Irish Crystal Read online

  “’Tis!”

  Police officials made their comments. Politicians promised that such threats were intolerable. Young Jack Curran, spokesperson for the family, warned with passion in his voice and fire in this eyes that if the family had to do it themselves, they would protect their parents.

  “We will not tolerate this vile plot against my mother and father. We will fight with all our power to bring the criminals to justice.”

  “There’s Blackie!”

  “’Tis, with young Father Rory, with whom he is apparently working.”

  Then Blackie, who disappears quickly, vanished.

  Mary Alice concluded the story.

  “The scare this afternoon was caused by an apparent car bomb attached to the car of Mr. and Mrs. John Curran, who were staying at the Four Seasons after a bomb blast last week destroyed their home on the banks of the Chicago River. Someone obviously wants to kill Curran, a prominent Chicago lawyer, and do it as spectacularly as possible. The question now is whether Chicago police will be able to protect the Currans from these mad bombers.”

  Me wife fell back on the bed.

  “That was right outside the window in the swimming pool.”

  “Woman, it was and yourself clueless.”

  “Well, I didn’t need clues now, did I? Didn’t Mr. Casey take care of it all?”

  “He did, now get up and dress yourself. We have a dinner reservation at the Cape Cod Room.”

  “Dermot, call home and see how the kids are!”

  So I called home and found out the kids were fine. I reported that we’d be back after we had our supper.

  “Take your time, Da,” Nelliecoyne said. “’Tis good for you and Ma to get out sometimes by yourselves.”

  What did the little witch mean by that?

  Better that I not ask.

  After we had our Bookbinder Soup (with the sherry) and ordered our crab cakes, we settled back in the warm comfort of the dining room and began to compare notes. The room looked like a restaurant on the Cape, but only if you’d never been inside a real Cape restaurant. The version at the Drake Hotel was much more elegant.

  “Someone thought they would be in the house on the night of the explosion,” me wife said, “and knew where their car was today. Someone with pretty good spies.”

  “In the family?”

  “Who else, Dermot Michael?”

  “I have a hunch you’re the first one who has thought of that … . What did you think of Estelle’s story?”

  “Don’t I believe every word of it and herself being a great brilliant woman. Still.”

  “Still.”

  ash.

  “You sound like Blackie … she may not have admitted it to herself and that’s all right, but I wonder if there was not some attraction for her in forbidden fruit, if you take me meaning?”

  “I take your meaning.”

  “It probably doesn’t matter. Her rebound is brilliant altogether. Great strength of character like.”

  “Will the character stand up under her current stress?”

  “Fair play to you, Dermot Michael. She’s an intense woman, just now on the edge of volatility, if you … But I’ve already said that, haven’t I now? Isn’t she just like our tiny one?”

  “Estelle Curran is like Socra Marie?”

  “Didn’t Dr. Foley at the hospital say Socra Marie had a very strong will to live and that’s why she didn’t die half a dozen times. Stelle has a strong will to live, that’s why she bounced back so fiercely. Just like our tiny one always bounced back.” ,

  “Fair play to you, Nuala Anne. I think you’re right, as always.”

  “Och, Dermot, don’t you make me blush … better that you say ‘most of the time.’”

  “Who would know where they’re staying?”

  “Wouldn’t the whole family know? If the spy is one of the family, it could be any of them.”

  “But how many knew they were leaving for Europe?”

  “You might be able to find out when you lunch with Jack and his wife tomorrow. Now didn’t he sound like someone right out of Bobby Emmet’s time on the telly?”

  “Not as pious as Emmet and not as judicious in what he said, but, yeah, maybe someone out of that world, like the priest, whose name we don’t know.”

  “Sure, isn’t Bookbinder Soup wonderful?”

  “’Tis.”

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “’Tis strange, isn’t it?”

  “Two feisty Irishmen with all the skills that your litigators should have and themselves working for John Curran.”

  “Three … John Curran himself.”

