After a while the only ones sober are me and Jason, and he’s been chewing steroids like they’re Juicy Fruit.
‘This is fucked up, man,’ he says for the hundredth time.
Some of the hostesses echo the sentiment back to him, but the number dwindles each time he says it.
I know how Jason feels; there are no words for this kind of situation. Nothing covers it. The numbness is leaving me now, and I miss it. In its place there’s a ball of nausea in my gut.
Have they told little Alfredo and Eva? Who’s going to take them in?
I feel myself getting Irish maudlin again, asking the big questions. Where has my life gone? What have I got? I remember my brother Conor and the look he always had on his face. The look you see on dogs in the pound, the ones they find in burlap with chains coiled at the bottom.
Fresh wounds are like doors into the past. Who said that? Hope to Christ it wasn’t Zeb. I don’t want to be therapising myself with any of his skewed wisdom.
Thanks a bunch. I said plenty of wise shit. Who told you not to fuck with the Jews? Who told you that?
By the time we run out of silver tequila, the cops are ready for interviews. They set up in Vic’s office and summon us one by one. I go second, after Brandi, who comes out snapping her fingers, like she’s won some kind of victory.
There are two local detectives in the room, both African-American females, which is not as much of a long shot as it used to be. They’ve squeezed themselves behind Vic’s desk and swept some of his porn memorabilia into a drawer. The junior detective is the lady who gave Vic grief over his trainers. I want to take a liking to this girl, but she’s got her arms folded across her chest and is wearing a pretty clear I don’t make friends face. I duck from habit under the steel construction beam that spans the ceiling, even though it’s a couple of inches above head height, and sit opposite the detectives.
I point at a Pirelli calendar on the wall. ‘You might want to take that down too.’
I am not being a smartarse here; it is important to me that this investigation goes well. The first forty-eight hours, as they say.
The younger detective rips the calendar out of the wall, taking a chunk of Sheetrock with it.
‘Satisfied, Mister McEvoy?’ she asks, giving me the bad-cop eyeball. We are off on the wrong foot; she has me down as non-cooperative.
‘That was a genuine suggestion,’ I protest, calmly and sincerely. ‘Connie was my friend and I want her killer caught.’
The cops are not won over by my Irish brogue; if anything, a foreigner seems to make them more suspicious. They sit up, shuffle papers and stuff, bump shoulders in the tight space. They were going for authoritative, lining up behind the desk like that, but they look like two school kids squeezed behind a bench.
‘Cornelia DeLyne was your friend, Mister McEvoy?’ says the older of the two.
Cornelia? I don’t know why Connie’s full name surprises me, but it does.
‘Mister McEvoy?’
I focus on the lead detective. She is maybe forty, striking, a slash of rouge on both cheeks, strands of silver in her cropped hair. She wears a grey suit and a colourful Jamaican parrot shirt that kind of jumps out at you.
‘Yes, Detective . . . ?’
‘I’m Detective Goran, this is Detective Deacon.’
Deacon, the smart mouth, is early thirties. Severe grey suit, wearing anger on her face like latex. I know the type; very serious about her work.
‘Well, Detective Goran, Connie and I were good friends. More than that, briefly.’
I figure Brandi has already told her.
‘So she broke up with you, and you were pissed off.’
I don’t sigh dramatically; I was expecting this.
‘We never broke up, as such. We had a weekend together, and I think there was another one coming up. If you want to talk pissed off, we had quite a ruckus in here last night. Bunch of college kids.’
‘We know all about it,’ says Deacon, cutting across me. ‘Harmless hijinks, I’d say. We want to talk about you, Mister McEvoy. You’re saying you were this beautiful young lady’s booty call?’
I heard this phrase once maybe five years ago. Nobody uses it any more.
‘Booty call, Detective?’
‘Fuck buddy. How does that suit you?’
From hijinks to fuck buddy in a couple of heartbeats. We’re down to this level already? I expected another minute of civility, but this is how it goes. It’s not personal, except with Deacon I have the feeling that maybe it is.
‘Okay, I get it, Detective. I know, she’s . . . she was twenty-eight and I’m . . .’
‘You’re what? Seventy?’
I don’t get riled. ‘I’m forty-two. I counted my lucky stars, believe me.’
Deacon goes for it. ‘You want to know what I think? I think you were fixated on Miss DeLyne. Obsessed. She kept turning you down. It’s disgusting, right? You’re an old man in a silly hat. So you freaked and shot her. Why don’t you sign the paper and we can call it a day?’
I can’t see myself, but I bet my jaw is jutting stubbornly. ‘Not that easy, Deacon. You’re going to have to work on this one.’
‘Come on, Danny, give it up. I’m tired and the coffee stinks.’
