Well Bred and Dead

by Catherine O'Connell

  “The Kehoes? You knew them? Why they’ve been gone for years,” the front sister continued. The chain slipped away and the half faces became whole, though they held their ground on the other side of the screen door as if the thin mesh provided protection from the terrifying world outside. “What do you want to know about the Kehoes?”

  “I’m trying to identify someone who has died, someone who might have been Daniel Kehoe. Did you know him?”

  “Little Danny? Why sure we knew him. Small, homely thing, poor child. Terribly unhealthy. His mother was always looking after him for some ailment or another. Did I say he was homely? Never could figure out how such a beautiful looking couple like Moira and Patrick could have given birth to such an ugly child. Their daughter was pretty as could be.”

  “Daughter? You mean Daniel had a sister?”

  “Sure he did, but she was much younger than him. Wasn’t expected according to Moira. She said she thought she had a tumor. When she found out she was pregnant Danny was nearly grown up.

  “We always felt so sorry for the little fellow. His father was terribly mean to him. He would cuss him out so fierce sometimes we could hear it all the way across the street. But with little Shannon he was different. He treated her like she was a little princess, always fussing over her and whatnot.”

  “Do you think you would be able to recognize Danny from a photograph?” I asked the elderly sisters, my adrenaline flowing thinking I might finally have some definitive answer. Their physical description of Danny was how I might have described Ethan.

  “Can’t,” replied the sister in front. “Got the glaucoma so bad we can’t even read the paper anymore. Can barely see the television.”

  I raised my eyebrows in appeal to the sister in back. She shook her head and her chin wobbled along with it. “Runs in the family.”

  “We’re sure to be blind nearly anytime soon,” said the first. “But we’re preparing. We been practicing for years, learning all the tricks like putting your finger in your cup to find the water level.”

  “We’ve been preparing for years,” the second parroted.

  “Would you by any chance know where I might find Shannon Kehoe?”

  “Well, she got married. Married an Italian. Magelli? Maginelli? Oh, what was it now, Esther? We went to the wedding.”

  “It was Maglieri, I’m sure of it. Anthony Maglieri. And I’m pretty sure they moved to Northview right afterward. At least that’s where the thank-you note came from. We gave them a beautiful trivet and she wrote a lovely note. Don’t know if she’d still be there now though. It was quite a few years ago.”

  I thanked the Schmidt sisters profusely and they closed the door against me and the demons of the outside world. A shudder passed up my spine as I thought of the cruelty life dispenses in one’s declining years, especially when one was of limited means. I had seen it with Miriam Doney, Sarah Moore Campbell, Emily McMahon, and now the Schmidt sisters. Loneliness. State homes. Cheap six-packs of beer. Blithe acceptance of encroaching blindness.

  I hoped I wasn’t getting a glimpse of my own future.

  16

  The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

  Shannon Maglieri did indeed live in Northview and was listed. When I contacted her and told her I might have news of her brother, there was a long silence before she said she would be happy to see me. I didn’t mention that the news might be his death, since I couldn’t be positive there was a relationship between my Ethan and her. If there was, then truth would out soon enough. Since no city buses serviced her suburb, I rented a car and drove to her home.

  The Maglieri family lived in a subdivision called the Cotswolds on the Green, ostensibly the developer’s attempt to lend an aristocratic air to imitation English manor homes built on postage stamp–sized lots. Though these houses couldn’t compare to the Lake Forest house I had been forced to sell, the facades were reminiscent of it, causing me to pine for my former home and its five quiet acres. Though I loved the messy vitality and convenience of the city, there was something to be said about the peace found away from it. So many memories of Henry’s and my life in Lake Forest still clung to me. Like summer breakfast on the terrace overlooking the rose gardens, listening to cardinals’ mating calls, and smelling the dewey scent of damp grass. Or the cooling swims in the pool on still August nights while crickets sang their high-pitched songs. Or fireside cognacs in the winter watching snow settle gently on the massive fir trees outside the library window. These were things that had been taken from me, and I still missed them greatly.

