A Death in Summer (26 page)

“Juice is fine,” Quirke said.

Sumner left the window and crossed to his desk and sat back with one haunch perched against a corner of it. The desk was vast and old and made of dark oak, with brass fittings and many drawers, and the top was inlaid with green leather. There were three telephones, one of them white, a large square crystal ashtray, a mug of pens stenciled with the badge of the Vancouver Mounties—Sumner saw Quirke looking at this last and said, “The baseball team, not the cops on horses”—a roller blotter with a wooden handle, an antique silver cigarette box, and a fancy Ronson lighter the size of a potato. “So,” the owner of all this said, “what can I do for you, Dr. Quirke?” managing to put a faintly comical inflexion on the word
Doctor
.

It was a straightforward question but one that always left Quirke feeling in a quandary. All his life he had struggled with the unhandiness of concepts, ideas, formulations. Where to begin putting all that chaotic material into short strings of words? The task always baffled him.

“I went out to St. Christopher’s,” he said.

Sumner looked blank. “St. What’s?”

“The orphanage that Dick Jewell funded—”

“Oh, yes, right.”

“—and that you fund, too.”

This Sumner frowned over for a moment in silence. “Me, fund an orphanage? You’ve got the wrong rich man’s son, Doc. Haven’t you heard? I don’t give to others, I take from them. It’s a grand old family tradition.” He put the baseball on the desk, where it rolled a little way and stopped. He flipped open the lid of the cigarette box and selected a cigarette and took the lighter in his fist and made a flame. “Who told you I bankroll motherless boys?” he asked.

“The man who runs the place,” Quirke said. “A priest. Father Ambrose.” Who smoked the same cigarettes Sumner did.

“Never met him, never heard the name. What’s he like?”

“He said that you and Jewell had set up something called the Friends of St. Christopher’s.”

Sumner suddenly pointed a finger. “St. Christopher’s, now I remember—that’s the place where Marie Bergin used to work, right, before the Jewells took her on?”

“Yes.”

“Right, right.” A thoughtful look had come into Sumner’s eyes, and he was frowning again. “St. Christopher’s. Dick Jewell’s pet project. So—what about it?”

The white telephone rang, making Quirke start, and Sumner plucked up the receiver and listened a moment, said “No,” and hung up. He produced a large handkerchief from the breast pocket of his shirt and used it to wipe the back of his neck. “Jesus,” he said, “isn’t there supposed to be a temperate climate here? I can’t take this heat—I grew up in a place of cool, pine-scented air and snowcapped peaks, you know?” He stood with his cigarette and walked to the window again. “Look at it,” he said. “It could be summertime in downtown Detroit.”

“So you’re not a Friend of St. Christopher’s, then,” Quirke said.

“Listen, pal, I’m not a ‘friend’ of anywhere. I’m a businessman. Businessmen can’t afford to be friendly.” He looked at Quirke over his shoulder. “You want to tell me why you’re really here, Doc?”

Quirke straightened himself with an effort in the baggy canvas chair and put his glass down on a low table before him. “I’m really here, Mr. Sumner, because I’m coming to believe that St. Christopher’s, not to mention the Friends of St. Christopher’s, is somehow connected with the death of Richard Jewell.”

Sumner turned his gaze back to the window and the street below. He nodded slowly, drawing up his mouth at one corner and sucking thoughtfully on his side teeth. His lavishly pomaded dense dark hair glistened in many points, a miniature constellation. “Where’s your sidekick today,” he asked, “old Sherlock? Does he know you’re here, or are you off on a frolic of your own?” He turned, a hand in a pocket and the cigarette lifted. “Listen, Quirke, I like you. You’re a miserable sort of guy, I mean you specialize in misery, but all the same, I do like you. Since you came down to Roundwood I’ve been rummaging through my memories of those golden days full of gaiety and full of truth when we were young and fair and roamed like panthers around this poor excuse for a city. You were quite the boy then, as I remember. Many a young lady, even including, if I’m not mistaken, the present Mrs. Sumner, had an eye for you. What happened to you in the meantime I don’t know and, frankly, don’t care to hear about, but it sure knocked the fun out of you. This game of gumshoe that you’re playing at, I don’t mind it. We all have to find ways of passing the time and relieving the
taedium vitae,
as that old bastard who was supposed to teach us Latin at college—what was his name?—used to call it. Where’s the harm in you and your cop friend flat-footing around and asking questions and searching after clues? None. But listen”—he pointed with the hand that held his cigarette—“if you think for a minute that I had anything to do with Diamond Dick Jewell getting popped, I’ve got to tell you, my friend, you’re barking up the wrong suspect.”

