Green Thumb

by Ralph McInerny

“That was long ago.”

  “Barley is my favorite suspect.”

  “Barley!”

  “They shared a quad in St. Edward’s.”

  “Two in a quad?”

  “Oh, there were four of them. But Barley had the strongest motive.”

  “What an odd fellow you are, Grantley.”

  “He is here for the reunion Sadler defiantly initiated as a thumb in the eye of the alumni association. They were to be a foursome at Warren, the four old roommates. They whooped it up in the Morris Inn last night and early this morning Sadler crept out on Burke for some practice holes. That is why he was found there.”

  “He was playing alone?”

  “What killed him was in his water bottle.”

  Philip Knight had already reported this to Carmody by telephone. “What does belladonna suggest to you, Father?” he’d asked.

  “I am a celibate.”

  “She is a poison.”

  “What a chauvinist you are.”

  “Roger tells me that chauvinist has something to do with baldness. My hair is still thick.”

  “You mean that Mortimer Sadler was poisoned?”

  “That was the first result of the police investigation.”

  This was dire news. High on Father Carmody’s list of priorities was that only good should be spoken of Notre Dame, and if evil occurred it was to be discreetly muffled if not entirely silenced.

  “Have the media been told?”

  “It’s hardly a secret.”

  The media! The plural of medium, a medium being one who conducted séances and invoked the powers of evil to wreak havoc in the world. Only such a profession would have accepted such a designation. Father Carmody, of course, exempted the alumni who had done well in journalism.

  “What are you going to do?” Grantley asked now, studying his empty glass. Father Carmody had capped the Powers after pouring Grantley a second tot and was indisposed to open it anew.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We can’t have a scandal.”

  Grantley’s remark reminded him of his feeling of impotence when Phil Knight had passed on the news. He had asked Roger Knight’s brother to represent the university in the matter, the better to prevent public attention. But it would have been delinquent of the local constabulary to treat a murder on campus as if it were a secret.

  “This would have been unthinkable once,” Grantley said.

  Carmody said nothing. A local woman had compiled an unpublished manuscript on the strange and unsolved deaths on the Notre Dame campus. Any acreage in the world chosen at random might deliver up similar mysteries. Was Grantley really unaware of the precedents? More likely his remark was simply another instance of his resolve to treat the present as a betrayal of the past.

  “The more quickly it is solved the better.”

  “The murderer found?”

  “I thought you suspected suicide.”

  “It was my first thought. But that is so horrible to contemplate.”

  Grantley’s tone indicated that he would have welcomed an exchange on the inscrutable ways of Providence, the folly of men, the mercy of God, and allied subjects. The fact was that the man annoyed Father Carmody, all the more because of his manifest assumption that they were in the same boat. Grantley considered his own years at Notre Dame to be a record of unjust treatment and feeble loyalty to one who had given his life to the university. He had a case of sorts, but what was the point of making it again and again? If it came from another it might elicit more sympathy, but no one can plead his own case without weakening it. Besides, Carmody did not see his own life as one of failure. There are seasons in human life and he accepted the one in which he now found himself.

  “You must pray for him, Dennis.”

  “That is difficult. I knew him.”

  “All the more meritorious.”

  Grantley held his glass to the light as if to verify its emptiness. Carmody did not take the hint. He stood.

  “You better get to your bed, Dennis.”

  “It isn’t nine o’clock.”

  “That is the witching hour here.”

  “I don’t know how you can stand this place.”

  “There were no empty rooms in the firehouse.”

  That was mean, and in repayment Father Carmody accompanied Grantley to the front entrance and through the sliding doors into the summer night.

  “Don’t tell me you walked.”

  “They make me park my car off campus now.”

  “You should get a bicycle.”

  Another mean remark. Grantley’s artifical knees would have made biking painful. Father Carmody patted his visitor on the back and sent him shuffling into the night. Back in his room he offered up a prayer in reparation for his lack of sympathy with Dennis Grantley. And for the repose of the soul of Mortimer Sadler.

  14

  The archives of the university of Notre Dame are located on the sixth floor of the Hesburgh Library. When the library was opened in 1963 it was vaguely called the Memorial Library, and donors of various degrees and dimensions were commemorated on plaques throughout the building. The first archivist, Father McEvoy, a distinguished if curmudgeonly historian, died at his post and was found one Monday morning at his desk. Eventually, the name of the library was changed to honor Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, the legendary president of the university who had retired, after decades in office, into an aerie on the thirteenth floor along with his long-time associate, Edmund Joyce, ostensibly to enjoy such years of leisure as might be left them. In any event, Hesburgh’s career had accelerated in his supposed retirement, and while he studiously attempted to keep in the background his successors were faced with the formidably eclipsing fact of his presence.

  As they awaited a building commensurate with their holdings, the archives continued to operate in their original quarters in the library, since expanded by various timorous forays into abutting territory, until almost the entire sixth floor was at the disposal of the archives. It was not enough. The denizens and votaries of the archives lived in the expectation that the day would come when quarters proportionate to the extent and value of its holdings would be provided. Among them was Greg Whelan.

