The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  “His glasses were there beside him, and I could tell from his”—it took some time for her to get it out—“stare that he was dead. Even before I noticed his chest.” Her body spasmed suddenly, as though she would retch, and a hand moved to her mouth.

  McGarr looked around and above them. Because of the high walls on both sides of the lane, the site was visible only from either end, and at night—had Kevin Coyle been murdered then—only from the nearer gate, where McGarr could see the top of a streetlight.

  “But exactly,” he insisted. “It’s important that I know how you found him. How he was positioned.”

  “Why?”

  Perhaps to catch you in a lie, McGarr thought, but it was more complex than that. A man who had been stabbed once cleanly through the heart would have gone down limp, like a rag doll, and what she had told him so far did not support that assumption.

  With a trembling chin and bleary eyes she tried to look up at him and then at her wristwatch.

  “The sooner you show me, the sooner you can get back to your guests.”

  She pointed at the spot as though to ask if he actually meant that she should. “You mean?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a place like any other. Sure, the ground doesn’t remember, nor the wall. And the blood”—he reached down and felt the brown area that now looked like nothing more than some large spot of grease—“is dried. And here…” From a pocket he pulled out a handkerchief which he unfolded and spread a few inches from the wall. Fortunately, it was clean. “For those dainty skivvies that match your eyes. We wouldn’t want them ruined, sure we wouldn’t.”

  She blinked away the tears and regarded him. “You’re not serious.”

  McGarr kept himself from saying, “Deadly.” He smiled slightly and nodded.

  “But, I won’t.”

  “Sure you will. You’re a lovely young woman who doesn’t wish to become involved with the police, unfanciable chaps that we are. Need I remind you that you and nobody else failed to report this murder. That you and—Mary Sittonn and Katie Coyle, was it?—decided to ignore what all three of you knew was the law and the only proper thing to do. Need I say that you compromised this investigation or that I’m struggling desperately—with my conscience, with what I know is my responsibility under the law—not to make any of this public. You’re a professional woman, you know how things proceed. Others might see you as an accessory to murder.”

  When she still did not move, he added, “At the very least it could put your name in the papers. RTE.” He meant Radio Telefis Eireann, the state-supported Irish radio and television network. “I should imagine that the murder of Kevin Coyle virtually in your back garden almost”—McGarr had to reach for a word—“contemporaneous with your firm’s release of Phon/Antiphon, might be construed by some as more than simple coincidence. And then I wonder how it would be taken in London, your involvement in a thing such as this.”

  He had been guessing, but the flash of her eyes told him he was right. “Who else could publish Kevin’s book, I’d like to know,” she said flatly, and drawing in a breath, she advanced upon the spot and lowered herself onto the handkerchief. Her back jerked as it touched the wall. She cocked one knee and placed a wrist on that thigh. Gingerly she stretched the other leg out straight and then raised her head until it touched the wall, her eyes looking up over the roofline of the row houses on the other side of the wall. “Like so.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “As sure as I am of myself,” she said defiantly. “I’ll never forget it. Never ever. Nor your making me do this.”

  “His glasses. Where were they?”

  “Here—by this hand.” She meant the right hand.

  “As though he had removed them himself.”

  “Now that you mention it, yes.”

  Again he thought of the one thrust right through the heart. Everything would have stopped for Kevin Coyle. Immediately. “Anything else you noticed before you moved him?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  Tomorrow he would tax that memory.

  McGarr offered her his hand, but she ignored it, and he retrieved his handkerchief as she strode past him.

  In the house where he followed her—to phone the Technical Squad that would search the murder scene, if indeed it was that, and his office for a team to canvass the neighborhood—McGarr found Mary Sittonn and Katie Coyle in the sitting room.

