Irish Alibi (15 page)

Phyllis liked his reaction. She lifted her glass, and he lifted his. They were toasting when Kitty Callendar appeared in the doorway. Her eyes widened when she saw Phyllis drinking with a customer at a table.

“I'll be right back.”

“Was it something I said?”

“I just got an order for a manhattan.”

Kitty never came all the way into the bar, of course, and she always took her drink back to her office. You knew it was near closing time when Kitty had her farewell manhattan. When Phyllis brought her drink to her, Kitty was fussing with her silly hairdo.

“How do you keep it up there?”

Kitty seemed to be smiling. She had a hairpin between her teeth. She plucked it out and stabbed it into the pile of hair on top of her head.

“Q.E.D., as we used to say in geometry. Where's Green Card?”

“I'll forget you said that.”

Sometimes Phyllis thought that Kitty Callendar had a crush on Michael Beatty. It was ridiculous enough to be true.

“Who was that?” Larry Douglas asked when she returned to the table.

“The Wicked Witch of the East. Or is it the West? I forget which witch. She's our bookkeeper.”

“So let's go over what happened here Saturday and Sunday.”

“What's the point? You got your man, the husband.”

“You ever see him around here?”

“I thought it would be the guy she checked in here with.”

“Maybe it was.”

“So why are you accusing the husband?”

“Maybe it was young Kincade. He was here Saturday night; he came back on Sunday.”

“To take Lulu to Mass.”

“Lulu?”

“The floozy in 302. Imagine that. After the way she was carrying on around here, off she goes to Mass like a good girl.”

“Some bad girls go to Mass.”

“You Catholic?”

“Aren't you?”

“Of course. I went to St. Joe.”

“So did I.”

Phyllis decided not to ask him when he had graduated. Larry Douglas wasn't a barrel of laughs, but it was a slow night, and who knew, maybe he'd want to take her someplace afterward. Geez. She was getting as bad as Lulu with the big good-looking Notre Dame student.

Larry wanted to know more about what he called the altercation when the Kincade boy had decided to go back and pound on the door of 302.

“He said he wanted to apologize.” She laughed.

“For what?”

“You'll have to ask him.”

“And there was already a man in the suite with her?”

“They went off from here hours before. He was the man Lulu was drinking with when young Kincade showed up. They had been at it all afternoon. No wonder they wanted to give the kid the slip.”

“Is that what they did?”

Phyllis shrugged. “Three's a crowd.”

Larry shook his head. “This is some kind of place, isn't it.”

“Oh, you know how it is. You meet someone nice, have a few drinks together, one thing leads to another.” She moved her glass about on the tabletop, bringing it into contact with his. She lifted her eyes slowly.

“Larry!”

A pudgy lady cop crossed the bar, looking daggers at Phyllis. She came up to the table and put her hand on Larry's shoulder. She might have been making an arrest. There was a diamond on the relevant fat finger.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, but she directed the question at Phyllis.

Phyllis got to her feet and picked up her drink. Was this how Lulu had felt when young Kincade came pounding on her door?

“Well, Officer, I've told you all I know.”

“This is Laura.”

Phyllis just nodded and drifted off behind the bar, feeling more foolish than she had in years. It didn't make a lot of sense, but she blamed Sean Feeney for her embarrassment. She had half a mind to give him a call. Maybe he thought Brickhouse was her married name. But it was her mother who had married again and had insisted that Phyllis adopt her new name.

“No one can spell Llewellyn.”

14

Arthur Benestad Crumley sat in on the arraignment of Magnus O'Toole before meeting with his client, Quintin Kelly.

“Who recommended me?”

“I just picked your name from the yellow pages.”

Crumley sat hunched over the table, his head seeming to be just emerging turtle-like from his torso. He wore his glasses on the tip of his nose, the better to peer over them. Practicing before a mirror, he had decided that this over-the-glasses look conferred a kind of shrewdness, even wisdom, on him. It made him look like that idiot senator from Michigan. He said nothing for a moment. Pauses, stretches of silence, were part of his forensic manner.

