Green Thumb (13 page)

“Oh, I'm going up.”

“You didn't want to go down?”

“It doesn't matter.” Again the vague smile.

The doors closed and Roger stood watching the indicator above the door as the car rose to the thirteenth floor. Did she ride up and down out of boredom, to put off her task? It seemed a symbol of his own vacillation. He hurried away. He did not want to be there when the car returned and learn whether the girl and her cart were still on it.

*   *   *

He had parked his golf cart on the west side of the library and when he went out to it, Paul Sadler was seated behind the wheel.

“Paul!” He had been introduced to the boy by Francie and, given the burden of his thoughts, recognized him immediately. “Just the man I want to see.”

“So Father Casperson told me. I was sure this was your cart.”

His plan had been to enlist Francie and arrange a meeting with Paul, but he was glad now that he did not have to involve her. Roger, with an assist from Paul, got into the passenger side of the cart and handed Paul the key.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere. We can talk as we ride.”

Paul put the cart in reverse and backed away, then shifted and they were off. The walks were filled with teenaged girls and their mothers, on campus for a flag-twirling convention, so Paul took the road that led past the Center for Social Concerns toward the firehouse. Roger was considering how to begin when Paul spoke.

“You visited my room.”

“Yes.”

“You should have called first.”

“I did. I wanted to make sure you weren't in.”

Under the bill of his baseball cap, Paul frowned straight ahead. Roger went on: “I had noticed your window box from below and wanted to get a look at it.”

Paul paused at a stop sign and then continued north. When they came to a barrier, the arm lifted and Paul drove on.

“Have you told anyone?”

“What would I tell them?”

“What you discovered.”

“It is the significance of what I discovered that matters.”

“You think I killed my uncle.”

“Did you?”

“No.” But he had hesitated before he said it.

Was this the sort of toying with the truth he himself had been guilty of with Father Casperson and Francie? “I didn't kill him, the water did”? As Lord Jim might have explained his desertion of the
Patna
by saying that he hadn't jumped, his feet had.

“If that is true, there's an end to it.”

“You don't believe me.”

Paul was hunched over the wheel as if their speed was considerably more than ten or fifteen miles an hour.

At Douglas Road they were held up by traffic, but then they crossed and continued along the road past the Credit Union.

“Where are we going, Paul?”

“You said just drive.”

It occurred to Roger that if Paul were lying—and that seemed almost certain—he was in a possible predicament, riding away from the main campus in this way. Ahead were the great fields used for parking on football days, now uneven expanses of grass. Paul bumped across them and came to a stop under the shade of a tree. They were in the middle of a vast field, visible enough if anyone were about but far from any actual witnesses. Above them, a plane descended slowly toward the airport, its wheels lowered. Paul turned to Roger and pushed back the bill of his cap.

“You could get me into a lot of trouble if you tell anyone what you found.”

“Deadly nightshade.”

Paul seemed surprised. “I mean the marijuana.”

“You could get rid of that.”

“I got rid of the entire window box. There's nothing to be found anymore.”

“I see.”

“But you could still say what you saw.”

“For many reasons, I would rather not.”

“But you will.”

“Tell me about your uncle.”

“I didn't like him, if that's what you mean.”

“Why?”

Paul lifted his hands from the steering wheel as if he were about to pray, then dropped them. “I wouldn't know where to begin. It has to do with my father.”

“Tell me.”

As Paul spoke, Roger felt his difficulty increase. It was impossible not to sympathize with a son who thought his father ill treated by his uncle.

“Not that he ever complains about it. He couldn't have been so marginalized if he hadn't allowed it.”

“And now he is the head of the family whether he likes it or not.”

“He will probably want me to take Uncle Mort's place.”

“Ah.”

“You'd have to know my father to understand.”

“Is he coming down?”

“That might have been his plane landing just now.”

Roger's apprehension at being with the one he thought might have killed Mortimer Sadler had dissipated. Was to know all to forgive all, after all? But how could he overlook what he suspected Paul of having done? What if neither Father Casperson nor Francie had noticed the window box? He had not drawn attention to it, but rather asked the priest to look for a copy of
The Republic
on Paul's desk, choosing a title he was certain would not be there.

“So what do you want me to do, Paul?”

“Nothing.”

“That is asking a lot. I am a private investigator, you know.”

“Who hired you?”

“The university asked my brother to monitor the investigation for them. And we are partners.”

“Would you mention the marijuana?”

“No.”

Paul looked relieved. “Then there's nothing to tell. Do you know who gave me the deadly nightshade seeds?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. O'Kelly. Francie's mother.”

“She did!”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Oh, she just talked about what an interesting plant it is. And it is. But you can see why I don't want it mentioned.”

“Tell me.” But Roger felt a renewal of dread.

“I took her to my room to show her the plant.”

A simple sentence but fraught with implications. Paul did not have to spell out what his own fears and suspicions were. But he did.

“She took some of the berries and a leaf or two.”

“Maybe we should head back.”

“Are you going to tell all this?”

“I wouldn't know what to say.”

And that, he considered, as they went back across the bumpy field toward campus, was the truth. Maybe not the whole truth, but the truth.

28

Her mother was spending the afternoon with a woman she described as a townie, a classmate who had settled in South Bend with her family and who had come to pick up Maureen, certain she could not follow the directions to her house. Alone, Francie had tried not to imagine what the point of Roger Knight's mysterious visit to Paul's room had been. But she couldn't avoid the thought that it had something to do with the death of Mortimer Sadler.

