Irish Gilt

by Ralph McInerny

  “Where might it be?”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

  It was like a parlor game, with everyone but Boris knowing the answer. Eventually, he had it. “I think it may be in the car.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Clare has the key.”

  “We can get it from her.”

  “What a goddamn wild goose chase,” Boris muttered, and led the way out of the room.

  Clare was in the lobby, waiting as if by agreement. She came with them into the parking lot, where she unlocked the car and stepped aside.

  Boris looked in and then reached for and brought out the briefcase. He put it on the hood of the car. “We can do this right here.” He snapped the catches, and the lid opened slowly, as if to reveal dramatically the plastic bag. Boris just pushed it aside, to display what else the briefcase contained. He turned triumphantly. “So much for this nonsense.”

  Jimmy had taken the plastic bag from the briefcase.

  “What’s this?”

  Boris scarcely glanced at the bag when Jimmy held it up. Jimmy turned the bag slowly. “This your wallet?”

  “Wallet?”

  “And keys. Change. Handkerchief.”

  “Let me see that.”

  Jimmy prevented Boris from grabbing the bag. He slid the top of it open and took out the wallet. It opened in the palm of his hand. He turned to Boris. “Xavier Kittock.”

  “Come on.”

  “That’s my line, Henry,” Jimmy said. “We can continue this downtown.”

  For a minute, Boris looked as if he might take a swing at Jimmy, but then an icy calm came over him. He turned to Clare. “Call my lawyer in Kansas City and ask him to get the hell up here as fast as he can. Tell him the problem.”

  5

  Larry Douglas had returned to the headquarters of campus security, his workday complete, when he heard his name called. He turned, and there was Kimberley in shorts and halter, a sweatband holding back her hair, pulling a wheeled golf bag.

  “I do like that uniform,” she cried, delighted. Thank God, he had taken off his stupid helmet before turning around. “Is the gun loaded?”

  “Famous last words. You’ve been golfing.”

  “Nine holes.”

  “Alone?”

  “No, I played with a couple of strangers. It’s so good to be out in the sun and away from that dreadful morgue.” She inhaled deeply of the unrefrigerated air.

  “You quit?”

  Kimberley stood there, the picture of health, slim and beautiful, her face flushed from exercise. “Feeney said he would consider me on leave, but I’m not going back.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Golf?” She smiled with radiant insouciance. “Do you golf?”

  “Not much lately. I golfed that course a lot when I was a kid. I used to go over the fence early in the morning and get in half a dozen holes before the ranger was out.”

  “When are you through?”

  “I’m about to check out.”

  She waited, her air receptive, inviting poetic thoughts. When he said nothing, she laughed. “I’ll wait.”

  “It’ll just be a minute.”

  Before he got to the door, Laura came out. Had she ever looked fatter? The two women exchanged a glance, and there was immediately enmity between them. Larry slipped inside.

  Laura and Kimberley were facing one another when he came out. Before and After. Larry felt like a traitor, but his heart thumped when he looked at Kimberley. He would have given anything to erase the memory of those lengthy evenings in his car when he had grappled with Laura.

  Kimberley was describing her job in the morgue as if she hadn’t decided to quit. “Larry has seen the place.”

  “Really?” Laura looked at Larry as if she would like to see him on a slab down there.

  Since they all three had cars, the scene dissolved without any need for Larry to explain to Laura who this Diana of the golf course was, this nymph who spoke so matter-of-factly about autopsies. They walked together to their cars, and Larry resisted Laura’s efforts to get him aside. He got behind the wheel of his car and started the motor and backed out. He had just turned onto Angela when a horn behind him tooted. He looked into the rearview mirror, expecting to see Laura following him, but it was Kimberley!

  He pulled onto a side street and parked, and Kimberley stopped just behind him. Larry jumped out of his car and went back to her. The thought of asking her into his own car was impossible. Maybe he would get a new car.

  “Who’s Laura?” Kimberley asked when he got into the passenger seat.

  “I thought she was your friend.”

  “Enemy would be more like it.”

  “She’s in campus security.”

  “That explains the uniform.”

  “We could go out 31 and have a beer.”

  “What about your car?”

  “Maybe someone will steal it.”

  She drove north across the Michigan line, and they stopped at a little A-frame roadhouse and ordered schooners. When they clicked their glasses, Kimberley said, “Here’s to campus security.”

  He would never have dreamed that Laura would fill the role of object of jealousy, let alone with someone like Kimberley. They soon exhausted that subject, Larry adopting the air of the gentleman who never tells.

  “There’s a lot of excitement downtown,” Kimberley said. “You know the body they found on campus?”

  “I found it,” Larry said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He did, giving her a version Crenshaw would not have liked to hear. He told her of finding in a trash can the plastic bag that might have been the murder weapon, and he told her that the pockets of the dead man had been empty.

  “That explains it, then.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They found his wallet and keys and things and arrested the man who had them. Boris Henry?”

  For a fleeting moment, Larry felt that Kimberley was encroaching on his territory and resented it. From the beginning, he had thought of the Kittock case as his own.

