The Letter Killeth (19 page)

Philip Knight still talked with Jimmy about the case, but he thought his work was done.

“At least it wasn't a student,” Father Carmody said. He was getting his cigar ready for the match. Holy Cross House was smoke free, but when reminded of it Carmody always replied, “All right. Where are the free smokes?” The nurses weren't likely to insist on the rule with someone who had the gravitas of Father Carmody. Roger's phrase. The lawlessness of gravity? Phil shook his head. He had to get away. The next thing you knew, he would be auditing classes.

“More snow is predicted,” he told Father Carmody.

Father Carmody smiled. He liked a snowbound campus. Notre Dame was the universe for the old priest, so he didn't feel deprived. His traveling days were over. Once he had spent a good portion of his time visiting various alumni around the country—around the world, for that matter—and bringing home the bacon for Notre Dame. He didn't miss it as much as he claimed. In any case, alumni came to him. Quirk. Reminded of Quirk, Father Carmody lit his cigar and disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

“I'm surprised he hasn't moved back here. Like Bastable.”

“Bastable.”

So Phil got the story on Bastable. Roger had called Phil's attention to the op-ed page in the
Observer
that had recently appeared. After a few swipes at the publication in which he was appearing, Bastable settled into the persona of an Old Testament prophet. His was an open letter to the president. Recent events on campus were the beginning of a divine judgment on the university. Warnings. There was still time to turn back. That a professed atheist had been on the faculty of Notre Dame indicated the extent of the decline from the days of yore. Who knew what other horrible revelations might be made? And please don't be deluded into thinking that the resurrection of the Fighting Irish was a sign of divine approval. Whom God would destroy, he first makes mad. Fanatic.

Bastable spelled it out. Fans. It was pretty bad. Right there he lost whatever wild sympathy he might have commanded. You don't talk that way about Notre Dame football. It didn't help that Bastable added that there are no atheists on the gridiron.

“You'd think he had been an English major,” Father Carmody said.

What he was majoring in during his retirement years was divine discontent.

“Do you see much of him, Father?”

“I'm never in to cranks.”

It was Roger's remark that he would like to meet Bastable that sent Phil to the town house overlooking the St. Joseph River. A large comfortable woman with her finger in a jumbo paperback, marking her place, answered the door. Phil told her who he was. She kept smiling. Then, stretching it a bit, Phil said Father Carmody had suggested he stop by.

“Carmody!”

She stepped aside, and the man who came forward was obviously Bastable.

“Philip Knight,” the woman said, and slippered away.

Bastable's face lit up with delight. He had made the connection with Roger.

“Come in, come in.” He took Phil's elbow and led him into what he called Command Central. He turned down the volume on Rush Limbaugh, then turned it off. “I'm taping it anyway. Why doesn't your brother ever return my calls?”

“This is quite a setup you've got here.”

“State of the art. Where would we be without the Internet? At the mercy of the media, that's what. Take a pew, take a pew. Can I get you a drink?”

“No thanks.”

“Diet Sprite. I drink six cans a day. It keeps the system running, if you know what I mean.”

Phil was still standing, looking out at the river. “What a view.”

Bastable stood beside him. “The awful thing is that I almost never notice it anymore.”

When they finally sat, he told Phil of his plans for retirement. He and Florence would settle in South Bend, to be near the institutions that had formed them. “Florence is a St. Mary's girl.” They had imagined taking part in campus events, attending lectures, plays, and of course sporting events.

“Who was it said you can't go home again? You can't go back to school again either. It's no longer there. But it isn't just that things are different. Tell me, what does your brother really think of Notre Dame?”

“We have an agreement. I don't speak for him, and he doesn't speak for me.”

“Okay. What do you think?”

“I came for the sports.”

“Sure. That's fine. But you must have some view on where Notre Dame is headed.”

“Mr. Bastable, you have to understand, I'm not Catholic. Roger is, but I'm not.”

