The Death of a Joyce Scholar (17 page)

Like drink.

That was it.
Ulysses
was a grand—perhaps the grandest—way to pass time. McGarr could imagine himself reading it over and over and over again, forever finding something new and forever only scratching its surface. And then Leopold Bloom, and even more so Stephen Dedalus, were what he thought of as typical intelligent Dubliners. They were cynical and sophisticated—by which he meant they were not naive—but they were essentially charming loafers. Defensive and guilt-ridden about their purposeless but oddly beguiling city, they wandered about, flirting with her tawdry charms. For Bloom it was an advert here, the promise of another there, many and recurrent stillborn ideas, and a balance sheet of small losses at the end of the day.

For Dedalus it was an afflatus, a wastrel’s bingey gyre from sobriety, control and frustration through drunkenness, nonsense and violence to the condition of having to borrow from another wanderer a few bob, a blessing and the hope of another day in some better and real place unnamed.

Yet in all it was a Bloomsday better than Kevin Coyle’s, McGarr supposed, readying (like Bloom himself, he now realized) a breakfast tray for his wife. He now pulled four slices of toast from under the gas and flipped them over. Think of it: Coyle as Stephen Dedalus, right down to his donning Joyce’s (Dedalus’s) boater and carrying an ashplant stick. Flood as Leopold Bloom, with his dark features and weight, his bow tie and professional manner, his being foreign and a Jew, his inconstant wife and equally liberal daughter. Granted Bloom had followed his Molly through her assignation only in his mind, and Maura Flood’s Blazes Boylan was Coyle (Dedalus) himself. But that was life, not art.

What would Flood have done had he caught them
en flagrante
, as McGarr had found the daughter and Holderness in Bray? Perhaps he had not required direct evidence, and—after having observed the brilliant Coyle awash in his talents the day long, and having returned to discover that his wife’s appreciation was rather more intense—he had snapped. Certainly the physical evidence suggested the possibility.

The toast was hot to the touch, and he flicked the slices off on a tray, slathering butter across the crusty tops. The dark, oily aroma of his coffee rose to him, and he thought of Catty Doyle, who would be who in
Ulysses?
Perhaps one of the Nighttown whores whom Dedalus visits near the end of the book. Certainly Catty had merged her romantic and professional interests with Coyle and Holderness. Could she have derived some as yet unknown benefit from her relationship with Mary Sittonn?

Lifting the tray and turning from the stove, he decided he was trying too hard to make Dublin then fit Dublin now. For instance, “Kinch” was what Buck Mulligan had called Stephen Dedalus. But Flood (Bloom) had also called Coyle (Dedalus) Kinch, which in Dublin meant—McGarr stopped short and coffee lapped over the edge of his cup—a noose in a rope, the sort that had been used for hanging.

See? More the fool he for reading the book. Were it indeed a “literary” crime, Coyle would have been hung, not stabbed once, neatly, in the chest.

But a few steps down the hall his imagination was off again: David Holderness, who was he in
Ulysses?
Buck Mulligan? McGarr remembered what Flood said Coyle had said about Holderness: “Beckett without Beckett’s intelligence, wit, or sympathy for the human condition.” Or here Mulligan’s wit. The trot that McGarr had followed in reading
Ulysses
had said that the character Buck Mulligan had been patterned on Oliver St. John Gogarty, legendary Dublin
physician and eccentric whose writing McGarr
had
read and who
had
been witty. What was that quote of his, describing an infamous Dublin madame? “She had a face upon which avarice was written like an hieroglyphic, and a voice like a guffaw in hell.”

No, Holderness was not much of a Mulligan or a Gogarty, or even much of a Beckett. He hardly stood out in any way; after all, there was not a Dubliner of McGarr’s acquaintance who wouldn’t have had something humorous to say when having been discovered en
flagrante.
And the way the man then insisted upon clasping Hiliary Flood to him, as though either to further humiliate her or—could it be?—to flaunt his prowess with women, had been cruel. Could he have been trying only to conceal his own nakedness? The erection and so forth?

Perhaps. And, given the name Holderness, he could well not be a Dubliner or an Irishman at all. From the little McGarr knew of him, he could be from Iowa or Nebraska, like Fergus bloody Flood. McGarr shook his head. The man had fooled him. He would have to learn more: about Flood, about Holderness, about literature, which he was now bloody tired of. He thought about the book-launching party later in the afternoon.

With a toe he eased open the bedroom door.

