“That’s nothing compared to murder, Liam. Don’t let it-”
“Don’t give me that! Yous don’t give a shite about the likes of me! You think I don’t know yous’re after the Egans. And that you’ll use me to get them! And now you’re trying to keep me talking so’s you can corner me here!”
“Liam! The street, the time, the car-anything. You name it.”
“Liars! You’re trying to get me to wear the murder or else use me to take down the Egans! I’m not stupid, you know, I know what’s going on, you know!”
“No, no, Liam. Give us anything. What street? What type of cars, do you remember?”
“Ahhh… Mount Street. I done a Golf, a GTI. There! I got a camera and stuff. Leather jacket. Ah, fuck!”
“Where did you fence the stuff?”
“Go to hell. What if I did?”
“If it checks out, Liam, then-”
“I’m gone, man! I already said too much!”
“Call again, Liam. Give me time!”
The line was dead. Minogue released his grip on the receiver. Kilmartin threw his jacket over his shoulder.
“Come on,” he said. “The stand-bys are up and running already.”
“Where is he?”
“Up the road,” said Kilmartin. “A phone box in Cabra. Come on, for the love of God!”
“Will you get that off the tape, Eilis, the car make?” Minogue called out as he rose. “And see if it fits? But work any address in Cabra belonging to family or associates of Hickey first, will you?”
They took Kilmartin’s Nissan.
“A bit of a dogfight there, pal,” said Kilmartin. He accelerated around a slowing bus. “But you got him handy. Minute and a half he jabbered on. We can land the bugger!”
The breeze in the window of the speeding car fanned grit into Minogue’s face. He rolled up the window halfway and pulled his seat-belt tighter over his shoulder.
“If he’d put another ten pence in the phone, he could have put a bit of weight in that alibi he pitched at me.”
“Alibi, is it?” snapped Kilmartin. “Ah, Jesus, man. One of his cronies did it and fed him the details.”
Kilmartin was late on a red light turning onto Infirmary Road. A van driver gave him the finger.
“Wait’n’you see, Matt. It’ll fall asunder in ten seconds flat when we have him sitting across the table.”
He looked over at his colleague.
“Come on, now. Don’t get to thinking we’re chasing a shagging genius here. Sure, look what he let slip! Mount Street, he says he did that car. Bloody Mount Street is only a stone’s throw from the canal, for God’s sake! Hickey’s just stupid. Smashed, maybe. He probably doesn’t know what the hell he’s saying, man. Sure isn’t he a junkie?”
“Stupid is too often the sorry hallmark of the truth, James.”
“Oh, will you listen to frigging Aristotle here. Stop worrying, will you. We’ll get him.”
They didn’t. Guards were still going door to door in the streets around the phone box an hour later. A shopkeeper came up with a jittery young man close to the photo. Hickey had bought a Coke and a packet of Major cigarettes there. That was a half hour before the call had even been logged. Kilmartin and Minogue cruised the area until three. A scene-of-the-crime technician had taken prints, many prints, from the phone box. Kilmartin pulled in beside it.
“Well,” said Minogue. Kilmartin ran his hands down his cheeks. His face had gone puffy in the heat.
“The bastard,” he grunted. “Either he legged it into the Park to hide out with the bloody monkeys in the zoo or he had some class of an out ready here. Still none of his pals have a flat here in Cabra?”
Minogue shook his head.
“Ah, Christ,” sighed Kilmartin. “Our stuff is out of date, I bet you. They move, these people… Bloody nomads.”
“I checked with Eimear at the lab though,” said Minogue.
“Majors he bought, right?”
“They’re the ones. Four of the butts from the canal bank were Majors with the names still on them. There are still thirty something awaiting analysis.”
Kilmartin smacked the steering-wheel and looked over at his colleague.
“Ah, he’ll phone again,” he declared. “The bollocks. But when though, that’s what-”
The phone interrupted Kilmartin. Minogue was pleased to hear Tommy Malone’s voice. Minogue stared back at Kilmartin while he listened to Malone.
“Great,” he said when Malone had finished. “We’ll be back in ten minutes. Thanks.”
“Molly’s back on board?”
“None other,” replied Minogue. “He just fielded a call from Fergal Sheehy. One of his got ahold of a fella who works in a club in Leeson Street. Over the Top is the name of it. Fergal’s been plugging the Alan thing and a Mercedes that Patricia Fahy coughed up the other day. He might have an Alan from one of the barmen at a club.”
“How so?”
“A fella came back from his holidays yesterday. He knows an Alan who comes to that club, or used to go clubbing there. He wasn’t sure about the surname. Kenny, Kelly, Keneally. Something with a K in it. Drives or used to drive a Mercedes.”
“Has anyone attacked the computer with this?”
“Tommy got a search and showed up an Alan Kenny. Mr. Alan Kenny drives a Mercedes.”
Frigging Guards! Because they were thick culchies, they thought people from Dublin were all stupid too. Gobshites! As if he’d never heard they could trace a phone call, for Christ’s sake! He stabbed hard at the earth between his knees and let the knife stand for several seconds before he yanked it out.
He shifted his spine away from the tree trunk and finished the cigarette. The smoke seemed to give up on trying to go anywhere and hung in the air instead. Midges’ and flies’ wings glittered in the sunlight. The blot of shadow he sat in was within sight of the Garda Headquarters. Funny if it wasn’t so stupid and serious. What the hell had brought him back down here to Phoenix Park again anyway? He thought back to waking up in the laneway. Wrapped up in cardboard and bits of paper, right in the middle of Dublin, and he’d slept until bloody eight o’clock! He might have slept even longer if that delivery van hadn’t come down the lane. No hangover, even. He’d probably puked everything up. Mental, he was. But what was he doing back here? It was the clothes, right, a change of clothes. Or was it something else? He remembered that creepy kind of feeling he’d had when he’d stepped off the bus next to the Park this morning and looked at the trees hanging over the wall. They’d looked like they were waiting for him or something. It had taken him a while to scout out a good phone box he could use.
Meet, said the cop. Have a chat. And that smoochy kind of voice, like a priest or a teacher fobbing off advice on you. If that cop ever got ahold of him, it’d be a hell of a different story. They’d batter him around until he signed a confession. He stared at the cars passing along the Main Road through the Park. He couldn’t hear any one of them over the background murmur of the city. His eyes moved from the far-off traffic to the branches overhead. The leaves had rusty spots and little holes. He thought of the conkers he used to gather and carry home in bagfuls as a child. Treasures. What had happened since then? The waste. His throat suddenly hurt. He tried to swallow but he couldn’t.
The traffic looked like it was floating over the grass. He imagined one of the cars turning off the road and drifting over the grass toward him. His stomach tightened when he thought of the car chasing him the other day. He felt his bladder turn weak. A bird swooped down out of the tree and landed near him. He stared at it, willing it to step nearer. It could just fly off in a flash and be above the trees in a few seconds, flying over the whole city and looking down at all the iijits sweating it out there.
He got up slowly and walked to the far side of the tree. He kept strolling around the trunk, trying to think. Within a few minutes he realized that he was circling the tree. Soon he settled into a rhythm. He heard himself whispering, swearing. The whisper turned to a murmur and he began to repeat the words: a matter of time…
