Irish Alibi (19 page)

“Is it?”

“Only the fictional parts.”

“And what are they?”

“I told him the Underground Railroad figures in my new novel.”

“You also told him you came north in order to write about the South.”

“That is true.”

“That you told him?”

James smiled. “Are you a detective or what?”

“I thought you'd never ask. I'm a professor at Notre Dame. Roger Knight.”

“I went to Notre Dame. What a place it was in those days. Frank O'Malley, John T. Frederick, John Edward Hardy, John Logan.” James said the names as if he were reciting the litany of the saints. “They made me want to be a writer.”

“Did you go to the game last Saturday?”

James smiled sardonically. “I never went to a single game when I was a student. But last week I made a little pilgrimage to campus. Everyone was excited about the coming game, and I thought I might go. As a lark. I drove down on Saturday. Do you know what I was asked to pay for a ticket?”

“So you decided to watch the game in the bar of the Tranquil Motel.”

“How could I resist a place with a name like that?”

“And you met Madeline O'Toole.”

“A terribly mixed-up woman. When she said she was from Memphis, I understood.”

“She was a writer.”

James hesitated. “I suppose I should speak well of the dead.”

“But not of her fiction?”

“I am sure it could be read with enjoyment,” James said wryly.

“You told her that you are the author of many thrillers.”

James sat back. “How did you know that?”

“She spread the good news.”

He thought about it for a moment, then smiled. “Fame at last.”

“It doesn't bother you?”

“Why should it? Some people might be impressed.”

“Why would you tell her something like that?”

James studied Roger. “I don't know how well versed you are in the art of seduction.”

“I am not even well prosed.”

“Very good. Anyway, it seemed a way to her heart. And so it was. We toddled off to bed as fellow hacks.”

“And you returned on Sunday.”

“Lust is a tyrannical vice. The lady and I had had a pleasant time. An aesthetic personality always imagines that repetition is possible.”

“Kierkegaard.”

“What do you teach?”

“I am the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies.”

“Good Lord.”

“Tell me about Sunday afternoon.”

“No need to describe the heated anticipation with which I drove from Dowagiac. I arrived, parked, let myself in by the north door, and hurried to the suite. When I had left the night before, I took the door key with me, thinking I would be right back. It enabled me to enter the suite without needing to knock. I found the body in the bedroom.”

“What was your first thought?”

“Flight.”

And fly he had, or drive, putting miles between himself and the grim scene in that motel bedroom. The beard? Of course he had feared someone might have seen him there. He did not want to get mixed up in that kind of mess.

“And now you are.”

“Stewart was right. This does sound like fiction. Madeline O'Toole fiction.”

“I think you're telling the truth.”

“Thank you.”

Roger got to his feet with an effort that Rufus James observed from a seated position. He turned his clean-shaven face up to Roger.

“Help me.”

7

The Kincades, father, sons, and daughter, along with Caleb Lanier, were having dinner at Papa Vino's in Mishawaka. The twins were subdued, having spent several hours in conference with Crumley, the lawyer, who seemed pessimistic about their chances of walking off scot-free. He would not be representing them at their disciplinary hearing at Notre Dame, but that was the least of their worries.

“They'll throw you out,” Mr. Kincade said. The thought did not seem to sadden him. “They should have thrown me out. Well, maybe Father Carmody can work his magic for you, too.”

“We can transfer to Georgia Tech.”

“And be scratched by cheerleaders.”

Sarah thought that her brothers were safe now that the man who had killed Madeline O'Toole was under arrest. She actually beamed at her brothers, full of admiration. She said that they reminded her of the twins in
Gone with the Wind
.

“Weren't they killed?”

“Oh, shut up.”

Malcolm told his father that Caleb was the guilty one. He had written a story praising Father Corby's role as a Union chaplain in the Civil War.

“He was a brave man.”

“That's all Caleb meant to say.” Sarah patted his hand.

