into place behind her.

“I think you better move along, Agent Ryan,” Charlie said, and though his voice was low, it carried a heavy threat that was unmistakable. Mark Ryan merely raised a red brow and then poured the rest of his whisky into the ferns behind him, straightened his tie and nodded at Pamela.

“Until later then, Mrs. Riordan.”

She was silent, the lack of words as effective an insult as any. Her senses remained on full alert as he moved off into the dusky shadows that were lengthening across velvety lawns, reaching out darkly from crooked oak boughs.

“What the hell was that about?” Charlie asked.

She took a breath, realizing she’d been holding it the entire time Mark Ryan had stood near her. A cold trickle of sweat was running down her spine, causing her to shiver involuntarily.

She summoned up a weak smile for Charlie. “Nothing, he was just asking after Casey.”