The Death of a Joyce Scholar Page 13

  “His jealousy of Kevin, if you must know. It was”—she cupped a hand—“pathological.”

  Holderness only maintained the wan smile.

  McGarr waited until it appeared that neither had anything else to say. “But Kevin Coyle…” he said to Holderness. “His murder. That made him a…?”

  Holderness’s eyes were clear and very blue. “A dead man.”

  “And nothing else.”

  “Not a thing.”

  “His death was no different from, say, natural causes?”

  “Dead’s dead.”

  “Who murdered him, then?”

  A shoulder moved. “Isn’t that your department?”

  “It’s the Beckett drivel again,” Hiliary Flood explained to McGarr. “You know, sometimes you’re a boring bastard, David. And so derivative. I wonder if you’ve ever had an original idea.”

  “And at other times?”

  “Beckett?” McGarr asked.

  “Samuel Beckett,” Holderness said condescendingly. “Perhaps you’ve heard of him. Novelist, dramatist, man of letters. Won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.”

  Books again, McGarr thought, and he turned back to Hiliary Flood. “That night, while you were”—he dismissed the word prowling—“searching for Mr. Holderness…” He waited for her to deny that, but she only looked away. “Where exactly did you go?”

  “His haunts. The Bailey, Keogh’s. When he wasn’t there, I went out to Drumcondra—”

  “To the inn?”

  She nodded, “The man who owns the place is a literary sycophant.”

  “I object to that. Rex Cathcart is—”

  “Another crashing bore who can scarcely distinguish between an artist, like Kevin was, and a mere would-be academic, like you, who—”

  “And he made a room available to you?” McGarr cut in.

  “A gracious man. And a gentle person.” A slight smile again curled the corners of Holderness’s mouth. “And if Hiliary were herself honest, she’d admit to singing Cathcart’s praises, however indirectly. I have in mind everything from moues of carnal pleasure to outright screams of orgasmic delight.”

  McGarr waited for a response, but the young woman only lowered her head so that her long tresses obscured her face. “Then you drove to the hotel in Drumcondra?”

  She nodded.

  “In the Fiat Five hundred?”

  Again.

  “Mr. Holderness was not there?”

  “I don’t know. By that time it was last call. He wasn’t in the bar or any of the public rooms. Cathcart bought me a drink in what I thought was a kind of holding action, and I waited for another half hour or so until the barmen got the others out. And then I left.”

  “In the Fiat Five hundred?”

  She looked away and seemed to come to a decision before answering. “No. When I got outside, it was gone. I assumed the police had taken it, since I had parked it”—her eyes flickered toward McGarr—“illegally, right there on the Swords Road in front of the hotel. There’s always a taxi around there at that time of night, and I took one home.”

  McGarr thought for a moment. Fergus Flood, her father, had admitted venturing out in search of his wife. Could he have looked for her at the Drumcondra Inn? He had not mentioned the hotel specifically. “Did you see your father at the Drumcondra Inn?”

  She did not seem surprised by the question. She shook her head.

  “Or your mother?”

  She lowered her head. “No.”

  “Was the car there when you got home? The Fiat.”

  Nor that question either. “No, it wasn’t.”

  “You looked for it.”

  She nodded.

  “You thought your father might have fetched it.”

  “He understands nothing about women. He can be such a bore.”

  Thought McGarr: nothing boring about knowing that both your wife and teenage daughter are frequenting the same hotel for much the same purpose. He wondered if mother and daughter had ever run into each other, if they shared “intimacies,” as it were. “And the next morning?”

  Again she tried to avoid McGarr’s eyes.

  “It was there.”

  McGarr turned to Holderness. “And you? Where were you then? After midnight.”

  “I was…engaged, I must admit.”

  The girl’s head rose to Holderness.

  McGarr waited.

  The smile was still on the man’s face, but behind the silvery surface of his glasses his eyes glittered with what seemed like playful malice.

  “With whom?”

  His head turned to Hiliary Flood. “Catty Doyle.”

  “Engaged?”

