The Prudence of the Flesh

by Ralph McInerny

“He was found in the river, but Pippen says he didn’t drown. His neck was broken. It was pretty obvious that he was dragged down to the water and thrown in. The lab will see what they can find.”

  Phil was already on the phone to Roger Dowling. “I can understand your resentment, Roger. It was a pretty bad article, but this is going too far.”

  There was a smile on Keegan’s tanned face that gave some indication of what he had been like as a kid. He and Dowling were old friends, and the phone call was the equivalent of playground teasing.

  2

  Marie Murkin acted as if the death of Ned Bunting were divine retribution for her cooperation in the article on the pastor of St. Hilary’s, and Father Dowling did not try to unravel her snarled theory. Meanwhile, over the next several days, he was kept apprized of the ongoing investigation.

  The deceased was indeed the author of that memorable tribute to Father Dowling that had appeared in the Tribune. Phil Keegan settled into a chair in the study.

  “He thought of himself as a writer, Roger. Quirk said he couldn’t write his way out of a wet paper bag.”

  “Faint praise, Phil. So why did he print it?”

  “He said it was an off day.”

  More people remembered Ned Bunting as an usher at St. Bavo’s than as a writer. Apparently he’d had some sort of tiff with the pastor there.

  “Monsignor Sledz,” Roger said.

  “Yes. Barbara Blaisdel, the housekeeper, said it had something to do with the parish bulletin. Bunting had offered to do a weekly column for it, and Sledz laughed him out of the rectory.”

  “He had been coming to Mass here.”

  “With a woman,” Marie said from the hallway. She looked in and said to Phil Keegan, “Ask Barbara who she was.”

  “I thought you wanted to be a priest, not a detective.”

  Marie’s eyes lifted to the ceiling, and her lips moved in prayer. Marie Murkin was the last of the male chauvinists when it came to the role of women in the church. How many of the apostles were women? This observation provided all the argument Marie was likely to make. How do you argue for the obvious?

  “Thanks, Marie,” Father Dowling said.

  “You’re welcome, I’m sure. I don’t know about whatshisname there.” She was gone.

  “Bunting was with a woman when she came here, according to Marie.”

  “I’ll talk to Barbara Blaisdel.”

  When Cy had talked to Gloria Daley, he learned that Bunting’s great project was a book about the priest scandal.

  Pippen’s report on her examination confirmed that Bunting had not drowned but had died of a broken neck. Only then had he been put into the water.

  “He was a big guy,” Phil said. “Putting him in the river would have taken quite an effort.”

  The examination of the scene at the edge of the river confirmed Cy’s guess that the body had been dragged through the underbrush to the water. There were several pretty obvious paths, but they had been avoided. The question was, where had the fatal injury been inflicted? The parking area was impossibly contaminated by all the official vehicles and then by the curious who had come to the scene of the discovery of the body of Ned Bunting.

  Cy had been there when the lab crew went over Bunting’s residence. It was a small bungalow in which he had been raised by his parents and where he had stayed on after their deaths. Two bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen. The place looked as it must have looked when Bunting was a boy, very old-fashioned but neat as a pin.

  “The basement was the thing.”

  The furnace, hot water heater, and washer and dryer were housed at one end of the basement, in a room built especially to keep them from view. The rest of the area was covered by indoor/outdoor carpeting. A long table ran the width of the short wall, and on it were a massive computer, a printer, a fax machine, a telephone, and a television set hooked up to a video and CD player. The lighting over the work area was provided by fluorescent lights. The rest of the area was devoted to comfort. There were several bookshelves, a couch, an easy chair, and a large coffee table strewn with publications. A massive ashtray was within easy reach of the chair. It was here that Ned Bunting had nursed his ambition to be a writer. On the walls were portraits of his heroes: a bearded Hemingway, a forlorn Scott Fitzgerald, Philip Roth making the most of what hair he had, John Updike looking a bit like a rabbit.

  “No sign of a struggle.”