  Though the Maglieri house had a three-car garage, there were still two vehicles parked in the driveway, one a square black minivan, the other a red truck set upon such ridiculously gargantuan wheels I wondered how anyone other than a giant could possibly get into the cab. I parked behind it, my rental car so dwarfed by the monster vehicle, I seriously questioned if I was running the risk of it being run over should the owner of the truck decide to take his leave.

  The walkway was lined with neatly trimmed boxwood bushes, and in front of the entry door two large terra cotta planters held fir trees I suspected would be replaced with flowers come summer. My ring was answered almost immediately by a handsome-looking woman a few years younger than I. Her thick shoulder-length hair was dyed shoe-polish black and her pale skin was enviably smooth with the exception of some character lines around the eyes and mouth. She wore a hideous blue exercise suit and smiled a wide but slightly apprehensive smile. There was something hauntingly familiar about her, though it took me some time to realize what it was. I was looking at Ethan’s dark piercing eyes.

  “I’m Shannon Maglieri,” she said, welcoming me into her house with an extended hand.

  “Pauline Cook.” We shook. Her hand was cool and dry. A couple of teenage boys with shaved heads and pierced ears emerged from the back of the house and grunted quick hellos at their mother’s insistence before disappearing upstairs. She led me into the living room off the entrance, a cavernous space dominated by a sectional sofa in a busy floral print and a black lacquered coffee table. Amateurish oil paintings of landscapes and still lifes ornamented the walls while crystal vases and figurines glowed from a black lacquer display case. Everything looked fresh and new and, one might say, very bourgeois. Quite very. No worn furniture or dusty heirlooms here. Across from the sectional was an enormous television that I suspected did not sit idle often.

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a TV quite that large,” I had to comment.

  “If you think that’s big, you oughta see the one in the basement. You know men and their sports. Being the only woman around here, I get out-voted all the time down there, so this is where I come for some peace and quiet. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve three boys. Married my husband, I guess.” She laughed a kind, sincere laugh that told me it was her joy in life to complain about her men.

  I took a seat on the sectional and she sat down next to me, so close our knees nearly touched. “You said you had news about Danny?”

  I felt the same twinge of guilt I had in the state home in Bury St. Edmunds, fearful of opening old wounds by digging up buried memories. But I didn’t know how else to go about this. “I don’t mean to upset you unnecessarily, but a man has died in Chicago who was a very good friend of mine. I knew him by the name of Ethan Campbell.” I studied her face carefully to see if the name drew any reaction, but she didn’t even blink. Her dark eyes remained fixed on me in anticipation of my next words. “In the aftermath of his death, several birth certificates were found in his apartment. One of them was for a Daniel Kehoe born to Moira and Patrick Kehoe. I’m here to see if my friend was the same person.”

  Her shoulders drooped and she shook her head sadly. “I haven’t seen or heard from my brother in over thirty-five years. I was just a little girl when he left my parents’ house.”

  “Do you think you would recognize a picture of him as an older man?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure, but I’d try.”<
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  I pulled out my well-traveled photo of Ethan at the Valentine’s Day party. She took it and ran a red polished nail tenderly across his face as if she were actually touching it. She looked back at me and nodded. “This is my brother. That sad face could never change.” Her eyes welled and she wiped back a tear with her finger. “How did he die?”

  Having learned there was no gentle way to deliver disagreeable news, I was blunt. “I’m afraid he died of his own hand. He shot himself.”

  A small gasp escaped her mouth as she drew a short breath. Then she calmed herself and said, “I suppose I should be glad to know what became of him. We worried about him so much, Mama and me. He left home right after his twenty-first birthday, saying he was off to make his fortune. For the first few years, he wrote to us all the time. Sometimes, he’d even call. The last time we heard from him he was somewhere in Virginia. He said he was heading to Miami. Then we didn’t hear anything else.” She sighed a wistful sigh. “He always wanted to live in a warm climate.”

