The Book of Kills

by Ralph McInerny

  “Looked?”

  She turned to Jimmy. “My own theory was that it was done to make Johnny look like a fool.”

  “Hmm.”

  “If you talk to him, you’ll see what I mean.”

  Johnny was in a sports bar on Route 23 with his wife Fiona, surrounded by a half-dozen giant screens bringing in athletic contests of note from around the nation. Johnny’s face was needed as support for his luxurious eyebrows that made his nose seem false. His baseball cap was pushed to the back of his narrow head. Fiona loomed over him subserviently.

  “We’re investigating the death of Orion Plant.”

  “Never knew him.”

  “We think he’s the fellow who overpowered you and took over your car.”

  This tore Johnny’s wandering eye from the screen he had been favoring. He became animated, and profane. Fiona clung to his arm as if to keep him earthbound.

  “The bastard must’ve been hiding in the back seat. Creepy thought, but who checks the back seat before he gets in a car? I do, that’s who. That’s where my passengers ride, I want it to be as it ought to be, but that day I didn’t look, and see what happened? I’m lucky I didn’t lose my job.”

  “Who would do a thing like that to you?”

  Johnny entered easily into the notion that the whole episode had been contrived to embarrass him rather than the chancellor.

  “I’ve thought about it, I’ve thought about it.”

  “What did you come up with?”

  “Johnny,” Fiona said in a warning purr, but he ignored her.

  “There’s a bitch who works in his office. Miss Traffic Cop. Half my age and she thinks she runs the place.”

  “You think she arranged it?”

  “Johnny!”

  “I’d look into it if I was you.” He glared up at his wife. “I was kidnapped as much as he was.”

  “Who is Harold?” Phil asked Johnny.

  “Harold?” The eyebrows rose dramatically in thought. He shook his head. “I don’t know any Harold. Who is he?”

  “You have an Uncle Harold,” Fiona said.

  Jimmy went through the account of the episode Johnny had given them, a marvel of pithiness. Husband and wife exchanged a glance. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  “It’s just what you said.”

  Johnny promised any future cooperation that would be asked of him and Jimmy and Phil left the den of cacophony and went out into the night air.

  “That’s it for today,” Jimmy said. “Where can I drop you?”

  They were not half a mile from the apartment and soon Phil was settled down before a single screen, watching a single game. How could you watch a game when you were watching another game? Other games. He was soon absorbed and was almost surprised when Roger came in on a rush of cold air. Of course he would not have heard Roger’s golf cart.

  “Have a good dinner?” he asked, turning back to the hockey game.

  “I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “Me too,” Phil said. “Later.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Lieutenant Stewart and I had a pizza.”

  “A snack! I’ll warm up the risotto.”

  26

  OTTO RANKE HAD BEEN filled with foreboding when Freda called to tell him of the police visit, and he found little reassurance in the fact that the brother of Roger Knight was also investigating recent events. Freda’s account was as incoherent as the initial seminar presentation of a new graduate student, but the central fact emerged that it was Laverne they had wanted to see. She had not been home for three nights now, and when they heard of the death of Orion, Freda expressed a ghoulish elation. The demise of the faithless suitor allayed Freda’s fear that their daughter had run off with the scoundrel. Apparently Orion’s wife had had the same thought, and becoming a new widow had not kept her from conveying her suspicions about Laverne and Orion to the police. But how could Otto feel that the whole sordid connection was at last definitively over when he did not know where Laverne was?

  He had from a distance checked her place of work in the library and seen that she was not there. Later he telephoned and in a disguised voice asked for her.

  “Laverne isn’t in today,” he was told.

  “They’ve killed her too,” Freda wailed. “They’ll find her body somewhere near.” And she began to wail louder. Otto ignored her.

  “Do you want to report her missing to the police?”

  “They already know that. They’re looking for her.”

  Did Freda have any inkling of what the police interest in their daughter might be? When he arrived at his office, Russell Bacon was waiting in the hallway to see him. The graduate student followed him in and this irked Ranke. He liked to be settled in before receiving visitors. Bacon shifted from foot to foot watching the professor hang up his coat and crown the stand with his hat. He settled behind his desk and looked at his visitor.

  “Well, sir?”

  Bacon sat down. “Laverne is staying with us. Carlotta didn’t think I should tell you, but you must be frantic.”

  “Laverne is with you?”

  “Carlotta works in the library too. They’ve gotten to know one another. When she came to the door the other morning, of course we took her in.”

  “In the morning.”

  “The wee hours.”

  Professor Ranke did not know what to say. His sense of relief gave way to anger that Laverne should have caused such anxiety to her mother, hiding in graduate student housing, so close by, while her mother imagined the worst.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve kept out of it. She and Carlotta talked for hours. I went back to bed. Apparently she intends to run away and start a new life.”

  The phrase was ambiguous and Ranke scowled at Bacon. This was the plagiarist who had beaten the rap, as he would doubtless have put it, brazenly submitting a paper of Orion Plant’s as his own. Did the Bacon hospitality have anything to do with his old grudge against Orion for exposing him, however ineffectually? How many knew of Laverne’s continued hankering after Orion despite the fact that he had unceremoniously dropped her for another? That she had resumed whatever it was with Orion after his marriage was probably better known than the doomed courtship that had played itself out in the privacy of the Ranke family room.

