The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  “As for means, we have Flood in possession of the murder weapon four days later. We have Jammer and his companions in possession of Coyle’s stick, blazer, and hat. We have Jammer as well in possession of a set of knives like those in Catty Doyle’s kitchen, but newer, and with the exception of the filleting knife itself which—again we assume—somehow found its way into the slot of the murder weapon in Catty Doyle’s kitchen, if indeed the murder weapon was taken from her kitchen, and we have no way of knowing that. We have Holderness with access to that knife and to Coyle, if we can believe Catty’s story that the considerate Holderness got up in the middle of the night to investigate some noise or knocking down at the back garden gate. Then there’s Catty, who, if Holderness slept through some of the night, as he said, had the same chances with the knife and victim as he. And finally—to complete means—we have the knife itself, which turned up in the Fiat to which all of the above-named, apart from Jammer (and we don’t know about him), had access: the Floods near total, Holderness on at least several occasions, and Catty on the occasions in which Hiliary drove down to help her prepare for the book-launching bash.

  “Motives? Floods are several.”

  McGarr’s eyes went from Bresnahan to Ward, who, seated on one of the tables, had leaned back against the cubicle wall and was watching her intently, a small smile puckering a dimple on his right cheek. Curiouser and curiouser, McGarr thought. Even down to Bresnahan’s sudden loss of the most distressing aspects of her Kerry accent. Had she been taking elocution lessons? he wondered.

  “Flood’s wife was having an affair with Coyle about which Flood knew. Worse, it was rather public—the Drumcondra Inn and that man Cathcart, and so forth. Coyle also had passed Flood by professionally and was likely, with the new book, to leave him in the dust entirely.

  “Jammer?” She cocked her head from side to side as though assessing the boy. “I suspect that somebody like Jammer wouldn’t need a motive, but why murder Coyle, who’d just made a deal to surrender what he had on him anyhow? Money? Coyle had needed none that day, and whatever little he’d had, I’d hazard was long spent by then. And would Jammer have come equipped with a filleting knife nearly a match for the one in Catty Doyle’s kitchen, or, to reverse the scenario, the filleting knife from Catty Doyle’s kitchen, which he would then carry all the way out to Flood’s house in Foxrock and secret into the Fiat? And then be so astute as to find a look alike for, and replace it in the sheath in Catty Doyle’s kitchen? And finally, after having done that, not gotten rid of the other knives in the new set, and him living just over the wall from Catty’s and the murder scene?” Bresnahan shook her head. “Either he didn’t know everything that was going on that night and/or later, or Jammer is stupid, and we’re thinking by the way he’s avoided us he’s not.

  “Holderness—he despised Kevin Coyle, who had denied him the advanced degree he was seeking. And then, what was it you wrote in yesterday’s report, Chief?”

  McGarr said nothing. She had the ball and was running well. He would let her continue. How many others of the staff had already read yesterday’s reports? McKeon, perhaps. Maybe Ward.

  “‘Kevin had genius, and he was amusing.’ I wonder how many times Catty said that in Holderness’s hearing? She’s manipulative and, I’d say, not a little bit nasty, when all’s said and done. Might she have been ‘playing’ Holderness on the night in question? Might she have worked him up enough about Coyle that when the knock came to the door—and her, knowing it was Coyle and how drunk he was—she feigned sleep so that he could slip downstairs and complete her design? Coyle could have phoned her, the way he phoned Maura Flood, from the Drumcondra Inn.”

  “But why would she have wanted that to happen?” asked McKeon, looking sourly into his empty cup. “What did she have to gain?”

  Bresnahan hunched her large shoulders. “I’d be hard-pressed to answer that. Something dark maybe that we don’t know about. Could be she suspected that both of them or men in general looked upon Catty Doyle as somebody fun to be with in the small hours of the morning, and she was searching for some corroboration that that fear was unfounded. Could be that she secretly despises men, or hated Coyle in particular for the way he treated his wife. Or maybe even—who knows with her?—a murder that night might have seemed like an interesting diversion or added a certain—”

  “Piquancy,” McGarr mumbled.