  “Ah, no. He didn’t want to become like his father. That is a strange combination altogether, isn’t it, Dermot Michael? What do you think John would do if he knew his father raped his wife?”

  “Kill him?”

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “I don’t think so, but he’d get him one way or another.”

  “Maybe Long Tom didn’t care?”

  “Just think about it, Dermot love. Suppose you resent your son, because he’s had an easy life and you’ve suffered under your own father and fought through torture and prison and four years of war and you envy him his beautiful wife. ’Tis a brilliant thing to take her, isn’t it now, and yourself loving every second of it.”

  THE WOMAN HAS A DANGEROUS IMAGINATION.

  You just figure that out?

  “I suppose so.”

  “And every time you see them together you can revel in what you know and what you’ve done. That’s a bad man.”

  “So as you’re getting old and near death, you decide you’ll have one more ultimate triumph over them?”

  “What good is it if they don’t know it’s you? At least one of them has to know.”

  “So Long Tom may not be the criminal?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I now, Dermot love?”

  “You’re just not convinced?’

  She was wolfing down the crab cakes and au gratin potatoes.

  “’Tis all right for me to eat this delicious supper. Best fish dinner since I left Connemara. Didn’t I have a lot of exercise today, one kind or the other?”

  “What, by the way, did Madame have to say to you?”

  “Wasn’t she pleased with me for one of the first times ever? … No, Long Tom is a bad man with a lot of hatred stored up in him. He’s probably killed a lot of people, but I’m not sure he’d try to kill his son.”

  “We don’t have any evidence anyway.”

  My cell phone rang.

  “Hey, Dermot, Alfie.”

  “Hey, Alfie.”

  “My friends tell me that their friends are really furious. The bombers are guys from out of town. Latins of one kind or another. They have no respect. My friends hear that their friends intend to find out who they are and either take care of it themselves or inform the police.”

  “Isn’t that second option a little unusual?”

  “Nah! My friends’ friends say that sometimes that’s the cleanest way to do it. Then they don’t get blamed.”

  “Cool, Alfie:”

  “Yeah, I thought so too. Hey, Dermot, tell that beautiful wife of yours that my whole family really digs her last record.”

  “She’ll be glad to hear it.”

  “aide,” Nuala Anne said as she dug into her second crab cake.

  “Yeah, he says to tell you that he and his whole family really dig your last record.”

  “Isn’t that sweet of him? Is he a bad man?”

  “Made man? Killer? Not at all. He’s a spokesman, passes on information for the outfit, but only what they want passed on.”

  I told her his message.

  “Will they do it?”

  “Sure. They have been treated with disrespect. Also they fear that they might be blamed, if not by the cops, then by the media. Two will get you five that the suits will be hinting tomorrow that it was an organized crime hit.”

  Nuala nodded slowly.r />
  “I want the bread pudding for desert, Dermot Michael … Still it’s strange them two feisty Irish lawyers are working on matters that are not exciting. I wonder why … Maybe John Curran is some kind of magic person. Well, I’ll find out when I see them tomorrow.”

  First I heard that John Curran was too important for the spear-carrier.

  23

  “You can pick out the great Irish litigators in the courts easily,” Gerry Donovan informed me. “They’re short, overweight, drink too much, and you think that when they were younger they wore baseball caps backwards.”

  He was a little above medium height, freckle-faced, with closely cropped brown hair and brown eyes that danced with mischief. A green hat and he would have been the perfect leprechaun, a role he had played, as it turned out, for the Notre Dame football team.

  “Well you’re not overweight,” his wife said, patting his arm. “And I won’t let that happen.”

  She was a gorgeous, statuesque blonde, a younger version of her mother. I had taken them to lunch at the Chicago Yacht Club, where the grass was green, the trees still barren, and the Lake still a dull gray. A few early boats were anchored at their moorings—April the cruelest month of the year at the CYC.