  Holderness actually laughed. “Surely you don’t mean me to answer that, sir. In present company.”

  “The venue,” said McGarr, but the derision in his voice was lost on Holderness and the girl, who were still staring at each other.

  “Her place.”

  “In De Courcy Square?” Near the Prospect cemetery, where Kevin Coyle’s corpse was discovered, he did not add. “What hours? When until when?”

  “Well, I’m presently completing a book, and I worked on that until eleven or so. Since I don’t drink—though I understand some do—I decided that on that of all nights it was best to leave here, rather than find myself beset by humors and demands that I judged I’d find distressing. In the particular.”

  But not as particularly dispensed by Catty Doyle, one could only conclude.

  “You got there?”

  “Say, midnight or thereabouts.”

  “And you found Catty home.”

  “As arranged.”

  “And you remained.”

  “Until my interest flagged.”

  “Which was?”

  “In a matter of the heart, Mr. McGarr, I heed no clock. Say, four or five. Catty was—how shall I put it—insistent that I stay, but one needs his sleep.”

  “And by what door did you leave?”

  “Does it matter? The front, of course. Ms. Sittonn may be a large and truculent woman, but she is most definitely a woman. I fear her not.”

  “And you suspected that she might be waiting outside?”

  “As I said, in spite of her appearance, she’s a woman.”

  “Which means?”

  “In this setting”—the smile grew somewhat fuller and the glasses flashed—“a kind of huntress, wouldn’t you say?”

  Considering mother and daughter Flood, Mary Sittonn, and perhaps even Catty Doyle, McGarr could hardly disagree. Of course, a case could be made that Fergus Flood, Kevin Coyle, and Holderness himself had been on the prowl as well, but McGarr found Holderness’s characterization of women unusual and interesting, especially in regard to what he had said earlier about there being no victims. “And you therefore are the hunted?”

  “As luck sometimes has it.”

  “By which you mean their willing victim.”

  “Now that I didn’t say. I mean the hunt in the sense of a search: one person for another who might through some imperfect means of communication, confirm her existence.”

  McGarr assumed they were getting back to Beckett again. He summoned up from his uncooperative memory the plays that Noreen had dragged him to. “Then there’re two persons in a relationship?”

  “I would think there would have to be.”

  “One dominant—”

  “The observed,” Holderness cut in.

  “—and the other—”

  “The observer.”

  “But isn’t it more aggressive than that? I’m thinking of the characters in Waiting for Godot. One had a whip and a gun, I seem to remember, and kept the other in traces.”

  “Theatrics,” said Holderness. “Mere posturing. One could make a case for Lucky enjoying the better—because less angst-ridden—part of the bargain. And later in his novels, Beckett refines that position. To know Beckett one must, in particular, read his novels.”

  The “novels of incompetence”? Not likely. The term
was still sitting in McGarr’s mind like a kind of—how had Flood explained it?—black hole. He hadn’t caught word one of what Flood had said.

  He stood. “Where’s your phone?”

  “Out in the hall.”

  As McGarr dialed his Castle office and waited, he heard Hiliary Flood say, “Catty Doyle—how could you, David? She is so…used.”

  “As well she should be. Another point to consider is that we need each other. She’s my editor and collaborator.”

  “As she was Kevin’s. In his turn,” the girl said tearfully. “You should mind yourself.”

  McGarr explained the situation to McKeon and asked him to send several somebodies out to pick up Holderness and Hiliary Flood, the Tech Squad for the Fiat 500 and what he supposed was the murder weapon.

  “For sure, this time?”

  “What d’ya mean, this time?”

  “The car. The murder weapon. We’re only after having phoned them and—”

  “Not us,” said McGarr, and when McKeon objected, he repeated the advisory. “Must have been a mix-up. Theirs.”

  “What is this—disinformation?”

  McGarr wished it were that simple. “Anything from anybody else?” He meant his staff.

  “Not a peep, but it’s only half-four.”

