MONDAY WAS not exactly a brilliant day. The two women in my life were recovering, my wife much more slowly than my daughter. Nuala spent half the day in bed with a touch of fever. I began to wonder whether we had to really take her to see a doctor. I called my father, however, and he assured me that what Nuala had, had been going around a lot lately.Naturally.
Things started out badly in the morning when I decided that I ought to take the wolfhound for her morning run, since Nuala now had missed two days. For some reason Fiona was in a contentious mood. She objected to my putting the flexi-leash on her collar, she objected to going outside, though it was a nice enough if bitter cold morning. Then, when we were outside, sensing that the situation might be different with me, she ran faster than I did, tugged on her leash, almost pulled me over, and generally misbehaved like a very bad dog. In the struggle for dominance between her and me, I emerged at best a close second. A squad car came by as we were running down Webster and the cop rolled down the window to warn me that I should be very careful to keep that dangerous-looking dog on the leash. He added that it looked to him that she was about to break free.
I thanked him politely. Fiona barked loudly at him as
if to tell him he had absolutely no business at all, at all, interfering with her morning run.
Back on Southport I decided that perhaps I ought to replace Nuala at Mass too. So I walked into church just as the pastor was beginning the liturgy, and ordered Fiona to sit down next to the last pew. She absolutely refused to do so and continued to strain on the leash as though she wanted to dash up to the altar and smother the priest with affection. Finally I tapped her on the nose and said, “Fiona, you are a very bad dog today—stop it, and stop it now!”
She yiped in protest. The priest winced as though somebody had stuck a knife in his back. I felt that it would be nice if temporarily the ground opened and swallowed me up.
“Fiona,” I said ominously, “bad dog.”
She looked surprised and then guilty and curled up at my feet in a solid, sullen knot.
“Miserable bitch,” I whispered to her.
We went back to the house and I let her out in the yard where she could continue her recreation of chasing what was left of the leaves falling from the tree.
Nuala was making breakfast, pale and tired and discouraged.
“Dermot Michael Coyne, I’m never going to get better. Why don’t you just take me to the home for the incurables and leave me there for the rest of my life.”
“We don’t have homes for incurables anymore, Nuala, and Ireland doesn’t either.”
She poured me my morning shot of Earl Grey tea.
“Maybe they could start one for me because I’m not ever going to get better, not ever, ever, ever, at all, at all, at all!”
“Your dog was misbehaving this morning,” I told her.
She sank into a chair across the kitchen table from me and brushed her disorderly hair away from her face.
“Kind of pushed you as far as she could to see what she could get away with?”
“That seems a fair description of it.”
“Och, the poor thing, she must miss me on her morning runs.”
That was one explanation.
Finally, we let the wolfhound back into the house. She sort of sulked by me, avoiding my accusing stare. Nuala went back up to bed and I went into the nursery to investigate Nellie. She glared at me too, not at all ready to be pleasant on a day on which the blue sky now was rapidly turning gray and the wind suggested that it was getting colder and colder.
It was time for a diaper change. So I put her on the diaper table and wiped her off. That improved her disposition considerably. She waved her arms, kicked her legs, and gurgled.
I folded the smelly diaper and stuck it in the diaper genie. I noted that I had better empty the genie before Nuala was well enough to inspect it. I lifted my laughing daughter off the table and put her on the floor for a moment so I could remove the bag inside the can. She rolled over and tried to sit up, but failed in her attempts. Still weak from the infection I thought. The phone rang, Nuala picked it up in the bedroom. Very cautiously Fiona thrust herself into the bedroom and nuzzled me. I patted her on the head very briefly.
“We’re not making peace yet, girl. You were a bad dog in church this morning.”
She hung her massive head in shame.
Why do dogs show shame so easily?
“Dermot Michael,” Nuala cried from the bedroom.
“Coming.”
I walked out of the door of the nursery, which was only a few feet down the corridor from the bedroom. I’d walked maybe half those feet when suddenly Fiona went berserk, barking like she were the hound of heaven.
“What’s the matter with you now?” I demanded and then I looked at my feet. Scooting around me at full speed was a going-on-eight-months-old baby, crawling
straight for the staircase. I snatched her up and carried her back to the bedroom and put her in the crib. Her dignity had been badly violated. She shouted in protest.