Malcom reached for the carafe of wine, and his father stayed his hand. “You're on the water wagon, son.”

“I was going to toast Father Corby.”

“Well, in that case.”

Glasses were raised in honor of the third president of Notre Dame. Caleb proposed another, to John Bannister Tabb.

“Good boy,” Mr. Kincade said. “I'll drink to that.”

They all did.

They went on to drink to Caleb's namesake Sidney Lanier, fellow prisoner of Tabb. Musicians both, but it was Lanier who, after the war, thought back sadly to the wild emotions with which he and others had marched off to battle. With experience, the resonant abstract words had given way to grimmer realities, and soldiers in the field tried to forget the endless political arguments that continued in the cities, besieged and unbesieged, behind them. At times there seemed more camaradie between the boys facing one another in opposite trenches than between either army and its wrangling civilians.

“There were civil wars on both sides in the Civil War,” Mr. Kincade intoned, and earned disappointed glances from his sons. Caleb said to Sarah that they must bring her father around to meet Roger Knight.

“I apologized to the man whose truck I stole,” Malcolm said.

“That may help you with Father Carmody,” said the father.

“Jackson,” Malcom said. “Do you know what his nickname is?”

“Jackson's?”

“Yes.” Malcolm looked around the table brightly. “Stonewall!”

8

Roger returned from talking with Rufus James in a pensive mood and gave only half an ear to the conversation going on between his brother and Jimmy Stewart. The tone of their voices conveyed the satisfaction they felt that they could consider the murder or homicide—Fauxhall had still not made up his mind what charge to bring against James—of Madeline O'Toole solved. Roger sat at the trestle table, shuffling through all the papers that were still there. It was when he was studying the list of items taken from suite 302 at the Tranquil Motel that the thought came. He sat back, his massive face seeming to reflect the sorting out that was going on in his head. The voices in the room became inaudible.

Roger rose slowly, put on a great hooded jacket, and shuffled to the door. “I'm going out.”

Phil turned, distracted. “Where?”

“The Tranquil Motel.”

He rode the wave of laughter into the great outdoors.

It was later afternoon now, gathering dusk, and what he proposed to do was doubly dangerous, driving through the twilight in his golf cart. But he thought not so much of the journey ahead as of its goal. Before turning the key in his golf cart, he got out his cell phone and made the call that told him his journey would not be in vain.

A golf cart was all very well on the roads and walks of campus, but once Roger had gone through the gate and headed north, he had to find less traveled roads, and he found them, parallel to 31. When he crossed Cleveland, he continued north for half a mile and then saw his way clear to head west. The twinkling sign of the motel was visible through the gloaming.

Some minutes later, he pulled up at the entrance of the motel and began the great struggle to get out of the cart and onto his feet. The doors of the motel slid open at his approach, and when he came into the lobby, heads turned at the apparition. Roger's bulky figure looked as if he weighed more than three hundred pounds because of his open jacket. He flung back the hood, lumbered to the desk, and told the startled clerk that he wished to see Miss Callendar.

“Kitty?”

“I called twenty minutes ago.”

“I am the manager, Michael Beatty. Can I help you?”

“Yes, you can. Take me to Kitty Callendar.”

Beatty hesitated, as if he thought he should forewarn Kitty of this unusual visitor, but he came around the desk and led Roger down the hall, calling “Kitty, Kitty,” as they went. All Beatty lacked was a saucer of milk.

Kitty Callendar sat behind her desk, back firm against the back of her chair, her gathered hair pinned atop her head, a manhattan on the desk before her. On the monitor of her computer, from which she had turned when Roger appeared in her doorway, the logo of the motel changed positions on the screen.

“I telephoned,” Roger said.

“Are you the one who asked if I was still here?”

“The same.”

“Come in.”

Easier said than done, as it happened. A frontal assault pinned Roger's shoulders to the sides of the door, but by turning sideways and with an assist from Beatty he managed to squeeze inside. “Thank you,” Roger said sweetly but dismissively, and Beatty backed off down the hall.

