The Haunting Ballad (3 page)

In response to my hello, a breathless young female voice launched into a monologue. “Oh! Mr. Plunkett? Mr. Lee Plunkett? Gosh, I'm surprised to hear a voice on the other end! I've been calling this number for days hoping to reach you. I was beginning to think maybe you'd retired or something. Not that you're old! No, I didn't mean that. Anyway, I'm just glad you answered. I'm hoping so much that you're the person who can set everything right.”

“To whom am I speaking?” I opted for professionalism instead of hurling out the
Who the hell is this?
that was on the tip of my tongue.

With a large sigh, the voice slowed itself. “Sorry. My name is Sally Joan Cobble.”

“Cobble?” I'd heard the name spoken not an hour before. “Like Lorraine Cobble?”

“My cousin. She … She died, you know.”

“Someone just told me. My condolences.”

“Thanks. I need you to find who killed her.”

That stopped me in my tracks. “It's my understanding that she, well…”

“Killed herself?” A note of bitterness crept in. “That's what everyone says, but it's just not true. She wouldn't have done that. I know the time you saw her at the Mercutio with Byron she was terribly agitated, but she would never—”

“Wait. How do you know I was there that night?”

“Because I was there myself. I came in with Lorraine.”

Now I had a face to go with the voice on the line—albeit a dimly remembered one. This was the short young blonde who had trailed Lorraine over to our table and tried to restrain her.

“I remember you,” I said. “How did you get my name?”

“People down at the Mercutio seemed to know who you were. Word gets around if there's an interesting character about.”

“Does me being a private eye put me in that category?”

“Oh yes. I heard you were from Connecticut, and I tracked you down. It seemed almost like a sign that you were there that night. Not that I've spent a lot of time at the coffeehouse myself. You see, I live outside Pittsburgh and was just up visiting Lorraine for that week, but I am back in the Village right now dealing with her apartment. On behalf of our family, I want to hire you to find whoever killed Lorraine.”

“Whoa now, Miss Cobble,” I said cautiously. “I can understand why you wouldn't want to believe your cousin took her own life, but I've heard there was a suicide note.”

“Suicide note?” Sally Joan sounded genuinely confused. “I think you've heard wrong, Mr. Plunkett.” She paused. “Oh wait! There
is
a note, but it's got nothing to do with suicide. I can show it to you when we meet.”

I caught a glimpse of a cart outracing a horse. “When we…?”

“Please, Mr. Plunkett, I'd rather talk in person about all this. Can't we at least sit together and talk?”

I gave in. “Sure, I suppose we could do that.”

I suggested we meet the next afternoon at her cousin's apartment. Might as well see the scene of the doubtful crime. Sally Joan Cobble thanked me profusely and gave me the address.

“I'll be bringing a colleague with me,” I added.

“Please do!” She almost sounded like we were arranging a garden party.

After hanging up, I sat there for a while reflecting on the weirdness of my life: Within an hour of my hearing from Audrey that Lorraine Cobble was dead, the woman's cousin had contacted me to solve her alleged murder. Here I was, potentially being drawn back into the orbit of the Café Mercutio, one of whose inhabitants might well be stealing my fiancée's affections. What a world, what a world …

I shook myself out of my little reverie and rang up Mr. O'Nelligan. Though he claimed to be glad to hear from me and asked about my sister's recuperation, there was a definite tone of distraction in his voice.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Oh, I'm splendid,” he answered in his rolling brogue, then added hazily, “It's just that this giant marlin has been putting up quite a battle.”

“Marlin?” I was struck by a preposterous image of Mr. O'Nelligan wrestling a massive fish across his sitting room. “What the heck are you talking about?”

My friend sighed with gentle exasperation. “
The Old Man and the Sea,
of course. By the estimable Mr. Hemingway. I'm in the final pages as we speak. Have you read it?”

The reality was that since high school I hadn't read much that didn't come with a lurid cover and a title akin to
Killer Cutthroats of Jupiter.
By contrast, Mr. O'Nelligan consumed books the way a kid gobbles gumdrops, mostly the great classics and other such highfaluting fare.

