The Widow's Mate

by Ralph McInerny

  * * *

  As Father Dowling returned to his study from seeing Amos off, he heard voices in the kitchen. Curious, he continued down the hall and pushed open the door.

  Marie sat at one end of the table, while at the other a bearded man was eating the sandwich she had made for him. The man rose when Father Dowling entered the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt.”

  He waited to see if Marie would say anything, and when she didn’t he retreated to his study. Recent events weighed on him, not least because there seemed nothing he could do to lessen their burden on the Flanagans. He pulled the telephone to him and dialed the Flanagan number. What better time than the present to go see Melissa? But no one answered.

  Fifteen minutes later, Marie looked in on him. “He’s gone.” He realized that she meant the bearded vagrant she had fed. “You don’t mind, do you? I could have brought food to him on the back porch.”

  “Nonsense. He seemed a pleasant enough fellow.” He paused. “A sort of Franciscan look.”

  Marie’s mouth became a line, and she glared at him. Then she went back to her kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

  20

  Luke wasn’t all that eager to come back to his apartment, preferring to stay in Fox River with his daughter-in-law, and Maud knew the reason was Boleslaw Bochenski. It had been just a lark the first time they wheeled the old guy down to their bar and made sure he had a couple of boilermakers; it was as if they were young and Boleslaw was old, although Luke wasn’t sure that the wheelchair was necessary.

  “He just likes to be pushed around,” Luke asserted.

  “He’s a man.”

  Luke hadn’t liked the way Boleslaw whined about how his daughter neglected him. If she ever had in the past, she was making up for it now, so they got to know Sandra, too, she and Luke. That, of course, was the problem. Luke had treated Boleslaw the way he had probably treated employees, and now to find that Sandra Bochenski had had an affair with his dead son, that they had planned to run away together, hit him hard. The fact that his son had run off with another woman, thus stranding Sandra as well as Melissa, didn’t register with Luke. Before those stories appeared in the Fox River paper, Maud would have said Luke liked Sandra, admired her. Unlike her father, she had independence. She clearly wasn’t dependent on anyone else.

  “Anyone but Tuttle,” he said. “I would have warned her if she had asked me about Fox River lawyers. Tuttle is a joke. I would have set her up with Amos Cadbury.”

  That would have been a pair. Maud half expected that Cadbury would have the family crest embossed on the door of the car in which he was driven around. Aristocratic, deferential, aloof, although he always talked to Maud as if they shared a secret. It turned out that Luke had told the lawyer that if he ever got married again, Maud would be the girl. Girl! Well, Luke hadn’t exactly asked, so she hadn’t answered, but that seemed another idea that was a casualty of these awful revelations about Luke’s family. The fact that his son had used the garage apartment for a rendezvous, taking Sandra there, might have been sufficient to keep him away from the apartment here for which he had paid through the nose. The fact was that Maud was lonely.

  She had returned from her trip to Kentucky to visit her son the monk. A few days was all of it she could take. Jimmy—she could never think of him as Brother Peter—accepted her visits as if he were doing penance. He had put her and the world behind him, but, of course, it was his duty to honor his mother. Maud didn’t want to be honored, not in that way. She didn’t know what she expected from Jimmy, but it wasn’t his dutiful presence when he spent time with her in the guesthouse.

  One day they had taken a long walk, along a road that went through the monastery woods to the hermitage that, he said, was famous because Thomas Merton had spent so much time there. Merton had been a monk at Gethsemani, and Jimmy seemed to have ambiguous thoughts about him. Not that he would criticize anyone. What kind of conversation could you have with someone who was determined to see only good in other people? Another guest, the one with the beard, was already at the hermitage, sitting on the front porch, looking off into the hills in the distance. The man got up as they approached, ready to leave the hermitage to them, but Jimmy insisted they didn’t want to disturb him.

  “How long’s he been here?” Maud asked when they started back.

  Jimmy didn’t know. What is time when all your thoughts are on eternity? She told Jimmy about Luke Flanagan, and he listened politely, but he might have been hearing the music of the spheres.

  The first time Maud saw Boleslaw’s daughter after she was taken in for questioning and the news about her and young Flanagan broke, she just went up to her and put her arms around her, no need to say anything.

  There were tears in Sandra’s eyes. “I didn’t do it.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “Of course? Oh, I could have. There were times when I would have found it easy. He needed punishment, but I didn’t want to be the one administering it.”

  “We all need punishment.” She might have been expressing Jimmy’s thoughts.

  “I think he killed Wally Flanagan.”

  “No.”

  Her story rivaled the one that had appeared in the paper. It made soap operas seem hard realism. Maud would never have dreamed when she met Luke and they became friendly that she would find him and his family involved in all these gothic horrors. The only ghost she had in her own closet was a son who was a Trappist monk.

  “What will happen next?” Maud asked Sandra.

  “To me? My lawyer doesn’t think they’ll dare to bring charges.” She had been taken in for questioning, held for a while, and then released. She wore dark glasses now, even indoors, no doubt fearful that she would be recognized. She said that when this was over she might go back to California.

  “I thought you took an apartment.”

  “Just a sublet for a few months. To be near Dad.”

