Drown All the Dogs Read online

  Drown All the Dogs

  A Neil Hockaday Mystery

  Thomas Adcock

  For my Aunt Jean and Uncle Fred Bradshaw

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks is given here for great help from the living and the dead, and from the shadows between these worlds. Among the first of this influential group are my friend Jeffrey Essman, the actor and writer, who is perhaps not a lapsed Catholic; my friend and dear editor, Jane Chelius, who one day on a train ride along the Atlantic coast of Spain encouraged me to write from the heart; and my wife, Kim Sykes, who is no less than the hope of me. The poet William Butler Yeats, who often worried that his verses might inspire the darker angels of man, died in 1939. Excerpts from his “Remorse for Intemperate Speech” and “A Full Moon in March” (published in Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, Macmillan, New York, 1956) are used herein, with gratitude. The beautiful plays of the late Brendan Behan (1923-64), the borstal boy himself, first taught me to listen to personal ghosts dwelling in Irish shadows. And so I did in writing this.

  —Thomas Adcock

  New York

  The fusion of belief and system produces the militant, a warrior fighting for an idea. In the militant, two figures are conjoined: the cleric and the soldier.

  —Octavio Paz

  Prologue

  “I hate it! Please God, I hate it.”

  Having said this, he was at peace with all he had told me this night.

  He turned his head toward the wall, as if to feel a morning’s warmth at the unseen window.

  It was well past midnight, into black Sunday, but the time of day had no meaning for him. A smile played carefully across his face as he lay in his bed, a bed too big for him alone. I put my hand on his. He let it lie there atop his paper skin.

  I asked, “What is it you hate?”

  He drew a deep breath and his blind blue eyes closed. Then he quoted again, from what his mind still pictured of pages he used to read, time and again: “Out of Ireland have we come; great hatred, little room, maimed at the start … I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart.”

  There was silence where I should have offered reaction, the kind of embarrassed quietude that tells an old man he has not been understood by a younger man. His useless eyes fluttered open and he said, with some exasperation, “It’s the root of this madness I’ve grown to hate, it’s old men at their windows I hate even more.” Then he lifted my hand away and said, “Now get you off.” That would be all for now, whether or not I understood. He needed rest.

  I walked to the door and opened it, but turned to look at him once more before leaving. He sensed this. His head rose slightly over the mound of blankets. He said, “When I’m gone, I want you to remember me.”

  I said, “Haven’t I always?”

  Chapter 1

  It was a good weekend, except for the dead priest.

  It was the weekend when it struck me hard how the past never passes, no matter how we try to bulldoze memory. It was the weekend I finally decided to become a serious character in the story of my life. It was the weekend that began the greatest case of my career.

  At first, I did not see greatness; nor even a case, for that matter. But others were alert to the significance of events at hand, and those yet to occur. Ruby, for one. For another, Captain Davy Mogaill, my rabbi. As the captain would put it, “What grander case may a detective crack than the mystery of his own makings?”

  This he suggested on a fine Saturday afternoon at Nugent’s bar. This piece of wisdom, among others. For my part, I told my rabbi about Ruby, and about the sorry reason we had for flying off to Dublin that Sunday night.

  No doubt it was somewhere during this good long boozy conversation of ours when old Father Tim first figured he had it coming.

  Back to Friday, when this all started:

  It was past five o’clock on an April afternoon that happened to be my birthday, but I am not saying which one. Ruby telephoned to inform me as to how I would want to wear a nice suit and tie that night because of what she wanted, which was dinner at some East Side place with a style to which I am not accustomed. With Ruby, life now contains such announcements.

  I said, “Well, I don’t know—”

  Ruby cut in with, “It’s my treat.”

  To which I quickly responded, “So where do we go and when do we eat?”

