The Book of Kills (15 page)

“Another self-effacing man. If I have anything against him it was his insistence that we needed a graduate program in philosophy. He brought Yves Simon here.”

“Was Jacques Maritain ever a faculty member?”

The old priest shook his head as if Roger should have known better. “Just a visitor, but a constant one. He loved Notre Dame. He bequeathed us his house in Princeton and his heart.”

“His heart?”

“His literal heart. He died in France, though, and the medical authorities wouldn’t permit the transfer.”

“How extraordinary.”

“Oh, I don’t know. They fought over pieces of Thomas Aquinas’s body. A few years ago, the then provost sold the house. Just like that. A damned fool thing to do.”

Father Carmody explained that it had functioned for a time as a residence for Notre Dame faculty on leave and doing research at Princeton.

“You heard Astrik Gabriel’s
mot?”

“Tell me.”

“It’s a good thing we didn’t get the heart. That provost would have sold it too.”

Ancient faces at the other tables turned when Roger roared. Not everyone here was thoroughly compos mentis, but Father Carmody said it came on so gradually it was not always noticed. And then they got back to Saturday’s game.

“Are you going, Father?”

“I may watch it on television.”

“Come to our place. We’ll watch it together and then have dinner when Phil gets back.”

The old priest extended his hand and they shook on it.
“Deo volente
, of course.”

“Of course.”

PHIL HAD BEEN TO THE
morgue to view the body and to read Doyle’s report. The final judgment was that the body had been dead for less than twenty-four hours when it was discovered.

“So he would have died at what? Six, seven o’clock.”

“More or less,” Doyle said with the caution of his trade. He had seen what had happened to coroners and medical examiners in recent highly publicized and televised trials. “He didn’t just die, he was murdered.”

“Weapon?”

“A tomahawk.”

“What?”

“It was found thrown into the snow six feet from the body.”

“So he was killed there.”

“No. He was brought there. There are signs that a vehicle of some kind was used to transport the body to the site. The weapon must have been pitched at the same time.”

“A tomahawk,” Phil mused. It seemed an inappropriate weapon for the self-appointed champion of Native Americans. “And he was wearing feathers.”

Doyle nodded. “He was a diabetic.”

“Is that relevant?”

“It probably was to him.”

When Phil talked to Boleslaw Kocinski he found him somewhat
nonplussed. The chief had set out in pursuit of Orion Plant as a suspect and now they were going to have to find out who killed him.

“The university was out to get him, of course. But I don’t suppose any of them did it.”

Phil left the remark uncommented on. He was glad when Jimmy came in and they went off together where Phil would receive a briefing.

“I looked in at the morgue.”

“Someone conked him on the head, probably with his own tomahawk, and then brought the body to where it was found.”

“Some one or ones?” Phil said.

“They must not have gotten out of the vehicle. There are no footprints or any other sign of people milling around.”

“What kind of vehicle?”

“It could have been a lawnmower.”

Phil imagined someone driving a mower along the lake path in the driving snow, Orion draped over the raised blades.

“Or a snow plow?”

Jimmy nodded. “More likely. We got some fair tire prints. I’ll have someone check out the ground crew vehicles.”

“I shouldn’t imagine it would be all that easy to appropriate one, especially during the snowstorm.”

“They didn’t begin plowing the walks or university roads until morning. The place is deserted.”

“I know. I live there. It will be a funny game with most of the students away.”

“Who would go in this weather?”

“I would. But it’s supposed to clear up. That was a freak snowfall.”

“I’m due to talk to the chancellor’s secretary. At her house.
She can give me half an hour. She sounds like an efficiency expert. Want to come along?”

Miss Trafficant had a condo in a development on the east side of the Saint Joseph River. The place had a winter look, almost a Christmas look, with the trees pasted with snow and their branches limned with it as if with decorations. There was a light on over her door.

“I suppose our half hour has already begun.”

Her coat was thrown over a chair and there was a man watching television. Harold Ivray. He nodded and went back to the televised hockey game.

“Tell me all about the kidnapping,” Jimmy said.

“Are you Professor Knight’s brother?” she asked Phil. She had looked at him more closely when Jimmy identified him.

“That’s right.”

“He’s been a great help.”

Phil didn’t ask how. Jimmy was waiting for her to begin.

“You’ll want to talk to Father Bloom, of course, although he’s still pretty shaken by the experience. His driver was on his way to pick him up at the airport and en route someone suddenly appeared over the back seat, told him to pull over, and then pressed something to his face. He went out like a light.”

“I’ll talk to him too.”

“His name is Johnny. He’s an idiot. They must have driven the car to the airport. When Johnny came to he was in short-term parking. But the car they shoved the chancellor into wasn’t the university car.”

“I was given the impression that the university thought it might have been Orion Plant behind it. The late Orion Plant.”

“It looked that way, didn’t it?”

“Looked?”

She turned to Jimmy. “My own theory was that it was done to make Johnny look like a fool.”

“Hmm.”

“If you talk to him, you’ll see what I mean.”

Johnny was in a sports bar on Route 23 with his wife Fiona, surrounded by a half-dozen giant screens bringing in athletic contests of note from around the nation. Johnny’s face was needed as support for his luxurious eyebrows that made his nose seem false. His baseball cap was pushed to the back of his narrow head. Fiona loomed over him subserviently.

“We’re investigating the death of Orion Plant.”