“Shut up, you little brat,” I told her. “Before this day is over I’m going to get a gate put at the top of that stairway so you won’t ever risk your life doing a crazy thing like that again.”
Fiona nuzzled me as I turned to go to Nuala’s room.
“Yes, Fiona, you’re a very good dog. We’re good friends now. Don’t ever let Nelliecoyne do that again.”
As I went into Nuala’s room I thought to myself that it might be a good idea for me to get the hell out of the house and go back to working in the Board of Trade, a far more peaceful place. Thank God my wife had not caught me in that moment of carelessness.
“What’s the matter with herself?” she demanded as I entered the bedroom, a warning frown on her face.
“She tried to crawl out of the bedroom and Fiona and I stopped her. She was most upset when I put her back in the crib.”
“Och, Dermot Michael, won’t that child be the death of all of us!”
“We’re going to have to keep a pretty close eye on her from now on. I guess she’s discovering the world and has found out that it’s a very big place.”
“And doesn’t she want to know everything about it? Och, Dermot Michael, what a shame it is that I’m never going to recover to be able to take care of her.”
I sat down in the chair next to the bed and felt her forehead, still a touch of fever.
“I hope you get better soon, Nuala Anne.”
“So you can get back into the habit of fucking me?”
“Nuala!”
“Don’t tell me you’re not thinking about it now because I know you are!”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
She sighed loudly.
“I guess we’ll just have to make up for lost time, if I ever do recover, which I know I won’t.”
“I suppose I could manage that.”
“I just had a call from poor Nessa,” Nuala changed the subject. “Hasn’t the little eejit broken up with her Seamus?”
“Why did she do that?”
“She had him out with some of her fancy friends from the University last night and they had some big argument and he disagreed with all the rest of them and embarrassed her something terrible.”
“How did he do that?”
“Faith, Dermot Michael, I don’t know. They were arguing about the Church and all of them were your kind of fallen away Catholics who felt the Church was terrible, and your poor man had the radical notion that people are the Church and it’s crazy to leave it.”
“That’s what the little Bishop says, isn’t it?”
“Sure is,” she said, sighing. “But these friends of hers like to stand on the outside and criticize.”
“So she was ashamed of him?”
“Didn’t she say that very thing? She said he was a nice young man and he was going to make a lot of money when he went back to Galway. They had different interests and they would have different kinds of friends and she simply couldn’t trust him in a room with a bunch of intellectuals.”
“How many intellectuals do they have at DePaul?”
“I don’t know, Dermot. Most of them are probably pretend intellectuals instead of real intellectuals like your man the little Bishop. But your pretend intellectuals are worse than your real intellectuals.”
The next blow came in midmorning when we had a call from a very officious woman who informed us that she was Ms. Kavanagh’s administrative assistant. Ms. Kavanagh, she said superciliously, had an emergency board meeting and would not be able to see us on Tuesday morning. She was rescheduling our conversation for
Thursday morning at the same time. I hardly had a chance to say “thank you” to her for the message.
Then at noontime Cindy called to report on Maybelline.
“She went ballistic after her first session with the new psychiatrist this morning, Dermot. She screamed and ranted and insisted there was nothing wrong with her and she was never going to go into the psychiatrist’s office again, that all psychiatrists were charlatans.”
“Her husband is a psychiatrist, isn’t he?”
“I’m afraid that Maybelline has been on the edge for a long time. The rest of us simply haven’t noticed because she doesn’t seem very different than in years gone by. Maybe she’s been right on the edge as long as we’ve known her. Her confrontation with Nuala might have pushed her over the edge. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, but it’s going to be hell on her husband and probably on the rest of us.”
“Oh, great!”
I told Nuala only a little about that phone call.
She felt better as the day went on and found enough strength to get out of bed and put on her jeans and her Bulls sweatshirt and walk downstairs into the television room.
I joined her.
“Is it because of your Stockyards, Dermot Michael, that they call the basketball team the Bulls?”
“’Tis, though the Yards are gone.”
“I keep learning about this strange city … . Strange and wonderful … . I should really be practicing me songs, shouldn’t I, Dermot? And doing the voice exercises? Won’t Madam be furious at me when she finds out that I have missed three whole days of exercises?”
