Irish Alibi (20 page)

“Tell me!”

He got out the
Confessions
and found the line and read it aloud.
Sero te amavi.

“What does it mean?”

“Late have I loved thee.” Roger actually blushed. “Of course, Augustine was addressing God, so the use I suggested to Caleb was perhaps inappropriate, but…”

Sarah interrupted him by throwing her arms about Roger. Or as about him as his girth and the length of her arms permitted.

Roger made popcorn then, and hot chocolate, and they settled down at the trestle table. Phil was in a beanbag chair in the next room, napping before the television, where a muted basketball game was on.

“Tell us again how you knew it was Kitty Callendar who had killed Madeline O'Toole,” Sarah urged.

“How I pinned the crime on her?” He tried to duck her playful punch.

Fauxhall had shown little confidence when Jimmy presented him with the basis for charging Kitty Callendar with the murder of Madeline O'Toole. “That's all you've got?”

It was more than enough for Crumley, who successfully demanded that his client be released. But of course physical evidence is always incommensurate with the crime it points to. If Kitty Callendar had not decided to take pride in what she had done, the case would doubtless have seemed flimsy. Where outside of a detective novel would three hairpins spell Q.E.D.? But Kitty had decided that she had acted as an agent of the divine wrath.

“Would Abraham have been guilty of murder if he had slain Isaac?”

It said something of her state of mind that she found this a relevant parallel. By that time, in fact, her lawyer, a shrewd local attorney named Alex Cholis, had decided to enter a plea of innocent because of insanity.

“I am not insane,” Kitty said to her lawyer.

“Well, you're not innocent, either, are you?”

The plea made Fauxhall's work much simpler, and there was little doubt that Kitty would spend some years undergoing therapy, a severer punishment perhaps than life imprisonment or even execution. Not that either of those would have been in the offing.

Roger's course in the spring semester was devoted to Ambrose Bierce.

“What has he got to do with Notre Dame?” Phil asked.

“Not much, but he fought in an Indiana regiment.”

Bierce's haunting stories of the Civil War, rather than
The Devil's Dictionary
, were the focus of the course. But it was the way Bierce's life had ended, or seemed to end, when he mysteriously disappeared into Mexico that fascinated Roger.

“Just faded away?” Caleb asked.

There are worse ways for a story to end.

ALSO BY RALPH McINERNY

MYSTERIES SET AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

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

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.

IRISH ALIBI
. Copyright © 2007 by Ralph McInerny. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McInerny, Ralph M.

Irish alibi / Ralph McInerny.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36457-1

ISBN-10: 0-312-36457-1

1. Knight, Roger (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Knight, Philip (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. College teachers—Indiana—South Bend—Fiction. 4. Private investigators—Indiana—South Bend—Fiction. 5. University of Notre Dame—Fiction. 6. South Bend (Ind.)—Fiction. 7. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Influence—Fiction. 8. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 9. College stories. I. Title.

PS3563.A31166I63 2007

813'.54—dc22

2007018142

First Edition: September 2007

eISBN 9781466835238

First eBook edition: November 2012