Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  FUNERAL, n.

  A pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears.

  Not bad. Not terribly good either. Well, that was true of most of Ambrose Bierce’s definitions. Once Chadwick had found that gloomy humor witty. Later, the entries came to seem forced. They were certainly uneven in quality.

  Bierce had been raised in Indiana, just down the road from South Bend. Off to the Civil War, into journalism, to San Francisco, then Washington, and finally the mysterious disappearance in Mexico. There were precedents for Timothy Quinn. Actually, he was more like B. Traven than Bierce. Traven had survived his disappearance. Mexico again. What intrigued Chadwick was learning that Quinn had made his way back to the campus after discharge from the army and worked on the grounds crew.

  “He said he operated a mower on the golf course,” Roger Knight had said.

  “Burke.”

  Roger didn’t understand.

  “The old golf course. Only half of it is left. I stopped golfing when they gobbled up the back nine for new buildings.”

  “You golfed?”

  “Often, but not well. The risibly cheap season ticket was one of the few faculty perks in those days. In August, before they installed the sprinkling system, a topped ball could roll three hundred yards on the khaki fairways.” Chadwick smiled into the past.

  “He is an odd fellow, Emil.”

  Quinn. “Well, after all those years of being dead.”

  Roger had of course recounted to him his visit to Minneapolis to see Beth Hanrahan and the surprising discovery of Quinn as a volunteer in her center for wandering homeless souls. “He works in the kitchen. He makes the soup.”

  “Was he a cook in the army?”

  “Just what I asked him. He said he wasn’t that bad.”

  Chadwick smiled.

  “I was in the navy, you know, Emil. The food wasn’t bad at all. At any rate, I thrived on it. You might say that it contributed to my discharge.”

  Roger had a semidefensive habit of alluding to his enormous weight. He asked if Chadwick had read the stories in the student papers.

  “Certainly not.”

  “There was going to be a revival of a play by Patrick Pelligrino. They intended to invite that group of students from the Class of 1989 to attend. The original cast. Of course, Brother Joachim could not have come.”

  “Meaning he wouldn’t want to. Trappists can do such things nowadays. Don’t forget that Joachim requested and was given permission to spend some time in the hermitage.”

  “The scene of the crime.”

  “It’s where Thomas Merton hung out. To be alone. Merton didn’t like community life.”

  Chadwick had visited the place with Maurice, Chrysologus, his son: a kind of camp, deep in the woods, a bedroom, an oratory, a kitchen, and a front porch where one had a wonderful view down a valley to some hills. He thought of his little house in Holy Cross Village. “We all end up monks of a sort.”

  “Beth Hanrahan has promised to come to the funeral.”

  “I would like to see her again.”

  “Again?”

  “She came to me for directed readings.” He laid his head on the back of his chair, thinking. “Hawthorne. We read Hawthorne.” A long silence. “The thing that interested her most was the fact that Hawthorne’s daughter became a Dominican nun.”

  Roger rose to go, asking if Emil would care for a cup of coffee.

  “It would keep me awake.”

  The door closed. Now Emil turned the pages of his book.

  CONVENT, n.

  A place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the vice of idleness.

  7

  ROGER DID NOT HAVE MUCH TO SAY when Phil ticked off the names of those he considered suspects in the murder of David Williams. Phil expected a protest when he led off with Brother Joachim, but Roger just worked his lips in and out, breathing through his nose.

  “Then there’s Jay Williams.”

  “His son?”

  Phil reminded him of what the guest master had said about the Notre Dame student who had visited Gethsemani on the day Williams was attack.

  “That’s pretty far-fetched, Phil. His own father?”

  “It bears looking into. You’re the one who told me what his girlfriend said.”

  Amanda Zikowski had indeed told Roger that she was worried about Jay. “He’s afraid his father is going to get married again.”

  “That’s not against the law, Amanda.”

  “You have to understand Jay’s feeling for his mother. She’s been gone years, yet he talks about her as if she’s in the next room. He thinks it would be a betrayal.”

  “Have you made up with him?”

  She smiled. “A cosmetic truce. He thinks because his father was a student actor it’s in the genes.”

  Roger remembered that Jay had once asked him—seriously? as part of his pranks?—if he could hire the Knight brothers to investigate his father. Concern with how the financial mess was affecting his father had been the reason given, but Amanda’s remark made him wonder. If Jay had told Phil he wanted to know if his father had a girlfriend, he would have been out of luck. Phil never took divorce cases.

  Phil had made a flying trip to New York and had not learned much. He had heard about Dave’s liaison with Mame, but Father Carmody had assured him there was nothing to it.

  Apparently, however, Jay had hired someone else. Phil had run into Ziggy Cobalt in Leahy’s. Ziggy was a private eye, his preferred self-description, and with lenses as thick as his, his eyes did seem to be enjoying their privacy.

  “Knight!” Ziggy said, looking over both shoulders first.

  “What brings you here?”

  Ziggy winked in reply. “Now, now, you know that’s not an appropriate question.”

  Later Phil asked Murph if Ziggy had talked with him.

