It also wasn’t standard procedure, but elimination prints should have been taken. Dan should have thought of that, but there is always that chaos at a crime scene.
You wonder how they nailed Al? Well, they never did, not for murder. They caught him in the act during another burglary two years later — it seems he found retirement wasn’t to his liking after all. It was only chance Dan recognized him when they brought him in to the station.
Al told Dan the whole story. I suspect Al was counting on Dan’s discretion, and maybe his help with a reduced sentence. And somehow Dan never did get around to telling anyone higher up.
He’d discuss it with me when he was in his cups, but he knew I’d never tell. It makes cops look bad, this kind of thing. Like we accidentally helped a guy get away with murder.
I mean, we’re human, you know? We make mistakes, rookies especially. You don’t fingerprint the guy who’s been robbed, for Chrissake.
The real homeowner never knew the difference. Besides, one less crook in the world and the case was closed. The tax-paying public was once again safe, and damn the city council.
And that’s all that matters.
I’m telling you, but maybe I’m just making it up.
Maybe Dan was making it up. Dan did drink a bit.
This round’s on me. No, I insist.
The Purloined Pigs
by Dennis McFadden
Dennis McFadden’s stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including the literary journals Crazyhorse, PRISM International, and The South Carolina Review. His crime fiction has twice been selected for the Best American Mystery stories series. In 2010, Colgate University Press brought out a collection of his stories entitled Hart’s Grove. He’s produced this impressive body of work while also serving full time as a project manager for the New York State Department of Health.
When he was three or four his mam told him there was no such a thing as Santy Claus, nor Father Christmas, nor any of them. She told him Santy Claus was invented in the dark ages by Oliver Cromwell solely for the purpose of keeping the Paddies simple and deluded. His da disagreed, saying there was no way a Brit could ever be so clever, but his mam was nothing if not firm in her convictions, and the one time his da brought home a Christmas tree — a spindly wee orphan of a tree at that — didn’t his mam come in and pitch the thing straight through the window, tinsel, ribbons, and all. A brilliant enough event in its own right, made all the more so by the fact that they were living at the time in the third-floor tenement on Rutland Place, the tree narrowly missing old man McGonagall as it crashed to the cracked and dirty pavement down below. Up until now, that had been Lafferty’s most memorable Christmas.
Up until now. The snow falling on Blue Bucket Lane, a rare and fabulous thing, was only the beginning. Miraculous mightn’t have been overstating the case, not so much for being the first snow to fall on the village of Kilduff in any number of years, and not so much for happening on the very eve of Christmas, but for the nature of the transformation, Blue Bucket Lane going from a squalid stretch of brown mud, dead grass, and bland cottages into a wonderland of glitter and grace. Lafferty stood for a time in the doorway, watching the plump flakes float down dark and white through the lamplight, gathering on the berm of the lane and the dirty yards, clinging to the clusters of branches and limbs.
Miraculous too, the snowfall, for its timing. Had it come two nights earlier, it would have found your man shivering sleepless and homeless under his sodden old newspapers at the base of the Kilduff Cross on the green across from his turf accountant’s shop. Having finally been tossed out of her house for all and good by his wife, Peggy, the locks on the doors changed, the Gardai forewarned and watching. The last straw — his extended visit to tend to the needs of the widow Reagan — having finally broken the back of the camel in question. So it was easy for Lafferty to look out now at the new snow, spotless as the soul of a baby, and imagine a fresh beginning. He was no spring chicken anymore, Lafferty wasn’t, turning the corner at forty before you knew it. Time to settle down, grow up. Time to try to make a go of it with Peggy. Hadn’t they once upon a time been crazy mad with the lust and the love for one another, two decades ago to be sure, but wasn’t that a feeling that might be recaptured, and wasn’t the snow falling so white and fresh a sign that slates could be wiped clean, that leafs could be turned, that lives could start over again.
Peggy came up to him in the doorway. “Move your arse, Terrance, or I’ll be after tossing it right back out in the snow again. My guests’ll be here any minute.”
“Yes, my love,” said Lafferty.
“ ‘Love’ my arse,” said she.
“Oh, I do,” said he, “I do,” and Peggy had to smile, at last. Having long ago grown immune to his charms and inveiglements, it had been awhile since she’d smiled at his clever bon mot, and he took the smile to be confirmation that the sign of the snowfall was true, that clean slates and turning leafs and fresh beginnings were all possible in God’s sweet world.
“The toilet needs scrubbing,” said Peggy, the smile run away from her face.
She was giving her Christmas party. She’d invited her friends and coworkers from St. Christopher’s, where she was a nurse. In addition to a pack of promises concerning the nature of his future behavior, which included gainful employment, it was the party, in fact, that helped him worm his way back. Not just the labor of the preparation, mind you, for appearances beyond polish and shine were important, the appearance in particular of a happy couple graciously, charmingly (this is where Terrance came in) entertaining their guests on a Christmas Eve. She cooked, he cleaned. And cleaned and washed and dusted and swept and mopped and scrubbed and polished, one chore after another, eager and uncomplaining, at least within her earshot. His mam hadn’t raised her son for physical labor, much less physical labor befitting a scullery maid, but a night or two in the cold and barren roads of Kilduff could fine-tune a man’s attitude, and nor had his mam raised a fool. Lafferty looked at the condition as temporary. He figured after the new leaf was turned, after the relationship was reestablished, then the labor would naturally sort itself out by appropriate role and gender, and the old order would eventually reemerge. All he had to do was keep his nose clean and his tool sharp. And though he doubted the old order would go so far as a move back to Dublin, who knew? He’d never wanted to leave the city in the first place, to move to a godforsaken village the likes of Kilduff, out in the heart of County Nowhere. When she’d told him she wanted to leave, to quit the city, to start anew in a small cottage in a little village, where perhaps she and Terrance could start over as well, without all the gambling and drinking and unsavory sorts to lead him astray, and maybe even have the child she’d been hoping to have, he’d told her by God he was staying. He was a Dublin boy through and through, born and bred. But once again the want of a roof over his head put the spoil to his best-laid plans, forcing a reconciliation, a reluctant move to the country. That particular reconciliation, like all those that followed, had faltered, and so Lafferty hoped — sincerely this time, perhaps — that this one might somehow fare better.
It was in the very spirit of that reconciliation, in fact, that Lafferty went to the bother of procuring a gift, a Christmas gift, for the first time he could remember, maybe for the first time ever. In the thrift shop by Connor’s News Agent, he found a porcelain pigs figurine, forking over the last two bob to his name, two bob he’d worked hard to attain, a coin or two at a time here and there, beneath the cushions of Peggy’s sofa, in a little ceramic box in the corner of her dresser, scattered in the junk drawer of her kitchen cabinet. For didn’t herself collect pigs. If there was any irony in her penchant, Lafferty never looked for it. She had porcelain, pewter, stuffed, and plush, pigs of all sizes, shapes, and colors, on this shelf or that, this room or that, kitchen, bedroom, and parlor. The figurine he’d spotted amidst the junk in the thrift shop stood out head and shoulders above the other pigs, and he suspected it might be what Peggy might call adorable: six inches high, white in color with only a blush of pink, a mama pig and baby pig standing up on their hind legs, clutching one another as if in fear, looking up with four large and wondering eyes at the world at large. It came in a box that Lafferty wrapped in pretty paper he found in Peggy’s desk, and stashed the thing on the top shelf of the closet in the bedroom behind a shoebox and well out of sight to surprise her with come Christmas morning. He couldn’t wait to see the look on her face.