Hoey feigned a grin but it was one of aversion. He reached reflexively for his cigarettes. Crossan went in search of a phone. Minogue sloped over to the desk and was directed to a stool by the wall. He sat down and leaned against the wall.
“Yes, Jimmy,” he said, and held the phone away from his ear.
“Close, but not close enough.”
Minogue elbowed away from the wall with the surprise.
“I wasn’t expecting-”
“You have such high regard for journalists like Hynes that you fired him right in my face?”
Minogue tried desperately to gauge the current mood of Garda Commissioner Tynan.
“Ah now, John. Shorty Hynes is like that. I merely passed on some facts to him. He’s not my puppet, now.”
“He’s an nasty little gawker. What do you think you’re doing? You’re supposed to be off on your holidays.”
“Has Jim Kilmartin been in touch with you?”
“I was in touch with him,” said Tynan. “Ask me if it was before or after I received calls from Superintendent Tom Russell and Hynes.”
Jesus, I’m sunk, thought Minogue.
“You know Tom Russell, don’t you?” Tynan pressed on.
“Yes, I’ve met him briefly.”
“In the recent past?”
Minogue suspected that Tynan’s sarcasm was a teasing prelude to tearing his head off.
“Look, John-”
“Look, yourself. Tom Russell wants you out of his hair. I want Tom Russell out of my hair. He says you showed up at the Garda station in Ennis without an invite but with an IRA lawyer.”
“Wait a minute. Crossan’s not that, he’s just a damn good barrister who wins too many down here.”
“What are you doing prowling around there teamed up with this lawyer and another Guard on leave? One Seamus Hoey?”
“Give me five minutes-no, three minutes-to explain. Three minutes.”
“You had your five minutes and more in Bewleys restaurant the other day. I phoned Kilmartin and told him I’d be speaking with you over this, what can I call it, gatecrashing. He asked if you’d be kind enough to phone him after our conversation. I believe he has something to tell you.”
He’d not need to pick up a phone in Dublin for me to hear him, thought Minogue.
“Three minutes, John. Did Hynes give any details?”
“‘Details’? All Hynes and his ilk are likely to give me is a migraine.”
“But maybe he believes that the Garda Commissioner should know that a man accused of and freely confessing to the shooting death of another man, with the use of a firearm illegally imported into this country, is allowed back to Germany on his bail.”
“Is this a recording of a speech you’ve prepared? Does a journalist think this would be the first time that Justice has left Guards with their jaws hanging? This is news? If Hynes wants to make a thing of it, it’s in the Department of Justice and the Courts he should be kicking shins.”
“Didn’t he tell you anything about the man who was killed, though?” Minogue persisted.
“I didn’t give Hynes the chance. I gave him the number for an Assistant Secretary in Justice.”
“It’s the fella who was killed. That’s what has me here. Listen, about twelve years back…”
Minogue’s armpits were itching when he finished. Tynan had not tried to interrupt him. Minogue looked down to see that one of his feet was tapping away rapidly with a will of its own.
“You’re on holidays, right?” Tynan asked finally.
“Right.”
“You’re Sean Citizen in Ennis. You’re pursuing some research of your own. Right?”
“Right.”
“And there’s no call for you to be elbowing yourself in to investigate this shooting, pestering people to see autopsy reports or hang about the scene. Right?”
Minogue baulked.
“Do you hear me?” Tynan’s tone was mild enough for Minogue to recognise the impatience. “And Tom Russell and his well-trained Gardai can manage this shooting all the better now that he knows I’m aware of it here. Do you recognise that?”
“Yes,” said Minogue. “But-”
“Tom Russell will take care of it. Consider me briefed. As for the other stuff, your hobby there-”
“Look, John, the more I learn about it, the worse it looks. Bad process at the very least. If ever the Murder Squad should have been-”
“Wait, wait,” Tynan broke in. “Go ahead and find bad process then. You wouldn’t be the first to find it. But just for your own edification now, proceed with your research, but only if it has some basis in fact. I want to know in advance of anything important you expect to dig up. Phone Kilmartin too, by all means, and tell him you are to keep me posted. Point number two is this: I’m wondering if you might get vexed enough if things don’t go your way in Ennis to leak some more laments to the likes of Hynes. ‘Commissioner and Superintendent try to quash investigation into shooting.’ Call Hynes off, man. You went right over the wall with that, now. I don’t need to tell you. If you leak again, I’ll have you plugged. You made your point. If I see stuff like that in the papers, I’ll step out of Russell’s way.”
Minogue put on his protective coat of indignation.
“Come on now, John. I wouldn’t go over anyone’s head. Except maybe my own.”
“Come on, yourself. I’m saying, don’t do it. Last point. I know what your colleague, Seamus Hoey, did or tried to do. I’m saying nothing about it except this: Don’t be so sure that you know better than the caring professions.
“You may phone me if you find yourself being crucified, though,” Tynan added. “Crucified unjustly, I mean.”
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Cut that out, now. Don’t spend time trying to think of a way. Phone Kilmartin.”
Minogue walked slowly away from the phone. He was too bewildered to feel anything distinctly. One clear idea emerged from the fog. He would not phone Jim Kilmartin without having a lash of whiskey first. He waylaid a lounge-boy and had him bring a small Jamesons to the foyer. He thought of Kilmartin’s ugly mood awaiting ignition with a phone call. He tipped the returned lounge-boy, swallowed the whiskey in four gulps and headed back to the lounge. Hoey had slid far down in his chair in a defensive slouch, fortified as best he could against Crossan’s bulbous, straining eyes. Preoccupied, Minogue tripped over Hoey’s outstretched legs and staggered a few steps before regaining his balance.
“For the want of it,” said Crossan.
The Inspector’s befuddlement gave way suddenly to irritation. Thwarted, he thought, and he couldn’t even have a damn drink without having to hide it from Hoey.
“Friend or foe?” Crossan asked. “The phone call?”
“A bit early to tell,” Minogue grunted. “I have to make a call. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He returned to the foyer little mollified by the fact that neither Hoey nor Crossan had pressed him on whom he had been talking to. Had his expression told them all they needed to know? Kilmartin’s voice was full of the light inflections of whimsy, the sonorous and beguiling range of tones and emphases, of words lingered on, others dropped like petals on water, at once inviting and intimate, one minute wryly direct, dreamily inconclusive the next. Many still mistook such signs from James Kilmartin. Minogue guessed what could follow and it made him more nervous.
“Yes, yes,” Kilmartin went on in an eerily light-hearted tone. “I neglected to tell you, you might be interested. That clown in Drimnagh, Nolan. He got bail.”
“How? Why? When?”
“Ah, well now, you surely know that there’s been so much progress in law reform in the country now, Matt, what with us being real Europeans now and the whole place rotten with consultants and the helping professions and what-have-you. All the fine barristers and social scientists and psychologists we have choking the universities.”
“How?”
“Well, now. It appears that this fucking slug, Nolan, is a walking compendium of troubles. Wisha, the poor little scrap. They’re after discovering he has a learning disability so he’s a class of illiterate, and that, you know, builds up all kinds of trouble. Has a, ahem, a poor self-image. He doesn’t feel good about himself, I was told. Poor lad has an alcohol problem too.”