“IT’S TERRIBLE altogether”—Nuala Anne sniffled as she dabbed at her tissue—“but, sure, isn’t our Neddie growing into a wonderful young man.”
We were in her office with the child and the hounds, the latter curled up in opposite corners watching the former intently.
“Sounds like he’s a mere plaything in that woman’s hands,” I said.
“Isn’t that why he married her? And himself a boxer!”
“That’s worse than being an overgrown linebacker!”
Nuala lowered her reading glasses, which she had to use with Ned’s script and glanced over them at me.
“ ’Tis not! Aren’t both fine manly exercises, so long as the man…”
“Does what his wife tells him to do?”
“Me very thought!”
Socra Marie was in a crib at her mother’s feet, kicking her legs up and down with great glee, having just discovered that she could do it.
“I’ll admit that he has become a tough and sensitive journalist. He still has to get over his feeling that he’s inferior to that wild man who is his father.”
“I think the General is cute! I can hardly wait to meet the mother, can we, Socra Marie?”
The child stopped kicking her feet when she heard a familiar sound. However, she didn’t identify it with herself and went back to kicking.
She couldn’t possibly have cerebral palsy, could she?
“Well, we’ll just have to plow through this won’t we? Didn’t his rivirence say that he thought there were some other copybooks around his basement?”
“He should call in the Chicago Historical Society and have them archive the place.”
“ ’Tis true…”
She put her glasses back on and began her second reading.
“Well, at least he’s learned how to be a strong husband,” she mused, “and himself not really knowing that yet.”
“Oh, he knows.”
She looked over her glasses at me, as if reflecting on a serious issue instead of a marriage, both partners of which were now in heaven.
“Och, Dermot,” she said, deciding that it was time for a serious answer, “don’t you have the right of it again and herself a very lucky woman.”
She averted her eyes and her face slowly turned crimson.
You won that.
I offered Socra Marie my finger. She considered it and then grabbed it… Something nice to hold on to.
“How did you think Seamus looked at the Baptism?” Nuala asked as she continued to read Ned’s manuscript.
“Pale and worried.”
“I thought so too … Why don’t you give your man a call?”
I punched in the number of the Reilly Gallery with my left hand since my daughter showed no intention of loosening her grip on my right hand.
“His son’s fiancée—marriage set for next month—called me this morning,” Mike the Cop began. “Russian woman. Pretty tough. She wanted to know the details of our protection. If she makes up her mind that Seamus needs security, then we’ll have a client. She’ll be good for that clan.”
“I think so too.”
“I have a lot more information about him, if herself is still interested.”
Nuala Anne smiled benignly over her phone.
“Herself is always interested.”
“He has had a lot of business interests, most of which have ended in conflicts that he’s won. Two of his former law partners sued him last year on the grounds that he defrauded them of their share of a settlement of a P.I. suit, Messrs. Kevin McGinty and Brian McGourty. Over a million dollars involved. He is majority owner of a string of profitable high-class suburban restaurants called Elegance Incorporated. He shoved out the founder and general manager of the chain, a certain Nick Papageorgiou, and charged him with inadequate financial reports. Then there is a developer named Jim Gigante, alias Jimmy the Giant, who planned a multiuse project out west on Ogden Avenue. Seamus funded him and then dumped him when the man couldn’t launch the project. Somehow Seamus was able to clear all the legal hurdles and is going ahead with it. It’s a high-risk venture, but he could make a bundle out of it.”
Nuala was busy jotting down names, probably misspelling them.
“He enjoys fights, I suspect, more than just winning.
“Doesn’t he like to win too?… Any of them fellows the kind that would put out a contract on him?”
“None of them would profit by his death, but all are very angry. Papageorgiou is in a business where, one hears, contracts do happen.”
“Never get a Greek angry at you,” I observed, “or a Mick either. Both have long memories. Who does stand to benefit if he should die?”
“If you order the suspects by the amount they would inherit, the prime suspect is one Cardinal Sean Cronin, Archbishop of Chicago.”
Nuala covered the phone and giggled.
“You never can trust those cock robin fellas.”
“Or those little auxiliary bishops with Coke-bottle glasses…”
“The money that’s not left to the Church, in his various different manifestations, goes into family trust funds for Diane, Lourdes, and Andy. Diane likes to shop, has more shoes they say than Imelda Marcos. Lourdes’s husband lost his shirt in a dot com start-up last March. Seamus supported that game and won’t support another. Andy blew his capital at the Merc and is now nothing more than a low-paid law clerk in Seamus’s firm, which by the way is still known as Costelloe and O’Sullivan.”
“Who’s O’Sullivan?”
“Got out long ago. Bad stomach.
“No Jewish names?”
