The Death of a Joyce Scholar (2 page)

“SORRY,” HE SAID, frightening her. “May I help you?” Raising a hand to her eyes, she tried to look up at him. She was a big woman in her early thirties; her dark brown hair was streaked with gray. Her eyes were also brown, and her skin was freckled and wrinkling on her white neck. “I’m looking for Superintendent McGarr.”

“May I ask why?”

She was wearing a plain white sleeveless blouse, turquoise-colored slacks, and white shoes, and McGarr could see that, in spite of her youth and good bone structure, her body had lost its shape from child-bearing. Her breasts had fallen and her stomach was pouchy and distended. To it she was clutching a white imitation-leather purse. “It’s about my husband.”

“What about your husband?” The dog, meaning to watch for any sign of hostility as she spoke, kept trying to hook its head around McGarr’s legs.

She took her hand from her eyes and looked down at her
feet, away from the sun. “Look—is McGarr in, or is he not?” She had a flat, Dublin, working-class accent.

He’s not, thought McGarr. Definitely. Categorically. But almost in reflex, knowing it was a mistake, he asked, “
What
about your husband.”

“Ah…” She cast her head to one side. “He’s missing.”

“For how long?”

“Three days now.”

“Is that unusual?”

Again her head went to the side, as if to say not really, but…

“And you suspect…?” McGarr looked off into the square, decided once again it was a park. From his vantage point he could see squadrons of fat bumble bees strafing a trellis of roses that was not visible from any other part of his property. Warped in the rising heat, the scene appeared as if through a film of tumbling water, and he blessed its tranquility and quiet.

“Well, sumtin’ happened to him. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise, what?”

“Otherwise he’d be speakin’ to me,” she said impatiently. “Look—are you McGarr? I can’t see you standing there like that. The sun—”

“You’ve been to the Castle?”

She nodded.

“And they sent you here?”

“No—it’s not like they did or nuttin’.”

“Of course you tried Missing Persons?” Three days was no time for a working-class Dublin man to be gone. He’d probably a drop taken or met up with a mot or both. Given the weather, he might as easily have awakened with some new friends in Wexford or Tralee. Working his way back, he was. On the tides that flow from a tap.

But it also now intrigued McGarr why she should think
her husband dead and the Murder Squad the appropriate agency to search for him. And now, in this heat in Belgrave Square.

“I rang them up and they said I’d have to file a report.”

“Which you did, I gather?”

She shook her head.

“Relatives. Friends. Any…” He looked off again at the roses. “…special interests?”

Did she blush? McGarr thought she did.

He waited and again catalogued the inspissated, matronly hands, water-worn and clutching the plastic purse that looked like it was melting in the heat. “It’s not like that.”

She had something else to tell him, something that had not come out as yet, and she had come for that purpose. How many wives with a husband missing three days would look up the Chief Superintendent of the Murder Squad, bang off, no other calls?

“And then”—she had so turned her head that she appeared to be speaking to the closed door—“I came to you because…” There was a pause. “…you’re one of…us.”

Really, McGarr thought. In what sense? Obviously in the pancake accent of the great family of Ath Cliath, which he hoped he shared with the woman only on occasion, and then when he was forgetting the best part of himself.

Still, it was an appeal that McGarr had not often heard, and he was enough a creature of his culture that he could not readily turn a stranger from his door. “Your name?”

“Katie Coyle.”

It was Dublin, all right, and nothing plainer. “Well, Katie Coyle—would you know how to get to the back garden of this house?” Taking the ring of keys from his pocket, he twisted one off and dropped it at her feet. With the same hand he gave the dog a command. McGarr had saved it from
the vet’s final needle when, after an explosion in an Irish National Liberation safe house that was being searched, the Canine Corps decided to put the animal down. Its right front leg had been damaged severely, and the dog would only ever move with a limp. McGarr, however, found the nearly nine-stone “personal protection” dog a home with his elderly next-door neighbor, a spinster, and there the creature adopted a proprietorial demeanor that prompted a resident to dub it the “PM. of Belgrave Square.”

