Sham Rock (9 page)

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Authors: Ralph McInerny

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PART TWO

THE BODY IN THE HERMITAGE

DAVE HAD DELLA SET UP AN APPOINTMENT for Larry Briggs, and Larry was there half an hour early. When he was ready for him, Dave went to the room in which Della had put him to find Larry glaring at the numbers flickering across the screen.

“I hate those goddam things.”

“Actually it's the best day we've had in weeks.”

“Meaning lousy.”

“Let's go to my office.”

“What's wrong with here?”

“Not a thing. Larry, I've wanted to have this conversation for a long time.”

“Then why have you been dodging me? I flew out to Notre Dame, hoping to catch you there, but you were already gone.”

“I won't have you bothering my son, Larry.”

“It's you I want to bother. Your secretary told meâ”

“Administrative assistant,” Dave corrected.

“Whatever. She told me you were in Florida, but you were gone by the time I got there.”

“I wasn't at my condo on Longboat Key.”

“I went to Siesta Key.”

“Casey Winthrop?”

“That's right.”

Dave already knew of this because Casey had called to ask if his other clients were as nutty as Briggs.

“Why else would they be my clients?”

“Mame isn't nutty.”

“No.” That was when Dave had decided to unload Larry Briggs.

“I'm sorry you went to all that pointless trouble, Larry.”

“Pointless! Do you know what this is doing to Philippa? As you damned well know, that money came from the sale of her father's business.”

“Larry, my suggestion is that you get out of the market.”

“You're dropping me?” Larry was aghast.

“You don't have the temperament for it. Let's cash you outâ”

“What could I possibly gain by that? Last time we talked, you sounded optimistic.”

“I think the market will correct itself, yes. In time. But it will take more patience than you've got.”

“Bullshit.” Briggs sat up as he said this, then once more slumped forward, his menacing hands dangling between his knees. He looked as if he'd like to put them around Dave's throat. “You've put me in the poorhouse.” Now he sounded like he was going to cry.

“Not quite that bad. Larry, here is my proposal. We will cash you out, and I will make up the difference between what we realize and your original investment.”

Larry turned his head and stared at Dave. He began to nod. “That's what I want, all right, but not that way. You're as bad as Bernie Madoff. I'm going to sue.”

“You'd lose and waste a lot of money besides.”

“I want people to know what you've done to me.”

“Any lawyer, well, almost any lawyer, would advise against that.”

“You're worried about the publicity.”

“Well, I wouldn't welcome it. Let's do what I suggested. I hope you understand that I am under no obligation to do what I propose.”

“I don't want your charity.”

“Just my scalp?”

“Yes!”

Dave observed some moments of silence. He decided not to tell Larry again what he thought of his bothering Jay with his problems. “Larry, today would be a good day for you to get out. Let's look into it.”

They moved to Dave's office; he called in Della and told her that Larry was cashing out.

“Just tell me what I'm worth now.”

“That's what we're going to do.”

Half an hour later, Della brought him the figures. Dave glanced at them and tried not to think how much he would have to add to the amount on the basis of the proposal he had made to Larry. He handed Larry the paper.

“My God!”

“Shall I sell?” Della asked.

“Larry?”

“You meant what you said earlier?”

“Yes.”

“You're trying to buy me off.”

“Larry, you're a hard guy to be nice to.”

Larry glared at Della. “Sell it all.”

Dave nodded, and Della withdrew.

Larry was staring at the figures he had been given. “I've lost at least forty percent.”

“That leaves you quite a bit. Bank it, Larry. Bank it and forget about it.”

“Don't think this squares us, Dave. Maybe I can find an adviser who knows what he's doing.”

For the rest of the week, the market was on a sharply rising line.

Larry called, furious. “You sonofabitch.”

“Larry, you haven't lost or gained a thing. You're back where you were.”

“After what you've put me through?”

He slammed down the phone.

AFTER PEACHES TOLD CASEY OF MAME Childers's interest in Dave Williams's place on Longboat Key, she fell silent, a little kewpie doll smile on her lips, eyes wide.

“Why would she want a place on Longboat Key?”

“She doesn't.”

“So you don't think she's serious?”

“You tell me. She's your friend. Know what I do think?”

What Peaches thought was that Mame would like to buy the place and sign it back to Dave Williams. “Casey, he's all she talks about. She's nuts about him.”

He thought about that. She had been nuts about Dave years ago, when they were all students. Casey knew that because he had become her target of opportunity, her ticket into all their doings; no member of the trinity would ask her.

“They had girls of their own?”

“The same one. Beth Hanrahan.”

“They couldn't all take out the same girl!”

“It all depends what you mean by taking out. We did things together. Pat wrote plays, Beth and Dave starred in them, Quinn was a poet.”

“And you?”

“I wrote sports for the
Observer
.”

She leaned over him and kissed his nose. “I love you.”

She crossed the room and eased herself into a chair, sighing as she did so. The phrase “heavy with child” turned out not to be a metaphor. “So who was Mame's boyfriend?”