“Find me a Jewish lawyer who’s dumb enough to get mixed up with Seamus.”
When we had hung up, I tried to recapture my finger from Socra Marie and instead hoisted her out of the cradle.
“Dermot Michael Coyne! Stop that!”
“She won’t let go!”
I lowered the child into the cradle.
“Well!” her mothered towered over us. “Won’t you just have to sit there until she goes asleep!”
She folded the child into her arms. Smelling Mama, Socra Marie promptly lost interest in Dada.
“Is Da being silly?” Nuala cooed. “He’s a little kid just like you!”
She began to sing.
The October winds lament
Around the castle of Dromore
Yet peace lies in her lofty halls
My loving treasure store
Though autumn leaves may droop and die
A bud of spring are you
Our daughter closed her eyes contentedly. If the strange world into which she had been plunged had such nice sounds, it must be all right.
Nuala sang again
Lullaby, lullaby,
Sweet little baby,
Don’t you cry
I’d rock my own little child to rest
In a cradle of gold on the bough of a willow
To the shoheen ho of the wind of the west
And the lulla low of the soft see billow
Sleep baby dear
Sleep without fear
Mother is here beside your pillow.
The small one was now sound asleep, doubtless with peaceful dreams of the sort we could not imagine, though I would have wagered that the wolfhounds were in them.
“WELL,” my wife exclaimed. “Da’s foolishness didn’t upset our little angel because Ma was right here to sing to her, wasn’t she?”
“The little brat wouldn’t let go of my finger!”
Ethne knocked at the doorjamb.
“There’s a foreign woman here to talk to you, Nuala Anne.”
Ethne, with her thick West Galway brogue, would not have for a moment thought of herself as a foreigner.
“Did she say who she was?”
“She said her name was Sonia and you’d know who she was.”
“A blond is it now and pretty in a Russian sort of way?”
“You have the right of it, Nuala Anne.”
“Ask her to come up.”
“Nice doggies.” Sonia hugged both Fiona and Maeveen, who rose to greet her. “Good, good doggies!”
A stranger walks into your office where the hounds are supposed to be standing guard and they promptly make peace with her because she likes them. Fierce guards, aren’t they now.
“Pay no attention to them,” Nuala insisted. “They think they’re the owners of the house … sit down the both of youse!”
The dogs sat down, their tails still wagging.
“Will they let me look at the baby, Nuala?”
“As long as I show her to you.”
Nuala lifted the sleeping child out of the crib. The two women mumbled approving sounds. The dogs joined the circle. Da was completely out of the picture.
Naturally.
“So pretty.” Sonia sighed. “So tiny and so pretty. Beautiful curls. I did not see her close yesterday.”
“She’s a feisty little one,” Nuala said proudly. “Determined to live.”
“One sees that.”
Nuala returned Socra Marie to her crib. The two women sat down on either side of her. The hounds reluctantly retreated to their sentential posts.
“Dermot love,” my wife said in her Holmes to Watson tone, “would you ever put on the samovar for us?”
I took the hint and slipped away.
Samovar indeed! She’d been reading Tolstoy again.
When I returned with the teapot and the cozy, the cups and the milk and sugar, Nuala and Sonia were chattering like lifelong friends.
“I’ll pour the tea, Dermot love.”
“Grand,” I said.
“Doesn’t Sonia want us to find out who’s trying to kill your man and Commissioner Casey telling her that occasionally we solve a small mystery?”
“I love Andrew. Good man. Father too much for him sometimes. Father good man too. Mother weak. Must keep family alive.”
That seemed to say it all.
“Indeed yes,” I said at my Watsonian best.
“I tell Seamus. He say hokay.”
That I thought was a little strange, but I let it pass.
“Seamus think Greek man put out hit. Tell Greek man he do it again he die. Greek man plenty scared. Beg mother she tell Seamus he didn’t do it. No one talk to police. Commissioner Casey do security now.”
“The best there is,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
“You and Nuala solve mystery?”
I caught my wife’s amused eye. Poor Sonia thought that my wife needed my permission. Is to laugh!
“We’ll certainly try.”
“I talk to Greek man. Very bad man. Greeks all very bad. He talk to you.”
Nuala nodded imperceptibly.
“We’ll do whatever we can,” I said cautiously.
“Good.” Sonia relaxed, her task successfully accomplished. She scratched the head of the good Maeveen, who had cautiously slipped across the room. “Good doggie!”
“I talk to anyone. Tell them talk to you.”
“Fine,” I said, suppressing a sigh.
“Well?” Nuala asked after I had returned from escorting Sonia to the door. The dogs had accompanied me. It was, after all, their house wasn’t it?
“Should we trust her?”
“Fiona and Maeveen trust her, don’t they now?”
