Irish Gilt (14 page)

“You must be dead tired, Clare.”

“You might have thought of that before.”

He put his hand on her arm. “I'm sorry.”

She was silent on the drive back to the Morris Inn, as if she were trying to figure out what the meaning of his touching her arm had been.

13

Larry Douglas was doing figure eights in the parking lot east of the library, all but empty at the start of a new day. Crenshaw was still mad at him for saying that a heart attack had been ruled out. He had gone back to the crime scene, if it was one, and managed to get the coroner to admit that he didn't know what the man had died of but that, sure, it could have been a heart attack.

“By the time he makes up his mind we'll all be dead.” This was Crenshaw's attempt at a peace offering. Larry didn't bring up the plastic bag that he had taken down to Feeney.

“It was the way you said it,” Laura explained to him.

“How's that?”

“Like you caught Crenshaw in a lie.”

Larry gave up, but he had hoped Laura would back him up, give him some support. Finally she had, last night, grappling in his car. She had decided she didn't like Crenshaw, who had said something about her weight.

“If that's a problem, why did they hire me?”

“Bike duty would do it.”

“Bah.”

Kimberley, the girl in Feeney's office, was not thin either, although compared with Laura … When she had come running after him to bring him back to talk with the coroner, he was in uniform but minus that stupid helmet. She seemed impressed by all the things hanging on his belt, especially his weapon. She put her hand gently on the holster, then pulled it immediately away, giving a little shiver.

“How does it feel to walk around with a gun on your hip?”

Since Larry Douglas had been doing this for only two weeks, he himself was very conscious of the fact that he was armed, but, asked, he just shrugged and grinned.

Crenshaw agreed that Larry should visit Feeney.

“It says Jankowski on the door,” Larry said.

“I'm assistant coroner,” Feeney explained.

“And he does all the work,” Kimberley said.

Feeney seemed pleased at her remark. Surely she wasn't interested in a guy that old.

The assistant coroner was explaining the tests he would run on the plastic bag. “Of course, your prints will be on it.”

“They're registered.”

“Of course.”

Feeney sat back and brought the tips of his fingers together, his eyes drifting to the ceiling. This was, he said, an interesting case. He went on, emphasizing the skills that he brought to the task, and Larry wondered why the hell he had come. The recital got easier to sit through when Kimberley exchanged a look with him. Larry settled in his chair and nodded, wanting Feeney to go on. It gave him a chance to look at Kimberley—and to think that as an officer of the law, more or less, he had skills of his own. He tuned out the assistant coroner and entertained fantasies of pursuing this interesting case. After all, he had found the body, and it was first of all a campus matter. Crenshaw was an idiot, of course—Larry's Jankowski—and there had been no investigative effort on the part of campus security. The whole thing had been dumped into the laps of the South Bend police, and that had been an end to it.

“Of course, we'll cooperate,” Crenshaw had said importantly, “but the powers that be want this thing over and done with.”

When Feeney offered to show Larry around his domain, the theater in which he exercised his skills, Larry rose. “I wish I had the time.”

Feeney laughed. “Kimberley hates the place.”

“It gives me the creeps,” she said, as she walked out to the lot with him. His car reminded him of Laura, and Kimberley seemed even more attractive.

“What's it like, working there?” he asked.

“It's a job. Temporary.”

“Oh?”

“I'd like to continue my education.”

They stood there by his car. Larry rested his hand possessively on a fender but avoided looking at the front seat that had known such passionate interludes with Laura. Then, incredibly, he was telling Kimberley of his love for poetry.

“Do you know Robert Lowell?” she asked.

He could see the photograph of the poet in the back of his
Golden Treasury.
“I would have thought you'd like Emily Dickinson.”

“Oh, I love her.”

Larry would have liked to recite some poem by the Maid of Amherst, but at the moment he was unable to remember a line. In Kimberley he saw a soul mate. What did he really have in common with Laura other than those silent hours in his car? And campus security, of course.

