Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

“Only the rumors. Sumner was making a takeover bid for the paper, Jewell wasn’t having it, they had a scrap-what’s so remarkable about that? Business is warfare by other means.”

“Yes, and people in warfare get killed.”

“And you think they don’t in business-?” He stopped. They had turned from the window and were facing each other now. Minor was smoking yet another cigarette-how did he do it? They appeared as if conjured straight from the packet already lit. “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?” he asked, with almost a laugh. “That Carlton Sumner-?”

“Let me get changed,” Quirke said.

The last of the long evening’s sunlight was in the bedroom, a big gold contraption falling down slantways from the window. Quirke stood and took a deep breath, then another. He took off his suit and hung it in the wardrobe-the jacket smelled of stale sweat-and put on a pair of gray slacks that were too tight for him, and found a pale-blue cashmere sweater he did not know he owned, and put that on, too. Then he caught his reflection in the wardrobe mirror, gaudy in pastel shades. He peeled off the pullover and the trousers and put on a pair of khaki bags and an old tweed jacket.

They went up to Baggot Street, to Toner’s. It was not crowded. The dreamy bluish summer dusk seemed to penetrate the smoky atmosphere, subduing further what little talk there was. At the bar Quirke sat on a wooden stool while Minor stood, so that they were almost at eye level. Minor, smoking of course, had one hand in a pocket of his trousers, jingling coins. Quirke thought it advisable not to drink, and asked for tomato juice. Minor ordered a pint of stout, which somehow, when he lifted the big glass to his beaked lips, made him look all the more like a cocky and prematurely aged schoolboy.

“So,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “you think Carlton Sumner did in Diamond Dick.” He gave a whinnying laugh.

Quirke considered this not worth replying to. “How serious was the takeover bid?” he asked.

“Very serious, so I hear. Sumner owns twenty-nine percent of Jewell Holdings. That’s a lot of shares, and a lot of clout.”

“He’ll renew the bid now.”

“Maybe not. They say he’s lost interest. You know what these big boys are like; they don’t hang about at the scene of a defeat. Anyway, what good would it do him to have Dick Jewell done in?”

“Revenge, maybe?”

Minor shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“What does Hackett think?”

“Who ever knows what Hackett thinks?”

They drank their drinks in silence for a while. “What else did she say, the wife-the widow?” Minor inquired.

“She has a daughter, nine years old. She’s worried about her. Hard, at that age, losing a father.”

“She’s French, right, the wife?”

“Francoise d’Aubigny.”

“Eh?” Minor gave him a keen look, catching something in his tone, perhaps, an unwarranted warmth. Quirke toyed with his tomato juice.

“She goes by her maiden name,” he said. “Francoise d’Aubigny.”

“Does she, indeed.” He grinned. “Is that what she told you, over the oysters and the vichyssoise at the Hibernian? That must have been a cozy occasion.” Minor took a professional pride in going too far. He licked his lips, still grinning. “She’ll be quite the heiress, I imagine.”

“Do you?”

Minor wore for a second a thin mustache of creamy froth that once again he wiped away with the back of that dainty little freckled hand. “There’s a trust, apparently. I don’t think she-the wife-I don’t think she has any interest in taking it on. She’ll probably settle for cash and move back to France. By all accounts she doesn’t exactly love it here. They have a place in the south somewhere-Nice, I think, or thereabouts.” He peered at Quirke closely. “You seem to have been impressed by her. A looker, is she? Heh heh.” Quirke said nothing. “Very strange,” Minor went on, “her phoning you up to have lunch and her husband hardly cold in his grave. The French certainly are different.”

Still Quirke would not respond. He was sorry now he had not left Minor sitting outside the front door, had not simply stepped over him and gone on about his day, instead of letting him in and giving him the opportunity to talk about Francoise d’Aubigny like this, as if he were running those clammy little hands of his all over her.

A large florid man in a dingy black suit who was passing by stopped and said to Minor, “Jesus, Jimmy, where have you been keeping yourself?” The man leered, swaying; he was blearily, shinily drunk. The two conversed for a minute in tones of raillery, then the florid man staggered away. Minor had not introduced him to Quirke, and Quirke had not expected that he would. Quirke thought, This city of passing strangers. He remembered that he had been supposed to call Isabel Galloway after work and before she went onstage-she was in Saint Joan and tonight was the first preview. He felt guiltily in his pocket for pennies and glanced towards the phone booth, a little cabin with a door varnished in a gaudy wood-grain effect and a circular window like a porthole.

“Is that all she said about Sumner,” Minor asked, “that there had been a row in Wicklow?”

Quirke drained the watery pink dregs of the tomato juice. “Have you got something on this?”

“On what?”

“Jewell’s death, the row with Sumner. You came to see me, remember.”

“I was hoping you’d know something. You usually do. Hackett talks to you, he’s your”-he smiled unpleasantly-“your special pal.”

Quirke batted aside the gibe. “Hackett is as puzzled as the rest of us,” he said. “Why don’t you go and talk to Carlton Sumner?”

“He won’t see me. His people say he doesn’t talk to the press. Doesn’t need to, I suppose.”

Quirke was developing a headache; it set up a beat behind his forehead like that of a small tight drum. He needed a drink, a proper drink, but he did not dare to order one. He stood up from the stool. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

“I’ll walk along with you.”

The night was mild and soft. Above Baggot Street a haze of stars looked like the bed of a river silted with silver.

“How is Phoebe?” Minor asked. “I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“She’s fine. She moved.”

“Where is she now?”

“Up the street there, beyond the bridge. She has what she calls a bed-sitting room.” Quirke had often wondered about Minor and his daughter. He presumed they were and always had been no more than friends, but he could not be sure. Phoebe had her secrets. He wondered if Sinclair had called her, after that disastrous dinner at Jammet’s. He hoped he had. The thought of Sinclair wooing Phoebe was a spot of warm potential at the back of Quirke’s mind.

“The yard manager, Maguire,” Minor said. “You know he served a spell in Mountjoy.”

Quirke took a second to absorb this. “Maguire?”

“He’s the manager at Brooklands-Jewell’s place.”

“What do you mean, a spell?”

“Three years. Manslaughter.”

Sinclair did telephone Phoebe. He invited her to the pictures. They went to The Searchers, starring John Wayne, at the Savoy. This second of their meetings was hardly more successful than the dinner at Jammet’s had been. The film seemed to irritate Phoebe. As they walked along O’Connell Street afterwards she talked about it dismissively. She did not like John Wayne, she said; he was effeminate-“that walk ”-despite all his tough-guy posing; really, he was nothing but a phony. And Natalie Wood, playing the girl who had been stolen by the Comanches-those braids, and that ridiculous shiny mahogany-brown makeup!