  “He’s talked with everybody. He says he’s a private eye.”

  “Then he must be out on parole.”

  “You know him?”

  “I did. Before his conviction. What’s he looking for?”

  “You got me.”

  “He’s been in prison?”

  “I’m kidding. Ziggy has no convictions.”

  Phil had tailed Ziggy to the residence in which Jay Williams lived. Had Ziggy told Jay about Mame? Father Carmody might dismiss it, but Phil thought otherwise.

  Phil went on with his list. “Then there is Timothy Quinn.”

  Roger rotated his wheeled chair. “That would seem more likely, but you would have to place him at the monastery at the time.” He thought of the name John Donne entered in the guesthouse registry and of Joachim’s remark.

  Phil didn’t think a lot of the list himself, but what else did he have? The biggest problem was jurisdiction—if there was even a charge. There was a sheriff in the county in which Gethsemani was located, a man named Casper, whom Phil had looked up before they headed back to Notre Dame. Casper was what Roger would call taciturn. When he did speak it was emphatically.

  “I don’t want to tangle with those monks.”

  “Someone has been murdered, Sheriff.”

  “Is that right? No one ever told me about it. Where you from, son?”

  Casper might have been a month or two older than Phil. Was this a sense of turf, or an exaggerated respect for the separation of church and state?

  “I work out of New York. I’m living at Notre Dame now.”

  “Notre Dame!”

  “It’s a university in Indiana.”

  “I know what it is. LSU cleaned their clock last year.” Casper’s narrow eyes grew narrower. “You working for those monks?”

  Phil gave up. Apparently the abbot had seen no need to call the sheriff because David Williams had died in the monastery infirmary. Wise as a serpent or simple as a dove? Maybe Casper wouldn’t have taken his call. If he ever did find out who had dealt
the ultimately mortal blow to David Williams, Phil wondered, where would he go with the information?

  Roger said, “Well, Phil, they should all be here for the funeral.”

  “Is Quinn coming?”

  “No one can find him to tell him what has happened.”

  Father Carmody was obviously of two minds. Phil sat with him in his room, watching vagrant snowflakes float by the window. Winter was on its way, and when winter came to Indiana it was, as Roger said, unequivocal winter. Father Carmody had enlisted Phil’s help to find out what had happened to David Williams in the hermitage at Gethsemani, so of course all he had to do was fire him if he wanted to. There had been little publicity about the murder, indeed no charge of murder, and Father Carmody liked that fine. The less danger of a blemish on the reputation of Notre Dame, the better. Who knew what Phil might turn up that would reflect adversely on Notre Dame? Or give her enemies cause for gossip?

  “There’s no doubt that his death was due to that blow on the head?” Father Carmody asked this as he expelled cigarette smoke. He might have wanted to see what it would sound like if spoken aloud. Phil said nothing to this, but when he described his conversation with Sheriff Casper, the old priest’s integrity was put to a real test.

  “There’s no official acknowledgment of murder?”

  “Casper knows nothing about it.”

  “So what are we investigating?”

  “The murder of David Williams.”

  Phil could see how much Carmody would like to say, Let sleeping dogs lie. Let Dave Williams rest in peace. If the sheriff down there doesn’t care, why should we? Care legally, that is. Of course he couldn’t bring himself to say that.

  There had been an autopsy when the body arrived in South Bend, but the blow on the head from which Dave had died might have been caused by an accident. The wound was included in the autopsy and the body turned over to Hickey.

  “Maybe you’ll never find out who did it, Phil.”

  “That’s more than possible.”

  This cheered Carmody up. It made Phil all the more eager to find who had brought that chunk of firewood down on David Williams’s head. Even if Carmody had told him to forget it, he would have gone on with the investigation.

  8

  BROTHER CHRYSOLOGUS WROTE TO his father to say that the abbot was sending him to Notre Dame as companion to Joachim for the funeral of David Williams, making it sound like a matter of obedience, as doubtless it was. Emil Chadwick did not often hear from his Trappist son, which, he supposed, was as it should be. When you leave the world you should cut your lines to it. To be sure, there was a filial letter at Christmas and from time to time a postcard—birthday wishes or the anniversary of his mother’s death—but Maurice had entered the monastery and meant to give it all he had.

  Emil Chadwick, on his rare visits—his coming to Gethsemani was all right since presumably it had a religious as well as paternal motive—had pieced together his son’s attitude toward the life he led. There was no doubt that he was a Cistercian of the Strict Observance, the official title of the Trappists. In his letter, he alluded to the attack on David Williams, regretting that it had occurred on sacred soil as much as that it was a murder, and added, “Perhaps we should tear down the place.” He meant the hermitage.

