The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  No, for Bresnahan it was air and light and open spaces and a house with wide bay windows perched, say, up the side of Slea Head, overlooking Bantry Bay; it was a big, strong Kerryman to tend the fields and get her with a brood of little lads and lassies who would care for her in her old age. It was a dream that she had largely forsaken, given the craven character of most men and their generally diminutive size. Instead she thought she might make a name for herself here in the city, and then with seniority and connections put in for the command of the Dingle or Kenmare or Tralee barracks.

  Catching sight of herself out of uniform and in Dublin mufti—a short-sleeved black blouse, collar up and opened to the third button, her flame-red hair pinned up and spraying from the back of her head—Bresnahan panicked. All, every bit of the dream, depended on her professional success now, and she was filled with jealousy and a kind of hatred for little jackeens, like Ward and McKeon and even McGarr himself, who had the look and the feel for and even the abrupt swagger of these mean streets. Damn them, she’d pluck up her courage and prove herself equal or better, she vowed, as she turned and plunged on.

  Coombe Collectibles and Rare Goods was a long, low building with a slate roof and dingy windows. Inside, the shop was dark and blessedly cool, filled with a stale, sweet smell of old wood and cloth and paper that reminded her of death. At first, thinking it was empty, she decided to look around and get the feel of the place before forging ahead with the questioning. The few times that McGarr had taken her along on an investigation—for cover mostly, she was sure—she’d noticed how he had seemed to survey everything first, his eyes roaming as though some crucial part of what he was seeking could be divined from the details of the scene.

  But the shop was packed to the eaves with every class of thing from a wicker baby’s pram to old, tin-pot soldier’s helmets like her great-grandfather had worn when fighting for the British in the First War. She had seen one just like it at her mother’s house outside Kenmare. Then there were crystal wine goblets and old silver and even gold plates in locked glass cabinets, frilly dresses and tuxedos and ball gowns on racks.

  Distracted by an array of dated fountain pens, Bresnahan had actually stopped to study their thick barrels—they would be well-suited to her large hand—when a curtain of beads across a door leading into the back of the shop suddenly parted and the head of what at first seemed like a chubby boy appeared. “Need help?” Her hair was close-cropped, her face small and full and sallow. On her arm was a small tattoo of a black cat with green eyes and an outstretched tongue.

  “Not at the moment.” As though surprised in the commission of a crime, Bresnahan flushed with guilt or shame; her heart pounded in her throat, and for all her size and authority, she felt like turning on her heels and fleeing out the open door into the sunlight. How could she go on? It was clear she wasn’t cut out for this work.

  “If you do, give us a shout,” said Mary Sittonn—it could be nobody else—as the beads fell back into place. Before venturing out of the Castle, Bresnahan had memorized virtually everyone in the Kevin Coyle file. She would not be stopped for want of application, and she nearly sighed her relief that the woman had left her alone.

  Carrying on with the pretense of browsing, she moved toward the voices that she could hear from that room.

  “…utterly brilliant. We’ll make a bomb, so we will. There won’t be a bookstore in the country with any left, and here we’ll sit with a pile of them at five pounds added, which makes, let me see”—she heard the distinctive click of a computer keyboard, and then—“thirteen quid apiece makes fifty-two-hundred pounds, thank you very much indeed!”

  Four hundred, Bresnahan thought. She had gotten a first on her leaving cert. in maths, and was nothing if not quick with figures. But four hundred what?

  Another voice now said, “Well—Kevin wouldn’t have objected.”

  “Much,” said someone else in a soft, sibilant tone.

  Books, Bresnahan concluded.

  “And then with the eighty—how many?”

  “Three,” the soft voice answered.

  “With eighty-three of the out-of-print volume…” Mary Sittonn then uttered what amounted to a mannish coo. “Where shall we go? Spain? Portugal? I hear the beaches in Greece don’t have a man on them this time of year.”

  Said Catty Doyle, whom Bresnahan could now see through the beaded curtain, “Then I’m for Norway or Sweden, where the men are tall and blond and liberated.”

