“My degree was in philosophy.”
“So was mine.”
“I’ve heard a bit about you, of course. I’m sorry we meet in such tragic circumstances, but I could not forego the chance to talk with you. Could I get you something to drink?”
“What are you having?”
“Don’t be guided by me. I am a teetotaler.”
“A matter of principle?”
“No, of conclusion. Alcohol doesn’t agree with me.”
“I have a long and deep understanding with it.”
Roger poured his guest a generous measure of single malt scotch, opened a root beer for himself, and they settled down to talk. As will happen when kindred spirits meet for the first time, theirs was a wide-ranging and excited exchange during which they found they had many interests in common. But then came a lull and, inevitably, the death of Samuel’s brother came up again.
“Roger, I can tell you now I was almost relieved that Paul, too, had become a target. I scarcely dared think this while he was in danger, but now I feel free to say it.”
“It does look as if one and the same person is responsible for what has been happening.”
“You don’t sound completely convinced of that.”
“I have learned to withhold judgment as long as possible in such matters.”
Samuel sipped his scotch. “Maureen O’Kelly?”
“Does that seem possible to you?”
“Mortimer had a genius for both lasting friendships and lasting enmities. He certainly gave her reason enough to resent him. On the flight down, he went on and on about the speech she gave when they graduated.”
“The flight down?”
“I flew down with Mortimer in his private plane the other day.”
“You did?”
“I wanted to spend a few days in the bookstores around the University of Chicago.” Samuel looked at his drink. “We would have flown back together.”
“So you were in Chicago when all these events took place?”
“Yes, I was in Chicago.”
36
Dr. Jack O’Kelly had taken his own room in the Morris Inn, but the fact that his daughter was rooming with his wife could have been explanation enough of that. Couples of an age can bear a little separation. But the separation of the O’Kellys was the effect of will and not merely of time. When Maureen went to her husband’s room those who knew her well would have been surprised at her trepidation and the timidity with which she tapped upon his door.
“It’s open,” cried a muffled voice, and Maureen entered.
The doctor was on the phone and made the usual gestures to explain, excuse, yet to continue attending to someone elsewhere. He turned away from Maureen as he ended the call a minute later.
“Well,” he said, facing her.
“You missed the funeral.”
“I came down to offer you my moral support, at Francie’s request. A detective named Stewart phoned me several times.”
“They think I killed Mortimer Sadler.”
“What nonsense! I want to talk with Stewart. I’ll put the fear of God into him.”
“You’re being very gallant.”
“Would you rather I hadn’t come?”
“Jack…” She moved toward him and he gripped her upper arms, more in defense than in an embrace. She stepped back. “Well, it gives you a chance to see your alma mater.”
He looked at the windows. “I scarcely recognized a thing.”
“Let’s go for a walk.”
“A walk?”
“About the campus. Don’t you advise patients to exercise? Heal thyself.”
His smile dimmed at this scriptural note. Despite Maureen’s wandering being the original cause of their estrangement, it was now understood, at least by her, that the separation was his doing. His chin lifted.
“Okay. I’ll change shoes.”
As they went through the lobby they ran into Francie and Vivian, and the girls showed too obvious a delight at seeing the O’Kellys together.
“Where have you been?”
“Out. Everywhere. We stopped at the Grotto.”
“There’s our destination,” Maureen said brightly to her husband, putting her arm through his. Francie glowed as if recent prayers of hers were being answered.
Outside, they turned north and strolled toward the Main Building and at once the campus of their youth seemed all around them. When he stopped at a bench to retie his sneakers, Maureen sat beside him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“It was all so long ago.”
He glanced at her, looked in her eyes and nodded. “A very long time ago. Did you attend Sadler’s funeral?”
“Of course I did.”
“Of course.”
“Oh, Jack.” Her hand slid down his arm but he took it and pulled her to her feet. “We’re out for a walk, remember.”
And so they walked in silence around the basilica and did go down the steps to the Grotto. Many alumni entertain the pleasantly false memory that they often visited this replica of the grotto at Lourdes, a sign of the fierce Marian devotion of Father Edward Sorin, the university’s founder. It was not the frequency of visits that imprinted the place on one’s memory but its open-air unapologetic tribute to the Mother of God, Notre Dame. Maureen was almost surprised when Jack went directly to one of the prie-dieux and knelt. She stood beside him. He seemed to be praying. But for what did he pray? The thought was not reassuring. She knelt beside him.
They had been married in the basilica and afterward had come here, Jack in his wedding suit, she in her bridal dress, and knelt like this. Maureen’s eyes swam with tears as she remembered the hope and excitement of that day. And the feeling of triumph. She had won Jack away from Laura Kennedy, the woman to whom he had been informally engaged. Now she had the terrible suspicion that it was Laura he prayed for, Laura and freedom from her and a new life before him, at his age! It was ridiculous. She stood and waited until he stood, too. He turned and looked toward the lake.
“Shall we?”
“Yes!”