  There is an old quarrel between monks concerning the relative merits of the hermetic life and community life. Thomas Merton had actually argued that the hermetic was the original Trappist charism. For Maurice, unlike for hundreds of others, Thomas Merton had been an obstacle rather than a spur to his vocation. Before entering, he had read Mott’s life of Merton and Furlong’s earlier one and been disenchanted. The hermitage had been built at Merton’s request, and the author had spent much time out there in the woods, endlessly writing, sipping wine, listening to Joan Baez records, becoming more and more political, fascinated by Eastern religions. The hermitage had become a place where he could entertain friends and fans far from the eye of the abbot. After he had entered, Maurice never said such things; he didn’t have to. While strict silence and its accompanying sign language were things of the past with Trappists, there is, after all, body language. Chrysologus made it clear enough to his father that the identification of Gethsemani with Thomas Merton displeased him.

  Getting to Sacred Heart for the funeral posed a slight problem. It was one thing for Chadwick to pedal to his office on his three-wheeled cycle, but rolling up to the basilica in it would cause an unwelcome stir.

  “I’ll come for you,” Roger Knight said. “We’ll go together.”

  A golf cart wasn’t much of an improvement over his tricycle, but Emil accepted gladly. Roger struck him as a bright light in otherwise dark days for the university and an ideal companion at funerals.

  Roger made his offer in Brownson when Chadwick showed him the letter from his son.

  “I can count the times I have seen him say Mass. I mean alone. At the monastery they say it together with the abbot.”

  There was a thump on the door of Chadwick’s office, in which he and Roger were talking. Another thump, the door swung open, and a radiant Sarah, now large with child, stood there.

  “I got it!” she cried.

  Sarah had been offered the tenured professorship.

  “Will you accept?”

  She stared at him, shocked, until she saw that he was being facetious.

  “Congratulations,” Roger said, taking her hand. She threw herself into his arms and kissed his cheek. “Now, now.”

  At his desk, Chadwick strained forward, offering his own cheek. He got his kiss, and the elated Sarah seemed to float out of the room.

  “Ah, youth,” sighed Chadwick.

  That was on a Tuesday. The funeral would be the following day. Father Carmody had decided that a viewing of the body would be held in the Lady Chapel of the basilica for an hour before the funeral Mass.

  9

  PLANES, TRAINS, AND BUSES ARRIVE at the South Bend airport, but Beth Hanrahan stayed on the limo she had taken from Chicago, having come there from Minneapolis by train. The so-called limo, actually a bus, after a first stop at the airport, continued to the Notre Dame campus, and it was at the bus stop there that Roger met her in his golf cart. She was wearing a purple beret and a black coat that seemed too large for her and was carrying a sport bag. Her eyes expressed pleasure at the sight of Roger, who had pushed back the hood of his parka as if she would have trouble recognizing him.

  “I don’t know where I’m staying,” she said, hopping in.

  “It’s all been arranged.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s a motel.”

  The residence in which the trinity had lived was now a women’s dorm, and the nun in charge was delighted at the prospect of putting Beth up there in a guest room. “Beth Hanrahan,” she said breathily. “What an inspiration she is. Perhaps she’ll give a talk at the Center for Social Concerns.”

  Beth’s eyes widened when he told her this. Apparently a group of students had been brought to Our Lady of the Road to impress upon them their obligation to help the needy.

  “A kind of slumming. Oh, I shouldn’t say that. They seem to think my life is romantic.”

  “Any word from Timothy Quinn?”

  She looked at him, then shook her head.

  It had been trying to snow for days, without success, and the campus had the bleak look of late autumn, the trees stripped of their leaves, which had been gathered by the grounds crew and spirited away, the grass dull and brittle looking. Students moved along the walks, all bundled up, chattering into their cell phones, elsewhere no matter where they were.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I packed a lunch.”

  “But you’ve been traveling all day. We’ll get you settled, and then you’ll come home with me. I’ll make spaghetti.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t go to any bother.”

  She acquiesced when she understood that she would be sharing Roger’s and Phil’s supper.

  “Father Carmody will join u
s.”

  “Oh, good.”

  A delegation waited on the steps of the residence hall, and Beth was led triumphantly inside. The nun was not pleased that Roger intended to take away this honored guest almost immediately. Beth pleaded that she would be dining with Father Carmody.

  “It’s all arranged,” Roger said.

  Father Carmody was napping in his room when Roger called to invite him for a spaghetti dinner that night. Having accepted, the old priest rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. He was bushed, no doubt about it, but there was a glow of satisfaction as well. He was almost looking forward to David Williams’s funeral.

  Peter Rocca would pick up Brothers Chrysologus and Joachim when they flew in. The monks would be lodged in Corby Hall, where many of the priests lived. A couple of Trappists in their midst ought to brighten up the place. He was smiling when he drifted back into dreamland.

  Philip Knight came to Holy Cross House for him, a courtesy Father Carmody would usually argue about before accepting. Phil drove with the enthusiasm of a NASCAR fan, making conversation difficult. It was just as well. Father Carmody wasn’t sure that he liked Phil calling the funeral a gathering of the suspects.

  Phil had an odd request. “Remember being told that Timothy Quinn came back here during his lost years and worked for a time on the grounds crew?”

  “Strange fellow.”

  “I wonder if he’s strange enough to do it again.”

  Father Carmody thought about it. “I can find out.”

  “I was hoping you would.”

  “Anytime you want a partner on a wild goose chase, I’m your man.”