The Letter Killeth

by Ralph McInerny

  Wack’s story was told with malice aforethought—he obviously hated Izquierdo—but the story had a different meaning for Phil, and he was sure for Jimmy Stewart, too. Whatever it was Wack had interrupted in Izquierdo’s office, it wasn’t a police investigation. Phil had stepped into the hall and called Crenshaw to ask.

  “I thought we agreed, that’s your problem,” Crenshaw said.

  “I just wanted to make sure we weren’t likely to interfere with each other.”

  Phil went back inside Wack’s office. The professor was certain the investigator he had spoken with was in uniform.

  “He showed his identification.” He looked significantly at Phil. His memory had kicked in. “Something you failed to do when I encountered you in the departmental office.”

  Suddenly Wack put a hand over his opened mouth and looked from Jimmy to Phil through his little round spectacles. He lifted his hand and slapped his forehead. “You don’t think he was genuine, do you?”

  “You say there were two?”

  “Only the one came here to my office. At my invitation! This was to permit his partner to continue investigating Izquierdo’s office.”

  “Was he wearing a uniform, too?”

  “The second one? I never got a real good look at him.”

  “But you did see him?”

  “I heard them before I beat on the door. There were two, no doubt about it. Besides, I saw the three of them drive away from that very window. After the interview, when he went back to Izquierdo’s office, I sat on. Of course, any hope of getting anything done was destroyed. I turned off the lights. This room is quite well lit from outside, you know. Not light to read by, but it isn’t dark. Very restful, actually. I was drawn to the window, the snow under the lamplight, the moon above…” He stopped himself. “Dear God, I sound like Immanuel Kant. Anyway, I was at the window when the cart came by to pick them up. Oh, there were two of them, all right.”

  “And the driver.”

  “She makes three, yes.”

  “She?”

  Wack seemed to have surprised himself. “How did I know that? Yet I’m sure.”

  “Intuition,” Phil said, and Wack looked sharply at him.

  “Is Professor Izquierdo in now?” Jimmy asked.

  Wack cocked his head, listening. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Could you telephone him?”

  He pulled the phone toward him and punched out numbers without delay. Phil listened for ringing in the next office but heard nothing. Then Wack straightened and hung up the phone.

  “He’s there.”

  5

  He had heard the rumble of voices next door but thought nothing of it. Lucy Goessen called to say that Wack was entertaining two middle-aged gentlemen. She had had a spy hole drilled in her door, at her own expense.

  “He’s insatiable. But maybe they’re from the IRS.”

  “You know, they could be.”

  Or from my insurance company, Izquierdo did not say. Pauline had brought him to campus in the Hummer that morning, truly a vehicle for this season. Pauline looked like a woman on an old Soviet poster behind the wheel of the massive vehicle. Woman liberated to do manual labor. They had spent hours the night before discussing the burning of his Corvette, the topic going to bed with them and keeping Raul awake after Pauline had slipped into sated slumber.

  Suspecting Wack was to flatter the idiot. Oh, no doubt he had lit the wastebasket, but that on any scale of nuttiness was a three or four. Setting a Corvette aflame was something entirely else. Also, there was the undeniable fact that Wack had been in Decio when the explosion occurred and gone to the scene with Raul and Lucy.

  The phone rang, and when he answered it went dead.

  Izquierdo eased the instrument back into its cradle and stared at it. Who could blame him for being jumpy? Maybe Wack hadn’t lit his wastebasket; maybe it was someone else, the someone who had torched his Corvette. There was a knock on his door.

  “Come in!”

  The knob rattled but that was all. He had locked his door. He never locked his door. He went around his desk and opened to two large men, the first of whom flashed his wallet and then returned it to his pocket.

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “Detective James Stewart.” He let Raul study the ID.

  “South Bend police.”

  “We are investigating your car.”

  These two must have been in the car that pulled into the driveway last night. Pauline had doused the lights.

  “What’s the point of that?” he had asked her.

  She snuggled against him. At the moment, he felt as amorous as an anchorite.

