Irish Coffee (15 page)

THROUGHOUT THESE EVENTS
the Lady Irish basketball schedule had gone on and Griselda's play improved once she had managed to drive from her mind that Fred Neville had been poisoned and now Naomi McTear too. On the floor, with the roar of the crowd, and life reduced to the task of getting down the floor and directing the team's play, she outdid herself. They played in Ann Arbor, they played Creighton in Omaha, they returned home for a game against Purdue. Everywhere it was Griselda who was first sought out by reporters after the game, and who at Muffin McGraw's side made the self-effacing statements expected of a star. Basketball was a team game, it was the team that won or lost. But flying home, her mind would be filled again with what Roger Knight had told her. Both he and his brother were tied up in the making of the case against Tom McTear and she was lucky to get a few minutes with him after class.

“You almost convince me Egan is a better novelist than I thought.”

In a paper, Griselda had compared him with the early James and Howells, and Egan came off well from the comparison.

“I'd rather read him than Howells.”

“Have you read
Indian Summer
?”

“Is that an assignment?”

“I think he was imitating James. Much of the story takes place in Europe.”

“Tell me about the other thing.”

He knew immediately what she meant. “It looks as if they are going to indict Tom McTear. Gibbons has been stalling the decision but he is running out of tricks.”

“What will happen to him?”

“There's no certainty they can get a conviction.”

“Do you think he did it?”

He thought for a moment. “Only every other day.”

“I'd like to make an appointment.”

“I'll call you, all right?”

“Sure.”

She told herself that he hadn't meant it as a put-down but that is the way she felt. Back in her room she called Mary Shuster and asked how she was holding up.

“It's very lonely.”

“I imagine.”

“And I suppose you're very busy.”

“Not too busy to take a break at the Huddle.”

 

The Huddle is the original non-refectory eating place at Notre Dame, housed in an old building that had once contained the science department in which the Zahm brothers had sought to provide a more balanced education to students, lest they think that the liberal arts made up the whole of higher education. The building had been doubled in size in recent years, with the original architecture retained and a fair facsimile of the brick once made of the mud that St. Mary's lake employed. To the naked and uninstructed eye it seemed in its entirety a nineteenth-century building. Like most of the older buildings on campus, it had known a number of uses, until it finally metamorphosed into the student center. The aroma of sizzling burgers emanated from it, riding the chill November air, but inside there was a choice of high-cholesterol foods, Asian and Italian as well as the mandatory hamburgers and fries. Clean it might be, at least several times a day, but it could not be called well-lighted.

Griselda loaded up a tray, hers the appetite of an athlete, but Mary settled for coffee, and they took a table away from the roar of the huge and distorting television screen.

“You won again last night,” Mary said.

The Lady Irish had yet to be defeated, but Griselda did not point this out.

“I've just come from Professor Knight's class.”

“What a comfort he has been to me and my mother.”

“And now they have the man who did it.”

“He can't have imagined that his sister too would die.”

Silence, or as much silence as could be expected in the Huddle. Then Mary said, “You know she was found dead in Fred Neville's apartment.”

“Roger told me.”

Mary's eyes were moist. “That was the final crushing blow. It has made me doubt that I ever really knew Fred.”

“He loved you.”

“So he said. But did he go on saying the same to her? She was able to let herself into his apartment, and that means—”

“Only that she had a key,” Griselda said briskly. “Besides, you know what she was like.”

“I didn't know her at all. She was just the name of a problem for Fred and me.”

“No one in the Joyce Center thought that theirs was anything more than what you would expect between a sports-information person and a reporter.”

“Is that true?”

“We were more likely to think it was Thelma and Fred.”

“Thelma!”

“I know. A real Flirty Gertie. She is one of those women who are always touching men, laying a hand on their arm, taking their hand, gushing.”

“To Fred?”

“Oh, to any man. Even to Anthony.”

Mary laughed. “Now that would be a pair.”

“Maybe they are. Anthony is the only bachelor she has left.”

“How was Roger's class?”

“Wonderful. He's always wonderful. Your father was a professor, wasn't he?”

Mary brightened at the reminder. “I only wish he had lived long enough to meet Roger Knight. And Phil, of course. He would have liked them as much as my mother and I do. Of course my father was very different from Roger, subdued, formal in a nice way. He was a poet, you know.”

“Published?”

“Yes. One book.”

“Oh, I must read it. Is it in the library?”

“I'll give you a copy.” She leaned toward Griselda. “And I'll tell you a secret. We have two unopened boxes of the book in the attic.”

