Prodigal Father

by Ralph McInerny

  “Why would the police think such things?” Boniface erased the question with an impatient gesture. “What do they think?”

  “Only what they were invited to think.”

  How odd that Amos Cadbury should bring to him news of such matters on the grounds of Marygrove. The venerable lawyer adopted elegiac tones to tell the story of the son who suspected his father and the father who suspected his son. The strange condition in which the police had found the maintenance shed was now explained. Insofar as he had thought of it before, Boniface assumed that Andrew George would have taken the first opportunity to clean up the shed. Nothing sinister about that. The man had a passion for order and neatness. But to learn that Michael had hurriedly cleaned the place up, even slapped paint around to cover bloodstains, put a new face on events Boniface had almost succeeded in consigning to a locked compartment of memory. His heart was wrenched with agony thinking of the reactions of father and son. But surely their doubts had been lifted when Stanley Morgan had been arrested. And just as surely the release of Morgan would bring back their doubts—as well as the curiosity of the police.

  “Father Dowling visited him,” Amos Cadbury said.

  “Morgan?”

  “Yes. He had asked for a priest. I suppose he meant you.”

  Boniface had the sense that one, if not the main, purpose of Amos Cadbury’s visit had been reached. The lawyer was of the opinion that Father Boniface owed it to himself, to his Order, to the Georges, and to the prisoner himself to pay a visit to Stanley Morgan before he became a free man once more.

  3

  To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.

  —Psalm 25

  Fingerhut from the lab stood in Phil Keegan’s doorway, chin on chest, looking over his glasses, combing his beard with fat fingers until he was noticed. Phil jumped.

  “How long have you been there?”

  “What day is it?”

  “Come on.”

  Chortling, Fingerhut crossed to Phil’s desk. “Boy, have I got something for you. Where’s your computer?”

  “Computer? I don’t use one.”

  “Ye gods, a Luddite. You’re going to have to come to the lab, then.”

  Phil went with him to the lab. Fingerhut never exaggerated the importance of what he found, quite the opposite; he was wary of creating false hopes in detectives. He waved a disk. “I took this from Charlotte Priebe’s laptop.”

  “Laptop.”

  Fingerhut smiled wistfully behind his russet beard. “She could have been my laptop any day. A laptop is a portable computer, Keegan. Let’s look at the file on the computer since you’re here.”

  Most of the files had to do with Charlotte’s work at Anderson Ltd. and would have to be gone through for whatever light they cast on things. An operation Fingerhut now regarded as superfluous.

  “I was just running down the contents of her hard drive when I saw this.” He highlighted an item on the screen: IN CASE I DIE. Fingerhut waited for Keegan’s reaction as he had waited in his doorway.

  “Is that it?”

  “It’s the name of a file.”

  Fingerhut clicked the mouse and there on the screen was a statement bearing the title In Case I Die. Again he waited in vain for a response.

  “You want to read it on the screen or should I print it out?”

  “I can’t read anything but the title.”

  “That’s because of where you’re standing. I’ll print it out.”

  He connected the laptop to a printer, clicked on an icon, clicked again, and the lights on the printer lit up. There was a whirring sound and then a page began to emerge from the printer. The first was followed by another.

  “I made one for myself as well.” He handed the first one to Phil.

  In Case I Die

  I have never felt afraid before, but I am afraid now. To explain why, I will set down a story that Lars Anderson told me on two separate occasions. The second time was today, and I am sure it was meant as a warning.

  Many years ago, when the enterprise that is now Anderson Ltd. was just beginning, Lars had a partner named Beamish. His story is that Beamish tried to squeeze him out of the business by enlisting the help of a local family whose reputation is well known, the Pianones. Lars got wind of it and went to the Pianones, made his own deal, with the result that Beamish ended up in a cement mixer and was poured into the foundation frames of the Wackham Building. I should say that Lars did not in so many words say that he dealt with the Pianones, but that Beamish’s supping with the devil had ended in the way just described.

  What is wrong with this story? I checked the contemporary issues of the Tribune and found that Beamish had indeed been reported missing. A national search was undertaken, without results. Mrs. Beamish was given a sizeable amount of money and moved to Sarasota where eventually she died. How would Lars know the whereabouts of Beamish if he had not been instrumental in doing his partner in?

  What is the relevance of this to me? I suggested a compromise to Amos Cadbury, who represents the owners of a property Lars is determined to get. Leo Corbett, the grandson of the man who gave the property to its present owners, the Order of St. Athanasius, had become the client of a local lawyer, Tuttle, who engineered a series of devastating articles in the Tribune aimed at claiming the entire property. The chances of this succeeding were virtually nil, however much harm the articles did to the present owners. I was asked by Lars to contact Leo Corbett, the grandson, and I did, persuading him that a compromise was his best hope of getting some of his grandfather’s property. Lars told him he would get the original estate buildings, mainly the mansion and the original gardens and lodge. Whether or not Lars was sincere, Leo Corbett took the bait. It was then that I proposed a compromise to Amos Cadbury, who was open to the possibility. But I did more.

