Bel of the Brawl--A Belfast McGrath Mystery Page 19

  “I didn’t. I guessed. I looked it up online.” She pointed to the papers that she had been carrying around and I looked at them. Yes, there were mushrooms that could poison you in a short period of time, leaving you gasping for breath and then, ultimately, dead. It was all there in black-and-white but my money was still on the rogue vegan bringing her own food to the wedding. Seemed like a lot of trouble to go through, carrying mushrooms around on a wedding day and then making sure they got onto one specific plate.

  “That’s a ridiculous theory, Pauline,” I said, flinging the papers onto my coffee table.

  “Got a better one?” she asked, defiant.

  “What did you tell the police?” I asked.

  “Everything I told you,” she said. “All of it. The rehearsal dinner, the wedding…”

  “The rehearsal dinner?” I asked, stopping her in her tracks. “What do you know about that?”

  “It was at Connolly’s place. Weirdly enough, three nights before the wedding, not the night before,” she said. “I was still working there at the time. Moonlighting. It was my last night.”

  Interesting. A place I thought no one would know, would ever go to if they were Foster’s Landing folks, was becoming ground zero. “So, you’re going to be deported?” I asked.

  She looked up at the ceiling. “Don’t know. If what I think is true, and that James Casey killed his brother-in-law, well, I guess I have to stick around for a while. Until they prove it. Until a trial.”

  I thought back to the day when I followed her in her car. “James Casey was following you the other day after I gave you your check.”

  “Of course he was!” she said. “He’s been looking for me. Are you an eejit, Bel?”

  “That’s no way to talk to the only person who is going to give you a couch to sleep on,” I said. “Were you blackmailing him?”

  “No,” she said.

  “So he’s the only one that you’re not trying to get money from?” I asked. “We’ve got Jed Mitchell, Angus Connolly, and who knows who else.”

  “Those guys knew what they were getting themselves into with me. A good time. Nothing else,” she said.

  “And blackmail. Don’t forget that.”

  “Who cares, Bel? They’re not nice guys.”

  We could debate that point all day long so I changed the subject. “So you were moonlighting at Connolly’s place but decided blackmail was a quicker way to get funds?” I asked.

  Her look was inscrutable but I took it as a “yes.”

  “And why are you so devoted to helping Donnie get rid of his debt?” There didn’t seem to be any love lost between the two of them but what did I know? Maybe there was some leftover affection from a marriage that didn’t seem to ever have a chance in hell of surviving, if what I had learned about Pauline over the last few days was any indication of her character.

  “I’ve known the lad all my life,” she said. “He thinks we’re soul mates, but we’re not. More like brother and sister.”

  “Then why did you marry him?”

  As I waited for an answer, I saw something I never thought I’d witness: Pauline began to cry. I poured her the last of the wine, hoping I’d get the remaining answers to the questions I had to ask.

  “A baby,” she said. “There was a baby.”

  “You left a baby in Ireland?” I gasped. “All this time?”

  “No!” she said, shooting me daggers. “It died. A stillborn. After that, nothing was the same between us. He was gambling and I was sadder than I’d ever been. I left and never looked back.” She softened her gaze, knowing that the story had a lot of holes but that she wasn’t willing to fill them in. “Until now. Until he called me and told me that he was into Mugsy Calhoun for a couple of thousand large.”

  “Mugsy Calhoun?” I asked. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  The look on her face told me that she thought she had said too much, that she wished she could take it all back, but she just shook her head. “Nope. Scariest loan shark in Ballyminster. Wears a guy’s pinkie around his neck just to let everyone know what a badass he is.”

  “A pinkie?” I said, my voice going to a register I didn’t even know I had. “Okay, Pauline, between this and poison mushrooms, this has gone beyond preposterous.”

  She shrugged. “It’s just what I heard.”

  “From Donnie?” I asked.

  “From Donnie.”

  It was late and my head was spinning. I went to the closet in the hallway and pulled down a set of sheets, a pillow, and a blanket; I tossed them to Pauline. “It’s been a long day. I hope you’ll understand if I try to get some sleep?”