FATHER CARMODY WAS AN
old man who had seen much. The Notre Dame to which he had come as a boy had grown beyond the dreams or plans of anyone at the time, but Carmody had found it all organic and had played a significant part in the stages that had brought the university to its present eminence. He had played a role in the replacement of Terry Brennan in the fifties, he had been a power behind the scenes throughout the golden Hesburgh years. Change is welcome in youth and even in middle age but when hair turns gray and slowly disappears, it is more difficult to equate change with improvement. Still, Father Carmody did not repine. Nor did he, as so many of the congregation did, resist transfer to Holy Cross House when he seemed to have entered the final act of his long life. The naming of Roger Knight to the Huneker Chair of Catholic Studies had been considered his parting shot. The donor was an old friend, the appointment was more or less in his gift, pace the restrictions of an altered policy on recruitment and hiring, and he had formed a close friendship with Roger and his brother Phil.

“Don't get too curious about Huneker,” he advised Roger.

“Oh, but I've already looked him up.”

“Then you must be surprised that his name should be attached to a chair at Notre Dame.”

“No more surprised than that I should be asked to fill it. Of course I have the wherewithal to fill a chair in the physical sense,” Roger said as he patted the enormous orb of his belly.

The death of Fred Neville had pained Father Carmody. He had known the man only slightly, meeting him at the Knights' apartment, but had quickly included him in the affection he felt for Roger and his brother. Roger's monograph on the soidisant Baron Corvo had captured Father Carmody's eye and quickly replaced Symon's
The Quest For Corvo
as his favorite book on that equivocal person. He had particularly liked Roger's handling of the break between Corvo and Robert Hugh Benson.

“Benson lectured here, you know.”

Roger said, “I am prepared to believe that anyone interesting must have lectured here.”

“Dick Sullivan was a great devotee of the writing of Corvo. Do you know the name?”

“Tell me.”

Sullivan was one of the luminaries of the English department when all the luminaries bore only master's degrees. He had written a book about Notre Dame, as well as some quite successful popular fiction. In his last years, bearded, unobtrusive, he had moved about the campus all but unnoticed by brasher new arrivals. “He put me on to
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
.”

“I'm surprised there isn't a Corvo chair, Father.”

“Oh, we'll never be as daring as that.”

A long life and a wide perspective had enabled Father Carmody to be philosophical about difficulties that seemed unprecedented. His motto might have been, This too will pass. But with the indictment of Tom McTear, the university was becoming the object of unwelcome curiosity on the part of the media.

“I am reliably told that a young fellow at the Joyce Center is planning to write a book about the case. Of course you know the kind of book he has in mind.”

“No
In Quest Of Neville
?”

“Good Lord, no. Symons wrote a masterpiece. Since excelled, needless to say. This would be what is accurately called a non-book.”

“Who is the young fellow?”

“Anthony Boule.”

Father Carmody had succeeded in surprising Roger. But he had more in mind in mentioning it to him. “I wonder if you could have a word with him.”

No need to say more. Discretion is the better part of such advice. The old priest went on to review the case against McTear, with an eye to imagining what Anthony might make of it if he went ahead with his plans, until Phil joined them to review the details of the investigation.

The fact that Tom McTear had been in Chicago when Fred Neville's body was found, and for some days before, was no alibi, given the way in which the murder had been accomplished. His motive was described in the newspapers as opposition to the connection between Fred and Naomi.

“The real reason is deeper. A visceral hatred of Notre Dame.”

“Ah.”

“And the church. But Notre Dame provided focus, and Fred a more narrow focus still.”

“I have met the type,” Father Carmody said sadly. Phil went on. Apart from motive, there was opportunity. Despite his loathing for Notre Dame, Tom McTear apparently could not stay away. When in town he often was given the use of one of the bedrooms in an apartment owned by his sister's cable channel. He was in it on the weekend before Fred dropped out of circulation. The discovery of the container of poison in the trash taken from that apartment might point to the sister as well as the brother. But her subsequent death seemed to rule her out. The fact that she had access to Fred's apartment, letting herself in after his death and brewing herself a fatal Irish coffee, was proof of that. The ingenious McTear was supposed to have learned of his sister's key and made use of it.

“Then she wouldn't have had it.”

“Not necessarily. He could have returned it. He may have had it copied.”

“Any proof of that?”

“No.” Phil said it reluctantly. Nothing exposes the strengths and weaknesses of a case against someone more than such a narration of it.

“Don't forget Santander,” Roger said. He had been silent during his brother's tale. “He identified Naomi as having been there at the apartment the day before Fred's body was found.”

“Roger, the fact that she brewed herself a fatal cup of coffee indicates that she did not know the cannister was doctored.”

Roger was roused by his brother's hastening over difficulties in the prosecutor's case against Tom McTear, and developed an account of his own.

