Green Thumb

by Ralph McInerny

  “You can probably find what you need on campus,” Knight said.

  “Good idea.”

  “Try the Alumni Office in the Eck Center.”

  Swithins dutifully left, going out to his car. He was still seated behind the wheel, plotting his strategy, when a car emerged from the police garage, Stewart at the wheel, Knight in the passenger seat beside him.

  He got his car started on the second try and pulled away from the curb, keeping the unmarked police car in sight.

  6

  The members of the class of ’77 had been asked to delay their departure plans, but after preliminary questioning this seemed an unnecessary hardship. In the end, only Sadler’s former roommates were asked to stay. Maureen O’Kelly and her daughter Francie had booked into the Morris Inn for a week. It occurred to Jimmy Stewart that he and Phil Knight knew as much of the circumstances of Sadler’s death as anyone else, having been on the course when he died.

  Max, the starter, in response to instructions from Stewart, had taken possession of Sadler’s golf clubs, driving the cart to which they were strapped into the maintenance shed and posting a DO NOT TOUCH sign on its windshield. Cart and clubs were taken away to the police lab shortly after noon. Meanwhile, Jimmy, with Phil at his side, talked with Sadler’s former roommates.

  Chris Toolin asked to be first, as he had an appointment in Chicago the following afternoon. Had Sadler given any indication that his life was in danger?

  “Wasn’t it suicide?”

  “Why would you think so?”

  “Who else would do it?”

  “He had no enemies?”

  “Of course there were people who didn’t like him, people who didn’t know him as well as I did. He held pretty strong opinions and wasn’t shy about expressing them.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything. I don’t know about any of his associates in Minneapolis, but no one on campus would do such a thing.”

  “Well, he’s dead.”

  “Why have you excluded suicide?”

  “We haven’t.”

  Toolin seemed to review the conversation thus far to see if this was true. He accepted Stewart’s disclaimer.

  “What kind of poison was it?”

  “Deadly nightshade.”

  “Sounds like a lethal window blind.”

  “It’s lethal, all right.”

  “Where can it be obtained?”

  “We’re looking into that.”

  “Mort wouldn’t know a nightshade from a venetian blind.”

  “Was he despondent, down, sad?”

  “You should have been at our celebration last night.” Toolin smiled. His smile faded. “He did make a silly bet on today’s match.”

  And so they heard of the appearance of Maureen O’Kelly at their table in the dining room.

  “Why would he make such a bet with her?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We’ve got time.”

  Toolin glanced at his watch. “Coeducation began the year before we entered Notre Dame. Mortimer Sadler became a big foe of it, writing all kinds of articles in The Observer, urging the university to return to its traditional status as an all-male institution.”

  “Didn’t he like girls?”

  Toolin tried not to smile. “They didn’t like him. In freshman year he made a big play for Maureen. She just made fun of him. His luck continued bad. Then he began his crusade against coeducation.”

  “A male scorned?” Phil asked.

  Toolin nodded. “This was all a long time ago.”

  “Is he married?”

  “Married? He has four children.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “All girls. He wouldn’t let them enroll here. Sent them all to St. Mary’s.” His mouth dropped. “Have they been told?”

  “They might want to talk to an old friend of his.”

  “My God, I’d rather not.”

  Jimmy had already called Minneapolis and told Mrs. Sadler that she was now a widow. Not that bluntly, of course, but there was no way the news he had to give could be softened. Nor was the task made easier by the suggestion that an autopsy be conducted. Patricia Sadler tearfully agreed and said she would be on the first available flight to South Bend.

  “Northwest has a direct flight,” she added, and gave a little sob. “I know because Mort took it. The kids can drive down.”

  * * *

  Jim Crown knew a good deal of Sadler’s life in Minneapolis, which he visited often from Rochester, where he was on the staff of the Mayo Clinic.

  “That’s out of Agatha Christie,” he said when told of the deadly nightshade.

  “Have you had any experience of it?”

  “Only in bad fiction.”

  “Who might have poisoned him?”

  “No one among his business associates. He was the toast of Minneapolis. Here at Notre Dame he had a reputation for controversy, but I think he left that behind at graduation.”

  “Domestic life all right?”

  “He has four kids. He and Pat are like honeymooners.”

  “Jackie Gleason.”

  “That was before my time.”

  “Mine too.”

  Crown held up a hand. “You know, when Mort was an undergraduate he once made himself sick to avoid an exam. He nearly killed himself. Accidentally. What was it he took?” Crown tried to recall but could not. “What if he was trying to get out of the tournament and the bet with Maureen O’Kelly and he accidentally killed himself?”

  “Had he ever tried anything like that since he was a student?”

  “Lieutenant, you have to remember what coming back here does. It doesn’t much matter what you have done since graduation—being on campus restores the persona you had here. It’s as if the experience of a lifetime is erased and you’re just a stupid kid again. You should have seen the four of us romping last night.”

  * * *

  Ben Barley’s eyes were red from crying. His was the first real emotion Jimmy and Phil had encountered among Sadler’s old friends.

