“Angel?” Phil asked.
“There are fallen angels, Phil.”
Thelma produced the microcassette from Fred’s telephone from her purse. Why had she taken it?
“Listen to it and you will see.”
It made melancholy listening. In recorded message after recorded message, Thelma had sought in vain to interest Fred in herself. This recorded persona had contrasted with her relatively subdued manner at work, where she had contented herself with batting her lashes at Fred, but then she batted her lashes at every man.
It was Fred’s susceptibility to both Naomi McTear and Mary Shuster that had encouraged rather than discouraged the enamored Thelma. If two, why not three? She had come to believe that Fred’s affection was indiscriminate but that, once he was smitten by her, he would swiftly become monogamous.
“It’s almost too easy,” Stewart complained on a visit to the Knight brothers.
Thelma had an uncle who ran a nursery and it was there that she had obtained the strychnine. Of course she had a key to Fred’s apartment, so there was no problem of access to his kitchen and coffee canister when her passion turned from desire to hatred. She had been in the group that had benefitted from Tom McTear’s play-by-play in the apartment at Hoosier Residences and thus had opportunity to drop the container stolen from her uncle’s nursery into the trash. Had she intended to incriminate Tom McTear?
“More likely Naomi,” Roger mused.
“Right. And that might have worked. Naomi was a more promising suspect than her brother.”
When Naomi had made coffee in Fred’s apartment and drank what might have been intended as a farewell cup to her departed beloved, suspicion had transferred to Tom McTear.
“He could have been found guilty,” Stewart said.
Silence followed this reminder of the contingencies of crime and punishment and the tantalizing non-convergence of legal and moral guilt.
2
NOTRE DAME’S MALE BASKETBALL team faltered as the season progressed but the Lady Irish were on their way to another national title. Griselda was a major cause of this success and on the floor she gave her mind totally to the game. But her ambition to lead a life like Roger Knight’s grew ever stronger. However, she was beginning to find it hard to share her mentor’s esteem for the novels of Maurice Francis Egan.
“Not all writers are major writers, Griselda.”
“He wouldn’t even sit on the bench.”
“De gustibus non disputandum est.” Roger crossed his fingers as he said this. The phrase suggested that literary judgments are mere expressions of subjective feeling, which was heresy to him.
“I’m going to take Latin,” Griselda said.
“It’s about time.”
And so the conversation turned to latinity, the Tridentine rite, the woeful liturgical translations, the great evolution from classical through medieval and Renaissance Latin. And inevitably the poem Fred had written for Mary Shuster came up.
Mary’s reaction to the arrest of Thelma Maynooth was something of a surprise.
“It’s awful to say, but I had half-hoped it was Naomi. If she could do that it would prove she didn’t really love Fred.”
“‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’” Roger murmured.
“Who says so?”
Her answer was the recitation of a large swatch of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Mrs. Shuster was enthralled.
“Nathaniel loved that poem. He was a little sheepish about it but he too had it by heart.”
“A priest visited Wilde on his deathbed in Paris,” Roger said. “Although there is a dispute as to what priest it was.”
“Who was Isadore of Seville?” Mary asked.
But Phil intervened before Roger could get going.
“You should get credits for living with him,” Griselda said.
“And grow dumber by degrees?”
But it was time for popcorn and Roger donned his apron and went to work in the kitchen. Griselda rose to help him.
“Did you hear about Anthony Boule?” she asked.
“What?”
“He’s out of a job.”
“Fired?”
“His position has been eliminated.”
“But not Fred’s, certainly.”
“There’ll be a national search. Anthony can apply for it, I suppose. I wouldn’t give much for his chances.”
“But he dropped the idea of the book.”
“What book?”
But of course the proposed book had gone the way of most such ideas for instant fame and fortune. It would have had to become the story of Thelma, and Anthony had no interest in that. He had been reconciled with Scott Frye and would himself be working in the Hoosier Residence until he knew the outcome of his application to succeed Fred.
“Scott is talking about a screenplay,” Anthony said, avoiding Roger’s eyes.
“Will you collaborate?”
“Ha! I’m cured of the writing bug.”
3
A MONTH BEFORE THELMA Maynooth’s trial a bearded figure showed up at Roger’s campus office.
“Professor Knight? My name is Greg Maieutic.”
