Sham Rock (17 page)

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Authors: Ralph McInerny

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Sham Rock
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JAY WILLIAMS SAT IN LEAHY'S Lounge in the Morris Inn across a little table from Mrs. Childers, who had surprised him with her call, telling him that she was on campus and hoped they could get together. With the egoism of youth, he assumed she had flown to South Bend just to see him. Ever since their meeting in New York, he had been puzzling about what she had said then. Once he got out from under the zillion-kilowatt floodlight of her sophisticated charm he had found himself strangely depressed. It was her possessive attitude toward his father and her zany notion that she would buy the condo on Longboat Key so his father wouldn't lose it that had been her big surprise. If she bought it, though, she would own it, not his father.
“Bourbon and water?” she asked Jay when Murph the bartender came for their orders.
“Beer.”
Her elegant eyebrows lifted, but she said nothing. “Martini,” she told Murph.
She had slipped off her coat and draped it over the back of her chair. Now she drew it over her shoulders. “It's chilly in here.”
“My dad has taken the condo off the market.”
“Isn't that wonderful?”
“You knew that?”
“Of course.” She seemed to be reading his thoughts. “Casey
Winthrop's wife is the Realtor in the case. Peaches.” A little laugh. “Only in Florida. I suppose it might have been Oranges.”
“Have you had a chance to get around the campus?”
“Oh, this is just an in-and-out trip. Do you know Father Carmody?”
“I've heard of him.”
“He was such a power, Jay. The man behind the throne. It is painful to think of him filed away in Holy Cross House.”
“You've seen him.”
“That was the point of the exercise.” A hand fluttered out and rested on his. “And to see you, of course. I want us to be friends.”
He fought the surge of pleasure. Of course she was nuts about him, what else? Middle-aged woman makes fool of herself over Notre Dame undergraduate. Thomas Wolfe had had an older mistress.
“I had hoped you'd bring Amanda.”
“She's all wrapped up in the revival of Pelligrino's play.”
“Of course.”
“It's a lousy play.”
“I always thought so. Still, it was so much fun putting it on. Dave was such a good actor.”
Dave. Well, what the hell, they had gone to school together—but that was a long time ago.
“Why did you have to see Father Carmody, Mrs. Childers?”
Murph brought the drinks, and she fell silent until he left them. “I'll let your father tell you.”
His father! He pushed away the glass Murph handed him and brought the bottle to his lips. She followed this as if he were performing some Olympic event, smiling wondrously.
“I haven't drunk beer from the bottle since …” She pursed her lips and half turned her head, her eyes never leaving him. “But there. I sound like an old woman.”
“You're not an old woman.”
Not at all, my dear, What's a decade or two difference in age? They can be erased by the ardor of our love. I will make you young again.
“Thank you. And stop calling me Mrs. Childers, please. It's Mame.”
“Is Mame short for something?”
She laughed. “Does it sound like Peaches to you?”
Banter. Persiflage. Repartee. Bullshit. As he talked with her, playing the Ping-Pong of patter, saying what you don't mean and meaning what you don't say, the depression he had felt after their meeting in New York put in a reappearance. What were his plans for Thanksgiving? “I plan to be with my father.” She acted as if she had already known that. He was relieved when the flunky looked in the door of the bar and told her her cab had come.
She gave a little cry and got to her feet. He held her coat so she could get her arms into the sleeves. On the way out, she put money on the counter, twice what the drinks cost, and sailed out. Her bags were being put into the cab when they went outside and stood under the canopy. She turned to Jay, a look of pained pleasure on her perfect face, then gathered him into his arms. Her lips pressed his cheek. She stepped into the cab and looked up at him.
“Wipe that off your cheek, Jay. Amanda will be furious.”
The door was pulled shut, a flutter of her hand, and the taxi moved away. The doorman smiled at Jay.
“Your mother?”
“No!”
The doorman's expression changed. He actually winked. Jay got the hell out of there.
 
