The Death of a Joyce Scholar (15 page)

“So, where’s Jammer and the gun?”

Bang hunched his shoulders, then held up a palm so McGarr wouldn’t begin abusing him again. “God’s trut’. Honest. He—”

“Moves around, don’t he, Sweets?” the other girl said. “Likes a bit’ a this an’ that. Mainly that, I’d say.”

Sweets went for her, and O’Shaughnessy had to separate them.

Bang used the disruption to say in a low voice to McGarr, “The cemetery—he would’ve stayed away, after what happened in the park. The cop and the stick and all. But it’s been days now, and Jammer, he’s different, he is. Likes bein’ alone. Private, like.”

O’Shaughnessy had by then restored order.

“Right,” said McGarr, reaching out to rap on the main door of the church. “All up.” He rapped again, harder, and they heard keys jingle beyond the heavy oak panels.

“Where we going?” the loud girl asked.

O’Shaughnessy pulled her to her feet. He explained, “Three parts, like the Trinity, which you so much revere. De
lousing. Then an examination—physical—at no cost to you. And finally an interview to ascertain if the truth could possibly reside in any statement you might utter.”

Outside the church, the Fourth Estate was waiting, cameras raised. They shouted questions about both the incident and the earlier handling of their colleague. But McGarr said nothing, only ordered one of the Guards to remain with the boater, the stick, and the blazer until the press quit the area. There was no percentage in putting Jammer on notice.

WHEN PROFESSOR FERGUS FLOOD complained that he was being made to repeat the story of his night of the sixteenth for the umpteenth time, Detective Sergeant McKeon said, “Then make it the humpteenth. The Super Chief has just joined us.”

Flood sighed and looked behind him at McGarr, who had just entered the room, and allowed—truly for the umpteenth time—that he really should have a solicitor present, only to be told once again that such was possible, he need only to make a phone call. They would wait.

“Ah, no—sure, it wouldn’t change anything, would it?” he said, sounding more like a Dublin navvy than a professor at Trinity College.

McKeon hunched his large, soft shoulders. “You tell us.”

“I hope you don’t think I’ve been lying to you.”

It was hot in the small interrogation room, and Flood’s white shirt was blotched with sweat. He was a man who needed to shave often, and his heavy face was now patterned
with shadow. As though in search of an ally, his dark eyes turned to McGarr, who was standing off to one side. In spite of the heat, his bow tie was still tight to his throat.

Daintily almost, he touched it with a large hand, before laughing to himself with evident resignation. “I must be losing me sense of humor. Which won’t do, will it? Where to begin?”

“From your leaving the pub in Foley Street, Professor.”

He nodded. “I said my good-byes to Kinch, to those of my clients who were still there, and to McGarrity himself, the publican, and left.”

“How was he then?”

“Who?”

“Coyle, of course.”

“Locked, as I’ve said.” It was an older Dublin expression for drunk, one that McGarr’s father had sometimes used, and it seemed odd coming from somebody like Flood. But then, what little they knew of Flood was odd, from his mixed professions, his marriage and family, to his story and the Fiat 500 and where it had been and what it contained.

“Weren’t you worried about leaving him in that condition?”

Flood’s slight cough was a laugh. “You didn’t know Kinch. There was no reasoning with him in that condition, and I could tell he hadn’t finished for the night.”

“And so you went home. How, please, Professor?”

“In my automobile, which I had parked in college.”

“Trinity?”

Flood nodded.

“You walked from Foley Street to which gate of Trinity College?”

“The Pearse Street gate, as I’ve said, which is the closest. I knocked and the guard, recognizing me, let me in. I’d parked where I usually do, in front of the English depart
ment. I got directly in the car, drove to the back gate, and then on to Foxrock.”

“How long did all that take?”

Flood’s shoulders rose then fell. “What did we say earlier? Ten or fifteen minutes to walk from Foley Street to the car. Then twenty for the drive out to Foxrock. Throw in another five for the lateness of the hour and how tired I was.”

“And when you got home…?”

“I fully intended to go straight to bed, but when I discovered that my wife wasn’t there, I went to look for her.”

“Without checking to see if she had taken the Fiat.”

“I knew it wouldn’t be there. My daughter had gone out to the ciney, and I never thought to check.”

“How would your wife, then, have gone out herself?”

“Taxi. Bus. Somebody might have picked her up.”

“Like Kevin Coyle?”

Flood inclined his head. His eyes flashed at McKeon. “Kinch did not drive.”

“Then you’re suggesting your wife had other lovers?”