The dog now hopped off the wall and on a hobbling gait was soon by Katie Coyle’s side. “You needn’t be afraid. He’ll see that you don’t get lost.”

And that you get where you’re going, he thought, as he waited to hear the door close and the latch catch.

He then scanned the quiet street, checking parked cars for passengers, the square for strollers or others sitting in the shade: anybody he could see in windows, doorways, stoops, side yards. But he saw no one. It was noon, and too hot to go out for those already not out.

Or for work at what was work.

In the back garden, under the deep shade of McGarr’s trellised grape vines, Katie Coyle told him that her husband’s name was Kevin and that they were from the Liberties, a profoundly working-class area of Dublin that occupied most of a hill between Christ Church Cathedral and the Guinness Brewery. They had nine children ranging from one year and three months to age eleven. They lived in a five-room flat, but were currently looking for something larger, but wasn’t everybody else.

And what with Kevin’s salary, which wasn’t much, and the kids, and the housing grants having been cut off again by the government, there was only so much they could do, him
(Kevin) insisting that they stay in the Liberties. “Where we were born and bred, the both of us, before it became the in thing to do for some.”

McGarr’s eyes met hers for a moment before angling off again. As she was speaking, he had been telling himself how much he needed an iced pint of lager. There were several tall cans in the fridge, but McGarr had a proscription, which he seldom broke: he would not take a drink at home alone before four in the afternoon, except on a holiday. He had almost convinced himself that it was in fact a holiday and that the beer would help him cope with the woman before him, when he chanced to ask, “And what is it that your husband does?”

“For a living? Or elsewise?”

First things first. The
elsewise
—doubtless beer and football; or beer, football, and horses; or (probably better for her, given their numbers) beer, football, horses, and women—they’d get to later, if McGarr tolerated her that long.

But when, with near embarrassment, she said, “Trinity College. He’s a professor there,” McGarr sat up on the bench they were sharing.

“A what?”

As though to say that she expected better of McGarr, she smiled wryly, and her large, dark eyes that were still a kind of perfection searched his face. “I know I’m not your typical Trinity professor’s wife. But nor is Kevin your typical Trinity professor.”

McGarr couldn’t help but wonder if he had a disturbed woman on his hands. Reaching down to stroke the head of the dog who was lying by his side, he asked, “Of what?” For God’s sake, he nearly added. Psychology?
Criminology?
He nearly cracked a smile. He could almost taste that beer.

“English literature, or like Kevin says, literature mostly in English.”

“A professor?”

She nodded, then looked toward the perfect rows of vegetables.

“A
full
professor?” he insisted. She would destroy his afternoon only for good reason. But the possible murder of a Trinity College professor of English literature and father of nine, who also curiously hailed from the Liberties, would be in the eyes of the press, which influenced such things in the eyes of McGarr’s superiors, the very best of reasons. And only at his peril could McGarr ignore it.

Then he could hardly disregard the fact that nearly nine out of ten homicides were committed by persons either related or known to the victim. And here was the man’s wife, who was by her own say-so “unlikely,” admitting that she believed her husband had been murdered. How had she put it? “…something happened to him. Otherwise…” Otherwise what?

Excusing himself by saying “Let me get my notebook,” McGarr walked into the basement, where he removed his boots. At the fridge in the kitchen he popped the top of a can of beer and swallowed long until the cold lager bit the back of his throat and brought a kind of satisfying pain to his right eye. He then repaired to the library where, if memory served him rightly, he thought he recalled having seen a volume by one Kevin Coyle, M.A.

And sure enough, there it was among his wife’s 90 percent of the library:
Myth-Making: the Personal/Impersonal of an Author of Competence.
A paperback, the volume had been reviewed in hardcover to what McGarr judged was critical acclaim. Said the
Times,
“Solid, insightful scholarship combined with trenchant wit and graceful prose…the book is a minor masterpiece of literary substance and style. As a primer on criticism, it will engage readers on every level.”

Said the
Guardian,
“Coyle has observed Pound’s dictum to make it new. His
Myth-Making
is so artful an approach to a truly new New Criticism that it often rivals the very works that it treats.”

