Celt and Pepper

by Ralph McInerny

  “Is it true you were a private investigator?”

  “Oh, I still am. That is, I have a licence. My brother Phil is the senior partner.”

  “He still takes cases?”

  “Only if they’re interesting. No divorces.”

  Kilmartin sat back. “I should have thought that was the bulk of the business.”

  “It could be if you let it.”

  “I want to hire him. Or you. Whichever. There is something I must know.”

  As described, it was the sort of case Phil would normally reject out of hand. It spelled trouble. A man who was not sure a woman was joking when she said she was already married spelled trouble. If the woman was married, there was another man, and if the first man, like Martin, had been deceived, he would be unlikely to take it lightly. That Martin wished to take such measures to find out about Deirde Lacey made clear that he did not regard it lightly.

  “And if she is married?”

  “Do you realize I announced our engagement? If she is already married, that is an end to it, of course.”

  We live our lives on the border between the ridiculous and the sublime. That a writer who could wring the hearts of a reader because he had first wrung his own should be caught in such an absurd uncertainty was not right.

  “Phil will find out. I’ll have him come see you.”

  “At home.”

  “Of course. Or you could come to our place. We could go there now. Phil’s home.”

  Roger’s office was in Brownson Hall, also called Earth Sciences—“As opposed to heavenly?” Kilmartin asked—behind Sacred Heart and next to a parking lot from which he could easily reach his first-floor office. Brownson is as old as campus buildings get, but like everything else it had been remodeled and redone several times. Still, the office from which Roger could look out across the parking lot to St. Mary’s lake had a nineteenth-century feel. He tried to reach Phil while Martin was with him, but Phil was not in the apartment.

  “Do you think he will take the case?”

  “I will urge him to.”

  Kilmartin wrung his hand in gratitude and they stepped gingerly out into a snowy world. It was an hour later that Roger talked with Phil.

  “I can’t take him as a client, Roger.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I’ll find out what he wants. But I have already taken Deirdre Lacey for a client.”

  Deirdre had called the 800 number she found in the yellow pages of the Chicago directory and left a message. Phil had been fascinated that someone at Notre Dame should unwittingly contact him. He called Deirdre.

  “Her hope, Roger, is that I will find that the man she married was married when he married her or has married since.”

  “Why?”

  “A quiet divorce, removing the main impediment to her marrying Kilmartin.”

  Among the impenetrable mysteries of human existence are the reasons a man and woman are attracted to one another. Kilmartin could never have known anyone like Deirdre before coming to America, and Fritz, in the secondhand account Martin had given Roger, was as different from the poet as Hyperion from a Satyr.

  “How does she expect you to locate this nomad?”

  “Oh, he’s here in South Bend. She seen him and is obviously frightened of him.”

  20

  The semester drew to a close, too soon for some, none too soon for others, the former largely students, the latter faculty by and large. Christmas parties were held. A wintry South Bend no longer exerted its magic and examinations loomed. The velleities of the previous months gave way to genuine resolution, and campus lights glowed as all-nighters were pulled, groups of students huddled together to make formulae and arguments and plots and characters adhere to the mind long enough to expel them into blue books. Hollow-eyed young women plodded across the campus walks to yet another examination, unshaven young men went red-eyed to their fate. And then, with the surprise of the last trump, the incredible happened. Examinations were over. The midsemester loomed. Sun-drenched beaches and far-flung places beckoned. Rejuvenated, the student body piled into their cars and drove away or took the shuttle to the airport and waited to be lifted homeward. In hours it seemed the campus was deserted. A light snow began to fall as if the silt of centuries were effacing all traces of the present and consigning to the past the year drawing to its close. Here and there a foreign student could be seen. But there loomed a more definitive shutdown when campus restaurants and the University Club and the Morris Inn would go on holiday.

  It was in this midsemester limbo that Melissa Shaw became curious about the light under Martin Kilmartin’s office on the seventh floor of Flanner Hall. Had he flown off to Dublin without turning it off? She told Branigan and they went up in the elevator together. But at the door, he hesitated.

  “What’s that smell?”

  She had no idea. Wariness induced him to call the campus police and soon Katie Schwenk arrived on her bicycle exuding the insolence of office. She opened the door and almost immediately stepped back.

  “Call the police!”

  From the hallway, Melissa had seen Martin Kilmartin slumped over his desk. Katie hung up the phone that lay beside his hand, and prevented Branigan from going in. This was something for the South Bend Police.

  “Is he dead?” Melissa managed to ask Katie Schwenk.

  “Who are you?”

  Melissa didn’t answer the little campus cop. As for her own question, she knew the answer when she spoke. She left, hurrying down the hall, wanting the refuge of her own office.

  PART TWO

  1

  Lieutenant Stewart. A South Bend detective, was in charge of the investigation, under orders from headquarters to wrap it up as quickly and discreetly as possible. Chief Kocinski, who had risen through the ranks from lowly patrolman as irresistibly as fumes rise from the Ethanol plant west of town, held Notre Dame in awe. Among other things, the university was the single greatest local employer and members of the force either retired onto the campus police or picked up bonuses directing traffic on football Saturdays. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. While the medical examiner’s crew went over the scene, Stewart talked a bit with Melissa Shaw, although a bearded professor kept interrupting. Mildly annoyed, Stewart took the elevator to the basement where Branigan had his lair.

