Stained Glass

by Ralph McInerny

  Hanging up the phone, she said to Amy, “She will. Amos Cadbury can do anything.” She paused. “Well, almost anything.”

  Susan went off to shower and, as she put it, to get undressed for work, meaning the jeans and sweatshirt she wore in the studio. Madeline got set up again on the kitchen table, opened the text on her monitor, and stared at the words. That’s all they seemed now, words. When she had written them they had been a pure medium that carried forward her story. Now they were clumps of letters, lines, bah.

  She went up to the studio to find Susan just sitting on a stool. She had a cigarette in one hand and her lighter in the other, and she might have been Lot’s wife for all the animation she showed.

  “I can’t work.”

  “Neither can I.”

  “Madeline, it has to be some horrible mistake.”

  “I hope so.”

  The doorbell rang, and Susan went to answer. At the sound of her scream, Madeline dashed to the front hall. A startled young man, impossibly good-looking, much more so than his pictures, stared at Susan. Susan had stopped screaming and was now laughing. “They let you go,” she cried. “I knew they would. Did Amos Cadbury take care of it?”

  She took his hand and led him into the living room. This was a time for celebration, she decided. “Wine,” she cried, and dashed away and came back with a bottle of merlot. “This is Australian,” she said. “No cork. Just twist off the cap.” She handed the bottle to Fulvio.

  “A small point of order, Susan. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  He uncapped the wine and began filling glasses. Susan glared at him, then went to the kitchen for the newspaper. She dropped it in his lap. “There you are. Read all about it.”

  He read. He worked his lips. He made noises. He kept on reading. Finally he looked at Susan. “That’s not me.”

  “What did I tell you, Madeline?” Susan said triumphantly.

  “I mean it’s not a picture of me.”

  “You just said that.”

  “Not quite.” He lifted his wine and stared at the glass like a scientist in a lab. “It’s my brother, Charles.”

  6

  After Margaret’s call, Cy Horvath and Agnes Lamb, accompanied by representatives of the Barrington homicide bureau, arrested Charles Ruskin at the home of Susan Devere. Both Susan and Amy Gorman had to be subdued by officers as the arrest was made.

  The subject himself was strangely composed. “I’m not Charles Ruskin. My name is Fulvio Menotti.”

  The cards and ID in his wallet bore this out. They took him in for questioning anyway, ignoring the wariness of their Barrington counterparts. Fulvio Menotti was the spitting image of the man sketched by Louellen, and that was good enough for Cy. Nonetheless, they were faced with the difficulty of understanding how someone named Fulvio Menotti had been calling himself Charles Ruskin.

  “Two names are not two people,” Cy said.

  Maxwell came in and was taken to view the suspect through a one-way mirror. “That’s the man I saw with the reporter and the skinny little hooker, the alleged suicide. He’s the guy that went into Borloff’s building and somehow disappeared by the time Cy and I got to the apartment. Ask the reporter from the Tribune.”

  Rebecca Farmer couldn’t believe that the source of her great story was now being held for questioning in the death of Carl Borloff and maybe others as well. She stared openmouthed at him through the one-way mirror.

  Agnes said, “Is he the man?”

  Rebecca gave her a stricken look.

  “Yes or no?”

  Her “yes” was almost inaudible. Agnes led her away.

  Returned from Peoria, an apparently cold-sober Tetzel was all over the place, going from Cy’s office to Agnes’s, taking notes like crazy, trying not to grin like an idiot. He had the pressroom all to himself now.

  If they had their man, though, there were weird complications. In Borloff’s apartment a plastic bag was found, containing the box cutter that proved to have been the weapon used on poor Bobby Newman.

  Maxwell said, “I think that’s the bag he was carrying when he entered the building.”

  The T-shirt found on the waterbed in Bobby Newman’s studio told another story when Rebecca broke down and related her visit there with the suspect. So they held him now on suspicion of having killed Borloff.

