“I’d like to get away, if you don’t mind.”
Perhaps she did not want those she worked with to see her being interviewed by the police.
Jimmy Stewart said, “I’m surprised you came to work.”
“It was either that or stay home.”
“I talked with your mother this morning.”
“Oh, Lord.” She looked at Phil, as if he would understand the remark. Was she referring to her mother’s clumsy efforts to pair herself and Phil?
Jimmy Stewart suggested the Mikado on 31, a splendid restaurant that had not yet been discovered by avid lunch goers. The menu was varied, the service suggestive of geisha deference, the dining room a clean well-lighted place. Phil’s serving of chicken-fried rice drew a gasp from Mary.
“You could feed an army with all that.”
She herself settled for tea and soup and salad. Stewart’s rivaled Phil’s in quantity and consisted of a series of courses. Phil unwrapped his chopsticks and began to wield them with great dexterity.
“Or a navy,” Phil said.
Their meals eaten and a fresh pot of hot tea called for, Stewart began to put to Mary the questions that needed answering.
“You were Fred’s girl.”
“His fiancée in all but name.”
“What was the secret?”
“Naomi refused to accept the fact that he was breaking their engagement.”
“She wouldn’t give back the diamond ring?” Phil asked.
Mary smiled. “That wasn’t the bone of contention.”
“What was?”
“Her refusal to agree that everything between them was over.”
They discussed this for some time. Phil remembered Naomi’s flamboyant entrance at the funeral home, her place of prominence in Sacred Heart, occupying the front pew with the Nevilles, the near public quarrel with Mary in the university club that Roger had told him of.
“When did you last see him?”
Mary thought. “Sunday.” The body had been found on Tuesday.
“Where was that?”
“We had dinner.”
“Your mother says she knew nothing about you and Fred.”
“She didn’t. How I regret now that I didn’t tell her. I think she imagines I dreamt the whole thing up.”
“You last saw him on Sunday?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t visit him at his apartment after that?”
“Certainly not.”
“You never went to his apartment?”
Mary looked thoughtful. “He was very old-fashioned in many ways. It was one of the things that attracted me to him. He was careful to avoid anything that might affect my reputation.”
Phil said, “That sounds like Fred. You know, he said nothing about you to Roger or me.”
“Of course not. We were agreed that my mother would be told first when it could be made public.”
“After Naomi capitulated?”
Mary nodded. “You can imagine what I thought of her, hanging on when there was no point, putting me in such an equivocal position. Oh, there were other reasons for not making a formal announcement.” She looked at Phil. “You know how my mother was. She persisted in thinking of me as an old maid and was constantly trying to throw me at some man of her choice.”
Stewart sipped his tea and said, “The manager of Fred’s building said you visited Fred in his apartment between Sunday and the day his body was discovered.”
Mary just shook her head. “No. I last saw him on Sunday.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
But she was not annoyed by the question. And so they had arrived at a dilemma. On the one hand, the building manager said Mary had been there during the days of Fred’s absence without leave, on the other she said she had last seen Fred on the Sunday.
“He must be mistaken,” Phil said. “The building manager.”
“I don’t know him and I don’t see how he could have known me. He said I had been there?”
“Yes.”
“That’s odd.”
And that was all. She did not protest at all, let alone too much. Phil could see that Stewart did not intend to press the matter. First he would want to talk again to the building manager.
They took Mary back to campus and then Stewart said, “I have to get a recent photograph of her. Asking her mother for one could be sticky.”
Phil said, “No need to do that. We can stop at the apartment and pick up the university staff mug book. Mary should be in that.”
And she was. Such photographs suggested driving license or passport photos, but were sufficient to serve their purposes.
“Where’s Roger?” Jimmy Stewart asked.
Phil looked at his watch. “In class. This is his big day. Two classes.”
“Wow.”
Phil let it go. There was no need to explain the apparent easiness of the academic life. The scant time spent in classrooms would have been surprising if one did not know that professors are, in a sense, at it twenty-four hours a day. Actual teaching is the periodic dissemination of thoughts and materials that accumulate over the long haul, incubating, achieving organization. No doubt it was possible for a professor to prepare a few canned courses and grind them out year after year, leaving his time free for whatever else he chose to do. But that seemed to be rare to the point of nonexistence, at least at Notre Dame.
Santander took some time to answer his door, but then the sound of the television made the door vibrate. Stewart pounded on it again and suddenly there was silence inside. Another minute and then the door opened and Santander looked out at them over a chain.
“IRS,” Stewart said.
Santander gave a wary smile. “Come on.”
“We need to talk.”
“We already talked.”
Stewart began to search the inner pocket of his suit jacket. “Well, if you insist on seeing the search warrant…”
“Just a minute.”
The door closed, a chain rattled, Stewart avoided Phil’s eyes, and soon they were inside.
“What were you watching?” Phil asked.
“Watching.” Santander looked puzzled, then understood. “The box? I just keep it on for company.”
