Irish Alibi (11 page)

“She likes Tabb's poetry?”

“I think he was some kind of friend of the family.”

“Do bring her next time.”

He brought her by that afternoon when he noticed Roger's golf cart parked outside his office in Brownson. There were those who wondered how the old building had survived the wrecking mania of recent years. Comparatively new buildings, like the University Club, were scheduled for the wrecking ball, but Brownson was as old as a Notre Dame building could be, and here it was in the third millennium providing office space to those on the lower rungs of the faculty. Roger was housed there because his first-floor office was easily accessible from the parking lot.

He greeted the young couple with delight. “I understand your family knew John Bannister Tabb.”

“My mother must have dozens of his poems by heart.”

Most of Tabb's poems were short, but even so, this was tribute indeed.

“It's because he was Catholic. A priest. My mother insists that Scarlett O'Hara and her family were Catholic.”

“I think she's right.”

So they talked of John Bannister Tabb, the scion of a wealthy Virginia family who had been a blockade runner for the South and been taken prisoner.

“He met Sidney Lanier in prison.”

But Roger couldn't keep his mind on such lore. Talking with Sarah made it impossible to forget that her brother faced possible expulsion for toppling the statue of Father Corby. Jackson, the man whose truck had been stolen, had identified Malcolm Kincade as the student who had driven off with his vehicle.

“Why did he confess?”

Sarah pursed her lips. “It's a secret.”

“Not that he confessed.”

“No. Why.”

“Oh, come on, Sarah,” Caleb said. “You can trust Professor Knight.”

“Oh, well, it won't stay a secret.”

It all turned on the fact that the Kincade boys were identical twins. Jackson had identified one of them. Soon he would be induced to identify the other as the student who had stolen his truck.

“Only one of them did it, but it will be impossible to say which one,” Sarah concluded.

“What an alibi,” Caleb said.

8

Feeney was a political hostage in the coroner's office, his acceptance of a place on the ballot some years ago the condition of his father's continuing to be cared for by the local political machine. This act of piety had blasted his career. After a residency in pathology at the Mayo Clinic, he had been on the brink of the kind of future he had long dreamt of, a combination of medicine and research. Instead he had ended in the coroner's office as assistant to Jankowski, who, like Feeney's father, was a beneficiary of political largesse. Whenever Jankowski pretended to the knowledge his position suggested was his, Feeney faced a problem in diplomacy.

“Smothered?”

This had been Jankowski's explanation of the death of the woman who had been found in the Tranquil Motel on 31.

“Probably a pillow. There must have been half a dozen pillows on that bed.”

Feeney said nothing. Jankowski's theory was a logical possibility, of course, but was hardly compatible with the bruises on the woman's neck.

Kimberley, Feeney's assistant, was reluctant to assist him in his professional task, and who could blame her. He couldn't stand dead bodies himself. So why pathology? The idea had been that he would spend his life examining tissue, doing biopsies, far from the sick, let alone the dead. Besides, Feeney felt guilty for persuading Kimberley to stay on here, rather than continue taking courses at the local campus of Indiana University. Maybe persuasion wasn't the right word.

“I don't want a career,” she had said.

How old-fashioned she was. A husband, a home, children, a life as much like her parents' as possible, that was her dream. She was very good with paperwork, what there was of it. Her main function, though, was to provide Feeney with company during the long, boring hours in the morgue. This was selfish. He knew that. At first he had thought that just possibly, despite the seven- or eight-year difference in their ages, romance might bloom in that chilly domain. But Kimberley was deferential and he was shy and nothing happened, and now she had more appropriate admirers: Henry Grabowski and, before him, Larry Douglas.

“What happened to Larry?”

“Nothing happened to him.”

“He used to come around.”

“That was in the line of duty,” she said primly.

As if to give plausibility to her white lie, Larry stopped by to ask what they had learned about the woman who had been found dead in the Tranquil Motel.

“You'll have to ask Dr. Feeney.” Kimberley's tone was several degrees below room temperature.

Feeney had followed this exchange from his office.

Kimberley brought Larry in. “You remember Officer Douglas, don't you, Doctor?”

“Sit down, Larry.”

“Should I shut the door, Doctor?”

“As you wish.”

She shut the door.

“What's wrong with her?” Larry asked.

“Perhaps you've broken her heart.”

“Did she say something?”

Good heavens. These were deep waters for Feeney, and he paddled quickly out of danger. “You came to see the corpse?”

“Can I?” How eager he was.

“Of course.”

Larry must be on the case. Feeney had learned from Kimberley when she had been interested in Larry that his ambition was to get on the South Bend police. Perhaps Feeney should speak to Casey. The politician owed him a favor for blighting his career.

They had to pass through Kimberley's office on their way to the elevator that would take them down into the morgue. Kimberley affected to be absorbed in her computer.

“We're going downstairs.”

“Do you want your calls transferred?”

“Just take messages.”

Larry's eagerness seemed to drop with the temperature as they descended, and when Feeney pulled out the drawer and pulled back the cloth that concealed the body, Larry let out a yelp.

“You say she was smothered,” he said when he could speak.

“That was Jankowski.” The alleged coroner might just as well have said that the woman had died because her breathing had stopped.

“That wasn't it?”

“Look at these bruises.”

Larry tried to look from about six feet away.

Feeney told him what those bruises probably meant. “You got the guy who did it yet?”

“Can we go back upstairs?”

Feeney covered the body and slid it away, and they went back to the elevator.

In his office, they settled down, and Larry developed his theory of the case. “The police, the South Bend police, are concentrating on two guys, her husband and her boyfriend. As they should, as they should. I think there may be a campus connection.”

“How so?”