  And nearly seven by the time McGarr got back to his house in Belgrave Square. There he found Noreen in his study, in his favorite chair, reading Phon/Antiphon by Kevin Coyle.

  “So?” he asked.

  “It’s really quite good. And different. It’s as though he pretends to be Joyce—critic, scholar, writer, practicing pedant, rampant genius—examining what was written in his time and since. Defending his reputation, so to speak. He’s utterly scathing on the modernists.”

  “Like Samuel Beckett and the ‘novel of incompetence’?”

  Noreen lowered the book. “You’ve read it?”

  “The ‘novel of incompetence’ or Samuel Beckett?”

  “They’re one in the same. No, this.” She shook the volume at him.

  “Oh, sure. Between meetings and interviews I gave it a peek. I found it revealing, like a still point in a turning circle.”

  “That’s Elliot, but it reminds me. You’re to call Bernie. Hughie Ward got mugged or something and’ll be off the Coyle case for a while.”

  McGarr made straight for the telephone in the kitchen. “Is he all right?”

  “Bernie said something about his refusing to enter the hospital, so I suppose—”

  Said McKeon when he answered the phone, “Sure, some little gurrier. A punk with Joyce’s hat on his head, the one Coyle was wearing, and the ashplant stick in his hands. Whipped around without warning and smacked him. His wrist is broke, and there’s some question about the hearing in his left ear, but he refused a bed. Said he couldn’t find the fecker and murder him in hospital. I ordered him off the case and put him on sick leave. He lost his weapon, though, the Beretta. I thought it best to wait before putting out the word.”

  McGarr thought about their earlier blunder. Now this. No—he would not be made fun of twice in one day. It was a chance he was taking, but they would recover the weapon and the punk who took it themselves.

  “We’ll wait.”

  “I thought you’d say that. I’ve put everybody available on it. Liam called just to check in, and he’ll be returning from Galway sometime tonight.” He meant Detective Superintendent O’Shaughnessy, who was McGarr’s second-in-command and as knowledgeable about Dublin and its netherworld as any tout or lout.

  McKeon then reported what Bresnahan had discovered: the roomful of Kevin Coyle volumes that she had come upon in Mary Sittonn’s Coombe antique shop.

  “But murder for a couple hundred quid?”

  “Try a thousand, and we’ve seen it for a fiver. And them three with their bent and all.”

  “And you don’t know the half of it.” McGarr told McKeon about the Bloomsday evening adventures of David Holderness and the family Flood: “Mother got a call from Coyle, her hubby’s colleague, to meet her at the Drumcondra Inn, where Rex Cathcart—do you know him…?”

  “Aye—a fop, a toper, a blithering ejit when in his cups, and an innocent man.”

  McGarr waited.

  Said McKeon, “Not three of the two-dozen swivers who frequent his bordello pay him more than lip service. With Rex a soft word carries far.”

  “David Holderness was also on his cuff, and, although Flood’s wife never got there, the daughter, Hiliary, washed up around closing. In the Fiat.”

  “Puddin’ proof of adultery as a family tradition.”

  “Daughter claims she had a drink in the bar with Cathcart in what she believed was a ‘holding action.’ And when she got back outside, the Fiat was gone. She says she took a taxi back to Foxrock, which we should check on. Next morning the Fiat was back in the garage, today with what I think is the murder weapon under the seat. No forced entry. No sign of having been tampered with.”

  “How times change. What thief from the old school would ever have thought of returning a car to its garage unscathed. And the care the driver must have taken, jockeying the thing between pillar and post out near the Glasnevin Cemetery. No harm, no foul. And more to the point, no police report.”

  “But Holderness was out there too.”

  “In Glasnevin?”

  “More particularly, in Catty Doyle’s house.”

  “Near Bingo Terrace? What hours? Mary Sittonn in her steamy statement right here in me hot little hand claims to have been cuddling Catty at least until midnight.”

  McGarr’s head went back. “Two dates, one night?”

  “Well—at least a frig and a date.”

  “Holderness says he left around four or five.”

  “The wee-wee hours, but light by then.”