  “Not in the physical sense.” You never knew when Cy was being less than serious. The basement room would be subjected to close analysis, the results of which would take time.

  Meanwhile there was the question of Ned Bunting’s funeral, and that concerned Father Dowling more directly. Gloria Daley came to the rectory, spoke at length with Marie, and then was led in to the pastor.

  “I think it would be wrong for Ned to be buried at St. Bavo’s,” she began, and told the story of the treatment to which Monsignor Sledz had subjected Bunting. “Now he claims him as an ideal parishioner, the best of ushers.”

  “Was he registered at St. Bavo’s?”

  “Father Dowling, we had been attending your Mass here. He had shaken the dust of St. Bavo’s from his feet.”

  “Who are the next of kin?”

  “I don’t know anyone who was closer to him than I was.”

  “And she prefers here,” Marie said.

  “I’ll talk to Monsignor Sledz.”

  Gloria was looking around the study. “If there was anyplace to hang it, I would give you one of my paintings.”

  Marie led her away.

  Roger Dowling had no intention of getting into an argument with Sledz about the funeral of Ned Bunting. Sledz was a member of the Polish Mafia in the archdiocese and, like the rest of them, the salt of the earth. Imperious, of course, one who did not suffer fools gladly and who assumed that most of the laity were fools. It was easy to imagine his reaction to his usher’s suggestion that he write a column for the parish bulletin, thus claiming parity with Sledz’s weekly written address to his flock.

  He telephoned Sledz and asked what he knew of the woman who had come to him with the request that Ned Bunting be buried from St. Hilary’s.

  “He was a parishioner here, Roger. Registered. He was an usher for years. We had a little misunderstanding and he got into a huff. He didn’t try to register there, did he?”

  “No.”

  “I should think that settles it, then.”

  “What undertaker will you use?”

  “McDivitt.”

  “I suppose I could come and concelebrate.”

  Sledz hesitated. He probably thought of concelebrated Masses what Roger Dowling did. “One thing you might do, Roger, is lead the rosary at the wake tonight. The fact is, this is my poker night.”

  “McDivitt?”

  “Seven thirty.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  3

  The death of Ned Bunting had made Tuttle reflective.

  “It’s almost like a death in the family,” Tuttle said to Hazel, standing beside her desk in the outer office. “He was more than a client, he was a friend.”

  “I never met him.” Thus do reports of disasters in far parts of the world inform us that no Americans were killed. Hazel was incapable of abstract emotions: She had to know someone in the flesh and blood to like or hate the person. Even so, she could sympathize with Tuttle’s stunned response to the death of Ned Bunting.

  The news had reached him a day after the discovery of the body, and he did indeed at first feel it as a personal affront. He and Bunting had worked together on the Gregory Barrett case. Tuttle would never forget the unstinting admiration with which Bunting had listened to Tuttle’s discovery of Barrett’s role in the birth of Madeline’s baby.

  “You know what this means, Tuttle.” Tuttle preferred to be told. He smiled wisely. “He’s the father, Tuttle! That’s what it means.”

  There was no point in quarreling with this interpretation. For Tuttle, it was easier to believe that then-Fa
ther Barrett had been what help he could to a young woman in distress. Bunting, though, was aflame with certainty. “Let’s tell Gloria.”

  In the event, it was Bunting who had told Gloria, in the course of the narrative failing to mention that the great discovery had been made by Tuttle. No matter. There was something unsavory in Bunting’s eagerness.

  Gloria listened with concern. “What will Maddie say when she hears?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “No.” She laid a hand on Bunting’s arm. “I’ll talk with her first. Who knows what trauma this will cause?”

  “We got him,” Bunting had said, hugging himself. “We’ve got the smug sonofabitch.”

  Such triumphalism was unseemly, and Tuttle was happy to get away into the company of the phlegmatic Peanuts Pianone. Peanuts wanted Italian rather than Chinese for lunch.

