The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  The substantiation had come later, when McGarr had submitted to examination and had been adjudged able. Noreen’s doctor was a feminist, and, leaving her office after an exhaustive physical and educational examination/interview, he had felt nigh on violated.

  “You can bring your friend along.”

  “Who?”

  “The bearded one. Ulysses. I’ll read to you in bed. It ends with a soliloquy that you’ll enjoy hearing and’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about women.”

  McGarr turned his head to one side, as though to share his anticipation with the aforementioned hero.

  And watching Noreen’s feline smile of satisfaction broaden as he pulled himself from the chair, McGarr wondered how much light, as opposed to heat, would be shed on the death of Kevin Coyle tonight.

  He suspected that Ulysses, having waited over eighty years for a “professional” appraisal, could tolerate another few hours of enigma, and on the stairs he reached for his wife’s thigh. “What d’ya mean walk?” he asked in her ear as she slowed and eased her back into him.

  “You know, the trudge. Ah, now Peter—don’t do that. I’m going to read to you. Janie—” And yet far from moving away from him, she instead reached her arms up over her shoulders and twined her fingers around the back of his neck.

  “Trudge?”

  “As though, poor things, you’ve got the weight of an improbable universe on your individual shoulders. Said burden you tot to and put off only in that second most necessary of premises. Fortunately for you, as planning has it, at least one such institution graces nearly every commercial block.”

  Spinning her around to fireman’s carry her to the bedroom—“Now, don’t be too rough.” There was hope in that—McGarr tried to think of a way of crossing Dublin without passing a single pub.

  It was a reflection that a few days later he would find, uncannily, in Ulysses, though Leopold Bloom’s institution of choice had been the church, not the pub.

  It had been a different age.

  PART II

  SIX

  JOYCE SCHOLAR MURDERED

  TRINITY PROF SLAIN ON JOYCE OUTING

  WRITER/LECTURER/SCHOLAR

  BLOOMSDAY VICTIM

  Slain Near Prospect Cemetery

  …were the headlines in the three morning papers. McGarr wondered how the last bit got in. Certainly not from one of his staff, nearly all of whom were seasoned veterans and understood what any breach of confidence would mean. Or the Tech Squad, though all of the papers had their touts.

  Sitting at his desk in his cubicle in Dublin Castle with a brilliant patch of morning sunlight illuminating the newspaper on his lap, he couldn’t keep himself from thinking of Catty Doyle. How had she described herself? “Acquisitions editor and publicist. They fairly well leave things up to me to make the most of.”

  What was bothering McGarr even more, however, were the editorials. It was as though all three newspapers had gotten together and decided to blame the police for Coyle’s death. One attempted to compare the current level of violent crime with that of 1904. None seemed as concerned with the actual statistics as with the details of Joyce’s Ulysses, as if the characters in the book of an artist who had spent nearly all of his life out of the country were real.

  “Bloom and Dedalus, the latter worse for drink, were able to circulate through Dublin and visit the notorious brothels of Nighttown without so much as a violent incident or the mention of murder, whereas now a renowned literary scholar has become—after having led a tour of literati through the city—the ninth murder victim of the year.”

  “Wrong on four counts,” said Hughie Ward, a young detective who, like the others gathered in the cubicle, had been watching McGarr’s eyes work down the page. The second least senior member of the Murder Squad staff, he was relegated to leaning against some cabinets just inside the door. The others sat on tables or on the windowsills. Detective Sergeant McKeon reclined in the cubicle’s only other chair, usually filled by Superintendent O’Shaughnessy, who was now on holiday. “One, in Nighttown a British soldier knocked Stephen Dedalus on his arse and bloodied his nose.”

  “Bully for him,” said McKeon. “I only hope Joyce was writing from experience. I have an idea it’s no end of trouble that fecker’s already caused us, and him how many—”

  “Forty-seven.”

  “Thank you, All-Knowledgeable and Yuppy Inspector Ward. Forty-seven bloody years in his bloody feckin’ grave”—he looked up—“and where in the name of St. Surplice, the Papal ponce, did you get that suit?”

