“ISN’T HE a wonderful man, Dermot Michael?”
“Who?” I looked up from the New York Times.
“Uncle Ned!”
“The trouble with him, poor dear man,” I replied, “is that he has so little confidence in himself. He’s let the General intimidate him.”
“Give over, Dermot, you’re just saying things like that to tease me. You know as well as I do that he intimidates the General and just about everyone else including poor Nora.”
I didn’t know that at all. At all. Yet Ned Fitzpatrick’s ironic and reckless integrity would scare anyone.
“Well, thank goodness I don’t intimidate anyone.”
“Sure didn’t you intimidate me something terrible in bed last night?”
“You started it!”
“And weren’t you after finishing it!”
Our flirtation with ecstasy the night before had apparently perked my wife up. She had run with the dogs, leaving me in charge of Socra Marie for a half hour. She charged up and down the stairs like she used to. She held the child in her arms and pretended to dance with her, much to the brat’s apparent delight.
“You know, Dermot Michael,” she said as though she were pondering a great philosophical truth, “I think this daughter of ours is developing a personality of her own.”
“Ah?”
I gave up on the New York Times editorials. They were pompous bunk anyhow.
“WELL, she has a very strong will and a mind of her own and she wants to be the center of attention all the time and she has a great sense of humor and she knows she’s beautiful and wants to be told that repeatedly.”
“Sounds autobiographical.”
My wife cocked her head, trying to be certain she’d understood me.
“Fair play to you, Dermot Michael! She’s my daughter, isn’t she?”
“No doubt about that!”
“Now let’s be serious again!
She put the daughter back in her bassinet, where the child returned to kicking her legs up and down as though she were riding an imaginary bicycle.
“About what should we be serious?”
“About poor Seamus, naturally!”
“What about him?
“Who’s trying to kill him and when he tries again?”
“There’s going to be another effort?”
“Oh, yes, that’s the whole point. If we can stop the next effort, then the mark of death will leave him until his natural time comes around.”
There were metaphysical and theological issues in that sentence I did not want to address.
“Tell me again why we’re concerned about that nine-fingered shite hawk.”
“How should I know, Dermot Michael? Why should we be concerned about the Haymarket riot that happened a hundred and fourteen years ago, even if it is nice to meet Ned and Nora and Josie again? I suppose because Ned thinks it’s time to tell the truth and he wants us to do it for him just like we told the truth about the death of Myles Joyce?”
Ned Fitzpatrick, now happy in the World-to-Come with his wife and family, suddenly decided that the truth about the bomb should be told and nudged my wife’s psychic sensitivities?
That laconic, ironic, brave and tender man surely had better things to do. What difference does history make to the blessed?
Still, what did I know?
“You don’t see the mark of death …”
“Violent, evil death, more evil than just plain death.”
“You don’t see it on many people?”
“Hardly any.”
“But when you do see it, you have an obligation to protect the person who is so marked?
“I do, Dermot Michael, else why would I see it?”
SHE’S DAFT YOU KNOW. SHE’S OVER THE TOP ALTOGETHER. YOU’RE ENDANGERING YOURSELF AND YOUR WHOLE FAMILY BY ENCOURAGING THIS SHITE!
Shit!
“Mike the Cop’s people are protecting him now, so he should be safe.”
“There’s still someone out there who wants him dead!”
“Who?”
“I think I know but still we have to talk to those two lawyer gobshites!”
“Who?”
She checked our wisp of a daughter to make sure she was still breathing, walked over to her desk and on a sheet of green note paper headed NUALA ANNE wrote in her long, firm handwriting a name and an explanation, hiding the text of her note from my eyes with her hand. Then she put it in an envelope with the same return address, sealed the envelope, and put it in her desk.
“Mind you, I’m not sure. But I don’t think I’m all that far from wrong.”
Which meant that the odds were that she was right. She’d done this before and I resented it because she was guessing. She had no right to guess.
“Why do I have to interview those two shite hawk lawyers if you know who took the shot at him over in the IBM Building?”
“I didn’t say that I knew who took the first shot. I’m saying I have a pretty good idea who’s going to take the next shot and you have to talk to McGourty and McGinty so I’ll know I’m right.”