  “I can’t believe he killed anyone,” Rebecca said to Agnes.

  A murder charge could not be just a matter of belief. Maxwell’s identification and Rebecca’s reluctant corroboration were something, but hard evidence was needed.

  Miss Pageant, the Kenosha librarian, came down and added her testimony. “That’s him, the silent partner.”

  To that extent, everything looked good, but Jacuzzi the prosecutor posed the puzzling question. “Why? What’s the motive, Cy?”

  The search for a motive now became the primary task. Agnes went back to Susan Devere.

  “He didn’t do it. I don’t care what you say. You heard him, he’s not Charles Ruskin. That’s his brother. Ask Amy Gorman.”

  “That’s what he said,” Amy admitted, but she no longer seemed to share Susan’s conviction that some horrible miscarriage of justice was under way.

  Neither Susan nor Amy knew where the suspect lived.

  “Didn’t you even wonder, Susan?”

  “He’s a sailor. My aunt met him on a freighter.”

  If a member of the merchant marine, he had to belong to the union. Cy checked on that and was given an address for Fulvio Menotti. It was a room in a one-star hotel on Dirksen, taken by the month. The clerk listened to their request, then said they had to talk to the manager. The manager’s name was Solomon, a tall fellow with a large head on which remnants of hair were carefully distributed. His eyebrows were luxuriant, and his belly hung over his belt. “Let me see your warrant.”

  “You want a warrant?” Cy asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then I’m glad I brought one.”

  The elevator was the size of a confessional—Cy’s analogy; Agnes let it go—and they rocked up the shaft to the third floor. At the door of number seven, Solomon asked to see the warrant again. He read it as if he were looking for a loophole. He gave it back to Cy and, as he unlocked the door, said, “He was such a nice guy.”

  Solomon was the first male who had spoken kindly of the suspect.

  Menteur was more typical. “I wouldn’t buy a used car from that sonofabitch. A real pretty boy.”

  “You bought a story,” Cy had told him.

  “We didn’t pay him!” Menteur paused, chewing gum furiously. “We did buy a pig in a poke.”

  Solomon went ahead of them into the Spartan room. The single bed was neatly made; there was a duffle bag lying on the baggage stand under the window. The bathroom was spick-and-span. The rope was looped over a hook in the closet. Cy fed it into a plastic evidence bag. He didn’t have to say “Kenosha.” There was nothing else significant in the room except the business card of Margaret Devere Ward stuck in the frame of the mirror. That went into another ziplock bag.

  “When did you last see him?”

  Solomon wasn’t sure. Downstairs, the clerk wasn’t sure. They had a photograph of the suspect with them, and both men looked at it. The clerk looked to Solomon for a cue, but the manager smoothed his eyebrows and nodded.

  The rope proved to match the length cut from it to choke J. J. Rudolph. Even Jacuzzi was impressed. Now it was Agnes who began having doubts. She told Cy she would talk to Margaret Devere Ward.

  “We’ve got enough identifications.”

  “Another can’t hurt.”

  Margaret Devere Ward was the kind of white woman that made Agnes want to check to make sure that Lincoln had actually issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Tall, patrician, a woman who seemingly hadn’t had a doubt in twenty years. So she was surprised at her graciousness.

  “Please sit down. You’re here about Fulvio Menotti, I suppose.”

  “What can you t
ell me about him? Your niece said you met him on a boat.”

  “That’s right. It was a very long voyage, and from the very first moment I met him, he struck me as someone special. Imagine my surprise when I learned that he was a grandson of Angelo Menotti.”

  “He looked you up when he came to Fox River?”

  “At my suggestion. I wanted to introduce him to my mother. She is a lifelong admirer of Angelo Menotti, and I was sure she’d want to meet him.”

  “Did you introduce him to her?”

  Margaret smiled. “Only recently, and got chased out of the room. My mother wanted to be alone with him. They talked for over an hour.”

  “And?”