  Small and dark with diminutive good looks, Ward dressed carefully and well. Today he was wearing a linen suit in an unusual taupe color. His tie was an ochre shade that got on well with his neatly parted hair, the two inches of handkerchief showing in the breast pocket of the jacket, and his woven cordovan leather brogues, the surfaces of which had been polished to a stylishly dull sheen.

  Some of the other men began chuckling. One reached out and tried to snatch the handkerchief, but Ward, smiling, dodged and parried his body. He was perhaps a dandy, but he had also represented Ireland successfully in several international boxing competitions. He was popular with the other men, and the smoke of rumor—fanned into a blaze by the Murder Squad staff—had it that he was with the ladies as well.

  “Two,” he went on, “Leopold Bloom was also accosted in Kevin Street and had to flee a bloke called The Citizen and his vicious cur, Garryowen. The Citizen hurled a biscuit tin at Bloom’s head.”

  “And the cut of it. The jacket,” McKeon went on, appraising Ward, “looks like something fit for a cocaine conquistador. Worse, it’s the very color of what’s left in the bottom of a porter glass.”

  There was a pause before Delaney—a senior man with a pixyish smile—asked, “Burple?” Sinclaire began chuckling.

  “Three, murder is mentioned in Ulysses at least once, and—”

  “Have ya ever read it yerself?” McKeon continued to Delaney, who had assumed the perch on the far corner of McGarr’s desk that McKeon himself usually occupied.

  “And four, we’ve had six murders this year and three arrests. One a month exactly. Murders that is.” Opening the jacket, Ward flashed its label at McKeon. “Brown Thomas, Sergeant. That’s a little shop in Grafton Street.” It was Dublin’s most fashionable and pricey department store.

  “All shite and humbuggery,” said McKeon. “On both counts, book and Gook. I have it on report that those two gentlemen emigrated to Hong Kong but can be had anytime mail order for twenty quid apiece.” Of course, he meant Brown Thomas.

  McGarr was scarcely listening to the colloquy, which was a feature of most morning meetings, as he continued to scan the newspaper commentary. Vague writing, either by design or ineptitude, went on to imply that the Garda Siochana might be partially responsible for “…a century-long decline in moral standards” and “an upsurge in capital crime.” As if any police force could keep a people from murdering each other.

  He closed the paper and placed it on his desk, carefully lapping it over the other two. Believing the mind to be disorderly enough, McGarr loathed a messy desk. He reached for his mug of coffee; he’d spiked it with a liberal dollop of malt before the others had entered the cubicle. Invariably it improved his mood, which was somber of a sunny summer morning with the Castle office looking like a cramped and time-sorrowed relic.

  “Then you’ve read the book,” he said to Ward.

  “Of course. Hasn’t everybody?”

  “Not that lout of an editor,” said McKeon.

  Nor anybody else in the cubicle, McGarr judged from the averted gazes.

  Said Bresnahan, “Must’ve been on his exam for the leaving cert.” Ward’s junior by a few months and the Murder Squad’s sole woman, she stood in the open doorway so she might more easily tend to any ringing phones or to McGarr’s coffee mug. It was the dog’s-body post that each new recruit had had to fill, each in his turn, but which Bresnahan resented on sexist grounds. “Then, you know
, there’s this other article in the Independent that tells all about it. The literary angle.” The floor groaned under her surprisingly quick but heavy step as she advanced upon McGarr’s desk.

  There she palmed up the paper, slapped three fingers on her tongue, and began leafing through the pages, her great, reddish-pink body looming over McGarr as he sipped from his cup and tried to place himself on the bench under the grape arbor in his back garden. At this moment a wedge of angling sunlight would be warming his back.

  “Dere, dere ’tis,” she said in her thick Kerry brogue. “Detective Ward’s advice exactly.” She stepped back from the newspaper. Two bright patches had appeared in her cheeks, and she was breathing volubly.

  Said McKeon, “I have a request. I wonder if Ban Gharda Bresnahan might take to wearing runners. Her tread, now—it’s grating, so it is. Day after day of it, you’d think you were living on the Great Plains.”

