The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  She’d heard of such things; in fact they’d been told to read about them in police training—the psychological ramifications and whatnot. Plainly, Hughie Ward had a Don Juan complex. It was the conquest that mattered to him and no more, and once he had that, there was nothing left. He simply couldn’t love, and his involvement with women was just an attempt to prove himself as a man. And wouldn’t you know—tears of self-pity now gushed from her eyes—she’d fallen for somebody like that, and she felt she was going to be sick.

  Until a knock came to the door. “Are ya comin’?” Ward asked.

  She wondered what he meant. “Comin’ where?”

  “Hogan’s. If you don’t get a wiggle on we’ll be late. You know how Bernie is with rounds. He’ll stick us with two and then leave.”

  With both hands on the basin and looking at herself in the mirror, Bresnahan said, “Let me understand this completely—you want me to go with you to Hogan’s for the gargle.”

  “Well—you don’t seem to be one to say no to a drink. I mean, the proper drink. And Hogan’s serves wine, I know.”

  “With Detective Sergeant McKeon and the others.”

  “That’s his rank. Superintendent O’Shaughnessy’ll be there, and maybe the Chief, if he gets back from that book thing in time.”

  “And you’ll go in one door and me in the other?”

  “No, no—what are ya talkin’ about, Rut’ie. C’mon, get your clothes on. We go in together.”

  Suddenly the door opened and her uniform and shoes were tossed in. The door closed.

  She examined the tears streaming down her face, which now looked worse than her body. “And what are we to do about this afternoon?”

  There was a pause, and then, “I don’t understand.”

  “How do we…approach people? McKeon. The Chief.”

  A longer pause. “I dunno—that’s up to you, I guess.”

  “And not you?”

  “Well—I won’t let on, if that’s what you’re worrying about, and why all the questions? Why don’t we just ramble on and see what happens.”

  Bresnahan watched her head move to one side as she assessed what he had said. She nodded. Don’t be heavy, be light. Granted he bore an even half of the responsibility for what had gone on, but if he was going to leave it in her hands, so much the better. They were capable ones. She now raised and pressed them on the mirror, then watched the prints evaporate.

  In the medicine chest, among a veritable chemist’s shop of emollients, shampoos, after-shaves, colognes, and dental flosses, Bresnahan found some eye drops. God bless yuppies, she thought. Or, rather, this yuppy. She scrutinized what skin that could be seen above her collar for monkey bites.

  And then her hands and her legs. She couldn’t remember where all he’d been, but she would, given a minute.

  SIXTEEN

  MCGARR WALKED from Dublin Castle to St. Stephen’s Green and the Shelbourne Hotel where the book-launching party for Kevin Coyle’s Phon/Antiphon was being held. As he expected, the event had attracted people from every part of the country; the entire area was jammed with cars, media vans, uniformed police, and a gaggle of raucous press persons who scurried hissing and clicking to every large car that pulled up in front of the hotel.

  There were brilliant camera lights on stanchions on the footpath and stairs of the hotel, and a new red carpet below. Somebody—presumably Catty—had even arranged for a massive klieg light that, driven by its computer, was trying to burn through the leaden skies that had rolled in over Dublin with the change in weather. McGarr wondered if the book launching would have been so well attended if not held posthumously. He half hoped it would rain.

  For out of their vehicles stepped the smart, trendy people who inevitably gathered at such occasions. They were Lord and Lady This or Baronet That or the sons and daughters of arriviste shopping-center moguls or plumbing-supply heirs with not much more to do of a day than haunt their property or, once or twice a month, haunt places like the Shelbourne. They ate too well and drank too much and, as expected, had little to say apart from tiresome chat about dogs and horses or inane drivel about the small circle of people they called friends.

  “Oh, Pegeen—didn’t I see your picture in the Times the other day?” With a blasé smile Pegeen would then reply, “But I saw you as well. You remember Dermot or Damian or Darryl, don’t you?” who was her latest, her husband being conveniently absent among the commodes and pipes of a warehouse or the featureless streets of his new housing scheme. How could she forget? There wasn’t much else to remember and—who knew?—Darryl might well be making the rounds, which was what persons like Darryl—McGarr now saw one—did.

