Irish Alibi (5 page)

“Is this a photograph of Sherman?” Babette asked, flourishing the paper.

“No, no. That's Father Corby.”

“Who's Father Corby?”

A reasonable question, but it was met with silence. Then a reedy voice spoke up, that of a little nerd from North Dakota. He might have been reciting in class.

Father William Corby had applied to the governor of New York and been assigned as chaplain to the Irish Brigade under General Thomas Meagher. Corby was at the Battle of Fair Oaks, of Antietam, of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania, sending the boys into battle with souls absolved of their sins. But it was at Gettysburg that the priest had risen to fame. The nerd from North Dakota indicated that the following passage in the article was taken from a history of Notre Dame written on the occasion of the centennial of the university by Father Arthur Hope.

The following morning the Irish Brigade was posted on Cemetery Ridge. In the valley below them was the little town. Just beyond the village, and only a mile away, the Confederates on Seminary Ridge could be clearly discerned. The battle began. The Third Corps was driven back by the Confederates. The Irish Brigade, until then held in reserve, must come to their assistance.

The reader stopped, as if for dramatic effect.

“Go on, go on.”

At this juncture Father Corby approached Colonel Patrick Kelly, now in charge, saying to him: “For two or three weeks, we have been marching constantly. My men have not had a chance to get to confession. I must give them one last bit of spiritual comfort. Let me stand up on this rock, where they may all see me.” It was so ordered. Above the terrible din of battle Father Corby told the men that since it was impossible at the moment to hear the confessions of the Catholic boys, they could be restored to the state of grace by prayerfully receiving the general absolution that he was about to impart. Let them, in their hearts, make a fervent act of contrition and a resolution to embrace the first opportunity of confession. As he finished these few words, and placed the purple stole over his shoulders, every man, Catholic and non-Catholic, fell to his knees. The chaplain's hand was raised in absolution.

“He's only blessing the Union army?” Babette addressed the question to Malcolm, for whom the information just given was as new as it was for her. “What about the Southern boys?”

“Corby's statue is in front of Corby Hall.”

Malcolm looked at Eugene. Eugene looked at Malcolm. A family memory stirred. They put their red heads together, whispered briefly, then nodded in silent agreement.

A reconnaissance party was sent to Corby Hall and reported back that the feat proposed was impossible.

“You'd need a crane.”

How does one thought produce another? Deep waters these, and not our present concern. In a trice, Malcolm was on the phone calling a nearby filling station. He had to call two others before he found one with a tow truck, and then he had to call a fourth to find one willing to send the vehicle to the Notre Dame campus.

Malcolm gave instructions on how to negotiate the gate. No guard would prevent a tow truck from coming to the aid of a campus motorist in distress.

“Who's in distress?”

“We need that truck.”

The driver arrived in forty-five minutes. During the interval, more beer had strengthened the resolve of the gathering. For Malcolm and Eugene, what they proposed to do was a gallant gesture to their lovely guests, as well as a chance to trump their father's feat of long ago.

8

The headquarters of campus security represented a little island of peace on game days. Cars patrolled the campus, and many members of the force, on foot or bicycle, sauntered or wheeled among the partying fans, but there was really little to do save observe. The stadium was manned by an army of ushers, many of whom were the second or third generation of families who every game day donned an official-looking cap and took tickets at the gate or directed fans to their seats. The huge influx of traffic was the purview of the county sheriff and South Bend police, aided by another corps of volunteers who made sure that cars were parked in even rows and space maximally used. There was very little going on in headquarters, accordingly, and it was there with his iPod in his shirt pocket and plugs in his ears that Larry Douglas was ignoring his pudgy fiancée, Laura.

“Can you hear me when you're listening to that?”

Not to answer seemed a kind of lie, but Larry did not answer. He had downloaded some selections from Schopenhauer, misogynistic tidbits that were affording Larry culpable pleasure. His mother could not believe that he was engaged to Laura. Larry didn't quite believe it himself. Trying to reconstruct how the bargain had been entered into, he was sure that he had never proposed, not right out, anyway. It seemed that he had lost his freedom when he took advantage of Laura's amorous nature during long and sweaty sessions in his parked car.

“I wonder if I should go on working,” Laura said. “After.”

Had a solitary adverb ever sounded so ominous? “Why would you quit?” The thought that his paycheck would have to cover the two of them had not been among those weighing upon him. Until now. “What would you do all day?”

“What do other housewives do all day?”

“I don't know.” His mother was a housewife, but she worked. He tried to think of a woman who just lolled around the house all day while her man was out working.

“I don't suppose there'd be just me for long.” Her smile was meant to be seductive.

“What do you mean?”

She got up and came to him. “You know what I mean.”

The phone rang, and Larry picked it up like a drowning man lunging for a life preserver. “Notre Dame Campus Security!”

He had to have the message repeated after he dug the plugs out of his ears.

“Some students stole my truck.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“The front gate.”

“Tell it to me in your own words.”

“They stole my goddamn truck.”

“I'll be right there.” Larry was on his feet and halfway out the door when Laura screamed after him.

“Wait! I'll come with you.”

“You're in charge here!”

He slammed the door and beat it out to his car.

*   *   *

When Larry went by the Grotto, he noticed some kind of commotion off to his left, no doubt a postgame celebration. At the guard shack, the driver glared at Larry.

“You security?”

“You the guy who lost his truck?”

This reminder of his humiliation softened the driver's attitude. “All I want is my truck back.”

“You'll get your truck back. Don't worry about that.”

The story was a simple one, but Larry wanted to hear it twice. He had never been in charge of an investigation before, or even of a complaint, and he was determined to do it by the book.