  “T’underin’ herds?” Delaney asked.

  “Horizon to horizon.”

  Somebody cleared his throat. Somebody else moaned his dismay.

  Said Ward in an unconcerned tone, “I only ever read the Times.” He then adjusted the cuff of his shirt, which was pinned with a gold link. Among Dublin’s smart set, the Independent was considered the farmers’ newspaper.

  “Ah Rut’ie,” said Delaney, who was the staff conciliator, “don’t even try. It’s just the boys pokin’ a bit of fun.”

  But her color had turned an alarming shade. “And whoi not? I’m as good as any man here.” Her hands went to her hips, and McGarr could see that two dark patches had suddenly appeared on the light blue of her uniform blouse. She glanced from him to McKeon, who had hidden his face in his hand, and back again, as though seeking corroboration.

  It was a painful moment, and, when support did not appear forthcoming, she made it worse, “Better, in fact. And when true liberation comes to this benighted isle, all you lard-arsed shaggers’ll find yourselves workin’ for the likes of me.”

  Sinclaire began chuckling, and the others quickly picked it up. “Lard-arsed shaggers!” he said. “It’s a classic. Sure, you would’ve thought I’d have heard that at home.”

  Raising the mug and inhaling the hot malt fumes before taking a long, satisfying sip, McGarr could scarcely await the day. As the malt settled in his stomach, however, he suddenly appreciated how much Bresnahan was in fact better than any man in the room. And then Ward too was not without his uses, the most advantageous of which was the possibility that he might keep him, McGarr, from having to tangle with the hydra named Ulysses.

  Ah, youth, he thought, reaching for a pad on his desk. And inexperience. The lesson? In a meeting with superiors, never volunteer information. Speak only when spoken to, and then to the point raised.

  As McGarr wrote, McKeon said, “Coyle’s blood alcohol level was point t’ree t’ree. Enough to congelifract a bull rhino. Excuse me, Rut’ ie, a neutered bull rhino. Add to that a stab in the heart, and it seems even less likely that he could have melted down a wall into a sitting position, at the same time removing his eyeglasses with his right hand and staring up over the house tops for one last glimpse of dear, dirty Dublin, the city of which he was the buttocks-befriending bard. In that regard I’m t’inking of Ms. Doyle, whose house was nearby.

  “The Tech Squad says the soft ground of the site itself was a muddle of prints: men’s, women’s, a horse, rubber cart tires. The blood was Coyle’s or at least of the same type, so that, if he bled to death, he did it there. Dead three days. They’ll have the complete written report to us later today.

  “The team we put on the Bengal Terrace/De Courcy Square neighborhood found nobody who saw or heard much, apart from a car in the alley leading from Finglas Road into those laneways there at the back of the cemetery. It’s an informal thing with two concrete-filled pipes to keep tinker’s caravans out. You have to drive up over the sidewalk and over a grass stretch to get in. Man in the house says he was wakened by the sound of a car trying to get up over the curb. He pulled himself out of bed and saw a small white car, something like one’ a them little Fiats they had a few years ago. ‘Orientals,’ we called them.”

  “A Cinque Cento,” said Ward.

  “That’s right. A chinko-chinko. Made a racket, so he said, trying to power up over the rise and then maneuver itself to squeeze between the pipes. Two people in it, or so he thought, and a learner’s sticker on the back window. He says he thought it was a couple’a yokes a little worse for wear, you know, after hours and—”

  “Yokin’ around,” said Delaney, who shook his head. “Scandinavians. Blondes. We’ll get Ward to round them all up, and our man or woman’ll be among them.”

  “—until it came back out the same way and had to yockey around a bit to make the squeeze again. One person this time, though because of the angle and the size of the car, he couldn’t see who. Man or woman.”

