Green Thumb

by Ralph McInerny

  “More likely hung over.”

  Crown smiled. Last night the foursome had dined at the Morris Inn, where they were staying, gone on to the bar afterward, and from thence to the suite Mort was writing off as a business expense, a large corner room from which the bedroom was separated by what Barley called a distinction of reason.

  “A what?”

  “Don’t get him started.”

  Whenever Ben Barley returned to campus whole lectures came back to him that he had not thought of for years. He was particularly susceptible to remembered philosophy courses. He had majored in theology and mathematics, unsure whether he had a vocation to the priesthood or to high school teaching. In any event, he became a lawyer in Chicago.

  “It’s funny, when I come down for games it doesn’t happen. I think I have to be with you guys. Do you remember the Principle of Sufficient Reason?”

  A pillow thrown from across the room silenced him. There followed ten minutes of the kind of mayhem that had characterized their undergraduate life: cushions torn from the couch and used as chest protectors, bottles of tonic water turned into weapons with which to spray others. Crown, remembering a bit of Latin before the liturgical reforms unleashed by Vatican II, intoned the Asperges me hyssopo when he shook his bottle and then, with its mouth half covered by the ball of his thumb, directed a spray of tonic water in a wide arc. A lamp was overturned, a chair upended, shouts and laughter filled the room. When the activity subsided, they collapsed on the floor wherever they had stood, filled with fierce and false memories of carefree youth.

  “More likely,” Ben agreed. “How’s your head?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  The two men took their second shots and drove on to where Chris awaited them beside his drive. Chris was the only one of the four who golfed well and he professed to prefer tennis. But then he played every game well. Effortlessly. He had done well producing infomercials for cable television channels, a once promising creativity directed into lucrative if trivial pursuits. Once he himself as well as the others had expected great things from him in the literary line. But the competent short stories of his undergraduate days had not proved a prelude to anything more. The previous night he had announced his attention to write a book called Ventriloquism for Dummies. All had laughed and then fallen silent, as if commemorating the death of his promise.

  Toolin, Crown, Barley, and Sadler. The four had kept in desultory touch since graduation. It had been Sadler who convinced a significant number of the class to defy the alumni association and hold their class reunion apart from the five-year intervals that brought other classes back to the campus for bouts of nostalgia. So it was that thirty-five members of the class of 1977 had reserved rooms in the Morris Inn and returned for two days of togetherness at Notre Dame. Paths that had diverged briefly converged and their practice had received the eventual benediction of the alumni association, thereby removing some of the zest from their reunions. Since he had been the initiator, Mort retained the right to devise the schedule of these days. The golf tournament on the second and final day had become de rigueur, looked forward to throughout the year by Mort, who could not abandon his undergraduate dream of athletic prowess. He bought the instructional videos advertised in Toolin’s infomericals, he sent off for trick clubs and devices guaranteed to improve his swing, and he was coached weekly by a pro in Minneapolis. And his game improved—so long as he did not play at Notre Dame. Returning to the campus brought back all the ineptitude of his undergraduate days and the faults that had been overcome in Minneapolis returned with a vengeance in South Bend. His old friends were right to suspect that he had stolen some time to practice before the scheduled match, despite previous agreements made with less than clear minds the night before. Perhaps he considered that playing a few holes on the old course did not violate the agreement, though none of his friends would have suspected him of such scrupulosity.

  “Maybe he ran away with Maureen O’Kelly,” Barley suggested on the first green, speaking while Toolin was in the act of putting.

  Crown barked with laughter. Toolin’s ball rolled twenty feet past the hole.

  Since the renunion was Mort Sadler’s inspiration, it was boycotted by the women in their class.

  “Girlcotted?” Barley asked. A return to Notre Dame brought back facetiousness like a plague.

  Maureen O’Kelly had taken a room in the Morris Inn as a member of the reunion, accompanied by Francie, her eldest daughter. When Mort had been sent the list of registrants by the Morris Inn he had immediately phoned his old roommates to inform them of the outrage.

