The Green Revolution (10 page)

“For what?”

“A ball. This is a putting green.”

Apparently a joke. Carmody listened while Douglas told him what he knew.

“Who else knows?”

“The cleaning crew found him.”

Carmody frowned. “And you called it in?”

“I told Bernice to let Father Genoux know.”

“She talk to anyone else?”

“Bernice?”

“I don't know her. Let's keep a lid on this, Larry. For now.”

“What about the body?”

For an awful moment, Genoux thought Carmody would suggest getting rid of it—bury it, drop it in the lake.

“No more harm can come to him lying there.” He turned to Genoux. “You got a cell phone, Father?”

Taking it, he punched a number with slow deliberation and then seemed to wonder which end to put to his ear. He listened, frowning out at the golf course, or what was left of it. The back nine had been built on; only the front remained. Genoux knew that Carmody did not like the new course north of campus that had cost a bundle to develop.

“Roger? Father Carmody. Is Phil there?”

2

“You want to come along, Roger?” Phil asked when he told his brother why Father Carmody had called.

“I have to go to Mass.”

Of course. Only Roger was Catholic, converted during his time at Princeton. He had enigmatically likened this to F. Marion Crawford's conversion while he was in India, after having been brought up in Rome in the shadow of the Vatican. Phil had learned not to ask Roger to explain such remarks. Phil believed in God, of course—someone had to be in charge of all this—but the niceties of religious belief had never drawn him.

“They will,” Roger said. Nothing smug about it, just a statement.

“Willis was among our guests last night, Phil.”

“I know.”

Phil did not want to think about that party; he did not want to remember how much he had drunk. The party had roared on for hours after Father Carmody left, and it continued to roar on in Phil's aching head.

“Call me after church,” Phil said, putting on a jacket.

There was no point in calling Roger. Even when he had his cell phone with him, he never turned it on until he wanted to use it.

When he went through the campus gate, saluting the guard, Phil wondered if she knew a dead body had been found on campus. He doubted it. Father Carmody had indicated that he didn't want anyone spreading the alarm, at least not yet.

Larry Douglas and his partner, Laura, were crouched at the edge of the putting green nearest the road. The two priests were standing by the body. Laura had put a piece of clear plastic on the ground.

“What are you doing?”

“Laura has found some footprints.” Larry crossed his eyes. No wonder. There were footprints all over the putting surface. Maybe Laura should get a big piece of plastic and cover the whole thing.

“You mean that?” Larry asked.

For answer, Phil crossed his eyes.

Father Carmody unnecessarily pointed to the body on the grass.

“Any sign of violence, Father?”

“You're the detective. I assume you'll represent the university in this?”

Phil knelt and looked at the lifeless body of Iggie Willis. There were no marks on the face or chest. He carefully turned the body. Nothing there. So what had killed him?

“I took this from his mouth,” Laura said, flourishing a little green towel with
ND
on it. It also had a metal-rimmed hole in one corner.

“From his mouth?”

“It was jammed in.”

Was that how Iggie Willis had died? Phil held open one of the plastic bags he had brought, and Laura dropped it in.

“You think that's a murder weapon?” she asked.

“I don't know. He doesn't look as if he had died from asphyxiation, but I'm no doctor. We'd better call Jimmy Stewart.”

Jimmy Stewart was a South Bend detective with whom Phil had worked previously, when some campus disturbance necessitated it and Father Carmody had enlisted Phil's now dormant private investigation agency. He was as much interested in the discretion he could count on as in Phil's professional expertise. Campus security had many members who had served on various police forces in the region, but they weren't equipped to conduct a murder investigation. If this was a murder.

“Last night he seemed to be trying to drink himself to death,” Father Carmody said.

“I wonder how he got here from our apartment.”

“He was staying in the Morris Inn.”

“So why is he here?”

“Maybe he didn't know where he was.”

And lay down here and stuffed a towel in his mouth? Phil dialed Jimmy's home number and waited out the enormous number of rings before the phone was answered.