Wolfhounds are the friendliest canines in the world, but they can sniff a phony from across the bog.
“That makes it official.”
“There’s something strange going on, Dermot Michael, very strange. Dark.”
She passed her hand across her forehead as if to banish the darkness.
“You don’t like it?”
“Not at all, at all, and himself such a difficult, contentious man, leaving enemies behind his path like a cow leaves manure.”
Nice metaphor.
“I’m supposed to interview this Nick the Greek person?”
“You certainly don’t expect me to take this poor little tyke into a Greek restaurant, do you?”
I could have pointed out that the restaurants were not Greek, only the former manager. However, that would be a waste of words.
I met Nicholas Papageorgiou in Elegance Mount Prospect, a tasteful imitation French bistro in a shopping mall on Busse Road. Apparently he was still welcome in the restaurant, though he didn’t own or manage the chain anymore. The hostess, the waiters and the buspersons treated him with respect and affection.
Such are the power of stereotypes, I expected to encounter Anthony Quinn playing Zorba the Greek, a big uncouth man with dark skin, a thick accent, and a sinister mien. Instead Nick was a short, slender man with light skin, delicate features, and razor-cut black hair. He wore a navy blue Italian suit and a custom-made white shirt, with ebony cuff links. His gestures were neat and economical, his voice soft, his eyes sad, a man who had perhaps just lost his fortune at Monte Carlo. The food was excellent, as good as one would have found downtown, and at half the price.
“I have a young wife,” he said, as though this were a tragedy, “and two beautiful children. If I should die, they would be virtually penniless. Mr. Costelloe has warned me that if anything happens to him or to anyone in his family, I will be killed and they will be left to starve or maybe he kill them too.”
Real sweetheart, our Seamus.
“Why does he think you were responsible for the attempted assassination?”
I nursed my white Rhone wine carefully. I did not want to ride back down the Kennedy Expressway at rush hour with a light head.
He sighed, as he often did during our conversation.
“This chain of restaurants was my concept. I put all my money into it. Mr. Costelloe ate in one of them one night and called me to praise it. He offered to invest in it. I thought God had sent him to help me.”
He made the Greek sign of the cross, the wrong way as we Romans think.
“We were very successful. He was pleased. I… I have no head for business. I am an artist, you see, not a thug as Mr. Costelloe seems to believe.”
His cell phone rang. Nervously he flipped it opened and spoke tersely, then angrily in a foreign language that I assume was Greek.
If I were a real detective in a real mystery story, I would be able to speak Greek and know what he was saying to his wife.
The tones were of the sort of impatience that a man uses with his wife if he can get away with it. I have never dared to use such tones because I know full well that I wouldn’t get away with it.
“My wife.” He waved a dismissive hand. “She is an immigrant from Greece. She is very anxious.”
My wife is an immigrant too, but patently of a different sort.
“So what happened to his successful business arrangement?”
He waved dismissively again.
“As I say, I am an artist who specializes in food and restaurants. I am not a bookkeeper. I hired my brother Hector to keep the accounts. He is very clever, very skillful. He showed that we made a nice profit. I do not know why Mr. Costelloe was so upset.”
“He did not think it was a nice enough profit?”
“He accused Hector of stealing from the company.”
“Did he?”
He shrugged as if it were an unimportant matter.
“I do not know. I am not a bookkeeper. Hector had a few unfortunate reverses. He may have borrowed some money. He would have returned it.”
I bet.
“I see… How much money did Mr. Costelloe claim he took?”
“Several million dollars. I do not believe this. However, I had no choice.”
“No choice?”
“If I did not turn the whole business over to him, he would see that both Hector and I would go to jail for long terms. It would kill our mother.”
Did Seamus pick up such losers and then put them out of business deliberately? Or was he being generous to people who belonged in jail?
How dumb did you have to be to think you could cheat Seamus?
“Is the matter settled?”
“Do you mean does he now own the whole company? Oh, yes, he bought my share for a half million dollars. It was worth much more, but we did not dare challenge the arrangement. But, you see, we would have nothing to gain by killing Mr. Costelloe. We would not get Elegance back.”
“He is convinced, nonetheless, that you are responsible for the attempt on his life?”
Nick’s eyes flicked nervously from side to side, as if Seamus Costelloe’s hired guns were lurking somewhere in Elegance Mount Prospect.
“He sent a message from the hospital saying that he had put out a contract on Hector and me and our wives and children. It would be carried out automatically if any further attempts were made to kill him. He has made this threat, it is said, to others who tried to eliminate him.”
“A man with a mask came to my home when we were having dinner with our families. He made the threat and then left. Our wives became hysterical.”
Five would get you ten, or perhaps I should say five thousand would get you ten thousand, that Seamus was bluffing. He knew he was dealing with cowards. You could scare them out of their minds by a threat.
