“Liam O’Reilly was either a snitch or a cop, wasn’t he?” I finally broke the ice. I was watching Jake’s face carefully but saw nothing there, absolutely nothing, so I took a wild guess, the more probable one: “He was a cop. Undercover? Special agent? How about drug task force?”
“I told you, Herbie, you’re not involved in this.” He was completely straight-faced, cool, revealing nothing.
“Was that what he was working on? Drugs? Is Gussie Murphy involved in some kind of drug-smuggling ring? Cocaine? Marijuana? Or something else? Are they unloading drugs off the coast? And transferring them to the mainland through lobster pots? Am I right? They put the stuff in the lobster pots, then Gussie goes out later and gets it? Takes it to his restaurant or wherever their distribution point is? Is that what this is all about?”
Finally a reaction: he frowned, started to hunt for a cigarette in his sports jacket.
“And Mr. O’Reilly? What did he do? Find out too much? Or not enough? Was he a plant, or just a guy trying to make a deal with the Feds? Was Gussie going to betray the others — his gang — or whatever they call it? Then someone found out and killed Mr. O’Reilly and stuck his arm in one of Gussie’s traps to show him what would happen if he doublecrossed them? I guess Gussie and his traps would be pretty useful in an operation like that, wouldn’t they? Plenty of traffic in and out of the canal. Barges, freighters, fishing boats. But whoever killed Mr. O’Reilly, they got the wrong trap, Jake. They put the arm in Neddie’s trap because out in the fog they couldn’t tell green from blue. And it’s a mistake I bet they’ve made before except that Neddie hasn’t found out about it. I bet Brucie Hacker’s in on the whole deal, or at least he’s been making out from it, right? I bet he helps himself to whatever gets mistakenly dropped into his dad’s traps. Am I right, Jake, am I?”
“You think you’re a real bright fellow, don’t you, Herbie?”
“Two plainclothes policemen, agents, whatever, they came to see me this afternoon, except I wasn’t home. They must have got my name from Mr. Hacker, and they came and asked my mother if I ever got in trouble at school. They wanted to know if I hung around the Lobster Trap much, if I’d ever worked for Mr. Murphy, or run errands for him, stuff like that. They wanted to know if I ever behaved strangely, got secretive, or hid stuff in my room. Mom’s not stupid, Jake. She knew what they were asking, and now she’s in bed scared stiff that I’m mixed up with some drug gang. So you’d better tell me the truth this time. All of it. Mom’s so afraid she’s made herself sick.”
But Jake was just quiet, thoughtful. He studied me, studied the cigarette he was yet to light.
“Come on, Jake. You’ve already moved Neddie Hacker. He’s gone. His boat is gone. I called the harbormaster down the river, and he said the Coast Guard escorted him out this afternoon. He told all his friends that he was going off on a ‘little vacation.’ You didn’t arrest Mr. Hacker, but you took him off to a safe place, didn’t you?”
“You ever hear of the word lagan, Herbie?”
“No, but—”
“During Prohibition bootleggers would sometimes hide their booze in barrels or containers under the water, marked with a buoy so they could retrieve it later. It was called lagan. I suppose the word is equally relevant here.” He lit his cigarette, studying me intently as he did. “But why is this happening to you again, Herbie? Can you answer me that? No, forget it. I’m sorry your mother’s upset by all of this. I’ll talk to her later. And those two men, they won’t bother her again. I didn’t have time to get to them earlier.” He sighed. “But what I’m getting at is this: you haven’t stumbled onto some drug ring, though it might have been easier if you had. No, what you stumbled onto is a ring of arms smugglers, Herbie, IRA sympathizers, Gussie Murphy among them. They transfer guns and ammunition into Northern Ireland.”
“Jake?” It was as if he’d slapped me across the face.
“So it’s the other way around, isn’t it? Reverse your story, and substitute guns for drugs. There’s a group that’s been buying guns down south, some in Virginia, some in other states. They bring them up here in crates of produce: onions, squash, even watermelon, all things a man like Gussie Murphy might be buying for a restaurant, right? Anyhow, the guns are brought in on produce trucks, wrapped up in watertight plastic bags, and then taken out on lobster boats and from there transferred to traps marked with certain colors, in this case, Gussie’s colors. Someone in a fishing boat, passing through the canal, lowers a dinghy off the side and quickly checks out a few traps — in the early morning maybe, or maybe when it’s foggy. It’s got to be done fast, Herbie. Then the guns make their way up the coast, from boat to boat, and across the ocean to Belfast. It’s the IRA you’re mixed up with this time. The bloody IRA.”
“Bloody politics,” I muttered. “And the reason for Neddie Hacker and Gussie Murphy’s feud?”
“Everything I just told you I learned from Liam O’Reilly ten days ago. He’s been watching Gussie and his whole operation for six months now. I’m the local contact, the guy who’s supposed to help—” He stopped, bit his bottom lip. “Anyhow, it looks like Liam got too close, or he learned too much. Maybe Gussie was thinking of cooperating with us, who knows? The point is that you’re probably right, that arm was meant for Gussie to see, not you and Neddie.” He killed his cigarette in an old metal coaster sitting on the windowsill. “It confused us at first, being in Neddie’s trap.” He looked at me meaningfully as if to say if you hadn’t explained it to us, we would have figured it out... eventually. “Now Gussie’s gone dumb. Won’t talk. Protested rather strongly this afternoon when we showed him our warrants and searched everything he owns: restaurant, warehouse, boats, his house. But we came up with nothing. Zilch. Zero. No guns. Not a single blasted bullet. And according to the last message I got from Liam there were forty cases being moved this weekend.”
It was then I finally swore, looking quickly into the house hoping my mother hadn’t awoken and heard.
“So we think they’re lying low. If Gussie had pulled that trap — if the arm had been put in the right trap — Liam O’Reilly would be just another missing person. And this just another dead-end investigation.”
“That phone call you made this morning. It was to the FBI, or the ATF, and—”
“Let’s just call them an important federal agency.” He managed a weak smile.
“So he got real close, didn’t he? Mr. O’Reilly?” I paused, seeing another angle to this. “And you got to know him pretty well, didn’t you, Jake?”
“Yeah.” He started fishing for another cigarette.
“But now you can’t get them, the people who did this to him.”
“According to Liam there’s got to be forty cases of guns somewhere.” He shook his head. “Maybe they found someplace else to hide them, someplace we haven’t thought of. And maybe he was wrong, maybe they did get them out and they’re halfway to Belfast on a fishing boat right now.”
“And maybe they’re out there, Jake. Maybe the guns are out there now.”
“Out where?”
“In the water! Isn’t it the best place to hide something? Like you said — lagan?”
“Herbie, don’t you think we’ve checked every pot in the bay? Pulled every buoy from here to West Doversport and back? Plus found excuses to go aboard half a dozen boats we’ve been suspicious of. Nothing.” Another weak smile. “And we certainly can’t drag the whole bay, though we’ve thought about it.”
“Runners,” I said. “That’s what the guy who built that wharf was, who had the big house on the island back in the twenties. Mr. Hacker called him a runner, a bootlegger, Jake! The wharf got torn down when they built the canal. They probably had to widen and dredge that whole area north of Smiley’s Island.”