Declan Hughes: The Color of Blood

Finnegan unleashed a salvo of self-approving mews and yaps as a coda to his painfully forced literary reference, and his thick lips quivered with near delight at his own facility, and for an instant I could see him back in the university debating chamber, basking in the braying regard of his peers, the legislators and judiciary of the future. He opened his great maw to continue, but I beat him to it. It was a little after nine in the morning, and I hadn’t had breakfast, and another of those ornate sentences that showed how much his father had paid the Jesuits for his education and I was going to have the kind of headache only gin would cure, and it was too early for gin.

“It’s about his daughter,” I said.

“Emily?” Denis Finnegan said.

“That’s right. She’s gone missing.”

“And he wants her found?”

“Or wants to talk about it, anyway. She’s nineteen, so there’s a limit to what I could do, if she’d prefer to stay lost. What I’d be prepared to do.”

“I see. I see. I was under the impression…or rather, I made, in the circumstances, the understandable assumption…”

“You thought he was hiring me to dig some dirt on his wife.”

“I certainly suspected he had something of that character in mind.”

“Is there any dirt to dig?”

“Let’s just say I believed it expedient to inquire a little further into the potential veracity and, so to speak, density of any such allegations before deeming it appropriate to conclude that an operative such as yourself might properly be charged with the task of investigating further.”

I had the headache now. My left eyelid was flickering like a lightbulb about to blow. I put my hand on the door and opened it, all the while keeping contact through my right eye with Denis Finnegan, who had narrowed his eyes and bared his teeth in a grimace of farewell. With the bare bulb directly above his head, his great face suddenly resembled a skull swollen and distorted by water.

“We’ll speak again, Mr. Loy, I have no doubt,” he oozed.

The words hung in the air like an emblem beneath a death’s-head. I stepped backward through the door and pulled it shut and went downstairs.

A broad-shouldered sandy-haired man in a white linen tunic had his face bent close to Anita’s pale head. His voice was working in a low rumble, then hers gushed forth in a flow of easy, throaty laughter. It was the kind of laughter that makes a man feel like his luck is in, the kind of laughter you hear in bars and on street corners late at night. When my leather-soled black wing tips hit the tiled hall floor, their heads sprang apart, and the man raised himself to his full height and turned to face me. He was about six three, heavily built like the rugby forward he had been, with a scowl on his open face.

“Mr. Howard,” I said. “Ed Loy. We spoke on the phone.”

Howard nodded slowly and looked at his watch. “You’re late,” he said, his tanned brow frown-ridged, bushy eyebrows shading his eyes.

“Your solicitor thought he needed to speak to me,” I said.

“Is Finnegan here again?” Howard said.

He glared at Anita, who flushed and nodded quickly. Howard flung a meaty hand in my direction.

“What did he want?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “I don’t think he knew himself. To listen to the sound of his own voice, it felt like.”

“That sounds like Dinny, all right,” Howard said, nodding. The huge planes of his face slowly began to shift into a smile. Then he laughed, an astonishingly loud, crashing sound, like the engine of a tractor flaring into life. As suddenly as it had started, the laughter sputtered out and he stared down at the black and white tiles and cleared his throat. He lifted his head, leant across the reception counter and patted Anita’s hand.

“I’ll be in the study, Anita. I’m not to be disturbed,” he said, nodded to me and unlocked a door across the hall from the waiting room. I followed. As I passed Anita, she was caressing her ring between finger and thumb. In the faint light, the uncut stones had the bright glow of arterial blood.

“Nice ring,” I said. “When’s the big day?”

“It’s not an engagement ring,” she said. Her accent sounded Eastern European. Color seeped across her pale cheeks like red ink on a blotter. “It’s for protection. A talisman.”

“Protection against what?” I said.

She shrugged.

“You know. Whatever. My sister gave it to me.”

She tried to smile, but it didn’t come out right. She looked down and fussed with some papers on her desk. As I opened the study door, she had pushed her left hand to her mouth and was gnawing on the ring like an anxious child with a pacifier.

Shane Howard sat behind a dark wood desk, lit by a green-shaded lamp. The long room was otherwise in gloom: heavy velvet drapes hung over the windows. There were more rugby photographs on the walls-Howard had been a second-row international when I was at school, and one spectacular shot showed him bursting across the line through a shambling disarray of English forwards. Above the white marble mantelpiece hung a portrait of a handsome silver-haired man in tweeds and flannels with a stethoscope around his neck; a plaque at the base of the gilt frame identified him as Dr. John Howard, 1915-1985. All over was an airless fug of dust and old upholstery and cigar smoke; Howard’s desk was strewn with papers and framed photographs, used cups and glasses, an almost empty bottle of Bushmill’s and two overflowing ashtrays. I sat across the desk from him, refused his offer of a cigar, and shook my head quickly when his hand strayed toward the whiskey. He nodded, cleared his throat, and then took an envelope from the desk, passed it to me, and said, “My daughter.”

Emily Howard was about nineteen, slim and petite, with a pale complexion and black eye shadow around her large brown eyes and full red lips and short spiky hair dyed candy apple red and piercings in her ears and nose and on her tongue. She also had a red rose tattoo high on one thigh and her nipples were pierced and her pubic hair had been shaved into a tiny heart and dyed red. I could see this because in the photographs, she was naked, and having sex with a boy and another girl, in most of the usual ways and a few that weren’t so usual, except in photographs like this. The other girl wore a sequinned eye mask and her blond hair was tied in a shiny scarf; the boy wore wraparound shades and a black baseball cap; the only one you could get a clear look at was Emily. I looked up at her father. His bloodshot eyes were fixed on one of the framed photographs on his desk: a sandy-haired big-eyed girl of about six with no front teeth, biting into an apple.

I looked at the photographs again. When I worked in L.A., at least once a month I was asked to find a girl who’d gone missing, and she’d almost always turn up having sex on camera in the San Fernando Valley, and in the movies she did, she always had this smile that didn’t reach her angry eyes, a smile that said fuck you to someone, usually her father or her stepfather or her uncle; to some man who had taken everything from her before she was old enough to understand what it was. And she’d always say the same thing: that she was never going home again. And if letting a bunch of strangers ejaculate on your face is preferable to going home, then home must have really been something. So I’d go back and tell the client-the father or stepfather or uncle-that she didn’t want to see him, and usually I’d give him a tape or a magazine so he could understand for himself what he had done. But he rarely did; more often than not, he’d ask me if I could get her autograph.

“Will you find her?” Howard said.

I looked at him. He didn’t look the type, if there was a type, which there wasn’t, and this wasn’t that kind of porn. Still, it was hard to tell from the photographs: in most of them, Emily Howard looked detached, ironic even, as if to indicate a distance from what she was doing; but in a few of the shots, there was a glint in her eyes that could have been anger.