“O-L-S-E-N?”
“O-N,” said Freeman. There was a tint in the glasses, Minogue decided. He returned Freeman’s fleeting smile with his dull stare.
“Your ex-wife, Mr. Leyne. Her residence currently?”
“Geraldine lives in Boston,” Leyne said “We get along fine. We’ve gone our separate ways. I go to Palm Springs five, six times a year. Pauline’s there most of the time. She’s trying to be a movie star. She wants to do screenplays too. Her and a hundred million other people. Anyway, Patrick phoned. He came by the office pretty regularly, I’d have to say. Which was fine. I didn’t want to have to guess what the hell he was going to do there. In the office I could deal with him.”
“Where did he live again?”
“Well he’d had his own room with his mother, Geraldine. She kept it for him. In Boston. That’s where he grew up, well from age ten anyway. When we split up. But he has… he had, his own place, since, well he was nineteen or twenty. His own apartment, I mean. That’s how he wanted it. He’d call by Geraldine’s a lot though. She’s tremendous. She’s a hundred times better parent than me. No secrets on that score there, er, Mike.”
“Matt’s fine ”
“I’m an open book here, Matt.”
“That conversation you had, the phone call. What did you talk about?”
Leyne coughed and lit another cigarette. He spun his lighter several times on the table
“News, that kind of thing,” he said.
“News? Does anything stand out? He told you he was going to Ireland?”
“Oh sure. Was there anything I wanted. As if there was no other way I could get it, you know?”
“Being…”
Leyne grabbed the lighter and stood it up
“Christ, who knows? A souvenir or something? Ah, he was trying to make himself useful, I suppose. What’s that word, ingra…?”
“Ingratiate?”
“That’s it. To make up. After his carry on. Trying to, well I suppose you’d say, be considerate?”
Freeman too was studying Leyne’s work with the lighter. Leyne suddenly stopped.
“Trying to suck up, is a way of saying it too. Right, Jeff?”
Freeman opened his hands, shrugged, and looked at the lighter again.
“Doesn’t sound very nice, does it?”
“Your son had been through a bad patch, Mr. Leyne?”
Leyne snorted and he drew on his cigarette. He squinted at Minogue while he sucked on it. Never the patrician, Minogue decided, for all the money.
“That’s what I like about here,” Leyne said. “About coming home. No, not home. There’s no going ‘home.’ It’s hearing the way things are said here. ‘A bad patch’ or ‘I’m sorry for your trouble’ or ‘God bless you.’ It’s not that they’re beating around the bush or trying to pull a fast one on you — no. It’s just that way of saying things. A ‘bad patch’ — and you’re the cops too, the real McCoy too, the tough guys. Right, Jeff?”
Again the shrug, and a perfunctory smile, from Freeman.
“I’m only standing in for the boss,” said Minogue. “He’s on leave.”
“Huh. A bad patch…”
Leyne sat forward, his elbows pressed hard into the armrests, and stared down at his cigarette. Minogue wondered if he was trying to keep from crying.
“… a bad patch. Right. Well, it was more like a fucking quilt. He’d been to Brentwood. That’s a clinic, a treatment center down in New Jersey. A kind of last resort. That was last year. He’d kicked, he told me. Even the booze, but he could take a glass of wine and then stop. According to him anyway, he’d beat the whole thing.”
“Is that true?”
“Not sure,” said Leyne in a quiet voice. He let the smoke out slowly.
“The clinic tested him for drugs. I made them. Jesus, I paid them enough. One of the conditions I put on Patrick, we put on him, was that he get tested every week at the very least. Last I heard it was good.”
“A condition, you said.”
“Geraldine and I worked it out. The fiancee thing was the last straw. We decided to cut him off if he didn’t get serious about his, his problems. Tough love, do people say that here in the old sod?”
Minogue nodded.
“The deal was he’d go to the clinic,” Leyne said. “He’d take the cure, however long it took. Move to a new place — whatever. I told him I’d stand by him, get him started up. He knew Geraldine would too, of course. He had to shake off that bunch of bastards he’d been running with too. They were the problem. They were taking him for whatever they could. And he used to talk it up, you know, play the big shot. The name.”
“Your name, is it?”
“Right. He signed things, he promised things, that could have gotten him time in jail.”
Leyne took a long pull on his cigarette. He coughed and waved away smoke.
“Maybe I should never have bailed him out,” he croaked. Minogue watched the color crest in his face and then fade. Brick red
“How was he doing then?” Minogue asked. “After this treatment center.”
“Seemed to be okay,” Leyne said quickly. “I got him a start with a company near Boston. Denis Coughlan, property development. Denis’d get him trained and running, then he’d send him south. The Sun Belt. A lot of business is moving south. Patrick wouldn’t be running the show.”
He spun the lighter again, stopped it, and glanced at Minogue.
“Patrick wouldn’t be able to run a bath. Denis would keep him on a short leash. Denis said good things about him actually. I was beginning to wonder, well, you know what I’m saying.”
“So your son just wanted to have a chat. Nothing else?”
“He wanted to meet me.”
“Did you?”
Freeman pushed at his glasses. Leyne stared at the tip of his cigarette.
“No, I didn’t.”
Minogue looked at the cigarette rolling between Leyne’s fingers.
“I was busy,” said Leyne “I’m always busy. Christ.”
He looked from face to face around the table.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t have that kind of patience. I worked my ass off. I started from nothing. You know, when I went to people here first with the idea that people would want to go to their fridges and take out frozen french fries — well, whatever… Marriages don’t come with guarantees. But that doesn’t mean that someone can go around blaming his parents for being fu — , for being a loser.”
“Is that what he did?”
“He tried to. Any time I’d go after him, you know, show him reality, well he’d pull that one. But I’d have to say he hadn’t been doing that for a while. No.”
Minogue looked down at his notebook. Leyne rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sighed. He sat back and looked over at the window.
“Did I want anything,” he muttered. “That’s what he asked me.” He held his cigarette close to his chin and fixed his gaze on nothing
“Guff,” he murmured “Bullshit, you say here now?”
“Both, Mr. Leyne. As a matter of fact I hear both terms used with frequency.”
“Ah,” said Leyne. “The political crowd here never changes, does it.”
“It was my daughter actually I was thinking of.”
Freeman allowed himself a smile. Leyne chuckled again. He eyed Tynan.
“Nice to see there are still some of the same Guards doing the job as I remember, Commissioner The old guard.”
Minogue didn’t look for Tynan’s reaction
“Do you put much stock in the psychology stuff here? Patrick did. It’s a bloody industry back in the States. He told me stuff about Ireland that he thought I was supposed to know. The Irish. Did I know any of the legends and
