Irish Coffee (13 page)

SANTANDER, PERHAPS UNDERSTANDABLY
less civic-minded than he had been before being questioned by Stewart, had not immediately telephoned the police when he noticed the unfamiliar car parked in Fred Neville's space. The tape had been removed from the doorway of Neville's apartment and the police vigil ended. It was the building manager's intention to talk with the woman about whom Stewart had show so much curiosity. To this end, he left the chained door of his own apartment ajar so that he might surprise her when she came out. He had noticed the car at midday and kept sentry duty throughout the afternoon, taking time out for hurried visits to the bathroom. Had she slipped away? But the car was still in Neville's parking place. Finally, he switched from passive to active mode and went upstairs and knocked on the door.

He stepped back, to provide a better view through the peephole, and waited. The door was not opened. He knocked again, more loudly. Again, nothing. He went downstairs and called Stewart.

When Stewart came he was alone and Santander went unimpeded up the stairs after him. Stewart turned.

“You got a master key?”

Santander handed it to him.

“You used this?”

“From time to time.”

“On this door, today?”

“No!”

Stewart pounded on the door with the full weight of police authority but as with Santander's earlier effort there was no response. He put the key in the lock and opened the door.

She was on the couch, slumped over, a cup of coffee on the table before her. Stewart stood in front of her, then looked at her from other vantage points, and took out a cell phone.

The routine in such matters is long-established. Touch nothing, move carefully, wait for the medical examiner. The coffee cup on the table prepared Stewart for Boswell's initial verdict.

“Ditto.”

“Poison?”

“Looks like it.”

Wearing rubber gloves, Boswell picked up the cup and smelled it. “Liquor too.”

“Irish coffee.”

The body was left where it had been found, once Boswell unnecessarily pronounced the woman dead. A crew from the police lab was in the wings but before giving way to them Boswell had a question.

“Who was she?”

“Naomi McTear.”

Boswell crouched and stared intently at the face that had come to rest against an arm of the couch. “I should have recognized her.”

“You never saw her dead before.”

“I never saw her alive. Live, maybe, on television. But never in the flesh.”

The word had an odd resonance in the circumstances. The police team took over. They were three, one stout woman named Benson, a dwarflike one named Hedges, and Farwell, who looked young enough to be Benson's son. Stewart took Hedges with him into the kitchen.

“Better check the coffee cannister.”

“We'll check everything.”

“Just don't forget that.”

Stewart called Phil Knight to say he was coming over. Roger answered, Phil wasn't there, but Stewart would settle for Roger.

 

Roger said, “She must have gone there after leaving me. She had said she was going to the airport.”

“Why would she go there and make coffee and relax with a cup?”

“Sentimental visit?”

“Any indication she might do that when you talked to her?”

“When she left it was to catch a flight.”

“So much for her as a suspect.”

Roger had never thought much of that idea but he would have preferred it to be disproved in a less tragic fashion.

The coffee in the cannister taken from Fred's kitchen proved to be liberally mixed with the poison that had killed first Fred and then Naomi. Stewart was understandably angry that he hadn't thought of the cannister but Roger consoled him. After all, his theory had been that Naomi visited Fred and, presumably, doctored his Irish coffee because she was so distraught over his desire to set her aside. Things were not simplified by the fact that the container of poison had been found in the trash bag taken from the network apartment Naomi had been occupying.

“If she put that stuff into Fred's coffee cannister, she wasn't likely to make a pot of coffee from it.”

The police mind has to assume that life is rational, however criminal. Effects have causes and when the causes are people they have reasons for what they do. Of course in the real world what we do often has unforeseen consequences and of these the agent acts in ignorance. No need to tell Jimmy Stewart that it was not at all impossible that Naomi had been preoccupied and had not considered what she was doing. Such things happen every day.

When Phil came, he listened to the news of Naomi's death with a stoic expression on his face. But his mind was working.

“So who's left?”

He meant who could have poisoned Fred deliberately and Naomi unintentionally? The fact that the poison had been found in Naomi's trash bag became the focus of attention. Scott was still being held and the three went downtown to talk with him. Scott's story that he had sequestered the trash bag for no reason and stashed it in the trunk of his car was inherently implausible. His protest that he had told Stewart about the bag was countered with the undeniable truth that it was the appearance of the girl from the cleaning crew that had prompted Scott to open the trunk.