  Mary Sittonn was dressed in a tight black tank top which made her breasts look like they had been wrapped flat, and her arms appear large and outsized, as from a rigorous program of body building. On one was a tattoo of a black cat that was posed coyly, as though undecided whether to pounce or run away. It was grinning, its blue eyes flashing, its tongue protruding slightly between its teeth. Around the young woman’s neck was a gold chain with a key. Her short hair had been oiled or greased and was brushed back. By her side was a small, brown Irish terrier that began growling at McGarr until he said, “Kinch? Come here, boy,” at which point the dog broke from her and circled McGarr’s legs, tail wagging.

  Mary Sittonn looked down into the tall glass filled with amber fluid. She raised it to her mouth.

  Katie Coyle herself was looking more like Mebdh on the one-punt bank note than anybody McGarr had ever seen. Her long brownish hair had wilted in the heat, and her fleshy face now looked more haggard than ever. Then there was her dress, made of a bleached-out blue color of cotton, which—neither a toga nor a sarong—resembled something meant for classical drama. It billowed around her neck and shoulders and then flowed out in waves, making her appear tented in a robe of state and only sadly regal, which was, of course, understandable.

  “Kevin wouldn’t have wanted us to mourn for him. He always hated that. ‘Dead is dead,’ he said both times his parents died.” She was drunk, or at least had been drinking, though the glass on the coffee table before her appeared untouched. “How goes it?” she asked in a voice that seemed so genuinely solicitous of McGarr’s progress that he rejected the conclusion that had been forming in his mind.

  Sisters. Perhaps he truly didn’t understand the concept. Or couldn’t.

  But her us was still on his mind. Could he be one of them, and in what way?

  FIVE

  AT HOME McGarr’s wife Noreen was waiting for him at the kitchen table, which she had set for tea. She had been reading; when he entered, she got up and, raising a palm, said, “Don’t bother yourself. Everything’s ready, even your essence du malt.” From the fridge she drew a can of lager and from the freezing compartment a frosted pint glass, both of which she placed before him. “I’ll let you pour that, since I’ve been led to believe there might be some problem with the bubbles, cold glass and all.”

  McGarr stared down at the glass, which he had not seen before. Or, rather, which he had been seeing most of his life but never before in his house. It was a standard twenty-ounce draft glass and had probably been nicked from a pub.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “Well what?”

  “What about Kevin Coyle, of course, and if you toy with me, I won’t let you see this.” She held up her book, the multicolored dust cover of which read:

  Phon/Antiphon

  A Work Of Imaginative Criticism

  by

  Kevin Coyle

  “Catty give you that?” McGarr asked.

  “D’ya know Catty? Brilliant young woman and”—Noreen’s eyes narrowed and she looked at him closely before continuing—“it seems that the book-launching party in the Shelbourne will go on Monday as planned. Imagine the…éclat, the coverage. The international press. Television, radio. The missus says,” and McGarr chimed in, “Kevin would have wanted it that way.”

  McGarr scanned his wife’s face: her long forehead and high cheekbones, and her nose, which was perhaps too straight and too narrow, so that it said more about class—her maiden name had been Frenche—than about beauty. And he decided it was her lips that he admired most. The upper w
as slightly protrusive and made her seem forever on the point of breaking into smile, an illusion which the uncommonly green eyes reinforced.

  Early in their marriage McGarr had taken to sharing some of the information that his investigations generated, if only to assure domestic tranquillity in his household. On more than a few occasions Noreen’s assistance, which was usually more informational than tactical, had proved important, and she was ever discreet. It was as if her academic background—first honors in modern languages at Trinity, and later her research study at the Courtauld Institute—had erected a felicitous blind through which she saw the world as a kind of shadow play; it was McGarr himself who from time to time pulled the blind down and permitted her to see things as they were, or at least as they appeared to him, which he hoped were one in the same.

  And thus he began telling her what he knew of the tragedy of Kevin Coyle, author, scholar, narrator/actor, university professor as well as husband, father, and what else McGarr had not yet determined. He told her how the wife, Katie, had appeared in Belgrave Square on their doorstep and had taken him to their Liberties “loft” apartment, which Noreen said she would kill to see. “Kevin had every class of arty friend, here and in London and New York. I bet the place is packed with important stuff. I wonder if she’ll sell any of it off.” From the waves of her deep red locks Noreen drew a pencil and marked Katie in the margin of the book. Forever panting, McGarr thought, regarding the faraway look in her turquoise-colored eyes.