“I would ask you to sit down, but…”

Roger smiled. “I can stand, thank you. My name is Roger Knight. You will have talked with my brother, Philip, who has been assisting Jimmy Stewart investigating the unfortunate death of Madeline O'Toole in this motel last weekend.”

“The terrible publicity was deserved,” Kitty said, chin up. “The things that go on in this motel!” She picked up her glass and sipped. “Adults are bad enough, but when you have a middle-aged woman seducing a boy!”

“I suppose you notice everything.”

“Have I any choice? I would have to be dumb and blind not to notice.”

“They have arrested a man and will charge him with homicide at least.”

“Let us hope that this time they have the right one.”

“I don't think they do.”

She sat more upright. “Really?”

“It was while studying the list of things taken from the suite in which the woman died that it struck me that you are the key to this whole sad business.”

“I have cooperated as best I can.”

Roger's hand rested on the Spanish Bible on the desktop, as if he were about to take an oath. He looked at what his hand rested on, then picked it up. “Spanish?”

“My great desire was to be a missionary.” She peered at Roger. “Your brother assured me that he is not a Roman.”

“Catholic? Oh, no. I'm the Catholic one.”

“Good heavens. Well, I hope you are ashamed of the behavior of your coreligionists. Imagine that woman, after a night of riot, going off to church with the boy she had led astray.”

“Well, her name was Madeline.”

“Mary Magdalene? She was a repentant sinner.”

“Let us hope that unfortunate woman was, too. At the last.”

“Far from it!”

“You were there, weren't you?”

“What do you mean?”

“It is so easy to overlook the small, significant thing. You lost some of your hairpins when you struggled with that woman.”

“Struggled with her?”

“Killed her.”

Silence in the office. On the computer screen the motel logo changed positions.

“That's nonsense.”

“Women do not use hairpins anymore. They are rarer than hair combs. But you need pins to keep your hair in that style, don't you? My Aunt Agatha did.”

“Please get out of this office.”

Roger was digging in his pocket for his cell phone when she came around the desk, heading right at him like a woman with a mission. He backed up toward the door and a moment later was in the doorway.

“Let me by.”

“I'm afraid I'm stuck.”

She pushed at him, but this only wedged him more tightly in the doorway. The fear that had begun when he mentioned the hairpins was now bright in her eyes. She began to beat on Roger's chest.

His hand was on his cell phone now, and he felt the vibration that he preferred to a ring. He took out the phone. “Phil?”

“Roger, where are you?”

“Where I said I was going. The Tranquil Motel. Get here as quickly as you can. And bring Jimmy.”

Kitty followed this conversation angrily. Again she pushed at Roger, trying to dislodge him from the doorway. She beat on his chest in frustration. And then, with preternatural calm, she returned to her desk, where she finished her drink and picked up her Bible. She was still reading it when Phil and Jimmy arrived.

PART FIVE

1

Despite Father Carmody's intercession, the Kincade twins were sent home for a semester's probation. This would postpone their graduation until the summer after their class graduated, but they would be retained on the roll of that year. Mr. Kincade found this an agreeable compromise.

The football season ended, midsemester came and went, and one February day, Caleb Lanier and Sarah Kincade were walking hand in hand on one of the lake paths. Any timidity Caleb had felt with Sarah was long since gone. She freed her hand, stooped, and filled her mittens with snow, trying to make a ball, but it was not wet enough. So she just rubbed the snow in Caleb's face and then set off down the path on the run. He caught up with her, and they tumbled together in the snow. He looked down into her taunting, laughing face.

“Sarah,
te amavi,
” he said.

“What?”

“It's Augustinian. Roger Knight suggested it.”

“What does it mean?”

“We must ask him.”

When they did ask the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies he became sheepish. “I hope it isn't sacrilegious.”