“You can tell Madam that you were sick, can’t you?”
“Madam’s pupils are not permitted to get sick, Dermot Michael, you ought to know that.”
She did work up enough energy towards suppertime
to sing a little bit. When Nelliecoyne heard her, she cried in protest.
“Would you ever bring her downstairs, Dermot Michael?”
Our daughter was standing up and hanging on the side of the crib when I entered the bedroom. She scowled at me and shook the crib angrily. I better let her mother discover this new trick for herself.
I removed her from the crib and brought her down to the television room so she could rest contentedly in her mother’s arms while the singing went on.
Nuala turned on the five o’clock news to see if Nick Farmer would appear. He was only supposed to have one slot a week but now that he had made himself into a celebrity, perhaps they would give him more.
The lead story on the news was about Nick Farmer.
“Chicago journalism,” the artificial blonde began solemnly, “has lost one of its most vivid and controversial commentators. Nicholas Herman Farmer’s dead body was found late today in an alley in the Uptown neighborhood. According to Area Six Commander John Culhane, he probably died last night and his body was only discovered behind a clump of bushes late this morning.”
The camera cut to John Culhane at his usual station behind a podium in Area Six headquarters.
“We have no report on the cause of death yet. Mr. Farmer does not seem to be a victim of foul play. We are investigating further.”
Then there was a shot of a covered body being brought into Ravenswood Hospital.
“Farmer had a distinguished career in Chicago journalism,” the blonde went on. “He had worked for the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Magazine, WMAQ Radio, The Reader, and a number of other journals. Most recently, he had also been a commentator on this station. He also contributed many articles to culture reviews. His voice was always clear, firm, and honest. Jody Clough, station manager of Channel
Three, said in a statement this afternoon, ‘Nick Farmer was the last of an old breed of Chicago journalists. A man of total integrity and gutsy honesty. We will miss him, we will not see his like again.’”
“Bullshit.”
“Dermot Michael Coyne!” Nuala said in shock. “The poor man is dead!”
“Indeed he is.”
“Funeral details are not confirmed yet,” the anchorperson continued. “Mr. Farmer is survived by his wife Martha and two teenage children.”
“I never knew that the man had a wife and kids,” Nuala said. “Poor dear people!”
The phone rang. I picked it up.
“Dermot Michael Coyne!”
“John Joseph Culhane here, Dermot. You’ve seen the five o’clock news?”
“Yeah, quite by chance we turned it on.”
“I wanted to get to you before it broke. We haven’t told them yet that Farmer was almost certainly murdered. He was given a huge overdose of heroin while his hands and feet were bound. After he was dead, his killers dumped the body in an alley behind Ashland Avenue and just north of Wilson in Uptown. The irony is that someone came forward in Evanston this morning and admitted that the assassination last week was, just as Nuala thought, fake. Farmer was hoping to get enough publicity so that somebody would give him a slot on television again. Evanston didn’t call us until the news broke this afternoon that this time he was really dead. I’ll try to keep you informed. By the way, there’s a wake tomorrow afternoon and evening up on Clark Street and the funeral Mass at St. Gregory’s on Wednesday morning.”
“St. Gregory’s?”
“Yeah, Dermot, I guess the poor man was one of us.”
There was mystery aplenty in the world.
“Dermot Michael,” my wife said to me, “you look
stricken! Aren’t you at least as pale as I am?”
“He was murdered, Nuala, it wasn’t a heart attack, it wasn’t a stroke, it was a massive overdose of heroin administered hours before his body was thrown into the alley in Uptown. The wake is tomorrow afternoon and evening and the Mass is at St. Gregory’s Church up in Summerdale on Wednesday morning.”
“Dermot Michael,” she said firmly, “we’re going to have to go, aren’t we? The poor man was a Catholic, it is the only thing for us to do.”
Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, have a dangerous habit of being ready to forgive everything at the time of death—however temporary that forgiveness is.
“Nuala, he tried to destroy your career, he tried to frame us for attempted murder, he was a mean, nasty, vicious man. I don’t see why we should pay any attention to his death other than to breathe a sigh of relief.”
“Dermot! You should be ashamed of yourself! The poor man is dead. We have to go up there and offer our sympathies to his wife and children! We are Catholics after all, are we not, Dermot Michael?”