“Nope, never read it,” I said, “but assuming you've landed your marlin by tomorrow, I've got a possible case that might pique your interest.”

I repeated the conversation I'd had with Sally Joan Cobble. For an extended moment, there was no response on the other end of the line. I guessed that my friend was sneaking himself another paragraph of deep-sea drama.

Finally he answered, “By all means, Lee Plunkett, I shall attend thee.”

“That means you'll be coming along, right?”

“Did I not just say so, boyo?”

*   *   *

HOW TO DESCRIBE
Mr. O'Nelligan? There are the facts of his life, of course, which would trickle out of him at odd intervals. You just never knew what fragment of his varied history he'd next reveal. Once, for example, he and I happened to be crossing a cemetery when I paused to comment on the fanciness of a particular mausoleum.

Mr. O'Nelligan nodded appreciatively. “Indeed, the ornamentation is striking. The structure itself appears quite sound as well. I myself built one once.”

“You built a mausoleum?”

“I did. It was many years ago, to be sure. Mine was of red brick, being a bricklayer as I was.”

“You were a bricklayer back in Ireland? I thought you'd been a teacher?”

“Also a train conductor and a salesman and a stage actor. A man may pursue many callings in his time, may he not?”

You've also been a warrior,
I could have said but didn't. Early on, I'd learned not to probe my friend too deeply on that subject. In his youth, back in the '20s, he'd played perhaps his most contrary role: that of the covert rebel and soldier. I knew that he had both faced and dealt death during those days. I knew that he wore his trim gray beard as camouflage for an old knife scar. All this seemed to conflict with the genteel individual that I'd come to know and admire.

There among the gravestones, Mr. O'Nelligan waxed poetic. “Laying bricks has much in common with your chosen art of deduction, Lee.”

“You don't say.” I in no way viewed my job as an art—I was satisfied just to draw a paycheck on the rare occasion.

“It's true. Just as a bricklayer must work brick by brick, row by row, to raise a solid structure, so must the detective build his case, stacking one observation upon the next until the proper outcome is achieved.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“Well, now you shall, yes?”

“Oh, yes indeedy.”

At the time of the Cobble case, I'd known Mr. O'Nelligan for about a year and a half. He'd moved to Thelmont from New York shortly after his wife's death and had settled himself into a cozy pine-hemmed little house three doors down from Audrey's family. Audrey and he had become fast friends, and in time I, too, had been won over by the man's quirky charms. On Audrey's urging, Mr. O'Nelligan had begun to aid me on my more complicated cases, and as a result my business (floundering since Dad's death) had been much revitalized. Mr. O'Nelligan was content to label himself my assistant, though that designation fooled neither of us—it was clear who had the true deductive chops in our partnership. Still, despite his invaluable help, the man wouldn't accept a penny from me. Whenever I'd argue the unfairness of that arrangement, he'd wave me off and declare, “Ah, it's fine, it's fine. Assisting you helps fill the hours and keeps my brain well oiled. What more compensation could an old reprobate desire?”

I never did come up with a good answer to that.

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

I considered letting Audrey know about my appointment with Sally Joan Cobble but decided against it. After all, I hadn't officially agreed to take on the case, and, considering whatever was going on with my fiancée, I figured it best to just see how things shook out. I did place a call to her house, though, and left a message with her mother that I'd be on a job out of town, so Audrey should make her own evening plans. That Friday afternoon—the day after Sally Joan's call—I picked up Mr. O'Nelligan and headed down Route 7 toward the Merritt Parkway.

“A fine spring day, isn't it?” my companion noted. He was dressed nattily in his standard vest and necktie. “A splendid beginning to a quest.”

“Listen, this is no quest,” I grumbled. “We're just going to meet a potential client. Accent on ‘potential.' Why is everything always a quest with you?”

“All life is a quest, lad. One merely needs to recognize it as such.”

Somehow in Mr. O'Nelligan's eyes I had maintained my status as lad, even though I'd passed the thirty mark.

“The thing is,” I said, “I'm not at all sure that there's even a case here. We may be talking simple suicide.”