  “Thank you, Chief—to the book launching. I don’t know, but there’s the literary aspect to all of this—the reference to ‘murderer’s ground’ out of Ulysses, and then the parallel to the Beckett stabbing in Paris—that shouldn’t be ignored. But if I know anything about women,” Bresnahan went on, her eyes narrowing a bit, “that Catty’s game is control, and for her control is everything: her writers and her lovers and her friends and acquaintances even, like Hiliary Flood, for Jesus’ sake, who was working for her and continued to work for her even after she knew of Catty’s goings-on with Holderness!”

  “Which is power,” said McKeon.

  “What?” Bresnahan demanded, again stopped in mid-stride.

  “Down, girl. Down. I was just making the observation that control is power and that’s what that…woman is after. Which is the animal that eats her mate, hoofs and all, after they’ve done the dirty boo-gee?”

  “The dirty what”

  “The dirty boo-gee,” said McKeon, rolling his eyeballs. “Like in boo-gee woo-gee.”

  “Why dirty?”

  “I don’t know, it’s American.”

  “I think he means boogie-woogie,” Delaney chimed in. “Something like, ‘Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar.’”

  “It’s not an animal but an insect,” Bresnahan announced in an attempt to regain the floor. “The praying mantis.”

  “Wouldn’t you know it’d be American. They’ve every class of thing going on over there.”

  “Sure, you’d be praying too, if you knew you were going like that. I wonder—can it be pleasurable? For the male.”

  Which was how the Castle Murder Squad left the Kevin Coyle case.

  Months went by. The hot summer mellowed into a fall of extended fair weather that did not harden into winter until November. Then, however, the days grew short, the skies darkened, coal was burned for heat, and with a sudden air inversion around the first of December, night seemed to extend right through the day.

  It was on one such gloomy afternoon that Sergeant McKeon, having worked a fortnight without a break, was taken to lunch at Hogan’s by McGarr and O’Shaughnessy and ordered not to return to the office for at least three days. After they’d left, Hogan asked McKeon if he’d care to remain in a snug through “holy hour,” an atavistic, Victorian licensing invention that forced Dublin tipplers into the streets between two-thirty and three-thirty each weekday afternoon.

  But McGarr and O’Shaughnessy having done their duty, McKeon had already imbibed snootful enough to warrant a breath of air, such as it was, and he remembered suddenly that it was Ward’s day off as well. His digs—a bachelor “pad,” if the singularly married McKeon had ever ogled one—were merely a stagger away on the quays. Humming himself a little ditty and feeling free as a bird who’d be willingly recaged in an hour, McKeon, the father of twelve children, set off.

  There he knocked once and, as was his custom with all friends, subordinates, or suspects, entered the old, battered, commercial building. Wondering why on the good, green earth that he once knew in his native County Monaghan, a young lad, like Ward from Waterford, would want to live in a shambles like this—unless it was to keep the cries of elation, the transports of joy, the screams of ecstasy from reaching innocent ears—he hauled his fifteen stone to the landing, where again he simply opened the door.

  And there it was, much like he had left it—when was his last visit?—nearly a year ago Christmas, when he’d also been in his cups, apart from the plants. Jesus, could Ward be moonlighting as a horticulturalist? he wondered. He pushed past the fronds of some jungly palm in an immense pot and turned
to a shelf of orchids, dozens of them, that scented the air like the perfume counter in a chemist’s shop. They lined the entire long divider that led into the living area of the loft.

  And distracted, turning this way and that, he failed to notice Ward in bed, bare from the torso up and a forearm covering his eyes in sleep, until he was nearly upon him. Checking his wristwatch, McKeon thought he’d just turn on his heel and go back out, since it was three and he’d return to Hogan’s just as the doors were opening. It was then he heard the click of a plate on the stove in the kitchen area and smelled—was it? Coddle, he bet!—bubbling in a pot.

  “Live-in” maid? he thought. The little dodger. But with the plants and all, he wasn’t able to see what she looked like until he stepped around the counter that functioned as a serving table.

