Authors: Stephan Talty
O’Halloran leapt up from his chair, his teeth gritted and his blue eyes ablaze.
“You killed them, you fucking cunt. You thought you were smarter than all of us, with your Ivy League bullshit. But we got you.”
“You framed me is what you mean.”
O’Halloran’s fist had smashed across her face before she even saw it coming. Her head whipped sideways and pale stars exploded inside her head.
When she opened her eyes, Perelli was shoving O’Halloran back in his chair.
“Sit down.
Sit the fuck down
. What did I tell you, O’Halloran?”
The Irish cop was snorting with hatred, staring her down. His eyes never moved off Abbie’s.
“I knew Jimmy Ryan. She’s probably got his eyelids in her goddamn pocket, Chief.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Sit down and stay down.”
Perelli turned to her.
“Tell me about Jimmy Ryan,” he said.
“I was first detective on scene,” she said. Her voice sounded suddenly robotic to her.
“You mean St. Teresa’s? The church you grew up going to? People tell me you knew that place like you were raised in it.”
“I didn’t—”
“How did you find out about the Clan? Your father was part of it. Did you hear him talking on the phone one night? Were you playing amateur detective in high school? Just tell me, Ab.”
“Chief, I’m not—”
The sound of his hand on the table was like a pistol shot.
“
Tell
me!”
Abbie shook her head.
“I have one more thing to show you. I wasn’t going to—the DA asked me not to—but I’m going to do it as a courtesy to a fellow cop.”
His eyes loomed larger as he leaned in.
“Then you
will
talk to me. Or you’re going to a cell in the holding center, mixed in with general population, where no cop should ever be. And I’m going to personally hang your badge around your neck as you walk in.”
He went to the cabinet in the corner. Abbie’s eyes followed him.
Perelli opened a drawer and pulled out a book. She couldn’t see the cover.
This had all been planned out, she thought. But was Perelli part of it too? It was essential to know that. Who else was part of the frame?
O’Halloran was smiling at her now. She wanted to say something smart, but she didn’t feel smart.
Perelli came back, holding the book in his hand. But it wasn’t a book. It was a picture album with a faded green cover. Abbie stared at the album as Perelli dropped it to the table.
“Where did you get that?”
“We found it in your basement, along with an old Bible. Do you know who they belong to?”
“My father.” He’d had it forever, adding pictures to it as the years went by.
The room seemed to grow dark. She felt claustrophobic, brightly colored spots appearing in the corners of her vision and shimmering there. She felt the black wave washing closer and closer to her eyes.
Perelli opened the photo album’s cover, standing over her as he flipped through the heavy pages. As if they were relatives looking at loved ones, long gone now.
Pool party. Fantasy Island. High school graduation. The last picture—her and her father in Niagara Falls. Smiling their lies.
“That’s it,” she said, her voice choked.
“No, it’s not.”
He turned the two blank pages. Then she saw it, stuck under the inside flap of the jacket cover. The corner of a faded photo, the old kind from the eighties that had no white borders. Perelli’s thick fingers reached under and plucked it out.
With a cold shock, she remembered it. Remembered not the picture but the moment. She’d been around two years old. Her and her mother in the cold place off of Main Street. One of their many homes, always cold, always dirty. Hunger in her eyes.
She couldn’t look at her own face in the picture. Abbie’s gaze fell to her hands. And in the right one, what was that, pushed up toward the camera to show how much she liked the gift?
A toy monkey, as clear as day.
P
ERELLI HAD BEEN AS GOOD AS HER WORD
. S
HE WAS TAKEN TO THE HOLDING
center.
“Name?”
“Absalom Kearney.”
The female cop looked up, her face scouring Abbie’s for a full few seconds.
“Middle name?”
“Margaret.”
“Let’s get your fingerprints.”