  I took Leo into my apartment, to make him inaccessible to Tuttle, and Leo and I fell in love. In all frankness I cannot say whether this happened before or after another idea occurred to me, one beneficial to myself. As Leo’s wife, I would gain twice—the bonus Lars promised me if the compromise went through, and coownership of what Leo got. Fatally, I did not tell Lars of this. Nor did I tell him that the safe house I had put Leo in was my apartment. Lars found out about that and must have surmised that I was working on behalf of myself as well as Anderson Ltd. That is when he told me the story of Beamish for the second time.

  As I write this, Leo has left my apartment. I do not know where he went. But I suspect that Lars persuaded him to go. The scene is set for something to happen to me, the sort of thing that happened to Beamish. Perhaps I am being paranoid. Perhaps not. I think not. Hence this statement which I trust will be discovered and read if I should die mysteriously.

  —Charlotte Priebe

  “It’s not dated,” Keegan said, after he read it.

  “The computer dates it. She wrote it the night before she was found dead.”

  Phil took the second copy of the printout from Fingerhut. “Lock up that laptop. This is going to be kept utterly confidential. The whole statement is a time bomb. You got that? Don’t tell anyone about this.”

  Fingerhut looked sad. “You don’t have to tell me that, Keegan.”

  “I’m sorry. I know I don’t. But it’s just as well that we both understand that whatever we do with this is going to have to be cleared. And I don’t have to tell you the complications of that.”

  “Robertson?”

  “Robertson.” Robertson was chief of the Fox River police, a sinecure he held thanks to the Pianone family and others. From the point of view of these patrons, Robertson’s principal function was to deflect legal attention away from them.

  “And there is Anderson. If we take this statement seriously, we would bring him under suspicion of two murders, Beamish and this girl. And Amos Cadbury is mentioned in a way that might sound compromising to some.”

  “So you’re going to sit on it?”

  It was Keegan’s turn to look sad. “I didn’t say that.”
/>   “Sorry. I know you didn’t.”

  Before leaving the lab, Phil folded the two printouts carefully and put them in an inside pocket, patting them as if to prevent any telltale bulge. Then he went back to his office and told his secretary to get hold of Cy Horvath.

  It is not a pleasant thing to spend one’s career in a police department that is more or less in the hands of the enemy, but such was Phil Keegan’s fate. When he had first learned of the influence of the Pianones on the force, his impulse was to resign and then raise public hell about it. His wife was alarmed at the prospect, he had her and his two little daughters to think of. There was no way he could sound the alarm about the inroads the Pianones had made into the department and then settle down peacefully to run a cigar store, say. The certainty he had of what would have happened to him made Charlotte Priebe’s fears more than realistic. There had been rumors for years that Anderson’s way with the building trades had been smoothed more than once by the intervention of the Pianone family. While he waited for Cy to come he thought of Beamish immured in the foundation walls of the Wackham Building. And he thought of Charlotte Priebe, submerged in her own bathtub with an overdose of sleeping pills in her system.

  “Close the door,” Keegan said, when Cy arrived. He began to take the folded sheets from his pocket, then stopped. He stood. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  In his present mood, he did not consider even his own office secure. He and Cy went down to the garage and checked out a car. Horvath did not question this. He was one colleague Keegan would trust with his life. When Cy’s athletic career at Illinois went aglimmering and he got on the force, Keegan had taken him under his wing. The integrity of the huge Hungarian was untouchable.

  Keegan drove. He got on the interstate and headed for the Belevedere Oasis where he parked. Over coffee in the franchise restaurant, he handed Cy a copy of Charlotte Priebe’s statement.

  “That was on her computer. Fingerhut found it.”

  Cy read the printout without any change of expression. His eyes lifted to Keegan’s.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “That’s what we came here to talk about.”

  Cy nodded. “There isn’t a clue in her apartment. The woman who sounded the alarm saw no one come or go during what would have been the relevant time.”

  “Was she paid off?”

  Cy thought about it. “I don’t think so. Her name is Matilda Szabo.”

  “Hungarian?”

  “Only by marriage. I don’t think she could keep her mouth shut.”

  “Maybe we better provide her with some protection.”

  “And take out an ad in the Tribune?”

  “Okay, what do you suggest?”

  “Checking out the basement walls of the Wackham Bulding.”

  “And take out an ad in the Tribune?”

  Cy never laughed, but he wrinkled his nose and that was a seismic event in his facial expressions. “There are pretty simple ways to detect human remains. Pippen was telling me about them.”

  “Does she know how to do it?”

  “I would say yes.”

  “Do you trust her?”

  “I trust her.”

  “Then do it.”

  It made sense. If the Beamish story was only something Anderson used to scare young ladies and nothing more, the statement would be half discredited.

  “Can I show her this?” Cy tapped the printout.

  “You said you trusted her. Make sure she knows how explosive all this is.”

  4

  Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself.

