Sham Rock
Page 21
“Right over there.”
Phil immediately left Roger’s side and started toward him. His manner must have alerted Quinn. He started, turned, and then began to move rapidly back along the road, Phil in pursuit. Quinn started to run, a mistake. Phil quickly caught up with him and took him by the arm, saying something. Quinn wrenched his arm free and began to run again. Roger thought it was overly dramatic of Phil to bring the fellow down with a tackle. No doubt the influence of the genius loci. Off to the east was the great stadium that Rockne had built and Lou Holtz had enlarged. Jimmy Stewart had joined Phil and was now manacling their captive. Roger sighed.
Beth Hanrahan had witnessed all this and was deeply upset. She came to Roger and grabbed his sleeve. “What are they doing with Q?”
Roger looked into her eyes, at the graying still-lovely hair, at the woman who had given her life to the downtrodden. “I think they want to talk to him.”
“About what?”
For answer, Roger let his eyes drift to the casket.
“That’s ridiculous!”
“I’m going with Maurice,” Emil Chadwick said, and Roger nodded. Beth was hurrying to where Quinn was in the custody of Jimmy Stewart.
“Where in the name of God is he going?” Mame asked in a tight voice. Her question seemed addressed to Roger. She was glaring at the man who had moved farther from the gravesite, strolling off on the road away from the sexton’s shed.
“Who is he?”
“Wilfrid. My husband,” Mame said. “Of course, all this ceremony is strange to him.”
Behind the wheel of his golf cart, Roger moved quickly after Wilfrid. The man jumped when Roger came up beside him; of course, the vehicle made no sound.
“Mr. Childers. Hop in.”
He looked at Roger, he looked at the golf cart, and his surprise gave way to amusement. “You’re Professor Knight.”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“Well, why not?” Childers said, settling himself on the seat beside Roger. Roger eased up on the brake pedal, and they began to move. The road made a turn and ran along the fence separating the cemetery from what was left of the sixteenth fairway. Where it turned again there was an entrance through which the hearse had entered the cemetery with the body of David Williams, the gates still open.
“You were a friend of David’s?”
“One of his clients.”
“Ah. Like your wife.”
Childers nodded.
“Did Ziggy Cobalt tell you about me?”
An attempt at a puzzled smile.
“How did you know who I was?”
“Is it a secret?” He managed to laugh.
“It is a very risky thing to hire a private detective, Mr. Childers. Particularly one like Ziggy Cobalt. They can become curious about your curiosity, and you become the watched rather than the watcher.”
“Interesting.”
“My brother has known Ziggy for years. I suppose you had him tracing David Williams? All the way to Kentucky?” Roger dropped his eyes. “Those aren’t the best shoes for walking in the woods, are they? Of course, any shoe leaves its distinctive imprint. You have made some rather sizable blunders. Including registering at the guesthouse as Briggs.”
Childers had been listening intently to what Roger said, amusement giving way to caution. Now he reached for and got control of the wheel of the cart, putting his foot over Roger’s and depressing the pedal. They shot through the gate and onto the campus road. Childers removed the key and hopped out of the cart, studying Roger. Then he went rapidly around the cart, pushed Roger across the seat, and reinserted the key. “Let’s go look at the lakes.”
“Why did you come to the funeral?”
“To make sure the sonofabitch was dead.”
Jimmy Stewart had put through a call on his cell phone, and a South Bend patrol car was on its way to take Timothy Quinn downtown for questioning.
“Questions?” Quinn asked. “What questions? Ask them here.” Beth was at his side, hugging his arm.
“You shouldn’t have gone to Gethsemani, Quinn.”
The man’s mouth fell open. The subsequent smile revealed discolored teeth. “Is that the charge, visiting a monastery?”
“That, and hitting your old classmate over the head with a piece of firewood.”
You never know how a killer will react when he’s caught. Quinn at least showed some originality.
“Let’s go to the sexton’s shed first. I should punch out.”
The patrol car slid into the cemetery road, and Jimmy led Quinn away.
“I’ll be down as soon as I can,” Phil said and started back to the grave. Mame Childers came hobbling toward him.
“Where’s my brother?” Phil asked her. “The fat man in a golf cart.”
“He has given my husband a lift! And I can scarcely walk.”
Then Phil saw Roger, with a passenger beside him, disappear through the gate. What the hell?
Phil loped away, a stitch in his side. The pursuit of Quinn had taught him how out of shape he was. When he reached the gate, he saw the golf cart going around a curve and then out of sight. At that moment, the hearse came through the gate, about to leave. Phil flagged it down. The driver was surprised to be asked for a lift, but Phil hopped in as he made his request. “Just go along this road, and step on it.”
“Who are you?”
Phil rolled to the side, got out his wallet, opened it, and flashed it at the driver. “I’m a detective.”