No special privileges. They had to segregate by sex, so she was thrown in with the female drug dealers and the gang members and the whores and skels, and they parted like the Red Sea for her, and she’d found her way to the corner. Ninety-five percent black, with one lonely Latino girl nursing a cut above her eye. The blood dripping to the floor in splashes. She felt she could hear the blood hit the floor, like a raindrop in a puddle, but that was impossible. Wasn’t it?
The place was dark, and it stank of gin and vomit and unwashed clothes. The walls were slab concrete. She pressed her back into the corner.
Oh, Absalom, what have you done? What brought you back here to Buffalo? You should have stayed away stayed away stayed away
.
At 2 a.m., the screeching began to die down. The meth freaks came off the tops of their high and huddled together for warmth. The cage grew cold. Abbie waited, hunched in the corner, seeing the skels fall asleep one by one, feeling like a gargoyle watching over a doomed city.
At 9 a.m., she was brought before a judge and charged with the murder of Billy Carney. The other charges would follow. Bail set at $1 million. She watched the entire scene as if she were looking at a TV. Even her “Not guilty” seemed to come from the mouth of an actor.
The sound of metal scraping metal. Abbie’s head snapped up. Something told her it was near dark.
“Kearney, Absalom.” The cop at the door had a long chain of keys hanging in his hand. He was looking at her with a face made blank by effort.
Her limbs were frozen stiff. She unfolded painfully from her crouch and began picking her way through the curled-up bodies on the floor.
“You’ve been bailed.”
“By who?”
“Zangara, the stupid fuck.”
“You put up your house” was the first thing she said to him.
He was silent, all the gregariousness drained away.
He nodded.
“Linda’s going to kill you.”
“Linda,” he said. “is the one who made me do it.”
She looked over at him. “Do you believe me, Z?”
Z, her fort, her friend. He turned away, looked out his side window as they drove down Delaware. They’d taken the back way out of the holding center. Z had managed to keep her away from the cameras that were no doubt stationed out front.
“I told you to get help.”
“Help for stress, Z, not for being a serial killer.”
She couldn’t see his face, but she heard the sigh.
“Yes, I believe you.”
“Thank you anyway.”
He made a left.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“You tell me. We can’t go to your place, unless you want to walk into a media circus.”
“Take me to the Reverend.”
Z nodded.
If he’ll have me
, she thought.
Where else is there to go?
“Z, I need one more favor.”
He looked straight ahead.
“I need the list of IRA fugitives, the one I found in Marty Collins’s Bible.”
Z sighed. “It’s in Perelli’s office. He’s not handing out copies right now. They want to control the investigation.”
“You have to get it for me. The killer is on that list. I need to find him.”
Z turned to look at her.
“I can’t lose my badge, Ab. I can’t do that to my family.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
She tried to think.
“Don’t call or text me, don’t come by the Reverend’s. Just leave the names in the third booth at Mighty Taco, the one near the window. Tape it under the table. I’ll pick it up in an hour.”
Z nodded.
He pulled up to 278 Hertel and she opened the door as he slid to a stop.
“Ab.”
She turned and leaned in the car window.
“Yes?”
“How’d the killer know about the monkeys?”
Her fingers curled in her palm.
“I wish I knew.”
John Kearney watched the door open and saw the nurse come in. She was new. Rosemary was gone. This one was tall and red-haired, with wide hips, and he didn’t recognize her.
The new nurse was young. She walked toward him with her left arm held tightly by her side, the hand hidden.
Sure, you don’t have to hide it from me
, he thought.
I’m a corpse laid out. I can do nothing to ye. She must feel guilty. How much are they paying her? Or have they told her the old story, and is she doing it for the Gaelic boys?
The nurse approached, tapped the tube full of clear liquid that led down to his arm.
“How are we this morning, Mr. Kearney?”
The surface of his face lay calm and impassive, like a lead blanket over his mind, which never seemed to sleep.
I’m fine. How do I look?
“Just a shot for the pain.”
Nothing can touch the pain
, he told her with his eyes, and she looked away. John Kearney thought of Abbie, and something burned in his heart.
