The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI) Read online

  “This is not about you and me, this is about the case: if you were having an affair with your father-in-law—”

  “Is that what you think of me?”

  “I don’t think. I ask questions.”

  “Ask your question then.”

  Linda’s face was flushed but defiant, so beautiful it made my pounding heart sore. Maybe if I’d stopped there, and taken her in my arms, and let the case fade away, maybe she’d still be alive. But how could I have done that?

  The vodka arrived. Linda drank a shot straight off, then made herself a screwdriver. She gestured to the bottle, as if to say, If you want one, make it yourself, walked to the window and looked out at the night.

  “All right, Ed. Shoot.”

  “Were you having an affair with John Dawson?”

  Her voice, when she spoke, was low and melancholy.

  “John Dawson is a lost and lonely man. His marriage has been dead for years. In a way, it’s like he’s been dead for years, he seems to take no pleasure in the present, in living, in his achievements. He and Barbara exist in a kind of total war. But it’s a cold war. He…I could never work it out, him and Peter: John seemed to like him so much, you know? He’d sympathize with him that Peter hadn’t made the big impact he thought he should. It wasn’t like…well, you hear about successful men giving their sons a really hard time if they don’t live up to their expectations. John wasn’t like that. Barbara was. Actually, it was like John wanted Peter to do well so they could get Barbara off both their backs. But beyond all that, there’s something…detached about him. As if John was dealing with Peter, with Barbara, with the day-to-day of his life, but that it was all faintly unreal. I don’t know, I guess a lot of people get like that when they’re older, like the people they knew in the past are their true reality. But with John, maybe there was something more. One night a few months back…they were just starting the work on Seafield Town Hall, and Peter was working late all the time, and John arrived. Just, out of the blue…and asked me to sit with him, and…make him tea, or a drink, and sit and listen to him, you know? Like I was his daughter.”

  “His daughter?”

  “That’s what it felt like. And then it became a regular thing, he’d come over when Peter was out. He’d want me to dress up, and then he’d sit and talk. It was…it was really weird, I suppose. An affair, you could call it. A family affair. I liked it. I liked being a daughter. Never got the chance, my dad walked out when I was five. And he spoke as if he had a daughter, or that one day he hoped to have one. About the funny little games and songs they’d sing, and how she liked her hair in plaits, not pigtails.”

  “You said he talked about people from the past. What people? Did he talk about my mother?”

  “Not your mother, no. He talked about your dad. And a guy called Courtney. Kenny, I think it was. How they were the wild boys, the Three Musketeers, all this stuff. That was actually pretty boring, how they robbed this orchard, or bunked into this cinema, or how they set a goat free once.”

  The Three Musketeers. My father, John Dawson, and Kenneth Courtney. And Courtney Estates, directors Kenneth Courtney and Gemma Grand.

  “Did he say what happened to Courtney?”

  “He died. Wouldn’t tell me how. As if it upset him too much. Your dad disappeared, and Courtney died, and that was the end of that. End of everything.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, apart from the fact that he asked me to hire you.”

  “He what?”

  “Peter disappeared around the same time your mum died. By the time you got home, and the funeral was set and everything, there was still no sign of him. We knew about you in L.A., that you were a private detective and everything. John said I should hire you, that you’d find Peter. And more besides.”

  “And more besides. Did he say that?”

  “Yeah. That you were your father’s son, and you’d know what to do.”

  Linda stepped away from the window and stumbled as she crossed the room. She made another screwdriver, lit a cigarette and sat on the bed, looked up at me beneath long lashes.

  “Do you, Ed? Do you know what to do?”

  “What about the Halligans? You said Peter turned to them for help.”

  Linda shook her head and sighed.

  “The sins of the fathers. You know all the talk about John Dawson with those houses on Rathdown Road, how Jack Parland helped get him the votes on the council to get the land rezoned? And how that help was doled out of John’s back pocket? Well, that was Peter’s first idea: bribe everyone. Only trouble was, he didn’t want to use the money he earned from Dawson’s.”