  “Have we canvassed everybody in the neighborhood?”

  “All but a young couple who left that morning on holiday. Who knows, they might have risen early for a jump on the highway.”

  “Am I hearing right?”

  “It wasn’t clear where they were headed, but we’ll put a man on them. You know what they say about three.”

  McGarr waited.

  “Butter then chew.”

  “Which is one way to manage—it’s French—a twat.”

  McKeon hung up.

  Before taking the phone from his ear, McGarr heard a second click, and before he could reach the fridge and its icy contents, Noreen appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  “What language was that?”

  “Pol-leesh.”

  “Then I’ll troublé you for a preprandial translation.”

  There was the light threat of no dinner in that. Before raising the can of lager to his lips, McGarr turned and noticed for the first time what his wife was wearing: a filmy, lacy dressing gown just the turquoise color of her eyes. “Here or there?”

  “There, of course, where we can press on with our project.” She turned, the silk whistling as she moved down the hall.

  McGarr imagined that Ulysses would have to wait yet another night for his “professional” opinion, but he vowed that he would get to it soon. It was beginning to irk him that so much of what seemed increasingly important in the Coyle case came cloaked in literary obscurity. Could the whole world be divided into those who had read and understood Ulysses, the rest of Joyce, the novels of Sam Beckett, and the works of Kevin Coyle, and those other poor benighted, inconsiderable groundlings who did not?

  McGarr raised the can and drained it, then reached for another. For the courage to be still without Ulysses. And without child.

  PART III

  TWELVE

  BRESNAHAN’S HEART was in her mouth. Never, not for her leaving certification or Garda exams, even for her interviews for the Squad, had she felt so nervous and discombobulated and just generally…sick. That was it. She was so destroyed over the miserable little shite who probably never gave her a passing thought, or worse, hated who she was and what she stood for—hersel
f, mostly, up until now—that, pausing before the ancient, battered, quayside building in which Ward kept his digs, she actually felt nauseous.

  How in the name of St. Peter, to whom she prayed every night for strength, had she allowed it to happen? And just when she’d been availed the opportunity of proving herself, and had come back with exactly what the Chief had wanted. McKeon had said, “Well—not half bad, Rut’ie. Your report of the interview in particular; how you led them on with the cute little culchie bit. Mind, it won’t work around here.” He had pointed to a stack of correspondence, but it was the first kind word she had ever heard from the sergeant, whom she regarded as the second hardest man in the universe.

  But when she heard in his next breath what had happened to Ward, she despaired. It was as if the floor had sundered to expose a great, yawning gulf down which she could see the young, dark, darling detective—yuppy though he might be—falling; it threatened to consume her as well. “But how?” she asked. Wasn’t he a former boxing champ? And the way he carried himself was like—well, like a dancer or, rather, a boxer, his square and well-muscled shoulders swaying, his legs always seeming to be set to give or receive a blow, his expression not cocky but quietly confident.

  “Got careless, I should imagine. Won’t happen again, I’d hazard. Not to Hughie. But we can only hope—about the ear. The wrist? That’ll mend, like his pride. But right now he’s one sorry soldier.” McKeon had picked him up at hospital and brought the hurting detective back to his flat.

  And leaving her in one rush, her sympathy—all eleven stone of it—went out to him, and she knew what she had to do.

  But the stairs of the building were so old they felt spongy under her step, and the door, when she knocked, roared like a drum. She heard what sounded like somebody falling and then Ward’s voice asking, “Who is it?”

  How to reply to that? Ban Gharda Bresnahan? Ruth Bresnahan? Or “Bresnahan,” which she shouted, sure it was how the others referred to her, and then was seized with immediate panic. What could she have been thinking about, coming out here when he was ill? It was the worst possible time, and surely not the way to go about making him aware of her as something more than a competitor or some poor, pitiable lump of pink flesh, which was probably more in line with his thinking. She caught sight of her reflection in the glass door—of her broad shoulders and her jaw, which was definite; of the oval of her long face, her surplus of bosom—and she nearly turned and fled.