Prodigal Father

by Ralph McInerny

  “Okay.”

  Et tu, Brute? Meanwhile, Leo had disappeared. They took turns going through the revolving door, Horvath first, then Tuttle, then Peanuts, coming into the summer heat.

  “You’ll regret this, Horvath.”

  “Tell it to your lawyer.”

  “I am a lawyer, dammit.”

  Tuttle’s car was left where he had parked it, to be ticketed and towed some hours later. On the ride downtown, he asked Horvath how he had known where he was.

  “We got an anonymous call about a vagrant doing a sit-in in the lobby.”

  Tuttle fell back. The Judas in the tweed hat? Leo? It gave him something to think about while he was taken to be booked. It wasn’t until then that the reason for all this soaked in. Charlotte Priebe was dead.

  Part Three

  1

  My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?

  —Psalm 22

  Keegan and Cy took turns questioning Tuttle, arresting him having seemed the best way to get his cooperation.

  “I was looking for my client.”

  “Get tired of chasing ambulances?”

  “Leo Corbett had been staying with her. I had the place under surveillance and when he moved out and went to that hotel, I followed him. He had just come downstairs when you showed up.”

  The information that Leo had been living with Charlotte Priebe was news, if true. Matilda hadn’t mentioned that. They put Tuttle in a cell while he shouted law at them. Give him a little shaking, that was the idea. But Phil Keegan was almost glad to be diverted from the murder of Father Nathaniel. Tetzel wouldn’t let up about the slowness of the investigation. He drew attention to the religious persuasion of Keegan and Horvath, intimating that they had some ulterior reason for letting the pursuit of the priest’s murderer wither and die. The reporter even supplied information about the percentage of successful arrests and convictions in murders over the past decade in Fox River. Now the murder of Charlotte Priebe would be front-page stuff.

  When the traffic cop called in to say a cleaning lady was reporting a murder, Cy Horvath had gone to check it out. He was taken up to the apartment and let in and found her in the bathtub, submerged. Fortunately Pippen and not Lubins came to check on the body.

  “She drowned,” Pippen said.

  It was something, standing there beside the comely coroner surveying the nude body of the young woman.

  “People don’t drown in bathtubs.”

  “There could be any number of explanations.”

  Photographs were taken, the lab exports went over the apartment with extraordinary care, every once in a while ducking in to look at the corpse.

  “Necrophilia is everywhere,” Pippen murmured.

  “Something wrong with her neck?”

  “No, your head.”

  Cy rummaged around in the desk and discovered that she worked for Anderson Ltd. As he was turning over papers, a lab girl said they were going to take the computer downtown. But Cy was wondering what sort of hell Anderson would raise when he found out that a woman who had obviously been high on the corporate ladder was found dead in her bath. He decided that Anderson should hear the news from him.

  Anderson’s eyes were cold but he was smiling when Cy went into his office.

  “What the hell is this about Charlotte Priebe?”

  “Did she work for you?”

  “Did she? What do you mean?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Anderson sat down and his smile went, but the wrinkles where it had been remained. Cy told him what they knew. Anderson gave an incredulous laugh when told the woman he described as his administrative assistant had drowned in her bath.

  “People don’t drown in bathtubs.”

  “Someone else said that. That’s why I’m here. I’m in homicide.”

  Anderson looked at Cy’s card for the first time. “Okay, Horvath. You’re a lieutenant in homicide. I want you to find the bastard who did this. That girl was like a daughter to me.”

  “She live alone?”

  Anderson exploded. “I won’t have you dragging her name through the mud. Just find out who killed her.”

  Cy decided not to tell him that Leo Corbett had spent some nights in Charlotte Priebe’s apartment. Maybe she took in stray cats as well and there was nothing to it. He asked Anderson if anything related to her work might explain what had happened.

  For fifteen minutes, Anderson told him what a genius Charlotte Priebe had been. “Came to work for me and within a couple of years, her office was next to mine. I invented the title administrative assistant for her. Vice president of whatever couldn’t have covered it.”

  “What had she been assisting you on lately?”

  Anderson looked at him shrewdly. “Why did you ask if she lived alone?”

  “Tell me.”

  Anderson’s response was an exercise in circumlocution. He told Cy in great detail about the plans he had developed for the Corbett property, if he could get hold of it. Charlotte worked with him hand in glove. He couldn’t pay her enough for all the things she did.

  “For example, Corbett’s grandson.”

  “Leo Corbett.”

  “So you read the papers. Young man couldn’t find his rear end with both hands. He had fallen into the hands of a shyster lawyer named Tuttle and it was Charlotte’s aim to free him from the association. I just learned that she had hid him in her apartment, so Tuttle couldn’t get at him. She came up with an idea to break the logjam with those priests who own the property. Do you know Amos Cadbury?”

  “Yes.”

  “The lawyer?”

  “I know him.”

  “Talk to Cadbury and he’ll tell you about it.”

  “So who would want to kill her?”

  “Well, one guy who had a pretty good motive was Tuttle. Do you know him?”

  “He’s under arrest.”