Professor Maieutic, as it turned out, taught creative writing at IUSB.
“I’m having a crisis of conscience,” Maieutic said, taking the chair Roger had indicated.
Roger, uneasy, said nothing.
“I had Thelma Maynooth in class. A night class.”
“A writing class?”
Maieutic nodded. “I speak to you in confidence. She wrote a novel for the course. Just began it during the semester, but she would come to see me from time to time and by gosh she finished it.” He ran his fingers through his beard. “I suppose I don’t have to tell you how rare that is. People think they want to write…” His voice trailed away, taking with it a thousand faded hopes of authorial success. He looked at Roger. “The novel might have been a scenario for what has happened. Of course it was autobiographical.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“Would you? I was hoping you would. That’s why I came. You’d have to read the novel to understand my problem.”
Meanwhile Laura Reith and Tom McTear were seeing a lot of one another. Phil had gotten the news from Stewart.
“Hasn’t he already had his quota of wives?”
“He’s going to have them annulled.”
Roger wondered if a church wedding would soften McTear’s attitude toward Notre Dame.
“Jimmy says Laura wants to get married in Sacred Heart.”
Roger did come into possession of Drink To Me Only, a mystery novel by Thelma Maynooth. Roger read it through in one sitting that night, fascinated, though not by any literary merits it had. Thelma’s command of English was shaky, but then she was mimicking who-knew-what models in the mystery genre. Maieutic had called it autobiographical and that was certainly true. Despite the stilted prose, Roger recognized the office in which Thelma had worked. The heroine was a vulnerable young woman who succumbed to the advances of a married man. As Roger read, western music was playing on Phil’s radio and a lyric captured the theme of the novel. A good-hearted woman in love with a two-timing man. But her good heart had been sorely tested when the heroine learned that her lover had a wife. The scene in which the two women met was one of the best in the book, and it provided the motivation for what happened. Rita, the heroine, decided to do herself and the wife a favor and send Howard the husband into the arms of St. Peter. Her weapon was Irish coffee.
Two days later Roger met with Maieutic again.
“Have you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty bad?”
“But fascinating.”
“You can see my problem. Should I show it to the police? It would go against all my principles, academic principles, but I am a citizen as well as a professor.”
“I don’t think there is any need to show it to the police,” Roger said. “They have a strong case without it. She has all but confessed, but even so
the evidence is overwhelming.”
Maieutic let out a great sigh. “I can’t tell you how relieved that makes me.”
“I suppose you could return it to Thelma.”
“I will. I will. That novel has been an albatross around my neck.”
And he did return Drink To Me Only to Thelma and, after her conviction, she contacted an agent who showed interest given Thelma’s current address. She telephoned Roger to gloat. And in a way to express her gratitude.
“You may have found me out,” she said. “But you made me a writer.”
Not even God could do that, Roger thought. Of course he congratulated her and then spent half an hour pondering the depths to which publishing had fallen.
“At least she didn’t call it Irish Coffee,” Greg Whelan said wryly.
“God forbid.”
Also by Ralph McInerny
Mysteries Set at the University of Notre Dame
On This Rockne
Lack of the Irish
Irish Tenure
Book of Kills
Emerald Aisle
Celt and Pepper
Father Dowling Mystery Series
Her Death of Cold
The Seventh Station
Bishop as Pawn
Lying Three
Second Vespers
Thicker Than Water
A Loss of Patients
The Grass Widow
Getting a Way with Murder
Rest in Pieces
The Basket Case
Abracadaver
Four on the Floor
Judas Priest
Desert Sinner
Seed of Doubt
A Cardinal Offense
The Tears of Things
Grave Undertakings
Triple Pursuit
Prodigal Father
Last Things
Andrew Broom Mystery Series
Cause and Effect
Body and Soul
Savings and Loam
Mom and Dead
Law and Ardor
Heirs and Parents
IRISH COFFEE. Copyright © 2003 by Ralph McInerny. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. 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.
Irish coffee / Ralph McInerny.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-7777-7
1. Knight, Roger (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Knight, Philip (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Private investigators—Indiana—South Bend—Fiction. 4. University of Notre Dame—Fiction. 5. South Bend (Ind.)—Fiction. 6. College teachers—Fiction. 7. College sports—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A31166I64 2003
813'.54—dc21
2003050620
Irish Coffee Page 16
