Green Thumb (15 page)

“You flatter me.”

“I accuse you. You are a magpie of gossip; news sticks to you as flies do to flypaper. What do you know of the doings of those members of the class of 1977 who are here for a reunion?”

Grantley thought about it. What surer route to a recovered sense of innocence than to accuse others?

“So you've heard about Maureen O'Kelly and Chris Toolin.”

“If I had, I wouldn't be pumping you for information.”

“It probably doesn't mean anything,” Grantley said in a tone that implied the opposite.

Carmody glared at him. “Don't be oblique. What are you talking about?”

Grantley opted for directness and told him what Agnes had found out about Maureen's going to Toolin's room in the Morris Inn. “After midnight,” he added.

“As you say, it probably means nothing.”

Grantley stared at the votive lamps flickering in the cavern of the Grotto. Our Lady, the epitome of purity and innocence, gazed down on him. “Or they could be in it together.”

“‘It'?”

“The poisoning of Mortimer Sadler.”

“Why?”

“In her case, it's obvious. There was enmity between him and the woman.”

“Don't abuse Scripture.”

“And she was Eve to his Adam.”

“You're not making sense.”

But it was clear to Grantley that Father Carmody had taken to heart his interpretation of the midnight tryst of Maureen O'Kelly and Christopher Toolin, co-conspirators up to no good in the night.

Father Carmody got to his feet. “You are a reservoir of iniquity.”

“And obliquity?”

“That too.” Father Carmody went up the steps to the parking lot and his car. Grantley took out his rosary again and began to pray it with attention and devotion. He might have been saying his penance.

32

When the cell phone went off in his briefcase, Cal Swithins at first had no idea what was happening. He was in his car at the time, parked in a lot at police headquarters, making notes for a dispatch to the
Chicago Tribune,
eschewing the press room lest the odious Raskow should be reminded of his professional duties. By the time he figured out that it was the phone Maddie Yost had given him, the better to have him at her beck and call, it had stopped ringing. With some difficulty, he managed to pick out the number of
The Shopper.

“I tried to reach you,” Maddie said without preamble.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Caller ID. Look, I want you to go out to the mall and get an extension from Boswell for his ad. Where are you now?”

“At police headquarters.”

“They'll never run an ad.” A pause. “Is something wrong?”

“Not if I get some rest.”

“Rest! Rest from what?”

Recent events had brought home to Swithins the demeaning trough into which his career had sunk. Imagine composing a column for a virtual illiterate like Maddie Yost. But even worse was the fact that she considered him a space salesman, not a writer. Dear God. Swithins's persistent investigation of the death of Mortimer Sadler now carried the promise of lifting him from the jaws of defeat and putting him on a more exalted path than he had ever trod before. The
Chicago Tribune
had expressed interest in receiving his accounts of the strange murder on the Notre Dame campus. Chicago was the home of vast numbers of Notre Dame alumni, and the city's population could be evenly divided into those who loved Notre Dame and those who hated her. Either way, interest in such a scandal would be intense.

Swithins would not have been human if he did not imagine the reaction of Lyman Mendax to the news that the reporter he had rejected had been good enough for Chicago. At one end of the spectrum of his hopes, Swithins imagined himself the regular Notre Dame correspondent of the Chicago paper, feeding it daily dispatches on campus events. Not sports, of course. Platoons of sports writers descended on South Bend on game days and covered each event like a blanket. Swithins frowned at the cliché. He must keep his style fresh and innovating, but accessible. At the other extreme of hope was a summons to Chicago, installation in an office with the title of feature writer. His eyes narrowed in pleasant thought.

He was shaken from his reverie by Maddie's nagging voice.

“Go see Boswell before you collapse.” Her voice was heavy with disbelief.

“Your wish is my command.”

“That wasn't a wish.”