“Me.”

“I take back that kiss.”

Memories of Notre Dame and of his classmates, particularly the trinity and Beth and Mame, began to interfere with the plot of the novel he was writing. He tried to banish them by making notes, but that only increased the flow of memories and, more to the point, thoughts of what he could make of them, fictionwise. Isn't that what Pat had attempted in the story he sent to the archives? Casey was powerfully tempted to set aside the novel he was working on and give full attention to what was now a distraction. In a later preface to
Ethan Frome,
Edith Wharton had mentioned the temptation a writer often feels when, in the midst of one story, an idea for another occurs, one which always looks more alluring than the one being written. Her advice: Never succumb to that temptation. Finish what you have started before turning to anything else. It was advice that Casey had always followed even if, as he learned, Edith Wharton hadn't. She was forever setting things aside in favor of another story. Maybe her fervor in that preface was the plea of the fallen rather than the stern voice of discipline.

Casey set aside the Western he was writing, looked at the notes he had taken while fighting temptation, threw them away, and started as he always had, by starting. He would discover the story as he went along. Maybe that's what Pat Pelligrino had done when writing the story he sent to the Notre Dame archives. Dave, when he told Casey about it, tried to laugh it off, but it was clear it bothered him. No wonder. Joachim all but accused him of taking a hatchet to
Timothy Quinn. Casey was sure he could make a better story of those events.

Three guys after the same girl, and one of them disappears. The other two look accusingly at one another. The story would bring out the fact that each had reason to suspect that the other had something to do with the missing member of the trinity. The disappearance alters the chemistry of the group, as Timothy Quinn's disappearance had affected them all. The girl becomes wrapped up in things at St. Mary's. Pat stops writing, Dave switches his major to business, and nothing is what it was before. Except Casey and Mame. They lasted right up to graduation, almost beyond it, but Casey briefly took a job on the sports page of the Sioux City paper, and Mame went to New York.

For years, nothing, and now Dave with his business apparently gone belly up wants to liquidate his Florida holdings. He came down again for the sale of his boat, and they had lunch at Marina Jack's to celebrate the price the boat had brought. Of course, it was sad the boat had to go.

“You can always buy another.”

“I've been thinking of how seldom we used that one.”

“Mame Childers paid us a visit.”

“She's a client of mine.”

“So she said. Is she as loaded as she appears?”

“She came out of her divorce with a pile.”

“Divorce?”

“She was married to a non-Catholic.”

“How do people live in Manhattan?”

Dave thought about it. “From day to day. Like everywhere else.” Casey thought of Larry Briggs. What a business Dave was in. And Casey had thought editors were a pain in the posterior.

He said, “Mame seems interested in this area.”

Dave just nodded.

“She's asked Peaches about your place on Longboat.”

“Come on.”

“Scout's honor.”

“She's lost a lot of money lately. Thanks to me.”

“She doesn't act like it.” A boat went past the deck on which they sat and headed into the Gulf. “What a contrast to Beth Hanrahan?”

“Her model is Dorothy Day.”

Casey sipped his beer, thinking of his plot. “You and Mame are the only ones I've seen. Of course, I'm a kind of recluse, as Peaches keeps reminding me.”

“You've got a good life. Not long ago, at a rental car counter, I noticed that the clerk was reading one of your books.”

“Good for her. How about you? Have you ever visited Pat?”

“Our Trappist classmate? I've been thinking about it.” He seemed to be thinking about it then. “He left me some money.”

“Where does a monk get money?”

“It was an inheritance. He left it all to me before he entered.”

“Lucky you.”

“But why me?”

“Who else is there?”

“You.”

“Dave, I was never a member of the trinity, and he couldn't very well leave it to Tim.”

“How can anyone just disappear, Casey? One day he's walking around campus like everyone else, and the next day, pfft. He's gone.”

“A dead body disappears in a relatively short time.”

“Until it does, it has to be somewhere.”

Both lakes on campus had been dragged, and even when the searches proved futile, it was thought the body would surface sooner or later. It never had. The river hadn't delivered up a body either, but how can you drag a whole river? Those searches were based on the hunch that Tim had drowned himself. Committed suicide. Beth would have been the motive. He was sure that Dave was her choice. Pat had thought the same. The crack-up had begun. Wherever Tim went he must have walked. He hadn't flown out of South Bend; he hadn't taken the South Shore to Chicago, or the airport limousine.

“Hitchhike,” Casey said. “Someone gives a kid a lift and never connects that to any stories about a missing Notre Dame student, if he even saw them. There are lots of ways.”

“You think he's still alive?”

“It's a helluva story, Dave. It would make a novel.”

“You going to do that?”

“I'll change the names to protect the innocent.”

“That's ghoulish.”

“Dave, that's what stories do, make sense out of what in reality is mystifying.”

“How's your Western going?”

“The way of all flesh.”

“In a Western?”

“You'd be surprised.”