  Did Boleslaw know what she was going through? When he wasn’t watching sports on television or drinking beer, or both, he just sat slumped in his wheelchair, lost in thought. Jimmy might have imagined that he was meditating on his life, thinking long thoughts about time and eternity, preparing to meet his God. Maud didn’t think it was uncharitable not to attribute that to Boleslaw. When he did speak, it was about some ache or pain or something else that annoyed him.

  “Where’ve you been?” he groused when Sandra showed up after her ordeal in Fox River.

  Sandra seemed happy that he didn’t know. “Maud, why don’t we go up the street and buy Dad a beer.”

  “I was just going to suggest the same thing.”

  It was the kind of lie Jimmy might have approved of.

  21

  As soon as the alternative entrance and exit to the Flanagan garage apartment became known, Amos Cadbury, on behalf of his client, demanded an inspection of all the tools arrayed above and around the workbench in the garage, a move that Tuttle grudgingly appreciated.

  “To free Mr. Flanagan of suspicion of wrongdoing is, of course, easily done, but my client insists that the outrageous crime committed in the garage apartment of his home be speedily solved,” Amos asserted.

  Cadbury didn’t exactly accuse Jacuzzi and Robertson of idiocy; nor did he criticize the thus far inconclusive efforts of Captain Keegan’s detective division. He spoke from such lofty high ground that those judgments were remote inferences from what he said. Tuttle might have tried the same tack but knew that he would sound ridiculous. His client, bless her soul, had been turned into a painted woman, a ruthless housebreaker, by the traitor Mervel.

  “The public has a right to know, Tuttle,” Mervel said unctuously.

  “Then they should know you were drunk when you wrote it.”

  “Sticks and stones, Tuttle. Sticks and stones.”

  Well, the pressroom in the courthouse did have the culture of an elementary school playground. Ninian slept on the Naugahyde couch; Bea Hyverson, of the PennySaver, a shoppi
ng guide left gratis in every local mailbox, knitted away in a corner while surveying the room over the rims of her glasses. Mervel himself had brought up an old file from his hard drive, the one labeled NOVEL, and was folding recent events into the narrative.

  Tuttle sipped the coffee he had let trickle into a Styrofoam cup and spit it back. “Who made this coffee?”

  “Coffee?” Bea cried. “Don’t drink that stuff.”

  Tuttle got out of there and went upstairs to Keegan’s office. “Any results from those other tools, Captain?”

  “They’re in the lab.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m glad you approve.”

  Tuttle left the office and went to the railing that gave him a bird’s-eye view of the black-and-white tile floor four flights below. A circular staircase wound down toward it, and an open elevator of ancient vintage dropped like a plumb line, its cable greasy and twisted. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Tuttle took the stairs. As he descended, he had the feeling that he was winding up the string of recent events into a ball. Maybe when he got to the ground floor they would make some sense.

  The trouble with that ladder that led from the main garage to the pantry in the apartment above was that you had to know it was there in order to use it. Luke Flanagan said he had completely forgotten it and, when he remembered, couldn’t believe the thing still worked. It had been his son’s idea, a boy’s whim catered to in the forgotten past. Melissa had known nothing of it. Sandra Bochenski had shown it to Tuttle, which meant two things: She had known it was there, and she didn’t see knowledge of it as any threat to her. No one else seemed to know of the trapdoor and collapsible ladder.

  Hazel put away the crossword when he got to the office, glaring at him as if she had found him goofing off, rather than the reverse. Then again, what else did she have to do?

  “Has your client skipped town yet?”

  “She won’t leave until I give the word. I want her name cleared.”

  Hazel ducked her head and looked at him.

  “No calls,” he said and went into the inner office. He seemed to be shutting out her derisive laughter when he closed the door.

  Sandra Bochenski was torn between the desire to escape to California and concern for her father, Boleslaw. How could Tuttle not respond to that touching concern for her parent? He himself had an almost Oriental devotion to his parents, especially to his father, whose encouragement and support had survived Tuttle’s checkered and prolonged progress through law school.

  Remembering Cadbury’s lofty statement, Tuttle realized that the only thing that would clear his client’s name was to identify the killer of Gregory Packer. Of course, the police did not seriously think that Sandra had killed the man.

  “Sure I could have. There were times when killing him would have been a form of self-defense,” she said to Tuttle.

  “Our conversations are confidential. Don’t talk like that to anyone else.”

  “I already have.”

  “Who?”

  “Sylvia.”

  Sylvia was the bimbo stashed in the same building by Marco Pianone.

  “How long has she been hooked up with Pianone?”

  “You want me to ask her?”

  “No!”

  “She was really surprised when she read that Greg had been my husband.”

  “Did she know him?”

  “She said Wally Flanagan talked about him. They had a lot of time to talk up there in the North Woods. He loved it, but she was cabin-crazy most of the time.”

  “How long?”

  “Years.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Fish, read, go for long walks.”

  There are those for whom such a schedule would seem heaven on earth, but Tuttle was not among them. He could sympathize with Sylvia Beach.

  “She ever say why he went off with her rather than go to California to be with you?”