  She made the couch up in silence; she was plumping the pillow as I went into my bedroom. On my nightstand, my phone was lit up, a text from Brendan Joyce having just been received, and it was different than the earlier ones, leading me to believe that he was starting to wonder why we weren’t spending as much time together as we had previously.

  “Are you avoiding me?” it said.

  I held the phone in my hand. I’m going to avoid everyone, I wanted to type, but instead, I sent him a heart emoji, something he’d never know didn’t have a lot of sincerity behind it. Before I got into bed, I stuck my head out into the hallway and called to Pauline in the living room. “Pauline?”

  “Yes, Bel?” she said, her voice sounding weary.

  “What was on the menu at the rehearsal dinner?” I asked.

  “Chicken. A Marsala.” she said. “All I remember is the groom’s Chicken Marsala. Special order.”

  CHAPTER Thirty-seven

  I don’t know why I made it my responsibility to see how Donnie Kinneally was doing, but when Pauline awoke, after scrubbing my tub clean with some kind of cleanser that Mom had left for me and that I had never used, and taking a long, hot bath with some scented bath beads left over from the seventies, or so they smelled, she asked me if I would go to the hospital and check in on her ex-husband. The bath had clearly rejuvenated her but she still didn’t want to be seen in public.

  “I have work to do,” I said, knowing that as the words came out of my mouth, I would indeed go to the hospital because in spite of everything, Donnie, to me, was a bit of a sad case and my heart wasn’t that hard. Being into someone for tens of thousands of dollars, a guy who wore a man’s pinkie around his neck no less, must have been terrifying. I drove down to the medical center and, dutiful as always, stopped at the front desk where a woman named Cassandra gave me a visitor’s pass and instructed me not to pass it on to anyone else and to abide by the half-hour visitation rule that had been indicated on Donnie’s chart.

  I headed up to the fourth floor and Donnie’s room; a new staff had assembled at the nurse’s station and I nodded at them as I walked past, thinking that I would find a sleeping Donnie Kinneally in room 332, more color in his cheeks thanks to whatever antibiotics and magical juice were flowing through the IV into his veins.

  Instead, I came upon an orderly stripping an empty bed of its soiled sheets.

  I knocked lightly on the door. “Excuse me? Is Mr. Kinneally here?” I asked. Mary Ann had done us a solid, as Cargan would say, and gotten Donnie a private room so there was no roommate I could ask regarding his whereabouts.

  The orderly stuck to his task and pushed all of the sheets into a large bin that he wheeled past me. “He’s gone,” he said, making his way down the hallway.

  “Gone?” I asked. A sick feeling took hold of my stomach, my head getting light-headed at the thought.

  “Yeah, gone,” he said, making his way toward the elevator.

  “What time?” I asked. I didn’t think that we still lived in a world where people died of pneumonia, but apparently, I was wrong about that. Dead wrong, as it were.

  “Dunno,” he said, pushing the cart into the open elevator door. “If you hurry, you can probably still catch him.” The doors closed and I was left standing in the hallway, the sound of footfalls on the polished hallway floors the only sound after the orderly and
his cart of dirty laundry departed.

  Catch him? He wasn’t dead, just gone. I eschewed the elevator and headed down the stairs, swinging myself around the landings and hoping I wouldn’t end up in this very hospital’s ER with an injury as I busted out the ground floor’s door and into the lobby. Cassandra issued a stern warning as I raced through the lobby and out into the parking lot, just in time to see a more robust-looking Donnie Kinneally talking to a guy who could only be described as rakish, a fedora sitting atop a craggily handsome face. I flashed on the fedora and the same guy dancing with Pegeen Casey at her wedding. But before I could register what was happening now, Donnie was in the car, a black Town Car, a grimace on his face as he caught sight of me running toward him.

  “Wait!” I called, but it was no use, the car driving away at a leisurely pace, one that allowed me to find the Volvo in the parking lot and bring it to a noisy start—I had to remember to get Dad to look at the muffler—and begin my tail of the fedora-wearing man and his passenger.