  They were two light-hearted kids, just touching thirty, the age when late adolescence is supposed to end.

  “So, yeah, I’d like to buy one of those Yacht Club hats and wear it, backwards, of course, the next time I go to court. Get one for Jack too. It’d create quite a scene. We’d be held in contempt but the judge would have to vacate the order when we explained that it was a repressed impulse from our days in the bar and not at it.”

  “Now ended,” she said, consuming him with an affectionate smile, “permanently.”

  “What man in his right mind would want to go to a bar with a wife like you waiting at home and two marvelous kids who are always quiet and obedient and reasonable.”

  They both were of Nuala’s cohort, and a few years younger than I was. He did wills for his father-in-law’s firm. She was a stay-at-home mom who wrote articles for computer journals and attended creative writing classes at a community college on the North Shore.

  “But you’re not a litigator, are you?” I asked.

  “Jack and I are both apostate litigators … Gerald the Apostate, has a nice sound to it, huh … We like the peace and quiet of Curran and Sons. When we need someone to appear in court one or the other of us goes over … Sometimes we send the boss if it’s a simple case … We both have beautiful wives. I have young children and he will soon … We get our jollies out of arguing with each other and our wives and our kids. John Curran has the right idea. There’s no reason that the practice of law should be a rat race.”

  “You both lose the arguments with your wives,” Deirdre said.

  “Well, we let them think so anyway … It’s not whether you win or lose …”

  “It’s how absurd your argument can be.”

  “That’s called litigation!”

  “Did you talk the other night about John Philpot Curran? You know anything about him?” he said, abruptly changing the conversation.

  “Just a little.”

  “I’m interested in the ’98 and the ’03. Crazy men, but very brave. Philpot Curran was a brilliant lawyer, but a nasty man, don’t you think?”

  “I agree completely.”

  “Gerry knows a lot of history,” his wife said admiringly.

  Please God don’t let that admiration die out.

  I changed the subject back.

  “No women in the firm?”

  “They thought my little sister-in-law Marie Therese would join up, someone to clean up the wastebaskets at the end of the day. But she wouldn’t do it. She knew that she’d have to make them work and that would be boring. So she’s into venture capital.”

  “She’d take over the firm.” His wife giggled. “Smarter than any of the men in the family.”

  “She’s a genius, Derm, and ambitious, two negatives for our firm … Besides poor Trevor provides all the serious we need.”

  He rolled his eyes as he mentioned his brother-in-law’s name.

  “That wife of his,” Deirdre commented, “is a bitch plus. Always quoting her Father Charles, as if the Pope worked for him … And you must take my husband with a grain of salt, Dermot, a whole sack of salt. They’re good lawyers, they work hard, and they earn lots of money. They’re just dropouts from the guild.”

  “Far be it for me, a frequent dropout from the poetry guild, to be critical … Now tell me. Who blew up the old home?”

  “And almost incinerated a large chunk of Lincoln Park West,” Gerry added.

  “We talked about it on the way over here,” Deirdre said, eating a small slice of the omelet she had ordered at my recommendation. “We can’t figure it out. Trevor thinks it was the developers. Gerry says it must be someone who is angry because they think the firm let them down. Jack says that it was clearly a Mafia hit because we weren’t paying protection money, but he’s not serious. Daddy thinks … I’m not sure what he thinks. Maybe someone who hates him and wants to kill him. He suspects they’ll try again.”

  “And what do you think, Deirdre?”

  “This is one of the rare instances where I agree with my dear husband,” she said again with the same maternal smite—tinged with erotic desire—that she used whenever she spoke of him or to him.

  She ran the show, no doubt about that. Did he realize the kind of trap he had entered when she seduced him into her bed? Probably. Probably he liked it.

  YOU’RE A HELL OF A ONE TO TALK, DERMOT COYNE.

  Shut up! I’m working!