  “Well, he ended up somewhere warm for quite a while. He lived in Puerto Rico for twenty-five years.”

  “Puerto Rico.” She sighed again and shook her head in memory. “Danny always wanted to live in exotic places, warm places. He was a real dreamer. He had what my mother called ‘illusions of grandeur.’ He read Fitzgerald’s books about the rich like they were the bible. He read The Great Gatsby so many times he knew it by heart. And he spent every spare penny he had on travel magazines. He told my mom when he got rich he was going to buy a yacht and sail around the islands and he would come and get us to go with him.”

  “Well, you might be proud to know your brother went on to become a well-respected writer,” I told her, thinking how Ethan’s desire for a boat had never changed. “He published a couple of biographies and was working on a third one when he died. In fact, it really seemed that he was enjoying more success than he ever had in his life. That’s why it’s so baffling that he did what he did.”

  “He wasn’t ever on a talk show or anything like that, was he?” she asked. “I always see writers on Oprah.”

  “No, I’m afraid his writing wasn’t quite that popular.”

  Yet another sigh. “You know two years ago, someone came around looking for Danny. Said he had some very good news for him, but wouldn’t tell me anything else. He was a very mysterious deformed man. I guess nowadays you’d say he had a disability. Anyhow, all I could tell him was I hadn’t seen or heard from my brother in years and had no idea where he was. He left me his business card in case I ever did hear from Danny. Guess I won’t need it now.”

  “May I see the card?” My thoughts careened back to Emily McMahon and the men who had visited her in the same time frame, also asking about Daniel Kehoe. She had said one of them had a deformity. Shannon left the room and returned a few minutes later. The speed with which she had unearthed the card told me that she kept it someplace convenient, that her brother must have been on her mind with some frequency all these years.

  “You can keep it if you want. I don’t have any use for it anymore,” she said, handing it over to me. I read the raised type. HOLSTEIN INVESTIGATIONS—SPECIALTY—MISSING PERSONS. There was a Boston address and phone number. I zipped the card into the inside pocket of my purse.

  “I know this sounds terrible, but did Danny leave money or anything?” she asked.

  “Not even enough to bury himself, I’m afraid.” I did not mention my prominent place in his useless will, thinking it might hurt her feelings that he made no mention of her. “In fact, I want to ask you if you’d like to see to the disposition of his remains.”

  “You mean, he hasn’t been buried yet?” She looked shocked.

  “No. The body has been under the jurisdiction of the state until we could figure out who he really was. Now that we know, it can be released—to you if you want him.”

  Her tone changed to a manner that I found none too encouraging. “I don’t want to sound cold, but I don’t feel any obligation to bury him. With three boys we’re about as stretched as you can get here. Mortgage, car payments, credit card payments, tuition, you know how it is. We’ll have two in college next year. Danny walked out of my and my mother’s life a long time ago. In fact, sometimes I blame him for her death. She never got over the loss of him. So I can’t exactly warm to him coming back into my life when he’s dead. In fact, if not for you, I bet I never would have even known he died.” Shannon Maglieri twisted her wedding band around her finger and looked out her picture window onto the street. “Let the state bury him.”

  “I see.” I sensed there was something more she wanted to tell me, but she remained silent so I got up to leave. “Thank you for at least clearing up the mystery of who he really was,” I said.

  I walked behind the red truck and got into the rental, mired in the thought that although I finally knew who Ethan was, I was now saddled with his funeral for sure. I started pulling out of the driveway when I heard her calling out. I stopped and she came running up to the car. There were tears in her eyes.

  “He was only my half-brother,” she said. “I never knew it when we were young. I never knew why my father was so cruel to him until my mother was on her deathbed. That’s when she told me that Danny wasn’t my father’s son. She wanted me to know so I could tell Danny if I ever saw him again. She wanted me to tell him she was sorry for the way my father had treated him and sorry she didn’t stick up for him. She said at the time that was the only way. Those were her words.”