‘What? You think I’m going to break down and blubber out a confession?’ I turn to Goran. ‘She always this lazy?’
I shouldn’t be smart-arsing, but Deacon needs to refine her style a little. This shooting has to be solved and the detective is throwing spears into the ocean hoping to hit something.
Goran shields her face with a file and I suspect she’s smiling. ‘You know the young ’uns, Mister McEvoy. Instant gratification.’
And suddenly Deacon is smiling too and I realise that this bull-in-a-china-shop attitude of hers is the oldest trick in the book.
‘You do bad cop pretty good,’ I tell her. ‘But time’s a-wastin’ and I am not the guy.’
Deacon flips open a field laptop. ‘Really? You have quite a file here, Mister Daniel McEvoy. And looky here, an interview with the FBI tagged on at the end.’
Groan. Word travels fast over the internet. Some tool in the army records department e-mailed my info to the FBI last year. Not so much as a court order and he shoots it across the pond.
‘I know what the file says. If you look at the end of that page, you’ll find it was a case of totally mistaken identity. I got an official apology, for Christ’s sake.’
Deacon ignores this, reading with great melodrama like she doesn’t already know what’s on the screen.
‘Company Sergeant Daniel McEvoy. Active service in the Lebanon.’ She says Lebanon with jazz hands, like it’s Disneyland. ‘Extremely dangerous individual. Trained in close-quarter combat. Expert knife man.’
‘I don’t like bazookas,’ I say, straight-faced. Luckily my file doesn’t mention sniper and marksman skills. I learned those on my own.
‘You’ve done some things, Daniel.’
‘Not murder.’
‘Not murder,’ she jeers, doing my accent. ‘Sez you. What are you, Daniel? Albanian?’
‘I’m Irish, American too. My mother was from Manhattan. It’s on the screen.’
She checks it. ‘Your mom moved to Ireland from New York? Isn’t that a little ass to mouth?’
Now she’s talking about my mother, it’s like we’re in the schoolyard. But it’s tactics, might even rile someone a little shorter in the tooth. I have to admit, this Deacon woman stirs shit good.
‘I think you mean ass backwards.’
I’m watching Goran through all this. The senior officer taking everything in, letting Deacon have her head, for now. This is their routine. Mother and tearaway daughter, I can see how it could work on a guilty person. Not that I ain’t a guilty person; I’m just not guilty of this.
What I want to do is cut through the bullshit, stop playing the game and really talk to these people.
‘Look,’ I say, palms up, which is body talk for trust me. ‘I liked
Connie, loved her a little maybe. Can we skip the regulation back-and-forth and see if I can’t actually help out? Come on, I’m not right for this. Once upon a time I was a professional. Do you seriously think I would shoot Connie, then leave her not ten yards from where I’m sitting drinking coffee? How does that make sense?’
Goran nods slowly, accepting the truth of my argument.
Deacon believes it too, but she sticks to her role just in case I’m a better actor than she is. ‘How do we know what kind of psycho you are, Daniel? Maybe you didn’t get enough killing in the army. Maybe you want us to catch you.’
I’m staring at Goran now, head to one side. ‘Okay. I see what you’re doing. You’ve got nothing, so you’re shaking the tree.’
Deacon closes the laptop. ‘Shaking the tree? Is that some kind of racist comment, McEvoy?’
I do my best to ignore this accusation. ‘Ask me something relevant,’ I say to Detective Goran. ‘The clock is ticking. Your actual murderer is probably halfway across the GW bridge by now.’
Goran is not ready to share just yet and covers the file with her forearm. ‘This looks like a crime of opportunity, Mister McEvoy. Right place for him, wrong place for her. Some crack-head looking for bag money.’
It’s a theory, but not a great one. In Ireland we would say she was patting my bottom and closing the door behind me.
‘You’re in Cloisters, Detective. We’re not exactly overrun with crackheads. This is the roughest joint in town and I haven’t even seen a needle in a couple of years. How many crackheads you know can make a shot right between the eyes?’
Goran’s chin comes up. ‘You saw the wound, Daniel. How’d that happen?’
That was a little slip. Maybe it’s time to stop talking so fast.
‘I made it my business to see before the tape went on. Wanted to be sure it was Connie.’
‘Touch anything?’
‘Not one damn thing.’
Goran gives me a long look, searching my eyes for the lie, which she doesn’t find, or maybe she does find it and decides to give me a little rope to tie myself up with.
‘Take a walk, but not too far. I’ll be dialling your number.’
My shoulders sag. ‘You don’t want to ask me anything useful?’
‘You want to tell me something useful?’
I leave without saying another word.
CHAPTER 5