Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  Timothy Quinn’s hatchet could be located by means of the large boulder that Patrick Pelligrino had carried to it. To mark the spot, to conceal it?

  The following afternoon, Roger and Greg went in Roger’s golf cart to the Log Chapel and then wandered west of it. They came upon the large rock described by Pelligrino. Was he directing them to a murder weapon?

  The sealed letter in the box was addressed to David Williams.

  What to do? Roger’s suggestion was that they put that question to Father Carmody on the telephone.

  The old priest listened to Roger’s account, saying nothing, and even allowed the story to be read to him over the phone.

  “I suppose you knew these boys, Father.”

  “In those days I knew everybody.”

  “Is that yes?”

  Father Carmody grunted. “What do you intend to do?”

  “Ask your advice.”

  The old priest took a moment. “Put it back in the archives. Bury it.”

  “Just that?”

  “Patrick Pelligrino was the author of two plays that were put on.”

  “The plays in which he and DW and TQ appeared, along with BH?”

  “Beth Hanrahan,” the old priest said softly. “What you’ve read me sounds like an undergraduate effort that for some reason he wanted preserved in the archives.”

  “You think it is twenty years old?”

  “The story reminds me of one of Pelligrino’s plays, inspired by Poe. A man named Primo bricks his rival into a wall and then is haunted by what he thinks are moans from behind the bricks. This goes on for weeks. Finally he tears open the wall, goes into the chamber looking frantically for a body. All this is recounted in a note, read years later. The wall is once more opened, and there is the body of Primo. It was a powerful play. Melodramatic, of course, and incredible, but good acting can do much for a weak story.”

  One of the playbills in the carton was for Behind the Bricks. The author, Pelligrino, had played the role of Primo. The rival was David Williams.

  Roger told the priest that there was another letter, addressed to David Williams, the name typed.

  “You didn’t open that one?”

  “It was addressed to David Williams. I wonder where he is now?”

  “David Williams? I see him from time to time. I could pass it on to him.”

  “Will you tell him about the story?”

  “That depends.”

  It was a few days later that Father Carmody called to say he was stopping by with an old student, David Williams.

  6

  JAY WILLIAMS AND AMANDA ZIKOWSKI were in the Computer Cluster in DeBartolo, sharing a computer, or pretending to. It was here that Jay had come up with the idea of a note to be slipped under the door of Roger Knight’s office.

  “Jay, that’s stupid.”

  “Of course it’s stupid. I’m a philosophy major.”

  “I wish you’d never signed up for his class.”

  “Amanda, it was your idea.”

  “A stupid idea.”

  “You’ve become a philosopher.”

  It was Amanda’s wide face with its luminous eyes and the blond hair arranged in some complicated way on her head that had first drawn Jay to her. Now minutes could go by before he noticed her exterior. It was the inner Amanda who fascinated him. And all her breathless talk about Roger Knight had made him jealous, nor had his first sight of the blimplike Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies driven away his jealousy. He knew how susceptible women are to the helpless male, and Roger Knight looked as if he needed twenty-four-hour assistance.

  The class was interesting in a way, Aquinas’s assimilation of Aristotle, but it was largely an hour and a half of tangents. Jay would have thought that the overweight professor was showing off, but that didn’t seem to be it. In fact, he rejected the idea that his numerous excursions off the subject of the course were tangents. He attributed Jay’s question about them to the fact that he was a philosophy major.

  “What philosophy courses have you taken?”

  “Before I became a major? A survey and then epistemology.”

  “Ah. And since?”

  “I’m taking Philosophy of Science this semester.”

  “Isn’t philosophy a science?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Do you think philosophy is a specialty?”

  “Well, it’s a major.”

  “You’ve put your finger on the problem with higher education.”

  Luckily Amanda had not been in on this conversation. Roger Knight had asked Jay to define science, and he had answered, “Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy.”

  “But what makes them sciences? You will say the application of mathematics to the natural world. A good answer. Of course, you probably think this is a fifteenth-century innovation.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Only up to a point. Well, at last you will be reading Aristotle’s Physics. Does the name Arthur Eddington mean anything to you?”

  This was hard. Jay’s grade point average was as close to a 4.0 as a B in biology permitted. With Roger Knight he felt like an illiterate idiot. He didn’t like it.

  “You remind me of myself at your age, Jay.”

  “My weight?”

  Roger Knight had roared. “Actually I was a wraith of a lad. The avoirdupois came later. Hop in.” Jay got onto the seat of the professor’s golf cart, and it started off silently. “Where to?”

  Jay shrugged. “Where are you going?”

  “Home. Care to come along?”

  That was how Jay met Roger’s brother, Philip, the more or less retired private investigator.

  “I worked with him,” Roger said proudly.

  “You were a private detective?”

  “I still have a license. We both do.”

  This was too good to be true. He could hardly wait to tarnish Amanda’s image of her favorite professor with this information. The great professor, great in every sense so far as Amanda was concerned, a onetime private eye.

  “What were some of your cases?”