  —Psalm 84

  As superior, Boniface was celebrant at the final rites for Richard Krause, Father Nathaniel in religion. He had wandered in exterior darkness for years but finally returned. He had died in the habit he would not have been permitted to wear had he lived and Boniface given him his verdict on his reinstatement. All that was irrelevant now. Death made so many things irrelevant. The mind concentrated on the grim boundary between life and death and the great questions surged up within. For the believer, those questions had received their answer. The religious lives out his acceptance of those answers day after day, year after year. For such a one, the words of the liturgy seem particularly apt: Vita mutatur non tollitur—life is altered, not taken away. There were ironies in according Nathaniel all the deference due a deceased priest. The casket of a layman pointed feet forward toward the altar, that of a priest was reversed. In the stalls were the four priests whose loyalty Nathaniel had divided.

  The ceremony was swift and simple, as required by the Rule of the Order. Afterward, the casket was lifted to a flatbed and the diminished community followed Andrew George as he drove slowly toward the cemetery. The undertaker followed in his car. Looking into the grave that had been dug for Nathaniel, Boniface resisted the thoughts that came, thoughts that might seem lugubrious to some, but not to him. But he was here to fulfill a function, not meditate on the last things. Within minutes it was over. The old men turned from the new grave and walked slowly and in silence back to the mansion.

  When Mr. Cadbury told him the story of Mr. George and his son Michael, he seemed to think that Boniface had already known it. Hearing that father and son had suspected one another and that the son had made a hurried cleanup of the maintenance shed in order to cover up what he thought his father had done filled the old priest with a tremendous sadness. What has become of us when we can suspect one another of having done so awful a deed? Boniface thought it was obvious who had killed Nathaniel. After Mr. Cadbury left, he drove downtown to police headquarters and asked if he could see Stanley Morgan.

  Morgan came into the room with a smile, then stopped. “I thought it was Father Dowling. All they said was a priest.”

  “Will you talk with me?”

  “Of course. Father Boniface, I can’t tell you how I regret having tried to deceive you as I did, at least at first.”

  “What you told me helped change the minds of those who had sided with Father Nathaniel.”

  “Good.”

  “Mr. Morgan, why did you run away the morning Nathaniel was found?”

  “That was cowardly. But after what happened to me in California, I could not stay.”

  “Running away was like an admission of guilt.”

  “They would have thought me guilty anyway.”

  “The Georges didn’t.”

  “They are good people.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  Then Boniface told the story of Michael George and the maintenance shed, of Mr. George’s anguished admission that his son had been in the shed when he went there to telephone.

  “Michael is putting himself under suspicion in order to protect his father.”

  “My God.”

  “You didn’t know this?”

  “No. Father, neither of them could have done such a thing.”

  “That is what I think.”

  Father Boniface sat in silence, certain that he was in the presence of a murderer, but a murderer with a strange conscience. He seemed genuinely moved by what the Georges had done.

  “Neither of them ever said he thought it was you.”

  Morgan asked to hear it all again, as if he wanted to memorize the events recounted. He shook his head sadly. “The short time I spent with them …” Again he shook his head. “The father and I stayed up until all hours that night, drinking Greek wine and talking.”

  “About Nathaniel?”

  “About him. About everything. Here was a man who had spent his life on that same plot of ground, gone nowhere, seen nothing, and yet he was wise. Of course he was angry that Michael might not follow in his footsteps because of Nathaniel. Some would call it a small ambition, wanting his son to be the groundskeeper there. But it was his whole world, and it was threatened with destruction.”

  “It is difficult to think of our lives without the Georges.”

  “But you said Nathaniel’s supporters had deserted him.”


  “There are other ways in which that future for Michael can be ruined. It is well on the way to being ruined now. Do you know what I fear? I fear that Michael will take the final step and confess to murdering Nathaniel.”

  “No.”

  “Of course, you have been arrested and are being held here. Largely because you refuse to get a lawyer. That does not seem to be the act of a man who is worried about himself.”

  “I hate lawyers.”

  “There are good ones and there are bad ones.”

  “Why do you think that Michael will confess?”

  “For the same reason he has done what he has already done. To protect his father.”

  “But who else thinks George could do such a thing?”

  “One is sufficient, if it is Michael.”

  Whatever Boniface had expected from the conversation failed to happen. And he did not know whether or not he was disappointed. When he left he met Lieutenant Horvath who talked to him of the death of the young woman, but Boniface listened to the story as if it were an event on another planet.

  Horvath said that there were those who thought the two murders were connected, but gave no indication he thought the same. It seemed to Boniface a far-fetched idea. His one desire was to have the death of Nathaniel cease being a matter of public discussion. But that wouldn’t happen until the murderer was tried and convicted. Complicating the issue by trying to link Nathaniel’s death with that of this young woman would only prolong the publicity and postpone the implementation of the plan he would present to the cardinal.

  “So what brings you here, Father?”

  “I have been speaking with Stanley Morgan.”

  Cy pulled on his ear. “He still insists he is innocent. Maybe he is.”

  Father Boniface felt a chill. Was this a warning that the police were now ready to act on what Michael had done? He couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  It was some hours later, that evening, when Boniface looked into the common room where the old priests were dozing in front of the television. The local news was on. And then it had Father Boniface’s full attention. Stanley Morgan had just confessed to the murder of Father Nathaniel.