“I guess so.”
“Besides, now we have another mystery to solve, don’t we?”
“Why is this our mystery, Nuala? Can’t we leave it to John Culhane and Area Six?”
“It’s our mystery, Dermot, because if it isn’t solved there’s always going to be a suspicion that somehow or the other we did it.”
“Culhane doesn’t believe that for a moment. The Chicago Police Department isn’t going to put us on its list of suspects.”
“It isn’t the Chicago Police Department that we have to worry about, Dermot, it’s public opinion. The poor man attacked us on television. He said that we were making threats against him. Someone wounded him in front of a bar. Then he turns up dead. Though they’ll never have any proof that we were involved—because
of course we weren’t—the suspicion will still linger. I don’t want our poor little Nelliecoyne growing up with that kind of suspicion around her family.”
“Now that you put it that way, Nuala, I can see your point. We do indeed have two mysteries.”
“And both of them, Dermot, are mysteries in which we really don’t know what the mystery is and a mystery in which what things seem to be is probably not what they are at all.”
“We have a pretty clear idea of what happened to Nicholas Farmer, don’t we? He was a mean, nasty man who made a lot of enemies and his enemies finally caught up with him.”
“That’s what it looks like, Dermot, but we should know by now that often things aren’t what they look like.”
The following afternoon Nuala announced that she was well enough to go to the wake. Irishwoman that she was, she would pull herself out of bed with a 103 fever to make it to a wake.
“What does His Reverence’s book say about St. Gregory’s, Dermot Michael?”
There was no point in denying that I had looked the parish up in George the Priest’s two-volume history of Chicago parishes.
“It was a German national parish founded in 1904, two decades after St. Gabe’s. Germans were a major component of the population of Chicago, more of them, in fact, than there were Irish. They were moving up from the near North Side to a district which people tend to call Lakeview or Edgewater but which, across Clark Street, is really Summerdale, because once there were summer homes up there. The Germans built lovely churches while, with the exception of Father Dorney, the Irish put up school buildings and used the auditoriums as churches. They also were much more serious about church music and liturgy than we were. The day the
parish was founded, they chose eight men to be their choir.”
“Not wild men from the bogs, were they now?”
“More civilized and more literate than we were, but not nearly as clever when it came to politics.”
At the wake we met Nick Farmer’s estranged wife, Martha. She was a tall, attractive, and somewhat haggard but extremely pleasant woman in her early forties. She introduced us to her son and daughter, two somber but presentable teenagers who both attended St. Gregory’s High School.
“It was so very nice of you to come,” she said sweetly. “Poor Nicholas was a deeply troubled man but he had so many good qualities and so much talent. Though we haven’t been together for many years, I still will miss him. Every once in a while he would feel terribly guilty about what he had done and would try to patch together our marriage. It never worked. His ambition was too strong and the sense that his great talent had been frustrated always burdened him.”
“How very sad,” Nuala said sympathetically.
“I know that he gave you a very hard time, Ms. McGrail. I don’t think there was any personal animosity in it. He had a hot temper but it cooled down very quickly. His vitriolic attacks on people were sudden bursts of anger which he knew called attention to himself and his work. He meant no harm by it.”
He may not have meant any harm by it, I thought to myself, but he surely did a lot of harm.
“Och,” Nuala said, “we weren’t thinking about that at all, at all. We just feel sorry for the poor man and for all your own sufferings.”
Martha nodded solemnly. “It’s very strange. I received a letter from him just yesterday, it must have been mailed right before he died. There was no hint in it that he expected to die. He pleaded for my forgiveness more strongly than he had ever pleaded before. Of course I forgave him, I had always forgiven him. I’m only sorry
I didn’t have a chance to tell him that one last time.”
“He asked for forgiveness?” Nuala whispered.
“Forgiveness, Ms. McGrail. Here, let me read the paragraph.”
She opened her purse and removed a much worn sheet of paper.
“‘Martha, I have been a rotten husband and a rotten father and I’m not much of a music critic either. I don’t know what’s happened to my life. I’m terribly sorry for having let you down so many times. I hope you will forgive me. I know that it is impossible for us ever to get together again. How did you and the kids put up with me at the times we were together? I’m a slob, a phony, a faker, and also a burnt-out case. I always will be that. On this day, when I feel a little guilt for the bad things I’ve done to people, I want to tell you how sorry I am.’”
