Irish Coffee

by Ralph McInerny

  “Nothing. I didn’t see him but, what the heck, he could have been on the road.”

  “Anyone visit him?”

  “You mean the big fat guy?”

  “He discovered the body. I mean before that.”

  “No one but his girl. And don’t even think it. She never stayed over.”

  “You check on such things?”

  “I just know it.”

  Phil said, “His girl. Always the same one.”

  “Of course. They were in love.”

  “What was her name?”

  “She worked at Notre Dame too. Mary. Mary something. You could look it up.”

  “We will,” Jimmy Stewart said.

  4

  GRISELDA NOVAK HAD NEVER personally known someone who died, not before Fred Neville, but even so she was ashamed that all she seemed to want to do was consider the effect of his death on her. She remembered glimpses of him around the Joyce Athletic and Convocation Center, she remembered him on trips with the Lady Irish to games away from campus, but most of all she remembered the dinner she’d had with him at Parisi’s when he had been assigned to talk her out of leaving the team. Would that evening had been so etched in her memory if Fred were still alive? After all, it had been talking with Professor Knight that had changed her mind, not anything Fred had said. But she had sensed that he, like herself, aspired to be like Roger Knight.

  When he had taken her unannounced to the Knight brothers’ apartment, she had sensed that their entrance created something of a sensation, at least with Mary Shuster. Of course Griselda knew that there was something between Mary and Fred—she supposed everyone connected with Notre Dame sports knew about it—but when they came in, Mary gave Fred the cold shoulder, and Griselda realized it was because Fred had taken her to dinner. The woman was jealous! Griselda had to admit she had enjoyed that, incredible as the suspicion had been. Fred was so much older than she that it had never occurred to her that anyone would imagine they had been on a date.

  It was a little much, though, for Mary to show up at the wake and funeral clad all in black, calling attention to herself and away from Fred. And then the woman named Naomi showed up and turned out to be Fred’s fiancée. It had made Griselda curious to learn what exactly Mary’s relation to Fred had been. She had certainly been upstaged by Naomi. What Griselda found hard to believe was that either woman had really cared for Fred. And wasn’t it sick to be fighting over a dead man?

  At the get-together at the university club Griselda became aware that she was the only member of the team there. Not even Muffin had come from the church to the club. But once she was there she decided to say. For one thing, she was hungry. For another, Roger Knight was there. So she witnessed the little scene at the table where Roger had been sitting with Fred’s parents. She saw Mary take his seat when Roger went to get the old priest some food. And then Naomi showed up at the table and it looked as if there would be a catfight. But the old priest seemed to put a stop to that and Naomi walked away. Griselda watched her showing off to those who crowded around her and drew near. Someone turned, a man with a silly expression that got sillier when he saw her.

  “Griselda! Hey look, Griselda Novak is here.”

  The circle re-formed around her, with Naomi McTear a member of it, no longer the center. Griselda had a sweet feeling of revenge, for what she didn’t know, but she did like these fans to be fussing over her rather than the sidelines color reporter from cable television.

  “Griselda is the guard of the half century,” the man with the silly expression said to Naomi.

  “I love to watch you play,” Naomi said.

  “It’s only a game.”

  Everyone laughed. Is this the way people behaved after a funeral? But then look at herself, trying to score points against Naomi. The reporter did have a way of flashing her great big diamond.

  “You’re right,” Naomi said. “Most of you have lost a friend. I have lost the man I intended to marry.”

  The circle re-formed and Griselda slipped away. It was difficult to say who was worse, Naomi or Mary.

  “You knew Fred, didn’t you?”

  Griselda turned, and there was Mary Shuster.

  “Of course.”

  “You play basketball.”

  “In my spare time.”

  Under her black mantilla, Mary’s face softened. “We met at the Knights’ apartment.”

  “I remember.”

  “You came in with Fred.”

  “We’d been to dinner at Parisi’s.”

  “Did you do a lot of that?”

  “Not enough. But don’t tell his fiancée.”

  “She isn’t, you know.”

  “Her diamond could have fooled me.”

  “It’s meant to.”

  “She isn’t his fiancée?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “You’ll have to tell me sometime.”

  “How about now? I want to go home and change out of this dress.”

  “You’re through mourning?”

  Tears formed in Mary’s eyes and ran down her cheeks. She turned away.

  “Please. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Mary shrugged. Griselda took her arm and guided her through the room to the front lobby of the club.

  “I’ll go with you. I want to hear all about it.”

  When they came outside, Griselda asked, “Is your car here?”

  “Oh, we can walk. We live in Harter Heights.”

  Griselda looked blank.

  “It’s just off Angela Boulevard.”

  They set off. Most of the snow had melted now and as they passed Cedar Grove, Griselda said, “Isn’t it odd that we didn’t accompany the body to the cemetery?”

  “Not in the circumstances.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then you haven’t heard. They fear that Fred’s death was not due to natural causes.”

  “No!”

