The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  Katie Coyle blinked.

  It was nearly the exchange that Bresnahan had had with McGarr when he’d hired her. After questioning her point by point, he had told McKeon to dismiss the other applicants. “We’ve found our woman,” he’d said, leaving the room. “Make sure she can fire a gun,” which she could, and well. Her grandfather had been in the IRA and had helped found the Fianna Fail, one of the factions of the gang to which Katie Coyle had referred. In his eighty-sixth year he had taught her how to shoot.

  “Now…” Opening her purse, Bresnahan pulled out her automatic pistol, which she placed on the table, and the three ballpoint pens and Garda forms that she had brought with her. “Since you believe otherwise, I’d like you to write that opinion on these pages along with the statement of where exactly you were, and with whom, on the night of June sixteenth and the morning of the following day.”

  The three women did not take their eyes from the gun and its large plastic hand grip. It was a Glock .38, a light but powerful weapon that Bresnahan had purchased after consulting with McKeon, who knew of such things.

  “And sign it, please. If you require more than one page, please initial the top of each sheet.”

  Still none of them moved. Said Catty Doyle, “I don’t understand.”

  Bresnahan nodded. “Chief Superintendent McGarr has sent me here to obtain signed statements from each of you detailing explicitly where you were and with whom on Bloomsday night and the morning of the following day. He also wants you to state just why it was that you thought you could break the law and move Professor Coyle’s corpse, to explain why you waited nearly three days before notifying the police.

  “Now—is that too much to ask?” Bresnahan smiled—she hoped—wanly enough to let them understand that, though a large, country girl from Kerry, she was most definitely competent and controlled. She had even managed to make her voice sound professional. “I should imagine here is more convenient than the Castle, it being so hot.”

  Sittonn let out a little cry of pique. “What balls!”

  Yes—what, Bresnahan thought, pushing back the chair and raising herself up. Since first sitting down at the table, she had been seeing in the shadows of the next room several bulky items that seemed out of place in an antique shop.

  “Where’re you going?” Sittonn demanded.

  “Just stretchin’ me legs. How’re you coming with that?” With her palm Bresnahan slid a sheet of paper in front of Sittonn. She handed her a pen. Then, with both hands, she lifted and situated the woman at the table in a position best meant for writing. “Square around there. That’s it. Now pen to paper and let fly, but only the truth. As you see it.”

  “You bitch.”

  “Me? And there all along I thought you were my sister.” She moved toward the storeroom.

  A head swung to her. “You need a court order to go in there.”

  “Why get technical—didn’t you invite me to tea?” Jesus, she thought, I actually like what I’m doing, and she even wished that McGarr or McKeon or even that little smoothie Ward were there to see her in action. Well, little wasn’t quite the word. Yes, he was smallish, but he was also strong—there was no mistaking that—and he had the class of body that she had more than once imagined herself smothering in a profound and passionately loving embrace.

  Really?

  Standing in the doorway, Bresnahan in one instant stumbled on two entirely disparate and disturbing facts. First she understood, with an immediacy that made her weak, that she was hopelessly in love with a terrible, adorable—worshipable, even—little shite who dated (most probably an entirely inadequate description) every class of gorgeous woman in multiple, from all that she could know.

  And two, she was looking at a storeroom filled with plastic-bound parcels of books. She moved closer and examined the covers. Phon/Antiphon, by Kevin Coyle. On a shelf under glass were—she raised a finger to count them—eighty-three copies of the earlier book.

  Turning back to the doorway, Bresnahan nearly staggered. In front of her was the most entrancing vision that could ever appear.

  She saw long, glorious nights of erotic love-making—clutches, embraces, positions, orgasms of which she had only had one complete on her own. Complete was also not the word, she had the suspicion. And then a happy, devoted, totally involved domestic life with a man who could—would—be McGarr’s successor, and her a kind of bigger, better, perhaps-not-more-beautiful-but-more-official Noreen, given the fact that she was a trained professional.