 
That night, late, he got his father on his cell phone. “Is this a good time?”
“I'm at dinner, but go ahead.”
Jay could hear the sounds of a restaurant now. “It's nothing important. Mrs. Childers was out here today.”
Silence. “You don't say.”
“We had a drink in the Morris Inn.”
He could hear voices, too, and then one distinctive voice, apparently speaking to the waiter. Mame Childers? Jay pushed the OFF button and sat staring at the wall of his room. His cell phone rang. He didn't answer.
That night he dreamt of his mother. The dream woke him up, it was so vivid. He got out of bed, quietly, not wanting to wake his roommates. He sat up in the dark and tried not to think. Easier said than done. His mother's face swam before him, he had carried the sound of her voice from his dream, and then he thought of Mame Childers. What an idiot he was. It seemed obvious now what she had been trying to tell him without actually saying it. So of course she wanted them to be friends.
Don't act like a kid,
he told himself.
Grow up.
As Amanda had said, his father was still a young man. It was really trading down to turn to someone like Mame, but what the hell? She was fun, she was … He was almost surprised to find that he was crying, sitting there in the darkened dorm room, weeping like a baby, feeling that his father was betraying his mother. He remembered sparring with his father, just kidding around, pulling their punches. When he went back to his bed he drove his fist into his pillow. The sonofabitch!
Well, he could celebrate Thanksgiving by himself.
PEACHES WAS AS BIG AS A HOUSE, but she still had a fortnight or so to go. Twins? They had both nixed the notion of a scan. That had been proposed earlier to determine the sex of the child.
“I want to be surprised,” Casey said. “Like Adam.”
“Didn't Eve have twins?”
“I'll look it up. Better yet, I'll ask Brother Joachim.”
He loved it when she squinted, making little chevrons appear on her forehead. What a blessing she was. For years he had thought he was a celibate.
“What's that?” Peaches had asked. Chevrons then, too.
“Sort of like a reprobate.”
Now she said, “What do you mean, you'll ask Brother Joachim?”
“I'm thinking of a little research trip. For the new novel.”
“You'll have to go alone.”
“It will only be for a few days.”
 
 
He drove, up through Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Nashville into Kentucky. Signs indicating Civil War sites flashed by. See the country by interstate. He might still be on I-75. He found the monastery without a hitch.
When he told a monk in the guesthouse that he had come to see an old Notre Dame classmate, the monk said, “Joachim?”
“You know him?” Casey paused. “Dumb question.”
“You're his second visitor today.”
Casey looked at the monk. “Maybe I'd better wait.” He looked around the guesthouse lobby. Maybe he could stay here.
“Perhaps you know him. David Williams.”
“Of course I know him. We were classmates.”
“It could be a class reunion.” The monk smiled. “My father taught at Notre Dame.”
Chadwick, Chadwick? Casey pretended to recognize the name. “Joachim is out in the hermitage. I'll take you there.”
“Couldn't I find it myself?”
“Probably.”
“You better show me.”
It was odd to be back where there are seasons. Many leaves had fallen, but the trees were bright with the colors of autumn. He asked Brother Chrysologus if he had gone to Notre Dame. He had. If Casey had expected a flow of reminiscence he would have been disappointed. Ten minutes later, Chrysologus stopped and pointed. Casey had trouble seeing the hermitage.
“I never would have found it.”
“Probably not.”
It was a low wooden cottage with a front porch on which a rocker moved slightly in the breeze.
“What does he do out here?”
“He's on retreat.”
Retreat from the monastery? Chrysologus gave a piercing whistle as they approached the hermitage. No answer. Onto the porch then,
and Chysologus knocked on the door before opening it. Or trying to open it. There was something preventing this.
“Chrysologus?”
Another monk came toward them around the house, apparently emerging from the woods. He stopped when he came closer and smiled. “Casey?”
It was Joachim. Casey had difficulty recognizing him, but maybe that was a two-way street. How do you greet a monk? Casey took his hand; he took both his hands. “Is Dave Williams here?”
“Inside.”
Chrysologus said, “The door is stuck. I tried it.”
Joachim went around his brother monk and tried the door as Chrysologus had. He managed to open it a bit, then put his head in and looked around. Suddenly he backed away, put his shoulder to the door, and drove through. Casey and Chrysologus followed him in.
The body lay on the floor, arms outstretched, an ugly wound on the head, blood from it trickling down Dave Williams's cheek. Joachim was on his knees and began to murmur a prayer.
As if in answer, there was a guttural groan from Williams. Joachim turned to Chrysologus. “The infirmarian, Brother.”
Chrysologus nodded, pounded across the porch, and jogged off in the direction of the monastery.
THE INFIRMARY WAS NOT A LARGE room, but the high windows, the white walls, and the beds with their white spreads gave an air of spaciousness. On one wall was a huge crucifix, very realistic, with great nails in the body, the crown of thorns huge and ugly, the wounds running with brightly painted blood. Brother Bernard, the infirmarian, came and went, seeming to follow his smile in and out of the room. Dave Williams looked like a monk himself, a sleeping monk, lying there with a white sheet to his chin, his head shaved, wearing a white turbanlike bandage, a pale face on the white pillow, out of the world.
Bernard looked at Casey when he asked when he could speak to Dave. “He's in a coma, son.”
Brother Bernard's specialty in what he called the world had been brain surgery. “Here we do soul surgery.”
“So you're an MD.”
“For my sins. I was on the staff of the Mayo Clinic.”
“How long have you been a monk?”
“Not long enough.”
“Did you have to shave Dave's head?”
“I wanted to make him feel at home.”
Bernard kept shining lights in Dave's eyes, humming as he did so.
“How long do comas last?”
“Why don't we leave that in the hands of God?”
The infirmary was state-of-the-art, and Bernard was more than competent; it wasn't that he meant to just stand by and watch. Hours later, Dave was in an ambulance, being taken to the nearest MRI. Bernard wanted a brain scan. It showed extensive damage to the brain. Surgery? Bernard shook his head slowly.
Casey was anxious to get back to Peaches. He explained why to Bernard.
“Your friend could linger for, who knows how long? You should go home to your wife.”
 
