“No, he didn’t,” Carmody said slowly.
“You don’t want it, do you?”
“I haven’t thought about it. But I guess not. Why should I?”
“You’re a stubborn man,” Father Ahearn said. “Just like your father. If you understood him, you might understand yourself, Mike. He was a proud man, and very set in his ways. But they were pretty good ways.” The old priest smiled slowly. “Remember how touchy he was about his singing. And the truth was he didn’t have a very good voice.”
“But big,” Carmody said.
“Oh, it was that, I grant you.” Father Ahearn got to his feet with an effort and went to the piano. “Eddie kept all the music, I see.” He picked up one of the sheets and smiled at it. “O, Blame Not the Bard ” His eyes went across the music. “Twas treason to love her, twas death to defend,” he murmured, shaking his head. Then he looked sharply at Carmody. “That’s something to remember about your father, Mike. He wasn’t allowed to love his own country. Like thousands of other Irishmen, that love was a kind of treason. Can’t you understand their bitterness when their sons went wrong over here? Instead of being grateful for a country to love and live in, some of the sons seemed bent only on spoiling the place. That hurt men like your father. It makes them angry and unreasonable, which isn’t the best tone to use on hot-headed young men. Can’t you see that, Mike?”
“Well, it’s all over, anyway,” Carmody said. “He’s dead and I’m still the rotten apple. Talking won’t change it.”
“How did you get so far away from us?” Father Ahearn said, shaking his head slowly.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t one decision.” Carmody shrugged. “Little by little, I guess.”
“Couldn’t you try coming back the same way? Little by little, I mean.”
“Admit I’ve been wrong? Ask for forgiveness.” Carmody turned away from him and pounded a fist into his palm. “It’s no good. If I did that I’d come to a dead-center stop. And I can’t stop while my brother lies dead and his murderers are living like kings.” Turning back, he stared angrily and hopelessly at the priest. “All I’ve got is a certain kind of power and drive. I can do things. The way I am, that is. But I’d be nothing if I turned into a confused sinner, begging for forgiveness.”
“You’ll be nothing until you see that Eddie’s murder was wrong,” Father Ahearn said sharply. “Not because he was your brother, or a police officer, but because he was a human being whose life belonged to God.”
A car door slammed at the curb. Through the windows Carmody saw George Murphy coming up the walk. “I’ve got to be going, Father,” he said, relieved to end this painful and pointless argument.
“Remember this,” the old priest said, and put a hand quickly on his arm. “Don’t get thinking you’re hopeless. St. Francis de Sales said, ‘Be patient with everyone, but above all with yourself.’ Keep that in mind. All sinners flatter themselves that they are hopeless. But no one is, son.”
“Okay, okay,” Carmody said shortly; he wanted to be gone, he wanted no more talk about sin and forgiveness. Turning, he left the house and met Murphy on the front porch.
“We’ve got to take a ride,” Murphy said. “You set to go?”
“Yes.”
When Father Ahearn came down the steps, Murphy’s sedan was moving away from the curb. He watched until it had disappeared at the corner, and then shook his head and started back to the rectory. His expression was weary and troubled.
“Well, what is it?” Carmody asked, as Murphy headed through the bright streets toward the River Drive.
“The Dobbses we found in the clips didn’t add up to anything,” Murphy said. He looked tired and hot; his day-old beard was a black smudge along his jaws, and his eyes were narrowed against the sunlight. “I worked all night on them and didn’t get a lead. But I found another Dobbs, and he could be our man.”
“Who’s that?”
“This fell into my lap, from an old guy named Sweeney who’s been a rewrite man on our paper since the year One. I got talking to him this morning, and he told me about a Billy Dobbs who worked on the Intelligencer years back. Not a reporter, but a photographer. The only memorable thing about Dobbs, Sweeney told me, was that he once stumbled accidentally into a bank stick-up. This was in ’38. Dobbs was coming in from a routine assignment, driving south on Market Street, when three guys ran out of the old Farmer’s Bank with satchels of dough and guns in their hands. They killed two cops right in the street, and a bullet hit the windshield of Dobbs’ car. He stopped and scrambled into a gutter to get out of the fire. All he thought about was taking cover instead of taking pictures. He could have been a hero by photographing the gunmen, but he’d probably have been a dead one. That’s what he said, at any rate. Two years later Dobbs quit the paper and that’s all Sweeney could tell me about him.” Murphy glanced at Carmody. “You see where this might be leading?”
“I’ve got an idea.”
“Right now we’re going to where Dobbs used to live. A guy in the Intelligencer’s personnel section gave me his old address. It’s in Avondale, in a pretty average neighborhood. Dobbs lived there with his mother and father. But they’ve all been gone for a long time.”
“We’ll have to ring a lot of doorbells to find someone who knew them,” Carmody said.
“I can’t think of any short cut,” Murphy said, and rubbed a hand wearily over his face. “I wish there was. I could use some sleep.”
They parked in front of the two-story wooden house in which the Dobbs family had lived, and got out of the car. The street was shady and quiet, in a neighborhood that was deteriorating steadily but gradually.
“You want the odd or even addresses?” Murphy said dryly.
“I’ll take the other side. Let’s go.”
It was in the middle of the afternoon and two blocks from the Dobbs home that Carmody got his hands on a lead. She was a pleasant little woman, starched and clean in a blue house dress, and she had known the Dobbses very well. “Funny you should ask,” she said, tilting her gray head at Carmody. “I was just thinking of Ed and Martha the other day. Something brought them back to mind, what I just can’t remember. But come in, won’t you? No sense baking there in the sun.”
In the dim old-fashioned parlor, Carmody said, “Do you remember when they moved away?”
“Yes, it was just before the war. The Second World War, I mean. About ’40 or ’41. Ed quit his job on the cars, and off they went. To California.”
“Did you know their son? Billy Dobbs?”
“Indeed I did. He was a quiet, steady youngster, and got himself a fine job on the paper. Took pictures for them. We used to see his name on them sometimes. Fires, accidents, all sorts of things you’d never expect little Billy Dobbs to be mixed up in.”
“But he quit his job, didn’t he?”
“That’s right. Moved off to another paper. It worried his mother, I can tell you, but it turned out pretty well, I guess.”
“Do you know what paper he went to?”
“His mother told me but I forgot,” the woman said, with a little sigh.
“Anybody around here ever hear from the Dobbses?”
“No, not for years anyway. Old Mr. Johnson, he’s dead now, looked them up when he was in California. He was out seeing his son who was in camp there, you see. And the Dobbses had come into good luck. Some relative of theirs in Australia had died, they told Mr. Johnson, and left them a nice little bit of money. They were living in style, he said. Flower garden, nice home, a maid even.” She smiled and shook her head. “A far cry from the days when they were on the cars.”
“Was their son around?”
She frowned. “Mr. Johnson never said anything about Billy...”