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.
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.
In graduate school it had dawned on her that she had joined something like the nunnery. Maybe a vow of chastity wasn’t in prospect, but neither was anything like an ordinary marriage. Lucy was on track to becoming a female academic, and everything else in her life was presumed to be secondary to that. A few dates convinced her that the males were interested in arrangements and little more. Isn’t that what feminism meant? And then on a fateful cab ride to campus she met Alan. He was driving the cab. When they got there, he got out, opened the door for her, carried her luggage to her door. He refused a tip and noted the address, and she went inside liking it that he had liked her.
He called. They arranged to meet. She didn’t want her housemates to know. From the start, she felt like Lady Chatterley about it. He was smart but uneducated. They bowled; they went to sports bars; she watched more games on television than she ever had in her life. And they never talked about the fact that she was a graduate student in English. She loved it. He became her reality principle. Then, in a whoosh of romantic impetuosity, after she had passed her written exams and needed respite, they became lovers.
“So, when will it be?”
“It?”
“The wedding.”
He meant it. My God. “But I’m going to be a teacher.”
“I have an aunt who’s a teacher.”
They got married. A civil ceremony. She moved in with him, not letting her friends know he was her husband. She was leading a double life. What would it be like if she dropped out of school and … And what? When she was with Alan that seemed possible, but then she was awarded a Fulbright to England. He just looked at her when she told him. She tried to explain to him what a coup that was, nobody got Fulbrights to England. It was the first time they really talked about her academic life. She tried to convince him they could go to Cambridge together. He kept on staring at her. So she had to decide. In her carrel in the library, she tried to convince herself that being the wife of a cabdriver was preferable to having an academic career, but she lost the argument. Only he wouldn’t have been a cabdriver anymore. It seemed to be his argument to keep her. He said he planned to drive a semi on the interstates of the country.
What would Jane Austen have done? They didn’t get a divorce, they just separated. Lucy went on her Fulbright, published several articles on Peacock, and was hired by Notre Dame. Confused hopes for the future began when Alan moved to South Bend. He could drive a cab anywhere. Raul came on to her relentlessly, but she managed to keep it all on the level of laughter. Until Pauline showed up at her office, hair to her shoulders, wearing a fingertip-length coat and a colorful scarf that hung to her ankles. She came in, shut the door, and asked what the hell was going on. Lucy had no idea what she was talking about.
“Raul. Don’t think I don’t know.”
“Sit down. What do you know?”
How do you convince a wife that you wouldn’t take her husband if he came with the winning lottery ticket? In self-defense, she told Pauline about Alan. Like an idiot she wept while she told her story. Pauline sat looking at her with those beautiful big eyes that soon brimmed with tears. Then she told Lucy what it was like being married to Raul. Lucy felt a sisterly solidarity Hilda Faineant would not have understood. When Pauline got up to go, they embraced.
“What a scarf,” Lucy said.
“I bought Raul one, too.”
Of course Lucy didn’t tell her about Raul’s shenanigans with women students. She must know about that. But why had he invented an affair with a colleague to tease Pauline with? What a relief it had been to confide in Pauline about Alan.
* * *
Then weird things began to happen. There was the fire in Raul’s wastebasket; his Corvette was firebombed. Lucy wondered if this was Oscar Wack’s revenge. Oscar was the only collea
gue she had told about Alan. It was Oscar who brought up pogo sticks, saying wistfully that he’d had one when he was a kid. So she bought one for him, bringing it to campus early one morning and getting the cleaning lady to put it in Oscar’s office. Surprise, surprise. Only the surprise had been on her.
For days after Raul’s body was found, Lucy avoided the third floor of Decio. The memorial service for Raul was in the chapel in Malloy, and Pauline was tragically beautiful wearing a fedora, a black coat with a fur collar, and that many-colored scarf hanging to her knees like a defiant badge of grief.
“May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.”
At which words, Pauline whispered to Lucy, “He had no soul.”
5
The only English professor Mary Alice had ever liked was Lucy Goessen, and she had kept in touch with her, more or less, since switching majors. She had suggested doing a profile of Professor Goessen for Via Media but been dissuaded. “I don’t have tenure.”
Mary Alice understood. Any connection with the alternative paper could have been the kiss of death with Lucy’s colleagues. Mary Alice did cover the memorial service for Professor Izquierdo and afterward talked with Lucy, waiting until she was finished commiserating with the strikingly beautiful Mrs. Izquierdo.
“Come to my office,” Lucy said.
So they crossed over to Decio and took the elevator to the third floor. Before unlocking her door, Lucy stared at the closed door across the hall and shuddered. When they were settled with coffee, it was of Raul Izquierdo’s death that they spoke.
“There are so many things about it that don’t make sense.”
“Well, they’ve arrested the man who did it.”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “So tell me what you’ve been doing.”
Lucy seemed skeptical about her enthusiasm for Roger Knight, giving a little cry when she heard he was lecturing on F. Marion Crawford.
“Good grief.”
“I know. But he can make anything interesting.”
Lucy had never met Roger. Maybe that would have to wait until she had tenure, too. Mary Alice felt she was gushing when she explained what Roger’s courses had meant for her. And she mentioned that Roger had been a private detective, with his brother Philip. Somewhat to her surprise, Lucy didn’t express shock at this.
The Letter Killeth Page 15