  “She’s a member of the class, Mort.”

  “Wasn’t she our valedictorian?”

  As if anyone could forget the commencement at which Maureen had harangued the twelve thousand people gathered in the Joyce Center for their graduation. Maureen had recalled the campaign carried on in The Observer without mentioning Mortimer Sadler by name, but of course every student there knew to whom she referred. Mortimer had sat sweating through the ordeal, which was made worse by his remembering the jocular incredulity with which Maureen had greeted his advances during their freshman year. Her disdainful dismissal of his suit had been the origin of his campaign against coeducation at Notre Dame. And now, on the culminating day of their four-year stay, she was allowed to malign him without possibility of reply. He had seethed. He had seethed during the years since whenever he recalled that ignominious occasion. And now she was registered in the Morris Inn, brazenly present at the reunion that had hitherto attracted only males of the class.

  “I understand the poor woman is a widow.”

  “Only a trial separation. And she is not a poor woman. She is amply provided for.”

  “She is more beautiful now than when she was young.”

  This was the unkindest cut of all, because it was so manifestly true. The previous night, before the golf tournament, when the four old roommates—they had presumed to refer to themselves as the Four Horsemen but dropped it when others called them the Four Jockeys—were dining in Sorin’s Restaurant at the inn, Maureen had come to their table. Her luxuriant hair was still golden, her features might have adorned the cover of a fashion magazine, her green eyes were playful as she stood over them.

  “Ah, the chauvinists reunited.”

  This accusation was vigorously protested by Mortimer’s three friends. Barley assured Maureen that they had had nothing to do with Mortimer’s quixotic campaign.

  “But you never repudiated it.”

  “We do so now,” Barely assured her, and two other heads nodded assent. During this exchange, Maureen had studiously avoided looking at Mortimer, who sat transfixed by her beauty as he vainly sought some word of repartee that would destroy her superiority.

  “Let bygones be bygones,” Toolin said. “After all, you have come.”

  “My daughter Francie and I are looking forward to the tournament. She was runner-up for the state amateur championship in Minnesota.”

  “How is your game?”

  “Not quite as good as hers.”

  “Are you willing to wager on it?” Mortimer managed to say.

  “Wager what?”

  “My score against yours.”

  “What is your handicap?”

  “Seventeen.”

  She laughed. “Think of all the strokes I’ll have to give you.”

  But the offer had been made and was heartily endorsed by Mortimer’s companions. The bet was for a hundred dollars. Belatedly, Mortimer remembered that Maureen had won the women’s golf tournament during their commencement week. Even with the strokes she apparently had to give him, he was uncertain that he could beat her.

  “What is your handicap, Maureen?”

  “The memory of an elephant.” And her green eyes burned into Mortimer’s uplifted face. “See you on the course.”

  She walked away, and her graceful movements were followed with murmuring approval from Mortimer’s table companions. He had walked into a trap. Maureen wo
uld beat him tomorrow, and it would stand as the refutation of everything he had written in The Observer.

  “She won’t stay single long,” Barley said.

  “Her daughter is a lovely girl.”

  All this was dust and ashes to Mortimer and he was unable to conceal it, thus opening himself to the teasing of his old friends. He sought consolation in drink and later, during the horseplay in his suite, he seemed to have forgotten the episode. But he was filled with foreboding. What if his golfing skills should desert him again when he played on campus?

  Thus it was that his three old friends concluded that a fearful Mortimer had gone out to play some practice holes on Burke before teeing up on Warren. Perhaps he would have been felled on the latter course, but there his death would not have been tainted with dishonor from breaking his promise about practicing to his old friends. Everyone assumed it was a stroke that killed him.

  4

  Mortimer Sadler’s death had been caused by poison.

  “Poison!” Roger said when he took Jimmy Stewart’s call and was informed of the result of the autopsy.