  Now he said, “What do you do with a burnt-out car?”

  “You had insurance, of course.”

  “Of course.” Pauline had checked that last night. But he would never find another Corvette of that vintage for any price he could afford.

  “Your neighbor says someone visited this office last night.”

  “Wack? He’s nuts, you know. Completely bonkers.”

  “He’s quite a fan of yours, too.”

  “What did he say?”

  “You wouldn’t want us to tell him what you tell us.”

  Phil said, “Did you notice anything when you arrived today? Anything missing?”

  Izquierdo pushed back from his desk and studied it from afar. He reached forward and opened the drawer. “Someone was in this drawer, that’s for sure.”

  “Something missing?”

  “It’s the mess he made of it.”

  “He?”

  “Whoever.”

  “Your colleague says there was a girl as well as the two men.”

  Izquierdo made a face. Phil was certain that if Wack said that every whole is greater than its part, Izquierdo would deny it. He was looking around his office now. Then he remembered something Lucy had said and had an inspiration.

  “My pogo stick!”

  “Your what?”

  “What I exercise with. I can do it right here. But it’s gone.”

  That seemed to be the only thing missing. Jimmy wanted a full description of it, even a crude drawing. Phil didn’t need that. There had been such a pogo stick propped in a corner of Wack’s office.

  “Those pretty popular here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do your colleagues get their exercise this way?”

  “Hey, this is my little secret. Can you imagine what they’d say if they saw me jumping up and down on that thing? But why would anyone take that?”

  When they left Izquierdo’s office, the door of Wack’s office was cracked slightly. Phil gestured him out, and on the second invitation Wack emerged.

  “I just want to confirm something, Professor.” Phil took Izquierdo to the door of Wack’s office and pointed to the corner. “Is that the sort of thing you’re missing?”

  With a cry, Izquierdo sprang into the office. When he came out he was flourishing a pogo stick.

  “You thief!”

  “What is that? I never saw it before!”

  “So you steal unconsciously?”

  Wack took hold of Jimmy Stewart’s sleeve. “He must have left it there last night. The investigator.”

  “Want to show us how that works, Professor?” Phil asked.

  This flustered Izquierdo. A door across the hall opened and a lovely young woman appeared. “What on earth is going on?” She smiled when she said it.

  Introductions all around. But it was the pogo stick that fascinated her.

  “I haven’t used one of those in years. Can I try it?”

  “Watch the ceiling.”

  When Phil and Jimmy left, Professor Goessen was hopping up and down, with others who had emerged from their offices applauding the performance.

  In the elevator, Jimmy asked, “Is everybody nuts?”

  “Compared to what?”

  6

  At his son Bill’s insistence, Fred Fenster had given Roger Knight a call and invited him
to lunch at the Morris Inn. The description his son had given him did not prepare him for the apparition that needed both doors opened in order to come into the lobby. A fur cap was pulled down over his ears; he seemed to have several layers of clothing beneath the massive blue parka with NOTRE DAME emblazoned in yellow across the back. His trousers were stuffed into unbuckled galoshes, which made his passage that of a tinkling Santa. His glasses fogged up immediately, and he removed them and looked myopically around. Fred went to his guest and introduced himself.

  “Fred? But isn’t it Manfred?”

  “I’m afraid it is. My mother had no sense of humor. Or maybe she did.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t remember Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog.”

  “Tom Terrific! Of course I do.”

  “So we must have similar misspent youths.”

  Fred helped remove several layers of clothing of his guest’s and pass them over the Dutch door to the attendant. Roger’s entry into the dining room commanded everyone’s attention as he maneuvered carefully between the tables, attended by the hostess, several waitresses, and the amused gaze of the assembly. Roger’s smile seemed meant indifferently for them all. At table Fred mentioned that his mother had mistaken Manfred for Buonconte in the Purgatorio when she named him.

  “Saved by a single tear.”

  “It is my hope.”

