NUALA ANNE had warned me when we left Ireland that we had not seen the last of Edmund “Ned” Fitzpatrick. As always, she was right. I folded the xerox copy of Ned’s article and slipped it into my jacket pocket. I would have known it was his work even if it had not carried his by-line.
Strange that the Chicago Daily News had carried his kind of report of the Haymarket Riot the day after the event, when the cops were rounding up every alleged radical and socialist in the city. Strange too that he had the right to express his emotions and his sentiments so strongly in a paper that, like all the others in the city, was howling for the blood of the Anarchists.
Apparently Ned had built up a journalistic reputation that protected him. Others who expressed sympathy with the Anarchists were promptly arrested by the police.
Who was the man who threw the bomb, a man whom Ned in a brief hint thought he might know? Had Ned eventually figured that out?
Had he kept a diary after he returned to Chicago with his bride Nora, the widow of a clan chieftain the British had unjustly hung?
I left the Chicago Historical Society with a briefcase full of books and xeroxed pages, the beginnings of my research on Haymarket. I would walk over to the Inner Drive and down Michigan Avenue to Northwestern Hospital to visit Seamus Costelloe. The Historical Society and the hospital were both assigned to me by Nuala Anne, who couldn’t possibly either leave the baby home or bring her along, surely not to a musty Historical Society or a germ-filled hospital.
The little lass herself continued to sleep and eat and defecate.
When not across the street at preschool, her girl sibling would sit next to her cradle for hours and rock her gently back and forth as she hummed tunes I had never heard before.
I wondered if Nellie had figured out a way to communicate reassurance and love to the small one’s consciousness.
“Some babies die,” my father told me. “Most don’t anymore, thank God. No pediatrician dares to provide absolute guarantees. Socra Marie is at risk, more at risk than any new term baby. At so much of a risk that you should have let her die? That would have been ridiculous!”
I nodded solemnly.
“Nuala Anne says she’ll be all right.”
“All mothers would say that.”
I didn’t explain to him that his daughter-in-law seemed to have access to special information.
Before I had set off for the Historical Society, we began our research. First of all herself called Commander John Culhane of the Sixth District.
“I hear there’s a new little one in the house,” he began genially.
“The sweetest little thing in all the world, Chief Superintendent. She sends you her very best.”
My wife always calls the Commander by his more or less equivalent title in the Garda, even though she knows better. See what I mean about kicking up the shite, er shit?
“I hope we don’t have to open a file on her like the one we have on yourself.”
“That was when I was a callow greenhorn … But tell me, now, whoever was it that took a shot at your man the attorney?”
“You mean Seamus Costelloe?”
“Didn’t I say that?”
She grinned impishly at me.
“I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.”
“Haven’t I learned since I’ve come to this brilliant city that even the South Side Irish have souls, even if they’re White Sox fans?”
Ah, how quickly the peasant child from Galway had learned to be a Chicagoan.
“Maybe he does,” John admitted grudgingly. “You’d have a hard time persuading insurance companies of that.”
“Och, now, didn’t me husband tell me that in this country a person is innocent until proven guilty! Then what does he know?”
“All right, all right… He came out of his office in the IBM Building late at night, walked to the elevator, someone called his name. He was smart enough not to look around since he knows that’s a hit man’s ploy, but ducked around the corner. He took a twenty-five slug in the shoulder. Just then a security guard got off the elevator and the shooter, wearing a Bill Clinton mask, took flight. The guard had the sense to call for an ambulance instead of chasing the shooter, who disappeared down the stairway—twenty stories up.”
“No description?”
“Black clothes besides the Clinton mask.”
“How did he get out of the building?”
“Grabbed a service elevator to the parking lot, we think.”
“You’ll find him?”
“Professional, not much of a chance.”
“A professional who missed?”
“Who do you think put out the contract?”
My sweet little wife had all the lingo down.
“Maybe someone whose case he lost. Or someone whose case he won that didn’t like his 40 percent take. Or a lawyer that he beat. Or a judge whom he bribed and wants higher office.”
“You don’t know?”
“You got it, Nuala Anne. I am, however, delighted that you’re going to find out for us. Give my best to the new kid.”
“Not much help,” she sniffed. “If someone had shot down a prominent solicitor in Dublin, wouldn’t we have the whole Garda out on the street?… Well, Dermot Michael, what are you waiting for and yourself knowing whom we call next?”
So I dialed the Reilly Gallery, which was also the headquarters of Reliable Security and its president Michael Patrick Vincent Casey.
“Reilly Gallery, Annie speaking.”
“Dermot, Annie.”
We had called her husband so often that she would surely know my voice.
“Dermot! Congratulations on the little one! I hear she’s gorgeous like her mother.”
“Certainly doesn’t look like me…”
“You want to talk to himself, I suppose?”
“If I may…”
“Dermot, what’s up?”
“Seamus Costelloe, how bent is he and who shot him?”