“I knew only of Kinch.”

“So—in the Rover you drove out to ‘different venues,’ as you termed it. You visited Jury’s Hotel, the Burlington, Sachs, and the Drumcondra Inn.”

Flood’s head went back just slightly, but enough. Yet he said, “No—I didn’t go all the way out there. I stayed here on the south side of town. After Sachs I came home, and there she was.”

“Then, since you didn’t visit the Drumcondra Inn, you wouldn’t have bumped into Kevin Coyle, who was waiting for your wife, or your daughter, who was on the prowl for David Holderness. Or into your Fiat, half up on the footpath in front of the hotel.”

“No, certainly not. As I’ve just told you, I went back home after Sachs.”

“What time was that?”

“However long it takes to drive to those places and look round.”

“An hour? Two?”

“Perhaps two.”

“Which would have put your time of rearrival in Foxrock at two-fifteen.”

“I didn’t check the clock, but it seems reasonable.”

“You checked that your wife was in her room. Or, rather, that the door to her bedroom was closed.”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t check to see if that Fiat was in under the car port, there at the side of the garage? Or if your daughter was in her room? Or the clock?”

Flood shook his head. “I was exhausted. Destroyed.” Again the working-class touch.

“Do you have your keys with you now?”

“Which keys do you mean?”

“Your personal keys. Any keys. Keys, man—do you have any in your pockets?”

Flood’s head turned to McGarr, then back to McKeon. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s perfectly plain,” said McGarr. “The sergeant would like to see your key ring.” McGarr reached into his own pocket and pulled out the keys to his Cooper, the Castle office, and the several that served his house in Rathmines and his wife’s business in Dawson Street.

Color had risen suddenly to Flood’s skin, and the dots of sweat on his forehead had begun to merge and track down his face. Slowly he produced his keys, which McKeon allowed to remain untouched on the table between them.

With a pencil he indicated one. “The Rover?” he asked.

Flood nodded.

“The Fiat, I presume?” That key had a large letter F on its side.

Again.

“And these others…?”

“College, the office, home.”

“Had you these keys or some others with you on Bloomsday evening?”

Flood said nothing. His gaze was fixed on the keys.

McKeon waited for Flood’s eyes to rise to his. “May I ask you, Professor—how is it that your Rover was ticketed at three-oh-five
A.M
. in Drumcondra for illegal overnight parking?”

Flood said nothing.

“How is it that Rex Cathcart, the hotelier there, saw you walk into the bar and look ’round and then walk out to the desk, where you asked if your wife was staying there?”

Still nothing.

“How is it that Cathcart, worried that you might make a scene, followed you to the steps of the hotel where Coyle was waiting for a taxi. He was drunk, had tired of waiting for your wife, and he had asked a barman to phone up for a lift.”

Flood’s eyes shifted to the grimy window. Now, in late afternoon, it was splashing a hot, milky light across the dayroom floor. The blat of a fly on a pane was languid and desultory.

“Question—did you offer him a lift home?”

“Why would I do that?”

“To take him out of harm’s way. As you said, you could tell he wasn’t ‘finished’ for the evening, and better that he finish with Catty Doyle than one of the family Flood. After all, your daughter was still inside. She—like your wife, like
you yourself by your own admission—very much admired Coyle. And he was in such great form that night. Your words.”

“Then why would I have taken the Fiat and not the Rover? Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

“Part punishment, part cure. She had no key to the Rover, which in any case was parked a block distant. She would have to get herself home as best she could. And without the Fiat there was no lift for Coyle.

“Tell me, where did you get the knife?”

Flood sighed, then reached into his suit coat, which was hanging over the back of a nearby chair. From his billfold he drew a small card which he placed on the table between them. On it was the name of a solicitor. “Would you ring that number, please? I believe it’s time for me to speak to this man.”

Off a fingernail McKeon flicked the card back into Flood’s lap. “Ring him yourself, Professor. Around here liars do their own bidding.”

It was half-six when McGarr got home, and Noreen had not yet arrived. Without pausing for a lager, he retrieved
Ulysses
from the bedroom upstairs and went right out to the back garden, where the high walls would shield him from the wind. It had brisked up around noon and had been building ever since. Tomorrow the weather would change, and he had spent far too many good days inside, as it was.

He set a comfortable chair in a patch of the brightest sun, loosened his tie, and sat. The heat was intense there and was soon baking him so agreeably that for a while he was not moved to open the book. During that time he heard a noise on top of the wall in back of him, a low whine and some panting, and he was soon joined by the P.M., the Garda veteran from the next house. The dog nuzzled his hand, re
ceived its requisite evening greeting, and then settled in the shadow of the chair and dozed off.