Larry had just come from the motel, where he had talked to a woman who tended bar there. “She had been working Saturday night. The woman we just looked at was there. A Southern belle with a tinkling laugh. According to Phyllis, she drew men like flies. One of them was a student. The way it came out was she brought up the incident on campus. Pulling down the statue of Father Corby?”

“I read about that.”

“So the kid who admitted doing that was in the motel bar that night. They all scattered after the statue came down, and apparently that's where he went. According to Phyllis, it was like a big reunion between him and Madeline O'Toole. They're both from Memphis.”

A complication in the story was that it was some other guy Madeline O'Toole had taken off to her suite. But the kid, Kincade, stayed on in the bar, and then he asked at the desk what her room number was. “Only he asked for Mrs. O'Toole. They said there was no Mrs. O'Toole there. He insisted there was. That's when he asked Phyllis to explain it all to the manager. She told him to talk with the bookkeeper Kitty.

“The bookeeper?”

“Phyllis says she stays late on football weekends.”

“Why?”

“To be shocked and scandalized.”

“She figured out he meant the woman in 302. And he went down there and began pounding on the door until she came to the door and told him to go away.”

There was more. Later still, Kincade and the man who had gone off with Madeline O'Toole to 302 came back to the bar together. “They closed the place.”

“So.”

Larry pulled on his earlobe. “It's what happened afterward that I'm interested in.”

“You figure Kincade went back…”

Larry nodded.

“How are you going to prove a theory like that?”

Larry sat back. “That depends on what the lab picked up when they went over the suite.”

9

Jimmy Stewart had Quintin Kelly put in an interview room and then sat at his desk looking over the report from the crime scene. The clothing Madeline O'Toole had hung in the closet suggested that she had come for a week rather than a weekend: a pantsuit, two dressy dresses, a pair of flats, a pair of heels, and running shoes to go with the warm-up suit. Had she gone for a run while registered at the motel? He would check that with Michael Beatty or, a source with more curiosity, Phyllis. Lingerie, sweaters, two pair of slacks. A purse as well as a kit bag for cosmetics and the like. Six hundred dollars in the wallet, along with a deck of credit cards, all of them in the name of Madeline O'Toole. The list of paraphernalia from the bathroom and bedroom was lengthy—brush, comb, hair spray, three hairpins, lipstick, perfume, creams, ointments, on and on. The glasses and bottle and ashtray had been gathered up as well, and the bedclothes. Nothing on the list jumped out at him. He buzzed Officer Hudak and told her to show Mr. Kelly in.

“In your office?”

“That's right.” It seemed best to keep the interview on a less threatening level.

Kelly came in glowering, looked around the office, and shook his head. “Now what the hell is this all about?”

“Well, whenever we have a dead body we like to seek all the help we can get in finding out what happened.”

Kelly sat. “I still can't believe this.”

“When did you last see her?”

“When exactly did she die?”

“Mr. Kelly, she was killed.”

Again he shook his head.

“Okay. You and Madeline O'Toole checked into the motel on Friday afternoon as Mr. and Mrs. Kelly.”

“I suppose they just assumed that.”

“You were in the same suite.”

Kelly looked away. “Yes.”

“None of your things seem to have been in the suite.”

“I moved out.”

“When was that?”

“Sunday afternoon.”

“Why did you do that?”

“That's a private matter.”

“Not any longer. You may have been the last one to see her alive. You did see her when you took your things, didn't you?”

He hesitated. “Yes, I saw her.”

“To say good-bye.”

Kelly sat forward. “Look, I hate to say this about her, but the woman was unstable. Emotionally. She seems to have met every man in the motel.”

“There were complaints from other guests.”

“I'm not surprised. It could have been any of her new friends, I suppose.”

“We like to have a motive. You seem to have a pretty good one. You brought her to South Bend, you were shacked up together—”

“Now wait a minute.”

“What would you call it?”

“Oh, call it whatever you want.” He looked desolate. “We talked marriage.” He might have been describing an abandoned scientific theory.

“I want to be accurate.”

“We shared a suite, yes.”

“And went to the game together.”

“I went to the game. She was living it up in the bar.”

“You didn't take her to the game?”

“She wasn't interested in the game.”

“So why did she come all the way to South Bend? There must be bars in Memphis.”

“I asked her.”

“Just to be company.”

“Look, I am perfectly willing to be all the help I can.”

“Good. I understand you're a publisher.”

“Juniper Press.”

“In Athens, Georgia.”

“Madeline was one of our most successful authors. Her novels weren't literature, but people seem to like that sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Romance.”

“So her death represents a loss to Juniper Press.”

“It certainly does.” He liked that.

“I suppose there was a quarrel when you saw her on Sunday afternoon.”

“I wouldn't call it a quarrel.”

“What would you call it?”

“I told her what I thought of her.”

“How did she react?”

He thought about that. A look of dejection. “As if she expected it.”

“Let's go back to Saturday. You went to the game. When did you return to the motel?”

“I didn't.”

“You didn't?”

“I ran into O'Toole in the bookstore, where he was signing books. He's a classmate of mine. He's a sportswriter in Atlanta. He invited me to watch the game with him in the press box.”

“You just ran into him?”

“Yes.”

“Nearly a hundred thousand people, and you just happened to run into Magnus O'Toole.”

“I told you, he was signing copies of his book in the bookstore. There were posters.”

“Is he one of your authors?”

“Definitely not. His book, if you can call it that, was aimed at Notre Dame fans. I don't publish that sort of thing.”

“Just romances?”

“And regional history. Southern history.”

“You a Southerner?”

“Macon, Georgia. Originally.”

“And now Athens?”

“Yes.”

“You say you didn't return to the motel after the game.”

“I didn't come back until Sunday, nearly noon.”