  “He didn’t have the money. I’ve been through his bank accounts, money was going through them like rain through a sieve. The Halligans must’ve had him laundering cash for them or something.”

  “That’s why Tommy Owens was bringing him money the night he disappeared.”

  “Money to bribe Joseph Williamson.”

  Linda looked away at the mention of his name.

  “Do you know what happened to him, Linda?”

  “He wouldn’t budge. He was the vote Peter needed. And of course, the vote the Halligans needed. Because now they were in on the deal. They soon got a couple of councillors to accept ‘donations.’ Then George went to John and Barbara, told them what was going on, and made it clear he’d let the press know the attempt to rezone the golf club lands was dodgy. The Dawsons realized they were trapped: they couldn’t go to the police, they just had to suck it up and hope for the best.”

  “I thought they had Superintendent Casey looking out for them.”

  “Barbara said with the Halligans involved, there was no way you could control the information.”

  “And how did the councillor die? Do you know?”

  “Peter met Williamson somewhere, then he contacted the Halligans, I guess to tell them Williamson wouldn’t play. After that, well, whether the heroin was a deliberate overdose, or just that they were trying to get him to change his mind and gave him too much by mistake, I don’t know.”

  “And Peter?”

  “Barbara said Peter came back that night in a state. He was upset by what had happened, and personally ashamed—after all, he had involved the Halligans in the first place. She said she tried to calm him down, told him it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Why? I thought she despised him. And it was his fault.”

  “Yeah, but she said she didn’t want him doing anything stupid.”

  “Like ringing the cops.”

  “Exactly. I mean, it’s a total cover-up, the whole thing. She said she gave him some Valium, he went into the garden to get some air. Next thing, they hear shots. It’s so fucked up the way she talks about it, like she’s proud of him now, like it was some kind of noble act. But she didn’t seem to think it was a good idea to have his body found in the house, so I assume the Halligans had to come to the rescue. And now the Dawsons can’t get rid of them.”

  “Do you think Barbara encouraged Peter to kill himself?”

  Linda drained her glass, and quickly shook her head.

  “No. No. I mean, she’s a monumental bitch, but she wouldn’t have done that.”

  “And what about John Dawson? He must have known all about this the night he came to visit you. What did he say? Did he show any sign of upset that his son had just killed himself?”

  “No, he didn’t. He seemed…serene. Almost euphoric.”

  “Euphoric?”

  “Yeah. Kept telling me not to worry, everything would work out for the best. That somehow, you would sort it out.”

  “And what about you? The night this happened, you narrowly missed meeting Peter in the High Tide. You did meet Tommy Owens. What did you do then?”

  “I went home. And drank until I fell asleep.”

  “What did you and Tommy Owens talk about? Did Tommy tell you anything about what was going on?”

  “Am I a suspect too, Ed?”

  “I’m just trying to wor
k out what you knew and when. I had the impression when we spoke earlier, before Peter’s body had been discovered, that you knew a lot more about what had happened than you were saying.”

  “It wasn’t that, it was…there was something Peter used to say about you.”

  “About me? I never met the fellow.”

  “I know, but he knew all about you. He…the whole family thing became something of an obsession with him, especially after we discovered we couldn’t have kids. He kept going through old photographs, and visiting Fagan’s Villas and so on. And he said he thought you and he were related. That…well, John Dawson was your father too. And that he killed Eamonn Loy so he could be with your mother. That’s what I didn’t want to tell you, Ed.”

  I went to the window and filled my lungs with air; I felt like I was going to suffocate. I’d become more and more convinced that my father had been killed, and that his killer was John Dawson; could it be that that was true, but that Eamonn Loy’s killer had been my real father? I poured myself a shot of vodka and knocked it back. It tasted like water, and had the same effect. I did it again.

  “Who did Peter visit in Fagan’s Villas?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that he visited anyone. I think he just went there to soak up the vibes. The past.”