The Irishman clicked his tongue. “Ah, but suicide is never simple. Back home in County Kerry, there was a miller by the name of Blowick who drowned himself in the River Fertha. It was near the end of March, and he had to hurl into the freezing waters to meet his end. No one could figure the why of it till much later when someone put together that March 29, the day he perished, was the Feast of St. Eithne, and that in his youth poor Blowick had loved and lost a girl named Eithne O'Mara. So, you see, there is oft a hidden complexity to these things. If I might quote Yeats…”

“Couldn't stop you if I tried.”

My friend always seemed to have handy a quote from his favorite poet and fellow countryman, William Butler Yeats. He now let one fly:

“A pity beyond all telling

is hid in the heart of love.”

“No doubt,” I responded. “For all we know, maybe unrequited love was the cause of Lorraine Cobble's leap into air. She certainly seemed to me to be chock-f of passion.”

“So you were acquainted with her?”

I described my night at the Café Mercutio, highlighting Lorraine's colorful behavior but excluding any reference to Audrey's fascination with Byron Spires. In regard to Audrey and me, I didn't want to put Mr. O'Nelligan in the middle of … well, whatever there was to be in the middle of.

My friend
hmm
ed softly. “The late Miss Cobble sounds like she was quite a perfervid individual.”

“Did you say ‘perverted'?” In the face of Mr. O'Nelligan's ten-dollar word, I felt the need to mock. “Gee, I don't know that I'd go that far.”

“Perfervid! It means ardent, of course. Hot in the blood.” He groaned. “Dear God, sir, sometimes I think that you and the English language aren't even on speaking terms.”

“Listen, no one says things like ‘perfervid.' At least no one who hasn't read
War and Peace
a dozen times.”

“Three times,” Mr. O'Nelligan informed me. “I've only read
War and Peace
thrice.”

“Only three times? My, what a lazy scholar you are.”

“Scholarship is in the eye of the beholder.”

“Then I must have a nasty case of conjunctivitis.”

My companion sighed pleasantly. “Ah, Lee Plunkett, you have more wit than one might give you credit for.”

I took this as a compliment and let it go at that. Mr. O'Nelligan now opened the thick volume that he'd brought along and read aloud. “‘Call me Ishmael.'”

“Shouldn't I call you O'Ishmael?”

“More wit, I see. Be truthful, is this not arguably the most memorable first line in all of literature?”

“Must be, since I actually know it.
Moby-Dick
, right? Hey, wait a minute, didn't you just read that last fall?”

“I did, but coming off Hemingway's sea tale has inspired me to ship aboard the
Pequod
yet again—for the fourth time, I might add.”

“Trading a marlin for a whale … that's some hefty upgrading.”

“Although still within the nautical realm,” Mr. O'Nelligan observed. “For, after all, aren't Hemingway's Old Man and Melville's Captain Ahab both obsessed mariners in pursuit of an elusive leviathan?”

“I was just about to say exactly that.”

My comrade smiled and buried himself in his book for the next hour and a half.

As we arrived in Greenwich Village, Mr. O'Nelligan traded literature for history, giving me a brief lecture on the area. In 1822, he explained, a yellow fever epidemic in lower Manhattan drove thousands of New Yorkers north to Greenwich, a village of underpopulated pasturelands. Prior to that, it had been the realm of wealthy landowners who craved a bit of country living. The yellow fever changed all that, and before long the place became a bustling sprawl of grocery stores, coffeehouses, tailor shops, restaurants, banks, and bars. As early as the nineteenth century, Greenwich Village had gained a reputation for its artists, radicals, nonconformists, and generally memorable characters.

Turning onto West 12th, my friend indicated the oblong granite cobblestones that paved the street. “Belgian blocks. They made their way to America as ship ballast and became the very carpet of the Village. And speaking of ships, down just a ways stands the pier where, some forty-five years ago, the survivors of the ill-fated
Titanic
were put ashore.”

“Am I going to be tested on all this?” I asked.

“No, Lee. Knowledge is its own reward.”