Blood Ties

by Ralph McInerny

  “And it didn’t even occur to me!”

  “So you and Nathaniel became permanent.”

  “In a California way. Madeline, you’re not jealous.”

  “Of a dead man?”

  “Ouch.” Her expression became the funereal one of the memorial. “I am determined that it won’t destroy me. This is the most difficult thing I have ever lived through. A little secret. The last time I was with him, we quarreled. Not unusual, that. Ours was a lengthy quarrel punctuated by, well, you know. Still, it hurts to know that the last things I said to him were in anger.”

  “He came to see me.”

  Catherine put down her glass. “I know. That’s what we quarreled about. I tried to stop him. It was crazy.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Tell him? I refused even to talk to him.”

  “Good for you. Imagine, after all these years, feeling the call of duty.” She sipped her wine. “Of course, all writers are insane.”

  The longer they talked, the more disarmed Madeline felt. She had come determined to tell Catherine what a hateful person she was, what an awful thing it was to tell her secret to Mark in what had to be an effort to break them up. What could possibly drive this woman? But as they talked, as Catherine talked, glib, flowing, hardly needing to take a breath, Madeline felt her hatred ebb. The woman across from her was hollow, artificial, all surface. Any soul she had seemed to have seeped away, and she was reduced to chatter.

  “Do you have children?”

  “Four sons.”

  “My God. Well, he had hairy arms and a thick beard, it figures.”

  “Is that what does it?”

  “Nathaniel hadn’t a hair on his chest. And he was balding, in a nice way.”

  “So no children.”

  “Oh, that was never in the cards.”

  “Why did you tell Mark?”

  Catherine seemed genuinely confused by the question. “Tell Mark what?”

  Was it possible that what loomed so large for Madeline was insignificant to Catherine? She changed the subject. “Janet was at the memorial, too. You remember Janet. We talked afterward.”

  “And didn’t come talk to me?”

  “We didn’t want to barge in.”

  “Oh, you. My best friend.” Catherine put her head to one side and smiled. “If I kissed you again I would probably get arrested.” She made a little face and shrugged. “So consider yourself kissed again. Madeline, why don’t the three of us get together, you and I and Janet.”

  “How long are you in town?”

  Catherine’s face fell. “Oh my God, that’s right. I’m flying back tonight. On the red-eye.”

  “Well, that’s that.”

  “At least I’ve seen you.”

  It was forty-five minutes later that Madeline left. Catherine did kiss her again, in the lobby, and Madeline kissed her back. Somehow the rage with which she had come downtown seemed uncalled for. Catherine in person did not inspire deep emotions.

  17

  Peanuts brought Tuttle the report Cy Horvath had written on his investigation of the downtown hit-and-run or whatever it was. At any other time, Tuttle would have read it immediately, but now, with several fish to fry, he just put it in his pocket. “Good work.”

  “You owe me a lunch.”

  Why not? Tuttle had spent the morning in old family court records, wasting hours until it occurred to him that Amos Cadbury was the key to his research. That required a competence with the computer Tuttle did not have. He called Hazel and had her put the paralegal on it.

  “Just have her pull up everything twenty-two years ago that involved Amos Cadbury.”

  “What did Bernard Casey want?”

  “I’d rather not say over the phone.”

  “So get back here and tell me.”

  “I should be there by midafternoon.”

  He waited for the sound of the phone being slammed down, but there was only an annoyed humming, and then that stopped. “Tell me about Martin Sisk.”

  “This afternoon.”

  She did slam down the phone then. Well, later he could divert her with stories of Martin and avoid telling her about the meeting with Bernard Casey. Meanwhile, he headed for the Great Wall with Peanuts.

  “The law is endlessly interesting, Peanuts,” he said through a mouthful of fried rice.

  Peanuts grunted.

  “Routine is the key,” Tuttle continued. “And records. Records last, that is the point. Everything is filed away somewhere, and it is just a matter of finding it.”

