TWENTY
That was half eight, right?” Malone asked. Kenny nodded. Malone ran the tip of his biro along the lines in his notebook while he read. “ ‘I’ll phone Eddsy if you’re not back here with all the money at ten.’ ”
“Yes.”
Kenny had left his sleeves rolled up. He was rubbing his wrists. He tossed his hair back every now and then. The mannerism was driving Minogue to distraction.
“You knew all along you’d never come up with the rest of it, the rest of what she wanted.”
“The three thousand? Yes. I mean no. I knew I couldn’t.”
“You’re certain that you never actually told her that?”
“Right. I mean, what did she really think? She thought I had that kind of cash lying around the kitchen?”
Minogue shifted in his seat.
“You never told Mary anything which would lead her to believe that you actually wanted it, that you might be interested in selling the stuff-”
“Absolutely no way.”
“-or using the stuff.”
“Impossible. She was just coming the heavy, straight out. She’d tell the Egans if I didn’t cough up. I couldn’t believe it when she turned on me like that. Just unbelievable.”
Took the words out of my mouth, Minogue said within.
“She was really scared, you said. Scared she’d be found out?”
“Yes. Either the cash or the stuff had to be there. She said Bobby didn’t mind if she did a deal without advance warning. As long as the money was there right away. They’d been burned before, he’d told her. She said, anyway.”
“Look,” said Minogue. ”How would she form the opinion that you were in the market for this stuff? She told you she’d done something dangerous by taking the stuff from Bobby’s. Why’d she pin you for this deal?”
“Wait a minute here! You agreed earlier on that in no way was I dealing just because I took the package off her hands for a little while that night. No way! The worst thing I did, if I did anything wrong at all, was that I’d tried the stuff once or twice. Right? I mean, is that the crime of the century? You told me that wasn’t an issue here at all.”
“Stop, stop, stop, Mr. Kenny. What I’m trying to understand here is how you got yourself into this mess. You haven’t told us everything.”
“Ah, come on. You’re the cop! You know human nature, surely?”
Minogue eyed Malone.
“Everyone wants risk, don’t they? Oh, come on! Danger even. Mary was an attractive girl. She was ambitious. Anyone could see that. I grew up in a different way, a different world really, I suppose I’d have to say. I never really had to…you know?”
Minogue wondered how long she had been playing him. Was he hers or was she doing it for others? Mary Mullen had persuaded herself that this was her chance to cross into his world, the black furniture and the air- conditioning and the money that lived in the computers, real money that was clean and just as powerful as the worn and worried-over twenties she’d earned as a prostitute.
“It probably started and ended with me being stupid,” Kenny was saying. “Pretending I’d tried the stuff before. Or that friends of mine, people I know, had used-had said they’d used-stuff.”
“Stuff,” said Malone.
“All right. Drugs.”
“On one of those ‘one or two occasions,’ you used Ecstasy when you were with Mary. Am I right?”
“Yes. I admitted that. Right.”
“Did she?”
“No. She said she wanted to stay straight, that she liked it better that way.”
“She shoved this package into your lap when she got out of your car that evening,” said Minogue.
“Right. At first I hadn’t a clue, but then I squeezed it and I knew.”
“So you handed the package back to her.”
“Bloody right I did! Like a hot potato. But she threw it back in and walked off. More like ran off.”
“But not before she told you that you had to come up with the cash or else?”
“Or else Bobby’d know about it and there’d be big trouble.”
“Your reaction again?” said Malone.
“Well, like I said. I was, well, totally flabbergasted. I mean to say. It was so out of character for her. I really thought she was strung-out or something. Just nuts, she was. The look on her face, I mean.”
“So you didn’t put much store in her telling you that she was dead against drugs, that she never used?”
“Up to then I thought, well, she was admirable, I suppose. She hung around in that, em, subculture, like. I never saw her stoned. At least, if she was, I never knew. Never saw her overdoing the drink either. But at that moment, I knew I couldn’t reason with her. She was just nuts.”
“You decided to get a thousand quid together,” said Minogue.
“Not right then, no. I mean, I was late for the dinner with the client and everything.”
“When did you decide again?”
“All during that dinner, I was trying to decide what to do. I don’t think I tasted one dish that I ate. I knew it was time to get out of this, you know. I made up my mind that she could have the thousand quid. It’d be a way of saying goodbye, sort of. I had to ferret around a few bank machines, I tell you.”
“But you planned all along to go back to the canal at eight to meet her?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t keen to, I tell you.”
“So. Eight o’clock rolls around. You have a thousand quid and the package.”
“I gave her the envelope with the money. I tried to talk to her. She ripped open the envelope, saw what was in it and then she freaked again. I tried to tell her that we should, you know, give things a rest? That I didn’t like the direction we had been going in.”
“By this time, you’re steamed up, aren’t you?”
“Sure, I was annoyed-I mean it was pretty clear she’d set out to take me, right?”
Kenny held his hair back over his head with two hands. Minogue stared at the shine on his forehead. Kenny let go. His head drooped.
“I was working too hard,” he said. “Everything was too fast. I didn’t weigh things. I realized that it was time to-”
“Settle down?” asked Malone. Kenny looked up at him and frowned.
“Yes, settle down. But I resent the way you make it sound. I was ready for a serious long-term-”
“Relationship,” said Malone. Kenny gave him a hard look.
“Marriage, actually. You can understand that, can you?”
“Mary knew of this?”
“Not in so many words. But I think she knew something was up. Women’s intuition and everything, right?”
Minogue studied Kenny’s tentative smile.
“It might account for her rotten humour though, wouldn’t it?” Kenny added. “Timing, I mean, trying to get whatever she could before it was too late.”
“So. You tried to give her the package.”
“Right-as well as the money. The thousand quid. I told her that I guessed she was under some pressure and would this help her. Told her I just couldn’t get into this kind of thing. There was absolutely no way. Imagine, I said to her, me trying to get rid of this stuff to clients and friends and the like. I mean it would be funny if it weren’t so, well, tragic, I suppose. Accountants-the high life! Really? Christ, how naive. I really couldn’t figure out where she’d gotten the idea that the likes of me… Television, maybe? I don’t know.”
He glanced at Malone. The hostility lay like a shadow over his colleague still. For a moment he saw Mary Mullen and thousands like her, tens of thousands like her probably, standing at bus stops for late buses, full buses,