Chapter Eleven #2
This isn’t what Cal was expecting. “Me and Lena,” he says. “I can’t say exactly what time, but it was when the rain slacked off for a while, so you might be able to narrow it down from that.”
Garda Dennis writes that down. “Theresa Reddy didn’t go with ye?”
“Nope. She wanted to take a shower.” Cal can read his careful printing, upside down: Wanted to Take a Shower.
“Where did ye go?”
“Up past Mart Lavin’s place as far as the bottom of the mountain road, then back again. About a mile each way. Probably we were out a little more’n half an hour.”
Garda Dennis asks, carefully, “And how was Missus Dunne? What kinda form was she in, like?”
A spike of fear goes right through Cal. He says, “Did something happen?”
Garda Dennis’s face moves through perplexed to horrified. “Ah, God, no,” he says hastily. “Everything’s grand—God, sorry, I didn’t mean to give you a fright. I’m only asking.”
Cal’s heart is hammering. “She was fine,” he says.
In truth, Lena seemed strange all night.
She ate the beef stew, took an interest in the nursing chair, discussed what to watch on Netflix, but something about her brushed cold along the back of Cal’s neck.
She seemed like she was hearing his voice across distance; her eyes, clear and blue as always, were on some horizon more than they were on him or Trey.
The remoteness that’s surrounded her since Rachel’s death has thickened, becoming a miasma that almost hides her from him.
He wanted to spend all evening with a hand on her, in case she disappeared altogether, dissolving into that mist and gone.
“Little bit tired, maybe,” he says. “Everyone’s had a long few weeks, around here.”
“Did ye argue at all?” Garda Dennis asks.
“Nope. Mostly we just talked about what sounded good on Netflix. What’s going on, man?”
Garda Dennis pokes a hole in the paper with his pen and looks wretchedly uncomfortable. Cal waits, patient but unrelenting, like a teacher waiting for the spitball-thrower to own up.
“I had a report come in,” Garda Dennis says in the end.
“A fella, naming no names, he said he was driving that way yesterday evening and he saw a man and a woman arguing on the road. The man hit the woman an awful clatter. He, this fella that called it in…” Garda Dennis shoots Cal an agonized look before ducking his head back down over the notebook.
“He identified the individuals in question as yourself and Missus Dunne.”
Cal knows better than to let his anger show. Aside from the fact that it wouldn’t be a smart call, none of this is Garda Dennis’s fault. The poor bastard is doing his best with the can of shit Tommy Moynihan has him carrying.
Instead he considers, frowning. “Shouldn’t you be talking to Lena?” he asks, a little reprovingly. “Before you talk to me?”
“Ah, yeah, no, you’re right, I should. I did go over to hers first, like, but she wasn’t in, and I thought…” Garda Dennis turns up his round, unhappy face to Cal. “What with you being, you know—”
“Hey,” Cal says, “it’s fine. You gotta use your judgment in this job.”
Garda Dennis looks slightly reassured. “You don’t have to say anything about it,” he says. “Sure, you know that anyhow. I just thought, maybe you might wanta—”
“Jeez, man,” Cal says, “come on. Of course I’m gonna talk to you. First off, I’ve never laid a finger on Lena or any other woman. Second, the only car that passed us yesterday evening was Alice Kelly in her Qashqai full of kids. Somebody’s been feeding you bullshit.”
Garda Dennis nods and writes that down, but Cal can tell from his face that something is bugging him. “There’s more,” he says. “Go for it.”
“When you were in to me the other day,” Garda Dennis says. He’s poking a new hole in his notebook. “You said yourself and the missus hadn’t been getting on.”
“Nope,” Cal says firmly. “What I said was we’re not having a lot of laughs these days, what with one thing and another. That’s not the same thing.”
“Right. Just, I heard she’s been a bit…” Garda Dennis trails off. When Cal raises his eyebrows: “A bit, you know. Off, like. The last while.”
“ ‘Off,’ ” Cal says. “ ‘Off’ like what?”
“I’m not saying she’s mental, or anything,” Garda Dennis assures him hurriedly. “But you said yourself she’s been stressed over Rachel Holohan. ’Tis awful hard on a man, living with a woman that’s up to ninety.”
“Give me a break, man,” Cal says. “Damn right, she’s been stressed out.
I told you that. It didn’t make me want to hit her.
It made me come in to you looking for something to set her mind at ease.
You gave me that—which I appreciate—and it calmed her right down.
Same as when your wife thought she heard rats, you didn’t haul off and slug her, you just climbed on up into the attic.