She hung up. Swithins searched for and found the appropriate buttons on the diabolical little device that seemed a leash Maddie Yost had him on. (Dangling prepositions were okay in the demotic style to be cultivated.) He stuffed it back in his briefcase with symbolic violence. Boswell indeed. Boswell was fighting a losing battle with the big chains, trying to run a bookstore on the old model. The truth was, Swithins liked the place. He and Boswell had spent many happy hours in the back room, sipping red wine and reviewing the disappointments of their lives.

“Of course I want to write,” Boswell had confided, sniffing. His nervous sniffing was a constant of his conversation. “That is why I envy you.”

Ah, if Boswell only knew how that confession made him plummet in Swithins' estimation. The reporter had sufficient self-knowledge to realize that anyone who envied him was on a very low rung of the ladder of life indeed. Boswell had rummaged in a drawer and come out with a legal pad whose top sheet was covered with a penciled scrawl. “Notes for my novel,” he said sheepishly.

Boswell ran a modest space ad in
The Shopper
that featured quotations from his favorite authors: Edna Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, John Bannister Tabb—choices that betrayed his age and his hopeless lack of fit in the contemporary scene.

Swithins drove to the mall and was soon ensconced with Boswell in his back room. Mrs. Hitts, his clerk, a deaf old lady who worked for peanuts out of love for books, minded the store.

“Of course I'll renew the ad,” Boswell said. He seemed in a manic phase. “John Bannister Tabb has worked his magic. I have had an extraordinary visitor.”

“Who?”

“You may not know him. Professor Roger Knight.”

“But I do know who he is.”

“He spent an hour with me.” Boswell rolled his eyes in ecstasy. “We talked of everything.” He sat forward. “He and his brother are investigating the murder at Notre Dame.”

Swithins's belief in Providence came roaring back. Maddie's importunate call suddenly seemed less an interruption of his Chicago dreams than an integral part of the scenario.

“And what did he say?”

“Oh, we talked of poisons. The man is a thesaurus of trivia. Of the best sort.”

“Do they have a suspect?”

“An old girlfriend, apparently. A classmate of the deceased.”

“Maureen O'Kelly?”

“That's the one. But mainly we talked of John Bannister Tabb. I didn't realize he was a priest.”

“Knight?”

“Tabb.”

While Boswell reminisced about Roger Knight's visit, Swithins resumed composing in his mind his dispatch to Chicago.
OLD CLASSMATE TARGET OF MURDER INVESTIGATION AT NOTRE DAME
.

“What's that sound?” Boswell asked.

Swithins snapped out of it and looked at his briefcase. “I've got to go.” He rose.

“Is it an alarm clock?”

“More or less.”

33

When the history of Notre Dame is written, the names of the occupants of the Old Bastards table in the university club are unlikely to figure in it. Their academic careers had been undistinguished, they had left little mark on the place where they had lived out their days, yet in their own minds they were the epicenter of local events. At lunch the following day, the topic was the funeral of Mortimer Sadler, which had taken place that morning in the basilica of the Sacred Heart. Only Bruno had attended, and the others listened patiently to his unnecessarily lengthy description of the send-off that had been given a son of Notre Dame who had met his end in so equivocal a way.

“Who preached?”

“One of the vice presidents.”

A groan. The multiplication of those bearing that title was a frequent topic of complaint at the table. There were now vice presidents, associate vice presidents, and assistant vice presidents in obscene number.

“We've become a Mexican army—all generals.”

Bruno regained the floor and attempted to give a resume of the homily but was hooted down. None of the Old Bastards had held a classroom of students in thrall, but they were convinced to a man that they could have given a better sermon than the superfluous vice president.

“And I didn't even know the dead man,” Armitage Shanks said.

“Neither did the preacher,” Bruno said. “It was a terrible performance. He thought he was addressing the widow but he was looking in the wrong direction.”

“How did she take it?”

“Like Niobe, all tears,” said Bruno, surprising himself with the remembered phrase.

“Was he buried in Cedar Grove?”

“He will be buried in Minneapolis.”

“At least he had his funeral here.”