Phil began to slap his knee with the staff mug book and Santander became curious.
“What’s that?”
Stewart said, “You told me that Fred Neville’s girl visited him during the days he was missing.”
“Missing? He was right there in his apartment all along.”
“And you saw a girl visit him.”
“Twice.”
“Had you seen her before?”
“How else would I have recognized her?”
“Good point.” Stewart asked Phil for the mug book. He opened it randomly and handed it to Santander. “You see her there?”
Santander brought the book to within inches of his nose and his head moved as typewriter carriages once had, from left to right, then return, another row, down one page and then the facing page. He looked over the book and shook his head. “No.”
Stewart took the book from Santander and made as if to rise. Then, as if struck by a thought, opened the book, paged toward the back, and handed it again to Santander. Phil knew that Stewart had displayed the page on which Mary Shuster’s photograph was prominent in the middle of a bottom row. They waited for Santander to reach the bottom of the page. He hesitated, then went on to the facing page. A slow reading of the rows of photographs there. He looked over the book, then closed it and handed it back to Stewart.
“Can’t find her?”
“She’s not there.”
Stewart opened the book, stood beside Santander and pointed. “Is that her?”
Santander hardly glanced. “No. I told you she’s not there.”
“Okay.” He looked at Phil. “No need to search the apartment, is there?”
Santander said, “I thought you already had.”
“I meant yours.”
A sputtering Santander accompanied them to the door. He stood in it until they were in Stewart’s car and then closed it, audibly putting the chain back in place. In a moment they heard the roar of the television begin.
9
MEMBERS OF THE ATHLETIC department were housed in a suite of offices separate from those assigned the coaches of the major sports, and were, like those, located in the Joyce Convocation and Athletic Center. Fans entering the building for basketball or hockey games passed the doors of these suites unseeing. But then games were special occasions. The ordinary daily work of the department went on unwitnessed by the vast body of Irish fans, all but unknown to the faculty, except for those who still worked out in the Joyce Center. The building was irreverently called the geodesic bra, its pale twin domes lifting to the sky in saucy presentation. Across the street was the stadium, recently enlarged to accommodate eighty thousand fans, before which stood a magnificent bronze statue of Frank Leahy, the legendary wartime and postwar coach of the Fighting Irish. A bronze Moose Krause, the longtime athletic director, sat on a bench outside the center. The Joyce after whom the center was named was Father Ned Joyce, who had been vice president during the long presidency of Father Hesburgh. Father Joyce was a gentle giant of a man who had retained his South Carolina accent and was credited with keeping the university financially afloat during the Hesburgh years as well as making sure that the athletic program was clean as a whistle.
The death of Fred Neville had cast its brief pall over the center and especially the sports information office where he had worked but, in the manner of such things, the pall lifted, the event began to recede into the past, work resumed. Only Anthony Boule seemed unable to shake off the dazed grief the death of Fred called for.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said to Thelma, the secretary.
“Yes.” Thelma was long of tooth and thin of body, a paragon of efficiency and matter-of-factness.
“No one will ever really replace him.”
“We’ll just soldier on for now.”
“I don’t suppose there’s been any talk of that?”
“Of what?”
“Fred’s replacement.”
Thelma looked at Anthony for a silent moment. “Are you going to apply?’
“Me!”
Anthony laid a stubby hand on where his heart was supposed to be. The unsuccessful beard was meant to compensate for his thinning hair. A favorite office sport had been for him and Fred to try to top one another with athletic lore, with the emphasis on Notre Dame. Anthony considered himself an expert on the postgraduation lives of Notre Dame athletes. Those who had gone on to professional careers were easy to track, but of course the vast majority of student athletes did not turn pro but continued in lines as various as the student body as a whole. Anthony had never been able to stump Fred, whose memory was a matter of wonderment to all. But then Fred had never stumped him in his favorite category—life after Notre Dame.
“Why not?”
“Has anyone mentioned it?”
Thelma tried her more alluring smile. “I just did.”
“But you’re prejudiced.”
“In what way?”
He hesitated. Anthony did not have a long track record with women. The truth was that they frightened him, not least Thelma, whose interest carried the suggestion of some shared future. He had taken her to lunch half a dozen times; it was part of his daily ritual to take a chair beside her desk and shoot the bull. Until he realized that she did not consider herself just one of the guys and interpreted his attention in an alarming way. But in the days after the funeral, he had renewed the practice.
“You found Fred tough to work for.”
“That’s true. And of course Mary Shuster always took pride of place.”
“How about her?” Anthony said.
“Her mourning? Apparently they were engaged.”
“It wasn’t apparent to his parents.”
“But you saw them when she dropped by. If that was platonic I’m an Aristotelian.”
