Shorty Hynes was a reporter for one of the two Dublin evening papers. He was a prodigious drinker, a gregarious and disarming character well known in the pubs and clubs of the city. Hynes could not wholly conceal the fact that he was as tenacious as a badger with a bone between his teeth. Hynes specialized in lurid descriptions of murders and violent crimes, wringing out the most minute and morbid details to gratify the tastes of the citizenry of Dublin and the island generally. Kilmartin had had Hynes barred from the headquarters of the Murder Squad after a spat between them. Hynes had been speechifying that the people had a right to know. Like any speechifier, Kilmartin did not take to competition in this line and he had told Hynes that, generally speaking, ‘the people’ were iijits. Hynes did not dispute this fact but still argued their right to be privy to details of a murder investigation. His insistence on this point had landed him out in the street. Still, Hynes had not taken it badly, and Kilmartin and he maintained a relationship which occasionally bordered on the civil. Hoey’s tight lips suggested that Hynes had refused to be put off looking for Kilmartin on the beach.
“Ha ha, men,” Hynes shouted, rolling his bonhomie across the room ahead of him. “The very men I was looking for. I was told that yous were at the scene but minutes before I arrived.”
Kilmartin glanced at Hoey.
“Are we just in time to have a nice little pick-me-up?” Hynes beamed.
“A kick-me-out-on-me-arse, you mean,” muttered Kilmartin.
“Landlord, landlord!” Hynes cried spiritedly. The waiter reappeared, looking more the ascetic monastery novitiate than before. Hynes ordered a Johnnie Walker and flipped a finger at the three policemen.
“No drink here,” Kilmartin declared.
Hynes shrugged and sat down, his hands on his knees.
“A few words, Chief Inspector, for attribution? And Sergeant- whoops, Inspector Minogue… fresh and well you’re looking,” the reporter smiled again.
“We were sitting down here discussing how nice it is to be nearer to retirement, Mr. Hynes,” Kilmartin drawled. “To have able and expert policemen in the Technical Bureau to go over the ground for us. To be looking forward not to be straining to be polite to certain members of the public, to certain organs in society.”
“Which organs, now?” Hynes guyed.
“Arra, don’t be offering me occasions of sin now, Mr. Hynes, if you don’t mind. My colleague here has a refined sensibility. I meant the media, specifically the press. There were times when journalists didn’t run berserk with the smell of blood to titillate their readers.”
Minogue doubted that the bibulous Hynes had sought Kilmartin out merely to torment him. The reporter must have heard less than he wanted down on the strand.
“What’s with your man down on the beach?” Hynes asked brightly.
“Apparently the man is dead, Mr. Hynes.”
“Ah, but the world and his mother know that, men. But sure that’s only the beginning, isn’t it?”
“Mr. Hynes, I’m going to be briefed as soon as there’s an officer comes here to brief me. There’s more than enough expertise and feet plodding over the scene below. You’ll doubtless have heard as much, and perhaps more, down there as you’ll hear from me,” said Kilmartin.
Minogue met Hoey’s eyes. Hoey looked to heaven.
“I thought as much,” said Hynes. He lit a cigarette from the butt of another and ground out the expended one slowly as though choking a hen. Minogue began calculating: he has a cigarette in his gob the minute he wakes up. Seven o’clock, say. A cigarette in his gob all day, then, so an average of five every hour if he takes them easy… up until the pubs close. Seventeen hours at…
Hynes was squinting up through a thread of smoke at Kilmartin, his fingers holding the butt pressed into the ashtray. “But my readers would still like your reactions.” He spoke around the cigarette.
“To what?”
Minogue liked Kilmartin’s pose. He even looked aloof, leaning back in his chair across from Hynes, as if trying to keep him at a distance.
“Someone phoned his paper, sir,” Hoey interrupted.
“Garda communications lagging behind the Press, is it? We passed it on to your crowd a half-hour ago,” said Hynes.
Kilmartin blinked.
“Your reaction to the murder of Billy Fine’s son,” Hynes added.
“Chief Justice Fine?” Minogue asked. The waiter laid a double Scotch languidly in front of Hynes.
“None other,” the reporter replied earnestly. He looked over his glass at Hoey and winked.
“Someone phoned the Irish Press claiming responsibility, sir. We couldn’t get through to you, what with the train and everything. I got it on the radio, but the Guards on the beach don’t know yet,” Hoey said quietly.
So it is a paramilitary thing, Minogue thought. But Fine?
“Paul Fine,” Hynes said.
“Who called and said they’d done it?”
“Are you ready for this one?” Hynes said, flourishing his glass. “The League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” He downed another gulp of Scotch.
Kilmartin stood up and motioned to Hoey, who followed him out to the foyer of the hotel. Minogue did not get up immediately, preferring to leave Kilmartin to vent his unjust anger on a tardy Hoey in private.
“I never heard of that mob, did you?” said Hynes, his eyes a glaze of wily smugness. He swallowed more whisky and slipped a notebook out of his pocket.
“Maybe you can have your say instead of Kilmartin, now,” he continued. “Give him time to find his feet.” Try as he might, Minogue did not detect any sneer on Hynes’s ruddy face.
“When he finds them he may plant one of them on your arse, I’d say,” Minogue offered.
“Oh, comical entirely. Is it my fault that the newspaper values its correspondent enough to put a space-age phone in his car? You’re well known for your ways, yourself, Ser-Inspector Minogue,” Hynes replied without trying to hide the ambiguity now. “But this isn’t a home-grown effort, with the mention of Palestine, is it?” he probed.
Minogue extemporized by saying nothing.
“And I don’t mean just that the man’s daddy is a Justice in the Supreme Court.”
Hynes finished the Scotch and looked down the glass at Minogue.
“The Fines are Jews, Inspector dear. One of our own, to be sure, but Jews nonetheless.”
CHAPTER TWO
Minogue’s thoughts kept returning to Hynes’s ‘nonetheless’ while Hoey drove back into Dublin. Instead of going back to the beach with Kilmartin, Minogue was now on his way to Justice Fine’s home in Rathgar. He was very nervous but too agitated to stay annoyed at Kilmartin. It was not so much that he resented being stuck with going to Fine’s house; what galled him was Jimmy Kilmartin’s method of inducing him to go with Hoey.
Kilmartin had heard from Hoey that Fine had been in his chambers when he was told about the murder of his son. No policemen had been to the house yet. Minogue had seen and heard the old Kilmartin then, the gritty Mayo giant who had been lost to the cattle-dealing or horse-racing profession in becoming a policeman; the Kilmartin who still defied the tailors of Dublin to encase him in suits which lessened the comic incongruity of city garb for him. When Jimmy Kilmartin had been recuperating after an operation, Minogue believed he had discerned a more thoughtful Chief Inspector, but the cajolery and cattle-fair persuasion now seemed to have returned in full force. “That bloody snake Hynes in there knew before we did, for the love of Jases,” Kilmartin had grumbled. “We’ll nearly have to be thanking him for not notifying next of kin before we get our hands on a case. I don’t like looking like an iijit.”
Uncharitably, Minogue wondered if the Chief Inspector was fretting less about the dead man’s next of kin than about Hynes making him look flat-footed. It was more likely that Kilmartin’s agitation had ballooned at the realization that he would be dealing with one of the leading members of the Irish judiciary. If Justice Fine were to but raise a ripple on his forehead about this investigation, Kilmartin might expect that ripple to be a tidal wave of disapproval by the time it reached him.