Irish Coffee (16 page)

YOUNG JACUZZI IN THE
prosecutor's office was understandably affected by the attention the case against Tom McTear had attracted. The media were in from everywhere, some perhaps anxious to see a colleague fall, others more sympathetic, all intent on squeezing every last line, byte or footage from the events at the St. Joseph County Courthouse, Judge Jerry Frese presiding. Jacuzzi had made himself available to the press with a prodigality that had brought a rebuke from the judge.

“I know it's old-fashioned, Graham, but I think courtrooms are where cases should be tried, not out on the steps. With all this snow and ice you might fall and break an arm.”

Laughter in the court. Maybe if judges learned how to express themselves otherwise than in multiply qualified sentences they would be interviewed more often themselves. Jacuzzi, a young man, did not question the desirability of exposure to the media. The fleeting fame associated with this seems timeless while it endures and second thoughts come afterward, if at all. Jacuzzi was not loath to suggest to the press that the case against McTear was a lock. Not even the laconic briefings of Jimmy Stewart raised doubt in his youthful mind.

“Of course it's all circumstantial,” Stewart said, stopping Jacuzzi in full flight.

“You mean we don't have video footage of him putting the poison in the coffee cannister?”

“Where did he get the poison? Did he buy it, did he steal it?”

“Aren't the Chicago police looking into that?”

“In between more pressing duties. Don't count on a bill of sale turning up. And of course there are no fingerprints of McTear anywhere in Fred Neville's apartment.”

“Gloves.”

Stewart did not tell him that no prints of McTear had been found in the Hoosier Residence apartment where undoubtedly he had stayed. The cleanup crew there really cleaned up.

“Nor did anyone ever see him enter Fred's apartment, let alone when Fred was missing from his office.”

Of course Jacuzzi had responses to all these. But his strategy was to fix in the jury's mind that McTear had motive and opportunity and blur such difficulties as Stewart was raising.

“You think he's innocent?”

Stewart said, “Guilty as sin.”

“So why are you giving me such a hard time?”

“I'm a Cubs fan.”

“You wouldn't want a murderer doing play-by-play.”

Stewart let it go. “But your main problem will be how he got into the building in the first place.”

“With a key.”

“Where did he get it?”

“From Naomi.”

“Too bad she isn't here to back that up. Besides it begs a question. Did she herself have a key?”

“Oh come on. She let herself in.”

Teresa, the supposed cousin of Santander? Stewart let it go. A nagging thought returned, one expressed by Phil Knight. They had not questioned the girl who had been with Santander on one occasion, a girl who worked in the building. She must have a master key. Had she let anyone into Fred's apartment at the relevant times? Investigators for the defense would surely think of that. Well, not surely. Maybe. Stewart called Phil and asked if he was up to a little detective work.

“As little as possible.”

“This won't take long.”

“The game starts at eight.”

“IF IT'S GOT TO BE ONE OF YOU,
I'll take you,” Santander said, when Roger had succeeded in rousing the manager.

“I won't tell my brother.”

“Which one is your brother?”

“The one who has the same parents I do.”

Santander accepted that. “So what is it this time?”

“I hate to talk in the hall.”

“I was just going to ask you in.” Santander had been casting incontinent eyes at Griselda during this exchange with Roger. “Don't I know you?”

“I don't know.”

“You look familiar.”

“She is a star athlete,” Roger said. “She plays basketball for Notre Dame.”

“That must be it.”

“Do you ever watch?”

“I must have seen you in the paper.”

“Her photograph?” Roger said. He had made it to the couch and now lowered himself on to the middle cushion of three. “Precisely why I am here.” He took the mug book Griselda had given him and thumbed through it. He found what he was looking for. “There. That is Griselda.”

Santander compared the page with Griselda who was shedding her jacket in the overheated apartment. “Sure,” he said.

Roger was turning the pages. He stopped and pointed. Santander stared and then looked at Roger.

“Familiar?”

Santander nodded slowly. “I should have remembered.”

