Irish Gilt (15 page)

*   *   *

Hairs from the dead man had been found inside the plastic bag. The only clear prints on it turned out to be the space cadet's—Larry Douglas—and the victim's.

“Are you saying he snuffed himself?”

“I'm telling you what we found on the bag.” Pincer from the lab sounded huffy.

“Or that maybe Larry Douglas did it.”

Pincer found the suggestion intriguing, and Jimmy rose to leave the lab.

“There were smudged prints around the opening of the bag, nothing clear.”

“The kind that would have been made by the one who pulled the bag over his head and strangled him?”

“Strangled him? He could have been just making sure the guy couldn't pull the bag off.”

“And had a heart attack?”

“You'll have to ask Feeney about that.”

*   *   *

Feeney was morose. His intern, Kimberley, had told him she had decided to leave and continue her education.

“It's not a permanent position, Feeney,” Jimmy said.

“I know. And she really didn't like the work. The bodies.” He made a face. “I know how she feels.”

“Any further thoughts on Xavier Kittock?”

“I had to release the body. The relatives were complaining.” Feeney rubbed his bald head as if he were looking for hair. “Even if it was a heart attack, it would have been brought on by the struggle when the plastic bag was pulled over his head.”

Ricardo had the build of a tango dancer, but how much strength would it take to keep a plastic bag on someone's head when you were standing behind him and caught him unawares?

“Jankowski will get you another intern.”

“Jankowski! I wish I could get out of here myself.”

Jimmy knew the story about Feeney senior and the waterworks. Well, what real difference did it make where Feeney plied his grisly trade?

“Cheer up,” Jimmy advised him. “We'll have more bodies for you before long.”

*   *   *

Reporters were waiting for Jimmy at his office, and he submitted himself to their questioning.

“It's all pretty circumstantial, isn't it?” Mike Lettney asked. He had wanted to talk to Jimmy in the hall where his cameraman was, but Jimmy had seen himself on television too much to agree to that. Cora Loquitur of what she liked to refer to as the print media had approved of having the interview in Jimmy's office away from the cameras. She wasn't all that photogenic herself.

“Fingerprints aren't circumstantial evidence.”

This remark excited Cora, who was used to making logical leaps. Let her speculate, Jimmy thought. It would anger Maple, the lawyer who had taken on Esperanza. Maple was worse than a reporter.

“It's pretty obvious, isn't it, Stewart? Sock it to an immigrant,” Maple had said when he arrived at the interrogation room.

“Cómo?”

“Funny.”

Maple fancied himself the champion of minorities. Jimmy told him that Ricardo hadn't come in across the Rio Grande. “He flew in from Buenos Aires. His father is a professor there.”

“You sound like you resent that.”

“Not if he doesn't.”

Jimmy got rid of the reporters and beat it out of the office so he wouldn't be there when Maple called asking what the hell fingerprints he was telling the press about. In the car he gave Phil Knight a call, and they arranged to meet at the driving range.

16

Because of the delay in releasing the body of Xavier Kittock, the relatives and friends who had come to campus for his funeral had a prolonged visit. This proved to be a bonus for Roger Knight, who was able to have a number of extended conversations with the interesting father of Rebecca de Vega Nobile.

“Her mother was at best tolerant of that middle name,” David Nobile said with a smile. “But then, Rebecca was her own mother's name, and that gained her assent.”

“Quid pro quo.”

“Exactly. But tell me about the edition you ordered through Boris Henry.”

Phil slipped discreetly from the room to the solace of the television while Roger brought out the recent acquisition and handed it to his guest. For an hour the two men examined the prize.

“I wonder if he has other things,” Nobile murmured.

“We can find out.” Roger wheeled to his computer and brought up the Web site of Boris Henry Rare Books.

While this feast of reason went on, Mrs. Nobile and her daughter were enjoying one another's company whenever Rebecca was not in class. With maternal wariness, Mrs. Nobile had met Josh Daley and wondered what this new friendship portended.