  “A Mrs. Burke?”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “All that stuff was in his files, Linda, remember? The boxes ‘Family 1’ and ‘Family 2’? And this is something else that was there. I found it on Peter’s boat.”

  I showed her the photograph of Eamonn Loy and John Dawson, a photograph I didn’t seem able to hold without my hand shaking.

  “My God, look at John, he’s so young. Is that your father with him?” she said.

  “It is.”

  “This photograph has been cut, hasn’t it? Look, the edge here is frayed and torn, but not all the way around. And it’s been cut on a curve. It looks like there was a third person there, the curve is cut in the shape of a head. As if whoever it was had been deliberately removed from the picture. Or someone wanted a picture of just the other person.”

  “Kenneth Courtney. The third musketeer. The other dead man.”

  Linda turned it over and noted what was written on the reverse of the torn fragment:

  ma courtney

  3459

  “The directors of Courtney Estates: Kenneth Courtney and Gemma Grand,” I said. “‘Ma Grand.’ Maybe Gemma Grand was Kenneth Courtney’s wife. Or Ma Grand was his mother, her maiden name.”

  Linda looked at me as if I was going to explain. But I didn’t have anything more to say.

  Nineteen

  I AWOKE IN THE GRAY PREDAWN. LINDA WAS KISSING MY eyes; her tears were wet on my forehead. She moved down my body and got me hard with her mouth, then she rolled beneath me and guided me inside her, and all the time we looked each other in the eye as if to break gaze would be the worst thing, and we moved long and slow, and both came hard, and cried out together, and fell back asleep almost at once.

  When I woke again, it was half-five, and the sun was hoisting itself above a pale red horizon. I felt like I’d slept twelve hours through, though it had been barely half that. I washed my damaged face and peered at it; yesterday you’d think I’d walked into a glass door; now, you’d just reckon it was a door. My clothes had been left in the corridor: my suit sponged and pressed, my white shirt bloodless and starched, my shoes polished. I thought about how frequent a customer Linda must’ve been to get service like that. Those thoughts weren’t very pleasant, so I put them out of my mind. It was easy to do, looking at her. She lay deep asleep, her mouth in a slight pout, her honey blond curls framing her pale brown face. I could still smell her on my body; I needed a shower, but I didn’t want to be without her scent. I thought about leaving a note, but I’d be back before she woke up.

  The sunrise was an orange blaze now, above a band of deepening red; it looked volatile, incendiary, like it was ready to engulf itself; I thought of the death-soaked canvas Linda had hung in her bedroom. It was time to go.

  Last night, Podge Halligan had assumed I didn’t know where Tommy Owens was. He was wrong. I took a taxi down to Seafield. I asked the driver to go past my house. Last time we’d clashed, the Halligans had trashed the place; the only thing left for them to do was burn it down. Instead, they’d returned my car. I paid the taxi driver off and inspected it. There was a tube of cream for securing false teeth and a packet of plasters under the windshield wipers: George Halligan’s way of saying sorry. He was going to have to say it again, and mean it.

  I drove through Seafield and left the car parked across from the new ferry terminal. I headed for the west pier, walking along the old road by the disused railway track until I reached the abandoned ferry-house. I knocked on the door repeatedly, until I heard someone stirring. A voice came from behind the door.

  “Who is it?”

  I didn’t think I could get my voice high-pitched enough for Podge, so I tried George.

  “The Count of Monte Cristo, the fuck d’you think it is? Open the fuckin’ door.”

  I heard the sound of a bolt being drawn, and as the door opened, I heard a voice say, “Colm’s down there. He’s—”

  The security guard had a navy uniform and a shaved head, and a black baton in one hand. When he saw I wasn’t George Halligan, he lifted the baton and came at me fast. I stepped in so close to him that he had no room to swing it and head-butted him in the face as hard as I could. His nose gave way and he screamed in pain and I pushed him back inside and closed the door behind me and steadied myself against it. My head was reeling, and the wound on my left temple had opened up, and blood was coming out of my nose; I hadn’t wanted to nut him but it was the only thing I had room to do, and now I wasn’t sure if I had the strength to do anything else. The security guard was on his knees, holding his face in his hands; I took a step toward him and he retreated behind an oval brass counter that had formed part of a ticket kiosk; there was bedding and a radio and assorted beer cans and pizza boxes scattered there; he huddled in a corner and held his baton in front of him.