Tears poured down the woman’s cheeks. Behind her, her daughter was weeping too and her son was struggling with his emotions.
“Daddy was not a bad man,” the daughter said. “Things simply never seemed to go right for him.”
Nuala was crying too when we left the funeral hone.
John Culhane greeted us as we emerged.
“I saw the ancient Mercedes,” he said, “and I thought I would stop to have a word with you.”
“It’s all so terrible,” Nuala said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “The poor dead man, the poor woman, the poor kids.”
“You see it every day in police work,” John replied. “Wasted lives. This man was apparently talented and he didn’t have the character to use his abilities.”
Too simple, I thought.
“Who might have killed him?” I asked. “What kind of enemies did he have?”
These are the kind of bread-and-butter questions that I am permitted to ask. It’s only the questions about ultimate
meetings and stories that Nuala bothers herself with.
“A long, long list of enemies, Dermot. Lots of people disliked him. He had very few friends. The crowd he hung out with in the bar on Chicago Avenue up in Evanston were celebrity worshipers, would-be intellectuals and would-be liberals who cluster around Northwestern University like vultures. In Chicago he hung out at the Old Town Alehouse which, as you know, is a dingy place for dingy journalists. I’m not sure that he had friends there. He has offended just about every editor and news director in Chicago and most of the journalists too. There won’t be a very big crowd here at his wake.”
“What did he do to offend editors and other journalists?”
“What didn’t he do! He stole other people’s work, he faked scoops, he plagiarized, he betrayed confidences, he attacked the innocent, he took advantage of young reporters. He didn’t destroy people but it wasn’t for want of trying. He seemed to think that he could succeed only if other people failed. For him all other Chicago media people were miserable fakes. He might have been right, but you can’t be too obvious about your contempt for your colleagues. He was smart and charming when he wanted to be and had a way with words. However, he usually destroyed himself before he achieved any real success.”
“That’s pretty sad.”
“Yeah, and he drank too much and he was always overweight and he pumped all kinds of chemicals into his system.”
“How did he get the job at Channel Three?”
“Doug Jurgens, the news director there, was an old friend. Went to high school with him. Figured he owed him a couple of favors. There weren’t very many markers out there for Farmer to pick up.”
As we angled over to Lake Shore Drive, Nuala said,
“Dermot Michael, don’t you think it’s time you check with your friends out on the West Side?”
“I hadn’t thought of that at all.”
When Lieutenant Knox asked the question about contacts with people who are involved in organized crime I completely forgot that Nuala Anne and I both knew the top leader of the Outfit. I had gone to grammar school with his grandson. He was terrified of Nuala because he realized that she was one of the dark ones.
“I could find out whether this was an outside job.”
“And maybe find out who did it.”
“As you know, that has to be an indirect approach. I’ll see what I can do as soon as we get home.”
“We’re really going to have to go to the funeral mass tomorrow, aren’t we, Dermot Michael?”
Did I have any choice? No.
“Certainly.”
“And to the cemetery afterward. There is bound to be only a handful of people there.”
“I quite agree.”
I agreed, mind you, but I would never have thought of doing it myself.
Nuala flipped open her tiny phone and called Nessa.
She shook her head after the usual brisk exchange in Irish.
“I think, Dermot Michael, that we better get gates at the top and the bottom of the stairs. This little monster is trouble.”
“Seamus?”
“Not a thing.”
Later, when Nuala was nursing Nellie after we returned to the house, she informed me, “That young woman is not only an eejit, she’s a fookin’ onchuck!”
“Nuala, I thought you’d given up such language!”
“Give over, Dermot Michael, sometimes only that type of language expresses the reality of things.”
“I suppose it does.”
“She didn’t say anything to you about Seamus?”
“If she wouldn’t say anything to you, she wouldn’t say it to me.”
“You’re right, Dermot Michael, as always you’re right.”
As always, huh?
“In two days,” Nuala predicted, “she’ll be missing him and then it might be too late, poor little thing.”
I wondered how often I was poor little Dermot when she was talking to Nessa.
I called my friend out on the West Side to see what he could do for me.