Silence fell as each considered that he, too, had such an appointment in Sacred Heart if not in Samarra, God only knew how soon. It is a peril of longevity that one outlives those who might have mourned him or at least shown up for the funeral. A month before, one of their number had succumbed and the members of the table had distributed themselves around in different pews in Sacred Heart, trying unsuccessfully to create the impression of a good turnout. The deceased represented one fewer attendant at their own final obsequies. The thought had brought on unsimulated sorrow. But for whom else do we weep at funerals if not ourselves?

Armitage Shanks called them to order by asking if the murderer of Mortimer Sadler had been found.

Bruno looked wise. “If only I was at liberty to say.”

“You are. Say it.”

“The university has put Philip Knight onto the case.”

“Who is he?”

“You know who he is.”

“Remind me.”

“The brother of Roger Knight.”

“
Obscurum per obscurius,
” murmured Angoscia.

“The fat endowed professor.”

“Endowed with fat?”

“He too is a private investigator.”

“A professor!”

“Before he joined the faculty. The two brothers worked together.”

“And they named him an endowed professor?”

“The Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies.”

“And they will solve the case?”

“The brother will.”

“The other brother.”

Debbie came sailing across the dining room to the table and pulled out a chair and sat. Her arrival drove gloom from the assembly and they all turned dentured smiles on her. But her manner was solemn.

“Have you heard?” she asked.

“What?”

“One of the students was taken to the hospital to have his stomach pumped out. He had the same poison in him that killed the man on the golf course.”

Appropriate murmurs and cries of surprise.

“What is his name?”

“Sadler.”

“No, no. The student. Sadler is the man who was murdered on the golf course.”

Debbie got huffy, as if her story was being questioned. “Well, that
is
the name I heard. Sadler.”

“The student?”

“Yes. Paul Sadler.”

PART THREE

34

Paul Sadler had made it to the elevator and descended to the first floor, which is why Father Casperson, hearing a weak scratching sound on his door, looked out and found the young man lying on the floor outside his room. His first instinct was to give absolution, after which he dashed to the phone and called 911. Next he called campus security. By the time he returned to Paul, he was certain Paul was dead, and he knelt beside him to pray. He was still kneeling there when the campus police arrived. They were followed soon after by the ambulance, and Father Casperson gave way to the paramedics, who were unsure what the problem was.

“Is he dead?” the priest asked in a strained voice.

“Not yet, anyway.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Sure.”

On the ride to the hospital, the priest spoke compulsively, saying that he had imagined filling in for the rector of Morrissey would be a restful stress-free time. He had never faced an emergency like this. As he spoke, his eyes never left Paul and his expression told what he dreaded.

In the ER, the doctor on duty assumed it was a drug overdose and ordered the patient's stomach pumped. This misconception saved Paul's life. Within hours, the poison in his system was identified. The police were notified at once, and Jimmy Stewart came, with the persistent Cal Swithins hard upon his heels. Stewart barred the reporter from entering the room in the ER where Paul still lay, awaiting transfer to a room in Intensive Care.

“How's he doing?” Stewart asked the nurse.

“You'll have to talk to the doctor.”

He showed her his identification.

“You'll still have to talk to the doctor.”

“Where is he?”

In reply, she pressed a buzzer and then left on squeaky running shoes. Paul's eyelids fluttered and Stewart leaned over him.

“What happened?”

The eyes opened. “Where am I?”

Stewart told him, adding what had been already done. “Tell me what you remember.”

The story was hardly audible and less than coherent, interspersed with groans as Paul felt the effect of the stomach pumping. A doctor came in in the midst of this, and ignored what was being said. His name tag read
ARINZI
.

“Deadly nightshade?” Stewart asked him.

Arinzi nodded. “That makes two, doesn't it?”

“Three.” Stewart got out his phone and punched a number. “Phil? Look, will you go over to the Morris Inn and have a talk with Maureen O'Kelly.” He added a cryptic account of what had happened. “I'll meet you there.”