Who else was there? Katie Coyle, the victim’s wife. Even though he had not until that night read
Ulysses,
McGarr knew something about Joyce, at least the biographical parts, and it struck him now how much Katie Coyle physically resembled Nora Barnacle, Mrs. James Joyce. Both were large women. Both had dark hair—Barnacle’s a deep red—and dark eyes. Both had been
wife
and little else to their husbands.

Wife. His own refused to wake up, moving away from his touch and deeper into the covers and pillows.

“C’mon now—all up. Tea’s hot. Buttered toast.” McGarr placed the tray on the table between the bed and the wing-back chair, which he turned around so they could breakfast together. He stepped into the bathroom, switched on the hot-water tank and the infrared light to heat the tiles.

There he was himself playing Bloom to his Molly, he again thought, closing the bathroom door behind him. And not for the first time did he, a man of a certain age, wonder if there were any Boylans in her life. Well—“Up now! I’ve lit the gas for your bath”—that was something you couldn’t worry about. But did.

“You sound tired.”

“Me? Been up for hours.”

He had not quite gotten himself back into the chair when the phone began ringing.

It was Sinclaire. The couple who lived in the flat on the Finglas Road overlooking the murder scene had returned from their holiday in West Cork; he could see them in a half hour, before they went off for work.

“I’ll be there,” said McGarr.

Noreen had fallen back to sleep, her chin pointed, like a dart, at the ceiling.

IT WAS AN ATTIC FLAT in a tall Victorian building, and both policemen were puffing by the time they had climbed to the door. The day was dark, muggy, and hot, and McGarr took the precaution of removing his tan straw hat and swabbing its band before setting it back on his head. Noreen had selected a light brown linen suit for him, and it wouldn’t do to arrive at the Shelbourne all damp or mussed.

When the door opened and a face appeared, McGarr nearly asked if the girl’s mother were at home. She was young, not out of her teens, as was the boy she introduced as her husband. Behind them, nearly dwarfed by him, the tiny flat was neat and clean and packed with many new things. Both were dressed for office work—shirt and tie for him, for her a tight black dress that flexed over her backside as she moved.

“We’re not usually light sleepers, and we sleep here.” She meant the room, no more than a large closet, that was closest to the door. “But the sound of the car was so strange.
Blatty, like a small tractor or something. Michael got up first and looked out, and when he didn’t come back to bed, I followed him here to see what was wrong.” She took the boy’s arm.

He was tall and had to stoop to look out the window of the back porch that had been closed in to form another small room. “We keep our bicycles in the garden.” He pointed to the clip that contained the right leg of his trousers. “And I need mine to get to work.”

A careful young couple watching their pennies, McGarr thought. In the nook that was their kitchen he had seen an oatmeal tin and a packet of the least expensive bulk tea. In another room was a sewing machine and a computer terminal; he concluded they’d make excellent witnesses in court.

“The car was a Fiat,” the boy said. “One of the first models. I had a toy car like it when I was a child. A Five hundred. The interior stayed dark forever, it seemed, with me hopping from foot to foot in the chill.

“Then the door opened and a heavy-set guy got out. He had a hat on, but when he reached the other side of the car, the light from the street lamps on Finglas Road caught his face. A dark man, fleshy face, maybe forty or fifty, hard to tell which. And steady. Not the other one, who couldn’t walk at all. I didn’t hear what was said, but the heavy one kept trying to get the slim one up the alley, where the car wouldn’t fit.

“Laurel and Hardy stuff. First Laurel dropped the stick he was carrying, but, bending over, the hat came off. When he reached for that he fell and lost the stick. Eventually the other man raised a wrist and looked at his watch. He pulled the slim man over near the wall, seemed to debate taking the hat and stick with him, but then laid them down on the drunk’s chest.”

“Took him forever to turn the car around and get it back
out between the auto stops there at the head of the lane,” said the girl. “Motor sounded like it would burst.”

“Or the clutch.”

Sinclaire traded glances with McGarr, who asked, “Bow tie?”

“Sorry?”

“Was the driver wearing a bow tie?”

They looked at each other. She nodded. He said, “Now that you mention it, he was. Large man. Powerful. He moved the other around like he was nothing at all. It was only the shouting that kept him from picking him up and carrying him. When he tried, the drunk started shouting something like ‘old’ or ‘hold.’ I only caught the first part of it.

“After a while I got tired of watching them and went back to bed. I reckoned it was a fair night and nearly over by then, and we were to get an early start on our holidays. If he was there in the morning, I’d try to get him some help. But as we were leaving I heard barking and looked out. A woman who I think lives up the lane in De Courcy Square was out there with her dog, bending over the chap, speaking to him. Jet-black hair, older. You know”—his eyes surveyed McGarr and then shied to Sinclaire’s snow-white hair, but it was too late to phrase the thought differently—“in her thirties.” He looked away.

