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Chapter 39
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
ROLY CALLS AT SEVEN. I’m still in bed, staring at the ceiling, and I jump up and scramble for the phone. “Roly? What is it? What did Wilcox say? Did you interview Conor?”
I hear traffic noise on the other end, the echo of his car phone system. “Hang on,” he says. “Can you be downstairs in thirty minutes? Around the corner by Morelands?”
“Yeah, I guess, but what’s going on? Won’t the reporters be there?”
“They’ve moved on. There’s a lot happening. Be outside in thirty minutes, D’arcy.”
I’m dressed in jeans and a sweater and boots, standing on the sidewalk around the corner from the Westin and holding two lattes when he pulls up to the curb.
He waits until we’re heading north on O’Connell Street to take a sip and say, “They arrested Robert Herricks this morning. Your tip was a good one. They went to talk to him in Baltinglass last night.” Before I ask he says, “Yeah, they let Griz in on it. I’m not sure what it was that tipped them off, but he had some very disturbing videos on his computer and they talked to the young one who used to work at the golf course. She said he raped her, right around the time Teresa McKenny went missing. She was embarrassed back then, ashamed to tell us what happened, so she tried to point us in the right direction by saying he’d been spying in the loos. But we missed it. We didn’t ask the right questions.”
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He looks over at me. “I’m suspended until further notice. Wilcox told me to stay home and cut my grass for the foreseeable future. He ordered Griz and Joey and John White to go back to the reviews they were working on before all this started.”
“Roly, I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.”
“Yeah, well. I accept your apology.” He doesn’t look mad, just resigned. And tired. But there’s something else there, too. Something to the set of his jaw, the way he’s gripping the steering wheel as he drives in and out of rush hour traffic.
“So where are we going?”
“We’re going to visit Bernie.”
***
The nursing home is in Drogheda, up by the border with Northern Ireland, an hour or so from Dublin. The drive is boring, motorway and fields. Roly seems to want to be quiet so I listen to the Top 40 radio he puts on and look out the window at the flashing green pasture, the distant spires and gray roofs of towns off the motorway.
Finally I say, “Why do you want to see Bernie?”
“I haven’t visited in a while,” he says. “It’s been too busy.”
“Why else?”
He takes a deep breath. “I tell her everything about my cases. I go up and I tell her about what’s going on and she gives me ... not advice, exactly. But it helps to tell her. I haven’t gone since before we found Erin’s scarf. I want to ask her what she thinks about the receipt, about Katerina Greiner.” He looks over at me. “It’s seventeen days, D’arcy. If Niamh’s not already dead, then she’s about to be. It feels like we’re getting there, like something’s going to break. I’m off the case, but I’m not giving up. I want to talk to Bernie.”
“Will she be able to tell us anything?”
“She’s got this breathing thing,” he says. “It makes it really hard for her to talk, so I try to ask questions she can answer with a nod or a simple yes or no.”
“Is her mind okay? Can she remember things?”
“Oh, she can remember things. That’s what makes it so tragic. Her mind is basically fine, but her body’s falling apart. She gets pneumonia because she can’t clear her airways. She almost died last year.”
“What happened, Roly? You only told me she was shot as part of an operation that went wrong.”
“She was on the drugs squad. You know that. And they were going after some fella who had been bringing heroin from Spain and dealing out of some businesses in Crumlin. Bernie was convinced someone was passing information to him. He kept managing to stay just out of their way. She tried to figure out who it was and wasn’t able to. Anyway, they knew there was a shipment coming in and they went to one of the businesses and got ambushed. She got shot in the back. Bullet tore into her spinal column. For quite a long time, they didn’t think she was going to survive.”
“Did they ever figure out who was leaking?”
“No.” His hands are gripping the steering wheel. The veins in his neck stand out against his pale skin. I let him be for a bit.
“So this receipt,” he says finally. “Griz thinks it shows that something happened when Erin was down in Wicklow. She came back to Dublin and got money and then she took off again. Who was she meeting? Who was she going with?”
“Niall Deasey?” I say. “You know what I thought back then. He definitely recognized me, or thought he did. He didn’t say, ‘Oh, didn’t we meet at a pub once?’ That would be the normal thing to say, right? And he didn’t.”
“Yeah, but he’s a professional gangster, like. They don’t give anything away, D’arcy. We checked him out. He has a great alibi: He was in hospital in London when June Talbot was killed, getting his appendix out.”
“What about Teresa McKenny? He was still living here and operating the garage when she was killed.”
“The ex-wife was pretty sure there was nothing funny going on. You could tell how much she hated him, so I think she might have been only too happy to give him up if she’d had something on him. But she didn’t.”
