Irish Gilt (12 page)

“Who is she?” Phil asked.

“That's what we're going to find out after we finish our Cokes.”

First, they told the desk clerk that they were finished upstairs.

“Is something wrong?” he asked them.

“You've lost a guest. But don't rent that room until I give the go-ahead.”

“Well, thank heavens he had to show a credit card when he registered.”

“Let me see that, will you?”

Jimmy had to show his ID again before the clerk slid the registration form across the desk. The impression of the credit card was blurred. A MasterCard. Jimmy jotted down the number. As they pulled out of the parking lot, leaving Phil's car behind, he was reading it to someone downtown who would check it out. That would give them an address.

“I wonder where the card is now? And whatever else was in his wallet,” Phil said.

8

Josh's grandmother had died during his freshman year, and he had gone home for the funeral. It had been his first experience with death. What had struck him most was the way people at the wake just stood around and talked, not solemn at all, no one really broken up, not even his father, whose mother she had been. Of course, Grandma had been old, but even so. Josh had gone off from the others and sat at the end of a row of chairs and looked ahead to where his grandmother's profile was just visible over the open coffin. Things quieted down when the priest came and the rosary was said, but as soon as it was over everybody was talking again, even laughing. Josh went up to the casket and knelt and prayed for his grandmother. He wanted to ask her to pardon her family and friends, who seemed to think her death was just another social event.

At least Rebecca seemed stunned when she told him about her uncle. She said it in a whisper, and he wasn't sure he understood, but then she repeated it. “It was his body they found on a campus bench this morning. Had you heard about that?” His expression told her he hadn't.

“Remember, we ran into him the other day.”

Of course he remembered. The man had called to Rebecca, and they had talked for a minute or so and then had gone on. She had called him the black sheep of the family.

“My parents are on their way.”

At his grandmother's funeral everyone seemed to know what to say to his father and mother, the phrases well worn from other similar occasions. Josh didn't know what to say to Rebecca. He put his hand on her arm.

“I still can't believe it,” she said.

“What was it? A heart attack?”

She lifted her shoulders. “I suppose.”

They went to the student center and sat in a booth, neither of them wanting anything. Over Rebecca's shoulder a television was visible, blaring on unheeded.

“I told you he never married.”

He nodded.

“And that he was in the navy.” A wry smile formed on her lips. “Roger Knight told me
he
was in the navy.”

Josh had to smile, too. “On our side?”

She put his hand on his. Pretty soon he would be as jolly as the people at his grandmother's funeral.

“I didn't hear a word Tenet said in class,” she said.

“I did. It didn't help.”

She squeezed his hand. “I hardly know you and I'm dumping all this on you.”

“How old was he?”

“He graduated in 1974. I suppose you can figure it from that.”

Subtract twenty-one or -two from the current year and it was clear her uncle had been no kid. He hadn't looked as old as he must have been when they ran into him on campus. It was a strange thought, an alumnus visiting the campus and being found dead on a bench.

The news had come on, and someone turned up the set at the mention of Notre Dame. The story was about the body found that morning on campus. Shots of the area, the bench on which the man had been sitting, and then a photograph.

Rebecca gave a little cry. “That picture's a hundred years old.”

The reporter was saying that the police were being very careful in their announcements. “Of course, folks, this is Notre Dame.” A faint cheer went up. So much for sarcasm.

Rebecca looked at her watch. “Their plane is due at seven twelve.”

Her parents. Should he offer to go with her to pick them up? He would if she asked, but she didn't, and that was a relief.

“That picture they showed? Uncle X was in the navy then, so think how old it is. Would you have recognized the man you met from that picture?”

“Probably not.”

“Probably?”

This was a running day, and he had not yet been out, but he didn't want to leave Rebecca alone. He suggested a brisk walk around the lakes.

She jumped at the idea. “I'm not even going to change shoes.”