“If I knew that poison was in there, I wouldn't have done it.”

“What did you expect to find in it?”

“I don't know. I want a lawyer.”

“I thought you might. Your friend Anthony should have told you to do that.”

“Anthony?” Roger said.

“Anthony Boule.”

Roger's eyes widened, but then the thought he had been having reasserted itself.

“Did Naomi's brother ever use the apartment?”

“Yes!” Scott was delighted with the question. “He was there that week. I talked baseball with him and one night he asked us up to watch the Blackhawks with him.”

“Us?”

“Me. Anthony. The girl from the Joyce Center with the big teeth.”

“Thelma?”

Scott nodded.

“Why the hell didn't you mention this before?” Stewart demanded.

“It's why I wanted the trash.”

During the game Tom McTear had drunk deep and become expansive. Scott said it was like having him give a personal play-by-play for them. And he had diagrammed various plays. “That's what I wanted. What a souvenir.”

“They weren't in the bag.”

“Anthony took them when we left, the sonofagun.”

Roger said to Stewart, “I think you better have a talk with Tom McTear.”

THE DEATHS OF FRED NEVILLE
and then Naomi McTear brought out another side of Roger Knight, and Griselda wasn't so sure she liked it. Why should he waste his brain wondering about why something or other had happened. There were zillions of such events every day and getting immersed in one of them seemed arbitrary.

“Fred was my friend,” Roger said.

“I don't mean they shouldn't find who did it and punish them but why should you spend your time on it?”

“Stick to important things?”

“Yes.”

“Shadows and images.”

Griselda didn't understand so he told her of Plato's cave and his emerging theory that the things of this world were not real, just pale copies of the really real which was outside space and time. The philosopher's task was to wean himself from the things of this world and occupy himself only with the eternal and changeless.

“It sounds religious.”

“Just what some of the Church fathers thought. But in many ways it is antithetical to Christianity.”

Like it or not, our lives are lived in a river of change and contingency from which truths are plucked, some likely, some highly probable, a few necessary. The mind enables us to transcend change in this way, but we are not mere minds. The mind is a capacity of a bodily creature, and our minds couldn't work without the constant sensory reports of those fleeting and temporal events.

“I have always found it impossible not to have a body,” Roger said.

Griselda laughed. “Okay. I'm wrong. So who did it?”

“Who is your suspect?”

“Mine?”

“Someone put poison in the coffee cannister in Fred Neville's kitchen. It killed him and Naomi as well.”

“What was she doing there?”

“The important question is who else was in that apartment?”

“I was.”

“You?”

“The night he took me to dinner at Parisi's for the big pep talk we stopped there so he could check his telephone messages.”

“Were there any?”

“I didn't eavesdrop.”

“I wish you had. The microcassette on which calls were recorded is missing from his phone.”

Griselda shook her head. “I never thought of Fred Neville as a man of mystery. Now all these things begin to seem important.”

“Everyone's a mystery. Who else could have been there?”

“Mary Shuster, I suppose. And people from the Joyce Center.”

“Anthony?”

“He was his assistant, more or less.”

“How well do you know him?”

“Anthony?” Griselda made a face. “He is very ambitious.”

“For Fred's job?”

“If he thought he would get that…” She stopped. “Do you think that Anthony did it?”

Roger shrugged. “I think lots of people could have done it. You, for example.”

“Me!”

“Say you resented more than you let on Fred's effort to keep you on the team. Maybe he misbehaved when you were in his apartment. This is how the police think. Lots of motives could be imagined. So you decide to give him the coup de grâce.”

“The coo de what?”

“You poison him.”

“I don't even like you imagining me doing something like that.”

“Oh there are many other candidates.”