“My friend out on the West Side” didn’t necessarily mean that the man in question lived on the West Side, though in fact in this case he did. Or that he was necessarily a friend. It merely meant that he was “connected” with the Outfit and sometimes acted as a go-between.
“Hey! Dermot my friend, how are you? It’s been a while since I have seen you!”
“Hey! I don’t get downtown too much these days. I stay home and I work on my stories.”
“I don’t blame you, Dermot. There’s nothing much going on downtown.”
We chatted for a few moments for the sake of professional courtesy.
“I wonder if we could find out something from some friends of friends of yours?”
Instantly he became uneasy.
“Dermot, I’ll be happy to talk to some of my friends to see if their friends can provide anything for you.”
“There was a certain business operation in Uptown the other night. I’ve been wondering if you could learn from any of your friends whether it was a legitimate business operation.”
“Gotcha, Dermot.”
“Sounds like something crazies out in South Chicago might try.”
I meant the Latino drug gangs who made the Outfit
in its present elderly manifestations look benign.
“I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be back to you, Dermot, as soon as I can talk to some of my friends who have friends.”
I was asking whether the mob was involved in putting down Farmer. It didn’t sound like the kind of thing they would go after. He was far too small a target for the cautious old men who now ran it. Some hits went down without authorization, which they knew about but did not stop because it was not worth their effort to do so. Rarely did the Outfit use anything so crude as heroin overdoses. I wanted to be able to exclude them from our considerations and perhaps open the possibility that they might be our allies.
There was only a small group of people at the funeral mass the next day at St. Gregory’s, a delicately beautiful church of the sort the Germans tended to build in Chicago. The Catholic funeral liturgy, done properly as it would be in a church whose origins were German, is an extraordinary experience. Restrained sadness and serene joy invade the souls of the participants. The service dulls the pain and lifts the spirit.
Hope is not a bad idea.
The elderly priest who had known Farmer as a student in high school thirty years before talked about his earnestness and enthusiasms and especially about the hungers in his heart.
“Nicholas hungered for the infinite,” the priest concluded, “we all hunger for the infinite. His hunger was stronger than that of most of us. I don’t think he came very close to the infinite during his life, though on occasion he seemed to know what he was seeking. Now he has it all and we rejoice he’s gone home to the peace and love for which he was always hungering.”
Several pews in front of us his wife was crying. Naturally Nuala Anne was crying next to me.
Then we rode up to All Saints Cemetery on the edge of the city. The same elderly priest said the prayers at
the graveside and offered his sympathy to the family. Nuala and I shook hands with the widow and her children. Nuala and Martha embraced.
A strikingly handsome man, with a shock of iron gray hair and big sad eyes, one of a dozen or so mourners around the graveside, extended his hand to me.
“Dermot Coyne?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Rog Conrad. I went to St. Gregory’s with Nicholas. It was very graceful of you and your wife to come to the funeral. Not many people cared about him.”
“My wife insisted.”
“I would like to buy you both lunch, as a sign of my gratitude.”
“Sure … Nuala, this is Rog Conrad. He wants to buy us lunch.”
“Sure, we never turn down a free meal, do we, Dermot Michael?” Nuala said, turning on all her charm.
Nuala’s eyes flickered at me as we turned to walk to our cars. The flicker meant, “We ought to talk to this man.”
I was improving at the art of reading her signals.
He was a freelance writer, a sometime reporter for The Wall Street Journal who had specialized in business scandals. He had written several books on the subject and was, he seemed to hint, very successful at that trade. I vaguely remembered reviews of a prizewinner about American oil companies in Africa.
He took us to an elegant restaurant in downtown Evanston—rich green wall hangings, daylight filtering in through skylights, crisp white linen tablecloths, shining silverware, attentive waiters, and a fascinating menu. In French.
Big deal.
Nuala made another phone call home. Apparently reassured by Nessa, she continued to charm our host. “This is a brilliant restaurant altogether, Mr. Conrad,” she said. “Isn’t it, Dermot Michael?”
I agreed that it was.
“I owe you two something for being so generous to Nicholas. He didn’t deserve it, but it was still good of you to be concerned about him and especially his family.”
“Your man must have been terribly unhappy.”
Sure, wasn’t she on the case and wasn’t I therefore advised to keep my mouth shut?