“Fair play to you, Nuala Anne.” I sighed. “I’m off to see them.”
I raised the sleeping child out of her bassinet and kissed her good-bye.
“Take good care of your mother, Socra Marie, she’s a little bit over the top these days.”
The baby opened her eyes, looked at me with something like disgust, then closed them and went back to sleep.
My wife giggled. “Well, I guess she told you, poor sweet little thing!”
I left before the two of them ganged up on me.
McGourty and McGinty occupied a cubbyhole office filled with the smell of cheap cigars and cheaper cologne in the Conway Building across from the County Building half of the City Hall/County Building. There was no hint of a secretary or a staff, no computer, no fax, only a single phone on a littered desk behind which the two of them sat like a modern Irish American version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, two short, fat, bald unsmiling trial lawyers gone to seed. Several years ago, I imagined, they would be wearing baseball hats turned backwards and Notre Dame sweatshirts. Now they wore unpressed black three-piece suits which might well have been purchased five or six years ago off the same rack. Brian McGourty and Kevin McGinty were the kind of legal hacks who had always gone for what looked like the main chance only to find out that it really wasn’t. Now they were ambulance chasers and low-level city hall operators.
How could Seamus Costelloe have ever worked with such lowlifes?
“We are not sure we ought to talk to you, Mr. McGrail,” McGourty began.
“We consider Mr. Costelloe’s charges to be defamatory,” McGinty continued, “and are considering going into the circuit court of Cook County to seek relief.”
“My name is Dermot Coyne,” I said, “Ms. McGrail is my wife.”
“Irregardless,” they said together.
“I believe that Mr. Costelloe has warned you that your lives will be in danger if there is another attempt to kill him. Knowing Mr. Costelloe, I’m sure you take those threats seriously.”
“Enough to have submitted a petition to the Board of Governors of the Chicago Bar Association to disbar him.”
“Yet you once worked closely with him,” I said softly, hoping that they would spill out their hatred for him.
“Yes, we were younger and we idolized his legal success.” McGinty replied. “He invited us into his firm. We were flattered and accepted. We understood that we were partners in the firm and that we had a handshake agreement on that.”
In fact they were not very old, younger certainly than Helen Shepherd. The stench of failure which clung to them made them look old.
“We brought many personal injury cases to his attention,” McGourty continued, “with our help, he made a great deal of money on the cases. When it came to the dispersal of funds, we were underpaid.”
“We protested to him. He acknowledged that there might have been a certain inequity in the dispersal. We proposed a formal arrangement. He accepted it. Then, when he won a huge settlement from an insurance company, we asked for a share that the agreement had specified. He laughed and said that such a dispersal applied only to cases that went to trial, not to those that were settled without trial.”
“I see.”
“We calculate that with due consideration of interest monies that are due to us, he owes us in excess of five million dollars.”
“Each … And we are vigorously pursuing our requests for relief in both state and federal jurisdictions. The playing field is not even. Mr. Costelloe has the resources and the influence to bribe judges at every level. Nonetheless, every time he obtains a fraudulent dismissal of our claims, we file yet another motion for relief. We will not be deflected from our pursuit of justice.”
“Never!”
These two lived in their own world of legal argot and constant legal activity, unaware that they had lost touch with reality. As long as they lived they would fight Seamus with unflagging hope in the will of the wisp—an honest judge who would at last see the justice of their claims.
“Has not Mr. Costelloe sought to settle your claims?”
“Naturally.” McGourty shifted in his chair as if he were brushing off a troublesome fly.
“Like all lawyers,” McGinty continued, “he would rather settle than litigate, always, candidly, on his terms.”
“Candidly” meant the same thing on their lips as it did on the lips of Newt Gingrich.
“He is oblivious to the value of our claims. We would accept three, even two million dollars, arguably a little less, so that we might be free of the burden of fighting him. He laughs when we mention sums like that.”
These two men, I reflected, needed a good lawyer to tell them the truth. A good lawyer, however, was the last thing they wanted.
“How long will you pursue him?”