  “I always wondered about that guy,” he said. Her expression made up for having heard this news from her. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he went on, “It’s a lot easier to work with the South Bend cops than with colleagues in campus security.”

  She actually put her hand on his. They ordered a second schooner, and Larry began to talk about W. H. Auden.

  6

  When Ricardo was released, he came to stay with Bernice, saying it was okay, they were still married, the divorce didn’t mean a thing.

  “So why were you fooling around with Marjorie Waters?”

  “Did she say that?”

  “Were you?”

  “Look, I fought her off.”

  Bernice beamed. “I can believe it.”

  Little Henry was not as surprised to have his father in the house as Bernice would have thought. The separation and divorce now seemed almost like a fantastic interlude. She tried to explain it to Marjorie.

  “Is that why you talked about him the way you did?”

  “Marjorie, you don’t understand what it is to be in love.”

  Marjorie turned away in anger. Over her shoulder, she said, “You’re still divorced.”

  “Tell it to Ricardo. He’s always been off-limits, Marjorie.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Let’s let bygones be bygones. Maybe Ricardo can fix you up with someone on maintenance.”

  It turned out that the only way they could put the divorce behind them was by remarrying, and Ricardo refused. “We are married!”

  “Not civilly.”

  “Then we’ll just live together uncivilly.”

  The prospect was almost racy, thought of like that, and Bernice agreed, not that she had any choice. Ricardo couldn’t get over the fact that Boris Henry would have let him go on trial for murdering Kittock.

  “But you didn’t do it.”

&
nbsp; “Of course I didn’t do it. But they arrested me, didn’t they?”

  “Well, you did threaten him.”

  “You’re damn right I did. Any husband would have.”

  “Ricardo, there was nothing.”

  “I know that.”

  Bernice could take that from him, but she was willing to let Marjorie think that it had been a real affair and that Ricardo had done away with his rival. Even in the altered circumstances, she retained the pleasant thought that she was a woman over whom men fought. And she had gone back to writing, something that annoyed Marjorie more than the suggestion that Bernice was a femme fatale. Ricardo agreed to let her sign up again for the writing course at IUSB now that she had quit her job on campus. Whatever he thought of her writing, it didn’t wound his honor the way having a wife working as a waitress had. The novel Bernice was trying to write drew heavily on her own recent experience, and she hinted to Marjorie that the character based on her was sympathetic. Marjorie just stared at her.

  Somewhat to Marjorie’s surprise, Ricardo did fix her up. It was a double date, and being at the sports bar seemed to take Bernice and Ricardo back to square one. The real surprise was that Marjorie already knew Jim Casper.

  “We met right here,” Jim said. “One night when Ricardo and I came here.”

  “I don’t remember,” Ricardo said.

  “You know how those things are,” Marjorie said meaningfully. Bernice just smiled. Ricardo had told her all about it.

  Casper proposed that they drink to Ricardo’s release, and they did, somewhat to Ricardo’s annoyance. “Didn’t you think I was guilty, Jim?”

  “Of what?” Jim tried to dig him in the ribs, but Ricardo was too quick for him.

  Perhaps inevitably, they talked about the death of Xavier Kittock. Whenever Bernice tried to get them on another subject, either Casper or Marjorie brought them back to it.

  “I’m sure you put the fear of God into him when you threatened him,” Marjorie said sweetly.

  “I didn’t threaten him. I just told him to leave my wife alone.”

  “Will you remarry?”

  “We only marry once in my family. And for keeps.”

  Bernice squeezed his arm, if only because she knew it would make Marjorie jealous. Jim Casper was okay, although next to Ricardo he looked like an aging hippie.

  The perfidy of Boris Henry made Jim almost eloquent. “The bastard would have let you hang for his crime.”

  Ricardo looked thoughtful. “What an idiot, carrying around the stuff he took from Kittock’s pockets.”

  “I wonder who put the police onto that?” Casper’s question gave them all pause.

  “Maybe that young guy in campus security. Douglas. The one who found the bag used to smother the guy? He showed more enterprise than the South Bend police,” Ricardo said.

  “You ought to sue them for false arrest.”

  “I don’t even want to think about it anymore.”

  7

  Roger Knight and David Nobile sat in Roger’s campus office in Brownson Hall talking about Lope de Vega. Roger had just put in a call to the Morris Inn and asked Clare Healy if she were free to talk with some potential customers.

  “Haven’t you heard what happened? They’ve arrested Boris.”

  “On what basis?”

  “Could we meet?”

  “In the Morris Inn?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  So Roger gave her directions to his office. Half an hour later, there was a knock on the door, and David Nobile got up to answer it. When he opened the door, Clare looked as if she had come to the wrong place, but then she saw Roger.

  “Come in. Come in. There are gods even here. So said Heraclitus.” Neither of his guests caught the allusion, and Roger let it go.

  When Clare was seated, she looked around the book-filled room. “Who’s the dealer, me or you?”

  “Nothing here is for sale. David is especially interested in Lope de Vega.”