  Peanuts hailed the waiter and ordered another beer. “You want that egg roll?”

  “Take it.”

  Peanuts took it and made it disappear as if by a magician’s trick. There were those who left Chinese restaurants with styrofoam boxes filled with what they had been unable to eat while there. Peanuts would never need a styrofoam box. His stomach was a styrofoam box. Tuttle looked at his mute friend with fondness. The report he had put in his pocket crinkled when he moved his arm. He got it out and began to read it. Peanuts, of course, went on eating. As he read, Tuttle became suffused with an unfamiliar emotion. The parlay of Martin and Bernard Casey was already a sharp change in his fortunes—the daily double, as it were—but what he read in Horvath’s report held the promise of a triple play. A hat trick. He took his tweed hat from the hook beside him and put it on.

  Peanuts noticed. “You going?”

  “Just my thinking cap.” He hung it up again.

  Peanuts was an ideal companion to ignore, and Tuttle let his thoughts run. The beauty of his situation was that he already knew what he had been hired to discover.

  The Lynches, through Martin Sisk, wanted him to locate the natural mother of their adopted child. Bernard Casey wanted him to locate the natural mother of his friend Martha Lynch. Cy Horvath’s report told him that Madeline Lorenzo was that mother. An inference, of course. Her panic at the reappearance of Nathaniel Fleck was due to the fact that he was the father of her illegitimate child.

  Putting two and two together promised a set of fees that would bring a smile even to Hazel. He frowned. Such affluence might lessen her obvious intention of dealing herself into what she considered Martin Sisk’s comfortable retirement. So what if he had twenty-five years on her. All the better, when you stopped to think of it.

  The troubling element in all this was the death of Nathaniel Fleck. Cy Horvath all but conceded that it had been a freak accident, not a hit-and-run. Still, there had been a vehicle and the driver had sped away. Tuttle could not really believe that Horvath could dismiss that, but what could he do about it? The reports of the witnesses, as Cy had summarized them, were conflicting. No surprise there. The notion of an eyewitness is a fuzzy one when there are several witnesses and multiple pairs of eyes. The witnesses might have been describing different scenes.

  When he and Peanuts finished at the Great Wall, Tuttle drove the replete little cop downtown. Only by talking with Horvath could he determine whether the detective had really closed the investigation. Meanwhile, the strange death of Nathaniel Fleck seemed a vague threat to Tuttle’s impending triumph.

  18

  Janet called Madeline and suggested that they meet in a mall in Schaumburg.

  “Our car is in the garage,” Madeline said.

  “Okay. Let’s make it Evanston.”

  Any reluctance Madeline might have felt gave way to the prospect of telling Janet of her meeting with Catherine at the Hyatt Regency. She had decided not to mention it to Mark, before or after. What was the point? The past had put in an appearance and now would go away. Nathaniel was dead; Catherine had taken the red-eye back to California. Still, it would be good to talk to someone about it, and Janet was the obvious candidate.

  They were hardly settled at a table with their coffee when Janet put a lurid publication on the table. “Have you seen this?”

  “Good Lord, no.” It was the sort of magazine that titillates shoppers
as they wait at the checkout counter in supermarkets. Madeline had never seen anyone buy one, though everybody scanned them passing by.

  “Look at this,” Janet said. She opened and folded the publication.

  The photograph that appeared on the dust jackets of Nathaniel Fleck’s books looked up at Madeline. In the simplest inflammatory prose the accompanying story mocked the claim of Catherine Adams to have been the companion of the dead author. Someone named Maurice Dolan, described as a golfing partner of Fleck, was quoted as saying that Fleck had dumped Catherine years ago. Again and again. “She wouldn’t stay dumped.” Janet’s eyes were bright with malice.

  “Well, well,” Madeline said.

  “Her performance at the memorial was a fraud.”

  “That isn’t the most reliable kind of publication.”

  “I just know it’s true.”