  “One of my favorites involved our aunt Lucerne.”

  Jay listened with fascination, as if he were gathering evidence. The case they had been put on by their aunt involved a riddle, and then there was the case of a dog named Fetch.

  “You should write them up,” Jay urged.

  “Not everyone would be as interested as you.”

  “Oh, I know all about that,” Amanda said when he hurried to tell her about Roger Knight’s past.

  “You do?”

  “He likes to talk about it. Sometimes I think he misses being a detective.”

  That was when Jay conceived the idea of testing Roger Knight’s prowess. It would begin with a note with a mysterious message pushed under his office door.

  “Jay, that’s stupid.”

  “It’s just the teaser. We complicate things by pushing an identical note under the doors of offices near his.”

  “What is the object?”

  He looked at her. Oh, those luminous eyes. He couldn’t say that he hoped to make a fool of Roger Knight. He didn’t like the frown that was forming on Amanda’s brow. “Just to let him show his stuff.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Amanda, he’s been a detective. This will be child’s play for him.”

  “Well, it’s child’s play, all right.”

  She didn’t like it. She would like it even less if Jay’s campaign showed that Roger Knight was mortal, fallible, not the paragon of wisdom she thought he was. It occurred to him that then she would despise Jay Williams, not Roger Knight.

  Amanda reluctantly came with him when he slipped the notes under the office doors. At the next class he asked Roger Knight to explain again the difference between numbering and numbered number. Roger was delighted and went on and on until even Amanda looked bored, but Jay intended to play fair, more or less. Afterward he expected Amanda to be mollified.

  “I as much as
told him who had written the notes.”

  “Jay, do you seriously think he is losing sleep over that silly message?”

  “You may be right.”

  No need to involve Amanda in step two of the plan. What he needed was a riddle, like the riddle in the case Aunt Lucerne had her nephews investigate. Her estranged husband had left her a Green Bay Packers fan cheesehead and a piggy bank on one side of which was taped Your name and on the other MacLivid.

  “What was the solution?”

  Roger smiled. “There was a Swiss bank account, in Lucerne, and the number was given in Roman numerals. MLIVID.”

  “Pretty obvious?”

  “Pretty unintelligible. It’s not a Roman number.”

  “Of course not. That’s the point.”

  “If you say so.”

  7

  ROGER TOLD PHIL THAT FATHER CARMODY would be stopping by, accompanied by a David Williams.

  “An alumnus?”

  “Class of 1989.”

  “It has to be the same one.”

  “Father Carmody described him as a benefactor of the university. He’s given the money to put up the building that will rob me of my parking place.”

  Roger, of course, had told Phil about the contents of the box Brother Joachim had sent to the archives and Greg had left with Roger, seemingly glad to get it out of his hands. It hadn’t elicited much interest from Phil, even after he read the story and the final typed page.

  “Did you check to see if the marker is there, Roger?”

  “I drove along the road below Old College. There is a large rock where Joachim said there would be.”

  “All you have to do is dig up the body,” Phil said wryly.

  “Is that your suggestion?”

  “No. Forget about it, Roger. Father Carmody would say the same.”

  “He already has.”

  Father Carmody didn’t knock or ring the bell but came right in, as befitted a close friend. The man with him bore a prosperous look and seemed unsure why he was being brought to see the Knights.

  “I have heard of you,” he said to Roger, trying not to show surprise at Roger’s bulk. “My son is in your class.”

  “Jay? Of course.” Roger stepped back and squinted. “I see the resemblance.”

  Phil joined them, then got beer for himself and Williams. Roger and Father Carmody had coffee.

  “This is left over from breakfast, Father.”

  “I like aged coffee.”

  “Jay says he has never taken a class like yours, Professor.”

  “That has the makings of an insult. You should have brought him along.”

  “I haven’t seen him yet. I went first to Father Carmody. I am here to explain that I will have to postpone my promised gift to the university. The financial mess has given me a little trouble.”

  “I don’t understand what is happening,” Roger said.

  Williams smiled sadly. “Who does?”

  Phil said, “I have everything in government bonds and municipals.”

  “Lucky man. If you’d been my client I would have argued against that.”

  “I don’t want to have to think about money.”

  Father Carmody, having tasted his coffee, lit a cigarette.

  Williams was surprised. “I thought this was a smoke-free campus.”

  “It is, it is. I just like to contribute something for it to be free of. We can smoke in Holy Cross House, you know. The only smoke-free zone I’m interested in is in the other world.”

  The sound of the game on in the next room caught Williams’s attention, and he and Phil drifted in there. Roger took Father Carmody into his study.

  “This isn’t the ideal way to show you this stuff. The stuff that was sent to the archives by Brother Joachim.” Roger took an envelope from the box and handed it to Father Carmody.

  “What’s this?”

  “What I told you about on the phone.”

  Father Carmody read it, indifferently at first and then with growing concern. When he had finished, he folded it carefully and returned it to the envelope. He didn’t look at Roger. “What are you going to do about that?”

  “That is my question to you.”