“Never knew him.”

“We think he’s the fellow who overpowered you and took over your car.”

This tore Johnny’s wandering eye from the screen he had been favoring. He became animated, and profane. Fiona clung to his arm as if to keep him earthbound.

“The bastard must’ve been hiding in the back seat. Creepy thought, but who checks the back seat before he gets in a car? I do, that’s who. That’s where my passengers ride, I want it to be as it ought to be, but that day I didn’t look, and see what happened? I’m lucky I didn’t lose my job.”

“Who would do a thing like that to you?”

Johnny entered easily into the notion that the whole episode had been contrived to embarrass him rather than the chancellor.

“I’ve thought about it, I’ve thought about it.”

“What did you come up with?”

“Johnny,” Fiona said in a warning purr, but he ignored her.

“There’s a bitch who works in his office. Miss Traffic Cop. Half my age and she thinks she runs the place.”

“You think she arranged it?”

“Johnny!”

“I’d look into it if I was you.” He glared up at his wife. “I was kidnapped as much as he was.”

“Who is Harold?” Phil asked Johnny.

“Harold?” The eyebrows rose dramatically in thought. He shook his head. “I don’t know any Harold. Who is he?”

“You have an Uncle Harold,” Fiona said.

Jimmy went through the account of the episode Johnny had given them, a marvel of pithiness. Husband and wife exchanged a glance. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“It’s just what you said.”

Johnny promised any future cooperation that would be asked of him and Jimmy and Phil left the den of cacophony and went out into the night air.

“That’s it for today,” Jimmy said. “Where can I drop you?”

They were not half a mile from the apartment and soon Phil was settled down before a single screen, watching a single game. How could you watch a game when you were watching another game? Other games. He was soon absorbed and was almost surprised when Roger came in on a rush of cold air. Of course he would not have heard Roger’s golf cart.

“Have a good dinner?” he asked, turning back to the hockey game.

“I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Me too,” Phil said. “Later.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Lieutenant Stewart and I had a pizza.”

“A snack! I’ll warm up the risotto.”

OTTO RANKE HAD BEEN
filled with foreboding when Freda called to tell him of the police visit, and he found little reassurance in the fact that the brother of Roger Knight was also investigating recent events. Freda’s account was as incoherent as the initial seminar presentation of a new graduate student, but the central fact emerged that it was Laverne they had wanted to see. She had not been home for three nights now, and when they heard of the death of Orion, Freda expressed a ghoulish elation. The demise of the faithless suitor allayed Freda’s fear that their daughter had run off with the scoundrel. Apparently Orion’s wife had had the same thought, and becoming a new widow had not kept her from conveying her suspicions about Laverne and Orion to the police. But how could Otto feel that the whole sordid connection was at last definitively over when he did not know where Laverne was?

He had from a distance checked her place of work in the library and seen that she was not there. Later he telephoned and in a disguised voice asked for her.

“Laverne isn’t in today,” he was told.

“They’ve killed her too,” Freda wailed. “They’ll find her body somewhere near.” And she began to wail louder. Otto ignored her.

“Do you want to report her missing to the police?”

“They already know that. They’re looking for her.”

Did Freda have any inkling of what the police interest in their daughter might be? When he arrived at his office, Russell Bacon was waiting in the hallway to see him. The graduate student followed him in and this irked Ranke. He liked to be settled in before receiving visitors. Bacon shifted from foot to foot watching the professor hang up his coat and crown the stand with his hat. He settled behind his desk and looked at his visitor.

“Well, sir?”

Bacon sat down. “Laverne is staying with us. Carlotta didn’t think I should tell you, but you must be frantic.”

“Laverne is with you?”

“Carlotta works in the library too. They’ve gotten to know one another. When she came to the door the other morning, of course we took her in.”

“In the morning.”

“The wee hours.”

Professor Ranke did not know what to say. His sense of relief gave way to anger that Laverne should have caused such anxiety to her mother, hiding in graduate student housing, so close by, while her mother imagined the worst.

“Why?”

“I’ve kept out of it. She and Carlotta talked for hours. I went back to bed. Apparently she intends to run away and start a new life.”

The phrase was ambiguous and Ranke scowled at Bacon. This was the plagiarist who had beaten the rap, as he would doubtless have put it, brazenly submitting a paper of Orion Plant’s as his own. Did the Bacon hospitality have anything to do with his old grudge against Orion for exposing him, however
ineffectually? How many knew of Laverne’s continued hankering after Orion despite the fact that he had unceremoniously dropped her for another? That she had resumed whatever it was with Orion after his marriage was probably better known than the doomed courtship that had played itself out in the privacy of the Ranke family room.

Bacon’s flat face with its crab-apple nose and pouting lips was repugnant to Professor Ranke. That a student might under pressure cheat and plagiarize was, if not excusable, understandable. But Bacon had been under no pressure when he purloined Orion’s seminar paper, nor had he felt an iota of remorse when he was confronted with the evidence of his deception. The best defense is a good offense. Bacon welcomed the official inquiry. The two papers were identical, but Orion had printed off a copy of his own paper after Bacon had submitted the paper as his own. Bacon raised the question of who had stolen from whom. Orion could not find the file on the hard drive of his computer. It had been erased. The case evaporated. But Bacon knew, and Ranke knew, the truth of the matter. And so of course had Orion, who began to call Bacon the Earl of Oxford.