“To the grave,” McGinty snapped.
“Kevin means,” his colleague quickly interjected, “that we will never give up. We were faced with that question when someone shot him. If it were necessary we would pursue our actions against his estate. Candidly we presume that the lawyers for the estate would be less inclined to risk their careers by turning judges than Mr. Costelloe is.”
In their own hermetically sealed world, these two losers had excellent reason to wish Seamus dead. Would they hire hit men to shoot him? Somehow it didn’t seem likely that they had the energy to do that. They would continue to file motions and to chase ambulances for less prestigious lawyers than Seamus Costelloe. Beyond that they would be content that justice would finally come down on their side.
“Yet the police seem to think that you had reason to commission a contract killing of Mr. Costelloe.”
“Candidly that is an outrageous allegation,” McGourty exploded.
“There is no evidence of that at all.”
“Our reputations are at stake.”
“If these defamations continue, we are fully prepared to seek appropriate redress.”
“I hardly endorse them,” I said reassuringly. “I’m merely asking you for your reactions.”
A thin layer of saliva appeared on McGinty’s lower lip.
“We talked to the police. They were very difficult at first. We offered to take lie detector tests. That offer remains on the table. They seemed to have lost interest.”
McGourty was squirming restlessly in his chair.
“Presumably they looked into our reputation for probity and decided that the complaints Mr. Costelloe made against us were absurd.”
“Frankly we talked to the police about Mr. Costelloe’s threats against us. They did not take our complaints seriously.”
“Costelloe has threatened you?”
He had threatened everyone. This dynamic duo were the only ones to tell the police. The cops took their story no more seriously than they had seriously considered these two losers as capable of plotting a contract killing.
Which was so inept, come to think of it, that it might have been the work of losers. Amateur night.
“A thug came into this office and threatened us with horrible deaths if there was another attempt on Mr. Costelloe’s life. He dismissed our protestations of innocence with a sneer.”
The twosome were now considerably agitated. Seamus’s goon must have been very persuasive. He must also have enjoyed scaring the daylights out of a half dozen people. I had no reason, in fact, to conclude that Seamus had not threatened a half dozen more of his enemies—or a dozen. The ones we knew about were the ones whose names the determined Sonia had been able to pry out of her future father-in-law.
“We cannot imagine”—the saliva was now drooling down McGourty’s chin—“why of all his enemies, Mr. Costelloe would think that we would be involved in such nonsense. It makes no sense.”
“Who would make sense?”
“Jimmy Gigante,” McGinty said promptly. “Seamus took his development away from him, a development in which Jimmy put all his money…”
“And all his hopes. If Mr. Costelloe were out of the picture, Gigante would have some hope of reclaiming his investment.”
“Yet Mr. Costelloe chooses to blame us and to threaten us. Candidly we believe that he is losing his mind.”
“His behavior has become increasingly irrational.”
“Not the Shepherds?”
“They hate him, of course, and with reason. But both are far too cautious to risk their reputations and perhaps even their personal freedom in such a tawdry crime. Gigante on the other hand is Italian. He would certainly have contacts in the organized crime environment who would attempt murder for hire.”
“Papageorgiou?”
“Another obvious suspect.” McGourty swiped at the saliva and made a worse mess of it. “He is afraid of his own shadow, to say nothing of his abominable mother. However, Greeks are known to settle feuds in this manner.”
“And,” McGinty continued, “to have long, long memories.”
It was time, I decided to escape from the noxious smells in their office and from the even worse smell of personal failure. At one time their parents must have been proud of them when they graduated from law school, young men, as they saw it, of great promise. They must even have been proud when the famous Seamus Costelloe hired them and hoped they would marry some nice South Side Irish girls—losers like them couldn’t come from the West Side. What, I wondered, did their families think of them now?
