Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

It was a straightforward question but one that always left Quirke feeling in a quandary. All his life he had struggled with the unhandiness of concepts, ideas, formulations. Where to begin putting all that chaotic material into short strings of words? The task always baffled him.

“I went out to St. Christopher’s,” he said.

Sumner looked blank. “St. What’s?”

“The orphanage that Dick Jewell funded-”

“Oh, yes, right.”

“-and that you fund, too.”

This Sumner frowned over for a moment in silence. “Me, fund an orphanage? You’ve got the wrong rich man’s son, Doc. Haven’t you heard? I don’t give to others, I take from them. It’s a grand old family tradition.” He put the baseball on the desk, where it rolled a little way and stopped. He flipped open the lid of the cigarette box and selected a cigarette and took the lighter in his fist and made a flame. “Who told you I bankroll motherless boys?” he asked.

“The man who runs the place,” Quirke said. “A priest. Father Ambrose.” Who smoked the same cigarettes Sumner did.

“Never met him, never heard the name. What’s he like?”

“He said that you and Jewell had set up something called the Friends of St. Christopher’s.”

Sumner suddenly pointed a finger. “St. Christopher’s, now I remember-that’s the place where Marie Bergin used to work, right, before the Jewells took her on?”

“Yes.”

“Right, right.” A thoughtful look had come into Sumner’s eyes, and he was frowning again. “St. Christopher’s. Dick Jewell’s pet project. So-what about it?”

The white telephone rang, making Quirke start, and Sumner plucked up the receiver and listened a moment, said “No,” and hung up. He produced a large handkerchief from the breast pocket of his shirt and used it to wipe the back of his neck. “Jesus,” he said, “isn’t there supposed to be a temperate climate here? I can’t take this heat-I grew up in a place of cool, pine-scented air and snowcapped peaks, you know?” He stood with his cigarette and walked to the window again. “Look at it,” he said. “It could be summertime in downtown Detroit.”

“So you’re not a Friend of St. Christopher’s, then,” Quirke said.

“Listen, pal, I’m not a ‘friend’ of anywhere. I’m a businessman. Businessmen can’t afford to be friendly.” He looked at Quirke over his shoulder. “You want to tell me why you’re really here, Doc?”

Quirke straightened himself with an effort in the baggy canvas chair and put his glass down on a low table before him. “I’m really here, Mr. Sumner, because I’m coming to believe that St. Christopher’s, not to mention the Friends of St. Christopher’s, is somehow connected with the death of Richard Jewell.”

Sumner turned his gaze back to the window and the street below. He nodded slowly, drawing up his mouth at one corner and sucking thoughtfully on his side teeth. His lavishly pomaded dense dark hair glistened in many points, a miniature constellation. “Where’s your sidekick today,” he asked, “old Sherlock? Does he know you’re here, or are you off on a frolic of your own?” He turned, a hand in a pocket and the cigarette lifted. “Listen, Quirke, I like you. You’re a miserable sort of guy, I mean you specialize in misery, but all the same, I do like you. Since you came down to Roundwood I’ve been rummaging through my memories of those golden days full of gaiety and full of truth when we were young and fair and roamed like panthers around this poor excuse for a city. You were quite the boy then, as I remember. Many a young lady, even including, if I’m not mistaken, the present Mrs. Sumner, had an eye for you. What happened to you in the meantime I don’t know and, frankly, don’t care to hear about, but it sure knocked the fun out of you. This game of gumshoe that you’re playing at, I don’t mind it. We all have to find ways of passing the time and relieving the taedium vitae, as that old bastard who was supposed to teach us Latin at college-what was his name?-used to call it. Where’s the harm in you and your cop friend flat-footing around and asking questions and searching after clues? None. But listen”-he pointed with the hand that held his cigarette-“if you think for a minute that I had anything to do with Diamond Dick Jewell getting popped, I’ve got to tell you, my friend, you’re barking up the wrong suspect.”

Sumner walked around his desk and threw himself down sprawlingly in the leather swivel chair, his linen-clad legs out to one side and widely splayed. “I’m a tolerant sort of chap, Doctor Quirke,” he said, “despite what you hear to the contrary. Live and let live, that’s my motto-not original, I grant you, but sound, all the same. So I don’t mind how you choose to amuse yourself or what sort of games you like to play. That’s your business, and I make it a rule not to interfere in other people’s business, unless, of course, I have to. But lay off the suspicion, right? Where I’m concerned, lay off.”

The white telephone rang again, as if on cue, and Sumner snatched it up angrily this time and shoved it against his ear and without listening to whoever was calling said, “I told you, no!” and hung up, and smiled at Quirke with his perfectly even, perfectly white big teeth. “They never listen,” he said in a tone of mock distress, “never, never listen.”

Quirke was lighting one of his own cigarettes. “A young man who works with me,” he said, “was attacked in the street last night.”

When Sumner frowned, his entire forehead crinkled horizontally, like a venetian blind being shut, and the line of his shiny brown hair lowered itself by a good half inch. “So?” he said.

“Someone had already rung him up and called him names-Jewboy, that sort of thing. He’s a friend of Dannie Jewell, as it happens.”

Sumner sat forward and planted an elbow on the desk and rested his jaw on his hand. “You’re losing me again, Doc,” he said, and once more did his film star’s toothily lopsided smile.

“Also,” Quirke went on, “a fellow called Costigan came to me a few days ago, after I’d been to St. Christopher’s, and warned me to mind my own business. You wouldn’t know him, I suppose, this Mr. Costigan? He’s one of the Knights of St. Patrick, and probably a Friend of St. Christopher’s too, for good measure.”

Sumner gazed at him for a long moment, then laughed. “The Knights of St. Patrick?” he said. “Are you serious? Is there really an outfit called the Knights of St. Patrick?”

Quirke looked to the window. Either Sumner was a masterly dissembler or he was innocent-innocent, at least, of the things Quirke had thought he might be guilty of. “Tell me,” he said, “why do you think Dick Jewell was shot?”

Sumner held out his hands with empty palms turned upwards. “I told you, I’ve no idea. Half the country hated him. Maybe he was playing mommies and daddies with somebody’s wife-though from what I heard he wasn’t much of a one for that particular kind of thing.”

Now Quirke did look at him. “What does that mean?”

“What does what mean? The word is, that where romance was concerned he had specialized tastes, that’s all.”

“What kind of specialized tastes?”

“Specialized!” Sumner shouted, laughing in exasperation. “Maybe he liked to screw sheep, or boxer dogs-how do I know? By all accounts he was pretty weird, but hey-who’s to say what’s normal? I told you my motto: live and let, et cetera.”

Quirke rose abruptly, picking up his hat from the low table, and Sumner blinked in surprise. “You’re not going, are you, Doc,” he said, “not when we’re having such a grand time here, surely?”

“Thank you for seeing me,” Quirke said. “I know you’re a busy man.”