  We wound through the streets of the lower county, finally getting onto the highway, the driver of the car in front of me never going over the speed limit, coming to a complete stop at every stop sign, yielding responsibly when asked to yield to other drivers. It was the most reasonable chase I had ever been on, despite the fact that I had only been on one other chase. But I had watched enough cop shows and movies to think that every one resembled the famous scene in The French Connection where cars darted in and out of traffic, avoiding young mothers pushing baby carriages and old people using walkers. This was like a Sunday drive—a strange one, but a nice one nonetheless. At one point, Donnie turned around from his position in the backseat and gave me a wave, one that said “Nice to see you, Bel. Odd that we’re taking the same route, isn’t it?”

  Odd, yes. And even odder when I realized where we were going.

  As we drove up the driveway to the Manor, the Town Car coming to a stop in front of my apartment, I wondered if the man wearing the fedora was interested in booking a wedding.

  When I saw his gun, trained on Donnie, the young guy walking in a straight line to the steps to my apartment, his mouth set in a grim frown, I realized that that probably wasn’t the intention of his visit. As I threw the car into reverse, putting pedal to metal, the Volvo breathed its last gasp, sounding eerily similar to Gerard Mason as he took his last gasp on his ill-fated wedding day.

  The guy in the fedora waved at me to get out of the car and I didn’t see that I had a choice. The ubiquitous lawn service, who interrupted every Monday morning of my time here at the Manor with their lawnmowers and leaf blowers, were nowhere to be seen, nor were any of the members of my intrusive family. Kind of like cops—there was never one around when you needed one. I thought for a moment about what I would do but it was clear that I had no choice. I got out of the car and started for the duo standing at the bottom of the stairs to my apartment, my legs feeling as if they were filled with lead.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, a stupid question and one that I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to.

  The man in the fedora smiled. “Just a spot of trouble,” he said, and in those few words, I heard the lilt of Ballyminster, this brogue sounding identical to Mom’s and Dad’s. “Nothing that a quick chat can’t fix.”

  Donnie and I headed up the stairs to the apartment, taking our time, the man in the fedora behind us. At the top of the stairs Pauline’s stricken face appeared in the window of the bathroom, her head going out of sight so quickly that I felt as if I may have imagined seeing her. I opened the screen door and went into the apartment, making as much noise as I could to let her know that we were past the bathroom and into the living room, hoping that my telepathic communication to her to flee was received. I also hoped that she would be as quiet as she could be as she exited the bathroom and went for help, but I had seen this woman in action and there was nothing quiet about her. I also wasn’t sure that she would have our best interests at heart, her own safety paramount.

  She was neither quiet nor interested in our safety as she busted through the bathroom door, hitting the screen door and heading down the back stairs. On the kitchen counter, I spied her car keys, wondering just how far she would get on foot.

  Fedora man looked at us and calmly said, “Stay here.”

  No chance, Dapper Dan. As soon as he was out the door, I slammed the back door shut, locked it, and yelled to Donnie, “Call 911!”

  When I got no response, my heart pounding from the panic, I raced down the short hallway to the living room where I found my partner-in-crime, as it were, passed out cold on the couch.

  CHAPTER Thirty-eight

  Kevin looked at Donnie Kinneally, now revived and drinking a cup of tea in my living room. “You’ll have to do better than ‘I dunno.’” He was clearly out of patience with the guy and who could blame him. Since Donnie had come back to life, all he had said was “I dunno” in response to every question he had been asked, even the easy ones like “What day is it?” Kevin looked at me, exasperated, while Cargan stood in the kitchen, his arms crossed, his face displaying the same placid look that it always had.

  I took a stab at the fedora-wearing man’s identity. “Was that Mugsy Calhoun?” I asked. I hadn’t detected a pinkie necklace around his neck but everything else about him screamed gangster.

  Donnie’s face went white at the mention, which led me to believe the answer was “yes.”

  Kevin looked at me. “What’s a Mugsy Calhoun?”

