Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  “Good morning,” Cy said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Police.”

  “I didn’t call the police.”

  “Eric did.”

  “Eric?” The door closed, there was the sound of the chain, and then the door opened again. Jason was wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. The hair on the sides of his head was wild; his eyes were puffy.

  “Can we come in?”

  He clearly didn’t want to ask them in, but he did. He stepped aside, and Cy and Agnes walked into chaos. There are kinds of messiness. Some kinds make sense, a sort of haphazard order, but Jason’s place was not of that sort. This was just a mess. Clothes, newspapers, books, plates, and cups. Glasses. The glass beside the couch—a sagging four-cushion affair—still had an inch of drink in it. A nightcap or a morning eye-opener? The place had the feel of a lair.

  “What’s this about Eric?” Jason demanded.

  “Your store was broken into.”

  He absorbed that. “What did they take?”

  “You’ll have to tell us that. Why don’t you go back there with us?”

  “But I’m not up yet.” It was ten of eleven.

  “Thieves wait for no man,” Agnes said. “Nice place you got here.”

  “It’s temporary.”

  “What isn’t?”

  For the first time he smiled and looked like a human being. A nice guy, actually. Agnes had made a conquest.

  “We used to live here,” she said. “The next row house, middle unit.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Why would I kid about a thing like that? We all wept when we moved out.”

  “That sad to leave?”

  “That glad to go.”

  “I’ve gotten used to it,” Jason said.

  Cy was trying to figure out why the son of Helen Burke was living in such squalor.

  Jason tried to smooth down his wild side hair. “I have to take a shower.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  He shrugged and disappeared, pulling a door shut behind him.

  “You think he’s got someone in there?” Agnes whispered.

  “Shame on you.”

  “He’s kind of cute.”

  “His family has money. This doesn’t make sense.”

  “He fits right in.”

  Agnes had picked up an ashtray with a casino logo on it. “Gambling as well as booze,” she said.

  “They go together.”

  “Like a horse and carriage.”

  She walked around the room, avoiding the mess, an odd expression on her face.

  “Boy, does this bring it all back.”

  “How long did you live here?”

  “I don’t like to think of it.”

  All the residents would have been black then, Cy thought. It was odd how you learned things about people you worked with. Well, what did Agnes know of him?

  Jason wasn’t quite transformed when he emerged, but his appearance had improved. You could almost mistake him for a man who owned a shoe store.

  “We’ll follow you,” Agnes said when they went outside. “You didn’t lock the door.”

  “I only lock it when I’m inside,” Jason said enigmatically.

  He drove a clunker whose motor had to make up its mind to respond to the starter. Finally it clattered into life. He put out a hand and waved and then started off.

  “His family has money?” Agnes asked.

  “Lots.”

  “Maybe he’s just eccentric.”

  “Being gentrified does that to you.”

  When they entered the Foot Doctor, Eric was sitting on a stool watching a kid try on tennis shoes. He started to rise, but Jason told him to go on with what he was doing. Eric seemed disappointed.

  Jason unlocked his office, stood in the doorway, and looked around. “What’s the problem?”

  Agnes looked at Cy. Well, considering the condition of the place in which he lived, the office looked almost neat.

  Jason went in, pushed the file drawers shut with his hip, and righted the chair. “I should have done that before I left.”

  “You tipped the chair over.”

  “I’m kind of clumsy.”

  “The wastepaper basket?”

  “I was looking for something, and I thought I might have thrown it out.”

  “You’re saying this is a false alarm?” Agnes asked him.

  “Eric is a good kid, but excitable. Did he say the door was locked when he got here?”

  Agnes said, “I’ll ask him.”

  When she came back, she said, “It was locked.”

  “There you are,” Jason said, giving her a big smile.

  It would be pretty hard to persuade someone who denied it that his place had been broken into.

  Cy said, “What’s in back?”

  “The stockroom. A john. Another room.”

  “Show me.”

  The stockroom was just metal shelving filled with shoe boxes. The john was a john. In the other room Jason checked the little fridge.

  “Nothing missing,” he said. He had hesitated.

  “You sure?”

  “This is a false alarm, Lieutenant.” He was addressing Agnes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Your tax dollars at work,” Agnes said.

  He came with them to the front door and stood in it while they went out to the car. Before she got behind the wheel, Agnes waved good-bye. Jason waved back. She settled behind the wheel.

  “Why is he lying, Cy?”

  “Good question.”

  Amos Cadbury was now seventy-eight, and aging had seemed to move him ever further from the era of rectitude, civility, and sanity in which his career had begun. There had been a time when the back cover of the telephone directory was not aglitter with the advertisements of law firms eagerly seeking business, usually from those with alleged injuries from accidents or complaints against the products they freely bought and consumed and then turned on in remorseful wrath. Gluttons sued the fast-food chains that catered to their appetites, likening the multicolored photographs of cholesterol-filled offerings to criminal and culpable temptations. Eventually someone would sue God rather than blame his troubles on his own weakness. Lawyers could be found who were not only willing but eager to aid and abet such nonsense. Against this background, Nathaniel Green’s new will, leaving all but everything to his vindictive sister-in-law, carried a note of nobility that cheered Amos. Helen had come to him demanding that he bring a suit against Tuttle.