  “What is it, a holy day?”

  “Every day is a holy day.”

  Well, every day was a holiday for Peanuts. Lunching with Peanuts was no obstacle to thought, and Tuttle had reviewed where he was at that time, professionally.

  Gregory Barrett was no longer his client, so there was no conflict of interest in gathering information harmful to him. Bunting was a client. How about Madeline? The trouble with that was that she was unlikely to be dunnable for any significant amount no matter what happened. He might as well be acting pro bono. Bunting’s reaction had brought home to Tuttle that he had little taste for this crusade against the clergy. Of course, the targets were bad apples, but not everyone who joined the pack was all that discriminating about the objects of pursuit.

  Later, in the pressroom at the courthouse, Tetzel was holding forth on the scandals. “It all comes down to celibacy,” he pontificated. “These guys are lonely.”

  “You ever been married, Tetzel?”

  The reporter ignored the hostile question. “Take Tuttle, now. He’s a celibate, sure, but that’s his nature.”

  Tuttle took umbrage at this; he wasn’t sure why. He had never thought of himself as a celibate before.

  “So let priests get married?” someone asked.

  “Sure. Why should they be happy?”

  Tuttle left. Hours of idleness might be the explanation of the resentment reporters felt for the rest of the world. They brooded too much. The scramble for news was demeaning. No wonder they hated the politicians they had to grovel before.

  And when Ned Bunting’s body was found on the western shore of the Fox River, in lovers’ lane, Tetzel, of course, had a theory. “Look, he talks some Amazon into parking with him, he gets fresh and gets his neck broken.”

  “A woman?”

  Light suddenly gleamed in Tetzel’s eyes. “You may be right. What do we know about Bunting’s personal life?”

  “He was an usher at St. Bavo’s.”

  “A perfect cover. We’ll check out the altar boys for complaints against him. I say it was a question of rough trade. When I was in the navy—”

  He was drowned out by the groans of his fellow members of the Fourth Estate.

  Upstairs, Tuttle walked into Cy Horvath’s office and said, “What do we know?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  Tuttle sat. “For instance.”

  “Well, two and two are four. The sun is ninety-three million miles away, the average lifetime of the fruit fly is—”

  “I mean about Ned Bunting.”

  “I should be asking you, Tuttle. You were a friend of his.”

  “I knew him, yeah.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Cy was serious, putting Tuttle in an unusual position. His visits to the offices on the top floor of the courthouse were made to gather, not give, information—but this was a special case.

  “He was a writer.”

  “What had he written?”

  “He had a story about Father Dowling in the Tribune.”

  “What else?”

  “He was engaged on a project. He wanted to write a book on the priest scandal.”

  “Tuttle, people keep telling us the guy was a writer, but no one knows what he wrote except that thing on Dowling. Isn’t a writer someone who writes?”

  “Horvath, you have no soul. You don’t understand artists, writers, painters.”

  “Painters?”

  “Gloria Daley was a friend of Bunting’s. She paints. Some of her things are on display at the Benjamin Harrison branch of the public library.”

  “A particular friend.”

  “Kindred spirits. She is also the friend of Madeline Murphy, the woman who accused Gregory Barrett.”

  “Hence the book idea?”

  “You got it. What about those tests?”

  “Pippen will let me know when she gets the result.”

  “They’re pretty important, you know.”

  “Tuttle, why don’t you find Peanuts and exchange great ideas?”

  4

  When the body was discovered, Nancy Barrett said to Gregory, “Have you heard? They found that fellow Ned Bunting in the river.”

  “Dead?”

  She nodded. What could he say? The thought of Ned Bunting just disappearing from the face of the earth had been an attractive one for weeks. They had discussed the threat posed by the record that had been found—he, Nancy, and Thomas.

  “What kind of a creep would scrounge around looking for that kind of stuff?” Thomas asked.

  “The role of Torquemada is always attractive.”

  “Poetic justice,” Thomas said now.

