“So he told me.”
“Did he tell you the rest?”
“What was the rest?”
Suddenly the gentle professor of French was the object of a campaign to make him look like a bumbling fool. Jokes in the Scholastic, things written on the board of his classroom, practical jokes.
“It was the water bomb that undid him.”
Apparently dropped from a third-floor window of O’Shaughnessy, the water bomb had exploded at Senzamacula’s feet.
“He had lost his son, a poor retarded little fellow they loved as parents do love such a child, and his wife was already gone. Now this campaign to make him look foolish. He had a nervous breakdown.”
“Who was behind all this?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “Your guess is probably the same as mine.”
“But nothing was done?”
“Let sleeping dogs lie.”
* * *
Roger directed his golf cart back to his office in Brownson. What is more conducive to thought than a silent battery-run vehicle that seems to know where you want it to go? He parked in the lot next to the old building and looked up at the spire of Sacred Heart just visible over the hulk of the basilica. As he eased himself from behind the wheel, there was the sound of a car door closing. He turned to see a spry, familiar little fellow approaching.
“Professor Knight?”
Piero put out his hand, and Roger took it. “Yes.”
“Could we talk?”
“In my office.”
Roger led the way inside and down the corridor to his door, which he unlocked and entered, Piero following, As he eased himself into his commodious chair, he heard the sound of the door lock being turned. Piero took a chair across from Roger’s desk.
“You’ve been talking with my father.”
The thoughts he had been trying to sort out on his way from Holy Cross House became suddenly clear, pieces of a puzzle fitting together.
“Yes.”
“He never really recovered from that harassment, you know. And when my brother died, he had a relapse. He would have retired if it hadn’t been for Father Carmody’s persuasion.”
“He is one of my dearest colleagues.”
“Father Carmody?”
“Your father.”
Roger was remembering how Piero had assaulted poor Horst. Had he been a surrogate for Ignatius Willis, a reminder of the campaign against Guido that had driven the gentle professor into a nervous breakdown?
“What size shoe do you wear, Piero?”
The young man sat back in his chair, his expression sad. He nodded. “So you have figured it out.”
PART FOUR
1
Phil and Jimmy Stewart were having a late lunch in Legends, the restaurant immediately south of the stadium.
“Cholis will get him off,” Jimmy said.
“Everything points to him.”
“Yes.”
That bothered Jimmy. It bothered Phil, too. Talking with Pearl Wintheiser hadn’t helped. She reminded Jimmy of his flown wife; she reminded Phil of several women he was glad he hadn’t married. Her clothes would have been appropriate for a younger woman; her eyes were made up in a glittering way, green eyelids, spiky lashes. It was clear that she wanted them to notice that she was a woman, as she clearly noticed that they were men. She laughed when Jimmy asked if she had spent last Saturday night in her husband’s motel room.
“Why would you think that?”
“Someone mentioned it.”
“George?” Then, theatrically, she understood. “I’m his alibi?”
“Were you in the motel that night?”
She dipped her chin. “I don’t have to answer that.”
“Of course not.”
She looked sultry. “I was in the Morris Inn.”
“So was Iggie Willis.”
“Not that night! He never showed up.”
“And now we know why.”
Jimmy said to Roger, “I don’t think Cholis will put her on the stand.”
“No, but Jacuzzi will.”
If George Wintheiser had lied about his wife coming to his motel room that night, it could have been because he knew that she had gone to Iggie’s room in the Morris Inn.
They were still there when Larry Douglas came in, wearing his uniform as a member of campus security. Laura was with him, her bulk putting a severe strain on her uniform.
“Can we join you?” Larry asked.
“Take a pew.”
Laura splayed her left hand on the table; she waved it in front of her face; she laid it again on the table. Ah, the ring. All eyes dropped to it. Larry looked at Jimmy and Phil like a condemned man.
“Congratulations,” Jimmy said.
“It is the man you congratulate,” Laura said coyly.
