Chapter 6

Later that afternoon, Conley climbed the peeling stairs to the front porch of a big colonial. An army of garden gnomes defended Simon O’Neil’s front lawn. The ceramic soldiers guarded birdbaths, gazing balls, wooden geese with windmill wings, plywood cutouts of bent-over, fat-assed ladies gardening. Wind socks and chimes crammed the space between rail and roof, a flapping, clanging curtain. He caught a splinter on the wooden rail and stopped to inspect his hand.

A shrill voice called from the door. “You here for the cats?”

A woman with a startling shock of white hair and a wrinkled face stood behind the screen. A faded pink housedress draped her skinny frame.

“Pardon?” he said.

“You gotta have a net or something.” She punched a fist in the air. “Tools. BB-guns.”

He flashed his badge.

“I’m Matt Conley, Mrs. O’Neil. Remember me? I went to school with your son William.”

Another crop of white hair appeared behind her, this one shorter. Simon O’Neil.

“Gracie, that’s the Conley boy. Billy’s friend, don’t you remember?”

O’Neil eased his confused wife back into the darkness and returned, opened the screen door, and waved Conley in.

“Matt, please come in. Of course we remember you.”

Simon O’Neil adjusted his glasses—big, square-framed jobs that magnified his tired brown eyes. Conley edged by, the smells of cabbage and Mr. O’Neil’s stale, moth-bitten sweater joining to greet him. Mrs. O’Neil sat in a rocking chair and studied Conley with slatted eyes.

O’Neil turned the television on for his wife.

“He gonna catch those damn cats?” she asked urgently, head thrust forward, skinny rump perched precariously on the edge of the chair.

“Stay there, Gracie,” her husband answered with a wag of his finger.

He was glad Mr. O’Neil used the word “there”. She might not have given a care to be commanded like a dog, but Conley had long been conditioned to shoulder the misfortune of others. Irish Catholics liked to savor guilt in all its delicious forms.

O’Neil led him through the ancient kitchen. White appliances looked diseased, pocked with black spots showing through chipped paint. Yellowed wallpaper repeated a pattern of a horse-drawn carriage traveling under lush oaks—about five hundred times. Blue linoleum had been worn away in front of the sink and stove to reveal rough subfloor.

He followed Simon O’Neil, and when squeaky hinges closed the back door behind them, they stood in a yard of colossal neglect. Conley had been there years ago with William, when the two of them stole his father’s wine grapes from the vines. Mr. O’Neil caught them and they swore innocence, lying vehemently through purple lips plastered with grape skins.

Bushes and small trees were winter bare, their brown, rotting leaves piled like fat aprons around roots. The lawn was a checkerboard of dirt spots and long clumps of straw-colored grass. Rusted metal tools lay in random places.

O’Neil led him to a structure used to support grapevines. The rickety wooden arbor was gray with age, and bare, withered vines snaked through the trellis, a tangle of brittle brown thatch. The old man invited him to sit on a low stone bench covered with mold and moss, the only things that seemed to flourish in the yard.

“Grace is suffering from dementia,” he said. “She sees cats everywhere. Thanks for coming, Matt. I was worried no one would care about my complaint.”

“You were expecting me?”

He put his hands under his haunches. “Matt, I complained to the police about that colored cop. Didn’t they tell you? Isn’t that why you came?”

Kendricks.

Kendricks must have already been there, surely because of Father McCarrick’s deposition about the old chicken-blood-on-the-statue prank. Conley hesitated, weighing the benefits of lying against the difficulty of what he needed to accomplish.

“Yes,” he lied, removing notepad and pen from his inside pocket. “Headquarters sent me, Mr. O’Neil.”

“Good. I was afraid they’d think I was a nuisance.”

“No, sir. We are public servants, after all.”

O’Neil smiled, revealing black and yellow teeth fighting for space.

“That eye, Matt. The monstrous blue eye that colored boy had. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“Birth defect?”

O’Neil grunted. “No, son. I thought you were smarter than that. One brown eye, one blue means his mother was white. He’s an abomination, no mistaking it.” O’Neil pronounced abomination phonetically, as if he’d just invented the word.

Conley changed the subject.

“Mr. O’Neil, how’s William these days?”

“He’s very well. Working hard. You should get together. He always talks about the time you two fought those bullies in the park.”