I watch the fields flash by outside the window. “Okay, but let’s say he had something to do with Erin’s disappearance. Let’s say he recruited her to transport something, drugs, money, guns, whatever, between Ireland and the US. Let’s say something happened and he killed her. Then what’s the connection to Katerina Greiner?”
“She’d been missing for a while. Maybe she’d been with him. Maybe she got wrapped up in something dangerous, too.”
I look over at Roly. “Drugs stuff? Prostitution? Arms smuggling?” “Maybe,” he says. “We didn’t find any evidence of that, but ...”
“But what about Niamh Horrigan and the other two? If he was recruiting Erin or something, if it was something related to Northern Ireland, then what about now? Does that stuff go on anymore? After ninety-eight? The location where Katerina Greiner was found has to be significant, right?”
“I don’t know, D’arcy. It’s hard to explain to ya. This thing, it’s different now. There’s peace. Yeah, there are fellas who still get up to it. Up north, yeah, there’s always the politics. But especially down here, it’s more drugs, organized crime these days.” Roly slows the car. There’s a sign up ahead for the exit to Drogheda and Donore. The M1 continues on to Belfast. “Will we?” he says quietly to himself.
“Will we what?”
“Ah sure, we’re only thirty minutes at this point. We’re too early for Bernie anyway.”
“What?”
“I’m going to take you to the border.” He speeds up and passes the exit and we drive north, past green fields dotted with sheep, stretching out toward low brown hills in every direction. In less than thirty minutes, we’re there; the fields are flashing by when he says, “That’s it. We’re in the north now.”
The only way I know is there’s a sign announcing that all distances will be in miles. “I remember driving up here once when I was a boy,” he says. “My ma had a school friend living in Newry and we came up to visit her at Easter. There was a border checkpoint, a low building, manned by British Army soldiers. The cars were lined up to get through and my da, he was a real joker, like, he said, ‘Ah, I hope we don’t get blown to smithereens, now.’ My ma, she walloped him and said not to scare the children. But the whole time we sat in that long line, an hour or more, I thought about it, about what it would feel like to get blown to smithereens.”
He pulls off the motorway, turns around, and gets us going south again. “We’re back in the Republic now,” he says after a few minutes. “The border’s still there, D’arcy. Who knows, it might come back someday. They’ve been talking on the telly about this vote for Britain to leave the EU coming up. Some fella said maybe that’d bring back the border. And then maybe it all begins again. For now, it’s quiet. For now, there’s peace. Now let’s go see Bernie.”
***
We park in the visitor’s lot and go in. The nursing home is a sprawling single-story building in the middle of an industrial park. It’s barely decorated inside, a few Virgin Marys and landscape paintings on the stark white walls, a strong smell of antiseptic everywhere.
“Hey, Bernie. Look who I’ve got to see you,” Roly calls out when we get to the room. He peeks around the doorway and motions me in. “A blast from the past, sure. Now, how’s herself this morning?” A nurse nods and smiles, leaves us alone.
Bernie is sitting in a complicated-looking wheelchair, a blanket folded over her legs. A television set suspended from the ceiling is on and Roly shuts it off and gives her a little pat on the shoulder. Her hair is shorter and she seems much smaller than I remember, thinner, frailer, but when she turns her eyes to me, I remember them.
“Hi, Bernie,” I say, my voice wavering now that I’m here. “It’s so good to see you.” She tries to smile, but it comes out more like a grimace.
“D’ar ... cy. How you?” The words come out slowly, with breaks for breath in between, but I can understand her. Roly adjusts her chair and talks in a nonstop torrent of words, telling her about the investigation. He gives her everything, every twist and turn, finding Erin’s scarf, the stuff about Katerina Greiner, updates on the Niamh Horrigan search, the things Griz and I found in the files. Robert Herricks. Then, with a glance at me, he tells her about Conor and Bláithín and Erin’s visit to their apartment. She nods, listening, and I can feel that this is a routine for them, that Roly talks so she doesn’t have to.
“Why did ... your cousin go down there?” she asks after a minute. “To the mountains?”
“I know,” I say. “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out. Someone called the house that day, from a pay phone, then she left and went to Conor’s house, then she went down to Glenmalure, went walking and lost her necklace, and then she stayed at the Currans’ bed-and- breakfast and, we think, took a bus back to Dublin, met up with someone, changed some traveler’s checks, and disappeared.”
“No,” Bernie says, with a lot of effort. “No ... why mountains?”
“Why did she go to the mountains?” I ask.
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