  Oh, Ethan, I thought. Do the surprises never end?

  “So do you know who his real father was?” I asked.

  “No, Mom never told me.”

  I drove away with shaking legs as it dawned on me the who part of Ethan’s mystery was finally solved. My deceased friend was a bastard, born in a Boston indigent hospital and raised in working-class Rochester. There had never been a christening at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and his mother had come no closer to New York’s café society than Ethel Rosenberg. At the time, I thought that was the extent of his deceit and that I would never know why he had chosen to pass himself off as an Englishman who had disappeared years before. I had to assume he was so ashamed of his humble origins that he wanted to escape them. That his father’s cruelty had destroyed his psyche beyond repair.

  But the bigger questions hovered untouched, the ones I had been avoiding since the start of this odyssey: the where, when and, more curiously, how he had become Ethan Campbell.

  But those were questions that would have to wait and perhaps might never be answered. For now it was time to put Ethan Campbell…a.k.a. Daniel Kehoe…to rest.

  17

  Unrequited Lust

  I caught the first flight out of Rochester Sunday morning and was back in Chicago before noon. I paid Jeffrey a very dear ten dollars for watching Fleur, and headed up to my apartment to reunite with my pet, who was angrier than ever. In fact she was so irritated with me that she fled into the recesses of my bedroom the moment I walked in the door. I knew that it was all attitude on her part, that she had been perfectly fine while I was gone. Cats are so admirably independent. Human beings would be well served to behave more like our feline friends.

  It felt sublime to be chez moi again after my travels—that is until I checked my mail. Bills and late payment notices abounded, and I put them in the drawer with the others and the special assessment announcement. Then I pushed them far into the back. My answering machine told me I had twenty-two messages that I decided to ignore for the time being. There was more than enough on my mind, premier being Ethan’s funeral. Doing it properly would be a burdensome expense, but I didn’t see any other way. Tout le monde would be watching to see how it was handled. I couldn’t very well let him pass to the other world without someone saying a few words in remembrance of him.

  I called Detective Velez and let him know that Shannon Maglieri had positively identified Ethan as her brother, Daniel Kehoe. He said he would contact Mrs. Maglieri and send her an autop
sy photo for verification. In the meantime, though, he was still waiting for the FBI fingerprint check to come through and couldn’t release the body until it did. Though he felt certain it would be any day now. I sighed at the temporary reprieve and went into my room to unpack.

  After putting my clothes away, I was trying to coax Fleur out from under the bed when the phone rang. I thought about letting the machine get it, but since there were already twenty-two messages waiting to be listened to, I decided not to add one more. And was glad for my decision.

  “Is that you, Pauline?” My heart lurched at the sound of the Irish accent. “Finally. I was beginning to think you didn’t really live there at all, just spent your time gallivanting ’round the world. I’ve been calling for days.”

  “Hello, Terrance,” I said, doing my best to sound casual, hoping he couldn’t detect the tremor in my voice. “Actually, I’ve just walked in the door after a tour of the Northeast. I haven’t even gotten to my messages yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t leave one. Never do. Hate talking into machines. Anyways, I’m in New York and I thought we might get together, you and I, and finish that business we started in England.”

  The trembling in my voice migrated south to my knees, forcing me to sit on the bed. A week ago he had left me in the lurch. Now he turns up halfway around the world and wants to see me. I was flattered to the soles of my Charles Jourdan pumps.

  “Unfinished business?” I purred, unconsciously tilting my head the way Fleur does when seeking a caress. An image of the heated hallway scene at the Angel Hotel popped into my head as I speculated on how that business might end.

  “Yes, unfinished business. Our missing Mr. Campbell. I simply haven’t been able to get his old mum out of my mind. I thought if you were game we could meet in South Carolina tomorrow and nose about a bit, see if we can solve the mystery of what happened to him.”