  “Already? Good. Good. Lieutenant, anything I can do.”

  So later, when he was questioning Tuttle, Cy asked him what Lars Anderson had against him.

  “Who’s Lars Anderson?”

  “Funny.”

  “I don’t know the man.”

  “He knows you. He says you talked Leo Corbett into being your client. Tuttle, we know Tetzel got the idea for that series from you. A real scorched-earth policy. Anderson says the girl you drowned in her bathtub had come up with a compromise and that meant getting Corbett away from you.”

  “Horvath, I was never inside that apartment. Scout’s honor.” Tuttle raised his left hand and tried to touch his little finger with his thumb.

  “Just talked to the cleaning lady?”

  “That’s right. Ask her if I went upstairs.”

  “You camp in the lobby there, too?”

  “I waited in my car.” Tuttle flipped off his hat. “Talk to Farniente, he’ll back up everything I say.”

  “Farniente!”

  “Ask him. You got to let me out of here.”

  “Know any good lawyers?”

  Tuttle, who never swore because his father never had, swore now. “Let me call my office.”

  “Did you find him?” Hazel cried.

  “I’m in jail. I’ve been arrested.”

  Her mocking laughter invaded Tuttle’s ear like a gas. “Mentally?”

  “If I want jokes, I can listen to the cops.”

  “What did you do, run a red light?”

  “Charlotte Priebe is dead.”

  “Miss Efficiency?” Like all dominating women Hazel despised other women.

  “In her bathtub.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I went there, trailing Leo Corbett, and the cleaning lady fingered me.”

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  Where is the beginning? And what was the point of telling her all this? But he did, in as much detail as he could summon, wanting to use every moment of phone time they would allow him. The cell gave him the creeps. He had visited clients who had been arrested, he ha
d watched them taken away after the interview and never really given a second thought to the door clanging on them. Hazel had about as much sympathy for him. He would like to lock her up and throw away the key. Tuttle listened to himself telling Hazel what had gone on since last they met. He recognized a boondoggle when he heard it.

  “What hurts is, just as I had him, the police barged in and made this ridiculous charge and the next thing I know Leo Corbett has vamoosed.”

  What did staking out the Priebe woman and tailing Leo have to do with one another?

  “He had been staying with her?”

  “Leo?” Again that noxious laughter. “She must have been really hard up.”

  “It really helps to talk to you.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get hold of Farniente. Tell him to come down here and clear me.

  “He should be a big help.”

  “Do it.” He hung up. The silence of the cell was better than talking to Hazel. Who did she like, anyway? She had contempt for Peanuts and thought Farniente was a joke. She wasn’t leading any cheers for him, either, so why had he gotten stuck with her?

  Farniente, when they brought him in, was the soul of prudence. Cy thought he would deny he even knew Tuttle.

  “All right, he hired me.”

  “What for?”

  “This guy Leo Corbett? He was giving Tuttle the dodge. He wanted to locate him. So he called me in.”

  “And you found him?”

  “He was shacking up with this woman who got herself killed.”

  It was difficult to establish a timeline on the basis of either Tuttle’s or Farniente’s stories. And then Pippen came through with her preliminary report.

  “Overdose.”

  “Of what?”

  “Sleeping pills.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Cy went over to the lab to see what they had. They had dusted the whole apartment but come up empty.

  “Nothing anywhere. The place had been wiped. There were only a couple fingerprints of the woman.”

  2

  Consider my enemies, for they are many.

  —Psalm 25

  When Amos Cadbury came to St. Hilary’s rectory to go over recent events, the venerable lawyer was visibly unhappy. He had met and admired Charlotte Priebe and found the story of her suicide incredible.

  “No container for sleeping pills was found in the apartment I am told,” Father Dowling said.

  “It is as likely that it walked out of there as it is that Charlotte Priebe committed suicide.”

  “Was she religious?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  Amos felt somewhat foolish giving this testimonial for Charlotte Priebe on the basis of their one encounter, but that had been an occasion when so many of the difficulties facing the Athanasians seemed to lift. And then came the murder of Father Nathaniel and now that of Charlotte Priebe. Who would not think that there was a connection between these deaths and the compromise Charlotte had broached? But a surprising call from Lars Anderson addressed that very issue.

  “We owe it to Charlotte to carry it through, Cadbury.”

  Business as usual seemed a strange memorial, but doubtless Anderson was right. Amos assured him that nothing was changed so far as he was concerned and that he would be speaking to Father Boniface that day. But he had allotted time for this visit to St. Hilary’s first.

  “I cannot regret old Corbett’s prodigality, Father, but it has created circumstances he could hardly have foretold.”

  “The incidental effects of our intended actions.”

  On any other occasion, Amos would have welcomed this opening to philosophical reflection, but he had come for more pragmatic reasons. Before he talked with Boniface, he wanted to know the latest results of the police investigation, and Father Dowling was almost sure to know them. Amos was reluctant to go hat in hand to the police asking for information. That was to run the risk of getting some condensed version. And he wanted to supplement what he could learn from the ineffable Fox River Tribune.

  “Does Dante have a place in hell for yellow journalists, Father?”

