The Book of Kills (14 page)

Well, that got it all onto the table. Jimmy got back to the point. “Tell us about Orion Plant.”

He might have been dictating an equivocal letter of recommendation.
Orion Plant had talent, he had done his course work, passed his candidacy exams, and was ostensibly working on his dissertation.

“He became diverted by tangents dealing with the early history of the university. His is an antic, undisciplined mind. He ran over the allotted time to write a dissertation by several years. Finally we terminated him.”

“How long ago was that?”

“A week ago. Slightly more.”

“What sort of tangents?”

“Indians. Native Americans,” he added, as if this was being recorded. And it was, in a sense, as Jimmy had a phenomenal memory. When he wrote up his reports the typewriter never stopped clacking, as if he had composed it all in his mind as the investigation went on.

“There seems evidence that he is behind the recent incidents on campus. And off.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Why not?”

“He is a resentful man. He causes himself trouble and then says that he has been treated unjustly. He thinks he has accomplished things because he has imagined them. He is a romantic. A revolutionary.”

“Did he ever talk to you about Native Americans?”

“He talked of little else. It had become an obsession.”

“Does he have Indian blood?”

“He is a second-generation American.”

“Does your daughter work?”

Again the about-to-lie expression, and again truth won out. “In the library.”

“On campus?”

“On campus.”

Jimmy rose, Kocinski followed suit. Mrs. Ranke appeared with a tea trolley. Jimmy sat when he saw the chocolate cake. Mrs. Ranke poured. It might have been one of a hundred academic tea parties. Jimmy had two pieces of cake. Ranke sipped his tea and brooded. Kocinski put Mrs. Ranke in the picture.

“I always knew he was trouble.”

“You fawned on him,” the professor growled. “You were as bad as Laverne.”

It was when they were on their way to the library that they were informed of the body that had been found near Fatima Retreat House. They headed there.

FATHER JAMES HAD NOT
had so much attention in years. With Sweeney, his superior at Fatima, he had waited in the lounge until the police came. He was still wearing his out-of-door clothes. He told them the story as they left the house and started toward the lake. Other vehicles were now parked in the retreat house lot, which had been empty, the snow not cleared away. They were low priority for snow plowing at any time, but early in the season they would be lucky to have the lot cleared before the snow melted.

Father James noted the absence of ducks as they gained the lake path. He led the way along it to the point where the ducks had wandered off it and begun to quarrel over a glove. Paramedics were already there, the call Father Sweeney had made providing directions enough for them. A young woman with a ponytail, not dressed for the weather, knelt beside the body.

“I gave him absolution,” James said.

The girl looked up at the uniformed policeman Father James had led with his lanky companion to the scene. “He’s dead, of course.”

“How long?”

She shrugged. “Let Doyle guess.”

Doyle, the medical examiner, came across the snow in street shoes, lifting his knees high as if he were in a pasture inhabited
by a healthy herd. He joined the paramedics and looked down at the dead man. His eyes lifted and he looked out at the frozen lake. He glanced up at the trees. He might have been wondering why he had ever left private practice for what had seemed an undemanding sinecure. He squatted as if to line up a putt and studied the body without touching it. Then he reached out, lifted an arm, and let it drop.

“What’s with the feathers?”

“He was wearing them.”

Doyle began to make a repetitious noise. Tom-toms. He looked up at Jimmy. “Twenty-four hours. At most forty-eight.”

“Cause of death?”

Doyle made a face and pointed to the bloody mess on the back of the man’s head.

“Turn him over.”

Rigor mortis had come and gone, Father James thought. He had picked up such lore from Agatha Christie, whose
opera omnia
were on the retreat house shelves. How like inert matter a dead body is, mere filling for the clothes. The lanky man leaned over the body and found a wallet. He opened it and looked at his uniformed companion.

“Well, we found him.”

“Orion Plant?”

“Soon to be planted.”

All the talk over the body was impersonal, jocular, a kind of verbal anesthetic to shield the speakers from the reality of death.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis
. As a young man, Father James had worried about such prayers. How could a soul rest?
Locum refrigerii et pacis
. Peace, yes, but refrigeration for the soul? Such quibbles faded with
the years. Faith is a mystery and few things try it as much as the dogma of the resurrection of the body. Orion Plant, when he had come upon him, looked as if he were already part of the soil. Turning him over had not helped. His face was drained of blood, making the painted streaks vivid. The medical examiner was making a tom-tom noise again.

Father James told his simple story twice there by the body. And after the body had been slid into a rubber bag and zipped up and taken away, he and Chief Kocinski and Lieutenant Stewart went back into the lounge where he told it all again. Father Sweeney kibitzed and, as was his habit, interrupted whenever possible.

“We didn’t hear a thing,” he said. “When was it supposed to have happened?”

Stewart looked up at Sweeney. “If you had heard something that might help set the time.”

“Did you hear anything, James?”

“I take out my hearing aid at night.” He looked slyly at Lieutenant Stewart. “In order to sleep soundly.”

Stewart barked in appreciation. “The question presupposes that it was done here. I want another look at that site. The body could have been brought here.”