  “What would be the charge, Helen?” Amos asked patiently. What a contrast the woman was to her brother-in-law.

  “Don’t lawyers have an ethical code? He told that reporter about work he had done for Nathaniel. Confidential work.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nathaniel might have released Tuttle from confidentiality in the transaction.”

  It was an odd position for Amos to occupy, defending the ineffable Tuttle. The little lawyer frequently skated near the increasingly fuzzy line that separated ethical from unethical behavior. He had often been brought before the local bar, threatened with the loss of his license. Amos had served on those boards. In another time, he might have landed on Tuttle like a Torquemada, but now Tuttle’s behavior scarcely differed from that of many of his fellow lawyers. In the dark of night all cats are black.

  “You don’t know that,” Helen said.

  “Would you like me to find out?”

  Helen threw up her hands. “I suppose he would lie.”

  “Putting that to one side, what do you think of the provisions of the new will? Of course, I know only what I have read in the paper.”

  “He wanted it made public, Amos Cadbury,” Helen said, undermining the claim that had brought her to his office.

  “He is being very generous,” Amos said.

  “Generous! It’s Florence’s money.”

  “Isn’t this what you once demanded he do?”
/>   Helen looked around the office with wild and angry eyes.

  “That’s what makes it so. …” She could not find the word. “He wants to humiliate me.”

  Amos had heard from Father Dowling of the treatment of Nathaniel that Helen had enforced at the parish center. He had heard, too, of her tearful admission to Edna Hospers that her conduct was reprehensible. Amos felt a wave of sympathy with Helen that was strengthened when he thought of her son.

  “How is Jason? This will affect him, too, eventually.”

  “When I am dead?” Helen said in the mournful tones of one who did not seriously believe in her own mortality. “Can you imagine what he would do with money, without restraints?”

  “How is the shoe store going?”

  “The Foot Doctor!” Helen cried. To such disfavor had the Burkes come.

  Amos had done the legal work for this new enterprise, as he had for Jason’s earlier entrepreneurial efforts. The location was good; people would always need shoes. With an accountant and reliable help even Jason should be able to make a go of it.

  “Has he overcome his weaknesses?”

  Helen seemed about to deny that her son drank and gambled. “As far as I know,” she said finally. It was as good an answer as any. If things went bad, she would be the first to know, confronted by a contrite Jason in need of maternal bailing out. Helen had reacted with horror to Amos’s suggestion, after Jason’s last debacle, that she simply leave her son to his fate.

  “They’d put him in jail!”

  “Helen, that might frighten him into serious resolution.”

  “If I could believe that, Amos, I would be tempted.”

  Unblessed by children of his own, Amos alternated between envying those with children and grandchildren and seeing the benefit he derived from not having any. Of course, that was selfish. Annoying as Helen Burke was, she continued to support her wayward son.

  “Perhaps, if he and Carmela …”

  “No! I trace all his troubles to her.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair, Helen.”

  “You don’t know her as well as I do.”

  Actually Amos knew Carmela a good deal better than Helen did. At first, Carmela had drawn sparingly on the money that had been placed in Amos’s care for her when she and Jason separated, but in recent years, once she had become a financial planner, she had become, if not a frequent, then a regular caller. It was usually an investment prospect that brought Carmela to Amos’s office.

  “You might want to invest in it yourself, Amos.”

  He smiled.

  “Who does handle your investments?”

  “You make that sound like a task. I take care of things myself, Carmela.”

  The years of wanting to amass more and more wealth were long behind Amos. He had never fully accepted the thought that money should earn money, at least in the way that was done in the stock market. One of his professors at Notre Dame had reviewed medieval theories on the matter and ended by asking if the class thought the ban on usury had been abrogated. The consensus was that the medieval economy and the modern economy were so different that those old strictures no longer applied. Amos had neither agreed nor disagreed, but throughout his long life he had often surprised in himself a medieval disdain for the antics of Wall Street. In his private restroom here at the office he had hung a framed photograph of Wall Street traders frantically waving slips, buying, selling. They all looked mad, in both senses of the term. Now Amos had almost everything in tax-free municipals. It simplified his income tax and gave him the comforting sense that he was benefiting communities rather than profiting from their debts.

  Carmela’s career seemed to be going smoothly, insofar as Amos understood it. At first, he had found it improbable that people would entrust their money to this beautiful young woman. Beauty can seem an alternative to brains, but Carmela had both.

  “It’s a shame you can’t control Jason’s finances.”

  Her reaction surprised him. The veneer of the professional woman seemed to drop away, to be replaced by the sadness of a woman separated from her husband. “How is he doing?”

  “Don’t you ever see him?”

  “I don’t dare.”

  “Dare?”

  The thought that Jason Burke represented a fatal attraction to Carmela surprised Amos at first, but, of course, they had been married. They were still married.