  “You found the body?”

  “I was there when it was found. A graduate student asked me to check the office.”

  “Why?”

  “She said the light was on. It was.”

  “Can you tell that in the daytime?”

  “It was because she had noticed it at night that she became concerned.”

  That had struck Stewart as odd when he talked to the young woman on the seventh floor. He would speak to her again when he could get her away from her bearded protector. “Why were you concerned about a lighted window?” he had asked her, and the bearded professor told her not to answer.

  “Shouldn’t there be a lawyer present?”

  “Why?”

  “To make sure Melissa’s rights are respected.”

  A real nut. Did he think Melissa was suspected of a crime?

  “Nice place you got here, Branigan,” Stewart said when they reached the nether regions.

  The building manager grinned. “I used to dream of retirement. Now I ask myself from what?” Concrete walls, clean and dry, pipes crisscrossing the ceiling, no window, but the neon lights made it seem daytime. Branigan seated himself at a desk but Stewart noticed the easy chair with magazines scattered around it. Nice.

  “How long you worked here?”

  Branigan consulted the inside of his eyelids. “Going on three years.”

  “What do you do exactly?”

  Branigan told him, in detail. Stewart nodded. “Mainly faculty in the building?”

  There was the university press, taking one floor of the eleven, and several institutes taking up others. The first floor housed student placement. But a lot of the floors were the offices o
f faculty, retired and still active. All those on seven were still active.

  “Academically active,” Branigan added, as if to be crystal clear.

  “Tell me all about the seventh floor.”

  Flanner consisted of two joined towers so that each floor contained two connecting pods of offices. The body had been found in the western pod, where there were a dozen offices.

  “Two corner ones. They’re bigger.”

  “Who gets those?”

  “Kilmartin was in one.”

  “You got keys to all the doors?”

  “I only need one.” Branigan plucked from his vest pocket the master key.

  Stewart decided that Branigan really knew nothing of what went on in the building. Unless he used his master key to check out offices, but he wasn’t going to admit that. Besides, who cared?

  Upstairs again, Stewart talked with “Ice” Cubit the coroner and Hupp of the ME team. A wide-eyed Katie Schwenk stood at attention beside Hupp.

  “She says when she went into the office the phone was on the desk and she hung it up.”

  Stewart waited.

  “My guess is that he was on the phone when he died.”

  “We know the cause of death, Ice?”

  “Oh, it was heart.”

  Stewart looked at Hupp. “You want to know who he was on the phone with?”

  “You’d think they would have reported it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe he knocked the receiver off the cradle when he fell forward.”

  “A funny thing,” Hupp said. He stepped closer to Stewart as if he didn’t want to be overheard making a stupid remark. “The receiver? Someone must have sprayed it with pepper.”

  The body was taken away, all withdrew, and a funereal silence returned to the seventh floor of Flanner. Stewart was the last to leave. He checked out Kilmartin’s phone and Hupp was right. It smelled heavily of pepper. A sneeze gathered and Stewart just got the phone into the cradle before it came, a head-clearing blast. Who was it that likened a sneeze to an orgasm? He didn’t think he had read that in Reader’s Digest, but you never know. He used his cell phone for the call he wanted to make.

  2

  When the phone rang in the apartment of the Knight brothers, which was located in graduate student housing, Roger was in the kitchen preparing a leg of lamb so Phil answered the phone.

  “Enough there for three, Roger?” he called after a minute.

  “Is it Greg?”

  “No, Stewart. Jimmie Stewart.”

  Roger had to think a moment before he remembered the South Bend detective. He and Phil got along, enjoying a professional camaraderie.

  “Invite him for dinner.”

  “I just did.” Phil came into the kitchen. “I figured I could send out for something if there wasn’t enough lamb.”

  “There’s more than enough.”

  And so it was that Jimmie Stewart brought the news of the death of Martin Kilmartin to the Knight brothers. Phil had not known the poet so it was understandable that he discussed it with Stewart matter-of-factly. Roger sat in the middle of the couch, trying to absorb the news. Without bidding, the lines of Kilmartin’s Dies Irae came to him.

  “How long had he been dead?”

  “Guessing, Cubit thinks two days, maybe more.”

  It was now Thursday. Roger thought back to the apparent time of death to find what he had been doing, as if that oriented the death of Martin Kilmartin. The poet had been so fragile, everyone had expected him to die young, yet the actual fact surprised, as death always does.

  “May he rest in peace,” Roger said.

  And then he thought to call Father Carmody. There was lamb enough for four if the priest were free for dinner.

  Father Carmody was fetched by Phil and Stewart while Roger tended the leg of lamb. When the priest came, his appetite seemed spurred by the news of a body discovered in a campus office. In pleasant silence, they settled to their dinner.

  “This is the best lamb I have ever eaten, Roger,” Father Carmody said.