  Was this among the things that Mary had offered to tell her? They went on in silence while Griselda contemplated the implications of Mary’s astounding remark. The sun was shining fitfully but a stiff breeze was in their faces when they turned onto Angela. “It’s not far,” Mary said, raising her voice against the wind.

  Griselda nodded and ducked her head. Not due to natural causes. What did that mean? And then the grim thought occurred and she wondered if she really wanted to hear more. But, whatever the phrase meant, it was certain to become public sooner or later and she wanted to learn now what it meant. How discreet Father Rocca’s words now seemed in light of Mary’s remark. It was not the sort of thing one would want to announce from the altar after the funeral Mass.

  The Shuster house looked like something from an old magazine. Mary opened the unlocked door and they went inside, hung up their coats, and headed to the kitchen where Mary proceeded to put on coffee.

  “What a lovely house.”

  “I’ve lived here all my life. This area used to be the favored spot for faculty. All our neighbors were professors when I was young.”

  “Your father too?”

  “Oh, yes.” Mary smiled wryly. “It is a lesson in something or other the way people who were prominent at the university are so swiftly forgotten when they are gone.”

  The kitchen was old-fashioned but cheerful, with what was called a breakfast nook instead of table and chairs. Griselda slid onto a bench.

  “I’ll show you the house later if you’d like. My mother should be home by then. Now we can just talk.”

  And so they did, with coffee mugs before them. Griselda sensed that Mary needed to talk more than she herself needed to listen.

  “You must have noticed that Fred and I were very much in love.”

  “When you visited him at the Joyce Center.”

  She nodded. “We saw no need to hide it there. Now I am paying the penalty of our decision to keep our engagement a secret.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Two reasons.
First, my mother. She is an incorrigible matchmaker and has been pushing me at men for years. When finally I met Fred and we fell in love, I wanted to keep it from her for a time. I suppose I was fearful that her reaction would be triumphant, finally getting her old-maid daughter off her hands.”

  “Old maid!”

  “I think my mother thought she was stuck with me forever. Of course I exaggerate.”

  “What was the other reason for keeping it secret?”

  “That was Fred’s. When he told Naomi he wanted to break their engagement, she wouldn’t accept it. I guess she was quite angry and threatening. She said she would sue him for breach of promise.”

  “In this day and age?”

  “It does sound somewhat Victorian, doesn’t it? But he wanted time for her to get used to the fact and accept that they were no longer engaged.”

  Griselda thought of the woman who strode away from the table where Roger Knight had been sitting with Father Carmody and the Nevilles. When she went to talk to the Nevilles, Mary had assumed the chair Roger had temporarily vacated.

  “I thought you were going to fight at the club.”

  “You can see what a forceful personality she has. She would have dropped Fred without hesitation if she had wanted to, but she could not accept being dropped.”

  “She wouldn’t give back the ring.”

  “Oh, that is her mother’s.”

  “Her mother’s!”

  Mary nodded. “She gave it to herself. Anyway, those are the reasons we never announced it. And why I am now in such a peculiar position.”

  Mary still wore her mourning dress, apparently having forgotten her intention to change.

  “What did you mean when you said ‘not by natural causes.’” asked Griselda.

  Mary held her mug in both hands and for a moment stared into it. When she looked at Griselda, there were tears in her eyes.

  “I blame Naomi. If she would have accepted the end of their engagement, he would not have been so torn. I didn’t realize how difficult she had made life for him. He was in a cruel dilemma. On the one hand, he had a fiancée he no longer loved, perhaps he never had, but she would not let him go. On the other hand, the woman he loved. He must have crumbled under the pressure.”

  “Suicide?” Griselda whispered the word.

  Mary sobbed. “Worse than having him gone is the thought that I should have done something to prevent it.”

  “You had no inkling?”

  “Only in retrospect. But not at the time.” She wiped her eyes. “He had an older sister who died in mysterious circumstances. Perhaps she was a suicide too.”

  Griselda almost wished she hadn’t come but of course what she really wished was that what she had heard could not be so.

  5

  IN 1963 WHEN WHAT WAS then called the Memorial Library was opened—only later was it named after the longtime president of the university, Father Theodore Hesburgh—the university archives had been assigned the sixth floor, a space that had seemed ample at the time. But the accumulation of archival materials, plus the exponential increase in the number of volumes that caused the library to covet the space, seemed to make it inevitable that someday new quarters would have to be found for the archives. But crowded though it was, and accessible by way of an unassuming single door just to the right of the elevators, those who worked there had come to cherish their working conditions, and none more so than Greg Whelan. Of course the jammed condition made it difficult to accommodate such visitors as Roger Knight, but then Roger presented a problem wherever he went.

  On the afternoon of the funeral, Greg had commandeered one of the rooms in the archives set aside for visiting scholars, and it was there behind a closed door that he and Roger discussed the strange passing of their mutual friend, Fred Neville.

  “There seem to be two young ladies who expected Fred to marry them,” Roger said.

  “I never noticed anything between Fred and Mary.”

  “How often did we see them together?”

  “Not often.”

  “Almost never, Greg. But Griselda led me to believe that at the Joyce Center the two of them were what gossip columnists call an item.”

