Irish Gilt

by Ralph McInerny

  He had spent long years at Mayo in the expectation that a time would come when people in the operating theater would await his examination of the results of a biopsy. Benign. Malignant. Depending on what he said, the operation would proceed or not. Or take a different tack. Being assistant coroner bore a remote resemblance to that. Jimmy Stewart’s investigation depended on his judgment as to the cause of death. There was no doubt that there were bruises on the throat. Even so. So he kept at it. With surprising results.

  Douglas, the young man from Notre Dame campus security, called to tell Feeney about the plastic bag he had found in a trash receptacle not ten yards from the body. “You know the kind shirts come it?”

  Feeney imagined the scene. A man is sitting on a bench; his assailant approaches from behind, positions himself behind the bench, lifts the plastic bag, and brings it over the sitting man’s head.

  Douglas said, “There are signs of a struggle.”

  Feeney reined himself in. “Isn’t that bench on concrete?”

  “Just off the walkway.”

  “Signs of struggle?”

  Listening to Douglas describe them, Feeney had a sense of the way he himself sounded to Stewart. “About that plastic bag.”

  “I’ll bring it down.”

  Meanwhile, back to the original guess. The trouble with that was that the heart showed no signs of an infarction. Imagine a court scene. Feeney often did, seeking to restore some sense of drama to his life. He would be called to the stand; life or death hung in the balance. If it came to that with Xavier Kittock, death by heart attack would be ridiculed by the defense. So what was left? Sighing, Feeney asked Kimberley to roll Kittock into the autopsy theater.

  Kimberley was only a high school graduate, and her internship was supposed to be a political plum. She almost always wore a mask, and her wide, frightened eyes followed everything Dr. Feeney did with the corpse on the table. When she talked with the mask on, the material made reading her lips easy. She wore a long white garment over her street clothes that looked like an alb, the mask, and then, to top it off, a baseball cap.

  Feeney turned on the recording equipment and reexamined the body of Xavier Kittock. Kimberley gagged and left the room when he uncapped the skull. He removed several sections from the brain, restored the skullcap, and called Kimberley back. Her eyes asked if she should take the body back to the cooler.

  “Just leave it here.”

  “You’re not done?”

  “No.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  She had a crush on him, but that was ridiculous. He was eight years older than she was.

  In his office, he was thinking of what he should tell Stewart, how he could put it, when the detective strolled in.

  “He wasn’t strangled,” Feeney announced.

  Stewart just stood there looking at him.

  “The marks on his throat must have been made holding the bag tight so he couldn’t breathe.”

  “Asphyxiation?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Honest?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “So it was his heart?”

  How do you say yes while retaining the right to say no later? Feeney didn’t know. “I guess.”

  “Guess?”

  “There is no damage to the heart.”

  “He is dead, isn’t he?”

  Feeney made a face.

  “So how the hell did he get that way?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  After Stewart left, Feeney resolved to resign his position and go off to the kind of medical practice he had prepared himself for. Surely they wouldn’t take the waterworks job away from his father, the old party loyalist. Then he thought of Casey’s dead eyes and knew the man would sell his mother into slavery if political revenge required it.

  That was when Kimberley came in, all smiles.

  “A fellow from Notre Dame brought this.” She handed him a plastic bag.

  “Has he gone?”

  “I could go after him.”

  Something in the way she said it gave Feeney a pang.

  10

  Roger was as delighted as the circumstances permitted when Phil brought him the news of the coroner’s vacillation. Of course, Xavier Kittock was still dead—Rebecca’s uncle was dead, and her parents had arrived, determined that the funeral should be at Notre Dame.

  “Ya es muerto, decid todos, / Ya cubre poca terra.” Roger murmured these lines when he was introduced to Rebecca’s father, David Nobile. Nobile immediately recognized the lines from La Dorotea.

  “Of course, you changed the gender.” He looked as if he’d like to take Roger off somewhere and talk about the poetry of Lope de Vega. He shook his head. “Terrible about my brother-in-law.”

  “I never met him.”

  “It’s damned annoying, the way they keep changing the cause of death.”

  They were in the hallway outside the chapel of Zahm Hall, where Father Carmody would say a Mass for the repose of the soul of Xavier Kittock. The Nobiles were planning to bury him at Arlington, but the body had still not been released by the coroner. Nonetheless, as Father Carmody put it with uncharacteristic rhetorical flourish, Kittock’s soul had long since been released from his body, and they could pray for its eternal rest while they awaited the verdict of the coroner.

  “When Rebecca called us I thought right away of South America,” Nobile said.

  Roger stepped back in surprise.

  “X had become obsessed with Father Zahm’s travels down there,” Nobile went on. “One of his books was called The Quest of El Dorado.”

  “Ah.” Roger had read the entire Zahm canon in preparation for his course, but he had to admit that the travel books interested him less than the others, except the one on the Holy Land. Still, he knew Nobile was right. Zahm had been a great admirer of the conquistadores and a gung-ho American as well. No wonder the priest and Teddy Roosevelt had gotten along so well.