Jackson, the driver, had received a call about a car in distress behind the South Dining Hall. He got directions at the gate and drove to the dining hall, where a group of students awaited him.

“You sure they were students?”

“They sure looked like them.”

“Lots of strangers on campus on a day like this.”

The kids Jackson assumed were students had greeted him, talking all at once, explaining what the trouble was. Jackson got out of the truck and went around back to judge how best to hoist the car he was directed to. That's when his truck drove off.

“You'd left it running?”

“I just got out of the cab to see what the problem was.”

“Why would anyone drive off in a tow truck?”

“You tell me. I went running after the truck like an idiot, and when I came back they were all gone. So, I walked back here and called you.”

The first thing to do was to take Jackson back to headquarters. Larry wanted one more version of the story. He also wanted Laura to see him in operation. As he passed Old College, the commotion he had observed earlier was still going on in front of Corby Hall. He turned in.

“That's my truck,” Jackson cried.

The truck in question had been backed across the lawn in front of Corby Hall. A chain from the raised derrick had been looped around the statue's shoulders. Even as Larry and Jackson watched, the truck began to move. It seemed to halt, then moved forward. Slowly the statue began to tip, and then, accompanied by a great roar from the onlookers, the effigy of the Rev. William Corby, CSC, third president of Notre Dame, Civil War chaplain, was ignominiously pulled from its base and toppled onto the lawn in front of the building named for him.

PART TWO

1

Quintin Kelly emerged from drunken sleep smacking his lips, unwilling to open his eyes, against the shut lids of which an accusing unseen light was visible. First, a mental inventory. Meditating monks had once begun their task by establishing a sense of place; just so did Quintin strain to locate himself in spatio-temporal coordinates. Shreds and fragments of memories raced across the bleak horizon of his mind. Magnus. He opened his eyes and looked around.

The present bears a necessary relation to the past, but memory is not always a reliable record of the link. He was on a couch in an unfamiliar place. In blips and shards, an episodic memory of the previous evening established itself in his mind. He had managed to do what he had come to do, speak with Magnus about Madeline, prepared for vilification, anger, the righteousness of a man whose woman had done him wrong. But what Quintin remembered was a bibulous camaraderie in which the two of them had seemed aligned against the general dissolution of Western civilization. He had gained the impression that Magnus had given him the go-ahead. Take my wife, please.

This realization had been succeeded by euphoria. How different would his report of the conversation to Madeline be from what he had dreaded. And then, as if in proof that there are no depths that do not conceal a further subbasement of the soul, a horrible realization came. Madeline awaited word of his encounter with her husband. He brought his watch within a few inches of his eyes but could not discern the position of the hands upon its face. No matter. Whatever time it was was a time far beyond when he should have returned to the motel room where she was sitting alone awaiting news of their future, if any.

He swung his legs off the couch and levered himself to his feet. Immediately, he began to careen across the room. In transit, he managed to aim himself toward a chair. He fell into it and it tipped backward, hung in the balance, and then slowly regained its original position. Quintin looked around. Magnus's apartment. It was hither they had come in the wee hours, long gone in alcoholic jubilation. Here they had sat for hours, exchanging remarks that failed to mesh but somehow amounted to communication, and then he had realized that Magnus was asleep in his chair. Quintin had a faint memory of deciding to rise and go. It might have been a moment before. First, he would shut his eyes and muster his forces. Between that moment and this stretched unconscious hours. Once more he brought his watch before his eyes. Nine thirty!

Slowly, carefully, he stood, his mind aroar with the lies he would tell Madeline to explain why he had let her spend an anxious night awaiting word that had not come. He found the bathroom, where he avoided his reflection in the mirror. He stooped over the basin and dashed water into his face. He lifted his head carefully and looked himself in the eyes. The sight was not as bad as he had feared. He washed his face and his domed bald head. He had to get to Madeline.

Call her. He extracted his cell phone and looked at it, as baffled as any member of a cargo cult when confronted with an artifact of an undreamt-of civilization. He did not know the number of the Tranquil Motel. For a frantic moment, he had wondered if he would even remember the name. He had to get there. So much was clear.

Back in the living room, shielding his eyes from the relentless daylight that poured in through the interstices between the slats in the window blinds, he listened. The stertorous complaint of snoring. He moved carefully in the direction of those primitive sounds. In a bedroom, Magnus lay diagonally across the bedspread like a bar sinister. Wake him? Why? The imperative was to get to Madeline. But how?

He returned to the living room. His eyes fell to the keys on the coffee table, and he had a vivid memory of Magnus tossing them there. He picked them up. He went to the door and let himself out.

He took the stairs to the ground level—four flights, but the thought of a descent in the elevator filled him with vertigo. He pushed down on the bar of a door and found himself outside, in a parking lot full of vehicles. Which was Magnus's? He looked at the keys and espied the plastic pod; he pressed
UNLOCK
and looked around him. On the third try, after moving about among the parked cars, he saw the winking lights he was looking for. A minute later he was headed out of the parking lot, bound for Madeline.

“Who is it?” a voice asked from behind the closed door he had refrained from opening with his plastic key.

”One or two,” he had been asked when he registered, and he had answered as if he were confessing. Two. What in the world was the vision of the world that swarmed behind the bland expressions of such young people at motel reception desks?

“Quintin.” He had brought his mouth against the panel of the door to speak his name. He repeated it, having moved back a bit, speaking more loudly.

Silence within. He had lifted his hand to knock when he heard a bolt being turned. The door opened, and Madeline looked at him over the protective chain. Had she locked him out or herself within? The expression on her face was unreadable.

“I'm back.”

“Where have you been?”

“It's a long story.”

She looked at him with amusement, as if from some vast height. The door closed, there was the sound of the chain, and then the door swung open.