“We have a class together. And we run.”

“Run?”

Rebecca explained. It all sounded wholesome enough. Mrs. Nobile was torn between the desire that her daughter should graduate and emerge into the wider world still single and the equally strong desire that she might meet the companion of her life here on campus. Was Josh Daley that companion? It was clear to her that the young man didn't have the mind of her daughter, nor share Rebecca's interests, but then there are so many facets to a life together, as she had learned. David's bibliophilic bent had not been evident during the years when her husband had amassed the wealth that had brought him leisure enough in midlife to pursue his surprising interest in the golden age of Spanish literature. Rebecca was her father's child, and Mrs. Nobile began to weigh the possibility that Josh might be the complement to her daughter that she herself was for her husband. Such thoughts distracted her from the grief she felt at her brother's death.

The realization that Xavier's death had not been natural added to the horror. When the young man employed in campus maintenance was arrested under suspicion of having killed Xavier, Mrs. Nobile took to her room in the Morris Inn, inconsolable in grief.

“It's better for her to be alone just now,” Rebecca said, as she and Josh prepared for their run. With practice, her endurance had increased, and she found it oddly pleasant to run in relative silence at Josh's side.

The route they took had become a familiar one, around both lakes and then from the Grotto along the road to St. Mary's and back again. This was far shorter than the distance Josh was used to, but he did not want to push her beyond her present strength. They ended on a bench beside a campus walk that led to Old College, the most ancient campus building. It overlooked the lake.

“My father is with Roger Knight, They're asking him to help fund the Zahm Center.”

Josh was now regularly auditing Roger's class devoted to John Zahm, a pleasant relief from Continental epistemology. “It's odd that both your uncle and Boris Henry developed such an interest in Zahm.”

“Not only them. Paul Lohman is another. They all roomed together. The Three Musketeers.”

*   *   *

Paul Lohman had arrived from Chicago, where he had been on business. Rebecca and her parents had dined with him, Boris Henry, and the elegant Clare Healy. Lohman was a short, cheery man who relieved what might have been the lugubrious atmosphere at their table with a lengthy account of the Red Sox's prospects for the season. Boris Henry seemed to regret the loss of the Zahm diary as much as he did his old roommate.

“Is there only the one copy?” Paul Lohman asked.

“It was never published. Of course there is only the one copy.”

“You should have photocopied it.”

Boris Henry stared at him. “Have you any idea what such an item is worth? It is as fragile as it is valuable. You don't subject a thing like that to a Xerox machine.”

“You might have made a longhand copy, then.”

“I intend to get it back! I have hired Philip Knight for that purpose.”

“Roger Knight's brother?” David Nobile's interest had finally been engaged.

“He is a private investigator.”

“I had no idea.”

“He only takes on very special projects these days.”

“I'm sure he will find it,” Clare Healy said.

Boris Henry reacted to this with impatience. “Clare, I needn't tell you of the shadier aspects of the rare book trade. God knows where the thing might have been spirited off to.”

“I'm sure he does,” Mrs. Nobile said. Her loss had brought on a bout of piety. “Have you all been to the Grotto?”

“Not yet,” Paul Lohman said.

“Tell me about it,” Clare urged, and Mrs. Nobile was only too happy to oblige. The replica of the shrine at Lourdes was a token of Father Edward Sorin's devotion to the Virgin Mary, the name of the university he had founded being another.

“You must take me there, Boris,” Clare Healy said.

Rebecca could not figure out the relationship between Boris Henry and this woman with the patrician air whom he had described as the effective manager of his rare book business. How so serene a woman could radiate such femininity was a marvel.

“Has Philip Knight turned up anything yet?” Paul asked.

Boris shook his head.

“I suppose the police are involved as well.”

“No! Good Lord, the less publicity the better. You realize that everything I have said is confidential.”