Sumner walked around his desk and threw himself down sprawlingly in the leather swivel chair, his linen-clad legs out to one side and widely splayed. “I’m a tolerant sort of chap,
Doctor
Quirke,” he said, “despite what you hear to the contrary. Live and let live, that’s my motto—not original, I grant you, but sound, all the same. So I don’t mind how you choose to amuse yourself or what sort of games you like to play. That’s your business, and I make it a rule not to interfere in other people’s business, unless, of course, I have to. But lay off the suspicion, right? Where I’m concerned, lay off.”

The white telephone rang again, as if on cue, and Sumner snatched it up angrily this time and shoved it against his ear and without listening to whoever was calling said, “I
told
you, no!” and hung up, and smiled at Quirke with his perfectly even, perfectly white big teeth. “They never listen,” he said in a tone of mock distress, “never, never listen.”

Quirke was lighting one of his own cigarettes. “A young man who works with me,” he said, “was attacked in the street last night.”

When Sumner frowned, his entire forehead crinkled horizontally, like a venetian blind being shut, and the line of his shiny brown hair lowered itself by a good half inch. “So?” he said.

“Someone had already rung him up and called him names—Jewboy, that sort of thing. He’s a friend of Dannie Jewell, as it happens.”

Sumner sat forward and planted an elbow on the desk and rested his jaw on his hand. “You’re losing me again, Doc,” he said, and once more did his film star’s toothily lopsided smile.

“Also,” Quirke went on, “a fellow called Costigan came to me a few days ago, after I’d been to St. Christopher’s, and warned me to mind my own business. You wouldn’t know him, I suppose, this Mr. Costigan? He’s one of the Knights of St. Patrick, and probably a Friend of St. Christopher’s too, for good measure.”

Sumner gazed at him for a long moment, then laughed. “The Knights of St. Patrick?” he said. “Are you serious? Is there really an outfit called the Knights of St. Patrick?”

Quirke looked to the window. Either Sumner was a masterly dissembler or he was innocent—innocent, at least, of the things Quirke had thought he might be guilty of. “Tell me,” he said, “why do you think Dick Jewell was shot?”

Sumner held out his hands with empty palms turned upwards. “I told you, I’ve no idea. Half the country hated him. Maybe he was playing mommies and daddies with somebody’s wife—though from what I heard he wasn’t much of a one for that particular kind of thing.”

Now Quirke did look at him. “What does that mean?”

“What does what mean? The word is, that where romance was concerned he had specialized tastes, that’s all.”

“What kind of specialized tastes?”

“Specialized!” Sumner shouted, laughing in exasperation. “Maybe he liked to screw sheep, or boxer dogs—how do I know? By all accounts he was pretty weird, but hey—who’s to say what’s normal? I told you my motto: live and let, et cetera.”

Quirke rose abruptly, picking up his hat from the low table, and Sumner blinked in surprise. “You’re not going, are you, Doc,” he said, “not when we’re having such a grand time here, surely?”

“Thank you for seeing me,” Quirke said. “I know you’re a busy man.”

He turned to the door, and Sumner rose and came around the desk, running a hand through his hair. “Not at all,” he said. “Drop in anytime, always glad to see you. By the way”—he laid a large and not unfriendly hand on Quirke’s shoulder—“I hear you’re helping the widow to handle her grief. That’s very large of you.”

Quirke looked at him, and at the hand on his shoulder, and at its owner again. Sumner was not as tall as Quirke, but he was a big man, muscular and strong.

“You seem to hear a lot of things,” Quirke said, “up here in your eyrie.”

“Eyrie,” Sumner repeated, admiringly. “I’ve never been sure how to pronounce that word—thanks.” He leaned forward and took the doorknob and drew open the door. “Say hello for me to dear Françoise,” he said. His secretary, a shapely young woman in a tight skirt and an angora pullover, leapt up from her desk in the next room and came tripping forward hurriedly. “Belinda, my beauty,” Sumner said to her, “please show Dr. Quirke the stairs, will you?” He turned to Quirke again. “So long, Doc, see you around.”

At that moment, seemingly out of nowhere, Quirke had an inspiration. Or no, it was not out of nowhere: he was remembering, he realized, the parting shot Hackett had fired off seemingly at random that day in Roundwood when he and Quirke were leaving Sumner’s house, empty-handed then, too.

Sumner had been about to step back inside his office and shut the door when Quirke turned. “By the way, Mr. Sumner,” he said, leaning back into the doorway. “Your son, did he know Dick Jewell? Or does he know Jewell’s sister, maybe?”

Sumner’s hand was still hovering somewhere near Quirke’s shoulder, and now he fastened it in place again, more firmly and more menacingly than before, and drew him back into the room, and shut the door in his secretary’s startled face.

“What do you mean?” he asked. His eyes were narrowed, and all the humor and the playfulness were gone.

“I don’t mean anything,” Quirke said easily. “It’s just a question.”

“What do you know about my son?”

“Very little,” Quirke said, in the mildest and most disinterested tone he could muster. “Inspector Hackett mentioned something about him, after we left you that day in Roundwood.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” Sumner said evenly, though a vein was beating visibly in his left temple. Quirke could see him riffling in his mind through all the possibilities of what things Hackett might have mentioned about—what was the name?—Teddy, yes, that was it, Teddy Sumner. “Quirke, listen to me,” Sumner said quietly. “I don’t care that you come here and try to cross-examine me, I really don’t, but you leave my son out of this—out of whatever this is you’ve got your busy nose stuck into. You got me?”

“I wasn’t aware of bringing him into it,” Quirke said. “I only asked—”

“I know what you asked, I heard you.” Sumner’s voice was very quiet now and the words came very fast. “Contrary to anything you might hear, Quirke, I’m a temperate man, like your climate is supposed to be. I don’t want trouble, I don’t look for trouble. I just try to live my life and conduct my business in an easy and orderly fashion. But when it comes to my family, and my son especially, I find that I’m inclined to lose my temper, despite myself. There’s all kinds of things going on here that I don’t understand, and that I don’t care to understand, much less meddle in. I don’t know anything about this man of yours that got jumped last night. I don’t know who gunned down Dick Jewell, nor do I care much about that, either. Most of all, I don’t know what business it is of yours who my son might or might not be acquainted with—in fact, I don’t know what business you have asking anything about him.”

Quirke looked again at that hand on his shoulder.

“The reason I ask,” he said, “is that my assistant was attacked in the street last night by two hired thugs who sheared off one of his fingers and sent it to me wrapped in a chip bag and stuffed in an envelope. Another reason I ask is that I know your son’s history of violence, as they say”—Sumner made to speak but Quirke held up a hand to quiet him—“and I wonder if there might be a connection between your Teddy and my man’s missing finger, though I admit I can’t say what it might be. But I ask too because I think your son did know Dick Jewell, and because I think he was a member of the Friends of St. Christopher’s, along with Jewell.” Sumner was staring at him glassy-eyed and breathing heavily through his nostrils, and it almost made Quirke smile to think of a bull pawing the dust of the arena and getting ready to charge. “Nor can I say,” he went on, “that I know how all this might be connected, but I believe it is, and I believe I’ll find out. And when I do, I’ll come back to see you, Mr. Sumner, and maybe we can have another chat, maybe a more enlightening one, this time.”

Sumner had taken his hand from Quirke’s shoulder but was watching him with his bull’s brow lowered and his jaw moving back and forth and those teeth silently grinding. “You take chances, Quirke,” he said.

On the way downstairs Belinda the secretary spoke in tones of cheerful dismay about the weather and the continuing heat wave. “Isn’t it awful?” she said.

“Yes, it is,” Quirke said. “Awful.”

*   *   *

It was the middle of the afternoon and Sinclair was dozing when Nurse Bunny came and shook him gently and told him there was a phone call for him. “I think I’ve never had a busier patient,” she said. He looked at her groggily, hardly able to lift his head from the pillow. “Who is it?” he asked. She said it was his brother. He made her repeat it. “Your brother,” she said, speaking slowly and directly into his face, as if he were a half-wit; she had given him another of her purple painkillers. “He says it’s urgent,” she said. “He says it’s news about your mother.” She helped him up, and walked him out of the ward and along the corridor, where the look of the chocolate-brown gleaming lino made him feel nauseous. The public phone was fastened to the wall beside the nurses’ station, with a scratched celluloid shield on either side affording a rudimentary privacy. The nurse passed him the receiver. He took it gingerly, as if it might explode in his hand.