demur.
“After all, ye’re the ones with the expertise and all-”
“I can do it,” Minogue said. “Shea can too, I imagine. Right?”
“What?” said Hoey blankly, his attention suddenly stolen by the match he had at last managed to light.
“Manage,” said Minogue. “Carry on, like.”
“Off to see her nibs?” Hoey asked. “Eilo…?”
“Well,” said Ward, “I have to tell ye now-and don’t get me wrong- but my advice is, well, leave things alone for the time being. Can’t ye get back to your business soon enough?”
Minogue looked at Hoey. “It might be better if we were to get to her before she gets news of this here, em…”
“Incident,” said Ward.
“If we stop to think about things at all, we might never get going again,” he said. “That’s about the size of it.”
“I know what you’re saying, but ye’re here as, well, not as investigating officers, more like…well…”
Minogue saw Hoey shiver once and lick his lower lip with a raspy, dry tongue.
“We’ll stay with it, I’m thinking.”
Ward shrugged and left.
“All right, Shea?” Minogue whispered.
Hoey looked up bleakly, ready to refuse. Exasperation and weariness took over his face and he closed his eyes. He pursed his lips and looked out the parlour window as the ambulance drove off the curb. Minogue could almost hear his fretting thoughts. Hoey stood and walked out the door, banging his shoulder as he crossed the threshold. Ward stood by the hall door writing in his notebook. Minogue gave him a card.
“I gave one to the first Guard. Long nose, tall…”
“Dempsey.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you later.” Ward started to say something and Minogue stopped, ready for the warning or anger he had been expecting. Did you drive an old man to this?
“There’s no way in the world we thought he was going to do it,” Minogue declared.
“And you don’t know why he…? You really don’t know?”
Minogue shook his head.
“Maybe I should have picked up on the way he was talking after the row.”
Ward frowned.
“I was too busy trying to figure out what he was saying. He had drink on him. I hadn’t a clue in the wide world he’d come up with a gun, I can tell you.”
Ward’s deep breath suggested to Minogue a conscious effort to keep his temper in check.
“Okay, okay. Just…”
“I will,” said Minogue.
Hoey was already sitting in the passenger seat. A faint smell of vomit clung to his clothes. He didn’t look Minogue in the eye.
“We didn’t do it, Shea,” Minogue repeated. “Do you hear me? He did it. He wasn’t in control of himself, for that matter.”
Hoey said nothing.
“Like it or not, it means something to us. You know what he said. We need to follow up on it. What he told us, like.”
“So what’s the plan now?” Hoey’s voice was sharp. “Where can we go to do more damage?”
“ ‘She did better out of it than she deserved.’ Do you remember him saying that?”
Hoey looked at his watch and rolled down the window. He blew smoke out and let his arm dangle over the door.
“She kept something to herself that she could have-should have- told us-”
“Why the hell should Eilo McInerny tell us anything?” Hoey snapped. “What good would it do her? Screw up her life again?”
Minogue knew enough to say nothing.
“I mean to say,” Hoey’s voice rose and he flicked the cigarette long after any ash had fallen. “Who in their right mind would talk to us? All we bring is-”
“We didn’t kill him, Shea. You’ve got to understand that-”
“All for what? Christ Almighty, we’re the kiss of death around here.”
“What Naughton said tells me that we really don’t know what happened that night. Naughton did. Or at least he knew something, and what he knew was important enough-to him at least-that he wasn’t going to tell us.”
Hoey drew on his cigarette.
“How can we walk away from it?” Minogue asked.
Hoey’s eye was smarting from the smoke when he looked at his tormentor. Again he looked at his watch, but Minogue knew it was a gesture. Tralee would take an hour and a half.
“Take the back, then,” Minogue said.
Hoey slammed the passenger door hard. Minogue strode in the door of the Central Hotel. His heart began to beat faster. He dodged a somnolent lounge-boy who tacked across his path.
The receptionist’s perfume met Minogue ten feet ahead of her desk.
“Oh, hello,” she smiled, and put down the telephone. “You’re back. Would you be-”
Minogue flattened his hands on the counter and leaned in over it.
“Eilo McInerny. Where is she?”
The receptionist’s smile faded, rallied and faded even faster when she met Minogue’s eyes. She screwed on the lid of the nail polish.
“Well, now, let me think.”
“Is she working now?”
“Well, if she’s in…this is the afternoon…she’d be somewhere near the dining-room, probably, helping set it up for-”
Minogue strode to the french doors and opened them. A teenaged girl with short dyed hair stopped setting a table and looked over at him. He didn’t stop to close the door but said Eilo McInerny’s name to the waitress. The girl stepped back and nodded toward a swing door behind a counter at the back of the dining-room. He kept moving and pushed open the door. In the kitchen now, he saw a white tunic move between a counter-top and hanging pots that obscured the face.
“Is Eilo McInerny here?” he said, rounding the counter.
Under the lopsided chef’s hat, which reminded Minogue of a wayward cartoon rabbit, was a watery-eyed man in his forties. The chef’s eyes darted toward a stained, stainless-steel cabinet next to a collection of buckets. He stepped out into Minogue’s path.
“Who’s asking?”
“A Guard, that’s who. Step aside, mister.”
He heard a movement next to the buckets, and he skipped around the cabinet. Eilo McInerny was on her feet, her magazine on the floor. She stepped on her cigarette and brushed at her skirt. For a few seconds her eyes continued to betray her fright. Minogue spotted the tumbler, half-hidden by the door of the cabinet which had been held open to hide a chair.
“You again. I never expected to see you back.”
Minogue came to a sharp stop and stared hard at her.
“Matter of fact, I told you and what’s the other one, the pasty-faced silent type with the black eyes, get lost and leave me alone.”
Minogue looked over his shoulder at the chef and then back at Eilo McInerny.
“I was talking to someone that used to know you. Back in Portaree. In the old days.”
“Fuck off with yourself,” she said.
“I want to pass on to you what he told us,” Minogue continued.
She threw her head back but she couldn’t shake free of what her darting eyes told the Inspector.