  Janet’s attitude decided Madeline against mention of the meeting in the Hyatt Regency. Her own grievance against Catherine made the posthumous claim to being Nathaniel’s lifelong companion, even if false, minor. Of course, there was irony in the possibility that a woman who had publicly insisted she made herself available to Nathaniel was lying. Most women would have lied to deny such a demeaning relationship.

  “The poor thing.”

  “Well, you’re certainly magnanimous about it.”

  “Janet, none of it matters anymore. It was all a long time ago. Now, thank God, it’s over for good.”

  Janet thought about it. Clearly she was disappointed that the lurid story hadn’t provided a basis for dismantling Catherine’s character, but she closed the magazine and looked around for a wastebasket. When she had disposed of it, she sat again and gave Madeline a little smile. “I felt like an idiot when I bought that.”

  “Not much food for the mind.”

  “Now, tell me about your four sons.”

  It was like a return to normalcy, talking of her boys. Of course they were all brilliant, like their father. Stephen, the oldest, was a freshman at Northwestern.

  “My daughter is a sophomore in high school. She’s gone out for track.”

  It was that kind of conversation, listening to earn the right to talk, each of them eager to laud their offspring. Of course, with four sons, Madeline had an advantage.

  “My youngest has asthma,” she said.

  “Ooooh.”

  “It can be controlled now, but it is a nuisance for him. Of course he’s the athletic one.”

  After half an hour of such talk it seemed they really had very little in common anymore. Janet said she hadn’t read a book in years. “And don’t think it’s because I read that kind of trash.” She nodded toward the wastebasket.

  Madeline tried to imagine a life without reading. Would that have become so important a part of her life if she hadn’t married Mark? Perhaps not. But she had married him, and Janet’s account of her husband’s wheeling and dealing on behalf of Kraft Foods brought home to her what a wonderful life she had. Janet’s remark that she supposed Madeline regretted not having at least one daughter made her uneasy, but it seemed to have no ulterior purpose.

  “Maybe I still will.”

  And the two mothers laughed merrily.

  Walking home, Madeline stopped at the supermarket and bought a copy of the publication Janet had shown her. Then she went to Mark’s office. She dropped the paper on his desk.

  “What’s this?”

  “Food for the mind.”

  “I think I already read this copy.”

  “Oh, sure. Look at this.” She sought and found the story about Catherine.

  When he had read it, he looked up. “Her checkered career continues.”

  Then she did tell him about meeting Catherine in the Loop. “I was going to tell her off. I went down there like an avenging angel. In the end, I just felt sorry for her.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Oh, pooh. Maybe I just lacked the guts.”

  He began to fold up the publication, then paused. “I wonder who Maurice Dolan is.”

  Madeline said nothing.

  19

  The news he had just received filled Amos Cadbury with dismay. Someone in records thought he would want to know that a request had been made for a list of all the cases in which Cadbury had been involved twenty-two years ago. Of course, all such records were in the public domain, available to anyone with the right to ask for them. The request had been made by Rebecca Young. The name meant nothing to Amos.

  “She has paralegal training. She was acting for Tuttle.”

  Tuttle! A familiar melancholy settled over Amos Cadbury. For years he had tried to regard the ineffable Tuttle as an anomaly, a blemish on a noble profession, but the news of the day had long since deprived him of that delusion. After long decline, the law had entered a tragicomic phase. Professors wrote books in which they argued that the law was simply judicial interpretation, the supposed will of the people guiding the judge. All sense of self-evident truths backing up man-made law seemed to have gone. Everything was relative. What was just today might be the opposite tomorrow, should we, or those who presumed to speak for us, so decree. Things being that bad on the level of legal theory, who could wonder at the circus trials that dominated the news. Manifest killers were exonerated by juries who had been misled by the charlatans of criminal law. Each time a celebrity was accused of a crime, the same familiar faces appeared on television; sophists ready to prove that black is white and up is down would do anything inside and out of court to save their client, and this for fees that made Amos want to gag. In what the law had become, Tuttle seemed almost respectable, but his interest in Amos’s cases of twenty-two years ago left little doubt in the lawyer’s mind about what that interest was.