“The police?”
“How could we go to the police? They would begin to ask questions about the business …” He shrugged helplessly. “We are at his mercy and the mercy of whoever tried to shoot him the first time. I beg you in the name of my innocent wife and children, Mr. Coyne, tell Mr. Costelloe that we had nothing to do with that attempt. We are only poor people who have no money and no future.”
“Don’t you have the half million Mr. Costelloe gave you for full ownership in the firm?”
“We cannot use it for two more years. That was part of the agreement. He did not want us to begin other restaurants until he had full control of these. We had no choice…”
I decided that I liked neither the whining nor the whiner. I didn’t much believe him either.
“Your brother’s debts were from gambling?”
“Yes, I believe so. Racing and such matters. I did not want to know about them. He behaved very foolishly. If it were not for him, we would not have these troubles…”
His cell phone rang again. He opened it, listened for a moment, muttered a word, and then snapped it shut.
Poor wife.
“Yes,” he continued, “my brother is responsible for all our troubles. What can I do? Our poor old mother worships him. She would die if anything happened to him. We must protect him.”
“Where is he now?”
“He has gone away for a few weeks until matters settle down. Then he will return. I do not know where he is. I do not want to know.”
“I see.”
“It sounds like a crock of shite to me,” my wife announced later when I had finished the story.
She and Nellie and the hounds had taken Socra Marie out for a walk in the stroller. The child had enjoyed it very much. She was sleeping soundly. And why hadn’t I phoned to find out how she was? I argued that I had been working and that I assumed I would hear if there were any bad news.
Nuala sniffed. My explanation was inadequate. Naturally.
“Next time, call!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well,” she asked after I had finished my report, “what do you think?”
“I quite agree that the man is a gobshite. I’m sure Seamus suspects the two brothers, probably because no one else is unbalanced enough to try such an idiot trick. I also think he’s bluffing about killing their families.”
“What would be their motive for trying to get rid of the poor dear man?”
“Beats me, Nuala. Maybe they think that if Seamus is out of the way they can try to void the agreement giving him control of Elegance.”
“The name was accurate?” she asked.
“It was indeed.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever want to eat there… How could they void the contract without revealing their embezzlement?”
“I don’t know. My impression is that they’re both a little mad, Hector more than Nicholas. They’re not cleaver plotters, but impulsive, madcap schemers. They get a nutty idea and act on it without thinking about the consequences. They’re negative on both emotional and intellectual resources. I sort of believe Nick, however, that most of this trouble would not happen if it weren’t for the brother.”
She nodded.
“Sonia said that this man Gigante will talk to you tomorrow.”
“Everyone’s eager to talk.”
“You might stop in to visit your man tomorrow and see if you’re right about his actually putting out the contract on the Papageorgiou family.”
“I might indeed.”
“And, Dermot love, I’m sorry for snapping at you when you came in. I guess I’m doing more stewing than I thought.”
“I should have called.”
“I should have kept me big mouth shut till later, but you know how hard that is for me.”
She brushed her lips against mine and all was once again right with the world.
That night St. Ignatius College Prep was playing Fenwick. Nellie Coyne, five feet nine with a comet’s tail of red hair behind her was still power forward. However, there was a new point guard, a tiny unsmiling freshman with a ring of thick black curls, who dominated the floor and fed the ball repeatedly to her big sister. St. Ignatius was about to drive Fenwick from their own gym in defeat when the stands collapsed from under me, the team disappeared in the terrified crowd and someone shook me out of my sleep.
Nuala Anne, full-dressed, and eerily calm.
“The little one is terrible sick, Dermot love. Ethne is coming over to watch the others. I’ll take the Chevy. You follow over in your Benz when she comes.”
She was wearing jeans, her “Galway Hooker” tee shirt, a white windbreaker (“Chicago Yacht Club”) and running shoes without socks. Where was she going dressed so carelessly at this hour of night?
The hounds were prowling around. Nellie was screaming hysterically. The baby was crying too, desperately it seemed.
I tried to shake sleep out of my head, still thinking I was in a nightmare.
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She can’t breathe and she’s burning up with fever. I suppose it’s pneumonia.”
Only then I see the little wisp of a child in her arms. She was turning blue.
I stumbled down to the door with my wife. Doll in one hand, Nellie followed us, still screaming.
“Hush now, child,” Nuala Anne said calmly, “your sister will be all right once we get some oxygen in her. Daddy will bring you over tomorrow… Hold the poor thing, Dermot love.”
Nuala, babe in arms, rushed down the steps, piled into our old Chevy and drove off into the night. I held the hysterical little redhead in my arms and kept repeating the mantra, “She’ll be all right, Nellie. She’ll be all right!”