Under somber rain clouds drifting leisurely in from the prairies, I walked to the River, tracing Ned Fitzpatrick’s path back towards North Avenue. The River was no longer the disorderly port of the world with schooner sails stacked up as far as 22nd Street. It was lined not with docks and lumberyards but with gracious, elegant skyscrapers. Across from Wolf Point a green glass building shaped the turn of the South Branch and acted as the gate for the River’s former rush to the Lake, now forever reversed by euphemistic Water Reclamation District Canal (nee “drainage canal”). Ned had lived into the nineteen thirties; he would have seen the disappearance of the schooners, the appearance of some of the skyscrapers, and the reversal of the River’s flow. He would have marveled at all this and would be delighted by the magic beauty of the riverbanks today with their lawns and curving walks and outdoor art exhibitions. My faith said that he knew in some way about all these marvels and rejoiced in them. It also said that if he were really involved in my wife’s attempt to solve the mysteries of the past (an involvement which I very much doubted), he would help us in our search.
I shrugged and crossed the River at Clark Street, before an armada of pleasure boats could force the bridge up, offending drivers and pedestrians as much as it did in Ned’s day.
At Hubbard Street (Michigan Street in Ned’s day), the old courthouse building—built after the demolition of the Haymarket trial court but on the same lines and with some of the same stone, loomed as a quiet remembrance of the past and its injustice. It has become the headquarters of the Board of Health (now presided over by a Catholic nun), then the Traffic Court (whose corruption Ned would have understood), and now a “loft” apartment building for yuppies who do not know or care about the ghosts of the men who had been hung behind it.
“I’m talking like an old man,” I told Ned’s ironic but gentle spirit. “Before the rains wash me away, I’m catching a cab and going home to my wife, whom I adore as you adored Nora.”
Said wife and youngest child were entertaining Sonia, the child resting comfortably in Sonia’s arms.
“She’s a little miracle,” Sonia assured me, “which I suppose is what everyone says. You are so fortunate.”
“The child is already a spoiled brat,” Nuala Anne commented, expecting refutation. “She demands adoration from everyone who walks in the house.”
Fiona, a half-awake sentinel, thumped her tail against the parlor floor as a greeting to me.
“What did you find out from the two lawyers?”
“South Side Irish creeps, a pair of losers, capable only of submitting sloppy briefs filled with misspelled words.”
“I do not understand these things,” the always serious Sonia said. “The two kinds of Irish in Chicago look alike to me. However, Seamus says that they are from the West Side!”
“Unthinkable!”
Socra Marie decided that Sonia’s arms were as good a place as any in which to return to the world of pleasant dreams. So she did. Sonia gently returned her to the bassinet. Fiona thumped her tail again.
“You understand what we Americans mean when we used the word ‘loser’?” I asked.
She smiled briefly and for that instant became very pretty.
“Oh yes.”
“Why does Seamus always pick losers to work with?”
She smiled again, this time permitting the smile to linger on her lips. Nuala Anne winked at me.
Outside thunder boomed and lightning seemed to crackle down Southport Avenue.
“He has worked with many who are not losers,” Sonia replied. “It is only the losers who might want to kill him.”
“None of them, especially the two shysters I met today, seem to have the decisiveness to contemplate murder.”
“Especially successful murder,” Nuala Anne said mysteriously.
“Is that not why they’re so dangerous?” Sonia asked.
“Do you know any of them?” I asked.
“I have not had the pleasure of meeting them,” she said formally, without a trace of irony. “However, I suspect the Greeks. They are a very violent people. Also they hate Russians because we think we are better Christians than they are.”
It was hard to tell when this woman was joking.
“Could not it be someone in the family?” I asked.
“Of course,” she agreed. “All is possible. My Andrew might hire an assassin though he is the most gentle man in the world. I would know if he did. The son-in-law needs money. However, Seamus is paying off his debt. Diane loves him in her own way. I do not think anyone in the family would harm him. I might be wrong of course.”
“She might be capable of arranging for a hit,” I said to Nuala Anne when Sonia left after the thunder shower stopped.
“Och, Dermot Michael give over! She’s much too intelligent. She knows her future depends on Seamus having a long life.”
That settled that.
“What next?”
“I think you should pay a visit to your man in his law office and make him tell you the truth.”
“How do I do that?”
“The same way you always do. Be your sensitive, sympathetic self, the little priest listening to a confession.”
So saying, she leaned over our child and sang a lullaby. In Irish.