“We ought to get together,” he suggested.

“Okay.”

“Tonight?”

“Tomorrow night would be better.”

So it was arranged. He drove off to campus with the sense that destiny had just put in an appearance. As he drove, whole poems by Emily Dickinson were ready on his tongue, and he declaimed aloud, “I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody, too?”

The next morning, in the parking lot, making lazy figure eights with his bike, he wondered how he could discover how the man found dead on the bench had got there.

14

Thin, gangly, his mousy hair worn to his shoulders, Jim Casper was in preventive maintenance and thus didn't see much of Ricardo Esperanza during work hours, but they had become friends of a sort. Casper had endured more grumbling about Ricardo's former wife than he cared to remember.

“Ricardo, you've got to move on. Get someone new.”

Ricardo just looked at him. It was never an easy thing to get Esperanza to agree to hit a few bars and see what might turn up. Ricardo drew unattached women like flies, a problem Casper would love to have. Ricardo just brushed them off, though, and Casper was there to try to interest them in himself.

“You're a goddamn monk, Ricardo. Why don't we have some fun?”

Only rarely would Esperanza relent, and then they usually ended up with a couple of compliant women seeking diversion in the local sports bars. All that had come to a screeching halt when Esperanza discovered that his former wife had found someone new.

“What do you do, follow her around?”

“She's my wife! The mother of my son.”

The guy Ricardo meant looked like an old man to Casper. They got a glimpse of him at the Jamison Inn, where Ricardo had driven to look for him.

“This place got a bar?” Casper asked.

“We're not going in.”

“Then what the hell?”

“There he is.”

A middle-aged guy had appeared on foot and was approaching the entrance of the inn.

“You're kidding.”

“They're always together,” Ricardo growled.

“Hey, it's a free country.”

Ricardo was from Argentina and wanted to apply the rules of his homeland to northern Indiana. It didn't do any good to explain to him that a divorced woman could go out with anyone she liked. It was one of the freedoms they had fought all those wars to preserve.

“Were you in the service?” Ricardo snapped.

Casper had tried to enlist but hadn't passed the physical—or the so-called intelligence test, matching blocks of wood to recesses in the board supposedly of the same shape. “That's not the point.”

The middle-aged guy had gone inside. Ricardo put it in reverse, and they got out of there. For once, he agreed to go to a bar where there was some hope of a little action. They managed to get a couple of stools and settled in. Ricardo was watching the televised games, but Casper was looking around.

“Ricardo!”

A real doll had squeezed between them with a big smile for Ricardo. He looked at her coldly. “Hi, Marjorie.”

“Introduce me,” Casper said, and was ignored by both of them. It took him five minutes to get Marjorie's attention. “You alone?” he asked her.

Casper had suffered that appraising look too often in the past. Her eyes swept over him, and it was like hearing again the bad news from the recruiting sergeant. She turned back to Ricardo, so Casper sought solace in his beer. He wasn't sorry when she went away. What the hell, he might just as well watch the televised sports events.

When he made a trip to the john, though, Marjorie intercepted him. “You and Ricardo are friends?”

“Who's Ricardo?” he asked, grinning.

“I know his wife. We're friends.”

She seemed to be reappraising him, and the verdict was not so bad this time. So he stayed there, talking to her; he could always go to the john.

“Aren't you drinking?” she asked.

“My drink is at the bar.”

“You could go get it, you know.”

He did, telling Ricardo he had hooked up with someone, no need to go into details. Ricardo just shrugged.

Casper had a couple of beers with Marjorie, and then she complained about the noise of the bar.

“Want to try another place?” He remembered he had come with Ricardo. “You got a car?”

“It's outside.”

He told Ricardo he was leaving—not that it broke his Argentine heart, but he couldn't just disappear. Marjorie drove across Main to a bar on the opposite side, one without a zillion television sets. He was explaining to Marjorie that he was in maintenance at Notre Dame.