  He was tall and thin with outsized shoulders and a great mane of black, curly hair. He had a long face with a drooping nose to match; his dark eyebrows had grown together. In all, he was an unsightly thing, the gaunt height of whom a black tuxedo only emphasized, and he virtually loped toward the marquee of the hotel with a youngish, busty woman in a satin, emerald gown. McGarr imagined that he was as ignorant as cow pie and probably hadn’t cracked a book—much less Kevin Coyle’s Phon/Antiphon—in years, yet for all his rudeness, he carried himself with a certain panache.

  Unself-consciously he strode forward, turning the charm of long, imperfect teeth to the cameras and offering his hand easily to Catty Doyle and the manager of the Shelbourne, who were greeting people inside the lobby. He made the grand entrance seem so terribly usual that McGarr was rather envious of his aplomb. But then, he had arrived in a glorious, ancient Daimler the color of an antique, ruby gemstone, and the black tie meant that he had been invited to one of the several smart cocktail parties and dinners that the papers were reporting had been arranged to follow the “fete/wake for the lamented auteur Coyle.”

  McGarr had enjoyed what he now appreciated as the Joycean touch in the phrase “fete/wake.” Now he waited until the Rolls of the “blond,” self-made publisher of several of Ireland’s most popular magazines pulled up, and he saw his chance. When the cameras rushed forward to engrave for posterity the image of the fortunate man who was her escort for the night, McGarr pulled the brim of his linen-covered hat over his eyes. Taking the stairs two at a time, he moved quickly past Catty Doyle, still in deep coo with earlier entrants.

  The reception itself was being held in the largest of the Shelbourne’s public rooms, into which it did not fit, and the invited guests had already spilled out into the wide hall. A waiter bearing a tray of champagne offered a glass to McGarr, who only knitted a brow and, using a shoulder, plunged into the smoky din. McGarr had only once drunk champagne in depth—lamentably, it had been on his wedding night—and he now had a pet theory that lightly alcoholic, deceptively acidic, Gallic, sparged water did not react favorably with the Celtic personality or corpus. Instead of warming the Irish and making them happy and libidinous, as advertised, it sparked flame and illuminated the other, darker side of the tribal personality. After only a few glasses they became argumentative and pugnacious and not infrequently sick for days. Or at least his and his wife’s kind of Irish.

  And there she was at the drinks table, glass in one hand, book in another, beaming up at the young man with the black, curly mane and long face that McGarr had disparaged from afar only a few minutes earlier.

  “Oh, Peter—just who I was looking for,” she said when after a good minute she finally noticed her husband by her side. “Do you know what Diarmuid just pointed out? You know Diarmuid Cox, don’t you? He’s at the Institute for Advanced Studies. This is my husband, Peter.”

  So much for ignorant suppositions, thought McGarr, taking the tall man’s hand, which engulfed his own.

  “He too has read Phon/Antiphon,” she announced, her nostrils flaring superiorly as she surveyed the crowd, only a few of whom were also holding a book, “and he’s called my attention to the most remarkable parallel between Kevin’s death and an attack upon Samuel Beckett that Kevin mentions here. Tell him about it, Diarmuid.” She looked around for some
place to put her empty glass; unfortunately, another waiter was just passing with a tray. “How felicitous. We must be on the same wavelength, you and I.” She picked up another, and the waiter glanced at both men before departing.

  Said Cox, “Coyle’s not the first to report it, but the parallel between what once happened to Beckett and how Coyle met his end is startling.”

  McGarr turned his head slightly.

  “A stabbing.”

  “Beckett?”

  “Yes—right in the chest, for no apparent reason. You see, little in a personal nature is known about Beckett. We know where he was born and went to school and university, and that, like Joyce, he left Ireland shortly afterward and settled in Paris, where he began writing.

  “But unlike Joyce, he didn’t develop a theory of the artist as a special person, as ‘seer’ or—”

  “Priest of external experience.”