Bastable stared at him. “Not a Catholic? I'm surprised they didn't offer you a professorship.”

“I'm a private detective.”

Bastable moved forward in his chair. “I had heard that.” He seemed to be thinking. “How would you like a job?”

“Not particularly. I'm more or less retired.”

“I would make it worth your while.”

Phil shrugged. He found he wanted to hear what Bastable had in mind.

“Look, it can be as hush-hush as you want. You're inside, you have connections. I think that atheist who was strangled was only the tip of the iceberg.”

He wanted Phil to dig up dirt on Notre Dame. What kind of alumnus was he? Bastable seemed to sense the question.

“You know what our trouble is as alumni? We refuse to believe anything bad about this place. You don't graduate from Notre Dame. At commencement you're turned into an alumnus. We trip over one another giving money to the place, and never ask what we are underwriting.”

Phil heard him out. It was a shame that a man made himself as unhappy as Bastable clearly was. Maybe it was his way of being happy. Phil told him he wasn't interested.

“Think about it.”

“I've met your classmate Quirk.”

Bastable beamed. But then gloom returned. “He has some crazy scheme of getting Notre Dame to buy a villa in Sorrento. He actually wanted me to contribute.” Bastable shook his head. “And he is pinning his hopes on Fred Fenster. Ha.”

“You don't think Fenster will come through?”

“You know where he is right now? In a Trappist abbey in Kentucky. He thinks prayer is the answer.”

“What's the question?”

“Maybe you're right,” Bastable said enigmatically, and drank greedily from his can of Diet Sprite.

3

Larry Douglas felt that he was on His Majesty's Secret Service. He didn't tell Crenshaw that Jimmy Stewart had enlisted his help, and he didn't tell Laura either. She was as chummy as before, chummier, but Larry told her he wasn't sure he was completely over the flu.

“I need lots of rest.”

“You shouldn't be working.”

“Maybe not.”

“I'll make soup and bring it over.”

“I can't hold anything down,” he lied.

Laura insisted that he go home immediately and get into bed. “I will explain to Crenshaw. Don't even answer the phone.”

So Larry drooped and looked sick and got out of there. After hours on that damned bicycle it was good to get behind the wheel of his car. When he went through the campus entrance, he pulled in to Cedar Grove, got out his cell phone, and called the morgue.

“This is Larry,” he said when Kimberley came on.

“I used to know someone by that name.”

“I suppose you heard about Henry.”

“Next they'll probably arrest your friend Laura.”

“How would you like to do a little police work?”

“Like what?”

“I'll come by the morgue, okay?”

“We've got some free slabs.”

It seemed a shame to be working for Jimmy Stewart and have no one know. He felt like a weasel, calling Kimberley with Henry under arrest, but after all Henry had grandly offered Kimberley to him on a platter. Have your old girl back. Henry was hard to like, no doubt about that, and Larry didn't know what he thought about the arrest. He remembered his own time downtown when he had been brought in by Jimmy and Phil Knight and there was Laura. He didn't like to remember how he had broken down and how Laura had comforted him. He stopped at his loft and changed and then went on to the morgue.

Feeley, the coroner, sat in his revolving chair, boxing the compass. He had been telling Kimberley for the hundredth time of his thwarted hopes for medical research, of the years at Mayo, of the bright future that had been dashed when he was told, run for coroner or your old man is on the street. If his father retired at sixty-five, Feeley still had years to go, and by then he'd be rusty, but he would try to get into Mayo's for a refresher. Why was he boring Kimberley with his sad story? Feeley was single and therefore, in theory at least, a rival, if Larry was in the running with Kimberley, that is.

“Business is dead,” Feeley said sepulchrally when Larry asked if he could borrow Kimberley.

“Borrow me?”

“‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.'”

Her eyes sparked; memories were enkindled. The way to her heart was through poetry.

“Let me use your phone book.”