  She gave me the pricey address of a restaurant I have seen mentioned more than once in charity ball photo captions published in the Times and said we should meet there at eight o’clock sharp. Which gave me two hours and forty-five minutes to wind it up for the day at the station house, grab an overdue shave and haircut on the way home, shower and sit around in my shorts for a while with a couple of fingers of Johnnie Walker red, find the claim check to my good suit down the block at the Korean dry cleaner’s, and have my shoes with the tassels shined. Then I would need a taxicab, preferably one with a driver who knew without my having to tell him how to get from my earthly place in Hell’s Kitchen over across town to the planet of Park Avenue. I was the first to arrive, none too sharply. This was at a quarter past eight.

  The restaurant had one of those names that was somebody’s idea of terribly chic but which is my idea of just plain terrible. In English, I think the place would be called The Llama with the Ironic Wardrobe. I could see past the dimly lighted command post of the maître d’hôtel how the dining room was crowded up with somebody’s idea of the New York smart set: gray eminences holding court for fawning thirtysomething executives in Armani suits, former wives of former potentates, Republicans of color, indicted Wall Streeters, glossy ladies with long legs and short résumés, and a passel of middle-aged white guys wearing aviator bifocals, Bijan suits, and little ponytails.

  “Oui, monsieur?” The maître d’ inspected me with sullen eyes, black as his dinner jacket. Then with a curl of the lip that must have taken him years of practice, he asked, “Puis-je vous aider?”

  I was not impressed. It happens I know something about France, namely that it is a place where New Yorkers go in search of rudeness; short of traveling overseas, any French restaurant in Manhattan will do. Besides which, this guy’s accent had way too much of the Grand Concourse where the Champs-Élysées ought to be. And anyhow, I was feeling good and sleek in my charcoal wool worsteds and my rose necktie and my shoes smelling fresh and waxy. I may be the type who pays cash, but I am no peasant.

  “I’m looking for a lady,” I said. I wanted to add, Knock off the act, Pierre, we both know you take your tips home to the Bronx. But I held this thought. Instead, I said, “Maybe she’s already here. I’ll just take a look myself.”

  “Sir, I do not think so!” Pierre was flustered and shocked, the poor thing. He manfully placed himself between me and the archway into the dining room.

  I said, “What—?”

  He said, “I do not seat unescorted ladies.”

  “How come? Is this a fag joint?”

  Then Ruby’s voice from behind, with a laugh in it. “Oh, Hock—behave yourself.”

  I turned to watch her walk toward me. Outside, from the taxicab, her driver was taking a last look, too. This was the sort of thing I was trying to get used to; Ruby is something to see, and I am not the only man in the city with eyes for the job. She was dressed that night in one of those little black beaded numbers that sparkle in all the right places. There was a bit of gauzy wool fluff nestled around her bare brown shoulders, rhinestones around the décolletage, maroon on her lips and tiny diamonds pinned in her ears.

  Miss Ruby Flagg, the actress, knows how to wrap herself up for a good review. And that night of my birthday, she was nicely wrapped indeed. Pierre, on the other hand, was having no part of the festivities.

  Appalled by me,
he appealed to Ruby. “Mademoiselle—s’il vous plaît!”

  She told him simply, “Table for Detective Neil Hockaday.”

  Pierre inspected me again, this time minus the curled lip, maybe out of respect for the courtesy title but probably not. In any case, he consulted his reservations list, taking his sweet time about it before finally saying, “Ah, oui. Monsieur Hockaday—for two. Très bien.”

  We followed him to a corner table. I was surprised how good this seating was until I realized that Ruby probably did a lot of business here back when she was in the advertising dodge, and that she had no doubt spread lots of money around the place.

  Not so long ago, Ruby wore female business suits and flogged a variety of potions that killed an impressive variety of body odors. For this she earned a considerable salary, with bonuses and a brisk expense account. A clever girl, she hoarded a good amount of this “silly money,” as she calls it, and invested in Manhattan real estate—specifically, a slanty frame walk-up down on South Street, where she carved out an apartment and a way-Off Broadway theater supported not so much by ticket sales as by rents from the tailor shop and the restaurant down below.