Vivian was busy with her mother, which was just as well. Francie felt a need to be by herself, but she had no inclination to sit alone in a room in the Morris Inn, brooding. The keys to the rental car were on the dresser and Francie thought of their golf clubs, hers and her mother's, in the trunk of the car. This suggested a way to while away the time.

She went downstairs and out to the car, drove to the campus entrance, and talked her way past the gate guard.

“I'm going to golf,” she told him.

“If you want Warren, it's over on Douglas Road.”

“No, I want the old course.”

He waved her through, and she drove to Rockne and found a parking place beyond the building housing campus security. She popped open the trunk and hesitated. Her mother's clubs were on wheels. Francie's plan was to go out to what had once been the sixteenth fairway and hit a few balls. She got her mother's clubs from the trunk and soon was heading out the ninth fairway, keeping to the edge because there were golfers approaching the tee. Five minutes later she had reached the truncated sixteenth, now a practice hole.

It was when she unzipped a pocket to get out some balls that she found the plastic bag. Curious, she took it out and held it to the light. The berries were bright and the leaves still fresh looking. An awful thought occurred to her when she realized where she had seen such leaves before: in her mother's herb garden at home. Deadly nightshade.

More thoughts roared through her mind like the cars of a train. She actually looked around, boxing the compass, fearful that she was being observed. She was about to stuff the plastic bag back where she had found it when it struck her that it would be the equivalent of pointing a finger at her mother. In a moment she made up her mind.

She took a sand wedge from the bag and hurried to the fence that separated the fairway from the extension of Cedar Grove Cemetery. She chopped at the turf, pulling away the grass and making a hole. Then she dropped the plastic bag into it, covered it over, and stamped the spot with her shoe. It was like repairing a divot. When she hurried back to her mother's golf bag she felt that now the two of them shared a terrible secret. She dropped a ball, improved the lie with the sand wedge whose face was caked with dirt, then swung deliberately, striking the ball. It rose, describing a perfect arc and then fell. Short of the green.

*   *   *

“Where have you been?”

“I went out to hit a few balls.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Hasn't Vivian called?”

“I'll call her.”

“Not right away. Francie?”

She turned to her mother, but avoided meeting her eyes.

“I love your father, Francie. The separation wasn't my idea.”

“Was it his?”

“He thinks he is in love with Laura Kennedy.”

“Did he really knock Mortimer Sadler down?”

“Yes!” There was the thrill of pleasure in her mother's voice. But she added, in a somber voice, “Little did I realize that that was the beginning of the end.”

“Because of Mortimer Sadler?”

“I suppose you could say that.”

“Would you?”

“It's as good as an explanation as any.”

“And reason enough to kill him?”

“Francie! Your father would never harm a single soul.”

“I don't think he would.”

“How I wish your father were here now.”

“Why don't you ask him to come?”

“Would you?”

The prospect of her parents' reunion was a powerful incentive. She telephoned her father in Minneapolis.

“Come to South Bend!” he cried. “What for?”

“Mother is in trouble, Dad. Serious trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Francie turned away from her mother as she told him. Mortimer Sadler's death. Police questioning. “They're harassing Mom.” It seemed a pardonable exaggeration. She wanted her mother to seem in need of her father's support. He did not interrupt. Afterward, he was silent. Then, “I'll be down as soon as I can.”

Her radiant smile when she turned to her mother answered the question in Maureen's eyes.

It was a moment when she might have accused her mother, told her what she had discovered, told her what she had done with the plastic bag filled with parts of the poisonous flower. But by burying it, she had already entered into a pact of silence. Whatever her mother had done, Francie knew she would never be the one to accuse her.

“Now I am going to call Vivian. We may go do something.”

“Oh, good.”

29

Dennis Grantley sat at a corner table in the bar of the Morris Inn, Agnes Walston across from him, gazing soulfully into his eyes. In street clothes, Agnes had shed her persona as long-time waitress at the Sorin Restaurant in the Inn, and on this, her day off, was (as she put it) all gussied up and dying to see the town. The prospect of an unsettling evening did not appeal to Grantley. He had accepted Agnes's flirtation for years and managed to keep the woman under control. Agnes had metamorphosed from divorcée into widow, thus removing the convenient impediment of a husband. Of course, Agnes had not been dissuaded in her ardor by Grantley's exaggerated account of the retirement package a grateful university had conferred upon him. She thought he was kidding when he said he had a room in the firehouse.

“There are great new steakhouses out on Grape Road and Main Street.”

“The mall? I can't drive a golf cart out there.”

Agnes giggled. Whenever Grantley spoke the truth she thought he was kidding even as she accepted his prevarications as gospel truth.

“We can take my car.”

“I'm not a gigolo.”

“What's that?”

“What I'm not.”

She let it go. One of her assumptions was that Grantley's long stay at Notre Dame made him an intellectual and that meant he could say unintelligible things from time to time. She sat back and arranged her décolletage, not an exercise in modesty. She wore a black suit and the jacket was not unlike the effect of Grantley wearing a suit coat without a shirt. A lot of Agnes was on display, and Grantley felt half-remembered stirrings of concupiscence. But if she was an occasion of sin, it was a remote one. Grantley's few excursions into the mysteries of the flesh had taken place years ago and all he remembered was the shame afterward, increased by the need to confess his transgressions, receive absolution, and be restored to the ranks of those who had a fighting chance of getting into heaven.

“Are you Catholic, Agnes?”

“Only on Sundays. Most Sundays,” she added.

“What kind of name is Walston?”

“It was my husband's name.”

“What was your maiden name?”

“Chorzempa.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“Polish.”

She had been raised on the west side of South Bend, once an ethnic stronghold with Poles and Hungarians in large supply, their rival churches standing shoulder to shoulder.