 
He wanted to talk to Joachim before leaving. What had happened to Dave? Both Joachim and Chrysologus had reacted calmly and efficiently in the crisis. Joachim's first impulse had been to send Dave shriven into eternity, but after the groan indicated that he was still alive and Chrysologus loped off to get the infirmarian, Casey and Joachim lifted Dave from the floor and put him on the cot in the hermitage bedroom. Over the inert body, Casey asked, “What happened?”
Joachim turned eyes that were like mirrors at him, then shook his head. “He was attacked.”
“By whom?”
“We had been sitting, talking. About old times. Notre Dame. I had left him alone there, going to say my rosary. I wasn't away five minutes when I heard Chrysologus whistle.”
It was difficult to face Joachim when the doubts started. The hermitage was an isolated place; there had been only Joachim and Dave. In profile, Joachim still looked like Pat Pelligrino, his old classmate, no one who would attack another person.
“Did you see anyone else?”
A shake of the head. Silence. “Do you think I did it, Casey?”
“Of course not!” But he looked away when he said it.
They sat by the cot in silence then, waiting for Chrysologus and the infirmarian. Dave's breathing was audible in the little room. Listening, Casey thought that was what the blow had been meant to stop, Dave's breathing. Someone had tried to kill him. Chrysologus's whistle might have saved his life.
Chrysologus had returned to the hermitage with Bernard and four other monks, and after a preliminary examination the infirmarian ordered Dave taken to the infirmary. Four monks lifted the cot with Dave on it and maneuvered it outside. Getting out of their way, Casey noticed the back door of the hermitage. They returned to the monastery, an odd procession, Bernard first, then the cot, followed by Casey and Joachim.
Casey had never seen anyone die before. He had killed off dozens of characters in his books, but death in fiction is not the real thing. The real thing took place in the infirmary. Casey had been sitting there, hoping Dave would come out of his coma, when Dave's breathing became erratic. Bernard came and did the work of a priest, anointing Dave. Joachim arrived, and Chrysologus. The intervals between the breaths lengthened, and when the next one came it seemed miraculous. Then Dave breathed what turned out to be his last. They all seemed to be waiting for another, but another never came. The monks began to chant in Latin.
The abbot had arrived in time to see Dave die. He seemed to think that Casey had come to make a retreat.
 
 
Casey felt guilty about being so eager to leave the monastery and get home to Peaches—but, good God, what if she went into labor
while he was away? The solution seemed to be to call Notre Dame. Father Carmody, at Joachim's suggestion.
When on the third try Casey got through to Father Carmody—the Notre Dame switchboard seemed something out of a Marx Brothers movie—he had his message compressed and ready to go.
“Father, this is Casey Winthrop, Class of '89. I'm calling from Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in Kentucky. Dave Williams, my classmate, is here. In the infirmary. Someone attacked him.”
He had to parse each sentence and expand on it before Carmody got it. “The infirmary?”
“Yes.”
“Attacked?”
“Hit over the head. In the hermitage. He was visiting Brother Joachim, another classmate.”
“How serious is it?”
“Father, he's dead.”
How easy that was to say. There was a silence.
“And what are you doing there, Casey?”
“Making a retreat.”
Or intending to make one. Or lying. He told Father Carmody he had to get back to his wife in Florida.
“I can get in touch with you there?”
He gave him his cell number as well as the number at the house.
“Class of '89?”
“Yes, Father.”
A pause. Then, “Okay. Thank you, Casey. Have a safe trip home.” He had seemed about to say something else.
 
 
Driving a long distance is a contemplative act, particularly on the interstate. Casey kept remembering the back door of the hermitage. A scenario began to take shape in his mind; think of it as a draft for a novel. Dave Williams comes to see his old classmate Pat Pelligrino, now Brother Joachim. They are sitting on the porch, talking about old times, talking about Notre Dame. That sounded peaceful enough. But he was remembering as well what he had heard of the packet Joachim had sent to the Notre Dame archives, stirring up old memories, claiming Timothy Quinn, who it turned out was still alive, had been killed. Joachim had also left Dave a pile of money. Why Dave?
Why not me, for crying out loud?
In the scenario, the two men in the hermitage began to argue; they stood; Joachim went outside, picking up a piece of firewood, which he brought down on Dave's head. Joachim hears a whistle. He pulls the door shut behind him, beats it out the back way, and comes around the hermitage to greet Chrysologus and Casey.
By the time he got to Atlanta, Casey had touched it up, tightened it. Going through Valdosta, he was reciting it as if it were an eyewitness report. On the long plumb line of I-75, dropping through Florida, his speed matching the number of the road, he insisted to himself that he was writing fiction in his head. An occupational hazard. Finally, he just wanted to get back to Peaches and forget the whole damned thing.

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