“What an awful thing to do!” It was unclear whether Father Sweeney meant killing the man or bringing his body here as opposed to somewhere else.

Father James’s day in the sun was far from over when the police were through with him. WNDU sent over a crew, hoping for an exclusive on a murder in their own backyard, but Maudit from the
South Bend Picayune
was hard on their heels. Father James was somewhat awed to be interviewed by a young lady
he had watched on the screen for several years. She was even nicer-looking in person, and she treated him with great deference.

“I understand you gave the man the last rites.”

“Instinct.”

“Of course you wouldn’t have known if he was Catholic.”

But it turned out that he was, nominally. Married outside the Church though. It was Maudit who had such arcana. The crew packed up and left and Father James and the reporter settled down as if in an ordinary conversation.

“He had come to me, Father. We talked, had a beer.”

“Would you like something now?”

“What do you have?”

Whatever he wanted. He asked for beer. Father James split it with him. The young man had seemed hesitant and James didn’t want to waste the house’s supplies.

“Why had he come to you?”

“He had a story. Father, I want you to know I’m a Domer, all right. But the public has a right to know.”

“To know what?”

“Everything.”

“Only God is omniscient.”

Maudit sipped his beer, and studied the priest. “Do you read the Picayune?”

“Oh no.”

“Why not?”

“When the students are here the
Observer
is more than I can take. I prefer television.”

“Show biz,” Maudit said dismissively. “I published a story about a serial murderer who operated around here in the nineteenth
century. My editor wants it to be a series, but they took care of that.”

“They?”

Maudit lifted his brows significantly. “Let’s just say that you stumbled on the body of my source there by the lake.”

“Fons et origo.”

“I took German.” Maudit rose. “But I wanted to take French. Maybe I will someday. Thanks for the beer.”

“Auf Wiedersehen.”

PHIL HAD BEGGED OFF THE
dinner, wanting to get all the details on the discovery of the body of Orion Plant, so Roger dined alone with Father Carmody in the refectory of Holy Cross House.

“Some woman who works in the archives has made a list of all the murders committed on campus over the years.”

Roger knew of it. “If I had been asked, I would have said none.”

“I wonder if she has the names of all those Indians that were written about in this morning’s paper?”

Roger made a note to check this with Whelan. The truth was, he wanted to get his mind off recent events. That his conversations with Orion Plant had led to the search for him as a suspect made him uneasy. He had not relished the thought of seeing either Plant or his wife again. Now he would not see Plant again in this life. As for Mrs. Plant, Carlotta Bacon, the wife of another history graduate student, had gone to be with her and had phoned back to graduate student housing that the new widow was hysterical. Orion had hit her in the face in public view and now she mourned him like a Neapolitan.

“We may play in the snow this Saturday.”

A light but swift team from an effete California campus was due for the weekend and cold weather was thought to favor Notre Dame. Father Carmody dismissed this. “Take a look at
the parts of the country our players come from. We used to be heavy with players from Pennsylvania, those that escaped the clutches of Joe Paterno, but now we seem to recruit in Dixie.”

The remark prefaced one of Father Carmody’s mild lamentations at the present’s poor show against the past. He was the elderly darling of the administration, a useful link to the past to parade before alumni, but he disapproved of most of what they did.

“Once
Ex corde ecclesiae
would have been redundant. Now some noisy professors profess embarrassment at being Catholic theologians.”

“Save in their own sense.” Father Carmody needed little prodding, but Roger wanted him to go on and blot out thoughts of poor Orion Plant. The plangent litany continued, practiced, repetitious, true. Of course, Father Carmody did not realize how thoroughly Catholic the campus appeared to one coming from the outside. Roger had never been in such congenial circumstances. The students were edifying, the ambience almost sacral, only some administrators seemed fitfully to hunger for the fleshpots of Egypt.

Ballast had called Roger’s office to tell him his report on Orion Plant had borne fruit. “We are bringing in the police.”

“But he’s already been expelled.”

“Well, he won’t leave the area. He can be more trouble now.”

“What’s the charge?”

“I’ll leave that to the police. They have enough to bring him in for questioning, thanks to you.”

Roger felt awful. But his spirits perked up when Father Carmody began to talk about Frank O’Malley and Dick Sullivan, Tom Stritch and Tony Chroust, Joe Evans, legendary faculty
members of what the priest clearly regarded as the golden age of Notre Dame, academically speaking.

“We were a college then, with the emphasis on undergraduates. Tony was the only scholar of the bunch, a bit of a pedant. He left quite a bit of money to the law school. At least it was considered quite a bit of money then. Like yourself, he was a university professor—law, history, philosophy—he taught them all. Courses that otherwise would never have been offered. Dick was a writer, a self-effacing man, and Frank was Frank, sui generis.”

“Do you know Otto Ranke’s book on famous authors who lectured at Notre Dame?”

“I was able to help a bit with that.”

“He should write another, about Notre Dame’s great faculty members.”

“Talk to him about it.”

“I will.” It was not only a worthwhile idea, it would provide a convenient excuse to pay a call on Ranke. “Tell me about Leo Ward.”

“L or R?” The two priests had been distinguished by their middle initials, taken to stand for literary and rational. “R.”