  “That is the CSC motto, you know. Spes Unica. An anchor and cross. I think the motto has Marian overtones as well. That’s clear enough in the university’s motto. Vita, Dulcedo, Spes.”

  “You’d be surprised how little I know about my university.” He had known what Roger said, but it seemed humble to pretend he didn’t.

  “No I wouldn’t. Lack of curiosity about the past of the place seems widespread. Maybe we look ahead too exclusively. What do you do, Fred?”

  This was always the difficult question. He could say what he was doing at the time, as if it were a profession or a job, but he found he did not want to mislead Roger Knight. He was beginning to understand Bill’s devotion to this improbable personage.

  “I’m afraid I am one of the idle rich.”

  “Retired?”

  “Well, you see, I never had to work, to earn my living. Long ago, the guilt that induces drove me into politics. I mean as a supporter. But that’s long over.”

  “And now?”

  “I am guided by my putative namesake, trying to save my soul.”

  Neither of them wanted a drink. When Fred ordered the Sorin Salad, Roger put down his menu. “Me, too.”

  “I wanted to tell you what a good influence you have been on my son.”

  “He is a good lad. And the newspaper he and his friends are putting out is a good thing.”

  Fred smiled. “The heresy of good works.”

  “Dom Chautard.”

  “You know him?”

  Roger shrugged. In the lobby there were stacks of the current issue of the Observer, but none of the paper Bill and his friends put out. Circulation was a problem, since they relied on volunteers to distribute copies to various places around campus. At first, piles of the paper had mysteriously disappeared. In default of his son’s paper, Fred had paged through the Observer.

  “That’s an amazing story about the professor whose car was firebombed.”

  “Izquierdo? I haven’t seen it.”

  “I don’t know when I last looked at a campus publication, but I was astounded at how matter-of-fact they were about the man’s atheism. An atheist teaching at Notre Dame? He seems to be something of a missionary as well.”

  “Professors aren’t above posturing, you know.”

  In reading the piece, Fred had been truly shocked. It seemed preposterous that parents would send a son or daughter to Notre Dame in order to have someone seek to undermine their faith. He could imagine what Bastable would think of this piece on Izquierdo. Of course it could be argued that one will meet with assaults on his faith throughout life and that there was little point in putting it off. An untested faith is impossible. It was quite another thing to subsidize the attack on one’s beliefs.

  But he had not asked Roger Knight to lunch in order to discuss campus politics. Everything Fred had heard of the portly Huneker Professor had made him wonder if he might not, as his father had, give some financial support to Notre Dame. Quirk’s campaign was having its effect. He dreaded the thought of calling on the Notre Dame Foundation, where professionals in the art of separating people from their money would have to be dealt with. What he wondered was whether he could not more or less directly underwrite the wonderful work that Roger was doing.

  “Fred, I am paid far more than I am worth as it is. I sit in an endowed chair. I have a discretionary fund. There is nothing I need.”

  It occurred to Fred that Roger might be drawing the wrong inference from the clothes he was wearing: the same baggy sweater and corduroys with their wales all but gone. “My family has always given generously to Notre Dame. I mean my father. I’m afraid I’ve let that sort of thing go.”

  Small amounts of money, given to quite specific purposes, seemed more effective. Large sums, very large sums, seemed to satisfy some need of the giver rather than the recipient. Fred was struck by the way new buildings at Notre Dame bore the names of their donors. The pharaoh principle, more or less. Thank God his father had not been in the grip of that kind of vanity.

  “In any case, I appreciate the thought. Money isn’t what Notre Dame needs most just now.”

  “And what is?”

  Roger was wedged into his chair; his napkin was tucked into his collar and lay like a pennant on his massive chest. He looked at Fred. “Let me tell you a story.”

  It was Roger’s story, orphaned early, raised by his older brother, dubbed a prodigy, and finished with college and graduate school when most boys were finishing high school.