“And himself with a very nice wife and two beautiful children,” Nuala continued.
“He had lots of talent, as Father Reinhard said at Mass. As a high school kid he was magic. Pure charisma. Enormously popular. What he lacked, I think, was patience. He had to have instant success. When he left college to go to work for the City News Bureau, an apprenticeship for many of us in those days, he charged in with supreme confidence that he was better than anyone else in the shop. Naturally, the veterans—guys a couple of years older than he was—found ways to make him look ridiculous. He was furious. He set out to get even with them and he did, but he made a lot of enemies.”
“Poor man.”
“Nick was too brash, too ambitious. He wasn’t able to keep his mouth shut, you see, and wait for the next time. And there would have been next times. Then later on he had to pick on younger guys just as older guys picked on him. He couldn’t help himself. When he wasn’t stirring up trouble against the boss, whoever the boss might be, he was feuding with his colleagues.”
We were served a mild red wine. Nuala ordered tournedos Rossini. So did I.
“I don’t want to get involved with this,” Conrad continued. “I don’t want to dig into his life and his past to get a story. There are enough stories going around as it is. I know you two are close to Culhane and I think you might want to pass something on to him.”
Aha, now we get down to business.
“I’m sure John would be happy if we passed something useful on to him,” Nuala said easily.
“Nick was working on a big story. A really big story. Or so he told me. He was always on to something big. This time he was more excited than usual. It’ll knock your socks off, Rog, he said several times.”
“Were any of his other stories really big?”
“Some weren’t, but some were. He’d always blow it.”
“Did it have anything to do with the music industry?” Nuala asked as she destroyed altogether an oil and vinegar salad.
“It might have. I think so. He was very vague about it. Nick was always vague about his top stories because he was afraid someone was trying to steal them. A couple of times his stories were stolen. Other times he tried to steal stories himself. I suspect that it was music. It was the beat he had chosen for himself.”
“Any idea what kind of music?”
“Gangsta Rap.”
“Bad business,” I said, tasting the wine and then tasting it again.
“Did he seem to think his investigation was dangerous?” Nuala asked, sipping delicately from her glass.
“Things were always dangerous for Nick. To hear him tell it, he never moved onto something that was safe. It was always a big story that people were trying to prevent him from telling. Danger, even if it was imaginary danger, turned him on.”
“How horrible!”
“Yes, indeed, Ms. McGrail.”
“That’s me mother. I’m Nuala or, if someone is wanting to say something special to me, Nuala Anne.”
Conrad, who did not seem much into smiling, smiled.
“All right, Nuala Anne. When we were all back in St. Gregory’s twenty-five years ago, he didn’t seem crazy. Ambitious, yes, a little ruthless, yes. But lots of fun. He was the leader of our little group who ran the school paper, a bunch of kids who wanted to grow up and be
like Woodward and Bernstein. He was a charmer too. Martha Grimm was the prettiest girl in the class. She fell totally in love with him and never really stopped loving him.”
“She’s free now though,” Nuala said.
“Free indeed but really not free and she might never be.”
“Poor woman,” Nuala said with the barest hint of a flicker of an eye in my direction.
“I don’t really know what he was working on. He certainly had lots of contacts around the city. And a nose for dirt. Sometimes he made up the dirt as he did about you folks … . He trusted me more than anyone else, but not by any means one hundred percent. I think he was a little scared. He made me promise to try to take care of Martha and the kids if anything happened to him. He had never done that before.”
“And would they be needing someone to take care of them?”
He shrugged indifferently.
“She doesn’t need anyone to take care of her or the kids, at least not financially. And I’m happily married so that’s not a route I’d be inclined to go.”
There was a faint hint in his voice that at one time he might have been inclined to go that route. Was Nick an old rival who had won in the contest for Martha?
“Tell us more about that darlin’ little parish. Did you all go through school there?”
My wife was up to something. I didn’t know exactly what she was up to but she was up to it.
“From first grade to high school senior year.”
His eyes clouded over and a quick spasm of pain raced across his face.
“And you all wanted to be journalists, did you now?”
She attacked the beef with a savagery that astonished me. Yep, she was getting better.