  Like many who are employed in university libraries, Whelan’s career had been a varied one. He had a Ph.D. in classics but because of a debilitating stammer, it had proved useless to him so far as employment went. He then acquired an LL.B. in the quixotic hope that preparing himself for a forensic career would somehow loosen his tongue and turn him overnight into a Demosthenes of the courtroom. It had not. In the end he got a degree in library science, was hired by the Notre Dame archives, and ever since had enjoyed the happiest days of his life. Not least among the reasons for this was his friendship with Roger Knight.

  Doubtless a hundred useless theories could be devised to account for the fact that with Roger, Greg Whelan’s stammer ceased and the two unusual individuals conversed with an ease and range that would have been the marvel of any witnesses, if witnesses would not have rendered Greg Whelan mute. A chance remark of Roger’s had unleashed him on such holdings of the archives as might cast light on the demise of Mortimer Sadler.

  For much of the university’s history a publication called The Scholastic had been the campus journal of record. Among its contributors had been numbered faculty of repute as well as gifted students. Through many permutations from the nineteenth into the twentieth century it had recorded and chronicled the doings of the legendary South Bend campus. In the turbulent sixties of the twentieth century—harbinger of many other changes to come, some representing progress, others mere change—a campus publication had been founded to contest the hegemony of The Scholastic. A product of antinomian times, inspired by the tiresome liberalism of the day, it had been rapidly transformed from an underground publication, a kind of samizdat of dissent, into the accepted daily newspaper of the university. (The Scholastic, bereft of its former greatness, continued as a badly printed weekly whose ineffectual sensat
ionalism did not offset the fact that it, was merely a relic of a forgotten past.)

  The Observer, still in the first feisty days of its antiestablishmentarianism, had provided a platform for the crusade that Mortimer Sadler, hardly the most effective pen on campus, launched against the novelty of coeducation at Notre Dame. The day after Sadler’s death Greg Whelan searched out and photocopied the lengthy series of diatribes Mortimer Sadler had penned. Letters of protest and contention filled the paper whenever he appeared. His was not a position universally accepted. At the outset, the male population of Notre Dame had apparently thought that coeducation was a device meant to provide each of them with a suitable object of affection. But the manner of accepting women students, concentrating exclusively on talent and test scores, insured that Mortimer Sadler’s campaign had adherents as well as dissenters. At that time, the female population of the student body was outnumbered by males in a massive manner. For all that, some males and those females who sought to counter the Sadler campaign were eloquent, however insignificant their actual numbers. Among them was Maureen Jensen, destined to be the valedictorian of the class of 1977.

  Her pithy and deadly responses to Sadler provided a literate and delightful counterpoint to his campaign, and Greg Whelan dutifully photocopied them all. The results, abstracted from their provenance, suggested a pointed and lively debate on an issue that only a chauvinist could deny Maureen had won.

  “Whatever became of her?” Roger asked.

  “She married an internist named O’Kelly.”

  “O’Kelly?”

  “Yes,” Greg said, correctly reading Roger’s reaction. “The very woman who is registered at the Morris Inn. If Sadler was her nemesis, she was his Waterloo.”

  “To mix a metaphor.”

  “A metaphor is already a mixture.”

  “Touché. Are these all the articles?” Roger ruffled the bundle of sheets Greg had given him.

  “All.”

  “There are other items in which the two figure, but unrelated to this controversy.”

  “Such as?”

  Greg combed his beard with his fingers. “She seems to have won every academic prize offered, even a poetry prize.”

  “Really?”

  “A villanelle called ‘Why a Good Man Is Hard to Find.’”

  “What is the answer?”

  “You have to lose him first.”

  “She does sound the feminine counterpart of the youthful Mortimer Sadler.”

  “And she won the Midland Naturalist prize for breeding a new species of tulip.”

  “A veritable Renaissance woman. I should like to meet her.”

  “Perhaps she has mellowed with age.”

  “She certainly has a lovely daughter.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You know her?”

  “Roger, I met her at your semester-end party.”

  “Of course.”

  Roger had given the party for his students of both the fall and spring semesters, renting a large room at the university club for the purpose. Of course he had invited Greg as well, but in such a crowd the archivist had been rendered mute. For all that, he seemed to have enjoyed it. Roger now remembered that he had deputized Francie to entertain Greg and she had been at his side most of the evening, chattering pleasantly and relieving him of the need to stutter.

  “She visited the archives the following week. I had told her how prominent a student her mother was.”

  “So you did talk to her?”

  “Yes.” Greg was half indignant, as if he forgot he had a speech impediment.

  “So you had already dug up half this material months ago?”

  “Oh, she wasn’t interested in her mother’s accomplishments. She asked to see anything I had on her father.”

  “Jack O’Kelly? So he was a student here as well.”

  “Before his future wife arrived on campus. He was in the class of 1970.”

  “And did you find anything?”

  “Dozens of poems. Mostly sonnets. They were all written to someone named Laura.”

  “Petrarchan sonnets?”

  Greg smiled. “They were either translations or close imitations. I don’t think his daughter believed me. She wanted me to identify Laura.”

