Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

And the world harsher. Denver, a big, hot, unpleasant city, and I got hungry now and I could read people when they were angry and I couldn’t ignore filth and dirt. Ketch softened the edges of everything, soothed you, blurred things like an impressionist painting. With ketch, Streisand was always singing and Vaseline was always on her lens.

I researched the stories of Robert, Charles, and Amber Mulholland. Old-fashioned police work. Phone calls to Harvard, to Cutter and May law firm, to the Mulholland Trust. Legwork at the Denver Public Library.

Robert and Charles checked out. They left traces all over the papers. Well known. The kids of a multimillionaire. Father divorced, the trust funds, the private schools, the Ivy League education, both PhDs in economics/political science. There were no surprises.

The surprise reserved for Amber Mulholland.

Hardly any information at all under that name. Her wedding in The Denver Post and The New York Times, but very little else. I remembered that photograph in the yearbook in her apartment. During her first year at Harvard, she had changed her name from Amber Doonan to Amber Abendsen. Now, why had she done that? She had mentioned some kind of problem with her father. But it had puzzled me at the time. Which was her real name? There was an easy way to find out….

I put on a shirt and tie and showed up with a dozen white roses at the nursing home Amber’s mother was housed at on Pennsylvania Street.

A very young security guard with a buzz cut.

“Yeah, maybe you can help me, I’ve got roses for a Mrs. Doonan, but then that’s crossed out and it says Mrs. Abendsen?” I said in my best approximation of an American accent.

The guy barely looked at me.

“Room 201,” he said.

“What name is it?” I asked.

“You had it the first time,” he said.

The home was upscale. Plush carpets, a mahogany handrail, nurses in crisp white uniforms. I knocked on 201. I went in. A frail, silver-haired old lady, sitting in a chair, looking out the window, stroking a sweater curled in her lap like a cat.

“I’ve got some flowers for you,” I said.

She didn’t turn around. Didn’t look up.

“Flowers,” I said again, but she didn’t even appear to be aware of my presence in the room. How old did Amber say she was? Sixty-eight? She seemed just a little older, but clearly, the disease had hit her hard. There was no way I could ask her anything but there was no point in wasting an opportunity. I put the flowers down and scouted the room. A few pictures, prints. Cautiously at first, I opened her chest of drawers. Amber’s mother didn’t move.

Old-lady clothes, adult diapers, nothing special, but in the top of a cupboard that she couldn’t reach — personal effects. China figurines, Hummel characters, bits of crystal, a few postcards. Several from Amber. Nothing of interest until I found an envelope filled with papers. The mother lode. Literally. Her birth certificate, born Louise Abendsen, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1927, her high school graduation certificate, her marriage license to Sean Doonan on October 31, 1955, and divorce papers from him on January 1, 1974, when Amber would have been about eight or nine.

Louise stared out the window, not stirring as I looked at this, the most significant piece of information so far. For on the divorce papers it said “Custody to the father, Sean Doonan, on the grounds of Louise Doonan’s present incarceration at the Huntsville State Correctional Facility.” The divorce papers made a big play out of the fact that Mrs. Doonan had gone to prison three times in the previous ten years for shoplifting, petty theft, drunkenness, and other crimes that the papers said “were signs of an unbalanced temperament.” The papers also made a point of explicitly denying “Mrs. Doonan’s claims that Sean Doonan was in any way involved in organized crime.”

“Flowers,” Louise said, not moving from her spot at the window.

I said nothing.

“Flowers,” she said again.

She was getting agitated. Time to go. I had plenty here to work with anyway. The information almost made me feel sorry for Amber. Screwed-up mother, dodgy father. I put the envelope back. I looked at Louise. I knew I couldn’t leave the flowers, in case someone wondered where they’d come from, so I took them with me and dumped them in a trash can down the hall. I felt bad. The guard didn’t look up as I walked out.

The rest of the pieces weren’t difficult to fill in. The New Jersey and, indeed, the New York papers had heard of Sean Doonan. A notable, but unindicted, member of the Irish mob in Union City. He had been implicated on several counts of union fraud, numbers rackets, protection rackets. He had never been convicted of anything.

After their divorce, Amber had gone to live with him full-time. She had clearly run a little wild. Amber Doonan’s name showed up in the Union City Gazette in connection with arrests for vandalism and car theft. I had interlibrary loan at the Denver Public Library get me a photocopy of the relevant issues of the Gazette . A grainy black-and-white photo that showed a defiant, pretty punk girl with a pierced nose and a shaved head.

Amber, however, had either done brilliantly on her SATs or her da had pulled strings, for she had been accepted to Harvard. As I’d already discovered, in her second year Amber began calling herself Amber Abendsen, her mother’s maiden name. Young Ms. Abendsen won a Boston Drama Festival Prize, and I even found a photograph in The Boston Globe that showed a girl with long blond hair in a Gucci blouse. Neither her father nor her mother attended Amber’s Harvard graduation, something two of her college classmates commented on when I phoned them. It didn’t surprise me now.

It seemed that Amber had reinvented herself in Boston. She had disowned her parents. Shanty Irish mobster dad, convict, drunken ma. She had made herself anew. She was moving in different social circles, ashamed of where she’d come from. She’d removed that harp tattoo. Cleaned up her elocution. But you could take the girl out of the bog, but not the bog out of the girl. The stealing of the tip money, the random fucks, she had a little throw-back in her. Or was that a racist thing to say? A classist thing. Maybe.

Regardless, from The Denver Post, it appeared that neither of Amber’s parents came to her wedding. Probably Charles understood why Amber wanted it this way. At the time of the wedding, her ma was back in jail and her father had been on TV as part of a prolonged trial that had just collapsed. His face had again been in the New York papers. Indeed, Amber’s father, Sean Doonan, was a nephew of Seamus Patrick Duffy, who was now the reputed leader of the Irish mob in New York City.

The more clear blue water between her and him the better, if she wanted to move in the dizzy circles around Charles Mulholland.

And all this would have been irrelevant but for one thing.

Now I probably knew where the gunmen in the park had come from.

My phone call must have precipitated it. Scared them. Charles and Amber at their wits’ end. Charles had messed up; even though he’d stuck a knife in my heart, I wasn’t dead. And Amber knew that to protect her husband and her future there was only one thing to do. She had to contact dear old Dad. It was possible. Why not? It seemed she had been telling the truth when she told me she didn’t have a relationship with her father. Eight years of estrangement would have had to come to an end. She needed his help. She needed someone in whom she could place absolute trust, who would not blackmail her and Charles, who could supply three professional assassins to meet her husband’s tormentor in Fort Morgan, Colorado. Charles had taken care of everything, but this loose end had to be taken care of by someone else.