The way you give a condemned man a hearty last meal. Poor Larry.
“You’ve been a lot of help, Larry,” Jimmy told him.
“I’ve got to get on the South Bend police force.”
“You do not!” Laura said. “That’s too dangerous.”
Phil got out his cell phone and called the apartment. No answer. He called Roger’s office. No answer there either.
“Oh, he’s in his office,” Larry said. “At least he was a few minutes ago.”
“How do you know?”
“His golf cart was in the lot.”
Phil rose and bade the others good-bye. In his car, he started for the apartment. Roger must be in transit. But Roger was not at home. Phil did not get out of the car but headed toward Brownson. The golf cart was in the parking lot.
The outer door was unlocked, but when he got to Roger’s office his knock was unanswered. For years he had been looking out for his precocious younger brother, protecting him, a surrogate parent. He lowered his shoulder and crashed into the door, splintering it. He stumbled into the office.
“Phil,” Roger said.
A man had leaped up from the chair and absurdly assumed a karate stance.
“This is Professor Senzamacula’s son. He wears a size seven and a half shoe.”
Piero sprang at Phil, uttering a great cry. Phil grabbed his arm, turned, and decided not to flip him over his shoulder. Instead, he drove a fist into his midsection. Piero went down with a groan.
EPILOGUE
Winter came with spring not far behind, and on the practice field players and coaches began to prepare for the coming football season. Hope springs eternal. Philip Knight and Jimmy Stewart were on the sidelines, in Roger’s golf cart, looking on.
“They can’t possibly be as bad as last year,” Jimmy said.
“That is our prayer.”
Prayer was not forgotten. Provisions were made for pauses in practice so that John Foster Natashi and his coreligionists could spread their little rugs and pray to Allah. John Wesley was agitating for a Methodist minister to attend to the spiritual needs of himself and others of like persuasion. Campus ministry was enthusiastic.
A large man in a tweed jacket and turtleneck, a Notre Dame cap on his head, came toward them.
“How are you, George?”
Wintheiser opened his hands. “The question is, how are they?”
The team. Wintheiser had come through the ordeal of last fall well. According to Father Carmody, he was reunited with Pearl. No comment, just a statement. Till death do us part. The old priest was urging that George be awarded the Chateaubriand Medal, however belatedly. Neil Genoux was interested. It seemed a small step toward reconciling disenchanted alumni with their alma mater. Answers to the inquiries of the Weeping Willow Society had gone out that, while their obliquity would have been the envy of any diplomat, nonetheless acknowledged the society’s existence. It was hard for Phil not to notice George’s shoes as he walked away.
* * *
The dismissal of charges against George Wintheiser had of course been inevitable when a suddenly repentant Piero Macklin told all. His confession was so heartfelt
that Alex Cholis was happy to take his case.
“Filial love,” he purred, doubtless thinking of what he could do with that in court.
The phrase seemed an accurate enough description of what had triggered such wrath in the television director. His father’s reaction to having his name appear on Lipschutz’s list, the mocking of the signatories, had brought back the long-ago attacks on his father that had led to a nervous breakdown, and now here was the culprit, Ignatius Willis, rallying alumni in his attack on the football team. Something snapped in that noble breast, as Cholis would doubtless put it. But why had he stolen a pair of Wintheiser’s size fourteen Strombergs and worn them over his own shoes when he stalked Iggie and laid him low on the putting green next to Rockne Memorial? It seemed that he had thought Wintheiser’s defense of the Fighting Irish during their 2007 collapse could have been more forceful, although surely nobody else had thought so. Cholis dismissed the problem.
“You mustn’t seek a rational motive in a man so intent on avenging his father against the man who had mocked him.”
Piero, saddened by the outcome of the game but gripped by melancholy, was just setting off for a moonlit tour of campus when he saw George drop Iggie off at the Morris Inn. Piero intercepted the weaving Willis and led him right through the inn, through the tent in back, and onto the putting green.
“Why?”