“Everything was clear during the time after the Watergate crisis. We wanted to make money, become famous,
and perhaps improve the world. Since the Northwestern Journalism school was up here in Evanston, we figured we would go there and become the Pulitzer Prize winners of our generation. Martha, Nicholas, Johnny Quinn, Doug Jurgens, Robin Cleary, and I. Nick dropped out after his sophomore year because he said they had nothing more to teach him. Johnny and Robin married each other and gave up on journalism. Johnny is an investment banker downtown and she has her own PR firm. Very power people. Martha heads up a small but well-respected market research firm. Doug is news director at Channel Three. Only Nicholas and I stayed in reporting.”
The facts in his narrative did not seem to justify the deep sadness with which he told the story.
“Ah, sure, don’t we all have great dreams when we’re young and we settle down and accept whatever happens.”
“You and Dermot seem to have done all right in your professional careers, Nuala Anne.”
“I never thought I was going to be a singer and Dermot never thought he was going to be a writer. I was going to be an accountant and he was going to be a commodity trader. And we were both going to be huge successes. Dermot was a failure as a trader, but made a lot of money at the exchange by mistake and got out while he could. And I had a good job at Arthur Anderson, but I liked singing better. So our dreams didn’t come true and ourselves being lucky that they didn’t.”
I didn’t like Nuala’s comment that I had failed in my chosen career. Still, it was the absolute truth, wasn’t it now? I had no idea what she was talking about. Neither, I suspected, did Rog Conrad.
“I’ve made it, I guess,” he said. “I’ve become the kind of journalist I wanted to be back in the days at St. Gregory. Sometimes I think it’s better if your dreams don’t come true. Today I wish we were all juniors again, just taking over the school paper.”
“Isn’t that the truth about dreams?”
“I never feel safe in Evanston,” I said to my wife as we drove home in the rain. “It’s where they started Prohibition.”
“It’s no wonder I was uneasy the whole time … what a terrible thing to do!”
“It was indeed. I expected any moment that someone from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would come in and take the wine away from us.”
There was a silence, then Nuala said, “Dermot Michael, whatever did you make of that man?”
“I’m not sure, Nuala. I remembered who he was during lunch. He’s a very famous writer. His book on Nigeria will probably win the nonfiction Pulitzer this year. The reviews were ecstatic. He managed to break through the protection around the military government and find out how they live. He reported in detail the corrupt relationship between the government and the oil companies. Somehow he was present at a number of embarrassing conversations in which the oil people bought off government leaders and later defended their actions to him on the grounds that America had to have oil and that’s the way business is done in the third world. Vivid, searing, scary stuff.”
“Doesn’t seem like the kind of man who could do that, does he?”
“His earlier books were pretty good too. Some people say he’s the best journalist in America … . What did you make of him?”
That was the question I was supposed to ask.
“Dermot,” she said thoughtfully, “he’s an awful nice fellow and very charming and he’s always been in love with Martha and he can’t wait to get rid of his own wife and pursue her, but he doesn’t have the courage or the passion to do it. And he really never liked poor Nicholas, especially since he stole Martha. Yet he came to the funeral. And himself trying to throw dust in our eyes, which I found most unusual, didn’t you now, Dermot?”
“Oh, yes, most unusual,” I said, not having noticed any dust at all. “Why would he want to throw dust in our eyes?”
“Now isn’t that the real question. Why would he tell us so much that he didn’t need to tell us without any good reason?”
“Because he had a good reason.”
“I think, Dermot, someday before the week is over we’re gonna have to pay a visit to Martha Farmer. Did they really think that journalism would be exciting when all it means is standing around outside a house on Southport Avenue on a cold morning waiting for something to happen, and knowing all along that nothing was going to happen?”
We turned off Sheridan Road and onto Lake Shore Drive. The skyline of Chicago loomed in front of us, a silver etching against the dark gray sky.
“Maybe he knew a little bit about your detective record and wanted to steer you down a wrong track.”
“Isn’t it clear that he wanted to do that? He didn’t need us to pass on a hint to your man.”
“Didn’t he take a risk by talking to us?”
“He was afraid of us, Dermot Michael.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t we now have two mysteries in which we don’t know what the mystery is?”
“In this mystery isn’t the puzzle who killed Nick Farmer?”
“No, Dermot Michael. It’s what happened to those poor people when they were back at St. Gregory’s High School.”