  Coming toward them with head bowed, wearing a black suit and a mournful expression, was Boris Henry. He nodded to Roger and put out his hand to Rebecca’s father. “Henry. Boris Henry. Your brother-in-law and I were classmates.”

  “Had you kept in touch?”

  “Paul Lohman is on his way. He and I and Eggs—Xavier—shared a room in Zahm.”

  “Eggs?” David Nobile chortled. “That’s good. It’s even better with his middle name.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Benedict.”

  Roger drifted away, to the degree that such graceful motion can be attributed to a three-hundred-pound man, and found Rebecca and her mother listening to a voluble young woman. Rebecca waved Roger over as if in relief.

  “This is Bernice Esperanza. Professor Knight.”

  “Knight?” Bernice stared at Roger, then grasped one hand with the other, as if she were taking herself into custody. To Mrs. Nobile she said, “You see how rattled they’ve made me. I think one of the detectives was named Knight.”

  “Philip Knight?”

  She wheeled on Roger. “You know him?”

  “Oh, he’s notorious.”

  “He wasn’t as bad as the other one, Stewart. They seemed to think … I don’t know what they thought.”

  “Why were they pestering you?” Roger asked, though he had already had an account of the visit from Phil. She had inhaled deeply, in preparation for answering, when a bell rang and down the hall Father Carmody appeared, vested to say Mass. In a stage whisper he said they could regard this as a dress rehearsal of the funeral Mass, which he would be saying in Sacred Heart Basilica at a time yet to be arranged.

  Roger felt a hand on his arm. Bernice looked at him anxiously. “Can I attend?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m not Catholic.”

  “Neither is Philip Knight.” He stepped aside for her to go in before him, which she did with a very puzzled expression.

  Phil’s report on
the visit he and Jimmy Stewart had paid to Bernice Esperanza, prompted by an anonymous call to police headquarters, had yielded what at the time seemed important information. Bernice had a former husband who had not taken kindly to her friendship with X. Kittock. In fact, he had as much as threatened him publicly on a campus walk. Roger had heard the same story from Rebecca.

  “Why can’t he put it all behind him?” Bernice asked the detectives when they brought up her husband.

  “I suppose that’s like asking why you don’t go back to him.”

  “That’s a strange thing to say.”

  “Would you call your friendship with Kittock a love affair?”

  It had been Jimmy’s purpose to stir her up, and he certainly succeeded. When he referred to Henry as a latchkey child, she demanded that they leave.

  “These are simply routine questions, Mrs. Esperanza.”

  “But why are you putting them to me?”

  “Someone telephoned.”

  “What?”

  “Normally, we don’t pass on that kind of information, but in your case it seems appropriate.”

  She would have liked to ponder the meaning of that, but she was not to be diverted. “And I know who called you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “The call was anonymous.”

  “It was Marjorie. It couldn’t have been anyone else. My friend! Now she’s chasing after Ricardo and trying to get me into trouble with the police.”

  “Marjorie who?”

  “Marjorie Waters. Wait, I’ll write down her address. Why don’t you go over there and bother her for a while.”

  There was no doubt a sadistic streak in Jimmy Stewart, but then he had been in police work a long time. His wife had left him, just walked out, leaving him an enigmatic note, so Jimmy had developed a pretty low estimate of the female sex.

  * * *

  After the Mass, Roger went out to his golf cart to find Greg Walsh sitting in the passenger seat. He had not yet heard the latest news from the coroner, and Roger filled him in.

  “So we might have a natural death, not a murder,” Roger concluded.

  “That’s good.”

  “It is indeed. Phil and Jimmy Stewart went right to work, as of course they should have, looking for an explanation of Kittock’s death. That is, looking for the person who had brought it about. Now, thank God, that can be set aside.”

  “Well, at least the letters are back,” Greg said.

  Roger had turned over to Greg the folder Phil had found in Kittock’s room. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to keep them.”

  Greg’s silence had nothing to do with his speech impediment. Well, one couldn’t expect an archivist to be philosophical about scholars walking off with precious materials. After some little while, he said, “I would never have suspected him of such a thing.”

  Roger told himself that the important thing was that the letters were back where they belonged. Still, their temporary absence nibbled at the edges of his mind.

  11

  In the folder containing the returned letters there was a brief biography of the legendary John Zahm.