 

Roger did not tell Griselda of the possibility that Naomi's brother was the one behind it all. He had little doubt that Tom McTear would soon emerge as Jimmy Stewart's number-one suspect. It might take a flight of fancy to put Griselda in the role of serial poisoner, but Naomi during her visit with Roger before leaving ostensibly to catch a plane had told him startling things about her brother's attitude toward Fred.
Hatred
was not too strong a word. All of McTear's negative feelings toward Notre Dame and the church had found their single focus in Fred Neville. Opportunity? He had been in town, the poison was found in the trash taken from the apartment where he had stayed in the second bedroom. Fred's apartment? Naomi must have had a key, she had let herself in on the fateful day she had made a lethal cup of Irish coffee.

TOM MCTEAR DROVE TO
South Bend after the call from Stewart came, doing eighty on the toll road and ready to plead an emergency if he were stopped. But he breezed through unticketed in less than two hours, communicating with Stewart along the way, the detective having made the mistake of giving Naomi's brother the number of his cell phone. He was told to come to Fred Neville's apartment and Stewart noticed that he did not ask for the address or directions to it. The body was still on the premises when he arrived and at the sight of Naomi he broke down, sobbing helplessly, wanting to take her in his arms.

“The poor little girl,” he said again and again. For him Naomi remained the little sister of long ago and the sight of her dead did not change that.

Stewart had not conveyed the apparent cause of death to McTear over the phone, and the location of the body had brought a profane reaction. “In Neville's apartment? What in hell was she doing there?”

“We're looking into it.”

“What do you mean?”

The signal was lost and Stewart turned off his phone. But McTear dissolved at the sight of his sister. Ten minutes after he got there, the body was transferred to a body bag and McTear let out a cry and went into the kitchen.

“Is that coffee fresh?”

“It's evidence.”

McTear looked at him.

“Everything in the apartment is potential evidence.”

“Can I have a cup of evidence?”

“I told you the medical examiner's preliminary cause of death.”

McTear looked at the carafe of coffee with dread. “My God.”

“Where will you be staying?”

He thought about it. “Do you know the Hoosier Residences?”

“Sure.”

“I have to get word to the family. And make arrangements.” He suppressed a sob.

“There's plenty of time. There will be an autopsy.”

McTear turned a tragic look on Stewart. “My God, this is awful.”

 

Opinions would vary on McTear's behavior when he first saw the dead body of his little sister. No acting had been required to express his grief and horror. That, it was conceded, was genuine. But his reaction to Naomi's death was perfectly compatible with his having been the one who put the poison in the coffee cannister. It was the scene in the kitchen that caused two schools of thought to form. The one held that he was genuinely surprised and would have poured himself a cup of the poisoned coffee if Stewart had not stopped him. Nonsense, the other school maintained. During his speedy but still long drive from Chicago he must have figured out what had happened. When he arrived he was told of the coffee Naomi had drunk. That was fresh in his mind when he put on the performance in the kitchen. If anything, it drew attention to him, as if by what he had done he was seeking to bring about the fallacious reasoning that characterized the first school.

Laura Reith emerged as Tom McTear's champion in the press. In her signature battle dress, she told the camera that the local police were persecuting the voice of the Cubs.

Belonging not quite to either school, Roger felt obliged to convey what Naomi had told him when visiting him on what would turn out to be the day she died.

“If he hates Notre Dame so much what was McTear always doing in town?”

“The last time? Baseball. He was checking out Maneri on some pro prospects the Cubs are interested in.”

True enough, as it happened, but that single-purpose explanation did not jibe with Scott's claim that Tom McTear had been a regular at the Hoosier Residences.

The chastened desk clerk had been released, having saved himself attorney's fees. But he was mindful that he had been let go because of the growing suspicion that Tom McTear had done away with his sister's beau and unwittingly with her.

“He must have put that package in the trash,” Scott said.

“Too bad for him you decided to put that bag in your trunk.”

“In a way I'm sorry about that. I told you what I was looking for. I don't wish him any harm, you know.”

But the news of Naomi's death was of national interest, given her prominence on cable television. There was more than a hint in several stories that Tom had been questioned by the police and that he had been no friend of his sister's boyfriend. That the dead couple had been engaged now went uncontested. For such a sports celebrity as Tom to be written of in this way was hardly a matter of indifference, and he demanded that Stewart spike these rumors.