  “We work with issues that involve a lot of money, tax payments, inheritance, property transfers, investments. We earn a lot because we have a reputation of being foolproof—We don’t make mistakes. Sometimes our clients think we have. So they sue us. We have two suits pending against us, both about wills, brought by those who think we helped to deprive them of their inheritances. But neither plaintiff is the kind of person who would even know how to put out a contract. Yet there might be someone out there we don’t know about …”

  “That’s why Mom and Dad have hired that nice Mr. Casey to provide security for all of us. It seems silly to me, but I guess there’s no point in taking chances … They are two wonderful human beings. I don’t see why anyone could want to kill them.”

  “Except for Trevor, and he’s basically OK, they have produced wonderful children, present company included. Just good people, maybe they don’t know as much history or theology as they think they do …”

  Deirdre had patted her husband’s thigh as he praised her.

  My wife would never do that.

  THE HELL SHE WOULDN’T!

  “I know it’s a vicious, crazy world out there, Dermot, filled with evil people, but I can’t imagine …”

  “Your grandfather is a strange man, Dee Dee.”

  “Moody and unpredictable. But he’s had a hard life. I don’t think he hates any of us. After what he went through in the Philippines …”

  “Bataan Death March … I agree that he’s had a hard life. Sometimes he’s very genial, sometimes not.”

  Her hand is still on his thigh even after he corrected her!

  LOOK WHO’S A PRUDE ABOUT PUBLIC AFFECTION.

  “Yet he might have enemies …”

  “I’m sure he did. He was not like Black Bart, but, I am told, he could be pretty ruthless. Yet he’s in his eighties. Most of his enemies are dead. Why go after his family at this late date? It’s a possibility of course. Someone should ask him. Yet I think it would be a dead end.”

  “He was supposed to be quite a lady’s man in his day. Do you think there might be another family lurking somewhere?”

  Deirdre considered that possibility.

  “He’s certainly a lady’s man. I don’t particularly like the way he drinks in women, myself included. I’m sure he’s not been celibate these thirty years in Ocean Reef. Yet h
e doesn’t seem to me, for whatever my instincts are worth, to be the marrying kind.”

  “Bed them and leave them,” Gerry said. “Not a nice man at all. Maybe never grew up.”

  24

  “I tell my wife, Nuala Anne, that we all have to die sometime,” John Curran said to me. “She agrees, but she says it would be nice to live long enough to watch our grandchildren grow up.”

  We were sitting in his elegantly furnished office halfway up the LaSalle Bank Building, which me Dermot tells me used to be called the Field Building and was the only skyscraper built during the Great Depression.

  “The Field Building, not too low, not too high,” me Dermot says, “is the perfect site for a very successful boutique firm concerned about its image. One Eleven West Washington would suggest it wasn’t all that skillful and Sears Tower or 333 South Wacker would indicate that it might not always be that discreet. When you get inside the office, you will find it very well appointed, quiet, restrained elegance. John Curran knows how important image is in the law business.”

  Me good husband has an amazing collection of useless but interesting information. That comes, I think, from reading too much, especially when he should have been studying in college. I like him the way he is still. He was certainly correct about the appointments in the law offices of Curran and Sons.

  Besides, he had the good taste to marry a foul-mouthed fishwife from the Gaeltach, didn’t he now?

  In defiance of the gray skies and the promise of rain, I had donned my mint green suit, which was out of place in a law office. I did it deliberately. I’m Nuala Anne and I can dress however I want!

  The reassuring solemnity of the law offices of Curran and Sons was marred that day by the presence of phalanxes of police officers, some of them working for Mr. Casey, and men in suits, as me Dermot calls the Feds. I had given them all dirty looks as I explained who I was, in Irish of course. Finally, young Jack Curran had to come and rescue me.

  “What,” he asked, his impish eyes twinkling, “if one of them had been able to answer you in Irish?”

  “Fair play to them,” says meself. “They could have arrested me as an IRA suspect. They can’t deport me anymore.”

  He thought that was very funny.