He turned to the yellow pages and looked up stores featuring athletic equipment, depressed to find so many. On the other hand, that meant a prolonged search.

“What are we after?”

“A pogo stick.”

“Why not a unicycle?”

“We'll look at those, too.”

The first half dozen stores said they didn't have pogo sticks in stock but they could order one for Larry. He told them maybe later, he would see if he could find a store that had one.

“I sold the only one I had two weeks ago.”

“No kidding.”

The clerk was adenoidal and had a bad case of acne. He couldn't keep his eyes off Kimberley.

“I sold it myself. To a real doll.”

Larry had been about to get Kimberley out of there, but instinct told him to hold the phone. He asked the clerk to tell him about the customer and while he listened felt disappointment. He had been certain it would be Mrs. Izquierdo, but the woman the clerk was describing was more like Lucy Goessen.

“Did you get her name?”

“You want her name?”

“You don't have it?”

“I could look it up.”

Larry flashed his Notre Dame security ID. The clerk looked at it and then at Larry, but he had seen enough television dramas to know about undercover cops. “Come on.”

The back office made Larry's loft look neat. Sales slips were tossed into a shoe box for later filing.

“Kimberley can help you.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Goessen.”

“Watch your language.”

“Lucy Goessen.”

“That's who it was,” the clerk cried. Then he found the slip.

“I'll take that.”

“Oh, I can't let you do that.”

There was a photocopying machine in a corner of the office. Larry suggested they make a copy of the sales slip.

“Please,” Kimberley added, and the clerk flicked on the copier.

When they went out to the car, Larry felt that he had hit pay dirt. His first impulse was to go out to Decio and confront Professor Goessen with what he had learned. But what had he learned? That she had bought a pogo stick. He decided it would be better to report to Jimmy Stewart.

“Want to come along?” he asked Kimberley, when he had explained his decision.

“Then what?”

“‘Doubt that the stars are fire,'” he began, and she squeezed his arm.

4

In all outward respects, Lucille Goessen was a daughter of her time. In departmental meetings, she voted with her sisters as a block, on every ballot for college council, academic council, whatever, she voted for females as her grandmother had once voted for all the candidates with Irish names. On the matter of the Monologues, she did not question the department's sponsorship of the event, nor did she snicker at the rape warnings pasted all over the door of Hilda Faineant's door. “Fair warning,” Raul had commented, but Lucy only smiled, not a breach of sisterly solidarity. But the outer was not the inner.

Lucy taught eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. English majors professed to be taken by
Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle,
which always turned out to be a bit of a pose.
Rasselas
? Forget it. Sometimes Lucy felt that she was feeding the disgust for literature that seemed departmental policy. It was Jane Austen who divided the sheep from the goats. The goats signed on to the dismissive stance of Kingsley Amis; the sheep knew they were in touch with something real. For the latter, step one was to rinse their minds of all the cinematic distortions of the divine Jane and get them to wallow in the text. In her heart of hearts, Lucy wanted a world where women were women and men were men, where courtship was a prolonged ritual, where love was forever, the good were rewarded and the evil punished. Henry had turned out to be one of the goats.

When Raul told her of the campus cop who was brighter than any student, Lucy was ready to dismiss it as typical Izquierdian hyperbole. It might even have been a new version of his line. But the mention of Goldsmith's
The Vicar of Wakefield
caught her attention.

“He's read it?”

“Several times. Not my sort of thing. You should talk with him.”

“Send him over.”

Henry had read a lot, no doubt about that, but it seemed somehow ammunition in a battle he was in. Even so, it was obviously a waste that he was in campus security. Why wasn't he a student?

“I can't afford it.”

She kept her door open during his visit, as male professors had once prudently done with female students. Hilda cruised by a few times during the session, her manner disapproving.

Henry failed the Jane Austen test, and that was a shame. If he could stop thinking of literature as a weapon, he could have been interesting. But he was already a disciple of Raul Izquierdo's, alas. Worse, Henry reminded her of Alan.