I gave him everything that he would have got somewhere else anyway: young love, midnight rendezvous, jilted hero galloping off into the cold cruel world, suitcase, trail of brilliant deductions. When I finished, he was giving me a wide-eyed look, awe tinged with something like pity, that I didn’t like at all.
“Holy shit,” he said, which did in fact sum things up fairly well.
“Breathe, Scorch. It’s been twenty-two years. That torch burned out a long time back. I’m only here because my favorite sister sounded like she was about to have a heart attack, and that could have ruined my whole weekend.”
“Still. Sooner you than me, mate.”
“I’ll call you if I need a shoulder to cry on.”
He shrugged. “I’m just saying. I don’t know how things work round your way, but I wouldn’t enjoy explaining this one to my super.”
“My super’s a very understanding guy. Be nice to me, Scorch. I’ve got Christmas pressies for you.”
I handed over the suitcase and my Fingerprint Fifi envelopes-he would get the job done faster than I could and with less hassle, and anyway Mr. Daly no longer felt like quite so much of a personal priority. Scorcher examined them like they had cooties. “What were you planning on doing with these?” he inquired. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Running them past a few friends in low places. Just to get an idea what we might be dealing with.”
Scorcher raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t comment. He flipped through the envelopes, reading the labels: Matthew Daly, Theresa Daly, Nora Daly. “You’re thinking the family?”
I shrugged. “Nearest and dearest. As good a starting place as any.”
Scorcher glanced up at the sky. The air had turned dark as evening, and the first big drops of rain were splattering down like they meant it; the crowd was starting to dissolve, people filtering back to whatever they were supposed to be doing, only the hard core of hoodies and head scarves sticking it out. He said, “I’ve got a couple of things to finish up here, and I’ll want a quick preliminary chat with this girl’s family. Then we should go for a pint, you and me, yeah? Do some catching up. The kid can keep an eye on the scene for a while; the practice’ll do him good.”
The sounds behind him changed, deep down in the house: a long grinding scrape, a grunt, boots thudding on hollow boards. Vague white shapes moved, mixed in with the thick layers of shadows and the hellfire glow coming up from the basement. The morgue boys were bringing out their catch.
The old ones gasped and blessed themselves, licking up every second. The morgue boys passed by me and Scorcher with their heads down against the building rain, one of them already bitching over his shoulder about traffic. They came close enough that I could have reached out and touched the body bag. It was just a shapeless crumple on their stretcher, so near flat that it could have been empty, so light that they carried it like it was nothing at all.
Scorch watched them sliding it into the back of the van. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said. “Stick around.”
We went to the Blackbird, a few corners away, far enough and exclusively male enough that the news hadn’t made it in yet. The Blackbird was the first pub I ever got served in, when I was fifteen and coming from my first day’s casual work hauling bricks on a building site. As far as Joe the barman was concerned, if you did a grown man’s job, you had earned a grown man’s pint afterwards. Joe had been replaced by some guy with an equivalent toupee, and the fog of cigarette smoke had been improved into an aura of stale booze and BO so thick you could see it heaving, but apart from that nothing much had changed: same cracked black-and-white photos of unidentified sports teams on the walls, same fly-spotted mirrors behind the bar, same fake-leather seats with their guts spilling out, a handful of old fellas on personal bar stools and a clump of guys in work boots, half of them Polish and several of them definitely underage.
I planted Scorcher, who wears his job on his sleeve, at a discreet corner table, and went up to the bar myself. When I brought back our pints, Scorcher had his notebook out and was jotting away with a sleek designer pen-apparently the Murder boys were above cheapo ballpoints. “So,” he said, snapping the notebook shut one-handed and accepting his glass with the other, “this is your home turf. Who knew?”
I gave him a grin with just a touch of warning thrown in. “You figured I grew up in a mansion in Foxrock, yeah?”
Scorch laughed. “Hardly. You always made it clear you were, well, salt of the earth. You were so secretive about details, though, I figured you had to come from some shit hole tower block. I never pictured somewhere this-what’ll we call it?-colorful.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“According to Matthew and Theresa Daly, you haven’t been seen in the area since the night you and Rose flew the coop.”
I shrugged. “There’s only so much local color one man can take.”