  “Easily enough done.”

  “Not when she is thought to be a student.”

  “But that would have been before coeducation.”

  “I checked all the Lauras at St. Mary’s during the years O’Kelly was a student at Notre Dame and gave them to Francie.”

  “To what end?”

  Roger did not approve of Greg encouraging Francie in her misunderstanding. It seemed obvious that her father had taken over the poetry and the dedicatee of Petrarch’s sonnets.

  “Oh, she was satisfied enough. There was a Minneapolis Laura Kennedy who is a longtime friend of the family. She never married, and Francie clearly thought she had been heartbroken when O’Kelly’s interest waned and condemned her to a single life.”

  “You must ask her if she has found anything to verify this romantic theory.”

  “I was hoping you would, Roger.”

  15

  “What were you and Mort arguing about the other night?” Crown asked Toolin.

  “Last night?”

  “After we left. I was almost ready for bed when I realized I had not taken my drink with me when I left Mort’s suite, for a nightcap. So I tiptoed back there in my pajamas and was about to knock when I heard the two of you going at it.”

  “It was nothing serious.”

  “It sounded serious.”

  “We were both half smashed. We both said things we wouldn’t have said otherwise.”

  “About Maureen?”

  “You really had your ear pressed to the door, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t necessary. Anyway, I decided it was none of my business and went to bed. I needed another drink like I needed a hole in the head.”

  Ever since the discovery of Mort’s body, Toolin had been thinking of the fact that the last time he had seen his old roommate they had quarreled. Toolin had not liked the way Sadler spoke of the O’Kelly marriage. Dr. O’Kelly meant nothing to Toolin—he had graduated before they had arrived on campus—but Toolin’s sense of gallantry had been sharpened by alcohol and he had risen to the lady’s defense.

  “The fact is, Mort, you loved her. I remember how you used to follow her around. It’s because she gave you the bum’s rush that all the other stuff followed.”

  “What other stuff?”

  “Your big campaign to return Notre Dame to an all-male student body. It was just sour grapes, Mort, and it’s ridiculous to keep it up. You’re a happily married man, she’s a happily married woman…”

  “There, my dear fellow, I beg to differ with you.” Sadler was apt to slip into his imitation of one of their old professors, Tom Stritch, when he got drunk. But he waggled his brows in an un-Stritchian way.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Trouble in paradise, my good man. They are separated. But she is as much sinned against as sinning. The good doctor has renewed a passion of his student days, a friend of my older sister, Laura Kennedy.”

  “My God, he must be nearly sixty.”

  “So what? Haven’t you heard of Viagra?”

  “It’s where we went on our honeymoon.”

  “Not Niagra. In any case, the lady is a tramp as well as trampled on.”

  “What lady?”

  “Who are we talking about?”

  “Laura somebody.”

  “No, no. Maureen O’Kelly.”

  “It is wrong to say such things of her.”

  It was not so much that they were arguing as that they both had spoken at the top of their voices, enunciating carefully and with thick tongues. Toolin had caught Mort in the face with a sofa cushion on his way out, pulling the door shut on his lucky shot. How sobering to realize that was the last time he was to see Mort alive. That melancholy realization kept the conversatio
n heavy on his mind during the next twenty-four hours. But the exchange took on a different aspect when Stewart and Philip Knight talked to him the second time.

  “What were you fighting with Sadler about the night before he died?”

  Crown must have passed this on, but why? He must know that the police were professionally suspicious. Good God, they talked to him as if he himself had something to do with the death of Mort. Toolin tried to dismiss it as nothing but soon, as he had with Crown, he told them what he and Mort had been talking about after the others left the suite.

  16

  Armitage Shanks took an initial sip of his executive martini, so called because it was served in a small carafe that yielded a glass and a half—or two, if one dallied and permitted the ice to melt. Across from him at the Old Bastards table in the university club, Ambrose Dulcedo followed Shanks’s testing of his drink with avid eyes.

  “Have one,” Shanks urged.

  Dulcedo held up an arthritic hand. “All that is behind me now.”

  “Why?”

  “Doctor’s orders.”

  “Surely longevity can’t be a goal at your age.”

  “I don’t want to commit suicide, either.”

  “What is the latest word on the golf course murder?”

  Others of the group began to arrive, jollying Debbie as they came in, lowering themselves slowly and sometimes painfully into their chairs, barking for a waitress so they could order drinks. When this had been done, the question about the murder on the golf course was raised anew. Bruno, of course, had news.

  He insisted on their undivided attention. He licked his lips and rolled his agate eyes. And began. The police had, in the interest of thoroughness and because they had few leads to go on, checked out the golf bags of Sadler’s three roommates.

  Bruno’s tablemates waited impatiently, but his eye was on the waitress approaching with his beer.

  “So what did they find?”

  Bruno drank deep and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Golf clubs,” Shanks said disgustedly.

  Bruno smiled as one in possession of as yet undivulged information will smile. It was a mark of the Old Bastards’ table that each of its occupants sought to bring some scoop to the meal and dole out what he knew as slowly as possible. Bruno was merely following the conventions of the group.