  “The poor sonofagun.” Barley dabbed at his eyes. “The only comfort is that he died at Notre Dame.”

  “Did he want that?”

  Barley stared. “Who wouldn’t? Gentlemen, this is a special place. You have to be an alumnus to understand.”

  “Would he have killed himself in order to die here?”

  “Suicide? A mortal sin? Not on your life. Mortimer Sadler was an outstanding Catholic, a true son of Notre Dame.”

  “I understand he didn’t like the daughters of Notre Dame.”

  Barley made a face. “That was long ago.”

  “Someone said that coming back to campus turns you into an undergraduate again, or words to that effect.”

  Barley nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true. Up to a point.”

  “How about the bet with Mrs. O’Kelly?”

  “You don’t think that she…?”

  “Why would we think that?”

  “What you said. She hated Mort’s guts. Have you heard of the talk she gave at commencement?”

  “Tell us about it.”

  “She really took after Mort in it. Before thousands of people. Not by name, of course, but we knew he was the target.”

  “Why was she speaking at commencement?”

  “She was valedictorian.”

  “Smart?”

  Barley closed his eyes and whistled softly. “Brilliant. And she was as beautiful then as she is now.”

  “She stopped by your table in the dining room last night.”

  “So you’ve been told of that.”

  “Isn’t that when the bet was made?”

  “I don’t think either of them was serious.”

  After talking with Barley, Jimmy decided to take a break and they went into the bar for a beer. Sitting at a little table, looking out at the greenery, they reviewed what they had learned. It didn’t help much. Then Jimmy called in. He held the phone to his ear, his face impassive
. He turned off the phone and looked at Phil.

  “The poison was in his water bottle.”

  7

  Francie O’Kelly had agreed to accompany her mother on this grudge return to Notre Dame but her motive, of course, was otherwise. She would be a senior at St. Mary’s across the way and had an ambivalent attitude toward the larger institution. St. Mary’s continued as a women’s college, having successfully resisted the blandishments of Notre Dame to merge. It was the failure of that effort at uniting the two institutions that had led to Notre Dame’s decision to go coed. At the time, this had been thought vindictive since the supposition was that if women could go to Notre Dame, they would eschew St. Mary’s and the college would wither on the vine. In any event, the college flourished. Its students had all the advantages of the facilities at Notre Dame while retaining the repose and dignity of a women’s institution. Despite the presence of so many eligible women on the Notre Dame campus, perhaps because of it, the women of St. Mary’s continued to be favored by Notre Dame men. Thus it was that Francie and Paul Sadler had met and entered upon a stormy but unbreakable relationship. This trip to South Bend with her mother gave Francie the opportunity of seeing Paul, who was taking a summer course in botany and working with the golf sports camp, the position secured by the fact that he was a member of the golf team.

  “How was your game?”

  “Okay.”

  “Beat your mother?”

  “Of course.”

  “Come on, she’s good.”

  Francie dipped her head in acknowledgment of this. She herself golfed well because she didn’t take the game seriously, and it still surprised her that intelligent people like Paul and her mother could consider knocking a ball about and rolling it into a hole as an accomplishment to be boasted of. ESPN carried matches in strange sports, and trying to follow them brought home to her the idiocy of most games. Francie was wise enough to keep such heresy to herself. With Paul she was willing to talk golf until the cows came home.

  “How about tonight?”

  “I promised my mother to have dinner with her. Want to join us?”

  “Where?”

  “The Morris Inn.”

  He shook his head. “My uncle is staying there.”

  This was the notorious Mortimer Sadler, her mother’s nemesis, bête noire, and designated Hittite. Paul seemed scarcely more fond of his uncle than did Maureen O’Kelly.

  “What’s he ever done to you?” she had asked the first time Paul made a face at the mention of his uncle Mortimer.

  “It’s a family thing.”

  “Oh well…”

  “It would bore you.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  There were four Sadler siblings: two sons, Mortimer and Paul’s father, Samuel, who was a few years older; and the two girls, Bridget and Irene, both younger. They had married and moved away from Minneapolis, but by the terms of their father’s will the four were equal heirs to the fortune he had amassed. They not only owned equal shares in the Sadler insurance agency, the four were on the board of governors of the Sadler Foundation. Mortimer was president of both the agency and the foundation because Samuel had no head for business. Paul had been raised in Deephaven, the youngest of three, and when he went off to Notre Dame his widowed father sold the house and bought a cabin on an isolated shore of Lake Minnetonka.

  “What does he do?”

  “He reads a lot. He’s stopped playing golf.”

  Paul made this sound like his epitaph, but Sam Sadler’s health was good. He had taught philosophy in a local community college on the strength of a doctorate from Tulane, gained after his graduation from Notre Dame. He had taken early retirement.

  “He spent his life teaching. Now he says he wants to educate himself.”

  “I’d love to meet him.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’ll talk philosophy to you.”

  It sounded like heaven. Francie had been smitten by the Socratic dialogues in her freshman year and had taken a philosophy course every semester since. She wondered if Paul, too, might mature into the man he described his father as being.