  “Deadly nightshade.”

  “Good Lord. How in the world…”

  “That’s what we have to find out.”

  Roger looked up deadly nightshade on the Google Web site and printed out a lengthy entry. After glancing through it, he put it aside. Roger was now reading the critical essays of Barbey d’Aurevilly, moving systematically through the volumes that filled a shelf on the eighth floor of the Hesburgh Library. He found it difficult to concentrate in light of what had happened to Mortimer Sadler—difficult, not impossible. But while he read, half his brain was pondering what he had heard from Jimmy Stewart. No one seeing him smiling as he turned the pages of the book would imagine that he was also thinking of the death that had occurred that morning on the sixth green of the old golf course.

  But Phil was not deceived. Meanwhile he went downtown to be of such assistance as he could to Stewart, having received a call from Father Carmody.

  “Philip, I am authorized to engage your services to represent the best interests of the university during the investigation into Mortimer Sadler’s death.”

  “It is now thought that he was poisoned.”

  “Well, he had a poison pen.”

  Whatever the priest’s intention, the remark suggested that Sadler’s death was somehow linked to his undergraduate journalism. Greg Whelan had come for lunch, while they were awaiting the autopsy report, and told them of Sadler’s constant ranting about coeducation in his columns in The Observer. Greg had read them all, but then he seemed to have read everything contained in the university archives, where he was an associate director.

  “Did he think the university would revoke the policy?”

  “He argued that they should. Of course he knew he was embarked on a losing campaign. It added zest to his style.”

  Jimmy welcomed Phil’s cooperation. “It should smooth our way on campus. There are all kinds of people I must talk to before they leave.”

  “His former classmates?”

  “Thirty-five or so are here for the reunion he organized.”

  * * *

  The tournament at Warren went on as scheduled, and Maureen had the fifth-lowest score. She dismissed the suggestion that, as the top woman golfer, she should receive a trophy. Her daughter had outscored Maureen but, of course, she was not entered in the tournament. She was in the class of 2005 at St. Mary’s, her loveliness reminiscent of her mother as a girl. The former roommates of St. Edward’s Hall were married, one and all, but it would have taken a St. Anthony of the desert to have been unmoved by the beauty of mother and daughter. The beads of sweat on their foreheads, pale thanks to the sunshades they had worn, and their damp golden hair enhanced rather than detracted from their beauty.

  “Like mother, like daughter,” Toolin said, and sighed.

  Barley had been on the phone to the Morris Inn and returned with the alarming news. Mortimer Sadler had been taken by ambulance from the old course and was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital.

  “Dead!”

  The inevitability of death in general does not diminish its surprise in the individual case, but this was a man of their own age, one they had known when young, a man with whom they had drunk and cavorted the previous night. This was not the time to comment on the perfidy that had taken him out on the old course at the crack of dawn in the wan hope of acquiring a competitive advantage for the tournament that lay ahead.

  “It was the bet with Maureen that undid him,” Toolin nevertheless decided.

  It was only when showered, restored with a drink in the clubhouse, and returned to the Morris Inn, that they learned the manner of Mortimer’s death.

  “Poison!”

  “What a way to go.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “‘Do it’?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? He couldn’t face the prospect of being beaten by the beautiful Maureen.”

  “She can beat me anytime,” Crown said equivocally.

  The remark fell like an obscenity uttered in church.

  “Poor Mort.”

  “May he rest in peace.”

  “Amen.”

  5

  Cal Swithins had been let go by The South Bend Tribune but continued to regard himself as a reporter, however he was regarded by others. He wrote a column for a shopping guide that was flung free at doorsteps in the city and stuffed with other unwanted materials into curbside mailboxes in the suburbs. The fuzzy photograph that accompanied these efforts—“Swithins Sez”—was a reasonable likeness of himself twenty years before. Time had taken its toll since then, time and the disappointments and reversals that had characterized his journalistic career. To himself, Swithins explained the fact that no one had ever mentioned the column to him as a result of that imperfect likeness. The title of the column had been chosen by the editor and publisher, Maddie Yost, whose late husband had founded The Shopper. She had come into sole possession of it some years before when her husband had gone off a country road and totaled the family car in a collision with a sturdy oak.