They all realized it. Paul Lohman twisted an imaginary key in his lips and tossed it over his shoulder, getting a laugh from Clare, but immediately afterward, he was talking again. “Didn't Eggs join an expedition in search of sunken treasure?”

“Sunken treasure!” David Nobile perked up, and the story was told, Boris and Clare spelling one another.

“That was the basis of his interest in Zahm,” Boris concluded, and began to talk about Father Zahm's South American travels and his interest in El Dorado.

Rebecca tuned him out. Who could compete with Roger Knight on the subject of Father Zahm? Knight's course, spurred by recent events, had veered into a discussion of Father Zahm's travel writings, interrupting his account of the priest's interest in Dante. The subject had taken him far afield, leading to a long and fascinating hour on the subject of rare metals.

“Gold has practical uses, of course,” Roger said to his class. “And not merely dental. But it is its comparative rarity, and, of course, its beauty, that explains the fascination it has always had. Mere rarity would not be enough, would it? And yet one thinks of the bars of gold bullion sleeping unused and highly protected at Fort Knox, Kentucky. They are still there even though the gold standard is a thing of the past. Once paper currency had been an implicit claim on that treasure, but no more. I find that there is a brisk trade in gold, quite independent of money and stocks and bonds.” He grew more pensive. “But its value is expressed in dollars.”

There was a ruminative, almost melancholy tone to his voice, and Rebecca commented on it.

Roger smiled. “I am mimicking Father Zahm's tone as he wrote of such things. Who has read
Treasure Island
?”

Josh, of course. The class had ended with Roger and Josh exchanging delighted memories of the novel.

Thinking of this, sitting beside Josh on a bench overlooking the lake, deliciously tired, Rebecca, said, “For a history major, you certainly know a lot of things.”

“Not epistemology.”

“Epistemology isn't everything.”

His hand found hers, and they sat on in silence.

17

“I haven't sat on a bench since this happened,” Armitage Shanks said with what might have been a shudder—but then, he shook all the time.

“Have you stopped sending your shirts out?”

“I always have them back on hangers.”

The Old Bastards were at lunch at their table in the University Club, happy to have the new twists in the death of Xavier Kittock to enliven their day.

“I got out my records,” Goucher said. “I never had him in class.”

“The maintenance man?”

“Kittock.”

“Class of '74.”

“You've been reading the
Observer.
” A low growl went around the round table, and the conversation threatened to get diverted onto the topic of the student newspaper.

“What was the motive?” Shanks asked querulously.

“A jealous husband,” Debbie, the hostess, said, sitting on the edge of an unclaimed chair.

“Chaucer.”

“No, Esperanza.”

“When's the funeral?”

Here was a lugubrious topic they could all get their teeth into, artificial or not. They had all long been in that twilit time of life when the daily obituaries are the first items read in the newspaper. Their companions had been picked off one by one, and they had taken pews in Sacred Heart to bid them a last adieu and ponder their own fate. To a man, they had plots awaiting them in Cedar Grove. Shanks, a bachelor, had already put up a marker over his: name, date of birth, and then a blank awaiting the day when the bell would toll for him. He had wrung a promise from the others that “Notre Dame Our Mother” would not be sung as taps at his obsequies.

“What's the difference? You won't hear it.”

“It's a tearjerker!”

“How about the
Salve Regina
?” This beautiful hymn was sung over the grave of a newly buried member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, but that was in the community cemetery. The Old Bastards never missed a funeral there, watching an old adversary being lowered into the ground.

“You're all too mean to die,” Debbie said. She had taken some plastic-wrapped crackers from the bowl in the middle of the table and turned them in her hand as if contemplating a bet.

“No one means to die,” Armitage Shanks said primly. “It is an end, not an aim.” He looked around brightly as once he had looked when he taught philosophy.

“A jealous husband, Debbie?”

At first she thought the question was personal. It took a while to pick up the broken rhythm of conversation at this table.

“The dead man had become interested in Esperanza's former wife. He threatened him in front of witnesses,” she explained.