“Jimmy? Philip Knight.”

“Call me back later.”

The phone went dead. Phil punched redial and wondered if he had interrupted something. Jimmy's wife had left him, out finding herself somewhere, but who knows what trouble a lonely single man can get into?

“Tell her I'm sorry,” Phil said, when at last Jimmy answered again.

“Tell who?”

“Then you're alone?”

A pause. “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“Jimmy, we've got a body on the putting green next to Rockne Memorial. Any chance of your dropping by?”

“You got coffee there?”

“I will have. How about some doughnuts?”

“And some juice. Tomato.”

“Yes, sir.”

Larry asked Laura to go fetch a breakfast for Jimmy and coffee for everyone else.

“I haven't eaten either,” Phil said.

“You hear that, Laura?”

“Yes, master.” She waddled away to the patrol car, taking off with a spin of wheels.

“I hope she doesn't obscure any footprints,” Larry said. The two priests just looked at him. Who cared? Philip Knight understood him.

Father Carmody had taken the plastic bag into which Laura had put the green towel. “There's no reason to make a big thing of this, is there, Phil?”

Father Carmody's concern for the good name of Notre Dame was phenomenal. It pained him personally to hear criticism of the university in which he had spent his lifetime, unless of course he was doing the criticizing. Phil knew that the old priest would give much if Iggie Willis's death could be judged natural. Cardiac arrests on game days were not a rarity. Unfortunately, the green towel cast doubt on this possibility. Even if it hadn't been the cause of Willis's death, there was the puzzle of what the towel was doing jammed into his mouth.

*   *   *

Father Genoux took the occasion of the lull to leave, mumbling about concelebrating in Sacred Heart. Laura got back with the food before Jimmy came. He got out of his car, looking ruffled and unshaven. He started toward them and stopped before coming onto the putting green, staring silently down at the piece of plastic Laura had laid down. Then he came to look at the body.

“Know who he was?”

“His name is Ignatius Willis,” Father Carmody said.

“He was at our party last night,” Phil added.

“Well, he's dead, all right. I'll call in and have them come take the body away.”

“They'll be able to tell if he died naturally, I trust,” Father Carmody said.

Jimmy said, “Of course.”

Phil took the plastic sack from the old priest and showed it to Jimmy.

“What about it?”

“It was found in his mouth.”

“In his mouth.”

Laura spoke up. “Just stuffed in. I took it out, It seemed the right thing to do.”

Jimmy said nothing. He held the plastic sack to get a better looked at its contents.

“You know what it is, don't you?” he asked Phil.

“The kind of towel that hangs from a golf ball washer.”

“Where's the nearest one?”

Father Carmody came with them. At Jimmy's request, so did Laura.

Larry Douglas, left to guard the body, was devastated. It was his dream to move from campus security to the South Bend police force, and he thought Jimmy Stewart favored this plan.

The ball washer was just off the first tee. A ball washer but no towel.

Jimmy put out his arms as they approached. “If this is where it came from, we don't want to muck up any prints.”

Prints there were, many old ones, others seemingly fresh.

Jimmy told Laura to cover the area with plastic. “Let's hope one of these matches the ones you covered on the green.”

Laura was aglow with the understated praise.

Father Carmody said, as they returned to the putting green, “Maybe we'll find Iggie Willis's shoe prints by that washer.”

3

Coach critic killed
was the headline in the local paper, story by P. G. Grafton. He had written beneath that “Putting Out,” but it had been deleted by Copey, his editor.

“Why?”

“It depends on how you pronounce it.”

Copey explained the ambiguity, but Grafton, who seemed to have hidden behind a bush in Eden when the apple was eaten, did not understand. The explanation became more detailed. In the end, the editor settled for the suggestion “Putt-ing Out,” and that is how it was printed.