The nurse injected the milky liquid into the tube as he watched. When the plunger was fully depressed, she took it out. She looked at him like you would a wax statue, her eyes avid to see the living dead man.
As John Kearney watched her go, something caught his attention. She’d done something different from Rosemary. The routine—the small bit of chat, the syringe, the milky substance into the tube—was all the same. But there was something missing.
What was it? His mind couldn’t latch onto details like it used to. It glided over things, unable to fasten on their edges, their meaning. There was a detail here that mattered.
Think, John
.
The little wheel. The white plastic wheel. She’d forgotten to turn it. The little wheel that let the new liquid flow into his arm.
He watched as the tube began to run dry, droplets of clear liquid left along its side like raindrops.
One last chance
, he thought.
Lord, please. I won’t waste it. My business is almost done
.
He felt a tiny prick of feeling in his right hand.
Abbie slid into the booth at Mighty Taco. She’d bought a salad and a loganberry, though she wasn’t hungry. She watched the other diners around her, but there were no whisperings or sudden turns of the head. She wore a blue and red hat with a “Buffalo Talking Proud!” decal sewed onto the brim that she’d found in the Reverend’s emergency bin for abused and destitute girls. Apparently, it disguised her well enough so that no one put her together with the photo running on
Eyewitness News
.
She took a bite of the salad, holding the fork in her right hand. With her left, she slowly felt under the table. After finding a wad of old gum, her fingers touched a wad of paper. Abbie carefully tore it away from the table, the long strands of tape finally releasing it into her hand.
Her fingers brushed something else as she pulled the paper toward her and stuffed it into her pocket.
Abbie took a sip of loganberry, laid a fork lengthwise on the pale yellow tabletop. She looked around at the other diners. She took another long sip from the straw and set the drink back down.
Then she reached her hand underneath the table, felt the Slammer suspended in a web of heavy tape, and pulled it free.
At 2 p.m. sharp, Maggie Tooley left the nurse’s lounge, where
The Price Is Right
was winding up. She was going to tell her boyfriend Pat that she didn’t want this job anymore, she didn’t care what they would pay her. The old man in the bed was starting to freak her out.
The eyes seemed to follow her wherever she went in the room, even though they never moved. And they were all liquid and shiny, like a cow’s eyes.
What was in the syringe that she gave him every four hours? She could guess. It was something that kept him alive but trapped in his own body. It was wrong. But the money was good, and Conor needed winter boots. He needed a lot more than that, including a father, but mostly right now he needed winter boots.
She walked down the hall, dodging the janitor, the patients pushing their own intravenous stands with the wheels on the bottom, and the duty nurses. Those bitches, both of them local girls, looked right through her as they went on their rounds. They’d been warned off of her, but the least they could do was say hello.
The cop must be on a break, she thought. She knocked on the door, then caught herself.
What’s he gonna do, say “Come in”? Maggie, get your brain clear
.
She opened the door. “Mr. Kear—”
Pat was going to murder her. The blanket was thrown to the floor, and the bed was empty.
Abbie opened the list of IRA killers and spread it out on the car seat. Then she laid the funeral oration of Pádraig Pearse next to it. Her eyes wandered across the second document.
Is this what it’s all about?
she thought.
The thing that started everything?
“It has seemed right,” the document began, “before we turn away from this place in which we have laid the mortal remains of O’Donovan Rossa, that one among us should, in the name of all, speak the praise of that valiant man and endeavor to formulate the thought and the hope that are in us as we stand around his grave …”
Jesus Christ, the Micks and their obsession with death. She was sick of it. Her eyes drifted down the page.
“I propose to you, then, that here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian we renew our baptismal vows; that here by the grave of
this unconquered and unconquerable man, we ask of God, each one for himself, such unshakable purpose, such high and gallant courage, such unbreakable strength of soul as belonged to O’Donovan Rossa.”
For a moment, she thought of her father. The words seemed to fit his hardness. “Unbreakable strength.” She felt she was getting a glimpse of the part of his life that had been always turned away from her.
Finally, the end:
“They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”