“I'm surprised they didn't arraign you.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“It's a better case than they can make against O'Toole.”

“I thought you were my lawyer.”

“This is just a preliminary conversation.” He was going to make this guy squirm for making that crack about the yellow pages. Crumley knew for a fact—well, an alleged fact—that Jimmy Stewart had recommended him.

“Maybe I should get someone else, if this is your attitude.”

Pause. Crumley realized that he didn't like Kelly. Nothing special about that, of course, He didn't like many people. “The best defense is to know the offense.”

“What I would like you to do is to make them let me leave town. I have a business to run.”

“So do the police. So does the prosecutor. You're a material witness.”

“I've told them all I know.”

“There are gaps.”

It all came down to which of the two, Kelly or O'Toole, had slipped away from the condo on Sunday afternoon while the other was sleeping. As far as Crumley was concerned, Kelly had a stronger motive for sending that high-flying lady on her way to the next world. He had said as much to Fauxhall, the deputy prosecutor.

“What evidence do you have that O'Toole was even in that motel suite?”

“A bearded man was seen around there Sunday afternoon.”

“You and I could grow a beard.”

“O'Toole already had.”

“Have you located Rufus James?”

“Are you representing O'Toole?”

“I wish I was.” Were? Whatever. But he was stuck with Kelly, who had checked into the motel with the departed lady, whose prints were all over the suite, who had managed to slip away Sunday morning in O'Toole's rental car and go to the motel to have a fight with his beloved.

Now he asked Quintin Kelly what he knew of Rufus James.

“He's a writer.”

“And you're a publisher.”

“Not his.”

“But you published Madeline O'Toole.”

“She wrote as Madeline Butler.”

“She and James seem to have hit it off in the motel bar.”

“And in the suite. She took him back there. I can't imagine what they had in common.”

Crumley pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose and then let them slide down again. If Benjamin Evans, the lawyer from Atlanta, knew his trade, he would hire someone to find Rufus James pronto. Get him anywhere near the Tranquil Motel on Sunday, and the case against O'Toole would evaporate. The jury would have their choice of bearded men, and James, unlike O'Toole, could be placed in the motel, and in suite 302, on Saturday night.

“I will insist to the prosecutor that you have to get back to Athens.”

“Good.”

“It won't be easy.”

Actually, Crumley had already won that argument with Fauxhall. Now he wished he had lost.

“Where are you staying?”

“In the condo.”

“As O'Toole's guest?”

“He doesn't own the place, you know.”

15

Grafton pulled the belt of his Burberry topcoat tighter when he got out of his car in the parking lot of the Morris Inn. Malcolm Kincade had agreed to meet with him when Grafton said he wanted to do a piece on the motive behind pulling down the statue of Father Corby last Saturday.

The young man was waiting for him in the lobby. Grafton recognized him from his picture in the
Observer
Larry Douglas had given him; he had also pulled up his Web page on the Notre Dame site. It featured a fluttering Confederate flag and a picture of Lee in profile, looking like the man on a cigar box.

“You the reporter?”

“Malcolm Kincade?”

“Eugene.”

“I thought your name was Malcolm.”

“That's my brother. He's in class.”

“Can you tell me about pulling down the statue?”

He clapped Grafton on the shoulder. “I was there. It was a family project. Let's go outside.”

Outside, there were tables, an expanse of lawn, and a large white tent at the end of the canopied walkway that started just beyond the table where they sat. Grafton got things going by mentioning that he was a bit of a Civil War buff himself.

“North or South?”

“Both.”

“Well, that's better than siding with the Union. That's what Notre Dame did. When my daddy was a student here and found that out, he nearly went on back to Memphis.”

“Your father was a student here?”