Conley had almost forgotten. He and William had been altar boys at St. Ambrose’s. William was really into the Church and seemed to be heading for priesthood. He was more principled than other kids his age, and the only time he seemed to get into trouble was when Conley led him there.

“Damn police here bothering me with silly questions while the devil’s recruits are handing out dope needles and marijuana sticks like candy.”

Conley opened his notebook. He didn’t really need to record anything. His goal was to capture a nugget of information, something Kendricks and Stefanos didn’t know about the murder of Victor Rodriguez, leverage to get back on the case. Probably a long shot given the bizarre nature of the visit so far.

He wrote O’Neil in the notebook and surrounded the name with flowing brackets, wavy, curving molding. He doodled as O’Neil talked—drew a spiral so tight it almost sprang from the page, along with pyramids, squares, rectangles that became castles when he added crenellations.

“Ocean Park’s going to hell,” O’Neil said and told him all the reasons why.

Conley found he’d drawn two squares next to each other and connected the tops so they looked like O’Neil’s eyeglasses. He filled the squares with big eyes, careful to capture the dilated pupils, and was so absorbed in his artwork he didn’t realize O’Neil had stopped talking.

“Matt,” O’Neil said, his face inches away, a real life doodle of eyeglasses, gray stubble, and nose covered with thin red veins, “are you getting all this?”

Those damn milky glasses were spooky. Now Conley knew what fish in aquariums felt like.

“Yessir,” he said, hugging notebook to chest and sliding back on the rough seat.

“Why didn’t the colored policeman ask me about Mr. Rodriguez?”

“You knew Victor Rodriguez?”

“Of course I did. For many years. He hired William.”

The bench under Conley felt colder all of a sudden. The sky over the park stilled, and nature seemed to pause for a discovery.

“Mr. O’Neil, does William sell insurance for Victor Rodriguez?”

O’Neil smiled, a ghastly mask. “No, Matt, he’s a manager, a very good one. Victor Rodriguez owned a restaurant downtown. Morgan’s Tap.”

Calling Morgan’s Tap a restaurant was like calling hell a warm weather destination. Restaurant? Maybe if you called a big jar of pig’s feet in brine on the bar pub fare. Microwave pizza?—European cuisine.

Morgan’s was the toughest bar in the city, maybe on the whole North Shore. The idea of Morgan’s being “managed” was absurd, akin to saying prison riots or cattle stampedes had oversight and organization.

“Mr. O’Neil, are you sure Victor Rodriguez owned the Tap?”

“Of course he did. Put William in charge some time ago. They came by here occasionally and Mr. Rodriguez always made it a point to tell me what a gem our William is.”

Time to talk with his old friend William, the unlikely gem of a manager of a crazy house fueled with grimy shelves of cheap booze and draft beer. Conley wasn’t sure he’d even recognize William, but he was sure he dreaded visiting Morgan’s Tap. No sane person strolled into the place alone, and even Ocean Park cops weren’t allowed to enter without backup.

He stood. Simon O’Neil looked up at him, and when he grasped Conley’s forearm, the old man’s skin felt like paper that would tear and blow away in a strong wind. His voice got louder but not stronger.

“Matt, where are you going? We have more to talk about.”

The hinges to the back door creaked and Mrs. O’Neil appeared, a butcher knife in each hand. Her robe was missing, one strap of her nightgown had fallen, and a white pancake breast quivered behind her upraised arms.

“Grace,” Mr. O’Neil called as he scrambled from the bench, traipsed the path of long grass to his wife and repeated her name, chanting it as if pleading for divine assistance.

Calling out a farewell, Conley took the opportunity to leave and found a path beside the house that led him past a handsome family of plastic deer grazing on the shriveled remains of last summer’s ragweed.

****

Simon O’Neil’s house was receding in his rearview mirror when Lisa called.

“Matt, I’ve been trying to reach you for days.”

“I’ve been pretty busy.”

“I’m sorry for what I said the other day.”

“So am I.”

“I spoke to Father McCarrick. He told me you’re leading the Rodriguez investigation. Shows you what I know. I’m very proud of you.”

“He said that, huh?”

Long silence before she spoke again. “When are you coming by?”

He stopped at the light on Chestnut Street. A canopy of oaks spread over him, and he was losing reception. Lisa’s voice was garbled. “Love” snuck through before static. The word “babe” made its way out of the crackle.

The sound finally cleared. “When, Matt?”

“Soon.” The light turned green. “Very soon.”