  “It’s too bad about the golf,” she said diplomatically.

  “Tragic. He always beat me when we played.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t let him beat you?”

  Paul was shocked. The point of golf was to score lower than your opponent, whoever it was. The thought that he might ease up out of deference to his father was incomprehensible.

  Whatever Paul’s future potential, she had to face the fact that right now he was a jock—a student athlete, in the phrase, for whom classes were a nuisance. Nonetheless, she had tried to interest him in Roger Knight.

  One of the perks of the St. Mary’s student is the ability to enroll in courses at Notre Dame—and vice versa, of course, though the traffic was largely in one direction. Thus it was that Francie had discovered Roger Knight, the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies, drawn to a course titled “Descartes As Catholic Author.” From the first day she had been enthralled. They had discussed Maritain’s The Dream of Descartes and the evidence that Descartes had kept his vow to make a pilgrimage to the House of Loreto in gratitude for the philosophical revelation vouchsafed him in a dream. The account of this dream, which Roger Knight compared in some detail to the Memorial of Pascal, has not survived, but the philosopher had it with him when he died in Stockholm. The fact that none of this interested Paul had put a severe strain on their friendship, which nearly did not survive in their junior year.

  “Give me plants any day.”

  “Plants?”

  “I’m taking botany.”

  Francie said nothing, assuming it was a jock course, an easy C or even B for student athletes, not too demanding. But Paul had followed it up with others, so maybe it wasn’t just easy credits.

  Paul was only one of the targets of opportunity that had brought Francie to campus with her mother. The other was Roger Knight.

  8

  After receiving his doctorate in philosophy from Princeton, Roger Knight, obese, eccentric, and brilliant, had found himself to be academically unemployable. A lesser man might have repined and lamented his fate, but Roger almost welcomed it. Learning had never been pursued by him with a utilitarian purpose—future employment—but for its own sake, and nothing in his depressed circumstances prevented him from continuing that pursuit. And continue it he did, a freelancer in the world of scholarship, in contact via e-mail with like-minded souls around the world, pursuing now one spoor of his interests and now another. His brother, Philip, a private detective, had after suffering his second mugging decided to absent himself from felicity awhile and moved from Manhattan up the Hudson to Rye. He placed ads in the yellow pages of various telephone directories around the country, identifiable only by profession and an 800 number, and accepted such employment as promised unusual reward. Eventually, Roger, who accompanied Phil when he accepted a client, himself applied for and received a private detective licence. And so their life might have continued if Roger’s monograph on the English writer who styled himself Baron Corvo had not enjoyed an unforeseen success. Roger had become a Catholic while at Princeton and was drawn toward the study of such unusual subjects as Corvo, whose real name, insofar as reality applied to him, was Frederick Rolfe. The monograph had attracted the attention of Father Carmody, and he proposed to the donor of the Huneker Chair of Catholic Studies that Roger be installed in the professorship at Notre Dame. This had been done against the usual opposition, and for some years now the Knight brothers had pursued their common and separate interests at South Bend. For Phil, access to the year-round athletic program at Notre Dame was a kind of nirvana, for Roger the opportunity to offer courses in whatever interest currently engaged him was welcome, and he had at his fingertips a magnificent library, to say nothing of the university archives. From time to time, as in the case of the death of Mortimer Sadler, Phil was asked to functio
n in his all-but-abandoned professional capacity.

  “Suicide has been excluded, Phil?”

  “Not excluded. But he showed none of the symptoms of one about to take his own life. The idea that he killed himself to avoid losing a bet to Maureen O’Kelly is ridiculous.”

  “What poison was involved?”

  “Deadly nightshade.”

  “Belladonna,” Roger murmured.

  “Deadly nightshade.”

  “It has several names. Devil’s cherries. Naughty man’s cherries. Devil’s herb. Others.”

  “Cherries?”

  “The berry of the plant can be lethal. So can the leaves and root.”

  “It was introduced into the water bottle from which he drank on his final round of golf.”

  Of course Phil had given Roger an account of his early-morning round with Jimmy Stewart, the South Bend detective lieutenant with whom the brothers had formed a friendship in previous joint endeavors. The account was slowed by Phil’s describing every stroke he and Jimmy had taken before arriving on the sixth tee.

  “He was lying on the green?”

  “This did not surprise us at first. Any man who had started a round in the way he had was capable of anything. We thought he was lining up his putt. It was when he didn’t move that we went to investigate.”

  Roger was fascinated by the story of the irregular meetings of the class of 1977 under the inspiration of the dead golfer.

  “The three men with whom he had shared rooms as an undergraduate are also here, and they celebrated the night before in Sadler’s suite at the Morris Inn.”

  “No indication of what lay ahead?”

  “None.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “On the basis of what we know, I don’t know what to think. It is conceivable that he committed suicide, planning the deed so that it occurred on a final round on the course he would have played as an undergraduate. But, as I said, his old friends saw no signs of such an intention. And there was no note.”

  “He does not sound like a suicidal type—insofar as there is one.”