  “Like your man, David Holderness.”

  There was a pause before Catty Doyle replied, “Ach, sure—he’s just a boy. An enormously talented boy with a bright future in front of him, but still a boy.”

  Said Katie Coyle, “I wonder how bright it would have been had Kevin—”

  Said Mary Sittonn, “Well—there was only one Kevin, wasn’t there. For all his faults.”

  It was then she glanced up at the beaded doorway; Bresnahan again began to panic. She snapped open the tiny black plastic purse she was carrying, but her hand could locate nothing more in the foolish thing than the automatic pistol that she had had to force into its folds.

  “May I help you?” Sittonn asked.

  “Yes…” Still distracted by the purse and the riot of her emotions, which made her suddenly angry, she pushed through the beads and finally came up with the plastic template of her Garda I.D. “I’m Ban Gharda Bresnahan, Murder Squad, and I’m glad you’re all together. Chief Superintendent McGarr has asked me to come ’round and speak with you. One at a time.”

  “Really now. Isn’t that considerate of the Chief Superintendent to send us a woman from the Murder Squad. We misjudged him. He isn’t the total shite we first thought him, after all. Would you care for a cuppa?” Sittonn asked. “Come, sit down and tell us about yourself. And let me inform you now, so you understand—you’ll speak to all of us together or none of us at all. We’ve got no secrets from each other, and the basis of our sisterhood is honesty. Total and complete. In everything.”

  Bresnahan’s head went back. She would not be toyed with, and she thought about what McGarr had told her—they, the three of them, had broken the law, and that was to be her lever. If worse came to worse, she would do what even McGarr did from time to time. She would haul them down to the Castle and to the clutches of Detective Sergeant McKeon, whom Bresnahan believed could have been a brilliant barrister, had his background been different—his tongue could be venomous. Absolutely lethal. And then there was some reason that they wished to be interviewed together, and Bresnahan wanted to know what it was.

  The women made room for her, the tea was poured, and a long, painful silence ensued in which Bresnahan, with the burden of their eyes upon her, struggled to keep herself from initiating conversation. It was McGarr’s technique to wait. What was it he had said? “Eventually people will tell you what you want to know, if you listen long and closely enough.”

  “So,” Mary Sittonn finally said, “you’re from Kerry? How long have you been with the Guards?”

  Bresnahan could feel her face taking on further color. The blood was pounding in her temples, her forehead and upper lip suddenly damp. But far from anger, which required a bit of self-confidence, she was now stricken with embarrassment. How, from the little she had said, had Sittonn been able to tell she was from Kerry? Unfair dumb jokes about her countymen and women—the way they spoke, acted, and even thought—were a national passion among the uninformed and ignorant, and nowhere more than here in Dublin. She wondered if Sittonn were poking fun or simply inquiring to make conversation. Someday, soon, Bresnahan would learn the difference, and the subtle, city way in which that difference was communicated.

  She managed a “Foive y’arr-es.”

  “Really! Not long to have been posted to the Murder Squad. You’d think they’d have you out in some cow town, hoofing it. It’s what happens to most, I’m told. You must be good at what you do, which is what, might I ask?”

  Raising her head to study the furrowed brow of the woman�
�s pudgy face, and then swinging her eyes to the others, Bresnahan decided that Sittonn was indeed making fun. She knew that position well enough, and understood that there were only two ways to deal with it: either to give back in kind, jibe for jibe, or to play along, and become more the ignorant culchie than their most comical expectations.

  Again lowering her eyes to the purse that she was balancing between her large hands, she admitted, “Typing and steno, mostly. I file some and answer the phone.”

  “No—don’t tell us,” said Sittonn. “And does he make you fetch him his tea?”

  Bresnahan sucked in some breath, making a sound that in the country passed as a yes. “Coffee. Always.”

  “The bastard,” said Catty Doyle.

  “The prick,” said Sittonn. “And his words—what are they like? Does he treat you…”

  “Coldly?” Bresnahan asked, when Sittonn did not supply a word.