  Could she live with that, playing second fiddle to a man? She sighed. No, she had never been content to be second in anything. But did it need to be second fiddle? No, again. They could be equals in everything, even police work, if Hughie dark-little-handsome-darling Ward could adjust to that, and she would see that he did.

  But then in the doorway Ruth Honora Ann Bresnahan despaired. How could she ever make that lovely, exploitative, trendy little bastard, who was most probably the shallowest human being that had ever trod a footpath, love her, when foxy chicks (she loathed the phrase) were drooling over his every move?

  She remembered the little mole—like a period in a sentence—that dotted his right eyelid when he blinked or closed his eyes (usually in pique over something she had said or done), and again she was consumed—destroyed—by her original vision.

  Yes, she was hopelessly, irredeemably, catastrophically in love, and with the bravado of a high diver she cast herself upon the winds of Eros, which she believed she had visited on holiday in Greece. Though she could be mistaken about that as well.

  In any case, she stopped in the doorway. “Sisters—how go the narratives?”

  Sourly, three heads nodded at her.

  ELEVEN

  DAVID HOLDERNESS, erstwhile research student at Trinity, lived in a battered Victorian pile on the sea front in Bray, a tatty, former resort town twelve miles south of Dublin. The house had not been painted in many years, and its stucco was crumbling in the salt air. Whole sheets of exterior dashing had fallen, like scales, from the upper stories, and every window of the west side had been boarded up.

  It was just five o’clock, and, although the wide road along the seaside esplanade was crowded, McGarr decided he would not park in front of the house. He was alone, Sinclaire having called for a car and accompanied Fergus Flood to the Castle, and he did not want any repetition of the earlier incident in Flood’s house.

  That the daughter had managed to abscond in the Fiat 500—which had obviously been used to transport Kevin Coyle to the scene of his murder and had had what McGarr supposed was the murder weapon under the driver’s seat—still smarted. It had been a major blunder, albeit abetted by Flood, and he only hoped that it was one Sinclaire had managed to conceal.

  And then, McGarr was thoroughly tired of the unusualness of the case, with its triad of prima donnas who had arrogated the law unto themselves, with Flood and his wife—who were either lying or not telling all of what they knew—with the daughter who for some reason believed she should run off with what was presumably the murder weapon, with the clique and its literary pretensions.

  Luck was with him, and, finding a safe parking place for the Mini-Cooper along a side street, he approached the building from the laneway, if only to understand more completely the totality of David Holderness’s abjection. The house was a wreck. The wooden-frame garage in back had tumbled into the garden, itself a tangle of wild rose bushes and rampant ivy.

  And there, under a spray of wisteria vines that had grown into a kind of tunnel, was parked the Cinque Cento, its rear-engine compartment still hot. Under the front seat the knife remained, untouched; it was as he had left it, the blood on the handle shiny. Which meant what? That the daughter, Hiliary, either did not know it was there or was waiting for some future opportunity to dispose of it.

  And Holderness? Well—other than his name and the report that he had had professional difficulties with Kevin Coyle, McGarr knew nothing of him. Except that he now appeared to be an acquainta
nce of Hiliary Flood.

  Easing the door closed and stepping toward the front of the car, McGarr bent to a tire and screwed off the valve cap. With a thumbnail he let the air out of the tire until it was flat. He doubted Flood would have equipped the car with a pressurized tin of air or that the daughter would know how to use one, but to make sure, he flattened a rear tire as well.

  Straightening up, he noticed a path leading through the wisteria and ivy toward the back door; it was open, and he moved toward it.

  The interior of the house was cool and damp, the walls white with mildew and cobwebs. He was on the side of the house that had been boarded up, and the kitchen and sitting room he passed through bore signs of having been squatted in and trashed. The sink had been ripped from the wall, and a couch appeared to have been set partially on fire.