“By then my father-in-law had arrived, and he’s not a man to be kept waiting. We thought nothing of it until we got home and the landlord told us what had happened.”

“The hat and the stick. When you saw the woman leaning over the man, did you notice if he still had those two things with him?”

The boy thought for a moment and shook his head. “I didn’t notice, but I don’t think he had. At least I can remember definitely that he didn’t have the blazer on. With the red
stripes, you couldn’t miss that day or night. He had gotten himself over to the wall proper and was sitting against it. His shirt was open and the glasses he’d been wearing were off. But…” He hunched his shoulders to mean that was all.

Said Sinclaire, “The woman. Do you know her?”

“Only on sight,” the boy said all too readily, and the girl looked up at him, her eyes searching his face. “At the bus stop, in the shops. The neighborhood’s a small place.”

McGarr had stepped closer to the window and looked beyond the immense gray stones of the wall into the cemetery. “You seem to know the area. How about a couple of punks. You know—spiked hair in outrageous shades, like pink and green. All leather and denim and studs. I understand they’re living somewhere in the cemetery.”

The girl joined him at the window. “Right over there, but there’s only one. A fella. Doesn’t seem to want to be seen much. Like a cat, he is—out the door and up over that great height of wall as quick as you please.” She turned suddenly to her husband. “Michael will tell you that up until five weeks ago I was home during the day. I brought my sewing over here to the window where it’s cooler and there’s good light.” Her eyes flickered down at her dress.

“A work of art,” said Sinclaire, who, apart from Ward, was considered the handsomest man on the Squad. “Smashing, really.”

She blushed.

“Shaved head but for a patch of blond running down the center,” said McGarr. “About six two or three. Thirteen or fourteen stone. A punk?”

Said the boy, “Last I saw, the patch was pink and spiked. His eye shadow was pink too. He’s only about six feet and no more than twelve stone.” He pointed a finger at his own shoulders, which were broad. “Pads. They’re all wearing them these days.”

“I wonder if you two would like another sort of holiday?” McGarr asked, turning to them. “Courtesy of the Garda Siochana—”

The boy held up a palm. “Ah, thanks, but we have to work.”

“And work you will, but from the comfort of some hotel—the Gresham or the Shelbourne, wherever you like.”

They looked at each other. “Really?” she asked. “You’ve got to be joking. Those places cost hundreds of pounds a night.”

“We’d like the use of your flat here, for…” He pointed toward the cemetery and the long shed that she had indicated. In the deep shadows glass could be seen, as though somebody had taken old windows and constructed a kind of shelter. “Provided I can be certain of your utter confidentiality.” He made sure that their eyes met his. “No parents, no friends, nobody should know of this. You can tell people you hit the lottery and you’re blowing it on a little high life.”

“Ah, but nobody would be—” she began to say before she blushed and looked away. “I mean, we’re saving for a house, and—”

Said her husband, pulling her into him, “We’ll think of something.”

With Sinclaire in the window of the attic flat, McGarr strolled leisurely along the exterior face of the cemetery wall until he got to the area—roughly fifty yards from Catty Coyle’s back garden door—that he guessed was in line with the shed he had seen from the window above.

There he stepped closer to the wall and allowed his eyes to run over its surface until he found what he sought. Jammer himself might be able to climb like a cat, but Bang had said that all five of them including their women had scaled the wall, and at least one of them had to be as ungainly as a
fifty-year-old gardener/investigator in what McGarr liked to think of as not half-bad condition. Chinks, they were, that looked to have been chipped out of the mortar of the wall at easy increments to the top.

Careful of the toes of his woven-leather brogues and of the tan, linen suit, McGarr made his way steadily but slowly to the top of the wall. There he found a rope hanging from the limb of a tree; he let himself down. It was cool on the other side, and damp even on a summer’s day, but quiet and still; it was as though he had lowered himself into another world. Few noises from the busy Finglas Road reached here. Above him in the trees two jackdaws were quarreling, and deep into the cemetery he caught the distant whine of a hedge trimmer.

McGarr scanned the rows of stone monuments, the empty drive, and the deep grass near the shed. It was a little-visited corner of the cemetery, and he imagined that at night the watchman shined a quick light on the shed and moved on. From his belt McGarr now pulled his Walther, checking it to make sure a bullet was chambered.

He moved to a side of the shed and with his hat off pressed an ear to the gray weathered boards.

He listened for minutes that seemed like hours, but heard nothing save the dripping of a tap. No moving about, no cough, no noise from within. He rounded the building and stepped quietly into the shadows that he had seen from the window of the attic apartment across the top of the wall. Sinclaire was there. He raised a hand.