  Noreen lowered the book, which she had been pretending to read, and turned her head abruptly to McGarr. She blinked several times, as though trying to clear his image. She was wearing a new plum-colored dress that swathed her like a second skin and was split up the side. He wondered to whose cocktail party and which dinner they had been invited.

  “Exactly. Beckett contends that nobody’s especially gifted with sight or tongues, and no experience, no matter how seemingly dramatic or unique, is so particularly notable that it should demand narration. In other words—and again completely unlike Joyce—the specific and myriad details of human life, all the objects and myths and ideas that Joyce wrote, for example, into Ulysses and The Wake, can’t tell us much about who we are as individuals, because those things are named as words, which are—”

  “The creations of Others.”

  Again a pair of eyes devolved upon McGarr and seemed to see him anew. McGarr was not very literary, but he was a good listener. Before exams in school, he had always made it a point to visit the first boy and coax him to expound at length; McGarr imagined that with Coyle’s death, Fergus Flood—whom he could see in a far corner of the room—was again first boy.

  “But if the thrust of literature, as we’ve known it since the Renaissance, has been the attempt—”

  “—to define oneself as an individual in one’s own terms, then using the words of Others makes it impossible. The second problem is that we think—”

  “Conceive,” Cox corrected, “of the persona as being an essential—”

  “Blank slate.”

  “Néant.” Cox’s gaze was now stony. “And finally, modern philosophers tell us that—”

  “—words don’t work.”

  Cox nodded. “The naming process is too general, and essentially flawed. The only way to name a thing truly specifically is to negate everything else in the universe, which is absurd.”

  “But we are forced to try, since, poor tools that they are—” McGarr waited for Cox to carry on.

  “—words are all we have. But try minimally we must,” Cox added, if only to have the last word, it seemed to McGarr. “Since the entire process of confirming our existences—and therefore being human—is just a nasty little joke that is being played upon each of us individually. Beckett calls it the risus puris, ‘The laugh down the snout at that which is—silence please—cruel.’”

  Noreen lowered her glass, which was half filled, looked into the pale, sparkling liquid, then set it on a table nearby.

  Smiling slightly, McGarr asked, “The stabbing?”

  “Oh, yes.” Cox seemed to blush, and he cleared his throat volubly. “I’m unsure of the date or time, though Kevin—consummate academic that he was—has footnoted it in Phon/Antiphon. But at some time in his Paris experience, a man simply walked up to him, plunged a knife into his chest, and walked away. The man was apprehended; when Beckett recuperated, he insisted upon visiting him in prison. There he asked but one question, ‘Pourquoi?’ The man replied, ‘I don’t know.’ Kevin interpreted the incident as experiential proof to Beckett that we’re merely motes living by chance in a purposeless universe.”

  “Tell me,” asked McGarr, “was the knife ever found?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The thing. The object. The knife itself—was it ever found?”

  Seemingly astonished at the question, Cox’s eyes scanned McGarr. “I’m sure I don’t know. If you’ll excuse me now, I really must—Pleasure,” he said to Noreen. “Oh, Deirdre, I was hoping I’d see you here.” His hand caught the elbow of a passing woman.

  Said Noreen to McGarr, her brow nettled, “Where’d you get all of that?”

  “That what?”

  “About néants and words. Beckett, for Jesus’ sake, and don’t play games with me.”

  McGarr again picked out Fergus Flood in the crowd; he took a step in his direction. “It’s in the air,” he said. Or the water.

  Flood was in fettle, surrounded by a brace of young women, not a few of whom McGarr recognized as emissaries of the Fourth Estate. He was wearing a charcoal-gray suit with a black bow tie; a black band was wrapped around his right arm. His smile fell as McGarr approached.

  “Ah, Fergus Flood,” McGarr said, nodding to the others as he stepped up to them, “professor, author, businessman, academe, and liar. Enjoying yourself while you’re still on the loose?”

  Flood’s eyes moved from McGarr to the women and back. “Please—do you wish to speak to me in private.”