Said the
Observer,
“A brilliant debut. One can only look forward with anticipation to Mr. Coyle’s succeeding work, which promises to deal with the entire ‘modernist’ movement in Irish arts and letters and to be a major publishing event.”

The reviews from America were similarly glowing; fanning the pages, McGarr noted that Noreen had actually read the book. It opened readily, and there was a distinct tea stain on page 285.

At the fridge he reached for another pint can, and dialed his Castle office. Glancing out the Georgian window at the end of the kitchen, he noticed that Katie Coyle was now stroking the P.M.’s wide head. A jackdaw kited down into the herb garden but fluttered up again when the dog moved for it.

“Bernie—tell me something. Was there a woman in there a while ago?”

“Jesus, Chief—she
didn’t.
When she said she would, I told her don’t. He’ll eat you alive, shoes, handbag, and all. She had your address and everything.”

“Kevin Coyle. From what she said, he’s a professor at Trinity College.”

“Yah.” McKeon’s tone was unbelieving.

“Lives in the Liberties.”

“Yah.”

“The wife seems to think—”

“Ah, Chief. She went through the entire drill when she was here, and Rut’ie nearly threw her out the door. Bodily. Fella’s only been gone a couple of days, for chrissake, and from the look a her—”

“Records,” McGarr cut in. “On both of them. I want a check on hospitals too. And the Liberties bit. Send Hughie out to interview neighbors.”

“You must be
joking.
We don’t even know he’s
missing,
much less murdered, and in this weather, with what we already have on our plate, and you—”

McGarr hung up blindly as he tilted the can back; he then dialed his wife’s shop in Dawson Street. The beer was now giving him a slight, agreeable buzz, and he imagined he must have been dehydrated. It was either that or he was going to hell altogether, which was a possibility now worth considering. He swirled his neck.

The P.M. had returned to Mrs. Katie Coyle’s side. The bells of the cathedral on Lower Rathmines Road were ringing. McGarr checked the kitchen clock: three, which was close enough to four, seeing as how it was a holiday of sorts. He allowed himself another gulp.

“Kevin Coyle—what can you tell me about him?”

“What’s wrong with your voice?”

“Nothing’s wrong with my voice.”

“There is, sure.”

“Like what?” He tugged again from the can.

“Like high.”

It was the proper word. The buzz had turned to a glow, and McGarr thought that after a bit more gardening, he might dust off his fishing rods and drive out to Howth for a little late-afternoon fishing. He had heard there were mackerel running off Puck’s Rocks.

“What are you doing?” she went on.

“Interviewing a complainant.”

“At home?”

“Why do you think I’m at home?”

“Where else would you be drinking malt where it’s quiet? Early, I might add. Would that we all were civil servants.”

“
Senior
civil servants.”

“An adjective all too revealing.”

Some twenty years separated them, and he wondered if Noreen was determined to keep him young through sarcasm.

“Coyle. I understand he’s a professor at Trinity. You have one of his books.”

“And
he’s
one of your complainants?”

“Did I say that?”

“You didn’t have to. I know the tone.”

Like she knew what he was drinking, he thought. Malt, not beer. “Which tone is that?”

“Coldly official. Your ‘state’ tone. The tone of the inquisitor.”

“Coyle. Kevin Coyle, M.A.”

“Sure, and much more. An utterly brilliant young chap. Professor, as you intimated. And early. It was either they promoted him or he was off. Don’t you remember me reading you the article in the
Times,
when the book came out?”

As far as McGarr was concerned, his ears had been virginal to the name Kevin Coyle up until a dozen minutes past, but he conceded. “Vaguely.”

“Ah, don’t cod me. Yah don’t. You never listen. I might as well be speaking to the bleedin’ wall.”

“Kevin Coyle. The book,” he prompted.

There was a pause in which, he imagined, she considered the fate of being married to an older man. Once, when she had complained of his not taking her seriously, she had accused him of thinking of her as “a tootsie, a bimbo, an…airhead.” McGarr had wondered where she picked up the phraseology, and when he had said, “I’ll take you anyway I can get you,” she had exploded, “
See
! That’s proof.”