  Sometime in the past the house had been made into a duplex, and a door with a simple catch bolt led into the stairwell. McGarr assumed that somebody either had let Hiliary Flood into the house or that she herself possessed a key. With the length of flattened spring steel that he kept attached to his key ring, he slid back the catch of the lock and stepped into what was evidently Holderness’s half of the house.

  The stairwell was a revelation. It was painted a blistering white and rendered all the more severe by a fanlight over the front door. The staircase had been stripped to the wood, a clear varnish applied to bring up the grain. The gracefully curved hand rail and balusters were oak and blond, the stairs a dark, reddish wood, probably mahogany, nearly slick under McGarr’s feet.

  He kept close to the wall, looking up toward the landing as he ascended—slowly, a step every fifteen seconds. He counted silently, until he heard voices or at least sounds coming from a room at the front of the house. He then moved quickly into the first open door he found.

  It was a kitchen that was as forbidding and sterile as the stairwell. The walls were the same stark white; in the center of the room stood a table fashioned in plastic or—was it?—enamel, in a modern design that only emphasized its severity. It was too tall and too straight, as were its chairs.

  Otherwise the room contained a single gas ring, a small fridge, and a cutting board on a spare wood counter that had been painted black. Nowhere were any foodstuffs or implements visible; McGarr found not a single can or bottle nor any sign of a bread box, a pot, or a pan. He opened the drawer beneath the cutting board: two knives, two forks, two spoons, all with handles of black enamel, like the table.

  McGarr moved back into the hall, into a kind of sitting room. The floor was the same mahogany color as the stairs; here and there sat heaps of formless, black material that looked like bean-bag chairs but were filled with feathers. McGarr bent to feel one. There was nothing else in the room—no tables or vases or ashtrays—apart from factory lamps that exposed bare, clear light bulbs under black enamel shades. They were suspended from the tall ceiling on thin black electrical wires.

  In the next room books lined all four walls, floor to ceiling. In the center of the floor, under the room’s only light, was a solitary chair that matched those in the kitchen.

  McGarr approached the door from which he had first heard the sounds; they were continuing, growing louder now as he brought his ear to the door.

  He heard what sounded like a moan and then, “Can’t we please go to the bed?”

  “No. It’s here or nowhere.”

  “But it’s no good for me here.” In the same breath, however, came a moan, and McGarr threw open the door.

  There on a chair in the center of the room was a young woman in curly black tresses and nothing else. Her back was to him. Her feet were on the floor, and she was obviously sitting on a man who was also naked. When the door struck its stop, his head appeared around her shoulder, and his hands, which were clutching the pale, taut, and obviously young skin of her buttocks, kept her from pulling away from him. She tried to turn her head, but he prevented that motion too.

  Her captor was a man with a long face, wire-rim glasses, and thinning blondish hair that had been clipped so close to his skull that he looked nearly bald. He was older by much than the woman, who McGarr assumed was Hiliary Flood.

  “Yes?” he asked. Not who are you? Or, what are you doing here? Or even, how dare you?

  “Peter McGarr. Murder Squad. If you’re David Holderness, I’d like to speak to you. If the”—McGarr had to force himself to say—“woman on your lap is Hiliary Flood, she should know that she’s under arrest for hindering a murder investigation.” His eyes swept the room: two plain windows without curtains on the second story. He could not see a fire escape; there was little chance that she or he could flee.

  And yet when the girl tried to move, she was restrained again, with one hand locking her wrist and forcing her back down.

  “Jesus! Let me go.” She began to sob. “David, you bastard. Let me go.”

  McGarr opened his jacket to expose the butt of the Walther that was stuck in his belt. He turned his back and stepped down the hall.

  Holderness appeared first, wearing the skimpiest of briefs, black, like the furniture. He was a tall man with a trim, athletic build. His shoulders were wide, his hips narrow, the muscles of his legs taut, like those of a runner. The hair on his chest was graying, and he was deeply tanned. Unselfconsciously he moved past McGarr and entered the sitting room. He reclined in one of the feather futons and looked up, his eyes fixing McGarr’s.