  McGarr had finished writing, and he reached one sheet to Bresnahan and the other to Ward, saying to the former, “Three women, one story. I want you to interview them in situ. Signed statements—where they were the night of the murder, with whom, etcetera. And checks. I want corroborations, where possible, on everything they swear to. Does any of them own or have access to a little Fiat? Do they drive? Maybe Catty Doyle had a date who drove her ’round to the back door. You know the case. For the moment those three are yours. See what you can do, and Rut’ie, remember this: You have the lever. They broke the law. Use it.”

  “But—” She looked up from the sheet, her expression at once hopeful, alarmed, and suspicious. “Who’ll do me…work while I’m—The typing and filing and the phone?”

  “Ring up clerical. Have them send somebody ’round.”

  “Two somebodies,” said McKeon in a tone so neutral that Bresnahan didn’t know if the remark were a compliment or yet another slag on her great size.

  “But…how long might I take, Chief?”

  “As long as you need. Ward…” McGarr glanced over at the young detective. “I want you to go over to a firm named Joyce’s Ireland and Bloomsday Tours in Nassau Street and get the itinerary of this year’s outing—where exactly they went and with whom.”

  He thought for a moment, mainly of how much the three-day lapse between the murder and the report of the murder had compromised the investigation. If most of Flood’s charges had been foreigners and they had come to Ireland specifically for the Bloomsday event, they might well have already left the country. Others, who were now touring, would be difficult to locate.

  “Names and addresses. Once you’ve got the list, notify the authorities at all points of exit—Shannon and Dublin airports, the boats to England, border crossings into the North. We need written statements from each one of them in regard to Kevin Coyle and what they saw of him that day. Anything…extraordinary. Provide specific queries. You know the procedure.

  “Then for those who’ve already left the country, I want you to write them a letter.”

  Somebody groaned. Another began to laugh. For most of the Murder Squad, reports were bad enough, would perhaps be impossible without Bresnahan or somebody like her. But letters to foreigners explaining what had happened and then asking the proper, specifically worded questions that a barrister couldn’t pick apart in a court of law without the help of Bresnahan, was a task too onerous to contemplate. And Ward and his wit had long since burned that bridge.

  “Also, since you know Ulysses,” McGarr went on, “I want you to get hold of a recent photo of Coyle. Preferably one in which he’s wearing the Joyce boater. The newspapers or Mrs. Coyle should be able to help you with that. Take it around the entire tour. Question anybody who might have had occasion to be with them—barmen, cabbies, shopkeepers. See what you can learn.”

  When McGarr paused, McKeon said, “Jayz—I hope that’s not it, Chief. Just look at the lad, rarin’ to go, and with the literary bend and all. Can’t we toss in a perk or two—some interviews at the Shelbourne bar around tea time and then on to White’
s-on-the-Green or the Friars Jacks for a working dinner with Catty? Don’t tell me you’re going to let him ignore her?”

  “The what?” Ward asked. Whites-on-the-Green and Les Frères Jacques were the two best restaurants in the city center.

  Said McGarr, “Not it in the least, Bernie. Ward, why don’t we have you ring up the papers and ask them to run a little article for us. We should write it for them to make sure they get it straight. Make it read—”

  McKeon cleared his throat and looped a finger at Bresnahan, who stammered, “But Oi-Oi t’ought the Chief Superintendent—”

  “Never t’ink when you’re around a certain class of man,” McKeon advised.

  “It’s suicidal,” said Ward.

  McGarr twined his hands behind his head and stared up at a ceiling netted with cobwebs and dangling bits of dust. No wonder he despised desk work, he thought. “Begin with the title: Gardai Issue Murder Appeal.

  “The Gardai are appealing for information from persons living near the Prospect Cemetery or Finglas Road who may be able to help in the investigation of the murder of Trinity College Professor Kevin Coyle.

  “The internationally-acclaimed literary scholar and father of nine is suspected to have been murdered in a lane near the eastern end of the cemetery sometime early in the morning of the seventeenth. Anyone who had contact with Mr. Coyle or who can remember seeing him on the previous evening is asked to notify the police.

  “Gardai are also anxious to talk with anybody who observed a Fiat Five hundred with a learner’s sticker in the vicinity that night.