  McGarr shook his head. “Already have, and pleasantly, with no result. I now have you placed definitely at the scene of the murder at the time of the murder. When you got to the Drumcondra Inn, Kevin Coyle was just coming out. You seized upon the opportunity of denying your wife—”

  “Can’t we step into another room?”

  One of the reporters had snapped open a small, spiral notebook. Another was digging in her purse.

  “Me take you out of here? How would that look? And then I wouldn’t want to ruin your fun. Great crack, what?” McGarr asked the women, reaching for a glass from a waiter’s tray. He handed it to Flood. “As I was saying—you saw it as a double chance to strand your wife, whom you thought was driving the Fiat, and to deny her her assignation with Coyle.”

  “Would you excuse us?” Flood said to the young woman whose hand was now moving furiously across the page of the notebook. When she said nothing, he took her arm.

  “Let go,” she complained, shaking him off. “Did you see that?” she asked McGarr, pushing back her eyeglasses on the bridge of a long, bony nose. They were thick and made her eyes look like two dark orbs swimming in a hazy medium.

  Said another, “We’re just trying to do our job.”

  “But how did you get in here?”

  “Somebody tell him it’s a party for the press.”

  “Ready with the truth?” said McGarr.

  “I am, yes, but—” There was discomfort in the features of Flood’s dark face. “Can’t you understand that I’ve merely been trying to protect my wife and daughter?”

  “What makes you think your wife and daughter need your protection?”

  Flood’s eyes swept the group, then turned back to McGarr imploringly.

  Said McGarr, “Would you excuse us, ladies? I should have something for you by the end of the day.”

  “No—why? We were invited here. Were you? And get this, McGarr—we’re not ladies,” she managed, “we’re—” But the rest was lost in the din of the others’ complaints.

  When McGarr finally got them to leave, he said, “You first. And your lies.”

  “I was confused and couldn’t imagine what had happened. I’d driven Kinch—I mean Kevin—up there to remove him from the hotel and, you know, make it difficult for Maura to get to Foxrock. I assumed it was she who was driving the Fiat. But I then had the problem of getting him close to the back gate of Catty’s house, and it wasn’t until he was out of the car that I realized how drunk he was. He complained and shouted, and—not wanting to make a scene—I left him propped against a wall with all his impedimenta—th
e hat and ashplant stick. Then to have him turn up dead and with the murder weapon under the seat of the car I’d driven away from there, knowing he was alive when I’d left him…well, I knew I didn’t kill him, and I thought maybe—”

  “Your wife had. Why?”

  Flood twisted his head, as though looking for her along the line of the ceiling. “She’s the most possessive—I mean, like most women—” He broke that off too. “What I mean to say is, it’s been my experience that some women are possessive. They want not only what they’ve got but what other women have too, and they’ll do—I don’t want to say that either.

  “It’s just that my wife is the jealous type and—”

  “She was of Catty Doyle?”

  “Certainly. Most assuredly. Elemental jealousy. Dark. Incomprehensible. Capable of—”

  “But she said—” She hadn’t actually left Foxrock, McGarr meant to say, but of course Flood was right. She said she hadn’t left the neighborhood. “How could she have gotten there and back before you returned?”

  Flood hunched his large, sloped shoulders. “Taxi? A lift from a friend. She might’ve borrowed a car from a friend.”

  What was McGarr hearing here, a man implicating his wife? The Floods, like Catty Doyle and her mates and David Holderness, were complicated people, and he wondered if all along the lie had been a ruse to divulge to the greatest effect what was now being said.

  “The Fiat is dead slow, and it took me an eternity to get it between the pillars in that laneway.”

  Dead slow, to be sure.

  “In a fast car she could have come and gone easily. And then I didn’t actually know that she was in her room when I got back. One thing, though—she’d been drinking. There was only an inch or two left in a bottle of gin on the sideboard in the sitting room when I got in. A glass. Melted ice. And when she’s drinking—”

  “Then you think she could have brought herself to murder her lover, Coyle?”

  Flood cocked his head, “It was my thought…” In lying to them, he meant.