Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

When word got about that Richard Jewell had been found with the greater part of his head blown off and clutching a shotgun in his bloodless hands, few outside the family circle and few inside it, either, considered his demise a cause for sorrow. Jewell, known to the jauntier among his detractors as Diamond Dick, had been a wealthy man. The bulk of his money he had inherited from his father, the notorious Francis T.-Francie-Jewell, sometime Lord Mayor and proprietor of a highly successful newspaper chain that included the scurrilous and much-feared Daily Clarion, the city’s top-selling paper. The older Jewell had been something of an uncut stone, given to violent vendettas and a loathing of trades unions, but his son, though no less unscrupulous and vengeful, had sought to polish the family name to a high luster by means of well-publicized acts of philanthropy. Richard Jewell was known for his sponsorship of orphanages and schools for the handicapped, while the recently opened Jewell Wing of the Hospital of the Holy Family was in the vanguard of the fight against tuberculosis. These and other initiatives should have made Dick Jewell a hero in a city beset by poverty and chronic ill health, but now that he was dead many among the citizenry declared themselves ready to dance on his grave.

His corpse was discovered that Sunday afternoon in his office above the stables at Brooklands, the place in County Kildare jointly owned by him and his wife. Maguire, the yard manager, had come up by the outside stairs to give him a report of a stallion that was lame and unlikely to run the following Thursday in an evening fixture at Leopardstown. The door to the office was ajar but Maguire had known better than to walk in without knocking. Right away, though, he had the feeling that something was seriously amiss. When asked later to describe this feeling he could not; only the hair, he said, had stood up on the back of his neck, and he distinctly remembered hearing Blue Lightning sending up a whinny in the quiet below in the yard; Blue Lightning was Dick Jewell’s darling, a three-year-old with the highest potential.

The shotgun blast had lifted Jewell out of his chair and flung him backwards at a crooked angle across the desk, where he lay with a bit of jawbone and a few teeth and a bloodied stump of spine, all that was left of what had been his head, dangling down on the far side. On the big picture window in front of the desk there was a great splatter of blood and brains, like a giant peony blossom, with a gaping hole in the middle of it giving a view of rolling grasslands stretching off to the horizon. Maguire at first could hardly take in what had happened. It looked as if the man had shot himself, but Diamond Dick Jewell was the last person Maguire or anyone else would have expected to blow his own head off.

Rumors and speculation started up at once. It added to the shock of the event that it had taken place on a drowsy Sunday afternoon in summer, while the beeches along the drive at Brooklands sweltered in the sun and the mingled smell of hay and horses lay heavy on the summer air. Not that many were privy to the details of what had happened. Who knew better than the Jewells how to hush up a scandal? And a suicide, in these days, in this place, was a very grave scandal indeed.

In the Clarion offices on Eden Quay the atmosphere was a combination of pandemonium and wondering disbelief. The staff, from copyboys to editorial, felt as if they were moving underwater, or through a medium heavier and more hindering than water, and yet at the same time everything seemed to be racing along like a river in spate and carrying all before it. The editor, Harry Clancy, had come in from Portmarnock, where a caddy had been sent on a bicycle to intercept him at the twelfth hole, and he was still in golfing gear, the studs in his shoes rattling out a tattoo on the lino as he marched back and forth in front of his desk dictating a eulogy which his secretary, the no longer young and faintly mustached Miss Somers, was taking down in longhand on a pad of copy paper.

“… should have been struck down in the prime of life,” Clancy was intoning, “by a cerebral hemorrhage-” He broke off and looked at Miss Somers, who had stopped writing and sat motionless with her pencil suspended over the sheaf of paper on her knee. “What’s the matter?”

Miss Somers seemed not to have heard him, and began writing again. “… in the prime of life…” she murmured, scoring the words laboriously into the cheap gray paper.

“What am I supposed to say?” Clancy demanded. “That the boss blew his brains out?”

“… by a cer-e-bral hem-orrh-age…”

“All right, all right, cut that.” Clancy had been pleased with himself for having hit on such an acceptable-sounding cause of death. It had been a kind of hemorrhage, had it not? There was bound to have been plenty of blood, anyway, seeing it was a shotgun Jewell had used on himself. The Clarion would not say it was suicide, nor would any of its rivals; suicides never got reported in the press-it was an unspoken convention, to spare the feelings of the relatives and make sure the insurance companies would not seize on it as an excuse to renege on paying out to the family. All the same, Clancy thought, better not to print an outright lie. It would get around soon enough that the boss had topped himself-Jesus, there was an apt phrase!-no matter what convenient lies were told. “Just say at the tragically early age of forty-five and at the pinnacle of his professional career and leave it at that.”

He thrust his hands into his pockets and crossed clatteringly to the window and stood looking down at the river. Did no one ever clean this glass? He was hardly able to see out. Everything was shimmering in the heat out there and he could almost taste the cindery dust in the air, and the river had a bilious stink that no thickness of grimed glass could shut out. “Read it over to me so far,” he growled. He had been on fine form on the course today, with three bogeys and a birdie at the ninth.

His secretary risked a sideways glance at him. That pink pullover might be all right on the golf course, she thought, but here in the office it made him look like a superannuated nancy boy. He was a stout man with a head of auburn curls, graying now, and a cross-hatching of livid veins over his cheekbones that was the legacy of a lifetime’s hard drinking. He should beware a brain hemorrhage himself, Miss Somers considered. He was the fourth editor she had worked for in the forty years of her employment at the Clarion, not counting Eddie Randall, who broke down after a fortnight in the job and was sacked. She remembered old man Jewell, the well-named Francie; over a hot port in Mooney’s one Christmas he had made an indecent proposal to her that she had pretended not to understand. All the same, he was a real man, not like the fellows going about now, calling themselves journalists-what ever happened to reporters?-and spending half the working week playing golf and the other half in the pub.

Clancy was off again, pacing and prating: “… scion of a great Dublin family and a-” He stopped again, checked as Miss Somers delicately but unignorably cleared her throat. “What is it now?”

“Pardon me, Mr. Clancy-but what was that word?”

“What?” He was baffled.

“Do you mean scion?” Miss Somers asked. “I believe that’s how it’s pronounced, not skion. ”

She would not raise her eyes to his, and he stood in the middle of the floor breathing hard and gazing at the white parting down the center of her silver hair with an expression of angry helplessness. Bloody, impossible, dried-up old maid! “Oh, do forgive my ignorance, please,” he said with weary sarcasm, “ -scion of a great Dublin family…” And a ruthless bastard, he was thinking, who would tear out your heart as quick as look at you. He waved a hand impatiently and went and sat down behind his desk. “We’ll finish it later,” he said, “there’s plenty of time. Ask the switch to get me Hackett over at Pearse Street, will you?”