  “Rut’ie” he nearly shouted. “What are you doing here? I thought you were—” In Kerry on holiday, since they’d arranged the schedule such that she’d work through the Christmas holidays.

  “And—” His eyes descended. Bresnahan was wearing a flowered Japanese robe that extended only to her upper thighs and was belted—loosely was not the word—at the waist.

  Plainly surprised by the visitor, she lowered the pot and tried out a smile. “Sergeant.”

  McKeon did not smile back.

  She hunched her shoulders and placed her hands on her hips. The smock was nearly transparent. “I could tell you five lies that you’d not want to hear and you’d not believe. Instead, can I offer you a drink and something to eat? Excuse me while I get my robe.”

  And whether it was what he’d already consumed or the heat of the place or the shock at having much of what he knew of two people who were close to him so radically altered, McKeon felt suddenly drunk or tired. “Oh—oh, no thanks,” he said, lowering himself into a chair in the kitchen area. “I—I t’ink it’s beautiful,” he crooned. “Bee-yoot-i-ful!” And all the more so when a glass was filled and tears came to his eyes. “I couldn’t think of anything better.” Or more surprising.

  It was during the same week that McGarr opened the Irish Times and discovered two articles that pertained, albeit obliquely, to the still-unsolved Coyle case. One was a reprint of a long Boston Globe article about an interview with Professor Fergus Flood of Trinity College, in which he cited his humble beginnings in Burlington, Iowa, his training in various obscure American universities, and finally his arrival at Trinity College on the strength of his published work on Joyce, Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, and Beckett.

  “You see, up until coming here I’d thought of myself as more writer than teacher. Here, however, teaching is my focus, if only because of the excellence of my peers. In particular, I mean the late, lamented Kevin Coyle, who was a brilliant chap altogether, and now people like…” He named several other Irish, academic writers, including David Holderness, “who has a book coming out, based on his thesis, that should make quite a stir.”

  Flood was candid about how quickly he’d become “acculturated”—“I’d had an Irish mother, you see, and things Irish just come natural to me, I guess”—and expressed no wish to return to his native land. “Everything’s so much more accessible here.” Like fame? the interviewer had asked. “In a country of four million people? Let’s call it notoriety instead.”

  The second article was a report that the suit of David Allan George Holderness, M.A., against Trinity College either to release his thesis or grant him his doctorate had been settled out of court. Holderness agreed to drop his demand for punitive, monetary damages in return for the granting of the degree, as well as the college’s pledge to examine without prejudice his further application for the position of Lecturer in English and Modern Languages.

  …a post that has been vacant since the death of the internationally respected Kevin Coyle. Holderness’s volume, “Less and Less, Yes: A Study of Style and Narrative Voice in the Novels of Samuel Beckett,” will be issued in March by the London publisher Hollis & Murken. Holderness was represented by Mr. Seamus Donaghy, Esquire.

  When McGarr got home that evening, Noreen poured two frosted pints of lager and raised hers in toast. “This is by way of congratulations. It seems you’re not as old and…used as you would have me think, and you’ve done your job.” She clinked glasses and drank until she nearly choked. She set the glass down. “That’s me last bit of booze for a good while. The doctor tells me I’m pregnant, and I’ll be thanking you to keep none of it in the house.”

  After congratulating her as fully as he thought decorous, McGarr took himself out for a few solitary jars to consult his real feelings about the extraordinary news.

  A few weeks closer to Christmas, Detective Inspector Hughie Ward was given by chance the very best of early presents. He was walking along Grafton Street, window shopping, when out of the corner of an eye he glimpsed something familiar and important in the throng of people before him.

  Turning as though to look in at a shop window, he used the angle of the glass to scan the street which, closed off during shopping hours, became a mall. What? Or who?

  The clutches of women, some speaking together, others window shopping? The tall, bearded man who, as always, was selling the latest issue of In Dublin in front of Bewley’s coffeehouse? The woman bearing down on him with a pram in one hand and a toddler in the other? Two nuns, one lame with an aluminum walker? The gang of punks who, having taken the middle of the street with hoodlum bravado, were causing milling shoppers to break before them like froth from the bow of a ship?

