"'Tis a vast city, New York, but the old Kitchen's not so big, and the pool we swam in wasn't large at all. We were forever in each other's way, forever coming head to head with each other, and everybody knew how it had to end. By God, I thought, if someone's after getting killed it needn't be myself, and I laid for the bastard, and I did for him.
"You've heard the stories, and there's a mix of the true and the false in them. This much is true: I took his great ugly head off his shoulders. Do that, I thought, and your troubles with a man are at an end, for the best doctors in the world won't sew him together again.
"I never thought to run a stake through his heart."
"Let's figure this out," I said.
"It's a mystery," he said. "If you'd been brought up in the Church you'd know that mysteries can't be figured out. They can only be contemplated."
We were in an all-night diner he knew in Queens, way the hell out in Howard Beach not far from JFK. He'd wanted to get away from McGinley amp; Caldecott, as if Paddy Farrelly's ghost had itself taken up residence there. I don't know how he managed to find the diner, or how he knew of it to begin with, but I figured we were safe there. The place was as remote as Montana.
For a man who'd just seen a ghost he had a good appetite. He put away a big plate of bacon and eggs and home fries. I had the same, and it was good. I could probably be a vegetarian like Elaine, but only if bacon was declared a vegetable.
"A mystery," I said. "Well, I didn't have the advantage of a Catholic education. I think of a mystery as something to be solved. Can we agree that it's not a ghost I saw?"
"Then it's a resurrection," he said, "and Paddy's an odd candidate for it."
"I think it would have to be his son."
"He never married."
"Did he like the ladies?"
"Too well," he said. "He'd have his way with them if they liked it or not."
"Rape, you mean?"
"Words change their meaning," he said. "Over time. When we were young it was scarcely rape if they knew each other. Unless it was a grown man with a child, or someone forcing himself upon a married woman. But if a girl was out with a man, well, what did she think she was getting into?"
"Now they call it date rape."
"They do," he said, "and quite right. Well, if a girl was with Paddy, she ought to know what she was in for. There was one was going to press charges, but Paddy talked to her brother and her brother talked her out of it. No doubt he threatened to kill the whole family, and no doubt the brother believed him."
"Nice fellow."
"If I go to hell," he said, "as I likely will, it won't be his blood on my hands that puts me there. But, you know, there were enough he didn't need to force. Some women are drawn to men like him, and the worse the man the greater the attraction."
"I know."
"Violence draws them. I had some drawn to me that way, but they were never the sort of woman I cared for." He thought about that for a moment. Then he said, "If he had a son, he'd have no love for me."
"When did Paddy die?"
"Ah, Jesus, it's hard to remember. I can't be sure of the year. 'Twas after Kennedy was shot, I remember that much. But not long after. The following year, I'd say."
"1964."
"'Twas in the summer."
"Thirty-three years ago."
"Ah, you've a great head for mathematics."
"That would fit, you know. The man I saw was somewhere in his thirties."
"There was never any talk of Paddy having a son."
"Maybe she kept it quiet, whoever she was."
"And told the boy."
"Told the boy who his father was. And maybe told him who killed him."
"So that he grew up hating me. Well, don't they grow up in Belfast hating the English? And don't the Proddy kids grow up hating the Holy Father? 'Fuck the Queen!' 'Nah, nah, fuck the Pope!' Fuck 'em both, I say, or let 'em fuck each other." He drew out his pocket flask and sweetened his coffee. "They grow into good haters if you teach them early enough. But where the hell has he been all these years? He's spit and image of his father. If I'd ever laid eyes on him I'd have known him in an instant."
"I saw how you reacted to the sketch."
"I knew him at a glance, and I'd have known him as quick in the flesh. Anyone who knew the father would recognize the son."
"Maybe he grew up outside of the city."
"And nursed his hatred all these years? Why would he leave it so long?"
"I don't know."
"I could imagine him coming for me in his young manhood," he said. "'When boyhood's fire was in my blood'- you know that song?"
"It sounds familiar."
"That's when you'd think he'd have done it, when boyhood's fire was in his blood. But he's well past thirty, he'd have to be, and boyhood's fire is nothing but dying embers. Where the hell's he been?"
"I've some ideas."
"Have you really?"
"A few," I said. "I'll see where I can get with it tomorrow." I looked at my watch. "Well, later today."
"Detective work, is it?"
"Of a sort," I said. "It's a lot like searching a coal mine for a black cat that isn't there. But I can't think what else to do."
I was home and in bed before sunrise, up and showered and shaved before noon. TJ had had a good night, and was sitting up in front of the television set, wearing navy blue chinos and a light blue denim shirt. He'd told Elaine he had clean clothes in his room, but she'd insisted on buying him an outfit at the Gap. "Said she didn't want to invade my privacy," he said, rolling his eyes.
I brought him up to speed and let him have another look at the man I'd come to think of as Paddy Jr., whatever his name might turn out to be. I was hoping there was a computerized shortcut to the task at hand.
"The Kongs could probably do it," he said, "if we knew where they at, an' if they still into that hackin' shit. An' if the records you talkin' about's computerized."
"They're city records," I said, "and they're over thirty years old."
"Be the thing for them to do. Have some people sit down an' input all their files. Be a real space saver, 'cause you can fit a whole filing cabinet on a floppy."
"It sounds like too much to hope for," I said. "But if Vital Statistics has all their old files on computer, I wouldn't even have to hack into their system. There's an easier way."
"Bribery?"
"If you want to be a tightass about it," I said. "I prefer to think of it as going out of your way to be nice to people, and having them be nice in return."
The clerk I found was a motherly woman named Elinor Horvath. She was nice to begin with and got even nicer when I palmed her a couple of bills. If only the records in question had been in computerized files, she could have found them for me in nothing flat. As TJ had explained it to me, all she would have to do was sort each pertinent database by Name of Father. Then you could just shuffle through the F's and see exactly who had been sired by someone named Farrelly.
"All our new records are computerized," she told me, "and we're working our way backward, but it's going very slowly. In fact it's not really going at all, not after the last round of budget cuts. I'm afraid we're not a high-priority division, and the old records aren't high priority for us."
That meant it had to be done the old-fashioned way, and it was going to require more time than Mrs. Horvath could possibly devote to it, no matter how nice a guy I was. The money I gave her got me ensconced in a back room where she brought me file drawers full of birth certificates filed in the City of New York starting January 1, 1957. I couldn't believe he was over forty, not from the glimpse I'd had of him, nor could I imagine he'd been more than seven years old when Paddy got the chop. According to what I knew about the father, by then the son would have had enough neglect or abuse or both to have been spared a passion for revenge.
That gave me my starting date, and I'd decided I'd go all the way to June 30, 1965. The killing of Paddy Farrelly, which Mick recalled as having taken place during the summer, might have occurred as late as the end of September, and the darling boy himself might have been conceived that very day, for all I knew. It all seemed unlikely, but you could say that about the whole enterprise.