“What did she mean?” Kilmartin asked. “Your Sister Joe.”
“That girls move from the streets indoors,” replied Minogue. “Money changes hands still, of course. Doyler agrees. The whole business is impossible to track.”
He looked away from the window. Kilmartin was poised on the edge of his chair looking up under his eyebrows. A smell of salami from someone’s lunch hung in the stifling air of the squadroom.
“Hnnkkk. This bloody flatmate of hers. Patricia Fahy. Christ, she has to start talking.”
Minogue sat back and watched Murtagh writing on the boards: addresses for hard cases and enforcers in the Egan clan. Next to one was the address of a shop owned by Eddsy Egan.
“Probably. We need to go to her with something, Jim. Something which will make her cop on to the fact that the Egans can’t touch her. Something to make her wake up and realize that we’re all she’s got. Any word on Hickey yet?”
“Not a sausage, and bugger-all new from the lab about Mullen’s bloody taxi either. I’ve been going through his log again, minute by minute nearly. We’re down to three or maybe four significant periods of time he could’ve had a chance. Murtagh’s got the file searches for regulars by the canal, the customers, well in hand. The gougers on the parolee list as well as ones on bail are coming up empty. We’ll have to widen the net. Open it up to a year even. Go through the logged incidents reported into stations. Jesus.”
Minogue caught Murtagh’s eye.
“This Balfe character uses the Egans’ shop as his HQ? ‘Painless’ Balfe?”
Murtagh nodded. Minogue swivelled back toward Kilmartin.
“We’re okay to jump on the likes of him, aren’t we? If we can’t poke the Egans directly?”
Kilmartin blew out smoke from under his lower lip.
“Don’t ask. Talked to Keane again. Last resort, says he. And I have to go through him if I want to. Holy God, says I, we have her in and out of one of the Egans’ houses-right from his own surveillance! ‘I know, I know, Jim,’ says he. Told him I could get a warrant as easy as kiss hands. ‘Course you could, Jim.’ All that shite. I talked to him for twenty minutes. Finally he drops the clanger: ‘Well, Jim, you’d really need to get good advice on going it alone with this.’ In other words, check upstairs or I’ll be pissed on. Trouble is, I knew that bloody Keane is right. But I didn’t let on, did I?”
He snorted and stood. A smell of sweat and long extinguished cigars wafted over to Minogue.
“I checked already with a certain party in HQ, you see. Turns out that Keane has all the trumps in the bloody deck. It’s a combo between Drug Squad Central, Revenue Commissioners, Customs and Excise, Serious Crime-with their automatics stuck down the back of their shagging trousers! Then, to put the tin hat on it, I find out that it’s the personal initiative of you-know-who, the Iceman himself. He set it all up. If I want to take the Egans in, it’s bloody Tynan himself I’d have to ask!”
“Well, did you phone him then?”
Kilmartin’s eyes opened wide.
“I could as easy have a nice chat with Tynan as my wife could walk by a shoe shop.”
Minogue looked down at the names again.
“Well, let’s pluck these fellas then.”
He flicked a glance at the boards. Kilmartin looked at the names.
“Doyler put them in order of severity. John’s got their haunts. Start with Balfe there?”
Kilmartin guffawed.
“‘Painless.’ Christ.”
“I’d like a poke at him too,” said Malone. Kilmartin and Minogue looked over at him.
“What class of a poke had you in mind there, Molly?”
“I knew him years ago. He’d remember me. Maybe I can get somewhere with him.”
Malone spoke with no trace of humour.
“Painless is an animal. The other one is a total loop in his own right too. Lollipop Lenehan.”
“Why not, Tommy,” said Minogue. “Will you arrange the pick-up then?”
Malone nodded, looked at Kilmartin and picked up the phone. Minogue stretched.
“God, the air in here,” he groaned. “I have to go out for a bit of fresh air.”
Kilmartin followed him out to the car park.
“Listen, Matt. Don’t let Molly off the lead so quick now. Here he is asking his pick of — ”
“He’s volunteering, Jimmy.”
Kilmartin grimaced.
“I’m saying he’s inexperienced. I don’t want this case banjaxed due to a trainee dropping the ball. It’s bollicky enough yet with all the blanks we have to fill in.”
“Ten-four, James.”
“Here-why’d he ask to see this Painless fella anyway?”
“Maybe Balfe knows the brother-Terry.”
“The Squad that used to be all business seems to be a holding area for comedians. If you ask me-”
Minogue didn’t. He held up his hand to be sure he had heard Eilis’s summons to the phone.
“Da.”
“Hello, love.”
“How’s it going?”
“A minute ago, I was looking for the jacket I never brought with me this morning. The heat has me addled.”
“Don’t be talking,” said Iseult. “I put paper on the windows here to keep the sun off.”
Minogue remembered that the window frames in Iseult’s studio were old metal ones. He had seen a crust of frost on them just after Christmas. Winter meant air thick with the smell of a gas storage heater and the sundry oils and dyes, the wood shavings and stains, the scents of hemp and paper. He had held off opining about the place as a health hazard. Iseult shared the studio with several others. He had been bewildered to find her working with chisels and awls last month, helping one of her fellow tenants to finish a wooden construction which looked, in sketches at least, to be a tank trap from a Normandy beach.
“Well, how are you anyway?” she asked. He forgot the ache in his back, the stale smell of sweat that clung to his shirt. Iseult wasn’t in the habit of calling him at work.
“For my age, do you mean? Or my occupation?”
“In general like.”
“Oh, as ever. Happy-go-lucky. Early dotage maybe…”
“Fibber. Are you working late?”
“It’s hard to know. The usual. Waiting, checking, talking, thinking, cursing…”
“I was just wondering.”
“Well, if I had known you were in the market for tea, now.”
“It’s all right.”
He waited for another hint. Malone waved at him, stepped over to the boards and tapped his marker against a name. Painless Balfe. Minogue put his hand over the mouthpiece.
“We can pin him, Tommy? Right now?”
“Surveillance at Egan’s shop saw him go in five minutes ago. They called it in for us.”
So Kilmartin had bargained something out of Serious Crimes then, Minogue reflected.
“Okay. Pick him up-only when he comes out though.”
“Here, I’ll leave you,” said Iseult. “You’re busy enough.”
The brisk tone made him even more alert.
“Busy? God, no! Where do you want to meet?”
“I don’t want to, you know, get in the way now.”
“Well, I do. What’s that black and silver place in George’s Street? Music from the Andes, the stuff on the walls, avant-garde and what-have-you?”
“‘Back Then’? Are you sure? It’s gone completely vegetarian, you know.”
He rolled his eyes.
“A quarter to six?”
“Done,” he said. “Will you be on your own?”
“To all intents and purposes. I’ll see you, Da.”
The connection was lost before Minogue could utter a word. Was that humour he had heard in her answer? He replaced the receiver and gave a sigh. Phone Kathleen. Tell her that Iseult wanted to see him. Him alone? How would he manage this one, he wondered.