  No. The step. The walk. The bounce, cocky. It was one of the things that McGarr had taught Ward when he first joined the Squad and began surveillance work. New clothes, a different hairstyle or color, a disguise—it didn’t matter. One thing few suspects could change for very long was the way they walked. And the tall man in the deep blue, three-piece pinstriped suit, wearing a bowler hat and carrying a long, spiked umbrella, bounced so on his shiny, black, wing-tipped brogues that Ward could see the soles were still beige.

  He did not need to check the narrow nose flaring to wide nostrils, the close-set hazel eyes, the high cheekbones and forehead. In bitter gall that cocky strut had been etched on his memory.

  Jammer.

  Ward felt almost nauseous, knowing that he had at last found him, and he did not pause to think what to do.

  Jammer himself had stopped to look at something a few doors distant, and in three quick strides Ward entered the boutique in front of which he was standing. A woman looked up and Ward said, “This is a police emergency. Phone this number. Tell them Ward has found Jammer near Bewley’s in Grafton Street. He needs backup.” Before he kills him, he thought.

  “Got that?” He tossed his I.D., which also listed the Castle number, on the counter near the cash register.

  “I think so. Who?”

  “I’m Ward,” he tapped the I.D., “and I’ve found Jammer.”

  “Jammer,” she repeated, as he ripped off his topcoat and his suit coat, placing the weighty Walther that McGarr had loaned him—until they retrieved the Beretta—on a shelf beneath the counter.

  The woman’s eyes widened.

  Ward raised a palm to calm her. He felt constrained by clothes; he never exercised in anything but tights and athletic shoes. He imagined he would look to Jammer like some shop boy hurrying back to business at closing time. And then there were far too many people about for the Walther. Or the Beretta, which he would have to get off him first. If he still had it, and Ward didn’t doubt that he had.

  “Now, please.”

  Jammer was now walking on jauntily, using the tall umbrella with its straight handle—something meant for golf, Ward judged, or to shield a group at the races—like a swagger stick. Looking this way and that, the bowler set down on his eyes, he was—and Ward knew he knew he was—collecting stares from the girls and young women passing by.

  What were they seeing? Banker, businessman, solicitor, financier. At least a clothing-shop manager. And all at such a young age. Which was? Twenty-five, twe
nty-seven. Nearly Ward’s own age, and much older than he had originally thought. But a felon packing a handgun? Nobody would have guessed, apart from Ward, who now stepped out of the shop.

  Ward himself was twenty-eight and had spent a good bit of sixteen years in the ring. He weighed 148 pounds and was in splendid condition. His left wrist? Well, he’d undergone therapy—prescribed and his own—and it still felt dicey after an hour or so on the bags.

  His left ear? With a surgical operation to remove dead tissue and blood from near the inner ear, his doctors had managed to save 10 percent of the hearing he’d had five months earlier. Ward had not managed to overcome the anger he felt about the loss, not that he had tried very hard.

  And finally, of course, he was missing his service weapon. Sorely. It was that that rankled most—the injury to his pride and the constant reminder, whenever he learned of a crime committed with a handgun, of how he had erred. Ward eased the door of the shop closed.

  He waited in the entry, which was darker than the street and shielded by glass, so he could see Jammer, but not Jammer him. No chances here. No warning. No regulation announcement. Ward was thinking revenge. He could taste it.

  Jammer was maybe twenty feet away and closing.

  Ward sucked himself up, the way he did in the ring, and shuffled a step or two. But muted; nothing to give himself away, no flurry of punches, no bobbing, no weave.

  Ten.

  Ward made himself realize that this was more than a vendetta, that beyond the personal score he would settle, Jammer had in some direct way been involved in the murder of not simply a citizen, which would be enough, but also a man who had made Ireland proud and could have made her prouder still, had he lived.

  Five.

  But Jammer broke suddenly. In a few quick steps he was off the curb and across Grafton Street toward the swinging doors of Bewley’s, which was always packed but especially at this hour and time of year, when it bustled with weary shoppers and retail personnel refreshing themselves before heading home.