“Who is it?” Griselda asked.

She might have been anticipating the knock on the door. Santander had not restored the security chain after admitting Roger and Griselda and there was nothing to impede Thelma's entry.

“Well, well,” Thelma said, locking the door but not putting the chain in place.

Roger looked at Thelma sadly. “So you realized how stupid it was to mention Santander and those keys?”

“And that you're not stupid enough not to pick up on it. I'm sorry about this.” She did not sound sorry.

“Are you going to make coffee for us?”

Thelma smiled. “Pretty good, eh? If Naomi hadn't paid one last sentimental visit to Fred's apartment no one would have known. I blame myself. I should have gotten rid of that cannister.”

“In the trash at Hoosier Residences?”

Thelma laughed bitterly. “No matter how much you plan, something is bound to go wrong.”

Santander had been following this with growing alarm and began inching toward the back of his apartment. Still facing Thelma and Roger and Griselda, he got the bedroom doorknob in his hands and slowly turned it. But before he could open it and slip into his bedroom Teresa pulled the door open from the inside and Santander tumbled backward into the room. This distracted Thelma. Griselda in one graceful movement rose and brought the side of her hand down on the secretary's neck. Thelma slumped to the floor. In the confusion, Teresa made a hasty exit.

“Good work,” Roger said to Griselda. “It might be wise to tie her up.”

A POUNDING ON THE DOOR
announced the arrival of Phil and Stewart. Since Griselda was busy tying Thelma's wrists and ankles, Roger rose from the couch and lumbered to the door. When he opened it, two surprised faces stared at him. Well, three. Jimmy had a firm grip on the arm of a squirming Teresa who was sputtering in Spanish.

“Roger!”

But Phil's eyes fell to where the bound Thelma was coming groggily back to the real world. Jimmy ushered Teresa inside and Phil followed.

“There's your murderer,” Roger said.

Santander appeared in the bedroom door and looked wildly about. The presence of Teresa did not soothe him.

“That's a lie!” he cried, but he was ignored. A guilty man feels universally vulnerable, but Santander's misdeeds did not include murder. Teresa directed her flow of Spanish at Santander.

“What the hell is she saying?” Stewart asked.

“You wouldn't want to know,” Roger said. “Thelma, perhaps you would like to tell Lieutenant Stewart what you've been up to.”

But the safeguards of contemporary criminal investigation were invoked by Stewart.

“You tell me, Roger.”

Roger returned to the couch where in comfort he told Thelma's story, not without repeated tries of intervention from Thelma, immediately shushed by Stewart. Griselda had helped Thelma to her feet with the brusqueness she might have aided a bowled-over opponent on the basketball court and plunked her into a chair. In a blow for modesty, she covered the bared legs of the bound receptionist with a Notre Dame blanket that had been rolled up and placed on the back of the couch.

If Stewart was surprised to learn that Thelma was the murderer he had sought, and thought he had found in Tom McTear, he gave little sign of it.

It was Phil who wondered what Thelma's motive could possibly be.

“Love,” Roger said simply.

“Love!” Thelma cried.

“Love thwarted. Love twisted. Love spurned.”

“I don't get it,” Phil said.

“Don't explain me!” Thelma shrieked. “You couldn't begin to understand.”

 

Understanding, however partial, came in the following days. Jimmy took Thelma away and Phil went with him, handing her into the back seat of Stewart's car. Downtown, the prosecutor was informed of the new turn of events, Tom McTear was released with Maurice Gibbons muttering about a suit for false arrest, harassment, and other indictable offenses, but these were merely pro forma. The lawyer preferred creating the impression that it was his legal skill that had brought about the liberation of his client. Thelma secured the services of Emil Zollar, a local attorney, but nothing could stop her now from talking. Zollar tried in vain to shut her up but she was determined to cast herself in the role of avenging angel. The phrase was Roger's.

“Angel?” Phil asked.

“There are fallen angels, Phil.”

Thelma produced the microcassette from Fred's telephone from her purse. Why had she taken it?