Mike the Cop, as his family calls him as though there is another Mike in the family when in fact there is not, chuckled.
“That fairie woman is at it again, isn’t she?”
“Is there a conflict of interest?”
“Not yet. Diane Costelloe wants him to hire Reliable as bodyguards. He’s not having any of it.”
“Very high-priced and very successful tort lawyer. Strange personality. Devout Catholic with a foul mouth and reputation for corruption. Made a lot of money and a lot of enemies, including lawyers who have been his partners.”
“So?”
“He dumped Helen O’Leary, who was his partner in the firm. He replaced her with his son, Andy, who is somewhere between beta and gamma on the brains, a nice but harmless kid. Helen turned around married Len Shepherd, the other top personal injury lawyer in town and Seamus’s arch enemy. She is a hater and, if you believe the rumors on the street, was ‘involved’ with Seamus before she married Len.”
“Seamus fools around?”
“So it is said. Not as much as do some of the hotshot P.I. guys. Is a Catholic of a sort, active in charity work, big guilt feelings maybe. Loud and obnoxious, takes too much of the creature but is not a drunk, likes big stakes card games, and Calcutta tournaments at the country clubs. Not in debt. Not in trouble with the Feds though they sniff around periodically.”
“Family?”
“None of them very bright, take after their mother, it’s said. No records for anything—gambling, drugs, fooling around. Ciphers. Kind of likable in a shallow way. Lapdog types.”
Mike had obviously been collecting data in case Diane Costelloe hired him.
“Mixed up in Irish stuff?”
“Plays golf over there every year with a bunch of Notre Dame cronies. I don’t think he’s connected to the lads.”
“That would be very dangerous.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Why doesn’t he want any security?”
“Says they won’t try again.”
“I suspect he’s paid someone off.”
“We should probably keep our noses out of it?”
“Absolutely—and you tell that to your wife and the next thing would be to tell the sun to stop rising in the morning.”
Mike knew Nuala Anne pretty well. Whenever something fey happened, we had an obligation to protect someone, whether they wanted to be protected or not.
“Outfit hit?” I asked, referring to the Mafia who are never called that in Chicago. “Outfit,” “The Boys,” “Our Friends on the West Side” are the preferred euphemisms.
“The word on the street is that the Council did not approve of the hit or even know about it. Independent operator. The boys don’t like that, but they’re not about to provide the cops with any information. If they find out who did it they might or might not take their own measures.”
“Why do you think he doesn’t want any personal security, Mike?”
“How well do you know him?”
“Not too well. Had dinner with the family a couple of times.”
“Loudmouth braggart, right?”
“I won’t argue the point.”
“He ever tell you about the DSC he won in ‘Nam?”
“He never mentioned that he’d been there.”
“Marine of course, fresh out of Notre Dame with an ROTC commission. First month in combat he leads a whole platoon out of a trap. Saves a lot of lives. Badly wounded.”
“Brave guy.”
“And maybe dumb, but certainly brave.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Unless he paid someone off, I suspect that he knows who put out the contract on him and has put out a return contract with the warning that if anything happens to him or to his family the contractor is a dead man.”
“Tough guy.”
“Guy that believes he lives in a jungle or a war zone. Too many tough criminal cases or P.I. cases to trust the police to take care of him or even Reliable.”
“So he doesn’t need any security.”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know who’s behind the shooter. I’m just saying that he thinks he’s safe.”
“Thanks for the information, Mike.”
“I’ll stay in touch.”
“Do that…”
“And, Ms. McGrail, I know you’re listening in, so congratulations on the new daughter.”
Nuala stuck her nose skyward.
“I’m not listening at all, at all,” she informed him.
Mike laughed and hung up.
“Male detectives,” she protested, her face crimson, “think they know everything!”
“So what do you think?” I asked her.
“I think you should visit him at Northwestern Hospital and find out who he thinks hired the shooter.”
“That’s all?”
“Something even an amadon could do!… Don’t I have to stay here and take care of our daughter?”
Socra Marie was sleeping peacefully on her mother’s lap with Maeveen standing guard. No need to keep the poor father around.
I had written a sequence of poems about our weeks of immersion in the hospital. I needed time to revise them before I sent them off to Poetry—which probably would not accept them anyway. The task could wait.
We had supper with them a couple of times after our return from Italy. They summered at Lake Geneva and we at Grand Beach so we didn’t see much of them in the summer. Seamus talked at great length about the superiority of Lake Geneva over the Dunes.
“I see your point,” I agreed. “There are a lot of West Side Irish up at Geneva. Civilizing influence.”
For a moment he looked like he might begin a long argument. Then his big, flat face, cracked open in a grin.
“Touché! Dermot… The problem with them is that they’re no fun. Terribly dull. You’re lucky down at the Dunes, you have a lot of South Siders around down there, so you have lots of fun.”
“I do not understand this West Side/South Side material.” Sonia protested sternly.