And so around St. Mary’s Lake they went, side by side, talk unnecessary because of the constant distraction of ducks and the sweet aroma of flowers. The path was not the makeshift one of long ago, but a firm and tended route that kept close to the shore.
They were halfway around, below Fatima Retreat House, when Maureen stopped. She waited until he faced her.
“Jack, I want this separation to end.”
He considered her as an adult would a child. “It’s a little late for that.”
“Nonsense. Nothing has happened.”
“Nothing?”
“You know what I mean. It is a trial, that’s all. Come home, Jack.”
They stood in silence for a time and then he took her hand, but it was not, she thought for a wild moment, a gesture of reconciliation. He talked as if to himself, explaining that he had treated Laura Kennedy shabbily once before and he didn’t intend to repeat that act.
“We have had our years together, Maureen. Many of them good. The children are raised. Who knows how much time we have left? You may think you miss me, but I know you better than that. Maybe I should have let you make the first move.”
“I would never have done that.”
“Perhaps not. But things have been done.” He looked at her. “Things that can’t be undone.”
“Think of Francie.”
“I do. Children of failed marriages have a strong incentive not to repeat the sins of their parents.”
“You can’t marry Laura, Jack. It would be a sin if you did.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Surely you know how easily annulments are granted now.”
“Annulments!” Suddenly she was furious. “You wouldn’t do that to me. You couldn’t do that to Francie. I would kill you if you tried.”
It provided him with the cruelest remark of all. “Not all problems can be solved in that way, Maureen.”
37
Roger Knight found his own life somewhat comic, a series of chance and improbable events. Orphaned as scarcely more than a child, he had been raised by Phil, who had adamantly opposed all suggestions that they be parceled out to relatives. In the end, their Aunt Cecilia had moved into the house their parents had left them, and some semblance of a normal household was established. Cecilia was a widow whose treatment of her late husband had been legendary in the family, but in bereavement she rewrote the history of her marriage and was often to be found mooning over photograph albums, recalling the alleged idyl of her married life. Her nephews were an enigma to her, but she became devoted to them, in her way.
When she too went to God, Phil, then returned from Vietnam, established himself as a private investigator and took his younger brother under his wing. When the supposedly slow-witted Roger was discovered to have enormous talent and potential, he had scooted through high school in a year and a half and been accepted as a graduate student in philosophy at Princeton. There he had become a Catholic and prepared himself for the academic life he was never allowed to enter. Interviews for potential jobs had been exercises in futility, the committees abashed by the range and depth of his knowledge but provided with the undeniable fact of his enormous weight to justify passing him over. And so, with the romantic notion that he would rival Phil, he had slimmed down and enlisted in the navy, where he spent a year proving that he was not meant to be a sailor. His discharge had been honorable but early and, once more a civilian, he had obtained a licence and become his brother’s partner.
The vast network of computers that can put one into instantaneous contact with almost anyone else is called the World Wide Web, and Roger was soon entangled in it as a fly to its spider. Soon he was in daily communication with scholars around the globe. The success of Phil’s agency gave Roger ample leisure, even when they were on cases, to go off in a van that Phil had had remodeled to accommodate his enormous girth in a swivel chair in the back, where he could plink away on his computer. It was when they were on a case in Memphis that Roger had, in the course of two weeks, written his monograph of Baron Corvo. Phil submitted it to a publisher, it knew an unexpected success, one result of which was the visit from Father Carmody offering Roger the Huneker Chair of Catholic Studies at Notre Dame.
It was because his own life was so improbable in retrospect that Roger seldom felt surprise or censure at the folly of the lives of those their investigations involved them in. But they had all been strangers. With the death of Mortimer Sadler by poisoning, he and Phil were dealing with people who were friends. All Roger’s efforts to free Francie O’Kelly from tragedy involved others he was almost equally loath to incriminate.
The sight of the window box in Paul Sadler’s room in Morrissey had led to a discovery that seemed to divert suspicion from Francie’s mother. Until he confronted Paul, that is. The young man had told him that Mrs. O’Kelly had asked for cuttings from the deadly nightshade plant he had been cultivating in his room. While he agonized over whether to tell his brother this, Paul had been taken off to Emergency where it was discovered that he too had been poisoned as his father had. Jimmy Stewart was then prompted to concentrate once more on Maureen O’Kelly as the culprit.
“But what of the poisoned water in Toolin’s bag?” Roger asked.
“She must have thought he was part of Sadler’s student crusade against coeducation.”
“Then why not the other roommates?”
“That is a question I must put to her.”
“One you might put to yourself is when those bottles were put into Sadler’s and Toolin’s golf bags.”
Jimmy looked at him. “When?”
“They brought the bags with them, didn’t they?”
“Oh, come on, Roger. Not that again.”
“Jimmy, what do you have except a quarrel twenty-five years in the past?”
“I’ll tell you.” And Jimmy reviewed the exchange between Mortimer Sadler and Maureen at the Sorin Restaurant in the Morris Inn.
“When Sadler’s companions disavowed any connection with his student campaign?”