  Much of Amos’s waning legal career was spent on the estates of deceased clients, men and women whose wills he had written and whose intentions he was committed to seeing fulfilled. The younger men in the firm brought in new business; Amos was introduced ceremonially to new clients, the grand old man of the firm, but he had nothing to do with them. Over his long career he had been involved in many different sorts of problems, but he had handled only one adoption. Twenty-two years ago. The way he had handled it had been perfectly proper, but he had taken great pains to separate the parties in the matter. The release obtained from the young mother was conducted as a self-contained matter. The adoption papers, giving the Lynches possession of the child, had been filed in Indiana, in South Bend. Amos had done this personally, on an ostensible visit to his alma mater. He was confident that no one who came upon the one transaction could possibly be led to the other. Yet he was uneasy.

  From Father Dowling he had learned that his awful suspicions concerning Madeline Lorenzo were unfounded. That left a mysterious death as mysterious as it had been, but sometimes an accident is one in the philosophical sense, unrelated to the intention of any agent, literally something that had happened but not been done.

  “Thank God,” Amos had said.

  “Amen.”

  The question now was whether the care he had taken long ago could continue to protect his clients from heartbreak. Embarrassment and heartbreak were only inadequately prevented by the law, even by law at its best, and Amos had no doubt that he had acted for the best. Even Tuttle might sometimes succeed. Should the Lynches continue in their anxiety?

  “Father, I wonder what would really be lost, after all these years, if the Lynches simply told their daughter of her origins.”

  “You wonder who they are really protecting.”

  “The mother has far more interest in maintaining the secret than they do.”

  “And what does she think?”

  This was something only Amos could discover. He asked Madeline Lorenzo if she could come see him again.

  When she came, Amos was once more struck by what a fine woman she was. Her youthful beauty had matured; there was about her an air of settled intelligence and the quiet authority of a parent. The thought that the wonderful life she had app
arently fashioned with her husband should be jeopardized by a past in which she had acted so well made the old lawyer waver in his intention.

  But it was she who broached the subject. “I have learned that my husband knew my secret all along.”

  “He did?”

  “Before we married.” She smiled a strange smile. “My best friend felt it her duty to tell him.”

  “Without effect?”

  “He is a wonderful man.”

  “I don’t doubt it. So it is no longer a secret.”

  “Not from him. But, of course, my children…”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “As you can imagine, I have been thinking a great deal of this lately. There is something you should know. The man I spoke to you about, the father, is dead.”

  “Nathaniel Fleck.”

  “You knew that?”

  “That he was dead? The papers were full of it.”

  “That he was the father of my child.”

  “When we spoke before, if you should have asked me if I knew the man, I could quite honestly have said no. You mentioned receiving a letter from him. But then he wrote to me, too.”

  She looked at Amos for a time. “And you wondered if I had been responsible for his death?”

  “My dear young lady.”

  “The police thought so. They had learned that Nathaniel Fleck had been to the alumni association at Northwestern, asking about me. That suggested a possibility they had to rule out.”

  “And, of course, did.”

  “They spoke to my husband. That is what prompted him to tell me that he had known all along of my baby by that man.”

  “Remarkable.”

  She smiled. “He is a philosopher.”

  “Even so.”

  She laughed a lovely laugh. “Oh, I will have to quote that to him.”

  “I have never aspired to amuse a philosopher.”

  “You have not said why you asked me to come.”

  “I, too, have thought much of these matters of late. The young woman, your daughter…”

  There was a little catch of breath on Madeline’s part, and then tears stood in her eyes.

  “I understand that she wants to know. If there were some way we could meet and talk, maybe even get to know one another, it would be so wonderful. I long for that as much as she does, I think. But it is one thing for my husband to know and…” She sobbed.