  “Irish gangster,” I said, as if that were the most normal thing about the whole conversation.

  “You’re making that up,” Kevin said.

  Cargan spoke up, a dozen feet away from the questioning going on in the living room. “Sadly, she’s not. Mugsy Calhoun is a notorious gangster in Ballyminster. Has started plying his trade in Boston recently. In my previous line of work, we were very aware of his activity.”

  “Why?” Kevin asked. “What does a gangster in Ireland have to do with things here in the U.S.?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” Cargan said.

  “Well, surprise me, then,” Kevin said, rapidly losing patience with Cargan’s “less is more” approach to conversation.

  “There’s drugs, for one. He’s got a container ship that makes its way back and forth across the Atlantic quite regularly to deliver ‘shipments.’”

  I flashed on the words “import/export” in my brain, my meeting with James Casey and his contention that most of what his company shipped was done by sea.

  “If you know this, how come you haven’t caught him yet?” Kevin asked.

  Donnie looked from Kevin to me to Cargan. “Aren’t you a banquet manager?” he asked my brother.

  Cargan looked him dead in the eye and told him the truth. “Yes, I’m a banquet manager.” He left out the part where he had been one of the best undercover cops the NYPD had ever had and was now on medical leave for PTSD. “Working on it, Hanson.” He gave Kevin a hard stare. “Working on it.”

  Kevin considered Donnie Kinneally, the look on his face telling me that he couldn’t figure out what was weirder about this conversation, Donnie Kinneally’s denial of knowing anything or Cargan’s assertion that one Mugsy Calhoun was in our midst. The way things had gone since I arrived home several months earlier, all of it made sense to me. Black was white at Shamrock Manor and up was down. Once you set foot on the grounds of the Manor, you had to suspend all disbelief. It was Crazy Town.

  Kevin put his hands on his hips, surveyed the living room as if my coffee table held the key to understanding all of this. “Where are you staying, Mr. Kinneally? And if you say ‘I dunno,’ I will resort to police brutality.”

  Donnie pointed out the window to the Manor in the distance. “There.”

  “Okay,” Kevin said. “Remain ‘there’ until further notice.” He looked at Cargan. “You and I need to talk.”

  Kevin and Cargan went outside and I sat down on the couch next to Donnie. “How are you feeling?
”

  He shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “On a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst one could feel, how do you feel?” I asked.

  “Fourteen.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Go on back to the Manor and get some rest. I’ll bring you some food later. Unless you’re hungry now?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not hungry.” He stood. “Really worried about Pauline, though. If he finds her, he’ll kill her.”

  “Why? Aren’t you the one who owes him money?” I asked.

  He fell back into the couch and held a pillow to his face. “Yes. It’s all my fault,” he said, his voice muffled behind my pillow. “He knows she’s got the money to pay my debt and he really wants to be repaid.”

  “Really? The amount you owe doesn’t sound like it would be worth the trouble on this guy’s part.” There was more to the story—there always was with Donnie and Pauline, I had come to learn. “Well, I can’t imagine how far she’ll get on foot,” I said.

  “You don’t know her. She’s fast. She’ll get as far as she needs to,” he said. “At least I hope so.”

  I sent him on his way. Guy was sick and needed his rest and I needed to be left alone to look into things on my own terms. I pulled my computer out from under my bed and made myself comfortable while I poked around. I had a hundred things to do at the Manor, but finding out if the guy I had seen was actually Mugsy Calhoun or some other nefarious type was at the top of my to-do list.

  As I scrolled through the information about Calhoun—all news to me—I thought back to a conversation Cargan and I had once had about criminals. We had been watching a Law and Order: SVU marathon one dreary Sunday afternoon prior to our family Sunday dinner, and I had mused that in real life, criminals seemed to make mistake after mistake after mistake and that it didn’t take the keen eye of Detectives Benson or Stabler to figure out what had happened, what had been perpetrated, and by whom. I had remembered a case where a guy had kidnapped a woman and then proceeded to use her credit card all over town, something that had led to his capture and arrest. I had asked Cargan why the guy would have done that.