  “Well, no. I didn’t mean coldly exactly, but…you know, patronizingly. Does he call you—what is your first name?”

  “Rut’ie.”

  “Ruthie or honey or sweetie, instead of Bresnahan?”

  She pretended to think for a moment, “No—to be fair, he doesn’t. He always addresses me like he does the others. Last name mostly, and short. He doesn’t waste words.” Or mince them, she might have added.

  “But others call you Rut’ie?”

  Bresnahan, thinking of McKeon, whom she revered only a little less than McGarr, nodded.

  “And do they make comments or touch you at all?”

  Bresnahan raised her head quickly, so that they might understand that nobody ever put their hands on her without permission. “The former.”

  “The low-lifes. The scum,” Sittonn hissed. “And to think sexists like that are charged with protecting society, over seventy percent of whom are women and children. Did you know that?”

  Bresnahan pulled in a little more air, noisily, another way to say no. She widened her eyes. She shook her head.

  “And yet it’s men that run things and abuse us here in what should be by simple vote our own democracy. And them con-sarned”—Sittonn pronounced the word as it was spoken in Kerry—“solely with exploitation and the flesh.”

  “But hasn’t it always been the way? Take Joyce, for instance. He was a typical Irish man.” Sittonn waited.

  “The writer?”

  Sittonn nodded. “A phenomenal masculine egotist who, after twenty-seven years together and two children, condescended to marry a woman named Barnacle who could scarcely read or write. In her youth she was a lovely thing, it was told, with that unlikely combination of deep red hair and dark eyes. His father had said of her, ‘Well—at least she’ll stick to him.’ And she did, through all his artistic and dypsomaniacal moods, waiting on him hand and foot.

  “He revealed himself, though, for what he was. Of women he wrote, ‘An animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, and parturates once a year.’ He likened Dublin to a woman ‘with her skirts raised, a whore and a strumpet.’ He called Ireland, ‘A sow that eats her own farrow.’”

  Bresnahan saw her opening and, turning her head slightly, asked, “Was that your husband’s opinion of women as well, Mrs. Coyle?”

  Katie Coyle seemed surprised by the question. Slowly she turned dark eyes to Bresnahan. “Never voiced, but there was hardly a woman he knew he didn’t bed, sooner or later. And indiscreet. Kevin was a kind of…intellectual playboy. An academic swordsman. It was his way of toying with women. A cat-and-mouse game.”

  “And he knew you, Ms. Doyle? And you, Ms. Sittonn?” Bresnahan went on in the same small voice.

  Katie Doyle answered, “Catty, yes, which was acceptable to me. After nine children, I’d had enough of him, if you know what I mean. Mary was more fortunate. She doesn’t fancy men.”

  Bresnahan glanced at the tattoo on Sittonn’s shoulder. The tongue of the little cat was too long, and there was a nasty curl on its end. Bresnahan repressed a shudder and thought of how, back home in Kerry, she could shock her friends with the tale of how she had interviewed—no, had tea and a chat with—an avowed lesbian. But she wouldn’t; she was beyond that now.

  “And your opinion of Kevin Coyle?” she asked the thin and striking Catty Doyle.

  “A brilliant and engaging wastrel, profligate of his talent, contemptuous of both body and mind. Often he reminded me of a drunken navvy who would’ve been better off equipped of a navvy’s intelligence. Sober, he was afflicted by that brilliance. He was acerbic and trenchant, an utter bastard to anybody who dared challenge his views. Drunk, he was more the self that he should’ve been, and he seemed to know it.”

  “And was that the self he brought you on the night of his death?”

  She swapped a glance with Katie Coyle. “Attempted to bring me. Yes, I should imagine.”

  “And had he, how would you have dealt with him?”

  “Lovingly, had I not been otherwise engaged.”

  “With who, may I ask?”

  “David Holderness.”

  Bresnahan’s brow knitted. “I don’t understand.”

  “I went out with Mary earlier in the evening, but I had arranged to have David stop by later.”

  “What time did he arrive?”

  “Some time past midnight.”

  “How long did he stay?”