  John Augustine Zahm (1851–1921) came from a farming family that moved from Ohio to Huntington, Indiana, from which town he came to Notre Dame in 1867 at the age of fifteen. Four years later, he received his A.B. degree and soon thereafter entered the Congregation of Holy Cross. Before his ordination in 1875, he held a number of administrative and teaching posts and was something of a protégé of the founder, Father Edward Sorin. His interest in science was evident from the very beginning, but he was as well an extremely cultivated man. Much of the scientific equipment and specimens that he collected went up in smoke when the Main Building burned in 1879, but Zahm, like Sorin, turned immediately to the task of rebuilding. His travels had begun in 1878. With Father Sorin, he toured the Holy Land in 1887. His campus activities, as professor of science and vice president, suggest a whirlwind. Beyond campus, he became known for his insistence that there can be no conflict between science and religion. His attempts to see evolution from a Christian point of view got him into trouble, and he had to rein himself in. Not all of his fellow religious shared his enthusiasms, and when Zahm was named provincial of Holy Cross, the effective director of all the congregation’s activities in the United States, he was subject to constant criticism. In 1906, worn down by the work, he stepped down and left Notre Dame. For the rest of his life he was quartered at Holy Cross College in Washington or was traveling. He had published before, but now came a steady stream of books, many of them under pseudonyms, such as the anagram H. J. Mozans. His travels in the southwestern United States had begun early. Now he turned to the south and undertook some demanding journeys, one in company with Teddy Roosevelt, who became a friend. Zahm was fascinated by the story of the search for El Dorado. In recounting that history, he mixed moralizing about cupidity with a clear admiration for the conquistadores. Zahm turned what might be construed as years of exile away from Notre Dame into the opportunity for travel of a kind his colleagues could scarcely have dreamt of. He died in Germany in 1921. His body was brought home to Notre Dame to the community cemetery, where he lies with Father Sorin and others of the great silent majority of the Congregation of Holy Cross.

  The account was not a photocopy, which told against the supposition that Kittock had taken it from a book of reference.

  “It is a thin digest of Weber,” Boris Henry said.

  The fact that the biography was found in the same folder as the missing but now returned letters seemed adequate explanation of their disappearance. Kittock must have taken the letters to his room at the Jamison to continue his research on Father Zahm.

  “Odd that he should have emphasized the travels,” Roger said. “No mention at all of Zahm’s Dante collection.”

  “Or of his brother Albert.”

  “Does El Dorado loom that large in his books?”

  “What have I been telling you?” Henry said. “I would call it an obsession. The accounts of his retracing the routes of the various efforts to find El Dorado are harrowing. Why would he have put himself through all that? Certainly not just to lament the folly of other men. He shared that folly. He himself was looking for El Dorado.”

  “And didn’t find it?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  It was Phil who told Roger that it was clear from Kittock’s effects that he and Boris Henry had been in communication about Zahm. In the room were were dozens of printed e-mails, some going back years, and, as if to mark a cultural divide, even older letters.

  “I had the impression that they had become strangers to one another.”

  But when Paul Lohman arrived he assured Roger that the three old roommates had never lost touch, however geographically separate.

  “Eggs had to go where the navy sent him, obviously, but e-mail is a marvelous thing. Particularly in recent years, and since Eggs’s retirement from the navy, there have been several messages among us every week.”

  “I got a different impression from Henry.”

  “He did think Eggs was poaching on his territory.”

  “In what way?”

  “The El Dorado thing. It’s funny,” Paul Lohman mused. “Neither Eggs nor Boris ever wrote a thing, not even letters once they started using e-mail. Yet both of them were planning books.”

  “And both on Zahm?”

  “They should have collaborated.”

  Meanwhile, Phil went off with Jimmy Stewart.

  “What’s up?” Phil asked.

  “I thought you’d want to be with me when I speak to Esperanza.”

  12

  When Clare Healy arrived, Boris was waiting for her at the Morris Inn. He had booked a room for her after receiving her phone call a few hours earlier. A room on the third floor. Boris was on the second. Discretion is the better part of valor. Boris was a different man on the campus of his old university, but Clare thought this would have been true even apart
from the purpose of his visit. The theft of the diary had rattled him less than she would have imagined. He nodded when Clare told him that she had found the news sufficiently disturbing to bring her to South Bend. After all, the diary was an investment by Henry Rare Books.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” He looked away, almost embarrassed by the admission.

  She had caught a flight from Kansas City to Chicago Midway and come the rest of the way in a rented car. It was two in the morning when she arrived. Boris waited while she got her key.

  “I left my bag in the car.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  Boris slung his briefcase over his shoulder, and they went together to the parking lot of the inn. Boris opened the passenger door and slid in.

  “What’s this?” Clare asked him.

  “I’ll give you directions.”

  When he told her to pull in at the Jamison Inn, she was confused. “Boris, I just checked in at the Morris Inn.”

  “I know. Come on.”

  Inside, he went to the desk and said, “Xavier Kittock.”

  The heavy-lidded eyes of the clerk lifted from the portable television with which he whiled away the night shift. He turned and took a key from a box and slid it across the desk. A minute later, they were ascending in the elevator. Clare said nothing further. Good Lord, was she remembering New Orleans?

  She said, “The clerk thought you were Xavier Kittock.”

  “That’s his problem.”

  “So what are we going to do, burst in on him?”

  “If he’s not out out with someone.”

  He wasn’t surprised to find the room empty. All the better.

  Inside the room, he turned to her. “You check the bathroom.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Clare, you know the diary is missing.”

  So she checked the bathroom, calling out that she felt ghoulish looking around. He knew how she felt. Then he asked her to come out.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked.