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“She won't stay single long,” Barley said.

“Her daughter is a lovely girl.”

All this was dust and ashes to Mortimer and he was unable to conceal it, thus opening himself to the teasing of his old friends. He sought consolation in drink and later, during the horseplay in his suite, he seemed to have forgotten the episode. But he was filled with foreboding. What if his golfing skills should desert him again when he played on campus?

Thus it was that his three old friends concluded that a fearful Mortimer had gone out to play some practice holes on Burke before teeing up on Warren. Perhaps he would have been felled on the latter course, but there his death would not have been tainted with dishonor from breaking his promise about practicing to his old friends. Everyone assumed it was a stroke that killed him.

4

Mortimer Sadler's death had been caused by poison.

“Poison!” Roger said when he took Jimmy Stewart's call and was informed of the result of the autopsy.

“Deadly nightshade.”

“Good Lord. How in the world…”

“That's what we have to find out.”

Roger looked up deadly nightshade on the Google Web site and printed out a lengthy entry. After glancing through it, he put it aside. Roger was now reading the critical essays of Barbey d'Aurevilly, moving systematically through the volumes that filled a shelf on the eighth floor of the Hesburgh Library. He found it difficult to concentrate in light of what had happened to Mortimer Sadler—difficult, not impossible. But while he read, half his brain was pondering what he had heard from Jimmy Stewart. No one seeing him smiling as he turned the pages of the book would imagine that he was also thinking of the death that had occurred that morning on the sixth green of the old golf course.

But Phil was not deceived. Meanwhile he went downtown to be of such assistance as he could to Stewart, having received a call from Father Carmody.

“Philip, I am authorized to engage your services to represent the best interests of the university during the investigation into Mortimer Sadler's death.”

“It is now thought that he was poisoned.”

“Well, he had a poison pen.”

Whatever the priest's intention, the remark suggested that Sadler's death was somehow linked to his undergraduate journalism. Greg Whelan had come for lunch, while they were awaiting the autopsy report, and told them of Sadler's constant ranting about coeducation in his columns in
The Observer
. Greg had read them all, but then he seemed to have read everything contained in the university archives, where he was an associate director.

“Did he think the university would revoke the policy?”

“He argued that they should. Of course he knew he was embarked on a losing campaign. It added zest to his style.”

Jimmy welcomed Phil's cooperation. “It should smooth our way on campus. There are all kinds of people I must talk to before they leave.”

“His former classmates?”

“Thirty-five or so are here for the reunion he organized.”

*   *   *

The tournament at Warren went on as scheduled, and Maureen had the fifth-lowest score. She dismissed the suggestion that, as the top woman golfer, she should receive a trophy. Her daughter had outscored Maureen but, of course, she was not entered in the tournament. She was in the class of 2005 at St. Mary's, her loveliness reminiscent of her mother as a girl. The former roommates of St. Edward's Hall were married, one and all, but it would have taken a St. Anthony of the desert to have been unmoved by the beauty of mother and daughter. The beads of sweat on their foreheads, pale thanks to the sunshades they had worn, and their damp golden hair enhanced rather than detracted from their beauty.

“Like mother, like daughter,” Toolin said, and sighed.

Barley had been on the phone to the Morris Inn and returned with the alarming news. Mortimer Sadler had been taken by ambulance from the old course and was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital.

“Dead!”

The inevitability of death in general does not diminish its surprise in the individual case, but this was a man of their own age, one they had known when young, a man with whom they had drunk and cavorted the previous night. This was not the time to comment on the perfidy that had taken him out on the old course at the crack of dawn in the wan hope of acquiring a competitive advantage for the tournament that lay ahead.

“It was the bet with Maureen that undid him,” Toolin nevertheless decided.

It was only when showered, restored with a drink in the clubhouse, and returned to the Morris Inn, that they learned the manner of Mortimer's death.

“Poison!”

“What a way to go.”

“Why did he do it?”

“‘Do it'?”

“It's obvious, isn't it? He couldn't face the prospect of being beaten by the beautiful Maureen.”

“She can beat me anytime,” Crown said equivocally.

The remark fell like an obscenity uttered in church.

“Poor Mort.”

“May he rest in peace.”

“Amen.”

5

Cal Swithins had been let go by
The South Bend Tribune
but continued to regard himself as a reporter, however he was regarded by others. He wrote a column for a shopping guide that was flung free at doorsteps in the city and stuffed with other unwanted materials into curbside mailboxes in the suburbs. The fuzzy photograph that accompanied these efforts—“Swithins Sez”—was a reasonable likeness of himself twenty years before. Time had taken its toll since then, time and the disappointments and reversals that had characterized his journalistic career. To himself, Swithins explained the fact that no one had ever mentioned the column to him as a result of that imperfect likeness. The title of the column had been chosen by the editor and publisher, Maddie Yost, whose late husband had founded
The Shopper
. She had come into sole possession of it some years before when her husband had gone off a country road and totaled the family car in a collision with a sturdy oak.

“‘Swithins Sez'?”

“It's catchy.”

“It's corny.”

“Of course it's corny. That's the point.”

He ended by being grateful for the out-of-date photo that accompanied his animadversions.

“Don't use no words like that on this paper.”

He promised to restrict his style to monosyllables and unadorned declarative sentences. Maddie ignored this grammatical lore.

“It's just filler anyway.”

With what she paid him, it was a licence to starve as well. Not that Maddie thought of him as a columnist. His main task, in her eyes, was to drum up new advertisers for the paper. Of course, he had other arrows in his quiver as well. He did piecework for the newspaper that had fired him, writing the death notices as well as unsigned accounts of Little League baseball in season. His application for employment was on file in the Office of Human Resources at Notre Dame. He longed to be taken on by one of the campus publications, where the pay was allegedly regal and the work risible. From time to time, he wrote critiques of these publications and dropped them off at the relevant offices, showing the flag. With the passage of years, he had begun to doubt that he would ever become a university employee. This was added to his list of grievances. In his rented room on South Main he had a little stuffed leprechaun, picked up at the Hammes Bookstore on campus. He used it as a pincushion whenever he unwrapped a new shirt, muttering what might have seemed curses as he plunged them in.

But his long run of bad luck had not induced despair. Despite it all, hope sprang, if not eternal then at least intermittently, in Swithins's breast. He lived on the alert for the big chance. When he heard of the death on the Notre Dame golf course something told him not to ask for whom this bell tolled.

One of the advantages of having a persona that did not attract attention—sometimes Swithins thought he had become the invisible man, so thoroughly was he ignored—was that he could loll around the press room at police headquarters and keep au courant without being noticed. It was there that he heard the death of Mortimer Sadler mentioned. Swithins looked at the speaker, Raskow, a dissolute overweight veteran of the press who affected an unlit cigar and wide-brimmed felt hat, the better to cover his absence of hair. Raskow clearly did not see the significance of what he said.

Swithins rose and went unnoticed out the door and down the hall to the office of Jimmy Stewart. There was a tall stranger with him. Their conversation stopped when Swithins stood in the doorway.

“What can you tell me about Mortimer Sadler?”

“I don't remember your name.”

“Calvin Swithins. I'm a reporter.”

“I thought you left town.”

“I'm back.”

“I'll be making a statement to the press later.”

But Swithins had put two and two together. If Jimmy Stewart was interested in Sadler's death, homicide must be involved.

“How was the murder accomplished?”

“Murder?”

“You're in homicide, aren't you?”

Stewart was annoyed, but then he was used to dealing with such domesticated animals as Raskow.

“Come to the press conference later. You back with the
Tribune
?”

“I never left.” Swithins hitched up his belt. “I do the obituaries.”

Stewart relaxed. This wasn't lost on Swithins. He should have used this earlier. Stewart was clearly relieved to conclude that Swithins's only interest in the death of Mortimer Sadler was to write his death notice. This, he decided, would be his cover as he investigated the matter. Already he was certain that the death of Mortimer Sadler was his ticket to fame and fortune.

“This a new man?” Swithins asked, indicating the stranger.

“I'm Philip Knight,” the tall man said, hesitating, then giving Swithins his hand.

If Swithins had been a pinball machine he would have lit up on learning that this was the private detective whose brother was now a member of the faculty of Notre Dame. Knight had teamed with Jimmy Stewart on other campus investigations.

“You can probably find what you need on campus,” Knight said.

“Good idea.”

“Try the Alumni Office in the Eck Center.”

Swithins dutifully left, going out to his car. He was still seated behind the wheel, plotting his strategy, when a car emerged from the police garage, Stewart at the wheel, Knight in the passenger seat beside him.

He got his car started on the second try and pulled away from the curb, keeping the unmarked police car in sight.

6

The members of the class of '77 had been asked to delay their departure plans, but after preliminary questioning this seemed an unnecessary hardship. In the end, only Sadler's former roommates were asked to stay. Maureen O'Kelly and her daughter Francie had booked into the Morris Inn for a week. It occurred to Jimmy Stewart that he and Phil Knight knew as much of the circumstances of Sadler's death as anyone else, having been on the course when he died.

Max, the starter, in response to instructions from Stewart, had taken possession of Sadler's golf clubs, driving the cart to which they were strapped into the maintenance shed and posting a
DO NOT TOUCH
sign on its windshield. Cart and clubs were taken away to the police lab shortly after noon. Meanwhile, Jimmy, with Phil at his side, talked with Sadler's former roommates.

Chris Toolin asked to be first, as he had an appointment in Chicago the following afternoon. Had Sadler given any indication that his life was in danger?

“Wasn't it suicide?”

“Why would you think so?”

“Who else would do it?”

“He had no enemies?”

“Of course there were people who didn't like him, people who didn't know him as well as I did. He held pretty strong opinions and wasn't shy about expressing them.”

“About what?”

“About everything. I don't know about any of his associates in Minneapolis, but no one on campus would do such a thing.”

“Well, he's dead.”

“Why have you excluded suicide?”

“We haven't.”

Toolin seemed to review the conversation thus far to see if this was true. He accepted Stewart's disclaimer.

“What kind of poison was it?”

“Deadly nightshade.”

“Sounds like a lethal window blind.”

“It's lethal, all right.”

“Where can it be obtained?”

“We're looking into that.”

“Mort wouldn't know a nightshade from a venetian blind.”

“Was he despondent, down, sad?”

“You should have been at our celebration last night.” Toolin smiled. His smile faded. “He did make a silly bet on today's match.”

And so they heard of the appearance of Maureen O'Kelly at their table in the dining room.

“Why would he make such a bet with her?”

“It's a long story.”

“We've got time.”

Toolin glanced at his watch. “Coeducation began the year before we entered Notre Dame. Mortimer Sadler became a big foe of it, writing all kinds of articles in
The Observer,
urging the university to return to its traditional status as an all-male institution.”

“Didn't he like girls?”

Toolin tried not to smile. “They didn't like him. In freshman year he made a big play for Maureen. She just made fun of him. His luck continued bad. Then he began his crusade against coeducation.”

“A male scorned?” Phil asked.

Toolin nodded. “This was all a long time ago.”

“Is he married?”

“Married? He has four children.”

“Good Lord.”

“All girls. He wouldn't let them enroll here. Sent them all to St. Mary's.” His mouth dropped. “Have they been told?”

“They might want to talk to an old friend of his.”