  “Blackmail.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “She found out about our plan. Her suspicions were aroused when he told her he wanted to arrange her portfolio so her worries would be over. What worries? The future. It sounded like the payoff for their affair. So she followed him, saw us together, and then confronted him, threatening to blow the whistle. Her alternative was that they do what Wally and I planned to do. That’s how she got him. He had no choice.”

  “You don’t sound bitter.” It was an odd thought, the two of them talking about the guy they had both been seeing, a married man.

  “He deserted her.”

  “Come on.”

  “One day, she came back from town—there was a bar there she liked and Wally didn’t—and he was gone. No note, nothing. Just gone. He might have done that to me.”

  “She have any idea how he ended up dead in Fox River?”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “Don’t.”

  Reviewing this conversation in his inner office, feet on the desk, tweed hat pulled over his eyes, Tuttle didn’t like the way the Pianones kept coming to mind. Wally’s body in the cement mixer had the Pianone touch, and maybe so did the murder of Gregory Packer. It turned out that he had put the touch on Sylvia, too, wanting backing for a driving range in Barrington—but Melissa Flanagan had already agreed to finance that project. If Marco thought some guy was trying to put the squeeze on Sylvia …

  These were not thoughts to pursue, not even in the privacy of his own mind. They would occur to Cy Horvath sooner or later, he supposed. From what Peanuts told him, Tuttle knew that Horvath knew at least as much as he did. But how willing was Horvath to pursue the Pianone connection, if there was one?

  22

  When Greta came into his office, carefully shutting the door behind her, she was holding a folded piece of paper in such a way that Amos Cadbury’s eyes were drawn to it.

  “He asked me to give you this. Unread.” She seemed to be pleading for understanding. “He was so polite. I thought he wanted a handout, but when I opened my purse, he just shook his head.”

  “A handout?”

  Amos had taken the note. Greta stood waiting as he read it. He read it twice and then turned his chair toward the window. What a dreadful joke. He was astonished that Greta had allowed herself to be used in this way. He turned back to her.

  “Describe him.”

  Her description of the man made it even more incredible that she had been taken in. Still, she had offered him money, so her first reaction had been sensible.

  “Will you see him, Mr. Cadbury?”

  Greta seemed to have become the vagrant’s advocate, but it was curiosity and controlled anger that prompted Amos to ask her to show the man in.

  She hurried across the room, opened the door to the outer office, and stood in it, urging someone forward. She stepped aside, and a bearded middle-aged man entered and approached the desk.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Cadbury.”

  Was it the suggestion of the note, its preposterous claim, or this office in which years ago he had presided over the arrangements Luke had made with his son that gave him pause? Amos rose behind the desk and studied his visitor. He still held the note in his hand. He flourished it.

  “Why have you come to me?”

  “You’re the family lawyer.”

  It was information anyone could have gathered from recent newspaper stories. The visitor looked around. “It was here that my father made me a rich man before my time.”

  Amos sat. “Go on.”

  The description of that event, of the discussions that had led up to it, of Amos’s reluctance to preside over the premature inheritance, was uncannily accurate. Amos studied the man as he spoke, and against all reason, he began to see in this bearded fellow some resemblance to young Wally Flanagan.

  “Wally Flanagan is dead, sir.”

  “I will not quote Mark Twain.”

  “Mrs. Flanagan identified the body.”

  “How?”

  “By his wedding ring.”

  “May I sit?”<
br />
  “What is the point of this farce?”

  He held up a ringless left hand. “I can’t imagine how my ring could have been found on a corpse.”

  Amos, certain the man was dropping the charade, gave him a clinical description of the body, the body parts, that had been found in one of the Flanagan cement mixers.

  “One of my father’s?”

  “In a Flanagan cement mixer,” Amos repeated.

  “You said body parts.”

  “The ring convinced her.”

  “I had stopped wearing it. For obvious reasons. I must have left it behind when I left Garrison. Yes, of course I did. In the sense that I had forgotten it. What happened to the ring?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I could describe it.”

  “Wedding rings are pretty much alike.”

  “There were inscriptions.”

  “Were there?”

  “Our names and the date of the wedding.”

  Amos restrained himself from congratulating the man on his good guess.

  “There was another inscription, too. Inside. It was Melissa’s idea. ‘Until death do us part.’”

  “And that is what happened when Wallace Flanagan’s body was found.”

  The man breathed deeply. “Of course you’re skeptical. I expected that. I would think less of you if you weren’t. But I have to convince you first. Otherwise, I will simply fade away.”

  There were intonations as the man spoke that were reminiscent of Luke. The facial hair was like a mask over the lower face, although the fellow had the same wide mouth as Luke. It was the eyes Amos found most unnerving.

  “How can I convince you?”

  “That you are a dead man? What is the point of all this?”

  “I wanted to be of help to my father. I heard that he was suspected of killing a man. Gregory Packer.”

  “I suppose you knew Packer.”

  “We were kids together. We were classmates at St. Hilary’s. Neither of us turned out very well.”

  “And now you’re both dead.”

  It occurred to Amos that by allowing this preposterous conversation to go on, he was seemingly giving credence to the man’s claim.