  Bacon’s flat face with its crab-apple nose and pouting lips was repugnant to Professor Ranke. That a student might under pressure cheat and plagiarize was, if not excusable, understandable. But Bacon had been under no pressure when he purloined Orion’s seminar paper, nor had he felt an iota of remorse when he was confronted with the evidence of his deception. The best defense is a good offense. Bacon welcomed the official inquiry. The two papers were identical, but Orion had printed off a copy of his own paper after Bacon had submitted the paper as his own. Bacon raised the question of who had stolen from whom. Orion could not find the file on the hard drive of his computer. It had been erased. The case evaporated. But Bacon knew, and Ranke knew, the truth of the matter. And so of course had Orion, who began to call Bacon the Earl of Oxford.

  “I understand you wrote Shakespeare too.”

  Bacon was no match for Orion’s bitter sarcasm.

  “You must submit the paper for the departmental prize. You may have better luck with it than I did.”

  This had been in the mail room of the department, before grinning witnesses. Bacon had picked up a metal waste basket and brought it down on Orion’s head. The bonking sound had brought others to the scene. Orion had wrested the waste basket from Bacon and was inspecting the dent his head made. He feinted at Bacon and his assailant fled, borne along on gales of derisive laughter.

  “Your nemesis is no more,” Ranke said to Bacon now.

  “That’s an awful thing to say. Carlotta and I are having a Mass said for poor Orion.”

  Ranke was surprised in recent years by any allusion to religious belief on the part of his students. One no longer knew which were Catholics and which were not, a
nd those that were understood their faith less than a band of Zulu catechumens. Little bits of legalistic lore clung to their minds, picked up God knew where. Thus, Laverne’s remark that Orion had not married his wife in the Church so it really wasn’t a marriage. Meaning he was no more encumbered than when he used to reign in the family room. Laverne’s Mass attendance was dilatory, though Sacred Heart Basilica was closer than the library to which she loped off each weekday.

  “How is Laverne taking it?”

  “Orion? She was so upset when she came to us—she hasn’t gotten much better—that Carlotta hasn’t even told her about Orion.”

  “You say she came in the wee hours.”

  “Tuesday night. Wednesday morning, really.”

  Where in God’s name had she been? Of course he would not ask Bacon. Any relief he felt at learning where his daughter was had been eclipsed by the humiliation of hearing this from Bacon.

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “I think you ought to come get her.”

  “Of course.”

  Bacon stood and waited. He meant immediately. Why had he let Ranke take off his things and settle behind the desk if this had been the purpose of his visit? But Ranke rose and put on his coat once more. Bacon helped him and Ranke resented it. He clamped his hat on his head, and indicated that Bacon should lead the way.

  The freak snow had melted, leaving the campus looking drab and dull. The library rose toward an overcast sky, the colors of its massive mural even more subdued. Bacon walked beside him, not taking his arm, but seemingly on the qui vive in case the professor lost his footing on this glazed walk. Ranke glowered into the impending gloom, not encouraging his companion to talk. What lay ahead? Would Laverne throw a tantrum, providing Bacon with more gossip for his fellow students? But Laverne’s taking refuge with the Bacons was damning enough.

  Carlotta Bacon was letting herself out of the apartment when they arrived. She was startled to see who was with her husband.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Carlotta, he had to be told.”

  “But she’s gone.”

  “Where?” Ranke demanded.

  “Where I’m going. To the library. She said it was time she got back to work.”

  “Did you tell her . . .”

  “That’s when she came around and said she was going back to work. She took it very well. Maybe I should have told her right away.”

  Bacon shrugged and looked at Ranke. Ranke looked at the couple and imagined what they thought of him. What nonsense had Laverne poured into their ears? He nodded in what might have been thanks, turned, and plodded back to his office.

  27

  WITH THE DEATH OF HIS client, Bartholomew Leone had lost the weapon he had intended to use against Ballast, but he had been handed another.

  “This would not have happened if you had not had him hunted down.”

  “Nonsense.” Ballast sat smugly behind his oversize desk.

  “You deny that you harassed him mercilessly?”

  “Your complaint, insofar as you have one, is with the police, not me.”

  “You informed them. You pressured them to bring him in.”

  Ballast steepled his fat little fingers with their manicured nails. His class ring was prominent on his right hand, his wedding band on his left. His smile was pursed. Leone shifted field adroitly, like a Rockne back.

  “Of course it will all come out now.”

  “What will come out?”

  “The damning evidence that Orion Plant had collected about the early history of this place.”

  “If the lurid tale of the murder of some Indians long ago by someone unconnected with the university is a fair sample, I would urge you to make the rest public.”

  “You know not what you ask.”

  Ballast rose and laid his hand on his desk. “Is this what you came to say?”

  Leone rose too. His own smile was confident if not smug. “I thought it only fair to give you warning.”

  “On behalf of the university, I thank you.”

  “I doubt that the university will thank you when I tell them that you urged me on.”

  “Why do you hate Notre Dame so?”