  That was a couple of years ago. But everybody from the old days certainly remembered Ruby Flagg. Beginning with our friend the maître d’.

  “Thank you, Pierre,” she said to him as he held her chair. I was left on my own. When his patent leather shoes went tapping away, I asked Ruby, “His name is really Pierre?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But he seems happy when I call him that.”

  A wine steward dropped by and kissed Ruby’s hand. I scowled stupidly. Ruby asked about his wife and his kids and he said the family was just swell. She sent him toddling off after a flowered bottle of Perrier-Jouët. Then she turned to me and said, “You know—you, of all people, shouldn’t let the likes of him get to you.”

  I had stopped scowling by then. I was instead now stupidly smiling at the little cleft in Ruby’s chin, and also the charming cleft in the scoop neckline of her evening dress. I said, “You’re talking about Pierre?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Allow the man his pretensions why don’t you? Where would you be yourself without deception on the job?”

  That was an understatement. When I am on duty, it is rarely in a suit, not even the boxy kind from the A&S bargain basement I am sorry to say is favored by most detectives of my acquaintance. And to say my work clothes are plain could be considered felony understatement. Mostly I am dressed in Salvation Army castoffs I have collected over the years, all except for my own good old Yankees baseball cap, circa 1963, and a pair of black PF Flyer hightop sneakers I have had since the days I was married to the formerly lovely Judy McKelvey and we lived in Queens in a cute house with a fence around it and were miserable and I coached a bunch of kids on the neighborhood P.A.L. basketball league. Irregularly shaven and dressed the way I usually am, you would likely not be able to single me out from a crowd of men with nothing to lose and nowhere to go, which is the basic idea of the SCUM patrol—which is for Street Crimes Unit-Manhattan.

  This night, on the other hand, I had somewhere to go. In fact, miles to go before we would sleep. I changed the subject with, “Let’s talk about the trip.”

  “Good idea,” Ruby agreed.

  The steward returned to our table with the champagne, poured out two glasses, set the bottle down in a bucket of ice and left. Ruby raised her glass and said, “To us and to Eire, and to your poor Uncle Liam—and besides all that, a happy birthday to you, my dear Hock.”

  So we drank to all that. After which I offered a second toast: “And now to Ruby Flagg, sure to be the most exotic woman in the streets of Dún Laoghaire.”

  Ruby laughed. “The only exotic, you mean.”

  “You shouldn’t be too surprised to see a face or two as dark as yours,” I said. “There was the Spanish Armada a few centuries back that left its mark.”

  “You like black Irish?”

  “I like both just fine.”

  “That’s not something most Irishmen would say.” She laughed at me again. The way she did it, she made me like it. I stared at her perfect white teeth and her maroon lips and the tip of her pink tongue. I might have drooled.

  Ruby asked, “What are you thinking, Irish?”

  “I’m thinking of the two of us lying on a beach with sand white as sugar and you’re talking to me in French. I look at you and think of things like that.”

  She rolled her bright hazel eyes and said, “I keep having to remember, you’re not like most Irishmen, are you?”

  “Neither is Uncle Liam,” I said. “If you’re worried he won’t take to you, don’t.”

  “And how did he take to your wife?”

  She had to bring that up? “That was a long time ago,” I said.

  “Was it?”

  Now I could not help but think how good it is for the ego for a man such as me, somewhere in the middle of his age, to be the focus of a woman’s abstract jealousy. Especially a woman who looked like Ruby.

  “Long enough,” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Forget it.”

  “All right.” Ruby fussed with a starched napkin. “But look, I am sorry about your uncle. It’s a shame you’re going to take me all the way over to the other side to meet him when he’s … well, the way he is.”

  “Dying. You mean to say dying.”

  Ruby leaned toward me and patted my arm, the way people touch each other at funerals. Here was I, already thinking of such things as a funeral. I barely heard Ruby saying, “I just wish I could be going to meet your uncle under happier circumstances.”