9

Sean Feeney loved pathology, but he hated dead bodies. He had been persuaded during his residency at Mayo that he needn't see a corpse from one year to the next. He would be examining the results of biopsies. He liked the picture of himself as more scientist than physician. It hadn't worked out that way.

He returned to South Bend from Rochester, not because he intended to practice there—he had three offers from clinics in preferable parts of the country—but to relax a bit and show off for his parents. They were proud of him, and he was proud of them for being proud. Who ever thought a Feeney would make it through medical school, let alone have a residency at Mayo? His big mistake was going to his father's political club, which was in a panic mode. Their candidate for coroner had died, and they had twenty-four hours to name a replacement.

“We can put up anyone with name recognition. He doesn't have to be a doctor.”

“But who will do the work?”

Casey, the wheeler-dealer, looked at Sean. “Who's this?”

“My son Sean. Dr. Sean.”

“Yeah. You teach or what?”

“He is a pathologist.”

In retrospect, his father must have seemed to be nominating him for coroner. Did Casey leap with joy at the prospect? He took Mr. Feeney into a corner and frowned while he talked. Sean's father kept shaking his head, and Casey kept grabbing his arm to keep him from getting away. Twenty minutes later Sean was presented with the results of the conference.

“I'm not running for coroner!”

“Assistant coroner,” his father said.

“Jankowski will carry you in, doc. Don't worry.”

“Tell him what I get,” Mr. Feeney said.

Casey smiled benevolently. He had his hand on Sean's sleeve. “Your father here has been a loyal member of the party.”

Sean knew all about that. His father would vote for Genghis Khan if he were a Democrat. As a reward for his loyalty, Mr. Feeney would spend his twilight years in a do-nothing position at the waterworks. Just watch the dials and try to stay awake. Casey punched Sean in the arm. The plea in his father's eye was one Sean could not resist.

His mother became hysterical when she heard that Sean was on the ticket. Her son the doctor, playing second fiddle to that idiot Jankowski?

“Tell her the rest, Dad.”

Sean went out on the porch. The neighborhood was not what it had been. Maybe his parents should move. Naw. They loved it here on the west side, half a block from church in one direction, half a block from a saloon in the other. All their old friends were here, at least the ones who hadn't moved to the suburbs. He was twenty-nine. Maybe his father's party would lose the election.

That had been two years ago. Jankowski and the rest of the ticket won in a landslide. The victor took over the coroner's office and let Sean do all the work. There had been plenty of work. Where did all these bodies come from? Of course, everybody has to die, but did everyone need an autopsy? The ones that came to Feeney did. Still, he hadn't had a real challenge until the body of Xavier Kittock was found on a bench on campus at Notre Dame.

On the scene, he had thought heart attack. Not stroke. Rigor mortis could mislead you, but Feeney ruled out a stroke. So a heart attack. He didn't chip it in stone, of course. Jimmy Stewart had wanted his guess, and that was what he got. Then Feeney noticed the bruises on the neck.

“Then we got a murder,” Stewart said.

“I'm not so sure.”

“What do those marks on his throat suggest?”

“Strangling.”

“That would be an odd method of suicide.”

“You may be right.”

“May be. Look, Doc, this is your call. Make up your mind.”

In an ideal world, Feeney would have been able to explore all the possibilities. The logical possibilities. His first hunch had been a heart attack, and that seemed to fit a body found on a bench.

“His pockets were empty,” Stewart said.

“A thief?”

Stewart shook his head.

“Look, this is more complicated than it seems.”

Feeney got out the lab report, but Stewart held up his hand. “I trust you. So we have a man who had a heart attack while being strangled.”

Feeney beamed. “That's a real possibility. I've been thinking the same thing.”

“Great minds.”

Stewart had a tough time keeping a straight face when he said it, but Feeney accepted it and left. In his office Feeney plunged his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and sat in the chair Jankowski had rejected and Feeney had claimed. It had wheels and turned 360 degrees with one good push of the foot. It was like sitting in a gyroscope, but Feeney found it conducive to thinking.