And then everything went back to normal. ”
Garda Dennis, scratching his nose with the butt of his pen, still looks troubled. He’s been too filled up with warnings, about Cal and Lena both, for anything else to feel reliable.
“Lemme ask you something,” Cal says. “This guy who called it in. How come he didn’t stop, do something about it?”
“The man was on his own, like. He mighta been worried that ye—or the, the couple—would have a go at him. Sure, you know yourself, that’d happen in domestics.”
“Huh,” Cal says. “How come he didn’t call it in right away, before the woman could get beat up any worse? How come he waited till today?”
“He mighta been thinking it over,” Garda Dennis suggests. “Deciding what to do, like. Around here they don’t always like bringing us on board.”
Cal leans back in his chair and rubs his jaw thoughtfully.
“This guy,” he says. “Don’t name any names, now; keep that part to yourself.
Just tell me: he the timid type? The type who’d be too scared to pull over, or even honk his horn a coupla times, if he saw a woman getting beat up right there on the side of the road? ”
He’s banking on Tommy having thrown his own personal weight behind this, seeing as it didn’t involve getting his hands dirty. Sure enough, Garda Dennis blinks, wrong-footed. “I can’t give out any information,” he says, falling back on a safe formula.
“Huh,” Cal says, eyebrows lifting. “OK. How ’bout indecisive, he indecisive? Slow-thinking? Nervous about cops? The type who’d spend a whole night going in circles about whether to call it in?”
Garda Dennis blinks some more. Cal leaves a minute for that to percolate.
“If it doesn’t make sense,” he says, “it’s probably bullshit. That’s always been my rule.”
Garda Dennis looks at him. “I wondered about that, all right,” he says simply.
“Sure, we’ve all had people using us to give each other hassle.
There’s two aul’ lads up in town, every week I’ve got one or the other of them ringing me up telling me the other fella’s dealing drugs outa the house.
Neither one of ’em ever went near drugs in his life; they just can’t stand each other.
” When Cal grins, he looks abashed, suddenly remembering who he might be talking to.
“But this fella,” he says, “he told me, ‘I know your man Hooper looks after Theresa Reddy, but he’s never laid a hand on her, as far as I know.’ ”
“Well,” Cal says. He keeps his voice even. “Your guy got that part right, anyway.”
“If he was just aiming to drop you in the shite, but, he wouldn’ta said that. He coulda done a lot more damage the other way.”
A part of Cal genuinely feels for Garda Dennis, trapped trying to deal with two mutually exclusive versions of him at the same time, when all he wants to do is stamp babies’ passport forms and reassure little old ladies that the scary noise in their garden is foxes.
“You go talk to Lena,” he says. “She should be home by now.”
He hates to do this to Lena in her current mood, especially when it won’t make much of a difference—domestic violence victims routinely hide the bruises and deny the whole thing, and Garda Dennis knows that as well as Cal does. But none of them have any choice.
Garda Dennis nods. He closes up his notebook and tucks it carefully back into his pocket. He still looks unhappy.
“I just want to say,” Cal says, “I appreciate the way you’re handling this.”
They look at each other across the table, as two cops this time, seeing the ways they both know this could have been done differently.
“I’m doing my best,” Garda Dennis says quietly.
“I know that,” Cal says. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this.”
He watches Garda Dennis hurry across the yard to his car, chin tucked down against the rain. Cal knew this was coming, but it leaves him sad all the same. He liked Garda Dennis.
The oven has heated up. Cal slides Trey’s burl onto the shelf and sets the timer for an hour. Then he sits back down at the table and phones Lena.
“That Guard from up in town is headed your way,” he says, when she picks up. “O’Malley. He wants to ask you whether I beat you up last night.”
After a moment Lena says, “That fucker.”
Cal takes some heart from the vividness of her anger: she sounds like herself again. “He’s just doing his job,” he says. “He got a report, he has to look into it.”
“Not O’Malley. He’s harmless. I mean Tommy. I oughta go over there and take the head off him.”
Cal says, “We can’t give him anything he can use.”
He listens to the silence roaring like water on the other end of the phone. “I shoulda seen this coming,” Lena says eventually.
“Yeah, me too. It could be worse.”
“Ah, yeah,” Lena agrees. “It could.” The anger has dulled out of her voice. She sounds like she’s talking to a stranger, about something that has little to do with either of them. Cal has no idea how to reach her. That spike of fear inside him is still there.
“O’Malley can’t do anything to me,” he says. “Just answer his questions and he’ll go away.”
“I’ll do that. It’ll be grand.”