  “It’s odd how the meaning of that word developed.”

  “Which one?”

  “Item. Literally, it means again. In lists it prefaced different points, functioning much like a, b, c. Then it came to mean the contents of what it introduced. So what was listed became an item.”

  Roger listened with pleasure. He always came away from a visit with Greg with some, well, item of information which, whether it came as complete news or not, was welcome. Silently, he shared Greg’s delight that with Roger he could be fluent, no trace of his stammer. His little linguistic aside was preparatory to what they had meant to discuss.

  “At first it was possible to imagine that Mary had merely imagined her liaison with Fred. Not so, if Griselda is right, as I’m sure she is.”

  “But wearing black!”

  “Her mother knew nothing of it either, Greg.”

  “Of what?”

  “The fact that Mary and Fred intended to marry.”

  “That doesn’t seem like a motive for suicide,” Greg said, with a sly smile. Among bachelors a certain amount of misogyny is de rigueur.

  “But it is Naomi McTear who has a diamond ring and who is accepted by the Nevilles as their future daughter-in-law.”

  “She looks like a tough cookie.”

  “A liberated woman?”

  “Enslaved by her job. I don’t know what Fred saw in her.”

  “Phil says she is stunning.”

  “So is novocaine.”

  “Phil knows such things.”

  A moment of silence during which the two seemed to acknowledge that they did not.

  Greg said, “I had the feeling that Mrs. Shuster was measuring Phil for the role of son-in-law.”

  “After she saw I wouldn’t do.”

  “Really?”

  “Phil says so.”

  The ensuing silence lasted more than a minute. Greg seemed to decide that there was no adequate comment he could make.

  “Fred came here a couple of times to examine the materials we have on Maurice Francis Egan.”

  “A man of varied interests.”

  “A mystery man.”

  “Everyone is a mystery.”

  Roger loved the archives and sometimes envied Greg the life he led among the boxes and boxes of Notre Dame lore. It was an odd thought that the present would one day be the past and matters of seemingly fleeting moment now be represented here in bits and pieces for some future scholar to make sense of. Doubtless Greg would start a file on Fred Neville and his untimely demise. The fact that the death was no longer ascribed to natural causes made this almost a certainty.

  “Poison?” Greg asked.

  “So Jimmy Stewart says.”

  “Self-administered?”

  Roger’s expression became pained. “They have to examine every possibility.”

  “He had no enemies, did he?”

  “So far as I know, everybody liked him. And two women loved him enough to want to be his wife.”

  “You have to keep me posted on the investigation.”

  “Of course.”

  That night Phil told Roger of the examination of Fred’s apartment. He had changed into comfortable clothing—Levis, a Notre Dame sweatshirt, loafers—and was sitting in a kitchen chair watching Roger prepare their evening meal.

  “Phil, it can’t be suicide.”

  “Probably not. At any rate, he had a visitor during the days he was missing from his office.”

  “Who?”

  “Mary Shuster.”

  “Surely there is nothing suspicious in that, given what we now know.”

  “What we know is what Mary tells us.”

  “Are you saying that Jimmy Stewart suspects Mary?”

  “He intends to interview her.”

  6

  THE UNIVERSITY OF NO
TRE Dame is the nine-hundred-pound gorilla in the South Bend area. The largest local employer, it is the reason 95 percent of visitors come to South Bend, the target of eighty thousand fans at every home football game when the local police are pressed into service to direct the influx of automobiles, vans, SUVs, and their excited occupants. Whenever a police matter involves the university, the local constabulary proceeds with consummate diplomacy, not wanting to offend Notre Dame officials, willing to keep under wraps things that would normally be splashed across the pages of the local paper. Jimmy Stewart did not object to this. In many ways it made such work as he did easier, justifying keeping the media in the dark. So it was with the case of Fred Neville.

  That the assistant sports information director should have been found dead in his apartment after being absent without leave for days was already something not to make a fuss about. Such things happen. But Boswell the coroner had complicated matters with the results of his autopsy.

  “He died of poisoning.” Boswell seemed to take a lugubrious pleasure in telling Jimmy Stewart this. But then he was a Purdue graduate. Boswell was thin and wore a toupee, which in the ads that had convinced him to buy it promised a return to youth and an enhancement of appearance. Stewart wondered if Boswell really believed his hairpiece wouldn’t be recognized as such from anywhere within five hundred yards. Reddish and lush, it sat atop his head in such a way that it immediately called attention to itself. It had sideburns that stood out from the head except where the bows of Boswell’s glasses gripped them, seemingly keeping the thing in place.

  “You’re sure?”

  Boswell was sure. That had sent Jimmy Stewart to the apartment where he took possession of the cup on the stand beside the bed in which Fred had been found. Boswell soon reported that he had found in the cup traces of the same poison he had found in the body.

  “Suicide?”

  Boswell had shrugged. “I have no way to tell. Of course I can’t rule it out. It would be much simpler, wouldn’t it.”

  This was a crack at the special treatment Notre Dame received from the police in delicate matters.