“Say it was indeed Naomi who arranged things so that Fred would eventually administer the coup de grâce to himself. I talked with her hours before she drank that lethal cup of coffee. She was a divided woman, telling me things it is difficult to imagine her volunteering to the stranger I was. But what if she had decided to do what she did, the ultimate recompense for killing the man she claimed to love. She left here, drove to the apartment, let herself in and romantically recalled other visits to the apartment. Then, resolved, she brewed the coffee and put herself beyond the reach of the law.”

Phil stared at his brother and was obviously disturbed by the ease with which he had constructed this scenario.

“Do think that is what happened, Roger?”

“About as much as I believe your account.”

“My account? I am telling you what the prosecutor thinks. And, I might add, Jimmy Stewart.”

“You spoke as if you thought it true.”

“I do!”

But there was bravura rather than confidence in Phil's voice. The conversation turned to other things and soon Phil slipped away to the television. Father Carmody went back to the threatening non-book about Notre Dame's murder scandal.

“How did you hear of it, Father?”

“From a young man I counseled for a time. He was thinking of entering the congregation but came to see he had no vocation.”

“Would you be breaking a confidence by telling me his name?”

“Certainly not. He is in a rage. A rage I cannot sympathize with. The idea for the book was originally his. His name is Scott Frye.”

ROGER KNIGHT WAS ABLE TO
get around campus with ease in a golf cart, but for ventures beyond he was dependent on his brother Phil and others. While Phil had a moderate-sized vehicle for his own use it had been necessary to refit a van to accommodate Roger. The central area was dominated by a swivel seat that could describe, in stages, a 360° turn, and no matter which direction Roger faced he was able to have his computer before him. In this van the Knight brothers made their journeys, avoiding air travel as much as possible, since there was no way in which Roger could fit into a single seat. Of late, given the various campaigns against obesity, hostility was added to discomfort, and they eschewed the airways entirely. Of course when Phil traveled alone he traveled in the ordinary manner.

The charge that Father Carmody had placed on Roger made travel off campus necessary, although initially, in his trip to the Joyce Center, his golf cart had sufficed. Since Griselda was with him, he turned the wheel over to her.

“I want to talk to Anthony Boule,” Roger said in reply to Griselda's question.

“Look, any inquiry about sports he can answer I can probably answer too.”

“I want to learn who the point guard on the women's basketball team is this year.”

Griselda slowed the cart and stared at him. “Are you serious?”

“No.”

“Meaning you don't want me to know why we're going?”

“You will be with me all the time and will soon know as much as I do.”

“Fat chance.”

“Precisely.”

“Oh, I didn't mean—”

“Always take credit for wit, whether intended or not.”

Roger hoped that he would not have to talk to Anthony. The secretary, Thelma, would do. As he understood it, she had been among the group Tom McTear had invited to the network apartment to watch a game in comfort. Perhaps she could give him Scott's address so that he could arrange for a meeting without alarming Anthony. Scott put himself in the position of the aggrieved and his complaint was against Anthony who was unlikely to be a forthcoming font of information about his new-won foe.

Griselda rolled them right up to the door of the building and parked.

“I will be ticketed and towed.”

She shook her head. “They'll figure it belongs to a banged-up jock.”

“Are athletes beyond the law?”

“Only in season.”

The glass double doors of the sports-information department slid aside at their approach and Roger waddled through, Griselda effectively concealed behind him. The girl at the receptionist desk looked up. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened, she raised a hand and lowered her glasses, she stared. Griselda came out from behind him.

“Thelma, this is Professor Knight.”

She lifted dreamily to her feet and held out a hand. “Oh, we've met.”

“So we have. I am as unlikely to have forgotten you.”

Her chin tucked in in doubt. “Me?”

Griselda said, “Do you have a chair? A large chair?”

The search for an adequate chair occupied the next few minutes. Finally, it was decided that Roger would be least uncomfortable in the armless chair that Thelma used, a secretary's chair. Lowering himself tentatively into it, Roger judged that it would do, at least for the short time he was here. “I feel that I am perched on one of those things golf fans unfold.”

“Have you really come to see me?” Thelma said, obviously delighted to be at the center of all this fuss.

“I need your help. I believe you know Scott Frye.”

Thelma had sat upon her desk after surrendering her chair to Roger. Now she slid along it away from him. Her receptive manner gave way to a receptionist manner.

“Scott.”

“He works at a place called the Hoosier Residences.”

Thelma said nothing.

“Where Naomi McTear stayed. And her brother,” Griselda said.

“But why have you come here?”

“Oh, it's probably only a baseless rumor. Scott came to my good friend Father Carmody saying that a book about the Tom McTear trial was being planned and I wanted to speak to him about it.”

“It is baseless. Scott couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag.”

“You're sure of that?”

