Benjamin Black - Christine Falls

“I’ve got to go,” Quirke said shortly. “There’s someone I have to meet.”

It was a lie. The old man looked put out, but made no protest. “You won’t…?” He held up Quirke’s whiskey glass but Quirke shook his head, and the old man turned and put both glasses back on the sideboard. “Are you sure you’ve eaten? I think you’re not taking care of yourself.”

“I’ll get something in town.”

“Flint could rustle you up an omelette…?” He nodded ruefully. “No, not the most tempting of offers, I grant you.” At the door a thought struck him and he stopped. “Who killed her, the Moran woman-do they know?”

“Someone got into the house.”

“Burglars?”

Quirke shrugged. Then he said:

“You knew her.” He watched the old man’s face. “Dolly Moran, I mean. She worked for you and Nana, and then later on for Mal and Sarah, taking care of Phoebe. That was how Mal knew where to go for help, with Christine Falls.”

The Judge was looking to one side, frowning and thinking. Then he closed his eyes and gave a cry as he had done earlier, softer but more sorrow-laden. “Dolores?” he said, and seemed about to falter on his feet, and Quirke reached out a hand to him. “Merciful God-was it Dolores? I never made the connection. Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Poor Dolores.”

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said again; he seemed to have been saying it since he had arrived. They went into the hall, the Judge walking as if in a daze, his arms hanging stiffly before him, and for a moment Quirke saw his likeness to Mal. “She was very loyal, Dolly was,” Quirke said. “Any secrets she had, she kept them. Mal should be grateful to her.”

The old man seemed not to have heard him. “Who’s in charge of the case?” he asked.

“Fellow called Hackett. Detective inspector.”

The Judge nodded. “I know him. He’s sound. If you’re worried, I can talk to him, or get someone to drop a word…?”

“I’m not worried,” Quirke said, “not for myself.”

They had reached the front door. Suddenly it came to Quirke that what he was feeling most strongly was a sort of shamefaced pleasure. He recalled an occasion when he and Mal were boys and the Judge had summoned him into the den and made him stand by the desk while he questioned him about some minor outrage, a window broken with a stone from a catapult or a stash of cigarette butts found hidden in a cocoa tin in the linen cupboard. Who had fired the stone, the Judge demanded, who had smoked the cigarettes? At first Quirke had insisted that he knew nothing, but in the end, seeing clearly how much of his authority the Judge had invested in this cross-examination, he had admitted that Mal was the culprit, which most likely, he thought, the Judge already knew, anyway. The feeling he had now was like what he had felt then, only now it was much stronger, a hot mixture of guilt and glee and defiant self-righteousness. The Judge that time had thanked him solemnly and told him he had done the right thing, but Quirke had detected in his eye a faint, evasive look of-of what? Disappointment? Contempt?

Now Quirke said:

“The business with the file, all that: I’m the only one who knows about it. I said nothing to Hackett, or anyone.”

The Judge once more was shaking his head. “Malachy Griffin,” he muttered, “you’re a bloody fool.” He laid a hand heavily on Quirke’s shoulder. “I understand your interest in the Falls girl, of course,” he said. “You were thinking of Delia, the same way that she went.”

Quirke shook his head. “I was thinking of Mal,” he said. “I was thinking of all of us-of the family.”

The Judge seemed to be only half listening. His hand was still on Quirke’s shoulder. “I’m glad you told me,” he said. “You did the right thing.” You’re a good boy. “Do you think I should speak to him?”

“To Mal?” Quirke shook his head. “No, best to leave it, I think.”

The Judge was watching him. “And you,” he said, “will you leave it?”

Quirke did not know what he would have answered, for at that moment Miss Flint came forward squeakingly, impassive of expression, bringing Quirke’s coat and hat. How long, he wondered, had she been standing there in the shadows, listening?

THE THING THAT ANDY WANTED WAS A CAR. NOT ANY OLD CAR, THAT some nigger with too much cheap liquor in his veins had finished bolting together one rainy Monday morning in Detroit. No, what he had set his heart on was a Porsche. He knew the very model, too, a Spyder 550 coupe. He had seen one, over near the Common, where Claire had dragged him with the baby to take a walk one day. In fact, he heard it before he saw it, a growling roar that for a thrilling moment turned the Common to savannah and a stand of pin oaks into tropical palms. He turned, all his instincts prickling, and there the beast was, throbbing under a red light at the intersection of Beacon Hill and Charles Street. It was small to be making so much noise, jelly-bean scarlet, with tires a foot thick, and so low to the road it was a question how any normal-sized person could get in behind the wheel. The top was down; he wished, later, for the sake of his peace of mind, it had been left up. The driver was just some Boston guy trying to look like one of those Englishmen in the magazine ads, slick-haired and sissyish, wearing a blue blazer with two rows of brass buttons and a loosely tied gold-colored silk scarf inside the open collar of his white sport shirt. But the girl beside him, she was a knockout. She had kind of an Indian profile, with high cheekbones and a nose that came down in a straight line from her forehead. She was no Indian, though, but pure Boston Brahmin, honey-skinned, with big blue wide-apart eyes, a cruel red mouth the same shade as the paintwork of the car, and a heavy mane of yellow hair that she pushed aside from her forehead with a sweep of one slender, pale arm, letting Andy see for a second the delicate blue shadow in her shaved armpit. She felt his hungry eyes on her and gave him a look, amused, mocking, and about a hundred miles distant, a look that said, Hey, pretty boy, you get yourself a college education, a rich daddy and an income of a couple of hundred grand a year and a car like this one, and who knows, a girl like me might let you buy her a Manhattan some evening over there at the Ritz-Carlton.

That Saturday he had been out to Cambridge to a used-auto place where there was a Porsche for sale, not a Spyder but a 356. It had looked good, all polished up like a shiny black evil beetle, crouched there among a fleet of chrome-encrusted jalopies, America’s finest, but two minutes under the hood had told him it was no good, that someone had driven the heart out of it and that it had probably been in a wreck. Anyway, who did he think he was fooling? He did not have the dough to buy it even if they offered it to him at a tenth of the asking price. The trip across the river had taken two bus rides there and two back again, and now he was home and in no mood for entertaining callers.

When he turned onto Fulton Street, footsore and mad as hell, he saw the Olds parked at the curb outside the house. It was no Porsche, but it was big and new and shiny, and he had never seen it before. He was looking it over with a critical eye when Claire appeared around the side of the house with a red-haired priest carrying his hat in his hand. Andy did not know why he fixed first of all on the hat, but it was the thing about the priest that he least liked the look of; it was an ordinary black homburg, but there was something about the way that he carried it, holding it by the crown, like a bishop or a cardinal holding that four-cornered red flowerpot thing that they wore saying Mass-he could not remember the name of it but it sounded like the name of a handgun, Italian, maybe, but he could not remember that, either, and was irritated all the more. Andy did not like priests. His folks had been Catholics, sort of, and at Eastertime his ma would lay off the gin for the day and take him and the rest of the kids on the bus down to Baltimore to go to High Mass there in the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. He had hated those trips, the boredom on the Greyhound, the baloney sandwiches that were all they would have to eat until they got home again, and the crowds of fat-cat harps in the cathedral making the place stink of bacon and cabbage, and the crazy-sounding guys chanting and moaning up on the altar in their weird robes that looked like they were made of metal, some sort of silver or gold, with purple letters and crosses and shepherd’s crooks embroidered on them, and everyone being so holy it would make you want to puke and muttering along with the prayers in Latin that they did not understand a word of. No, Andy Stafford did not care for priests.