Grafton was a self-made reporter, whose models would not have figured in any ordinary course of journalism. Not for him the weary train of w's—who, where, what, when, and the rest. Grafton did not write, he composed; he saw the facts that he was narrating through the medium of his imagination. Why else were they called the media? The body on the putt-ing green on campus had been only a tragic object until Grafton googled the name Ignatius Stephen Willis and came upon the Web site CheerCheerFor
Old
NotreDame.com. He would not have described the inspiration that then came to him with the banality of a light bulb going on over his narrow, sparsely thatched head. Such an intuition was too sacred for that. Reading the Web site's passionate comments on the current Notre Dame football season and thinking of that body on the greensward—he looked up the word—something more compelling than logic linked the two beyond any doubt in the reportorial mind. A critic of Charlie Weis, a man who had rallied his fellow alumni into a virtual army of protest, demanding that the coach be sacked, had been definitively silenced.

The suggestion was made impressionistically, of course. Let the reader's engaged mind slide from one event as cause to the other as effect. Grafton thought of his method as Socratic. The reader could connect the dots. (In his mind, he deleted that cliché.) Only later did he learn that the prudent Copey had run the story by the paper's lawyer before giving his final okay. Such caution amused Grafton. If Notre Dame had been stung by the story, they certainly would not have drawn even more attention to it by protesting or threatening to go to law.

*   *   *

Grafton was particularly lucky that Feeney, the coroner, had reached a tentative verdict before his story achieved its final form. Until then, there had been ambiguity. The towel from the golf ball washer on the first tee of the old Burke course seemed an unlikely murder weapon, although Grafton was ready with a headline:
THROWING IN THE TOWEL
. There were no signs of violence on the body, Feeney explained to Grafton, reviewing his gruesome probing.

Feeney was a nervous little fellow who had been talked into running for the elective office of coroner in order to ensure that his father would continue to be favored by the local political bosses.

“I did a residency in pathology at Mayo's,” Feeney said mournfully. “They wanted me back there on the staff.”

“You could have been somebody?”

“How many pathologists do you know? It's not fame, Grafton. Not money either. I could have been rich in ten years in private practice. No, it was the admiration and approval of men I admired and wished to model myself after. It all went up in smoke.”

“Is your father still working?”

“Well, he's drawing a salary.”

“What do you make of that green towel?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why was it stuffed in his mouth?”

“Search me. All I know is it didn't kill him.”

A light had begun to shine in Feeney's eyes, and Grafton knew they were coming to the big conclusion.

“Something toxic, Grafton. Something taken internally.”

“Poison?”

“Do you drink?”

“Alcohol? Very, very rarely. It is the bane of my profession.”

“Just about anything can kill, you know. Things usually taken in moderation, or in less than murderous doses. Think of drowning. Willis's body had as much alcohol as blood in it. You could call it a kind of suicide.”

Feeney might want to call it that, only it turned out he wouldn't—what basis did he have?—but Grafton wanted murder. Somehow it all seemed to hinge on the green towel with
ND
on it that had been taken from the ball washer on the first tee.

Grafton had omitted from his story what he had wrung out of Stewart about the shoe prints. All it came down to was that prints by the ball washer matched the ones on the putting green that had fascinated Laura.

“That doesn't tell us whose shoes they are.”

“Not Willis's?”

“None of his prints are among those around the ball washer.”

“All you have to do is find a shoe that matches those prints.”

“What a brilliant idea.”

For a moment, Grafton had thought Stewart was serious.

4

On Monday, Roger went in his golf cart to the Morris Inn, approaching it from the rear. A huge tent erected to accommodate the overflow of celebrating fans made it impossible to see if Mimi O'Toole was waiting for him on the patio. He should have called to confirm the luncheon date to which he had agreed during the distractions of their party Saturday night. Roger managed to maneuver his vehicle into the great tent. He left it there and lumbered through the tent. When he emerged onto the sidewalk leading to the patio, there were expressions of astonishment and at least one of welcome on the face of a pretty little lady at one of the tables. She raised her hand and several pounds of jewelry slipped from her wrist toward her elbow.