  And he told her how the first “sister,” the attractive and feminine Catty Doyle, whose dog had discovered Coyle’s corpse, had chosen to phone the wife and not the police, whom they did not fancy. And how the certainly masculine and perhaps even dykelike Mary Sittonn, owner of an antique shop in the Liberties, had hitched up her horse to her cart, and how, like two tinkers, she and Katie Coyle had crossed the Liffey and climbed the Phibsborough Road, having thought so far ahead as to bring with them a tarp to cover Coyle’s dead body.

  They found him propped (arranged?) against the granite-block wall of the Prospect Cemetery, behind a neighborhood of working-class row houses. He had been stabbed once, perfectly in the heart, but the murder weapon was nowhere in sight. His straw boater, the same kind that some character had worn in Ulysses—“Stephen Dedalus,” Noreen supplied; “Don’t tell me you, of all people, have never read Ulysses?”—and actually a hat once owned by Joyce, was also gone. And his glasses with a shattered lens were found “roughly” by his side, as though he had taken them off with his right hand. If the “sisters” who carried him back to the Liberties and allowed him to lay in a kind of state for two or three days before blowing the whistle could be believed. “What do you mean, me of all people?”

  “You—the professional Dubliner?”

  McGarr’s head went back slightly, but he went on. The wife, Katie, seemed to point the finger at a man named Flood—“Fergus Flood,” Noreen interjected. “He was at Trinity when I was there. Or, rather, he was teaching when…Brilliant man, and a good, a solid teacher. Unlike some other lecturers, he gave you the feeling that he truly loves literature.” And another man named Holderness. “Holderness. Holderness. Haven’t I heard or read his name someplace before? Didn’t he write something controversial?”

  Said McGarr, “What do you mean professional?”

  Noreen hunched her shoulders and smiled slightly, knowing she had browned him off. “Well, if you’re not the sempiternal Dub’, I don’t know who is. From”—she flicked out a hand, and her eyes scanned his face—“how you look, act, even walk—for Jesus’ sake—to who you are and how you”—she now fell to laughing—“think and act. Even what you do—Murder Squad, and good at it—is Dublin. Have you ever listened to yourself? We must get a tape recorder. Say, ‘Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.’”

  McGarr stared down at the half-filled pint glass of lager. Think? How could she know how he thought? And what was wrong—or rather, right—with his walk, that it was so much the walk of a Dubliner?

  “Go on—say that?”

  Trying to smile, he shook his head. Did he need this abuse after a hard hot day and what promised to be a spate of others no less difficult, at least until public interest in the Coyle murder waned or he solved the crime? But his eyes fell on her shoulders and chest and silky dressing gown, and another promise made him say, “Stadely ploomp Book Molligun—what’s the rist of it?”

  She couldn’t contain herself. Her laughter was so intense, tears came to her eyes. “Admit it, Peter, you—of all people—have never read Ulysses.” In mock disbelief she put a hand to her mouth and looked away.

  McGarr sought relief in the pint glass, which he drained, and considered the disadvantages of having married a much younger, intelligent, redheaded woman who was no less a Dubliner than he, though from the fashionable and Protestant south side. “Slagging,” however—as derisive humor was called in Dublin—wasn’t limited to any social or religious background, and he waited until she had calmed herself before raising the empty glass. “Interesting item, this. Cost much?”

  “Not a penny. Objet trouvé on loan from Buswell’s Hotel.” It was a hostelry near her family’s picture gallery in Dawson Street. Noreen frequently entertained clients there.

  It was McGarr’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “To be returned, I hope.”

