Carlton sumner had offices in the top two floors of one of the big old Georgian houses on Leeson Street, not far from the corner of St. Stephen’s Green. “You’d think,” he said savagely, “the god-damn air would be a little fresher up here, but it’s worse than at ground level. And of course, over here they’ve never heard of air- conditioning.”
It was another sweltering day under a hot white sky. The traffic in the streets jostled and clamored like a panicking crowd. There must have been a fire somewhere for there were sirens going in the distance and there was a faint acrid reek of smoke in the air. Quirke sat by one of two low windows in an uncomfortable chair made of steel and canvas, nursing a half-empty glass of orange juice that had been ice-cold but had now turned tepid. “I drink this stuff by the quart,” Sumner had told him, holding aloft his frosted glass. “One of the girls buys the oranges on her way in and squeezes them with her own fair hand. Why is the concept of fresh juice another thing unknown to you people?” He wore a pair of white deck trousers and slip-on shoes with tassels, and a white silk shirt that had a large damp patch where he had been leaning against the back of the black leather chair behind his desk. He had put his glass down on his desk and was pacing the carpet now, tossing a sweat-darkened baseball from one hand to the other. Quirke remembered the snow globe Francoise d’Aubigny had been holding in her hand that Sunday at Brooklands, and wondered idly where it was now.
“I didn’t see an orange until I was in my twenties,” Quirke said. “Then the war came and they disappeared.”
“Yeah,” Sumner said with heavy sarcasm, “you guys sure had it hard.”
“It wasn’t so bad. We were neutral, after all.”
Sumner stopped at the window and looked down into the street, frowning. He pitched the ball with increased force and caught it in each cupped palm with a loud thwack. He had expressed no surprise when Quirke telephoned and asked if he might come and talk to him. It would take a lot, Quirke supposed, to surprise Carlton Sumner, and a lot more to make him show it. “That’s right,” he said now, darkly. “Neutral.” He turned to Quirke. “You want a real drink? I’ve got Scotch, Irish, vodka, gin-you name it.”
“Juice is fine,” Quirke said.
Sumner left the window and crossed to his desk and sat back with one haunch perched against a corner of it. The desk was vast and old and made of dark oak, with brass fittings and many drawers, and the top was inlaid with green leather. There were three telephones, one of them white, a large square crystal ashtray, a mug of pens stenciled with the badge of the Vancouver Mounties-Sumner saw Quirke looking at this last and said, “The baseball team, not the cops on horses”-a roller blotter with a wooden handle, an antique silver cigarette box, and a fancy Ronson lighter the size of a potato. “So,” the owner of all this said, “what can I do for you, Dr. Quirke?” managing to put a faintly comical inflexion on the word Doctor.
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.