Kincade pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and laid it on the table. It was a photocopy of an old photograph showing the statue of Father Corby draped in a white sheet. The boy grinned expectantly when Grafton looked up from the photograph. “My daddy.”

“So it's a family tradition.”

“It is!”

“What are they going to do to you? And your brother?”

“Nothing.” He looked disappointed.

“I understand there are plans to put up a statue of John Bannister Tabb.”

“That's a start. Most everybody around here thinks the war was about slavery.” He shook his head. “That was only an excuse, and it wasn't made until the war was a year and more old. The South was fighting for the Constitution.”

“Which one?”

“The original. The one written largely by Southerners.”

Grafton made notes, wondering what kind of a story he could make of this. An essay on the War Between the States would get hoots of laughter at the
Tribune
, and Grafton had had too much trouble becoming a regular reporter to want to run that risk. He decided that any story here lay in young Kincade and his twin brother.

Kincade had pulled out a copy of the
Irish Rover
, an alternative student paper. This was a story about Notre Dame during the Civil War.

“Who is Caleb Lanier?”

“A good man. Just misinformed.”

Kincade seemed to think that Father Corby should have crossed the lines and blessed the Southern boys, too, before the Battle of Gettysburg was fought.

Grafton listened and went on writing. After a while he got out his camera and took some shots of Kincade. He thought of taking Kincade over to where the statue of Father Corby had been replaced on its base, but he had pretty much lost confidence that he was onto something newsworthy.

“Was it you or your brother who was out at that motel Saturday night?”

“Why do you ask that?”

No point in telling the young man the story he had heard from Larry Douglas, one he had concocted with Sean Feeney, the assistant coroner. Magnus O'Toole had been arraigned for the murder of his wife, so the idea that the Kincade boy would be accused of anything seemed fanciful.

“Just asking.”

“No, tell me.”

So Grafton told him. The young crusader's ardor was dampened by the thought that someone might actually think that he, or his brother, had killed a woman, a Southern woman, a woman from Memphis, and Grafton realized that he himself was taking pleasure in seeing the worried look on the young man's face.

“They already arrested the man who did it.”

“O'Toole has been arraigned, yes. It's a ploy that's often used.”

“How do you mean?”

“Pretend that the investigation is over, lull the other suspects into carelessness.”

Kincade frowned.

16

“I'm not a murderer,” Magnus O'Toole had begun when he was led in to meet Benjamin Evans, the lawyer the paper had sent up from Atlanta.

Evans looked like a choirboy and dressed to look older than he was. Magnus was not cheered by the thought that his fate was in this lawyer's hands. Evans took off his topcoat, hung it up carefully, then unbuttoned and rebuttoned his double-breasted suit jacket. “The charge is homicide.”

“What's the difference?”

“Years and years.” Evans sat down and drew a long yellow legal pad from his briefcase and placed it on the table. He shifted it around a bit to get it right. “So let's begin.”

“I didn't do it.”

“That's axiomatic. I want you to give me as complete an account of the relevant days as you can.”

Magnus felt his heart sink. It was difficult to forget the nice conversation he had had with Philip Knight when he thought they were looking for ways to pin Madeline's death on Quintin Kelly. He felt that he had been tricked into saying things that could later be twisted to mean what he hadn't intended. He said as much to Evans.

“Who is Philip Knight?”

“A detective.”

Evans ran his hand carefully over a head of hair that looked as if it had never been mussed. “A detective on the South Bend police?”

“No.”

“Excuse me a moment.”

Evans stood and left the room, leaving Magnus to feel miserable. There was a Bible in the holding cell, and he had begun reading the Book of Job. He stopped when it seemed to be about himself.

Evans came back. “There is no South Bend detective named Philip Knight.”

“He's a private detective. His brother teaches at Notre Dame.”

Evans regarded this as irrelevant, so Magnus told him of how he and Kelly had gone to the Knights' apartment after the game last Saturday.

“A social evening?”