  She looked down at the empty glass. “I suppose you don’t want another of those.” And when he looked away, she added triumphantly as she rose to fetch another beer from the fridge, “Bernie called.” She meant Detective Sergeant McKeon. “He said the preliminary forensic report puts the time of death sometime early in the morning of the seventeenth. The alcohol level in his body was point three three, which made him—”

  Locked, thought McGarr. Absolutely drunk. He thought again of the eyeglasses with the smashed lens, which Catty Doyle said were resting on the ground near Coyle’s right hand.

  “Then the guess is that the knife was plunged in”—she was pouring the lager, but averting her head as she grimaced, splashed some on the table—“and withdrawn immediately, given how much he bled.” Placing the glass in front of McGarr, she then glanced down at a note pad. “Otherwise the corpse is unremarkable—how can anybody say that of such a…fine man. Or, at least, a fine mind?”

  She sat and paused a minute over Coyle’s book before addressing herself to what she knew McGarr was waiting to hear. “‘Sisters’ bothers me, and that bit about not fancying the police. I would have thought that Kevin Coyle was apolitical. An academic. An artist.”

  But it was Coyle’s wife and her “sisters” who appeared to be political, or at least to possess a perspective that was militant, and gender-relatedly so.

  “And then that cart ride—how many miles?”

  McGarr was that much a Dubliner that he could say automatically, “Two long miles. Exactly.”

  “And how long would that take in a cart? An hour in the morning, considering rush-hour traffic? More? You’d think she would have called a cab, him—her husband—dead or not. And would she have taken anybody’s word on that?”

  Not if she really was one of us, McGarr thought. But to give her her due, she might have known how long it would take by any means. McGarr in his little Cooper, which could dodge and jink here and there, had spent about seventy minutes on the road to De Courcy Square, or rather, the rear of Bengal Terrace. But then traffic would have been flowing the other way when the cart made its trek to the cemetery in Glasnevin.

  It was the us that was bothering McGarr. He was about as much one of the “sisters” as he was the sort of person who would bother to sit down and piece out the drivel that was Ulysses. He’d tried it once and had nearly thrown the book across the room.

  Yet after a pleasant repast that featured a delicate prawn salad served with a crisp Montbazillac, McGarr withdrew to the library, where he chanced to pull the volume from the shelf and managed to discover several sections
that were nearly intelligible.

  But no sooner had he turned back to the beginning and become engrossed, than Noreen appeared in the doorway, catching him at it. “So—it’s now that he chooses to invest himself in the lore of his beloved city.”

  McGarr asked himself why now wasn’t as good a time as any, until he glanced up from the book and noticed how, silhouetted against the light from the dining room behind her, Noreen’s dressing gown had become transparent. And then there was a certain rake to her stance that was suggestive if not downright provocative. She had one leg forward and a hand on the gentle curve of the other hip.

  She had decided three months before—arbitrarily, in a dictat delivered over dinner at McGarr’s favorite restaurant, “My treat. Keep your hand off your billfold”—that after nine years of marriage they would now, in the watershed thirtieth year of her life, have children. “How many?” he had asked. “We’ll see,” she had answered. “But the way I’m feeling tonight”—she had craned her head and looked off, her pupils dilating—“a veritable hoard.”

  They had been “trying” now for three months, which meant precisely timed bouts of strenuous, if draining activity, to no result apart from the threat that he, not she, would have to visit her doctor for some “coaching.”

  “I, sir, have been examined. There is nothing wrong with me. You, on the other hand, are—how shall I phrase it tactfully?—a man of a certain age with…debilitating habits. You drink, you smoke, you exercise infrequently. And, please, don’t give out to me about the garden in which your heart rate is probably never elevated above two strokes per minute. Results are what’s called for. I want—”

  McGarr had stifled that desire, or rather, the desire of the moment, but he had never heard anything more absurd. Yes, he was fifty, but, yes as well, he had never felt more fit and able in his life. “Feeling able and being able, my dear, are two different things,” retorted his lovely wife, who had tried to schedule an appointment with the damn doctor, who was also a woman, to ascertain—“Scientifically. It’s just a simple test”—if he were man enough to get her with child. And the “my dear?” Where had she gotten that, off the telly? Nobody in Ireland said “My dear.”