  Afterward, it occurred to Gregory Barrett that none of them had expressed regret at the death of Bunting. Understandable, perhaps, but not very Christian. Then again, what kind of Christians were they, after all? He and Nancy had explained abandoning their vocations as the result of having been let down by the Church. It was as if what they had done were the principled, the noble thing. Well, it had been the right thing, he was sure of that. In the intervening years, the developments in the Church had seemed to justify what they had done. Of one thing he was certain: He could not have faced all those changes with equanimity. At Mass—and they went nearly every Sunday—he found himself dismayed by the liturgical changes. The priest, now called the presider, smiled out at the congregation, an emcee there to hold their interest and entertain them. Criticism came easily because it was a species of self-justification. He marveled at the way Roger Dowling had adjusted to all the turmoil. The day after Bunting was found, he went again to St. Hilary’s, just dropping by.

  “Father is saying the noon Mass.” The housekeeper could scarcely disguise her disapproval of him.

  “I’ll go over to the church.”

  When he came in, an old fellow with a croaking voice was reading the scriptural passages of the day while Roger Dowling sat behind the altar. Of course, he read the gospel and followed it with a four-minute homily—Barrett timed it—a brief and pointed commentary on the story of the ten lepers. Roger suggested that the story could be read in two ways: only one of ten or at least one often. He exhorted them to be that tenth cleansed leper.

  Roger said the Roman canon, which was the one they had grown up with. For a short time, Barrett could imagine that the old thing went on, that the changes were superficial. Roger’s fidelity to his vocation seemed something to envy.

  Barrett did not go forward at communion time. What was the condition of his soul? His soul had become a stranger to him, ceding its primacy to mind and his love of literature. In his next program, he would speak of Trollope and Lily Dale’s reaction to being jilted by Crosbie. An impossibly, unbelievably good woman, worthy of Dickens. But he would contrast Lily with Mrs. Lupex and Amelia at John Eames’s boardinghouse. Trollope could write truly about women, but he had a fatal weakness for females like Lily Dale. Even as he prepared the program, Barrett found himself congratulating himself on his perception. It all seemed trivial watching Roger Dowling say Mass.

  Afterward, he went into the sacristy where Roger greeted him warmly. “Good. You must have lunch with me.”


  “Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

  “And why not?”

  “I don’t think your housekeeper approves of me.”

  “Would you want her approval?”

  “You certainly have it.”

  “You see? She has abysmally low standards.”

  When they took their places in the rectory dining room, Marie Murkin was on her best behavior, and Barrett relaxed.

  “Do you know, when I visited you a few weeks ago, it was the first time I had been in a rectory since I left. Now here I am in the dining room.”

  “Where did you speak with Equivocal Casey?”

  The meal was passed discussing Casey and other professors they had had. What fun it was. Afterward, they went to the study, where they could smoke.

  “Have you heard about Ned Bunting?” Greg asked.

  “Poor fellow. I commemorated him in today’s Mass.”

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “No reason why you should have recognized it. I just referred to him as Edward.”

  “That was good of you.”

  “He had been coming to Mass here.”

  “Do you know how he died? The news reports are vague, but they suggest drowning.”

  “He died of a broken neck.”

  “Good Lord.” Barrett drew on his cigarette. “You’re sure?”

  “I have friends in the police. Do you remember a fellow named Phil Keegan at Quigley? A class or two below us.”

  “No.” He rubbed the tip of his nose with the back of his hand. “Not that my memory has been all that reliable.”

  Roger ignored that. “He left and went into the service, served as an MP, and became a policeman when he got out. He is now captain of detectives. We’ve become great friends.”

  “Do they have any idea who did it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You know what I fear, Roger.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I will seem to have had a pretty good motive for wanting to get rid of him.”

  “So would I, for that matter. Abstractly, I mean. My hagiographer. I can’t tell you how I was teased about that ridiculous piece.”

  “Watching you say Mass, I don’t think it was all that ridiculous.”