  Amos said, “You really should see him.”

  It was the kind of unsolicited advice he almost never gave.

  Carmela Rush—for professional purposes she had resumed her maiden name—shared offices in Schaumburg with two other financial advisors. They called themselves the Avanti Group, the name suggested by Augie Liberati, who had also been the one to invite Carmela to join forces with Andrew Baxter and himself.

  “A partnership?”

  “Limited. We will share rent, insurance, utilities, office help. From then on it’s to each his own.”

  “So what’s the advantage?”

  “You’ll pay a lot less for rent. We can pool quite a bit of equipment. Of course, if economizing means nothing to you …”

  Carmela joined the Avanti Group, armed with the experience she had acquired working for someone else. Baxter was the oldest member of the group, a retired economics professor who had decided to try practicing what he had preached. He had an annoying habit of explaining how he operated as if he were giving a lecture, but that had been a one-time event and Carmela came to like him and his fat, nagging wife. Their kids were grown and gone, and Mrs. Baxter took to dropping in unannounced as if to surprise an office orgy in progress.

  This was Augie’s interpretation. “I know the type.”

  “Your wife?”

  “I’m not married. You?”

  She had been aware of him trying to get a good look at her rings. Her wedding ring was not on the appropriate finger. That was in her apartment, left behind like her married name when she came to the office.

  “Once bitten, twice shy,” she said.

  “Ah.”

  That had been meant as information as well as a warning. She had remained faithful to Jason, only saying it that way made it sound like a chore. Carmela felt that the years with Jason had cured her forever of the mating impulse. Now she just wanted to make money, lots of it, for her clients, for herself. Her goal was to have more money than her mother-in-law; why she didn’t know. Still, one needed investment goals. That was the creed she preached to her clients and thus had to practice herself.

  Augie had taken classes from Baxter in the long ago, as Augie put it, but now their roles seemed reversed. Gradually Baxter shed his theories and took his cue from the swashbuckling approach of Augie. As far as Carmela was concerned, they were both too deep in hedge funds, their clients as well as themselves. To her the whole thing looked like a bubble bound to burst, and she steered between the Scylla of excessive caution and the Charybdis of moderate speculation.

  Augie dipped his chin and looked at her over his glasses. “I’d ask you to explain that to me, but I’m afraid you would.”

  “The Strait of Messina. The Aeneid.”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Loyola.”

  “You’re Catholic?” He brightened as he asked the question.

  “Once.”

  “That’s all it takes.”

  “Are you?”

  “Only on Sundays.”

  The three of them sometimes had lunch together, when they didn’t have something brought in. Augie preferred eating out. He worked like a Trojan mornings and then liked long liquid lunches in which he could savor the accomplishments of the morning. From time to time, Carmela accepted his invitation to come along.

  “Dutch,” she said.

  “I voted for the other guy.”

  He had to explain that to her. She kept the lunches to the minimum because she didn’t like to drink in midday and because the lunches were too much fun. In another world she could have liked Augie, a lot,
but she was in this world, a disillusioned wife who blamed the troubles of her marriage on her mother-in-law. The way Helen babied Jason was disgusting, and he claimed not to know what Carmela was talking about when she brought it up. The fact that it was still going on, Helen paying off Jason’s gambling debts, setting him up in one enterprise after another, kept the flame of Carmela’s resentment bright.

  “My husband drank,” she explained once when she had to refuse Augie’s repeated offer that he join her in a drink during lunch.

  “Your husband?”

  “It’s a long story. And it’s all over.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  “I’m sure Jason does, too.”

  “Jason.”

  “My husband.”

  “Your former husband.”

  “Former human being would be more like it.”

  Eventually, to lighten the burden of Jason’s guilt, Carmela told Augie about her mother-in-law. She talked too much. When she mentioned Florence’s death and Nathaniel’s insistence that he had killed her, Augie’s eyes widened.

  “In Fox River?”

  She nodded. She might just as well have a drink, the way she was babbling.

  “O’Hara,” Augie said, searching for the name. “Bourke.” Then he had it. “Burke.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I have a sister in Fox River,” he said.

  “Lots of people do.”

  From his sister he got all the details. Carmela liked that better than being the one to tell him the whole sordid story. His sister was married to a Pianone.

  “The Pianones?”

  He laughed. “That’s how they think of themselves.”

  Did he know their reputation in Fox River? “What’s your sister like?”

  “You should meet her.”

  They left it at that.

  When Nathaniel was released from prison, Augie knew of it before she did.

  She was delighted. “I used to visit him, in Joliet. Once a month. He is the sweetest man in the world.”

  “I resent that.”

  That kind of kidding was becoming a habit. A warning signal. Carmela resolved to see less of Augie, but she saw him every business day whether she liked it not, and she couldn’t help liking him. She promised herself to be careful. For a week she worked with such intensity that even she marveled at the results. Eat your heart out, Helen, she would say to herself. Sometimes she thought her plan was to make a bundle, resettle in Fox River, and be a standing rebuke to Helen.