“Jesus,” the driver exclaimed and stepped on it.
They made the turn and went past the practice putting green and then Rockne Memorial. There was a stop sign at Dorr Road, which led to the highway. Phil flipped a coin in his head and said, “Straight ahead.”
The lake came into view, and then they were on the road that passed the Log Chapel.
“Stop!” Phil cried. He already had the door open. He piled out and went running toward the chapel.
Roger was at the wheel of the golf cart, with which he had pinned a man to the wall of the chapel. The man, struggling, cursing, could not free himself. Roger seemed to be inching forward, increasing the pressure as Phil came up.
“What’s going on?”
“Meet the murderer of David Williams, Phil.”
EPILOGUE
ROGER WADDLED INTO THE ROOM WHERE PHIL AND Jimmy Stewart were watching television, considered one of the beanbag chairs, thought better of it, and lowered himself onto the middle cushion of a couch.
“What’s on?”
He was ignored. He was not offended. His own mind was still full of the commentary by Cornelius a Lapide he had just been reading, that on Psalm 87, a reminder of the fragility of life, the shortness of our days. He must tell Jay Williams what good company writing that initial message had put him in. Your days are numbered. That in effect had been Brother Joachim’s salutary reminder to his classmate. That Joachim had been there at David Williams’s bedside when he died was a comforting thought, almost a reconciliation scene.
Winter had come and gone; new life greenly put in its appearance on the campus; the game on the screen was baseball. The seasons of the athletic liturgical year succeeded one another, although with some overlapping, to the delight of Phil and Jimmy.
The jurisdictional dispute as to where Wilfrid Childers would be tried, and indeed for what, went on. Meanwhile, Jacuzzi, the local prosecutor, had brought a charge of kidnapping against the suave New Yorker for carrying Roger off as he had. Childers’s lawyer had countered with a charge of assault and battery against Roger.
“Well, the cart is battery driven,” Roger mused.
Childers’s mistake was to have left the ignition key in place when he tried to pull Roger from the cart. He succeeded only in pulling him behind the wheel. Roger released the brake and for several minutes pursued Childers about the lawn below the Log Chapel. It was when Childers had attempted to leap onto the abbreviated hood of the cart that Roger was able to pin him helplessly against the wal
l of the chapel. Given the outcome, Jacuzzi was not sanguine about the kidnapping charge.
Jacuzzi had gone to Kentucky and passed pointless hours there. Emptor, the county prosecutor, was an auctioneer in his spare time, which seemed to be considerable, and did not give Jacuzzi comfort. “Sheriff Casper knows nothing about it.”
Childers’s lawyer had chuckled when Jacuzzi told him about the cast of the footprints found at the back door of the hermitage; wearing latex gloves, he handled the chunk of firewood as if he were about to go to bat. He shook his head. “Not heavy enough.”
That might have described all the evidence, since it was all circumstantial. Had Wilfrid Childers signed in at the Gethsemani guesthouse as Larry Briggs? The guest master, shown photographs of the two men, pointed to Childers when asked which was Briggs, but Jacuzzi was not charmed by the thought of putting a monk on the stand.
“He’ll get away with murder,” Jacuzzi wailed. As a prosecutor he must have known how unfortunately common an outcome that was. The criminal justice system is an imperfect substitute for the Last Judgment.
Meanwhile, Mame had been reconciled with her husband. That she herself had been the occasion for his putative actions had its effect on her. Her former husband was thought to have killed her lover. It came to seem almost Shakespearean. “Allegedly killed,” she would add primly.
“The woman has become a moral theologian,” Father Carmody complained. “Apparently, she has wearied of canon law.”
The intricacies of human action, the murkiness of responsibility, the sea of contingencies in which we live our days, of all these Mame Childers had become the poet.
“He was driven out of his mind,” she explained to the priest. No need to say by what. Ah, the fatal susceptibility of the masculine heart. When she wasn’t instructing Father Carmody in moral theology, she was advising her husband’s lawyers. Yes, husband. The reconciliation had been total. Father Carmody had been approached on the matter, but in the end Mame and Wilfrid were united in holy matrimony by Monsignor Sparrow. Wilfrid, of course, was out on bail.
“Peace to them,” Carmody muttered. “Pox eis, that is.” And he spelled it for Roger.
The Old Bastards in Leahy’s Lounge gave all these matters their full attention. They had not been impressed by the funeral of David Williams.
“White vestments!” Horvath cried. “There wasn’t a moist eye in the church.”
Armitage Shanks began to chant the Dies Irae but found that he had forgotten the words.
“You see? We’ll be forgetting the Our Father soon.”
The sequel to the burial buoyed them up. The fat Professor Knight being carried off by the killer and then pinning his abductor to the wall of the Log Chapel—that was a scene to which they could relate.
