“Wash the sheets!” Nuala retorted. “Anyone would think we had fleas. Come on, Finbar. We know when we're not wanted.”
She slammed the door behind them. I was so angry and frustrated I felt I could burst. There was no place I could call my own anymore. I was sure she had snooped through my things before now, but knowing that she could be sleeping in my own bed every time I went out was something different again. I wasn't sure what to do— I could complain to the O'Hallarans and have the lot of them thrown out, of course, but that might risk having Seamus and his two out on the streets. And however much I told myself that I wasn't responsible for what happened to them, I still felt responsible.
I crossed to the window and opened it wide, wanting to blow away the stale smell of their bodies. Fd have to do something with my life to get me out of here—find a paying, respectable job and earn enough money for my own place. Which was essentially back to square one. I did have Paddy's money in the bank, but I still couldn't justify using it outside of business purposes.
I stripped the bedclothes off the bed and then sank down on the mattress. What a fiasco. What a hopeless failure. Now all the potential evidence was gone, the killer had gotten away scot-free and I was proving to be a rather mediocre investigator. I had learned nothing from the fire, had I? Shouldn't I have looked for fingerprints on the windowsill or worked out what had been used to start the blaze? Useless, I said to myself. You useless bag of wind—I stopped because I was sounding just like my mother again.
As I got up from the bed, I realized that I had learned one thing from the fire. Sergeant Wolski couldn't have been right after all. If it had been a gangland revenge killing, then the killer would not have needed to come back. He had wanted very badly to make sure that some kind of evidence was destroyed. I knelt down and pulled out Riley's briefcase from under my bed, then I spread out the three folders on the floor. Lord Edgemont and Kitty—what could Paddy possibly have uncovered about that case to put himself in danger? I worked backward through the little black book. Several mentions of LE and KL—times that he came and went from her house, when they were seen together in a box at the theater. All harmless stuff.
Paddy had hardly started on the embezzlement case, so the file was almost empty. Besides, if the embezzler really had taken a ship to South America a full four days before Paddy was killed, then he could hardly have slipped back to be the killer. I could double-check with the shipping company, just to make sure—but I rather thought that Mr. DeBose would have been thorough in his own attempt to retrieve his money.
Which left us with the MacDonald case. Elizabeth MacDonald had become hostile when she thought I might have been from a newspaper—could she have something to hide? But then she was the one pressing for the divorce. I sat and thought about this … It was possible that she wanted incriminating evidence against Angus so that he was taken by surprise and didn't have time to dig up any dirt against her. Now that was a thought worth looking into.
Then I remembered something else—I had observed Angus leaving his office building in a big hurry right after he thought I had gone. And not too long after that, Paddy's office had been burned down. This was the case worth digging into then. There had been some piece of very important evidence hidden in Paddy's office—evidence so vital that it was worth killing for and then burning the place down.
I went through the MacDonald file again. It contained details of Paddy's original conversation with Elizabeth, a documentation of Angus's movements, including visits to certain clubs and a weekend out at Newport, Rhode Island. Again all seemingly harmless stuff. Nothing. I closed the files and went to put them back in the briefcase when I noticed that something had fallen out. There was a small snapshot caught in the leather fold of the briefcase. I took it out and looked at it with interest. It looked like the sort of snapshot someone would take on holiday—a beach scene with two young men in bathing suits standing in the waves laughing, their arms around each other's shoulders.
Completely harmless, except that I recognized the two men. One of them was Angus MacDonald and the other was the beautiful Irish playwright, Ryan O'Hare.
Seventeen