  “That was it. I had already introduced him to Susan. I was certain that she would be impressed to find that I had such bohemian friends, and he that I had such a niece.”

  “We arrested him at her house.”

  “Poor Susan.”

  “Did he ever call himself Charles Ruskin?”

  “That was his little joke, I suppose. Of course you know who Ruskin is.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “One of the most perceptive art critics who ever lived.”

  “That was the joke?”

  “He adopted the name when I asked him to inquire about Carl Borloff.”

  “Inquire?”

  “Our family foundation had long supported Borloff’s art magazine, Sacred Art. At my mother’s insistence. Now she wanted to give him an enormous amount of money to produce a book of reproductions of Menotti’s stained glass windows. Menotti again. My mother’s obsession. Susan was strongly opposed, as was my brother, James. When he suggested to Amos Cadbury that a private investigator should be engaged, I told him I already had done that. When I mentioned to Fulvio my misgivings about Borloff, he said he would look into it for me.”

  “Amos Cadbury engaged an investigator named Maxwell.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Did Charles Ruskin report to you about Borloff?”

  “He told me he would write up a full report when he was finished.”

  “How did you get in touch with him?”

  “He came here. We talked on the phone.”

  “Do you have his number?”

  She thought. “He always called me.”

  “There should be a record of incoming calls on your phone.”

  There was. Agnes jotted down the numbers from which her investigator had called Margaret Devere Ward. There were several, but one occurred often.

  Mrs. Ward came with Agnes through the outer office. She extended her hand. “I can’t believe that I was such a bad judge of character.”

  Agnes got an address for the frequent number, expecting it would be the hotel on Dirksen. When it wasn’t, she tried the other numbers, but they were all public phones. The address she had gotten for the number from which Ruskin had usually called was in Skokie, and Agnes thought of calling Cy before going there. He wasn’t in, so she left a message, telling him what she had learned and where she was going.

  The address was a house in a neighborhood of little houses whose owners had a strong sense of property—well-kept lawns and shrubbery and a flag flapping at every door but Fulvio’s. She got out of the car and had started for the house when she was hailed from the next yard.

  “Anything wrong, Officer?”

  He was a thin rail of a man, barefoot, playing water over a flower bed from the hose he held. Agnes talked to him over the hedge.

  “Just routine.”

  “He’s not home.”

  “Fulvio Menotti?”

  “Is that his name?”

  “Didn’t he use that name?”

  “He’s not very friendly.”

  “How do you know he’s not home?”

  “He usually leaves his car in the driveway.”

  “Well, I’ll check it out anyway.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “We hope he can help us in an investigation.”

  “Lots of luck.”

  Agnes rang the front doorbell without result, then went around to the back, following a little walk beside the drive that led to the garage farther back. She stretched and ran her fingers along the ledge above the back door. Nothing, She looked down at the mat on which she stood. She stepped back and lifted it, and there was a key.

  She hesitated, then put the key in the lock and turned. The door stuck when she pushed on it but then opened. Agnes went inside. She looked around the kitchen, which had an unused look. Why would Fulvio Menotti have a room on Dirksen in Fox River and a house in Skokie? She went through the kitchen and dining room toward the living room, whose blinds were closed.

  There was a sound behind her, and too late she tried to get out her weapon. Something landed on her head, sending shooting stars through her brain, and then she was falling, falling, falling.

  7

  Edna went over to the rectory to tell Father Dowling that the story in the Tribune must be about the man who had come to the center to ask about Willie. “I told you he lied to me about having attended the school.”

  “I remember.”

  “All the awful things he’s done, Father.”

  “Like not graduating from St. Hilary’s?” He smiled when he said it.

  He went back to the school with her, remembering what Willie had told him of Holloway. Edna went up to her office, and Father Dowling went down the stairs to the lower floor where Willie’s room was. He found the maintenance man slumbering in his chair, with the Tribune scattered on either side of him. He had cut something from the paper and pinned it up alongside the story of the attempted bank robbery that had put him in Joliet. He jostled Willie’s shoulder. The little man grumbled and turned away. There was an impressive number of empty beer cans scattered among sections of the paper.