  Stewart also complimented the cook. When they rose from the table there was little left on the platter but a bone; the scalloped potatoes were gone, the broccoli consumed, and mint sauce melted on their plates. Phil was pouring cognac when the call from Cubit came. “His heart just exploded,” he told the detective. “The condition he was in it wouldn’t have taken much.”

  Stewart brought this lugubrious news to the others.

  “A sneeze could have killed him,” Roger said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. He said so himself.”

  “There was a strong aroma of pepper on the receiver of his phone.”

  “Pepper?”

  “A spray probably. I nearly sneezed out of my shoes myself when I was about to call out on it.”

  “Then he was murdered,” Roger said deliberately. “Someone knew his condition and used pepper spray as a weapon.”

  “Who would do a thing like that?”

  “I could make a list.”

  Phil said, “Before you do that I want to make a call.”

  The phone in Deirdre Lacey’s apartment rang a dozen times before the recorded message came on. Phil replaced the phone.

  “Jimmie, I think you and I should pay a visit.”

  * * *

  When he and Roger were left alone, Father Carmody began to speak of deaths on campus, bodies not found for days, and gave his theory about the best time for someone at Notre Dame to die. The old priest hadn’t really known Kilmartin, so, like Phil, he could speak of him almost casually, an instance of mortality, not the singular Irishman he had been.

  “He was supposed to be in Ireland,” Roger said. “He wanted to show Dublin to his fiancée.”

  “A young lady from here?”

  “The one Phil has gone to check on.”

  The full significance of Phil’s call to Deirdre now struck Roger. Phil was concerned for her because of what had happened to Kilmartin, and the two were linked, not merely as intended bride and groom, but because of the man Deirdre had hired Phil only a few days ago to check into, a man she had been married to.

  “I am assuming it was not a valid marriage,” the poet had said to Roger. He had come by Roger’s office the previous week, showing up unannounced, still shaken by Deirdre’s revelation that she had been married before. “Are American marriages valid? They went to some bureaucrat in the courthouse. A civil marriage. Do they count with the Church?”

  “I’m not the one to ask. But if it does?”

  “I can’t marry her, of course.”

  This possibility did not seem to devastate the poet as much as it might have. Phil was not a Catholic and shared with Deirdre the feeling that a mountain was being made of a molehill. He had heard her side of the story on Monday.

  “Now she wishes she hadn’t told him. What if she hadn’t, Roger, and they went ahead and got married and he finds out later? What then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are they married or not?”

  “Phil, I think you have a vocation. Become a Catholic and devote yourself to the study of canon law.”

  Phil was made uncomfortable by any suggestion that he make so drastic a decision as conversion. Roger was sure that some day his brother would come into the Church, but it would be a day when it was less foreign to him than it still was.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, Roger. She told him about the husband, mainly because he had shown up in South Bend and she didn’t feel safe with him running around loose. He sounds like a Hell’s Angels type.”

  “What exactly are you to do?”

  “Find out why he is here.”

  “And then?”

  “That depends on why he is here.”

  “Why does she think he’s here?”

  Phil tipped his head to the side. “To rough her up. Maybe more. She is definitely frightened. She left him because of that sort of thing.”

  The story conjured up
the image of young men and women drifting about the country, forming temporary alliances, breaking up and going off in different directions and contracting other temporary alliances and so on to infinity. Only that is not what life is, an ever open vista in which our past plays no role in the present and future. Quite apart from a religious perspective, the nomadic life Deirdre had led with her husband Fritz was unworthy of a human being. We are meant to introduce direction and sense into our lives. Even pagans know this. It said much for Deirdre that she had escaped, had educated herself, and was continuing to distance herself from the heedless days with Fritz.

  3

  Shamrock residences was one of a dozen developments in an area east of the university once called Dogpatch that provided housing for students who chose not to live on campus. These developments had replaced ramshackle single dwellings and their proximity to campus put them within walking distance for the hardy. Deirdre Lacey had considered and then rejected the possibility of sharing an apartment with three other graduate women in the housing provided by the university. It was one thing to become a student again as she approached thirty, it was something else to become completely assimilated to students almost a decade younger than herself. Besides, Deirdre had gained self-confidence as the result of her studies at Madison and her association with Notre Dame. The autonomy of having her own apartment appealed to her.

  “Two bedrooms!” Martin had cried, when he came to inspect it. “You should sublet.”

  “If I wanted company I would be in graduate student housing.”

  “I will take that as a rebuff.”

  That was in September. Deirdre was used to being flirted with. For reasons she never understood, men felt compelled to act amorously around her, and Kilmartin had then seemed merely one more insincere swain. It had never occurred to her that he would become serious. When he began to speak of marriage, it might have been an extended joke, but then out of the blue he announced their engagement to the assembled faculty and students of Celtic Studies, and that he was taking her to Dublin as a pre-wedding trip.

  She might have kept silent about Fritz, dismissing it as something past, dead and buried, but then, like a monster in a bad dream, Fritz himself had suddenly confronted her. She had just parked and gotten out of her car, not paying any attention to the pickup parked a few places away. But when he hopped out of it, as agile as a boy, and came toward her, she froze in her tracks. Her first mad impulse was that he must not learn where she lived.