“He needed air. So did I.”
It was Iggie’s drunken mockery of the Lipschutz group that altered the character of their midnight stroll. Iggie promised to post their names and photographs on his Web site and invite alumni to let them know what they thought of the idea of abandoning football. That brought back memories too bitter to withstand.
The matter of the towel from the golf ball washer on the first tee never came up in the trial. Piero confided in Father Carmody his reason for stuffing it in the mouth of the man he had just struck down. It seemed that Willis had not only been a plagiarizer, he cheated at golf, once depriving Piero of a prize for the least number of putts in an alumni tournament.
“Did you think you had killed him?”
“Father, I took one swing at him and that was that. I thought I had just knocked him out.”
“Does your lawyer know that?”
“I’ve told him everything.”
* * *
“I wouldn’t want to be on that jury,” Roger said to Father Carmody.
“I just hope he doesn’t connect his defense too closely to the university.”
A wan hope, that, but a tribute to Father Carmody’s unswerving loyalty to Notre Dame.
Mimi O’Toole, to the dismay of the administration, had been moved by Lipschutz’s vision of a research center. After a talk with Frank Parkman, she had persuaded her husband to put up the money for it. It was Mimi, Lipschutz explained to Guido Senzamacula, who had insisted that he, Horst Lipschutz, be the director. Now the administration was looking around for a building to tear down so the center could be built.
* * *
One April afternoon, sitting in the sun on the lakeside of Holy Cross House, Father Carmody asked Roger what he was teaching this semester.
“Do you know William Butler Yeats, Father?”
“Tell me about him.”
Roger did, highlighting the poet’s two visits to Notre Dame.
“An Irishman?”
“Yes.”
“Catholic?”
“Oh, no. Anglo-Irish.”
A nonecumenical remark seemed about to be made, but Father Carmody held his tongue. He listened with feigned interest as Roger recited “The Second Coming.”
“‘Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born?’”
Roger let it go. Turning poetry into prose is seldom a satisfying exercise.
“He was a great admirer of the then president, Father O’Donnell. The priest poet of Notre Dame.”
“Good man.”
Did Father Carmody mean O’Donnell or Yeats? Roger decided not to ask.
ALSO BY RALPH MCINERNY
MYSTERIES SET AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
Irish Alibi
The Letter Killeth
Irish Gilt
Green Thumb
Irish Coffee
Celt and Pepper
Emerald Aisle
Book of Kills
Irish Tenure
Lack of the Irish
On This Rockne
ANDREW BROOM MYSTERY SERIES
Heirs and Parents
Law and Ardor
Mom and Dead
Savings and Loam
Body and Soil
Cause and Effect
FATHER DOWLING MYSTERY SERIES
Ash Wednesday
The Widow’s Mate
The Prudence of the Flesh
Blood Ties
Requiem for a Realtor
Last Things
Prodigal Father
Triple Pursuit
Grave Undertakings
The Tears of Things
A Cardinal Offense
Seed of Doubt
Desert Sinner
Judas Priest
Four on the Floor
Abracadaver
The Basket Case
Rest in Pieces
Getting a Way with Murder
The Grass Widow
A Loss of Patients
Thicker Than Water
Second Vespers
Lying Three
The Seventh Station
Her Death of Cold
Bishop as Pawn
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE GREEN REVOLUTION. Copyright © 2008 by Ralph McInerny. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McInerny, Ralph M.
The green revolution / Ralph McInerny.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36458-8
ISBN-10: 0-312-36458-X
1. Knight, Roger (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. College teachers—Fiction. 3. Knight, Philip (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 4. Private investigators—Indiana—South Bend—Fiction. 5. University of Notre Dame—Fiction. 6. South Bend (Ind.)—Fiction. 7. College stories. I. Title.
PS3563.A31166G738 2008
813'.54—dc22
2008020335
First Edition: September 2008
eISBN 9781466835245
First eBook edition: November 2012
The Green Revolution Page 16