“Listen to it and you will see.”

It made melancholy listening. In recorded message after recorded message, Thelma had sought in vain to interest Fred in herself. This recorded persona had contrasted with her relatively subdued manner at work, where she had contented herself with batting her lashes at Fred, but then she batted her lashes at every man.

It was Fred's susceptibility to both Naomi McTear and Mary Shuster that had encouraged rather than discouraged the enamored Thelma. If two, why not three? She had come to believe that Fred's affection was indiscriminate but that, once he was smitten by her, he would swiftly become monogamous.

“It's almost too easy,” Stewart complained on a visit to the Knight brothers.

Thelma had an uncle who ran a nursery and it was there that she had obtained the strychnine. Of course she had a key to Fred's apartment, so there was no problem of access to his kitchen and coffee canister when her passion turned from desire to hatred. She had been in the group that had benefitted from Tom McTear's play-by-play in the apartment at Hoosier Residences and thus had opportunity to drop the container stolen from her uncle's nursery into the trash. Had she intended to incriminate Tom McTear?

“More likely Naomi,” Roger mused.

“Right. And that might have worked. Naomi was a more promising suspect than her brother.”

When Naomi had made coffee in Fred's apartment and drank what might have been intended as a farewell cup to her departed beloved, suspicion had transferred to Tom McTear.

“He could have been found guilty,” Stewart said.

Silence followed this reminder of the contingencies of crime and punishment and the tantalizing non-convergence of legal and moral guilt.

NOTRE DAME'S MALE BASKETBALL
team faltered as the season progressed but the Lady Irish were on their way to another national title. Griselda was a major cause of this success and on the floor she gave her mind totally to the game. But her ambition to lead a life like Roger Knight's grew ever stronger. However, she was beginning to find it hard to share her mentor's esteem for the novels of Maurice Francis Egan.

“Not all writers are major writers, Griselda.”

“He wouldn't even sit on the bench.”

“
De gustibus non disputandum est
.” Roger crossed his fingers as he said this. The phrase suggested that literary judgments are mere expressions of subjective feeling, which was heresy to him.

“I'm going to take Latin,” Griselda said.

“It's about time.”

And so the conversation turned to latinity, the Tridentine rite, the woeful liturgical translations, the great evolution from classical through medieval and Renaissance Latin. And inevitably the poem Fred had written for Mary Shuster came up.

Mary's reaction to the arrest of Thelma Maynooth was something of a surprise.

“It's awful to say, but I had half-hoped it was Naomi. If she could do that it would prove she didn't really love Fred.”

“‘Each man kills the thing he loves,'” Roger murmured.

“Who says so?”

Her answer was the recitation of a large swatch of
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
. Mrs. Shuster was enthralled.

“Nathaniel loved that poem. He was a little sheepish about it but he too had it by heart.”

“A priest visited Wilde on his deathbed in Paris,” Roger said. “Although there is a dispute as to what priest it was.”

“Who was Isadore of Seville?” Mary asked.

But Phil intervened before Roger could get going.

“You should get credits for living with him,” Griselda said.

“And grow dumber by degrees?”

But it was time for popcorn and Roger donned his apron and went to work in the kitchen. Griselda rose to help him.

“Did you hear about Anthony Boule?” she asked.

“What?”

“He's out of a job.”

“Fired?”

“His position has been eliminated.”

“But not Fred's, certainly.”

“There'll be a national search. Anthony can apply for it, I suppose. I wouldn't give much for his chances.”

“But he dropped the idea of the book.”

“What book?”

But of course the proposed book had gone the way of most such ideas for instant fame and fortune. It would have had to become the story of Thelma, and Anthony had no interest in that. He had been reconciled with Scott Frye and would himself be working in the Hoosier Residence until he knew the outcome of his application to succeed Fred.

“Scott is talking about a screenplay,” Anthony said, avoiding Roger's eyes.

“Will you collaborate?”

“Ha! I'm cured of the writing bug.”