  “But you just bought a very expensive edition of the poems.”

  “Don’t rub it in,” David groaned.

  “Have you checked our Web site?”

  “Why don’t we do that now.” Roger turned to his computer and tapped a few keys, and in a moment the handsome page of Henry Rare Books appeared. “Maybe you should do the browsing, Miss Healy.”

  “Clare.”

  “Not a Poor Clare, I’m sure.” Roger did explain this allusion, and any wit it had was thereby smothered.

  Clare settled herself at the computer, and soon Henry’s holdings of Lope de Vega appeared. Looking over her shoulder, David was able to determine that there was nothing there he didn’t have.

  “Then we’ll try a wider database.” As she tapped the keys, she explained that the holdings of dozens of rare book dealers were entered on a common site. David pulled his chair beside hers and almost immediately cried out. He had spoted the 1621 Madrid edition of La Filomena.

  “That contains the novella Las Fortunas de Diana!”

  Roger blinked when he saw what was being asked for this prize, but David Nobile was unfazed. Clare helped him put in an order for the book. When the deed had been done, David showed something of the ambiguous triumph of one whose bid had been accepted at an auction, but satisfaction outweighed any regret at the expenditure.

  “Tell me about Boris,” Roger said.

  The question transformed Clare Healy. Since her arrival she had been the picture of the composed and supremely competent rare book expert. Now her shoulders slumped, and she looked abjectly at Roger. “I still can’t believe it.”

  Beginning slowly, she told the story of her visit to the Grotto with Paul Lohman and their accidental discovery of the contents of Boris’s briefcase. “I would give anything if we hadn’t opened it.”

  “Or if Kittock’s effects hadn’t been in the briefcase.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did Boris offer any explanation?”

  “His first impulse was to call his lawyer from Kansas City.”

  “A wise move,” David Nobile said.

  “Someone could have put those things in his briefcase,” Roger said.

  “That was my first thought!”

  “Did you have a second?”

  “I’ve thought of little else since the police took him away.”

  “It’s odd,” Roger said. “There has been a small epidemic of missing things. First, some Father Zahm letters from the archives—”

  “That’s why Boris and I went to Kittock’s room in the Jamison Inn!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When I arrived from Chicago, it was in the wee hours of the morning, but Boris insisted we had to pay a call on Kittock. He was sure Kittock had taken them.”

  “Boris Henry was still up when you arrived at the Morris Inn?”

  “Sitting in the lobby. I had reached him by my cell phone to tell him I was on my way. I had no idea he would wait up for me.”

  “So you went to see Kittock.”

  “He wasn’t in.” She paused. “Of course, now we know why.”

  “And the letters were in his room?”

  “Boris found them. I was looking in the bathroom, and he called me out. There they were on the desk.”

  “Well, they are safely back in the archives now. I wonder where the diary is.”

  “God only knows.”

  “You don’t suppose that Boris Henry had the letters with him when you went to the Jamison Inn and put them on the desk while you were looking in the bathroom?”

  Her mouth opened slowly. “Why on earth would he do a thing like that?”

  “I suspect the police will be more interested in learning that he was up and dressed during the time that Kittock met his death.”

  “Oh my God.” Suddenly her old manner was back. “I won’t tell them what we did that night.” Roger said nothing, nor did David Nobile. “And neither of you must tell them, either.”

  Roger said softly, “I doubt that eit
her of us will be asked.”

  “Of course you won’t be. There is no reason the police would find out about that visit.”

  “No. But things look bad enough for Boris as they are.”

  A grim little smile appeared on her pretty lips. “Foster is a very, very good lawyer.”

  8

  The Old Bastards, at their customary table in the University Club, were reviewing recent events and making mordant comments.

  “I always thought Zahm was overestimated.”

  “By whom?”

  “Not by me. Do you know he wrote with great confidence that the earth was no more than ten thousand years old?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  Cosmo, who had lectured on astronomy, made an impatient sound. “I suppose you find merit in the geocentric system, too?”

  “What has Zahm to do with the murder?”

  “What has the age of the earth got to do with anything?”

  “It’s a sad day when one alumnus is accused of murdering another.”

  “You mean when one roommate is accused of murdering another.”

  “That sounds like a mitigating circumstance.”

  “They were roommates?”

  “In Zahm.”

  “Isn’t that hall ten thousand years old?”

  Debbie paused to refill water glasses. Cosmo said he wanted another drink.

  “I thought you were the designated driver.”

  “The National League doesn’t accept that rule. Pitchers hit.”

  Debbie looked ready to hit him with the water pitcher. “Another Bloody Mary?”

  “Another round.”

  “On you?”

  “Of course on me. I am a retired professor in possession of limitless funds. Buy your own drink.”

  “I would never order or pay for a drink called a Bloody Mary. It is sheer anti-Catholic bigotry.”

  “I checked my old grade books. I never had either of them in class.”

  “Are you proposing that as an alibi?”

  “Elsewhere.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what alibi means.”

  “You always were a pedant.”

  “Does knowing the meaning of Latin words make one a pedant?”