attorney if you’re reading me my rights!”
“We will get to that in due course Mr. Hamilton, but right now you can answer a few questions here or I’ll be taking you downtown”
“Now I’m under arrest? For what? Just tell me what is going on?”
“Detective Gina Ellioto is dead and you may have been the last person to see her!”
Detective Donohue made good on his threat. The prosecutor felt good there was probable cause to detain Hamilton and so did Donohue. He was certain that forensics would turn up the necessary evidence once they had run both apartments for prints. And most importantly, he didn’t want the cop killer to have the opportunity to run. But then why hadn’t he? The criminal mind he had thought, capable of any amount of delusion. When it is plain for all to see, the criminal sees nothing! He knew that he could hold Hamilton for forty eight hours and he would get the confession. And who knows, maybe this guy did the whacking on the Mattingly case as well. He’d get the old lady in for the line up! It’s a stretch but you just never know, maybe Hamilton is a real sicco, homo. All the neighbors had said that Mattingly was a flaming fagot. They had seen him at the late night parties there in the garden, dancing and holding ass; filthy prick got what he deserved. Dirty degenerate homo succo of the big salami. Donohue’s mind raced with all the possibilities, years of ground work. His head swelled with thoughts of the press weighing in on his every statement, the Mayor patting him on his shoulder, maybe a new car and raise. Dirty Harry reincarnated… make my day m-o-t-h-e-r-f-u-c-k-e-r!
The cell was not a pretty sight, the area had the smell and feel of a freighter, all metal. Hamilton’s head was spinning with the thoughts of Gina…murdered! Jesus, he thought, I didn’t even get to know her first name. She was such a beauty, and just as they were getting to know each other. He knew that he was moments away from nocturnal bliss, the plunge into the magic moss and the world that creates such opportunity for romance and even love! Life’s hand, dealt precariously…one moment you are handing out spades, diamonds and hearts…then a club hits you in the ass and the bits and pieces that you shared are gone, and a bit of magic as well…perhaps never to be shared with another living person.
Maybe he should have told Donohue he didn’t know anything but his better judgment told him to remember that cops often have their own agenda that permits the truth to be obscured by a slight variation of the evidence. With thousands of cases that go without solution, hang on to the one with probable cause. But what was probable about this case? Hamilton had neither known the victims nor did he have a problem accounting for his time. Well for sure on the Mattingly murder, but then there was the old lady - she would know that he wasn’t guilty of the murder of Mattingly.
Who was Mrs. Toddy? Another missing first name? The cops had her in a secure spot. That’s what Gina had told him. But is that so; do they know where she is? Or has she flown to some distant relative in fear of her life? If the cops have her, and they have a cop killer, or their profile of what a cop killer looks like… they could put a lot of ideas in an old lady’s mind. You know how old women get, most with minor dementia, and then the onset of Alzheimer’s. By the time Donohue and others finished with her in the early morning hours she would be ready, willing and able to identify Hamilton as Attila the Hun or at least the lover and killer of Dennis Mattingly!
SHE RODE HORSES
Mary Finnegan was the kind of young woman who made the Irish proud. She was strikingly beautiful and now nearing thirty she had the figure of a woman in her prime. Her work and love of the horse had kept her in the peak of shape. She weighed no more than 110 pounds of solid muscle. She spent her mornings mucking stalls at Miles Park Race Track and served as a contract exercise rider for three outfits. When she galloped a horse she was at once a thing of unique and unquestioned beauty - she, the horse and the wind in one motion. She loved this motion, sitting on this mighty engine, her hands on the withers. She used them as a race car driver would use the throttle, and when she returned to the barn and into the shed row it wasn’t unusual to hear the catcall from the grooms and other exercise boys because when she dismounted and pulled off her helmet her beautiful Irish red hair glistened in the light against her pinkish skin, flawlessly natural with only a touch of lipstick on lips full by any measure. Her eyes were a greenish blue and contrasted with her hair and the color of her skin. Certainly for all who enjoyed the view she could have been a model or in the movies but not Mary Finnegan. She had a work ethic which was only overshadowed by her honesty, tenacity and love of the horse, and her loyalty to her connection to Ireland through her great aunt Ellen O’ Toddy, who had come to the United States by ship in 1932. It was Ellen O’Toddy who had given her the connection to the old country by telling her stories of Ireland, the old family and the ways of the land.
She read to her of the homeland in and around Connaught as described by O’Flaherty: “The soile is almost paved over with stones, soe as in some places, nothing is to be seen but large stones with wide openings between them, where cattle break their legs. Scarce any other stones there but limestone, and marble fit for tombstones, chimney manteltrees, and high crosses. Among these stones is very sweet pasture, so that beefe, veal, mutton are better and earyler in season here than elsewhere; and of late there is plenty of cheese, and tillage mucking, and corn is the same with the seaside track, in some places the plow goes. On the shore grows samphire in plenty, ring- root or sea holly, and sea-cabbage. Here are Cornish choughs, with red legs and bills. Here are Ayres of hawks, and birds which never fly but over the sea, and, therefore, are used to be eaten on fasting days; to catch which people goe down, with ropes tyed about them, into the caves of cliffs by night, and with a candle light kill abundance of them. Here are several wells and pooles, yet in extraordinary dry weather, people must turn their Cattell out of the islands, and the corn failes. They have noe fuell but cow-dung dryed with the sun, unless they bring turf in from the western continent. They have cloghans, a kind of building of stones layed one upon another, which are brought to a roof without any manner of mortar to cement them, some of which cabins will hold forty men on their floor; so ancient that nobody knows how long ago any of them was made. Scarcity of wood and store of fit stones, without peradventure found out the first invention.”
Reading such things as these, and of how St. Albeus, Bishop of Imly, had said, “Great is that island, and it is the land of saints; for no man knows how many saints are buried there, but God alone,” and of an old saying, “Athenry was, Galway is, Arian shall be the best of the three islands.”
Mary Finnegan could not remember a time when her dearest, sweet Auntie Ellen wasn’t about. Her own Mother could not have loved her more. The three of them kept alive by the Irish devotion and commitment to family. Mary’s farther had been killed in Vietnam and her mother forced to work at the hospital as an aide on what they called the ‘graveyard shift’. Aunt Ellen was there though to tuck her into bed and read to her the stories by O’Flaherty of Ireland and her heritage.
She adored her Aunt Ellen, and dotted on her so much so that when Ellen (now Toddy and not O’Toddy for some reason) became seriously ill and in need of a kidney, Mary gladly responded stating flatly, “The good Lord hath given me two and my water will go through one just as efficiently…and if it doesn’t, I’ll simply drink less!”
That’s the way it was with Mary, nothing heroic here, and if Auntie Ellen had needed a foot and it was medically possible, the transplant would have been made.
The house was quiet as Ellen Toddy pulled the door to and heard the faint click of the lock. Mary was fast asleep, so weary from her work at the track and her mother would not be home until the morning. Time for Mrs. Toddy to catch the bus at 6th and Oak Streets in Limerick for the twenty minute ride to Grinstead Drive, where she would get off and walk the three blocks to Shawnee Parkway. She clutched her purse to her midsection, frumpy from years of heavy Irish stews and the homemade rich brew which she enjoyed on a winters evening to drive away the chill and bring the dreams of the Irish seacoast and of a lad who beckoned