Anthony let it go. Thelma knew things that he did not. He often felt stumped when speaking with her, not that she took on the triumphalist air Fred had when he got Anthony off his speciality and shamed him with the extent of his expertise. Anthony took pleasure in impressing others with his grasp of the history of Notre Dame sports, but in the privacy of his own heart he admitted that Fred had it all over him.
“Did Fred ever speak to you about Naomi McTear?” Thelma asked.
“Not in so many words.”
She dipped her chin and looked at him over her half glasses. “How then?”
“They always got together when Naomi was in town.”
“But that was business.”
“Sure it was. But a little monkey business too.”
Thelma turned her chair toward him. “Tell.”
“There’s really nothing to tell.”
“Come on.”
He made her beg before he told her of what he had heard about the network apartment Naomi used when she was in town for Notre Dame games. One of the desk clerks there was a regular at Houlihan’s, a sports bar a mile from the apartment. A bulbous fellow named Scott whose tone was insinuating and who believed that everyone but himself was living a bacchanalian life.
“You wouldn’t believe what goes on there on game weekends.”
They were sitting in Houlihan’s, in the bar where a dozen television sets brought in every game in progress anywhere. Racing, one of several sports Anthony could not abide, was coming in on both sets in their immediate view.
“Parties?”
“You can call them that.”
“Well, you have a good many footloose celebrities there.”
Scott’s brows danced significantly.
“Isn’t that where the network crews put up?”
“A lot of them.”
“Naomi McTear.”
Scott reacted as if he had guessed the winning number. “I suppose you know about that since you work with him.”
“Who?”
“Neville. Fred Neville.”
How could he not be curious about what the man he considered his rival was up to. If anything. He waved away the suggestion.
“Fred and Naomi McTear.”
That had been a year ago. Anthony continued to express disbelief, not giving Scott the satisfaction of thinking he believed him. But he did check it out and it was true. Back then it hadn’t only been at the network apartment. Anthony had followed them one Saturday night to the Carriage House, where he waited for hours in his car, smoking surreptitiously, from time to time getting out to stretch his legs and stare at the night sky above with its sprinkling of stars. It was quiet as could be out there, though from time to time there was the distant sound of a plane taking off, one of the private craft flown in by the dozens by affluent fans. Anthony tried not to think of what he was doing, of what he would think of anyone else doing what he was doing. It was sneaky, it was low. He went back to his car and thought of leaving. Instead he lit a cigarette and continued to wait.
When finally they came out, it was clear they had supped and sipped well. In an elaborate display of joking gallantry, Fred opened the door for her and nearly fell backward as he did so. Clear tinkling laughter in the thin night air. Fred drove unsteadily out of the lot and headed back toward town. If he were stopped he would be in trouble. DUI. What a thing the local rag would make of that. Anthony, by contrast, felt as sober as a judge and it was with the eyes of a judge that he watched them emerge from the car at the building where Scott worked and go inside. So far nothing indictable. He had waited in vain. Still he decided to wait for Fred to come out and bring the whole silly evening to closure. But the minutes passed, and then a quarter hour, and Fred did not appear. Anthony, numb from lack of sleep and not welcoming the morning light, was still behind the wheel of his car when Fred appeared. It was nearly nine in the morning. He got into his car and drove off and Ant
hony went to his bed, pondering what he had witnessed.
It was a version of this, less unflattering to himself, that he told the toothy Thelma. No need to tell her that, while this had gone on for some months, it seemed to have stopped suddenly a few months ago. If Fred and Naomi were getting together it was not in the network apartment. His effort to strike up a friendship with Santander went nowhere.
“So he must have given her that rock.”
Anthony shrugged.
“It’s odd that we’re surprised that celebrities can get as lonely as we do.”
“Celebrities!”
“Naomi.”
“Oh, sure.” He had thought she meant Fred.
“It has to be a lonely life.”
“Oh, I don’t know. On the move, game preparation, friends from coast to coast.”
“She wouldn’t have had a Fred from coast to coast.”
“How can you tell?”
“The diamond ring.”
Anthony shrugged.
“Where are we having lunch?”
“I didn’t know we were.”
“That’s why I told you.”
What could he do? Thelma wouldn’t be all that bad-looking if it weren’t for her teeth. And they weren’t that bad when she smiled. They went arm-in-arm into the snowy world.
10
“MARY WASN’T THE WOMAN, Phil?”
“No. If there was such a woman. I would hate to have to rely on Santander’s testimony in court. Besides, visiting someone is not a crime.”
“Provided that someone was alive when one arrived and was not dead when one left.”
“It must have been suicide, Roger.”
“Must it?”
“Who has a motive? Mary loved the guy.”
“Who was engaged to another woman.”
“Which she knew because he told her. She understood that Naomi was not giving up easily.”
Roger sat and hummed and then, as if despairing of achieving perfect pitch, said, “It is so hard to imagine Fred as the acute point of such a triangle. It was news enough when we learned about Mary, but suddenly there is Naomi. What a Bluebeard our friend has turned out to be.”
Irish Coffee Page 7