The words of the employee and detective echoed around John’s head as he tried to make sense of them. It was clear this guy was lying, but what could he do? He just stood there silent and invisible. Helpless.
“So, wait here and we’ll get our sketch artist to do another composite,” Williams offered.
“I really can’t remember anything of his face—it’s all a blur.”
“You said you had a good look when we first asked you!” Williams persisted.
“I’m sorry—I can’t help you.”
“If I find out you’re concealing the attacker’s identity, Mr. McGinty, this won’t end well for you. This is an attempted murder charge. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” McGinty answered, his voice small now.
“You’re free to go…for now.”
John felt his anger rise. The O’Donnell’s employee had just become the focus for all his frustration. Leaving the detective and Jennifer’s father to their follow-up meeting, John caught up with McGinty outside the precinct. He followed him down the crowded street, weaving in and out between the mortals: a mother kneeling to attend to her small child who had fallen over; roller skaters slaloming through seemingly stationary pedestrians; fast-walking, suit-wearing business types and dozy tourists with gaping mouths and city guides in hand. Some seemed to attract the attention of passing spirits, others did not.
As McGinty crossed a side street, a battered blue Chevy Caprice pulled up, blocking his path. Both he and John bent over to get a look at the driver. It was Jim Donovan.
“Get in!” Donovan ordered.
As McGinty got in, so did John by passing through the rear passenger door. Streams of Whiskey by The Pogues was playing inside the car until Donovan turned the music down.
“Well? Took you long enough!” he snapped, staring at McGinty as he drove on.
“They had a composite photo of the guy I saw.”
“What?”
“From another witness.”
“Shit! But you didn’t confirm it was him, right?”
McGinty said nothing.
“Right?” Donovan pressed, his voice now louder.
“No, of course not. I did like you said.” McGinty paused a moment. “I’m taking a risk for you, lying to the police’n’all.”
“Are you fuckin’ trying to blackmail me, because I know you ain’t got a conscience. If you wanna keep slinging dope in my pub, you’ll do what I tell you to. Do you really want to cross me, you little shit?”
The car screeched to a halt. “Get the fuck out. Remember, I know people.”
The employee nodded apologetically and got out.
John remained seated as Donovan drove off. He was in shock. His father’s best friend was involved in his stabbing? How was that possible?
The engine rattled and grated as Donovan angrily gunned it, cussing to himself. The route they now followed suggested they were going to O’Donnell’s.
O’Donnell’s sat low among its taller neighbors in the Queens borough of Jamaica. The Star-Spangled Banner, soaked and heavy from the previous night’s rain, hung by the main entrance at the midpoint of a row of green canopies. Each one of the etched glass windows beneath the canopies bore an elaborate pattern of curlicues framing either the words Public Bar or Fine Food & Spirits. The ‘fine food’ part, in John’s opinion, was a gross misrepresentation and the spirits, he suspected, were watered down.
Donovan parked at the rear next to John’s BMW, which was still where John had left it on the night of the attack. He loved that car. His father had bought it for him the same day he got his own Maserati. Not a day went by without him appreciating how fortunate he and his father had been. If his father hadn’t sold acres of Irish farmland to Hewlett Packard in the eighties just at the right time, he wouldn’t have had the money to invest in the subsequent property deals that made him even richer. They wouldn’t be living in a luxurious condo in New York, he would never have driven that BMW, and he wouldn’t be in line to inherit a successful property development business.
John had never taken the time to look at the rear of the pub during the day, but as he waited for Donovan to haul himself out of the car, he noticed that “the old girl,” as Donovan called the place, was peeling paint from rotting timbers and the lack of mortar in places gave the illusion of some of the bricks not being fixed but floating in the walls.
John had found out only a few months ago why his father had continued to invest in the pub after generously helping Donovan to buy it when the man was nearly broke, and when it clearly had become a money pit. Recently, he had confronted his father after finding in his study some of the half-baked financial reports, showing consistently poor results that had been sent by Jim once a year. When he’d suggested that Donovan was either a terrible businessman or suffering from a drinking problem—or both—his father’s response had shocked him.
He told his son that Jim Donovan had saved his life in what could have been a fatal car accident when they had both been teenagers, and that that kind of debt could never be repaid. Embarrassed, his father went on to explain how he had crashed the car into a tree following a drinking binge. Jim, who had been following behind, had pulled him out in the nick of time, before the vehicle had caught fire.
Donovan now wandered toward the door at the back of the pub. Unclipping a bunch of keys from a belt loop on his jeans, he thumbed his way through them and opened a series of locks with the systematic efficiency of a prison guard. John followed him in, past kegs of beer and boxes of dubious-looking French wine, all stacked against one wall of a narrow corridor. John recalled Jim explaining that the wine had been bought ‘for the ladies and stuck-up buggers.’ The Irishman definitely wasn’t going to fit with the ongoing gentrification of this area, where gourmet prepared-food delis and