McGarr was surprised to find that the windows had been fitted to a precise frame, with most of the lower runs blacked in. All of the work, with obviously “found” materials, looked professional, with tight joints and not a “holiday” in a painted surface that McGarr could see. He tried the door, which was open, and why not? Anybody wanting to get in to
the shed would merely have to break the windows. With the barrel of the Walther he scanned the single, open room. Nobody. Only a table, a chair, a cot, a sink, a towel, a bar of soap, and a stool. On the table was a two-ring electric cooker and a set of dishes, neatly stacked. McGarr stepped farther into the room.

The cot was made to what McGarr judged were army specifications; the covers were pulled taut enough to make any packet of cigarettes bounce on the top blanket. At the foot was a fluffy eiderdown which wore like a badge of honor its Brown, Thomas price tag and plastic cord on an outer seam. It had cost 122 Irish pounds. McGarr was acquainted with the security at the fashionable department store, and he wondered how, given the way he looked, Jammer had gotten it out. Below the bed was a single pair of shoes, perfectly aligned and polished to a mirror sheen. Wing-tipped bluchers, by Church; McGarr would not mind owning a pair himself. Another hundred pounds at least.

But he soon understood how the theft of the eiderdown had been accomplished. A section of the glass-enclosed space had been sectioned off by a curtain, behind which McGarr found a three-piece tweed suit, a Burberry’s storm coat and matching fedora, a long umbrella with a heavy straight handle that was meant to fit in a golf bag and, when opened, would shield both caddy and player. In a kind of hat box he discovered a human-hair wig, cut long and sweeping in back and slightly graying on the temples. In all, it was a disguise to make Jammer look like a young, monied blood up from the country for a touch of town.

With such cunning, McGarr wondered why Jammer associated with the others, the three McGarr had rousted from the St. Michan’s. He also wondered at his age and background; it was one thing to don the garb of respectability, something again to affect the manner. From appearances,
however, Jammer’s future was not on the streets. He was too altogether neat and contained and—was it?—tasteful for petty theft. Embezzlement, bank fraud, or some clean scam would be more to the taste of someone dressed in the natty costume that McGarr held in his hands. It was probably only a matter of time or daring. With care McGarr rearranged the wig in its box, let the curtain fall back in place.

And it was in turning back into the room that something struck McGarr’s eye. Four pots hung from a rack above the cooker, scaled according to size with their lids over the pegs. Various cooking implements hung on another rack, accompanied by a set of cooking knives in an extended rosewood sheath. McGarr moved toward them.

Brass rivets held their rosewood handles in place; apart from age and use, they appeared no different from the murder weapon that had been found under the seat of Flood’s Fiat 500. A stamp at the heel of the chef’s knife certified that they had been made by Everdur in Gottingen. The set gleamed in the dim light but was incomplete: the filleting knife was missing.

Suddenly McGarr remembered where else he had seen such knives in exactly the same rosewood sheath—in Catty Doyle’s neat kitchen, but there a full set. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Or could Jammer have murdered Coyle? Why? What motive would he have had? Could he have known Coyle? Without Jammer or Coyle, it would be impossible to know.

But, say, if Jammer had murdered Coyle, why hadn’t he dispensed with the other knives? He was smart; economy aside, wouldn’t he have packed up and fled a site so close to the murder scene? It was just over the wall. And why then would he have given away Coyle’s blazer and ashplant stick, which could link him to the murder?

Nowhere in the enclosure could McGarr find a newspa
per, magazine, or book. There was a radio, but contained in a large, portable sound system—a boom box, they called it—with a generous supply of audio tapes, again arranged neatly in a plastic credenza designed for that purpose. McGarr flicked it on: the machine was set to play a tape of a Dublin pop group that McGarr had often heard on his car radio. The volume was low, scarcely audible. McGarr rewound the tape and switched off the unit.

A hideout, a bare-bones safe house. McGarr wondered if Jammer enjoyed some understanding with the cemetery personnel. He couldn’t imagine their not knowing he was here.

He felt like waiting, but he suspected the boy would by now have questioned why Ward for no ostensible reason had gone after him, which was probably why he had not returned to pick up his things.

And then with the gun, used to full effect in what comprised Dublin’s underworld, Jammer could have practically anything he wanted.

Which was?

Hard to tell. Nowhere had McGarr seen any evidence of drugs, and the order of the place implied an asceticism and sense of discipline that rather denied the possibility. Also, the way he had dealt with Ward revealed a certain alertness and daring.