“You think she believed that?”
It would have been easier for Roger to speak of the flimsiness of Jimmy Stewart’s suspicions if he had not been told by Paul that Maureen was in possession of cuttings of deadly nightshade, a plant she knew well, having grown it in her herb garden in Minneapolis. Finally, Roger told Phil of Samuel’s having been in nearby Chicago during the tragic events on campus.
“It’s not much more than an hour’s drive away, Phil.”
“You think he killed his brother?”
“Remember Cain and Abel.”
“And his son?”
But Roger had thought of that. “Paul could have administered the poison to himself.”
“Roger, you can’t just pick up deadly nightshade at your local florist.”
“He wouldn’t have to.”
Phil listened, stunned, while Roger told him of his visit to Paul’s room. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before?” he said when Roger had finished.
“For the same reason I have kept silent about Samuel Sadler.”
“And what is that?”
“Francie.”
Phil thought about that, and while he understood Roger’s tangled motivation he was no less angry. That was when Roger should have told his brother that Maureen O’Kelly had gotten cuttings for Paul’s plant before Mortimer Sadler’s fatal final round on the front nine of Burke. But before he could, Phil stormed out of the apartment and drove off to talk to Jimmy Stewart.
38
Jimmy Stewart had talked with Samuel Sadler, an exchange of a few words, during which he assured the man that they would find who murdered his brother.
“Then you’re sure it was murder?”
“There are only two possibilities. Suicide was a possibility only so long as we didn’t know that others had been put in danger in the same way.”
“His classmate Toolin?”
“That’s right.”
And that was it, save for some questions about the kind of man his brother was.
“The pillar of the family. That enabled me to live the kind of life I prefer.”
“And now?”
“I will keep the seat warm for Paul.”
When Phil Knight gave him the information about Samuel’s being in Chicago and not far off in Minneapolis as had been thought, it seemed worth looking into. Jimmy had no more stomach for accusing Maureen O’Kelly than the Knight brothers apparently had.
“Could you check it out, Phil?”
* * *
“So you’ve met my brother,” Phil said when he had been admitted to Samuel Sadler’s room. A laptop computer was on the desk surrounded by books, and Phil had obviously interrupted a man at work.
“I hope to see him again before I leave.”
“When will that be?”
“I won’t go until Paul has been released from the hospital. My schedule is pretty much what I decide it is.”
“You’re retired.”
“From teaching, yes. For years I have been dreaming of writing a book on critics of the Enlightenment: de Maistre, Chateaubriand…”
Phil held up a hand. “That’s Roger’s department. You would be surprised how little I know.”
“I understand you’re a detective.”
“Semiretired. My schedule, too, is what I make it. The university asked me to keep close to the investigation of your brother’s death.”
“Stewart seemed to think I am eager to have the culprit found.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Would it really make any difference?”
“Stewart is a cop, not a philosopher. Of course he intends to solve this case.”
“Has he made much progress?”
“A little.” Phil crossed his legs. “Roger enjoyed talking with you.”
“I shall want to try out on him some of the themes of my book. I suppose it
is a what-if theory. What if the contemporary criticisms of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had become the dominant view.”
Again Phil displayed a protective hand. “You were doing research in Chicago?”
“That’s right.”
“Where?”
“The Newberry Library.”
“Where is that?”
“Your brother would know.”
But Phil got the location from Samuel Sadler. He did not want Roger to know that he was on this wild goose chase as a favor to Jimmy Stewart. It proved to be a wild goose chase indeed.
Phil took the South Shore to Chicago and then a cab to the Newberry Library where, as he had hoped, a book was kept of those who made use of the facilities there. The woman he talked to, Maud Gonne, seemed an historical specimen herself, seventyish, dim eyed. She worked her lips as she studied the visitor’s book.
“Samuel Sadler,” Phil reminded her.
“My hearing is perfectly in order,” she said primly. She was turning pages. “How long ago would this have been?”
Phil told her. She turned back a page or two, then looked up at him.
“I don’t find his name here.” Belatedly, she wondered what the basis of this inquiry was. “Why are you asking?”
“My brother often comes here. Roger Knight.”
“Roger Knight!” Her thin lips widened to display a row of too-even teeth. “He is your brother?” She looked at Phil in disbelief.
“He got all the fat in the family.”
“He is just the size he should be. The British have a saying, meant as praise: ‘A man has bottom.’ It fits your brother perfectly.”
“We had a special chair made for his study at home.”
Maud Gonne blushed. “That isn’t what the phrase means.” She hesitated. “It is a metaphor.”
“Could Samuel Sadler have used the library without signing in?”
“Oh no. It is an ironclad rule. Is your brother with you?”
She seemed disappointed to learn that Roger was not in Chicago. Phil managed to get away without indicating his surprise that Samuel Sadler’s account of his time in Chicago could not be corroborated.
From the Newberry, Phil went to police headquarters, where an old acquaintance, Parker Nosey, agreed to check out the registrations at Chicago hotels for the days Samuel said he had been in the city.
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