The door of Fred's office opened and Anthony came out, preoccupied, papers fluttering in his hand. He stopped abruptly at the sight of Roger Knight. He looked at Thelma.

“Why don't you help this gentleman, Anthony,” Thelma said. And to Roger, “We can wheel the chair right into that office.”

“Anything at all,” Anthony said, but he was puzzled, perhaps by the expression on Thelma's face and her tone of voice. But the secretary came into the office too and so did Griselda. Anthony took the chair from behind the desk and rolled it free, perhaps not wanting to seem to usurp Fred's office. The time for obliquity and indirection was past.

Roger said, “Your friend Scott Frye told Father Carmody that you have stolen an idea he had for a book about the McTear trial.”

“Stolen!” Thelma said. “How can you steal an idea?”

Roger nodded. “A good point. The sense in which our ideas are ours is unrelated to their content.”

Silence fell.

“Of course there can be ownership of a sort. Plagiarism is a case in point.”

Anthony was aroused. “It's true that Scott and I talked about such a book. He seemed to think I would write it and he would get credit. Such a thought could occur to anyone but if they are unable to write how can they have a claim on it?”

“And you have claimed it?”

“I am giving serious consideration to writing such a book.”

“I can see the attraction of the idea,” Roger said. “Publishers seem drawn to such books, don't they? Exposés, sensational treatments. I can also see why Father Carmody thinks the university would not be well-served by such a book.”

Thelma came around to face Roger. “Anyone could have that idea. Maybe others already have. The university can't stop such a project.”

Roger looked up at her. “Are you involved in it too?”

She stepped back. She looked at Anthony. Anthony said, “If I go ahead it will be a joint product.”

“Ah.”

“Coauthors.”

Roger switched gears. He smiled at Thelma. “I really have to get a chair like this. It's quite comfortable.” As if in proof he spun around. Griselda stopped him as if he were the great globe itself. He ended facing Anthony. “You must have given a lot of thought to recent events. Fred's death, Naomi's, the arrest of Tom McTear.”

“That will be the meat of the book.”

“Do you think Tom is guilty?”

“The book will follow the trial process. The jury will determine who did it. Or who they think did it. I suppose it could have been any number of people other than Tom McTear.”

“He did it,” Thelma said flatly.

Roger swung back to her. “It certainly looks that way, doesn't it? I would hate to be his defense lawyer.”

“But what is punishment nowadays?” Anthony said.

Roger said, “For me, the mystery is how Tom McTear could have gotten into the apartment to poison the coffee in the cannister.”

“Maybe Fred let him in?”

Roger shook his head. “And left him alone to poison his coffee? If it was just his cup that had been poisoned, conceivably that could have been done surreptitiously. But the whole cannister?” Roger looked around as if in bewilderment. “Of course that begs the question of his getting in. He must have done it when Fred wasn't there. In that way he could be far off when Fred made use of the poisoned coffee.”

Anthony nodded. “That is a problem.”

“Santander could have let him in,” Thelma said.

Anthony shook his head. “He would have mentioned that by now if he had.”

“It seems a small point,” Thelma said.

“He couldn't have gotten at your keys,” Anthony said with a laugh.

“No way. He's never been in the office so far as I know.”

“Your keys?”

“People leave keys to their homes and cars and apartments here with Thelma. In case of loss, so their mail can be taken in when they're away, whatever.”

Roger nodded. “One theory is that he took the key from Naomi's purse. After all, she must have had a key.”

Thelma grew animated. “How else could she have gotten into the apartment the other day?”

“That must be it.”

They ended on a happy note of agreement. Anthony accompanied them out to the golf cart, Thelma having repossessed her chair.

“It may fall through, you know. The book. It's still just an idea an agent is trying to peddle. Tell Father Carmody that.”

“And to pray that the deal doesn't go through?”

Anthony looked back at the closed double glass doors.

“As far as I'm concerned, I hope it doesn't. I don't want to do anything to jeopardize my position here.”

As they drove away, Griselda said, “His position? He's one rung above Thelma.”

“And what rung is hers?”

“The one below his.”

Roger said, “What got Mary Shuster off was the mug book of people in the administration, all rungs and ranks. There is one for the faculty too, and another for the chaired professors.”

“And one for the athletic department.”

“Do you have one?”

“I could get one.”

“Now?”

Griselda made a U-turn and headed back to the Joyce Center. Roger waited in the cart, his hood pulled over his head, while she went inside again. She hurried past the double doors of sports information and went out of sight. Five minutes later she was back.

“Got it. I assume you want to see my picture.”

“I hated to ask directly.”

She punched his arm. “Home?”

“Where is your car?”

“You want to go someplace else?”

“If you'll take me.”