  The news of Liam had come last week in a letter from Ireland, from one Patrick Snoody, my uncle’s self-described “loyal friend.” I had never heard of him. Snoody wrote to say that Liam and his weak heart were now confined to bed; he said Liam had “perhaps a year or better” left; he offered the standard Irish condolence, “I’m sorry for your troubles.” And now, on Sunday night and under this sad cloud, Ruby and I would fly off to Dublin to show a frail old fellow that life goes on. It was the best I could do.

  I said to Ruby, “I am not being morbid. I’m only facing the facts is all. Liam is dying and I think that’s the word he’ll be using himself.”

  A waiter came by to flutter over Ruby and ignore me. Eventually, he got around to taking our orders; and eventually, we got through dinner, which was very good and worth nearly all the money that Ruby had to pay for it. Then finally, as we loitered over coffee and port, up again rose that most unappetizing subject of all.

  “What was she like?”

  “She—?” As if I had to ask.

  “You know who.”

  “For crying out loud, it’s my birthday.”

  “So I bring you to this nice place and wish you many happy returns. Now I think it might be nice if you sing for your supper. This is asking too much? You know how to sing, right? After all, you were a choirboy once-upon-a-time, weren’t you, Hock?”

  Exactly when had I mentioned this? The most frightening thing about women is that they remember everything you tell them.

  About the choirboy days, it was true. I was a soprano at Holy Cross Church on West Forty-second Street back when Harry Truman was in the White House, Sunset Boulevard was on the movie screens and shifty-eyed Communists were everywhere, working day and night to subvert the American way.

  Father Timothy Kelly had been especially concerned about these Communists. He believed the reds were in league with Lucifer, and especially dedicated to the business of corrupting the youth of his parish. Thus, Father Tim hoped to lead us impressionable Hell’s Kitchen lads toward the pursuit of our better angels by way of singing the Lord’s songs. Father Tim had a particular interest in protecting me against the subversive forces of those days, as it happened I was the nephew of his great and good friend from Dún Laoghaire, my own Uncle Liam.

  I had not thought of the boys’ choir in a very long while. Nor of
Father Tim, I am ashamed to say. Not since Father Tim had left the neighborhood for his professional reward: a room in a home for retired priests, on a leafy street in Riverdale, up in the Bronx. I visited him there once, about a week after he had moved out of sight. Then I telephoned three or four times, just to keep in touch like I promised. Then I became a typical shitheel and put the old fellow out of mind as well.

  “When I was a choirboy, I sang to heaven,” I said to Ruby. “On my wedding day, they told me marriages are made in heaven. So you’ll understand if I don’t much see the point of singing nowadays.”

  Ruby said, “Yes, and nowadays you don’t much see the point of marriage. And so you’ll be introducing me to your little old Irish uncle as, what—your main squeeze?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “How are you going to put it when you’re face-to-face with Liam and he can’t help notice that I’m there beside you?”

  “I’m going to tell him we’re slow-dancing together.”

  “Aha! The very words you’ve said to me, Mr. Charmer. Only now they sound too clever by half.”

  Absolutely everything they remember!

  “What do you want out of me?” I said.

  “You talk pretty, Hock, and I like it. But sometimes pretty’s not enough.” Ruby had been leaning toward me in her chair, and I had been enjoying the warmth of her breath and the heat of her caramel skin. But now she sat back. “When you talk about certain things, you have a way of turning words into walls.”

  “Certain things?”

  “Your father, for instance. Your mother—”

  I interrupted. “Pardon me, I thought we were talking about my wife. My ex-wife.”

  “Her, too. We’re talking about all those hollow places of yours, where people have dug holes in you. If I dance slow with a man, I want to know where the holes are.”

  “Why—you don’t want to risk falling into his troubles?”

  Ruby smiled patiently, like she was a kindly nun and I was the big dumb slow kid in her classroom. “In the case of other men I’ve known, that’s certainly true. But since you’re a cop and there’s nothing I can do about that, who knows but maybe I’ll have to pick you up from time to time. So you see how I’ll need to know where the holes are.”