“ ’Tis all nonsense, dear” Nuala Anne assured her. “But they have fun with it.”
That was about as lively as the conversations ever became.
Then, with Nuala’s pregnancy, we drifted away from them, though I was sure she called them regularly. We were still responsible for keeping this awful man alive.
Michigan Avenue was awash in color from Mayor Daley’s gardens in the parkways and on the median. Spring dresses had blossomed on young women. People were smiling at folks they did not know. Spring, as the song said, was busting out all over in honor of our daughter.
The Chicago skyline, pastel in morning mists, loomed up like a mystical fairyland or a scene in Coleridge’s poem.
My cell phone rang.
’TIS HERSELF.
“Who the fuck else would it be?”
TEMPER!
“Dermot Coyne.”
“And me expecting Dr. Watson?”
“Nuala Anne!”
“I suppose you’re not interested in a report on your children?”
She was up to something. This was merely a dodge. I leaned against the red wall of the Nieman Marcus building—Needless Markup as everyone calls it—and waited for her to spring the trap.
“Tell me about them.”
“Well, your elder daughter didn’t want to cross the street for school this morning. Wanted to stay here and help with her little sister. We were having none of that, though I did promise her that when Socra Marie was a little older I’d walk over and show her off to the other kids.”
“Wise decision.”
“Your son and Ethne are playing with his trucks in the family room and he comes out every half hour to kiss the baby and offer her a truck. He’s delighted when she doesn’t take it. He’s trying, Dermot.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“Maybe when you come home, you could spend a minute or two playing with him.”
She meant at least a half hour.
“I’d been planning to do just that.”
LIE.
Well, I’d thought about it.
A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO.
“And meself and herself and themselves are sitting here in my office and ourselves listening to Mozart.
That sentence was phony Irish. Nuala was putting me on.
“And you all like old Wolfgang Amadeus?”
“The poor dear man was only two years older than you when he died. Our younger daughter seems to enjoy him. Isn’t she right here in me lap, all wrapped up the knitted blanket that arrived this morning from Carraroe and meself already calling me ma to thank her for it.”
“Annie is well?”
“You’d think that Socra Marie is the only baby in all the world to hear her talk and herself not even seeing the lass yet save on our e-mail picture.”
“She is the only baby in all the world.”
“Sure, Dermot, you always know how to say the right thing.”
“What’s our new daughter doing?”
“When she’s not eating, she’s checking out themselves. I don’t think she can quite believe that such creatures exist. She seems to like them though.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“ ’Tis true. She’ll have to learn to live with them… What have you found out so far?”
“I discovered a vivid description of the riot in an article in the Chicago Daily News by our old friend Ned Fitzpatrick.”
“Did you now? Wasn’t I saying we weren’t through with that young fella yet.”
“I hope he kept a diary of the whole story.”
“He’s the diary-keeping type.”
“ ’Tis true.”
“When you see your man in the hospital, you should ask him outright who the fella is that he put out the countercontract on. You might startle him into an answer.”
“I doubt it.”
“No harm in trying. Let me know what happens.”
“Okay.”
I had been Nuala Anne’s spear-carrier for seven years now. I was used to doing what I was told.
“Thank you, Dermot love.”
I walked down to Superior Street and turned toward Northwestern Hospital. The cell phone rang again.
“Still Dermot Coyne.”
“Is it now?”
Different woman altogether, shy, vulnerable, even fragile.
“Didn’t I forget something the last time?”
“Did you?”
“I said I did.”
Fragile indeed but still a touch of the woman leprechaun. It would do me no good to be impatient.
“Was it important?”
“Not at all, at all.”
Which meant very important.
She said something but static interrupted it.
“Lost that, Nuala.”
“I saw your man at the hospital yesterday when we picked herself up.”
“Ah.”
Who was me man, er, my man.
“And you know what he told me?”
“No.”
“You do. You’re just having me on.”
“I’m not.”
“Och, Dermot, you are terrible dense sometimes.”
“Well, who was me man, er my man?”
“Wasn’t it the OB doctor?”
This in a tone of voice which implied that I was a friggin’ gobshite for not knowing that.
“Ah.”
“And you know what he said?”
“I’m still dense.”
“Well,” she hesitated as though she were embarrassed which she may or may not have been, “didn’t he hint that it might be all right if we resumed normal sexual relations?”
My heart missed a couple of beats and my loins reacted appropriately.
“Did he now?”
“He did.”
“What did he mean by normal?”
“I didn’t ask the man. Would you think we were ever normal, Dermot?”
“I think I may have forgotten how.”
She laughed, with just a hint of lasciviousness in her voice.
“I’d be thinking that you’ll remember quickly enough tonight.”
“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.”
“That’s the way I talk, Dermot Michael Coyne. You shouldn’t do it at all, at all.”
She hung up.
Sex with Nuala, I told myself, as I floated down the street toward the hospital was never normal, thank God.