  “Willie?”

  Willie came awake with a start, looked wildly at Father Dowling, and tried to get up.

  “Stay in your chair, Willie.” He drew up the straight-back chair and sat. “I see you’ve read the story in the paper.”

  Willie admitted that he had.

  “Is that the man who visited you, the one who wanted to steal a stained glass window?”

  “Holloway? Naw, that’s Floyd.”

  “Floyd?”

  “Pretty Boy Floyd. It’s a good thing he knew how to take care of himself. Even so, the chaplain had him moved.”

  “Father Blatz?”

  Willie nodded. “For his own protection. Joliet is a zoo, Father.” “Tell me about Floyd.”

  “It’s funny they didn’t mention Joliet in that story.”

  “Yes. I wonder if the police haven’t arrested the wrong man.”

  “Oh, that’s Floyd, all right. He talked circles around the chaplain, acted as altar boy, the whole bit. Spent most of the day in the library. The sonofagun was a VIP down there.”

  “Floyd’s name wasn’t Floyd?”

  Willie shook his head. “Charles something.”

  “When did he get out?”

  “Before I did. Months before.”

  Before calling Phil Keegan, Father Dowling thought he would run down to Joliet and talk with Tubby Blatz.

  His old classmate had drawn an assignment few would envy, prison chaplain, but maybe in the Joliet diocese it was regarded as a plum. Tubby was in his office, talking with an inmate, and Father Dowling waited until the man left.

  “You’ve been waiting, Roger? You should have let me know you were here.”

  “You looked busy.”

  “They come to me just to break out of the routine.”

  “Have you been reading about events in Fox River?”

  “What events?”

  Father Dowling was glad he had thought to bring along the rectory copy of the Tribune, over Marie’s protests. (“I want to save that.”) He opened the paper and showed Tubby the story.

  The chaplain shook his head as he read. “So Charles will be coming back.”

  “Tell me abo
ut him.”

  “Of course he was innocent, like everyone else here. He might have gotten away with it, too. The woman he had robbed changed her story and said she had given him the money. The fact that he had been found with her jewelry and checkbook made that less persuasive.”

  “That’s his photograph?”

  Tubby studied it again. “He doesn’t look a day older than when he was here. He was known as Pretty Boy. You can see why. I got him out of harm’s way and had him assigned to me. He stayed in a little room off the sacristy.”

  “A Catholic?”

  “More or less.”

  “How more and how less?”

  “He knew a lot about the Church, but then he’d say something that rang false. He thought absolution was an indulgence.”

  “So he practiced?”

  Father Blatz was silent for a moment. “Roger, he was a con man. I came to think he wasn’t a Catholic at all. I told him he had to stop receiving communion.”

  “He accepted that?”

  “He said he had been about to suggest it himself.”

  “What was his real name?”

  “Menotti. Charles Menotti.”

  The drive back to Fox River was one of the times that Father Dowling wished he used a cell phone. Phil Keegan had to be told that they were very likely holding the wrong man. Phil had chuckled when he told the pastor of St. Hilary’s that Fulvio had said they were looking for his brother.

  “Amos Cadbury called,” Marie said when he got back to the rectory.

  “Any message?”

  “He wants to see you. He actually asked where you were.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “In prison.” Marie never smiled when she was pleased with herself. “I told him I didn’t know when you’d be back.”

  In his study, Father Dowling put through a call to Amos Cadbury.

  Amos told him that James Devere and his sister, Margaret, were anxious to talk to him. At the Devere house. “I’ll come by for you, Father.”

  “No need for that. I’ll meet you there.”

  “In an hour?”

  Before giving the paper back to Marie, Father Dowling opened it on his desk and studied the photograph. Family resemblance is often a mysterious thing. He looked forward to talking with James Devere—and Margaret, too.