Irish Coffee

by Ralph McInerny

  The phone rang. “Thelma.”

  Her eyes rolled upward and she exposed her teeth. “Can I take a message, Scott? I have to leave this phone open.”

  She nodded, murmuring affirmatively as she listened, then put down the phone. Almost immediately it rang. Rose at the library had LMP open before her. A lengthy conversation ensued, with Thelma taking rapid notes. Anthony got up and went to Fred’s office. The door was closed, but not locked. He went inside and shut the door behind him and was enclosed by the absence of Fred. He went around the desk and sat, imagining himself as Fred’s successor. But the book idea would put an end to such thoughts. That realization, plus the sense of treachery going ahead without Scott gave him, convinced him he had to call a halt before Thelma went too far.

  The seat he sat in was both comfortable and upright and wheeled easily about. He turned this way and that, looked at Fred’s framed Notre Dame diploma, at the plaques and awards he had received. It was a depressing thought that those walls would be largely bare if this were his office. He could put up his Boston College diploma, a conversation piece that could lead into talk about Frank Leahy.

  The door opened and Thelma came in, closing the door with a practiced bump of her hip. She was studying the notes she had. Then she looked up at Anthony sitting at the desk.

  “Well don’t you look pretty.”

  “Thelma, I’m having doubts.”

  She came and sat on the desk. “Of course you are. This is a big step. But it’s a step into the big time. Let’s go over what I’ve learned.”

  There seemed little harm in that. Sometimes the best way to handle temptation was not vigorous rejection but parrying it by apparently giving in.

  Thelma called what she thought was the most promising agent on the list and conducted the conversation herself. Anthony might have objected, feeling for a moment as he had with Scott, but it was better this way. The responsibility seemed to devolve upon Thelma. No need to tell her right away about his doubts. She was tantalizingly indirect when she talked with the agent, not wanting to give away too much, just enough to be tantalizing.

  “It’s a Notre Dame sports book with a difference.” The magic words. The shelves in the bookstore groaned under Notre Dame titles but they sold like candy and not just on game weekends. Alumni were scattered across the country, almost all of them potential buyers of such a book.

  “You appreciate that we have to be cautious. Who’s we? Just say it is someone in the athletic department. Of course I’m calling from Notre Dame.”

  Once again she was making notes. Fifteen minutes later, having parried the agent’s efforts to know more, she hung up.

  “Here’s what we do. First, a one-page statement of the thesis of the book. Second, a rough indication of the chapters. When you get those done I’ll fax them off to him and we could know in hours if it will fly.”

  Again a point was reached when he should dash cold water on the idea. But Thelma had already gone to so much trouble and that seemed cruel. Besides there was no guarantee that the agent would be able to place the idea.

  “Use Fred’s computer, but don’t store anything. Caution is the watchword.”

  She got off the desk and looked down at him with her arms folded. Anthony decided that she wasn’t all that bad-looking, or maybe he was just used to her. And it was hard not to be impressed with the way she had taken the ball and run with it. Again, she kissed his cheek, putting her arms around his neck.

  “Fred always kept the door open when I was in here with him.”

  The remark hung in the air after she had left, urging him to get going. When he had something printed out they would talk about it. Thelma was a flirt, no doubt of that. And he himself had only been a target of opportunity before. When Fred was around, it was for him that she had batted her lashes.

  6

  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.”

  7

  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.”r />
  “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.”

  8

  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.”