  “Please do not identify your unprepossessing person with this great institution.”

  It was not bad as an exit line. He found his car with a citation tucked under the windshield wiper. He had parked in a spot reserved for the handicapped. It seemed half the parking spaces in the world were reserved for the handicapped, as if one were living in a recovery area for the walking wounded. He tore the citation free, crumpled it into a ball, and sent it sailing toward a receptacle. Swish. Two points. Make that three. Humming, he settled himself behind the wheel of his Lexus.

  Reconstructing the visit to Ballast on the drive back to his office, Leone was satisfied that he had acquitted himself well. Not an unequivocal triumph, but then there had only been an exchange of lawyerly remarks. Arrived, he gave instructions that he was not to be disturbed save for the gravest reasons. He got out Orion’s dossier and opened it on his desk, put a note pad beside it, and though he had read it, he began again to read what the scowling graduate student had brought him. He paused before beginning. May he rest in peace, he murmured, then set to work. He might have been fulfilling his client’s last wishes.

  The appendix of the dossier consisted of photocopies of old records, most of them from the university archives, some from the Northern Indiana Historical Society. Documentation for the charges Orion Plant had formulated in his text. His account of the displacement of local tribes and the heroic saga of Father Petit made for moving reading, but Leone found that the damning tone of Orion’s narrative detracted from the facts, which were damning enough uncommented on. Deeds of transfer from the county plat books recorded the sale of the confiscated land. The trial led through Father Badin to Edward Sorin, founder of the university. As a strictly legal matter, there was, of course, no case. Leone had recognized that from the beginning. But it could easily be argued that the tainted past of the land, however legally acquired, spelled a public relations disaster for the university.

  Half an hour later Leone asked his secretary to put through a call to Maudit at the Picayune. They met in the courthouse café.

  The reporter was a furtive young man whose pride in his story about the slaughter of Indians by an irate settler seemed under control.

  “I caught hell for that.”

  “From the university?”

  “Not directly. I assume they were behind it. My editor chewed me out for considering last century’s events as news.”

  “They must have gotten to him.”

  “Did you see my piece this morning?”

  “No.”

  “All about the heightened security for Saturday’s game.”

  “Are you saying you don’t care to pursue the matter?”

  “It’s not what I want.”

  “Orion gave you only the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Awful what happened to him.”

  “Are you frightened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who do you think was responsible for his brutal death?”

  “I’m not on that story.”

  “I’m asking you to put two and two together.”

  Maudit occupied himself with this arithmetical problem. “I don’t get you.”

  “Who was hurt by your story?”

  Maudit tossed back his head. “Descendants of the killer, I suppose. There aren’t any descendants of that tribe still living within a hundred miles. Or beyond for that matter. I stopped trying to trace them.”

  Was the reporter being willfully obtuse? In any case, he was clearly no longer the means whereby Orion’s research would reach a wider public. Maudit got to his feet.

  “I’ll be covering the funeral.”

  “You could mention things in that story.”

  Maudit shook his head. “I do not want to join the ranks of the unemployed.”

  The
hero of a free press left and Leone was not unhappy to be rid of him. He sat pondering the situation. Making the dossier public brought it to the attention of thousands of indifferent readers. The aim was not the masses, but those who might act on it. He summoned his secretary.

  “I want a dozen copies of this made,” he said, handing Mrs. Atriks the dossier. The woman was crippled with arthritis but was the most efficient secretary he had ever had. But then she was the only one he had ever had. How she managed to work the keyboard of her computer with hands twisted with arthritis was a mystery. “I want copies sent to every lay member of the board of trustees of Notre Dame.”

  Gerry nodded.

  “FedEx?”

  “Of course.”

  And she hobbled out with her burden.

  So it was that, the following day in Tulsa, Mr. Schippers scanned the contents of the package that had arrived. As he read, he felt that the chancellor had been less than frank with him about the crisis facing the university. In another letter, mailed from the chancellor’s office by the hand of Miss Trafficant, was a newspaper clipping about the body found near Fatima Retreat House. Orion Plant. That name had arisen when the chancellor told him the suspicions about that student.

  “Former student,” he had added. “Dismissed. Doubtless this is his revenge.”

  But now the avenger was dead, found on the campus. He picked up the phone and asked to be put through to his colleagues on the Notre Dame board of trustees.

  “Seriatim,” he added.

  Meanwhile, Bartholomew Leone had arranged to meet with Professor Quinlan, president of the faculty senate and a notorious malcontent.

  28

  ANITA TRAFFICANT CALLED the computing center and asked for Harold. He was out on a job.

  “Send him a message on his pager.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “This is Anita Trafficant in the chancellor’s office.”

  “But that’s where he said he was going.”

  “Then he received my message.”

  She hung up. It was better that he came unsummoned. Suddenly she felt in pursuit of Harold, though it had been otherwise at the beginning. She dated the change to the arrival of the police at her door just when they had been about to set off for Sunny Italy. That made no sense. Harold had shown no interest in the inquiries of the city detective and Philip Knight, the brother of the Professor of Catholic studies. Harold had gone on watching a ridiculous hockey game until the detectives had gone.