  “Swift as my passage through college and university was, delighted as I was to be able to pursue a dozen interests at once, from the beginning I felt something was missing. You have to take a course in Dante from a professor, and a good professor, too, who shares none of Dante’s religious beliefs, to know what I mean. A man can teach Shakespeare well and yet not inhabit in any way the world of the poet’s real beliefs. So, too, with Chaucer, Milton, Browning. It is of course far worse in philosophy. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, certifiably mad, read as guides to what? The tail end of modernity makes clear that it was rotting from the head down.”

  “So what happened?”

  A radiant smile. “I read Chesterton. I read Belloc. I read Claudel. I read Maritain. Then I knew what was missing. I became a Catholic.”

  “And came to Notre Dame.”

  “Eventually. It was a bit of a shock to find almost the same assumptions and outlook that I was fleeing here. It would be too much to say that people were ashamed of the faith; the fact is, many of my colleagues haven’t the least inkling of the tradition in which the university allegedly stands. They have been trained as I was and simply accepted it as the way things are. It is tragic. A whole patrimony is ignored or, when taken into account, treated in the way I found so dissatisfying.”

  “And you are offering an alternative.”

  “In a small way.” He patted his middle. “Insofar as I can do anything in a small way.”

  Roger tried discreetly to learn just what it was Fred did with his life, how he spent his days. He dodged the questions, again characterized himself as one of the idle rich. Much as Roger impressed him, stirring as what he had said was, Fred was not prepared to speak of his religious enthusiasms.

  In the lobby, dressing to face the elements, Roger wrapped an Observer into his clothing and then, attended once more, went outside to where his golf cart awaited him. Fred waved him off and went up to his room. A message. He checked it out and groaned. Bastable.

  7

  Hugh Bastable was in a rage. He paced from his study through the dining room and into the living room of the town house overlooking the St. Joseph River to which h
e and his wife, Florence, had moved with the idiotic notion that they would end their lives pleasantly near the institutions that, with the passage of years, seemed to have been the scene of the best years of their lives. They had come fleeing what seemed the debacle of their family. Young Hugh—he was thirty-seven now—had come out of the closet, as he put it (“The water closet!”) and was now tossed about by the zeitgeist. Myrtle, their daughter, had married, three times so far, and had one neglected child for each of her discarded spouses. Florence subsided into silent resignation, but Hugh disowned them both, sold out, and moved to South Bend with Florence.

  What had he expected to find? Florence had returned from her one and only visit to St. Mary’s in wordless shock. And Notre Dame! What in the name of God had happened to Hugh’s alma mater? During his active years, he had paid little attention to what was happening to the Church in the wake of Vatican II. The truth was that he hadn’t been much of a Catholic, too busy, too successful, too whatever. There were disquieting moments when he wondered how responsible he was for the directions his children’s lives had taken. But self-knowledge was not prominent among his gifts. He needed an external enemy, and by God he had found it. Day after day, he fed his discontents, and reading the benighted Observer was a reliable negative stimulus. Today’s issue had provided a sympathetic portrait of the professor whose car had burned near the library. Izquierdo! Was the poor fellow the victim of some bigoted student, the reporter asked? That the man was an atheist and was noted for heaping abuse on the faith in his classroom was conveyed without the least hint that there was something odd about this. Surely this was the last straw.

  The difficulty was that the past three years had provided one last straw after another, and nothing seemed outrageous enough for the university to finally shape up. Bastable had scanned the story and then faxed it to a dozen kindred spirits around the country. He sent out a spam e-mail to his classmates. Florence had diligently put together an almost complete list, with e-mail addresses, that facilitated the sending of such missives. He awaited a call from Fred Fenster. But what was to be done? Bad publicity? What worse publicity could be imagined than that chuckleheaded tribute to the campus atheist? Hugh had long since canceled his pledge of support to the university. But how could you punish an institution that was the beneficiary of endless floods of generosity from the most diverse sources? To make things worse, football, after having been in the pits for years, had suddenly been turned around, and the Fighting Irish were once more at the top of the heap. Which meant more money. Was even God against him? Without three hours a weekday of Rush Limbaugh he doubted that he could go on.