“We must all get such carts,” Potts said. “We can roam the campus looking for administrators.”
The prospect of pinning vice presidents and provosts and deans to campus walls and trees excited them.
“Do you need a license to drive one of them?” Bingham asked.
“You already have a driver’s license, Horvath.”
“It’s restricted.”
“Hang him high,” Potts growled. Doubtless he was remembering the campus petition to show clemency to Wilfrid Childers.
“He’ll get off scot-free.”
“What is the meaning of that word, scot-free?”
Armitage Shanks launched into an explanation, but Murph arrived at last with their drinks.
“Feeding time,” he said cheerfully.
Events had of course led to the abandonment of plans to stage a revival of Behind the Bricks, and Hazel was furious. Jay and Amanda went to explain.
“After all the trouble I took.” She glared at Amanda, but her expression softened when she turned to Jay.
“It’s all your fault, Hazel.”
“My fault?”
“You turned down the part I offered you.”
The cancellation complemented the cancellation of Casey Winthrop’s lecture. The Irish Rover had begun a three-part series on the life and work of Casey Winthrop ’89, but it was not the same thing. Jay and Amanda planned to visit the author when they went to Florida on spring break.
“The sequel to Tumbleweed has appeared,” Jay said.
“What’s it called?”
“Cactus.”
“Any good?”
“How can you ask?”
Fenway in the Notre Dame Foundation had approached Jay about his father’s offer to fund a new ethics center. Jay told them he had other plans.
“Some other building?”
“Yes.”
Fenway sat eagerly forward.
“In Minneapolis,” Jay said.
On an early April morning Beth Hanrahan was hurrying back from Mass at Holy Rosary. Father Romanus had told her he was offering it for the repose of David Williams’s soul. Another? Beth was surprised, but Romanus explained this was not the Mass she had requested long ago. “Buy one, get one free.”
“I didn’t give a stipend.”
“Don’t be so literal.”
Returning from Notre Dame to Our Lady of the Road had been in many ways a relief. Q drove her back, muttering about the indignity of his arrest by Jimmy Stewart. As for Phil Knight, Q complained that it hadn’t been a clean tackle.
“Will you stay?” She meant in Minneapolis.
Thought went on beneath the Cubs cap. “Either that or reenlist in the army.”
“I’ll take that for yes.”
Once it had seemed that the only one of them who was leading a more or less normal life was David Williams. Now Beth would cast Casey Winthrop for that role. What a lovely woman Peaches was. And the baby!
The baby. Father Carmody baptized Casey and Peaches’s baby in the Log Chapel before they fled again to the warmth of Florida. Then it was time for Beth’s request. The old priest had been agreeable to her suggestion that they include Brother Joachim in the little ceremony by the Log Chapel. So, two days after David’s funeral, at the crack of dawn, the three of them had stood over the spot where so many years ago she and Joachim had buried her miscarried child. Joachim recited the De profundis, while Beth tried unsuccessfully to hold back the tears. Father Carmody sprinkled the boulder that Joachim had replaced, and all withdrew.
ALSO BY RALPH MCINERNY
MYSTERIES SET AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
The Green Revolution
Irish Alibi
The Letter Killeth
Irish Gilt
Green Thumb
Irish Coffee
Celt and Pepper
Emerald Aisle
Book of Kills
Irish Tenure
Lack of the Irish
On This Rockne
ANDREW BROOM MYSTERY SERIES
Heirs and Parents
Law and Ardor
Mom and Dead
Savings and Loam
Body and Soil
Cause and Effect
FATHER DOWLING MYSTERY SERIES
Ash Wednesday
The Widow’s Mate
The Prudence of the Flesh
Blood Ties
Requiem for a Realtor
Last Things
Prodigal Father
Triple Pursuit
Grave Undertakings
The Tears of Things
A Cardinal Offense
Seed of Doubt
Desert Sinner
Judas Priest
Four on the Floor
Abracadaver
The Basket Case
Rest in Pieces
Getting a Way with Murder
The Grass Widow
A Loss of Patients
Thicker Than Water
Second Vespers
Lying Three
The Seventh Station
Her Death of Cold
Bishop as Pawn
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are
either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SHAM ROCK. Copyright © 2010 by Ralph McInerny. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
eISBN 9781429937245
First eBook Edition : February 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McInerny, Ralph M.
Sham rock / Ralph McInerny.—1st ed.
p. cm.—(Notre Dame series bk. 13)
ISBN 978-0-312-58265-4
1. Knight, Roger (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Knight, Philip (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. College teachers—Fiction. 4. Private investigators—Fiction. 5. University of Notre Dame—Fiction. 6. South Bend (Ind.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A31166S49 2010
813’.54—dc22
2009041528
First Edition: April 2010