The rest of the pieces weren’t difficult to fill in. The New Jersey and, indeed, the New York papers had heard of Sean Doonan. A notable, but unindicted, member of the Irish mob in Union City. He had been implicated on several counts of union fraud, numbers rackets, protection rackets. He had never been convicted of anything.
After their divorce, Amber had gone to live with him full-time. She had clearly run a little wild. Amber Doonan’s name showed up in the Union City Gazette in connection with arrests for vandalism and car theft. I had interlibrary loan at the Denver Public Library get me a photocopy of the relevant issues of the Gazette. A grainy black-and-white photo that showed a defiant, pretty punk girl with a pierced nose and a shaved head.
Amber, however, had either done brilliantly on her SATs or her da had pulled strings, for she had been accepted to Harvard. As I’d already discovered, in her second year Amber began calling herself Amber Abendsen, her mother’s maiden name. Young Ms. Abendsen won a Boston Drama Festival Prize, and I even found a photograph in The Boston Globe that showed a girl with long blond hair in a Gucci blouse. Neither her father nor her mother attended Amber’s Harvard graduation, something two of her college classmates commented on when I phoned them. It didn’t surprise me now.
It seemed that Amber had reinvented herself in Boston. She had disowned her parents. Shanty Irish mobster dad, convict, drunken ma. She had made herself anew. She was moving in different social circles, ashamed of where she’d come from. She’d removed that harp tattoo. Cleaned up her elocution. But you could take the girl out of the bog, but not the bog out of the girl. The stealing of the tip money, the random fucks, she had a little throw-back in her. Or was that a racist thing to say? A classist thing. Maybe.
Regardless, from The Denver Post, it appeared that neither of Amber’s parents came to her wedding. Probably Charles understood why Amber wanted it this way. At the time of the wedding, her ma was back in jail and her father had been on TV as part of a prolonged trial that had just collapsed. His face had again been in the New York papers. Indeed, Amber’s father, Sean Doonan, was a nephew of Seamus Patrick Duffy, who was now the reputed leader of the Irish mob in New York City.
The more clear blue water between her and him the better, if she wanted to move in the dizzy circles around Charles Mulholland.
And all this would have been irrelevant but for one thing.
Now I probably knew where the gunmen in the park had come from.
My phone call must have precipitated it. Scared them. Charles and Amber at their wits’ end. Charles had messed up; even though he’d stuck a knife in my heart, I wasn’t dead. And Amber knew that to protect her husband and her future there was only one thing to do. She had to contact dear old Dad. It was possible. Why not? It seemed she had been telling the truth when she told me she didn’t have a relationship with her father. Eight years of estrangement would have had to come to an end. She needed his help. She needed someone in whom she could place absolute trust, who would not blackmail her and Charles, who could supply three professional assassins to meet her husband’s tormentor in Fort Morgan, Colorado. Charles had taken care of everything, but this loose end had to be taken care of by someone else.
So maybe she had picked up the phone. Knew that he would trade it for future favors, but even so. Dad I need your help….
So it was another fuckup on my part, I’d arranged the meeting in the graveyard a day in advance, plenty of time for Doonan to fly a hit team to Denver, to drive to Fort Morgan, to scout the territory, to lay the trap. What a fool I’d been. And perhaps Charles had bullied her, frightened her. If I was right, it must have taken some persuading to get her to talk to her da, especially after all she had gone through to be rid of the past. But she had agreed. The future, too important. A politician’s wife. A rising star. Yes, Charles, I’ll call Da, he’ll take care of it, he’ll kill Alex.
Thanks, Amber. I am not one to hold a grudge. But, my dear, prepare your screams. Your Jackie Kennedy face. In three days Charles is going to be lying beside you with a bullet in his skull.
I needed a weapon, so I went to see my old dealer, the Mexican kid who worked behind the Salvation Army shelter on Colfax. Entire books have been written about the relationship between a user and his dealer. Burroughs, De Quincey. Lou Reed has written songs about it. Mine was uncomplicated. I liked Manuelito. I had quit now and no one was interested in ketch in Denver, so I didn’t blame him when he gave me a bit of the old cold shoulder at first when I went to see him.
“Manuelito,” I said with a big grin.
“Manuel to you,” he said sourly. His baby face trying to force a frown.
“Listen, I quit smack, don’t bring me down.”
He shook his head.
“Man, you know, heroin isn’t even worth the risks anymore.”
“I know,” I said, and we chatted about the dreadful state of affairs the world was in when kids wanted to do crack and then go out and rob some old lady, rather than taking honest-to-God Afghani horse, which was so pure these days you could smoke it, mellow out, chill, harm nobody but yourself. On the subject of the dangerous world we lived in, I told him I needed a piece and he told me about an unlikely place to buy one.
“There’s a guy called Tricky, lives a couple of blocks away from the police headquarters on Federal Plaza, I’ll take you over.”
We went to see Tricky. A wiry, high-strung Guatemalan kid who had so much energy he made me nervous. Also a bit tense to be looking at shotguns, Armalites, pistols, and a machine gun and thinking about committing a political murder a hundred yards from the police HQ and a divisional office of the FBI. Tricky wanted me to take the machine gun off his hands, but in the end I settled for a long-nosed.38 revolver similar to a gun I’d had in the peelers. Stolen from a gun dealer’s in Mexico, Tricky said. As good as untraceable. Pistol in hand, I thanked the two boys and went back home.
Pat wasn’t doing so well these days. He told me not to worry, saying that some weeks you were good and some weeks you were bad. His doc told him to expect that. It would be a sine curve of health, up, down, up, until the final cataclysmic plunge.
He coughed most of the time now and as I got stronger and put on weight, he balanced me out, getting paler and losing weight. Most nights now I fed him soup and did my best to keep his apartment clean.
Pat and I were really getting on and I felt a bit guilty about leaving him. But leave him I must. Either for jail or the afterlife or maybe even for Ireland. In case of the latter, I had changed my airline ticket once again, deciding that if I survived the assassination, I’d fly to Dublin that night on my real passport.
And I might shoot Charles and get out, but more likely I’d be killed at the scene or arrested. Congressman Wegener would be there and a senator from one of the logging states and they were bound to have protection. Peelers and FBI and maybe a few private security guards.
“Hey, Pat, does Colorado have the death penalty?”
“No,” Pat said, with a little cough. “But you won’t get that far,” he added with an ironic grin.
He was wrapped in his blankets. He had a cold. A cold can kill an AIDS patient. He’d given me the list of numbers to call if we had to run him up to Saint Joseph’s.
“Do you want some tea?” I asked. Pat shook his head.