  Father Carmody thought. Whatever moral drama was going on in his mind, Roger knew that any judgment would be made according to its possible effect on Notre Dame. Father Carmody might be critical of this or that in the current administration’s doings, but all that was on the surface, something that would pass away, while Notre Dame endured forever.

  “Seal it and put it back in the archives.”

  Roger nodded. It was the answer he had expected, and it wasn’t just self-serving. What could possibly arise out of a Trappist monk’s fictional claim of responsibility for a fellow student who disappeared twenty years ago?

  “This is the other letter.”

  He handed it to the priest, who glanced at the envelope. “David Williams.”

  “They seem to have been classmates.”

  “They were close friends. They were roommates.”

  Father Carmody tapped his forehead with the envelope. “Do you think he would repeat that suggestion of murder in this?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  “If he does, I will regret giving Dave this letter.”

  “I have a letter for you,” Father Carmody said brightly when they joined Phil and David Williams.

  “For me?” Williams took the letter and looked at his name written on it.

  “Who’s it from?”

  “Pat Pelligrino.”

  “But he’s a monk.”

  “You don’t have to read it now.”

  “Of course I’ll read it now.” Moments went by, though, before he opened the envelope. Two official sheets, looking like a legal document. Williams was stunned when he looked up. “He’s made me his heir.”

  It was indeed a legal document, dated some twelve years before. Pelligrino had inherited an uncle’s estate and, before entering the monastery, had made out this will, bequeathing everything to David Williams, effective immediately.

  “He must have been very sure he had a vocation,” Father Carmody said.

  “I can’t accept this!” Williams said in a strained voice.

  “How much would it amount to?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Why don’t you evaluate what the uncle had before you decide.”

  “I have decided.”

  “Dave, all you can do is give it away yourself now. You’d want to know what you’re giving away, wouldn’t you?”

  “Notre Dame can have it.”

  “It may amount to little.”

  “How did you get the letter, Father?”

  “He knew the address of the university, Dave.”

  Suggesting that Brother Joachim would have sent the letter directly to David Williams if he knew his address. Perhaps he would have. Father Carmody would have said that he had no control over what others thought his statements implied.

  The bequest amounted to a lot. Arturo Pelligrino, Patrick’s uncle, had eschewed brokers and bought in such a conservative way that his holdings were largely unaffected by the current economic situation.

  Then there was the gold.

  There were those who succumbed to the blandishments of dealers in precious metals, who touted the stability of those metals against currencies. Arturo had succumbed; he had bought half a million dollars’ worth of gold, whose current value was many times that.

  There seemed no need to tell Williams that his benefactor had all but accused him of the murder of their common friend, Timothy Quinn.

  8

  SARAH WIGGINS LIKED THE COMPANY in Brownson, but the truth was that her office there was an outward sign of her secondary status. A not unimportant aspect of her hope to be given a tenured position would be a move to an office in Decio, where most of the members of her department were, making her a full-fledged member at last. For all that, it was lovely to have the chance of visiti
ng with Roger Knight and the old curmudgeon Chadwick. They seemed always to be in their offices, particularly Chadwick, who was emeritus and, in his phrase, hors de combat.

  “My dear, it is good to have the losing battles all behind one,” Chadwick said, putting a match to his pipe. The tobacco smelled so good at first, but that didn’t last, maybe because newly lit tobacco had to compete with all the pipefuls of the past whose ghosts haunted Chadwick’s office.

  “When did you join the faculty?”

  “In 1955.” His eyes were on her when he said it. “Before your parents were born, I suppose.”

  Good Lord. Sarah wouldn’t have been more surprised if Chadwick had said he had been a contemporary of Father Sorin, the founder of Notre Dame. To her, 1955 sounded as long ago as 1842, and he was almost right about her parents’ birth.

  “What was it like then?”

  “The same and different. That’s a definition of analogy.” Chadwick had taught philosophy and called himself a repentant professor. “It took me a lifetime to learn that I know nothing.”

  Chadwick’s office was a chaos of books and papers and memorabilia. He told her about the old days. Father Hesburgh had been president; Frank O’Malley and Leo Ward were colleagues. “We all knew one another then. The fraternity of penury.”

  The student body had been all male when Chadwick came, and the faculty as well. Discipline was enforced. Football games were won. O’Shaughnessy Hall had opened just before Chadwick joined the faculty. There were fewer than half as many buildings then as now. He had taught six days a week.

  “Six!”

  “There were two sequences, Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Saturday classes were a problem on football weekends. So classes began an hour earlier.”

  That old Notre Dame was spoken of condescendingly now, but Chadwick was a distinguished scholar, author of eight books, one of which Sarah had heard of before she and Charlie came to Notre Dame. The Unknown God: An Essay in Natural Theology. Chadwick had spent sabbatical years in Europe, in Paris, in Rome, a term at Oxford. He had been a widower forever, as he put it. There was a photograph of his wife on his desk, emerging from scattered papers. “My Last Duchess. My late wife. In every sense, she was always tardy.”