  The entrance hall had a crumbling marble floor of brass-flecked coral, with a small waiting room to the left of the door; past where the kiosk would have been, a brass rail bisected a semicircular set of steps that led to two swing doors with porthole-style window frames without glass. I went through one of the doors and found myself in the old double-aisled departure hall with windows on the left looking out at the west pier. There were old chairs and tables piled about at random, and a dilapidated wooden corral halfway along on the right that might have been a customs post. Matching swing doors at the bottom of the hall led to a stairwell that smelled of smoke and diesel and brine; I clattered down the steps to the disused railway station. The gray-and-blue-tiled platform was still intact; old railway sleepers and fragments of sleepers were piled onto the mangled tracks; a rusting buffer lay twisted beneath them. I got an intense flash of traveling with my father on the ferry, a day trip to Holyhead to get I don’t know what, duty-free booze most likely; I remember I got precious sweets you couldn’t get in Ireland. The force and vividness of the memory took me aback, and I sank to my hunkers to bear it: my hand in his, the flat green and white package of Major cigarettes he’d take from a pocket of his khaki brown corduroy jacket, his smell of Brylcreem and Old Spice and alcohol and motor oil and smoke, the dark look in his eyes that, even as a child, I recognized was defeat, self-hatred, surrender. Maybe we didn’t get along so well. Maybe he was not a nice man, or a good one. Maybe he wasn’t even my father in blood. But he was a man, and John Dawson was going to pay for his death. If the cops wouldn’t make him, then I would have to.

  Colm Hyland must have moved with the silence and grace of a cat, or maybe I was momentarily deafened by the swirl of blood that memory had sent to engulf my brain, but I only saw his shadow, only felt the rush of air above me, only moved in a quick forward roll an instant before he brought a short length
of railway sleeper down where my head had just been. He was left off-balance, and the heavy wood slipped from his hands; he stretched his long torso to reach for it, and I stood and kicked him hard in the stomach. He grabbed my foot by reflex, but couldn’t hold it, and dropped to his hands and knees, wheezing and gurgling, desperate for breath.

  “Colm’s down there,” the security man had said. “He’s—”

  He’s what? But I knew. I knew since the Halligans had trashed my place and Tommy had vanished that they were holding him somewhere; I knew since I had seen Colm and Blue Cap bringing supplies in here that there was a good chance that somewhere was here; I knew after my encounter with the Halligans last night that they would probably try and move him. Colm’s down there. He’s on the job.

  “Get up,” I said. “Show me where you’re hiding Tommy Owens.”

  Hyland said nothing, just did some more wheezing.

  “Get up, Colm.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” he spat.

  I kicked him in the face, and in the side, in the ribs, and in the balls, and I had to stop before I went further, stop before I took it all out on Hyland, every humiliation I’d suffered at the hands of the Halligans, who at least had some genetic rationale for their behavior, unlike this bastard of a boatman who must’ve had a choice and chose badly, stop before I literally kicked his fucking head in.

  “Show me where he is,” I said, looking away quickly toward the down stairway, blocked up with old baggage trolleys, and the derelict escalators, and turning back to see the knife flashing as Hyland lunged forward and cut into my trouser leg, aiming up but lacking the strength to lift his arm; I felt a flash of pain along my calf, and stamped on his arm with my other foot until he dropped the knife, and slapped his head hard against the tiled floor until he was out. I sat beside him and inspected the damage he’d done: a clean slash along the muscle, a lot of blood, surprisingly little pain, a trouser leg that did not look to me like it could be mended. Hyland was unconscious; I rolled him on his side and took his knife with me.