  “‘Swithins Sez’?”

  “It’s catchy.”

  “It’s corny.”

  “Of course it’s corny. That’s the point.”

  He ended by being grateful for the out-of-date photo that accompanied his animadversions.

  “Don’t use no words like that on this paper.”

  He promised to restrict his style to monosyllables and unadorned declarative sentences. Maddie ignored this grammatical lore.

  “It’s just filler anyway.”

  With what she paid him, it was a licence to starve as well. Not that Maddie thought of him as a columnist. His main task, in her eyes, was to drum up new advertisers for the paper. Of course, he had other arrows in his quiver as well. He did piecework for the newspaper that had fired him, writing the death notices as well as unsigned accounts of Little League baseball in season. His application for employment was on file in the Office of Human Resources at Notre Dame. He longed to be taken on by one of the campus publications, where the pay was allegedly regal and the work risible. From time to time, he wrote critiques of these publications and dropped them off at the relevant offices, showing the flag. With the passage of years, he had begun to doubt that he would ever become a university employee. This was added to his list of grievances. In his rented room on South Main he had a little stuffed leprechaun, picked up at the Hammes Bookstore on campus. He used it as a pincushion whenever he unwrapped a new shirt, muttering what might have seemed curses as he plunged them in.

  But his long run of bad luck had not induced despair. Despite it all, hope sprang, if not eternal then at least intermittently, in Swithins’s breast. He lived on the alert for the big chance. When he heard of the death on the Notre Dame golf course something told him not to ask for whom this bell tolled.

  One of the advantages of having a persona that did not attract attention—so
metimes Swithins thought he had become the invisible man, so thoroughly was he ignored—was that he could loll around the press room at police headquarters and keep au courant without being noticed. It was there that he heard the death of Mortimer Sadler mentioned. Swithins looked at the speaker, Raskow, a dissolute overweight veteran of the press who affected an unlit cigar and wide-brimmed felt hat, the better to cover his absence of hair. Raskow clearly did not see the significance of what he said.

  Swithins rose and went unnoticed out the door and down the hall to the office of Jimmy Stewart. There was a tall stranger with him. Their conversation stopped when Swithins stood in the doorway.

  “What can you tell me about Mortimer Sadler?”

  “I don’t remember your name.”

  “Calvin Swithins. I’m a reporter.”

  “I thought you left town.”

  “I’m back.”

  “I’ll be making a statement to the press later.”

  But Swithins had put two and two together. If Jimmy Stewart was interested in Sadler’s death, homicide must be involved.

  “How was the murder accomplished?”

  “Murder?”

  “You’re in homicide, aren’t you?”

  Stewart was annoyed, but then he was used to dealing with such domesticated animals as Raskow.

  “Come to the press conference later. You back with the Tribune?”

  “I never left.” Swithins hitched up his belt. “I do the obituaries.”

  Stewart relaxed. This wasn’t lost on Swithins. He should have used this earlier. Stewart was clearly relieved to conclude that Swithins’s only interest in the death of Mortimer Sadler was to write his death notice. This, he decided, would be his cover as he investigated the matter. Already he was certain that the death of Mortimer Sadler was his ticket to fame and fortune.

  “This a new man?” Swithins asked, indicating the stranger.

  “I’m Philip Knight,” the tall man said, hesitating, then giving Swithins his hand.

  If Swithins had been a pinball machine he would have lit up on learning that this was the private detective whose brother was now a member of the faculty of Notre Dame. Knight had teamed with Jimmy Stewart on other campus investigations.