“Just tell the media you're innocent.”

He had done that, of course, in an interview with Laura Reith, but the reporter's crusade had not caught on with her colleagues in the media.

“No. That would only give credit to these wild guesses.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Find out who did this,” Tom pleaded.

“I would like a little cooperation from you.”

“Cooperation! I came down here like a shot, I have been at your disposal ever since arriving, what more do you want?”

“Less interference from your lawyer. Every time I ask you a question, he puts the kibosh on it.”

“Ask me anything.”

“You mean it?”

“Of course I mean it.”

“Sure you don't want your lawyer present?”

“To hell with him.”

Maurice Gibbons, a suave and gifted lawyer from Chicago who, among other clients, had the Chicago Cubs, would not have appreciated this summary dismissal. But it was an opportunity not to be disdained, so Jimmy Stewart and Philip Knight were closeted with McTear, but not until a little flare-up about Phil's presence was settled.

“He's not a South Bend detective?”

Phil said, “I represent the university.”

“Notre Dame? What do they have to do with this?”

“You're kidding, right? You know where Fred worked.”

“And you objected to my having Gibbons here.”

“You want to give him a call?”

“No. Let's get on with it.”

They got on with it, starting with the fact that Tom had been staying in the Hoosier Residences network apartment with his sister. He seemed surprised they knew that. And he was clearly unprepared for the news that in the trash bag from that apartment had been found a container of the poison that had killed Fred Neville and Naomi.

“That seemed to point the finger at her,” said Stewart.

“Naomi?”

“Maybe it still does. There seems to have been a falling-out between your sister and Neville.”

“I told her what I thought of him.”

“You didn't like him.”

McTear hesitated. “I suppose you get used to it in this town, but Notre Dame fans can be a pain in the rear, and nobody works for them who isn't a fan. How can you be objective if you're already committed to the view that a team is God's gift to the world?”

“Is that how Fred felt?”

“They all feel that way. I've seen it for years.”

“Do you think it is possible your sister put that poison in Neville's coffee cannister and then mistakenly made a pot of coffee from it?”

“That's an awful question to have to answer.”

“What is the answer?”

“I don't know. You're asking me if my sister was a murderer.”

“There is another possibility, McTear. You could have put that poison in Neville's coffee.”

“Oh, sure. Just dropped in and loaded up his coffee.”

“It could have been done.”

“Tell me, what made you look into the trash from that apartment?”

“That was courtesy of a fan of yours.”

McTear lowered his chin and stared at Stewart. “A fan?”

“Fellow named Scott. He is a desk clerk at the Hoosier Residences.”

McTear was nodding.

“Apparently you had him and some of his friends up to the apartment to watch a game. You diagrammed some plays and he hoped to find them in the trash.”

“Did he?”

“A guy named Anthony swiped them before Scott got to them, though.”

“The one from the sports information department?”

“That's right.”

“If he had asked, I would have given them to Scott.”

“If you had, he wouldn't have swiped the bag and then been forced to tell us he had put it in the trunk of his car.”

“Forced.”

“One of the cleaning maids…”

A man may well wonder about the tremendous odds against things happening as they actually do. Tom McTear had little inclination to philosophy nor indeed to general theories, outside the realm of sports. But he wore a stricken look as he considered the implications of what Phil had told him.

“I didn't do this. I didn't like Neville, but it was impersonal. He could have been any mad Irish fan. And I don't mean, if not me then Naomi. Whatever else, she liked the guy. Really. I talked to her like an uncle, but to no effect. I probably strengthened her in her determination to marry him.”

“The obstacle seems to have been on the other side.”

Tom waved away this objection. “Naomi always got what she wanted.”

Stewart told Tom he appreciated his sentiments but the fact remained that the container of poison had been found in the trash bag taken from the apartment in Hoosier Residences shared by the two McTears.

“It looks like it had to be one or the other of you.”

“What about this guy Scott?”

“What about it?”

“If he took the bag he might have dumped the container in it.”

“That's possible, of course. But unlike you and your sister, he seems to have no motivation.”

McTear looked from Phil to Stewart. His mouth became a thin line. “I better call Gibbons.”