to ferry them home to blighted suburbs. Mary had seen too many Alan Kennys cruising by in their Mercedes.
“Maybe I yapped too much,” said Kenny. “About deals, the film business.” He looked from Minogue to Malone and back. “Maybe it’s when you guys, you know, finally crack a case. Yes. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Crack a case,” said Minogue.
“When you’ve just pulled off a big deal, I mean. When you’ve gotten it on paper? The deal. You’ve just got to talk about it to someone.”
“You boasted to Mary Mullen about your deals.”
“What I meant was that Mary might have picked up a false picture of the work I do. She thought it was just a matter of picking up a phone, talking big talk and then you went home rich.”
“Oh,” said Malone. Kenny’s lips tightened.
“It might look like that to someone on the outside,” he said. “She used to pick up on strange phrases. ‘The inside track’ was one. She wanted to be in on deals, deals she’d never understand. ‘In the know’ was another one. I bought an apartment, right? I kept it, I rode the trend and got out with a tidy sum. Okay? Is that so awful?”
Minogue looked at the wall above Kenny’s head.
“But Mary-people like Mary, anyway-they think it’s easy. They think it’s magic! They can’t see how it’s done. Don’t you get it? She said, ‘But you don’t use the apartment, you don’t even live in it.’ You see what I’m trying to get at?”
“Maybe, Mr. Kenny. Maybe.”
“So I tried to explain to her that money was made in buying and selling merchandise and services. Products. An expert’s time and training. Property. Information. Investments. Her eyes would glaze over. So when she shoved those pills at me and I told her I could never use them, she tells me, ‘Well, you told me it was all about buying and selling stuff you didn’t need.’ Why couldn’t drugs be just another commodity there, you know?”
“They already are,” said Minogue.
“Yes, but not legitimate business, not in the sense of…”
He let the words trail off. His eyes still blazed as they bored into the Inspector’s.
“Okay,” said Minogue. “There you were. You gave her the money, you gave her the package. It’s eight o’clock.”
“I gave her the money, yes. I tried to give her the package.”
“That was when things turned, let me see…” He looked down at his notes. “ ‘Really nasty’?” Kenny nodded.
“I told her I just couldn’t do it. She could keep the money. I told her, tried to tell her, that it was time to, you know…”
“Go our separate ways,” said Malone. Minogue glanced at him. The detective’s face was blank.
“That’s right,” snapped Kenny. “And, by the way, I’ve heard your accent there.”
“And?” said Minogue. Kenny kept his eyes on Malone.
“Haven’t you heard of inverted snobbery?”
Malone shook his head.
“Well, maybe you can’t credit anyone who happens not to have been born on the Northside of Dublin with any feelings, any positive feelings, I mean. Is it my fault I grew up in Foxrock or something? Is it my fault I have a good job? Christ, man, you don’t know the hours I put in! But hey-I’m not complaining!”
Malone’s expression didn’t change.
“A thousand quid,” he said.
“Yes! A thousand quid. That’s a lot of money for me. A lot.”
“You tried to buy your way out,” said Malone.
“Buy my way out? That’s a damn lie! I reckoned on it being enough to get her out of whatever scrape she was in. Enough for her to forget that stupid stunt she was trying to get me into.”
Scrape, thought Minogue. What was the going rate for an abortion in London anyway?
“ ‘Scrape.’ ”
“Whatever she wanted to use the money for, I don’t know. Maybe she had debts?”
“You keep on saying, or suggesting, that Mary was under pressure. How so?”
“I don’t know. I don’t.”
“What did you suspect?”
“I really don’t know. Maybe they told her to hurry up. The Egans, I mean.”
“Um. It was at that time that she became, shall I say, explicit about threats?”
“Yes.”
“Go through it again.”
“Do I really have to? We’ve been talking… Oh, I get it. You want to find inconsistencies and then jump on me, is it?”
“Maybe,” said Minogue. “Do we, Tommy?”
“Don’t know about you. I wouldn’t say no to a bit of that. Yeah.”
“So, Mr. Kenny?”
“Number one: She’d tell the Egans that I had stolen the drugs-the package. They’d believe her, she said. Her word counted for a lot more than mine there. ‘When it really counted,’ she said. Maybe mine might count with the Guards, I remember her saying, but where it really mattered, hers would. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?”
“Deeply,” said Minogue. “Go on.”
“This Eddsy Egan would do a number on me, personally. He was a sadist, she said. He’d, well, he’d…”
“‘Chop your fucking nuts off,’ ” Malone murmured. Kenny frowned at him.
“Yes. So I began to get more annoyed. I mean, who was she to threaten me like this? I mean, what had I done to her that I deserved that kind of thing?”
Done to her, Minogue reflected. Given her hope, maybe.
“I mean, all she has to do is bring the damn stuff back,” said Kenny. “Then she can keep the money, right? Go her own way. I mean to say, Mary knew how to take care of herself, didn’t she? But no. She goes into a tirade about us, how I was the scum of the earth.”
Malone began to recite, his finger following the scribble across his pages.
“‘Southside fucking bastard…’ ”
“Yes, yes-whatever. That’s when she comes up with the photo bit. She tells me she has photos of a night in the Breffni hotel. I don’t care, I tell her. Well, Eddsy Egan does, she screams back.”
Kenny broke off to rub his hands alternately through his hair.
“You knew before then that she did photo sessions for the Egans?”
“No. She told me that Eddsy, the crippled-looking one, was the one who started her on them. Apparently he can’t, well, you know what I’m getting at. All he can do is look on, I hear. He likes to know the girls he’s looking at. The crazy one, Bobby, is into it as well. He gets prospects for the brother. Bobby’ll go, how can I put it, all the way. His harem. Him and Mary. As well as others, of course.”
“Back to the threats. The break-every-bone-in-your-body bit.”
“You make it sound trivial. Like it’s funny or something.”
Minogue and Malone stared at him.
“She said, ‘I know a guy who can break every bone in your body.’ ”
“ ‘Every bone in your fucking body,’ ” said Malone. He wasn’t looking at his notebook now.
“This is separate from the threat about Eddsy Egan?” asked Minogue.
“Well, I didn’t know, did I? At that stage I was thinking that she was so shrill about the Egans that there was something strange going on. More than just her anger and everything. She was losing it. Panicking. I got the idea then that she wouldn’t dare tell the Egans. That she’d get into trouble with them if they found out what she’d done, what she’d tried to do. That she was bluffing.”
“So the other threat was her own, sort of?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“You used the term ‘double-cross’ earlier on. You said you believed that Mary had been caught in a double- cross.”
“Yes, I did.”
“And that you were annoyed enough-the money, the threats-that you decided to just drive off.”