  “All night, I believe. I mean, when I awoke, he was gone.”

  Bresnahan struggled to accept what she was hearing without divulging her disapproval: the woman had had relations with two persons not of the same sex on the same night, and one of them knew as much. And to look at her you’d think she was as pure as the driven snow. Her fine features suggested perfect innocence, which was probably the attraction—for Coyle and Holderness, and for Mary Sittonn as well. Bresnahan had read of such an attraction in the clinical psychology books that she boned up on at night.

  “What time was that—that you woke up?”

  “Half past eight. I remember because I had so much to do with the book-launching and the party and all. I let Kinch, my dog, out and dressed as quickly as I could. When Kinch didn’t come to call and I could hear him barking, I—but I told all of that to the Superintendent.”

  Again Bresnahan pulled in some breath to indicate she knew as much.

  Said Mary Sittonn, “Not half bad for a country girl. First interview?”

  “Alone,” Bresnahan admitted.

  “And they sent you down to us. Just what is it they told you they wanted to know?”

  Bresnahan decided to continue the ruse. “What I’ve been asking, mainly. The usual stuff. You know—motive, means, and opportunity. For instance, where you were?”

  “Me?”

  Bresnahan nodded. “After you left Catty off.”

  “I dropped in on Katie.”

  “At her flat?”

  “Of course. Katie has the responsibility of her children. After midnight she’s at home.”

  Said Katie Coyle, “Surely they don’t think we—”

  “And Mary was with you how long?”

  “All night, if you must know.”

  “You didn’t leave each other’s sight?”

  As if distressed by the question, both looked away.

  Bresnahan continued in the same even tone, “And why exactly did you think you could break the law, once Professor Coyle’s corpse was found?”

  There was a pause while Sittonn’s eyes surveyed Bresnahan’s reddish, freckled complexion and her large well-structured face. Although a pleasant-looking person, her appearance on first glance conveyed the impression of certain strength. Once, when she was a uniformed Guard in a country town, she had knocked a six-foot-three-inch farmer on his britches with one blow of her fist. It was a story that had circulated throughout the county. Since joining the Murder Squad, she had begun studying kemp po, a martial art taught by an official from the Chinese embassy.

  Said Sittonn, “Well—it looks like you’ll just have to disappoint
them, won’t you?”

  Bresnahan turned to the other two.

  Said Catty Doyle, “I phoned Katie first because Kevin was her husband, the father of her children, and plainly dead. After that, I thought it her decision. To phone you or not.”

  Bresnahan’s gaze shifted to Katie Coyle. After a while she said, “Who in the name of hell are you that I should phone you when my husband dies? Who do you represent, or don’t you know? You and that plastic shield of yours front for an agreement made sixty-some years ago by two factions of a gang of fighting men who raped, pillaged, and plundered the country and are now long dead. They made laws that allowed them and their bastard spawn to continue the practice legally.

  “Ours”—she swept her hand to indicate the other women at the table—“is a more ancient and—I would have it—honorable, humane, and civilized code. It has to do with the positive values of growth, life, and procreation. With gentleness, understanding, trust, and love. Not exploitation, greed and fear, intimidation and punishment.

  “Does it really matter who killed Kevin or how or why? Will knowing that bring him back or help his wife and family get on in the world? Or solace the bereaved? I think not.”

  Bresnahan waited to make sure the woman had spoken her piece, then said, “Answer me this—in this ancient, honorable, and civilized order of yours, is it wrong for one person to take another’s life? You don’t have to be a genius like Kevin Coyle, who would appreciate the point, I’m thinking. Nor the wife of a genius, like you, who obviously doesn’t consider the way she’s acted since his death. Everybody—even the lowliest of us—knows what’s right or wrong, and if we don’t, we don’t deserve to belong in society. At least on a daily basis. We’re not talking about gentleness, or trust, here. We’re talking about murder. And murder violates everything. It’s as wrong as you can get. And when it happens, society—even yours—should reserve the right to know who’s responsible for the crime and why, if only to keep it from happening again.”