He had spent long years at Mayo in the expectation that a time would come when people in the operating theater would await his examination of the results of a biopsy. Benign. Malignant. Depending on what he said, the operation would proceed or not. Or take a different tack. Being assistant coroner bore a remote resemblance to that. Jimmy Stewart's investigation depended on his judgment as to the cause of death. There was no doubt that there were bruises on the throat. Even so. So he kept at it. With surprising results.

Douglas, the young man from Notre Dame campus security, called to tell Feeney about the plastic bag he had found in a trash receptacle not ten yards from the body. “You know the kind shirts come it?”

Feeney imagined the scene. A man is sitting on a bench; his assailant approaches from behind, positions himself behind the bench, lifts the plastic bag, and brings it over the sitting man's head.

Douglas said, “There are signs of a struggle.”

Feeney reined himself in. “Isn't that bench on concrete?”

“Just off the walkway.”

“Signs of struggle?”

Listening to Douglas describe them, Feeney had a sense of the way he himself sounded to Stewart. “About that plastic bag.”

“I'll bring it down.”

Meanwhile, back to the original guess. The trouble with that was that the heart showed no signs of an infarction. Imagine a court scene. Feeney often did, seeking to restore some sense of drama to his life. He would be called to the stand; life or death hung in the balance. If it came to that with Xavier Kittock, death by heart attack would be ridiculed by the defense. So what was left? Sighing, Feeney asked Kimberley to roll Kittock into the autopsy theater.

Kimberley was only a high school graduate, and her internship was supposed to be a political plum. She almost always wore a mask, and her wide, frightened eyes followed everything Dr. Feeney did with the corpse on the table. When she talked with the mask on, the material made reading her lips easy. She wore a long white garment over her street clothes that looked like an alb, the mask, and then, to top it off, a baseball cap.

Feeney turned on the recording equipment and reexamined the body of Xavier Kittock. Kimberley gagged and left the room when he uncapped the skull. He removed several sections from the brain, restored the skullcap, and called Kimberley back. Her eyes asked if she should take the body back to the cooler.

“Just leave it here.”

“You're not done?”

“No.”

“What are you looking for?”

“You'll be the first to know.”

She had a crush on him, but that was ridiculous. He was eight years older than she was.

In his office, he was thinking of what he should tell Stewart, how he could put it, when the detective strolled in.

“He wasn't strangled,” Feeney announced.

Stewart just stood there looking at him.

“The marks on his throat must have been made holding the bag tight so he couldn't breathe.”

“Asphyxiation?”

“I doubt it.”

“Honest?”

“Cross my heart.”

“So it was his heart?”

How do you say yes while retaining the right to say no later? Feeney didn't know. “I guess.”

“Guess?”

“There is no damage to the heart.”

“He is dead, isn't he?”

Feeney made a face.

“So how the hell did he get that way?”

“I'm working on it.”

After Stewart left, Feeney resolved to resign his position and go off to the kind of medical practice he had prepared himself for. Surely they wouldn't take the waterworks job away from his father, the old party loyalist. Then he thought of Casey's dead eyes and knew the man would sell his mother into slavery if political revenge required it.

That was when Kimberley came in, all smiles.

“A fellow from Notre Dame brought this.” She handed him a plastic bag.

“Has he gone?”

“I could go after him.”

Something in the way she said it gave Feeney a pang.

10

Roger was as delighted as the circumstances permitted when Phil brought him the news of the coroner's vacillation. Of course, Xavier Kittock was still dead—Rebecca's uncle was dead, and her parents had arrived, determined that the funeral should be at Notre Dame.

“Ya es muerto, decid todos, / Ya cubre poca terra.”
Roger murmured these lines when he was introduced to Rebecca's father, David Nobile. Nobile immediately recognized the lines from
La Dorotea.