  Said Hiliary Flood from the room that McGarr supposed was the bedroom, though he had seen no bed, “But my clothes—they’re in the pantry.”

  McGarr turned to Holderness, who did not move.

  “David!” she pleaded.

  Still he didn’t move, nor did McGarr, who cared little for the situation: the curious, sterile ambiance of the house, which was such a shambles externally; the man who seemed to have been content to be interviewed en flagrante. And he would tolerate no more mistakes in the case.

  She appeared in the doorway, her head down and her hands clasped in front of her so that her breasts, which were substantial and firm, were pushed together. She was tall, with an angular build and classic proportions. She had her mother’s definite features but her father’s coloring, which was dark. There was a crispness to her step that made the flesh on the flare of her hips tremble.

  As the door opened into a pantry, McGarr caught sight of a blouse and brassiere on a countertop, a pair of tennis shorts on the floor, and briefs that looked either to have been hung on a knob of a cabinet or to have snagged there in the heat of the moment. Reaching for them, a breast and nipple were silhouetted against the glare of a window.

  Holderness’s gaze, to which McGarr now returned, seemed to ask, Wouldn’t you like some of that, old man? Or, rather, they said, You’ll never have some of that, old man.

  Yet McGarr said nothing until Hiliary had dressed and seated herself in the sitting room on a futon rather far from Holderness. She folded her legs under her, lowered her head and looked down at her hands. Only then did he say, “Well, so much for introductions.”

  “Really?” asked Holderness. “Have we been introduced? As far as I’m concerned, you broke and entered. Have you shown us identification? Have you a writ to be here?”

  McGarr flashed his photo I.D. “Want a closer look?” He flicked his fingers to let the man know he would have to come to him. Making others cater to you was a game McGarr didn’t much fancy, but was good at all the same. “As for the writ or the B and E, you were sheltering a criminal in flight, Mr. Holderness, which makes you a criminal yourself.”

  “Are you charging me with a crime?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “Are you charging Hiliary with a crime?”

  The young woman’s head bobbed up.

  “That depends on how helpful she is.” McGarr turned to her. “Bloomsday evening, you were…?”

  She paused, shrugged. “Out, I guess.”

  McGarr asked himself how much of his life he had spent waiting and listening
, and wondered if one of the secrets of a successful life was perhaps doing nothing well.

  Hiliary forked her fingers through her black tresses. It was a gesture that cinema stars employed, and seemed entirely appropriate. McGarr could not keep himself from seeing her as he first had, and then later, as she had walked by him.

  Finally she spoke. “I went to a film.”

  “What did you see?”

  She named a movie that McGarr knew to be playing in the Dublin area.

  “And afterward?”

  “I went for a drink.”

  “Where.”

  “I prefer not to say.” Her eyes shied toward Holderness.

  “Were you with Mr. Holderness?”

  Holderness smirked.

  She averted her eyes and shook her head. “I was alone.”

  “At the movies?”

  She nodded.

  “And for the drink?”

  Again, which McGarr found hard to believe, for a woman of her age and beauty. “You find it humorous that I should ask if she was with you?” he asked Holderness.

  The corners of his mouth rose in what approximated a smile. “She was most probably looking for me. It’s a family trait—prowling.”

  Tears had formed in Hiliary Flood’s eyes. “Why—Why do I always let you victimize me?”

  Holderness tsked. “Sloppy thinking again? How many times must I tell you that there are no victims.”

  “Then Kevin Coyle was a what, Mr. Holderness?” McGarr asked.

  “A human being, minimally defined.”

  “David! You may not have cared for him or he you, but it’s academically dishonest to deny his brilliance, which is just another instance of your—” Her eyes darted at McGarr.

  “His what, Miss Flood?”