In his earlier attempts to read
Ulysses,
McGarr had discovered that the only availing approach for the novice reader was to consult the “guide” often and in depth. But he now found himself forgetting the many allusions to symbol, history, and myth and merely “listening” to the words on the page, much as he would listen to a piece of music.

It was a peculiarly Irish song, he understood from the first page, and a particularly Dublin ditty—now melodic and fine, later rough and raspy, then rambling and vague and what McGarr thought of as ethereal, counterbalanced by a focus as sharp and unsparing as any microscope. From the books that a certain literary martinet of a schoolmaster had forced upon him long before, and from years of recreational reading, he understood that
Ulysses
must have been for its time and was most probably still a tour de force, containing more literary devices than he could name or explain. He couldn’t keep himself from concentrating on the “voice,” or rather the “voices”; they were whispering and singing and chanting and cursing and praying and now stating bluntly in journalese or implying in ad lingo or slyly insinuating, like a whisper in the ear, propositions, avowals, invocations, promises, directives, observations, and whatnot, all in such a heady, ever-changing concoction that after several dozen pages McGarr decided it was more than mere song.

The novel reminded him of the complex weave of voices raised in complaint, laughter, song, noise, and lament that he had heard all his life in one or another Dublin licensed premises, which could not have changed since Joyce’s era. And it was little wonder that—as Flood had said—the more complete book (
Finnegan’s Wake
) was the story of the dream of a Dublin publican. McGarr was entertained mightily and did not stop on page 100, when Leopold Bloom—Dublin Jew
man and one of the two major characters—approached the cemetery in Glasnevin and another character pointed toward Bengal Terrace:

—That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.

—So it is, Mr. Dedalus said. A gruesome case. Seymour Bushes got him off. Murdered his brother. Or so they said.

—The crown had no evidence, Mr. Power said.

—Only circumstantial, Martin Cunningham added. That’s the maxim of the law. Better for ninety-nine guilty to escape than for one innocent person to be wrongfully condemned.

They looked. Murderer’s ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered, tenantless, unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully condemned. Murder. The murderer’s image in the eye of the murdered. They love reading about it. Man’s head found in a garden. Her clothing consisted of. How she met her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used. Murderer is still at large, clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed. Murder will out.

McGarr read on, even though it occurred to him that such a reference would not have been lost upon (and had not been mentioned by) Fergus Flood or David Holderness or, for that matter, the only literateuse involved in the case: the comely Catty Doyle.

Could she have chosen to reside in De Courcy Square that shared an alley with Bengal Terrace because…? And what motive might she have had to murder Coyle beyond possessing a number of signed, first-edition Kevin Coyle volumes that with the man’s death would doubtless increase in value? McGarr did not actually know that the books belonged to Catty; Bresnahan had reported overhearing the three women discussing the situation, as though the books were mutual
property, but the fact of the matter was, they were actually in Sittonn’s possession.

And then Doyle had been Kevin Coyle’s editor, and on that basis had lost by his death perhaps more than anybody save his wife and Maura Flood, who had been another of his lovers and had seemed genuinely saddened by his death. McGarr wondered if Doyle made it a point to know all of her writers
in the flesh,
so to speak, and if such practice was standard to the publishing industry. He would have to take to writing books.

Or might the same feminist triumvirate have tired of Coyle’s antics and decreed his end? No, again. They might have attempted to alter his…behavior, but would they have done him mortal harm? Sittonn’s having dropped Catty off at De Courcy Square after their “date” put her on the scene. Had it been straight home for Sittonn? McGarr would have to find out.

In any case, McGarr was—as he had suspected from the first—solidly on literary turf, and he now found it passing strange that nobody had mentioned the murder that was spoken of in the novel and Coyle’s death there nearly in the very same spot: Flood, who taught Joyce in university; Holderness, who was the research student in literature; Catty Doyle, who most probably knew
Ulysses,
or who would have been informed of the distinction of her address by either of her male lovers. Even from the little McGarr knew of academics, he could scarcely imagine a practicing Joyce scholar resisting the opportunity of displaying his erudition to the likes of a Catty Doyle.

Or, fully understanding that eventually the correlation would come to light, could the three women have so arranged Coyle’s demise as to suggest an academic connection? To implicate Flood and/or Holderness?

It was then that McGarr glanced up from the book and
saw the large, bearded Rabbi Viner peering over the wall.