“You work with Ricardo?”

“He's not on my crew.”

Her expression suggested that he had impressed her. It seemed inevitable that they would talk about Ricardo and his former wife. Casper mentioned the middle-aged man.

“I thought he was imaginary.”

“How so?”

“Do you know Bernice?” Casper let it go, but she didn't. “She's my friend and all that, but the way she talks, all kinds of men are nuts about her.”

“Well, Ricardo is.”

“What a waste.” She sipped her beer. “I mean wasted effort. She'll never go back to him.”

They were both a little woozy when they left the bar. It was something new for Casper, being in the passenger seat with a woman at the wheel.

“I've got a son,” she said.

“You married?”

“Would I be with you if I was?”

So he gave her directions to his place. Not that he could ask her in. Not that he dared. When they got there, he put his arm on the back of the seat, and she rolled warmly toward him. Some minutes later she drew back. “It's funny kissing a man with long hair.”

“I never tried it.”

She dug him in the ribs, and Casper felt like a wit.

The next time, he picked her up and took her where he was sure Ricardo wouldn't be, but even so all she talked about was Ricardo and his former wife. Still, it wasn't so bad. The two of them seemed to draw closer as she talked of the other couple. Casper was sure that his ship had come in, and he was making plans for the big move.

He still hadn't got around to it when one night she had something she couldn't wait to tell him, “The man found dead on campus the other day? That was the guy Bernice said was nuts about her.”

She went on, and when Casper realized what she was suggesting, he came to Ricardo's defense. “He wouldn't do a thing like that.” Even as he said it, he thought of how obsessed Ricardo was with the way his ex-wife was playing around.

“I wonder if we ever know who would do what,” Marjorie said.

“I know what I would like to do.”

And they did it. Later, driving home, Casper thought that his chest expansion had doubled. In bed, he remembered what she had said about Ricardo, and it no longer seemed fantastic. Latin blood and all that. Marjorie really surprised him when she told him she had called the police and told them about Ricardo and the dead man. Geez. Not that she had identified herself, she added.

“Smart.”

“The important thing is that they know.”

15

When Jimmy Stewart put the question to him, Ricardo Esperanza said he didn't remember what he had been doing on the Sunday night when Xavier Kittock had been killed, or where he had been. He even seemed to have trouble remembering that a dead man had been found on a campus bench.

“He was a friend of your wife.”

“She divorced me.”

“You take that pretty hard?”

“Wouldn't you?”

Jimmy thought of the wife that had walked out on him. That had stung his pride, but life had actually been better since she left. “Maybe.”

“I heard he died of a heart attack.”

“Then you do remember.”

“Now that you mention it.”

“People say you were pretty angry about his friendship with your wife.”

“Who?”

“Friends of your wife.”

He sniffed. “Marjorie Waters.”

The name of the anonymous caller. The wife had thought so, too. “And people who work with you.”

Incredulity flickered across Ricardo's handsome face, but then he seemed to remind himself of the perfidy of friends. “Jim Casper. What did he say?”

“And then there was your public threat to Kittock.”

“What are you getting at?”

“What do you think?”

Ricardo clammed up. It was just as well. Jimmy didn't want to continue until the guy had a lawyer. “I'll read you your Miranda rights.”

“Carmen?”

Jimmy laughed. “How come you remember Carmen Miranda?”

“I saw her movies in Buenos Aires.”

That got him talking again, but now it was just about himself, so that was all right. Jimmy was almost sorry for the man when he told him he was taking him in for questioning.

“You are questioning me.”

“Ricardo, it looks to me as if you had all the reason in the world to kill Xavier Kittock. You can't say where you were at the time. And we did find the plastic bag.”

Jimmy waited, but Ricardo gave no sign that the remark affected him. Now Jimmy wished he had mentioned the plastic bag before he told Ricardo he had to take him in.