  “I am afraid he has a place for all of us if we misuse our freedom. That is what, in his letter to Can Grande della Scala, he gave as the allegorical meaning of the Comedy.”

  Another tempting tangent, but Amos was due to see Boniface in an hour. Tetzel had written a saccharine story of the suicide of a young woman, broken under the stresses of ruthless capitalism. He had found that she had once been a student of the liberal arts at the University of Chicago and conjured up an image of corporate recruiters descending like roaring lions on such lambs, seeking whom they might devour. The suggestion was that Anderson Ltd. had diverted Charlotte Priebe from the life of the mind, exploited her talents, burned her out in a few years until she bade good-bye to all that in the manner of a Roman Stoic by slipping out of life in her bath.

  “That would have been written before doubt had been cast on its being a suicide,” Father Dowling said.

  “Don’t be too sure. That man and the truth are strangers. At least it has gotten him off the subject of Father Nathaniel.”

  “Stanley Morgan cannot be blamed for the death of Charlotte Priebe.”

  “And there is a connection between those deaths, Father. I am sure of it. They should release the man.”

  “Morgan still doesn’t have a lawyer.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “He asked for a priest.”

  Father Dowling’s tone of voice suggested that was an avenue they could not pursue. “Why doesn’t he have a lawyer?”

  “He refused to get one. He has suffered much because of lawyers.”

  “Who is the judge in the case?” He was putting the question to himself, and he gave himself the answer. “Holmes. Christina Holmes.”

  “Apparently she has been having trouble assigning a lawyer to Morgan.”

  “I will talk to her. There are young people in the firm …” The firm of Amos Cadbury was not one any judge would regard as a pool of publicly appointed defenders, but Amos could alter that with a word. And suggest names.

  “Phil Keegan dismisses the notion that the two deaths are connected, which is why he sees no reason to reconsider holding Stanley Morgan.”

  “It is logically possible that they are not connected. But life is not that logical.”

  “And the link would be the Corbett estate?”

  “Exactly.”

  Amos went off to meet with Boniface, leaving Father Dowling to puff meditatively on his pipe and reflect on recent events. A unified theory attracts the logical mind, and Amos Cadbury was a man of reason. But the theory faced imposing obstacles. Stanley Morgan had to be seen by the police as a plausible murderer of Father Nathaniel, and Phil showed great reluctance to give weight to the strange behavior of the Georges, father and son. The father had revealed that Michael had come out of the maintenance shed as he ran to it to report the body of Nathaniel at the grotto. When it was discovered that the shed had been hurriedly cleaned up, the son admitted that he had done this. An attempt to destroy clues as to what he had done to Father Nathaniel there? That was the implication. But another and more poignant possibility had arisen. Michael had seen the body at the grotto when he arose early and was on the way to the shed, to see if his father had already gone there. He was surprised the old man was not still in his bed at the lodge, sleeping over the long session with retsina wine he had enjoyed the previous evening with Stanley Morgan. He came upon a shed that indicated to him that a great struggle had taken place there. When he came out and met his father the dread that had prompted him to clean up the shed seemed verified.

  Phil Keegan had listened to Cy Horvath recall the actions of the Georges and drew another conclusion.

  “Morgan sits up drinking with the old man, the old man goes to bed. Morgan lures Nathaniel to the shed, buries an ax in his back, and then returns to the lodge. That would
have been around two in the morning. The scene for the Georges to suspect one another is set. When we arrive, Morgan disappears. Why? Cy picks him up right here, Roger, in the school. He has been in jail ever since, which is where he belongs.”

  “So who killed Charlotte Priebe?”

  “That is a whole ’nother matter.”

  Father Boniface tried unsuccessfully to take an interest in the murdered young woman that Amos Cadbury told him of. Obviously this meant a good deal to the venerable lawyer, but Boniface could summon little more than generic sympathy several times removed. Until the relevance of Charlotte Priebe’s death to the affairs of the Athanasians became clear. She had worked for Lars Anderson, she had presented Amos with a proposal that seemed the solution to all recent troubles.

  “I would ask the Order to surrender very little in return for a great deal. As a not-negligible bonus, it would get you off the front pages of newspapers.”

  “Of course we would be guided by you, Mr. Cadbury.”

  “One of the lamentable effects of this young woman’s death is that it prompts the police to release the man they have had in custody, under suspicion of murdering Father Nathaniel.”

  “Stanley Morgan.”

  Amos nodded. “While it would be absurd to suggest that an imprisoned man could commit another murder, it is equally absurd to think this exonerates him of the murder of which he is already suspected.”

  Of course, Amos Cadbury was right in rejecting any connection between the dreadful thing that had happened to Nathaniel and the death of this unfortunate young woman.

  “Now I suppose the police will take a different attitude toward the Georges, father and son.”

  “The Georges.”

  “Would it occur to anyone that either of them could have done harm to Nathaniel?”

  Amos Cadbury was not being ironic. Perhaps he didn’t realize how threatening to the Georges all the talk of selling Marygrove must have seemed. However, that did not mean that …