Stained Glass

by Ralph McInerny

  Gary prompted hellish thoughts again, but they were brief, and then on either side of him were the rolling farmlands of Indiana. He got out his cell phone and called Hugh Devere, correcting his estimated time of arrival.

  “Today?” Hugh said. “I thought Grandma meant tomorrow.”

  Had she? She had assured him that she would forewarn her grandson, a verb Carl had not liked.

  Hugh told him that lunch was out and he had a class at one. “You could come to that if you’d like.”

  “I only wish I could.” Audit a class! No thanks. They arranged to meet at two.

  “Just park across from the main gate. You could look around Cedar Grove Cemetery.”

  “Good idea.”

  Well, this was a fool’s errand, so what did he expect?

  He did park in the lot Hugh suggested, and he did stroll through Cedar Grove, a peaceful place as cemeteries go. When he went on into the new section he was astonished to see two huge mausoleums loom ahead. He inspected them. File away your remains until the last trump. Bury me not on a marble shelf, he sang to the tune of the old western. There were benches by the mausoleums where one could sit and ponder the fleetingness of life or, in the case of Carl Borloff, have a cigarette. In a cemetery everything seemed dangerous to one’s health.

  The young man looked younger than he was, and Carl felt a trace of condescension in him. How had Jane Devere described him to Hugh? An old family retainer? One of the house slaves. He made the mistake of grumbling about the mausoleums.

  “They were designed by Thomas Gordon Smith!”

  They went to a place called Legends near the stadium, a kind of sports bar, its walls festooned with Notre Dame sports memorabilia, televisions everywhere. A famished Carl devoured a hamburger as large as the plate it came on. Hugh had a Guinness.

  “Your grandmother tells me that she has put you in charge of the Menotti project.”

  “Whatever that means. You don’t expect any advice from me, I hope.”

  “I shall want you to be acquainted with each step of the process. It shouldn’t take any time away from your studies.”

  “It’s one of the best ideas she ever had.”

  Carl remained silent. Had Jane claimed the idea as her own? Perhaps if you financed a project, you thought that you owned it in every sense.

  “She mentioned your sister, Susan.”

  Hugh’s eyes seemed distracted by a television screen. If he had meant to say anything he changed his mind. A slight nod and that was that.

  “I’ll be going to Peoria to bring Angelo Menotti up to date on things.”

  This got Hugh’s undivided attention. “What a man,” he said.

  “You’ve visited him?”

  Hugh nodded. Carl had the sudden feeling that the Deveres were encircling his project, taking it over. Well, at least Hugh Devere didn’t take the assignment his grandmother had given him seriously. The large question was, did Hugh share his sister Susan’s skepticism? Carl decided that there was no need to mention that he himself had not yet made the pilgrimage to Peoria.

  9

  Ladislaw Sledz, pastor of Our Lady of Chestokowa, called Father Dowling. His church, too, had been on the list that had appeared in the Tribune.

  “Quinn and Perzel have agreed that we should ask for an appointment at the chancery. You’re an old hand down there, Roger. We need you.”

  “I’ve already been down there, Lad.”

  “You have!” Sledz made it sound like a betrayal.

  “I never thought of going as a group. I wonder if that’s wise.”

  “Who did you speak to?”

  “Bishop Wilenski. He assured me that there is nothing final about that list of parishes that appeared in the paper.”

  “You believed him?”

  That a pastor should suspect the chancery of double talk indicated the despondency into which Sledz and doubtless the others had been cast.

  “I can’t believe you’re in any danger, Lad.” Former parishioners and their families converged on Our Lady of Chestokowa from the suburbs to which they had moved, filling the huge church every Sunday.

  “It’s the school that’s the problem,” Sledz cried. “Why can’t we just sell the schools to the city?”

  “Have you ever thought of converting it into a parish center?”

  “Roger, you could shoot a cannon through this parish any weekday and never hit a Catholic.”

  “No seniors still in residence?”

  “No Catholics.”

  “Then make it ecumenical.”

  “Is that what’s going to save St. Hilary’s, the way you use your school?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I see in the paper that your old folks have organized.”

  “That was their idea, not mine, Lad.”

  “I could get hundreds of names, Roger, people who come here to Sunday Mass. The trouble is few of them live within the parish boundaries.”

  “You don’t want to stir up the pastors in the parishes where they’re now living. They wouldn’t like the thought of all those people driving off to Our Lady of Chestokowa on Sunday.”

  “They’re packing them in out there as it is.”

  “How long have you been pastor there, Lad?”

  The question triggered a twenty-minute bout of reminiscence. Sledz had gone to Our Lady as an assistant and never left. His knowledge of Hungarian as well as Polish made him a natural for the place.

  “You have lots of confessions?”

  “They must go in the suburbs, Roger. I hope.”

  It was pretty clear that Our Lady was vulnerable. Roger suddenly had the thought that he and Sledz and the others were like those pathetic figures who refuse to leave their homes when a freeway is scheduled to run through it and eminent domain invoked. There was something noble in such protests, not least because they were doomed to failure.

  The local story prompted by Bartelli and his group had contrasted the American situation with the European, where churches stood for centuries. A selective comparison. Many churches had been closed on the Continent. Of course the great historical cathedrals stood, but what had they become in too many instances? Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna had put it succinctly: Our churches have become museums and our museums have become churches. Of course, abbeys and convents and their churches had been knocked down under Henry and Elizabeth in England. “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet bird sang.”

  “We have here no lasting city, Lad.”

  “Roger, if they close this place I am going to retire to Florida.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  10

  Agnes brought the woman to Cy’s office, stood at her side and a little behind, and said, “This is Madeline Schutz, Lieutenant.”

  From anyone else south of the planet Pluto this would have gotten a theatrical reaction, but Cy simply looked at Agnes and at the woman. “Please sit down.”

  Just like that. For days they had been investigating the cruel death of Madeline Schutz, who had been cut down from a strut in Amy Gorman’s garage, whose mutilated body had been clinically examined by Dr. Pippen in the morgue and whose antecedents Agnes had been assigned to check. This should have been easy. How many Madeline Schutzes are there? Two, as it happened. An elderly woman confined to her bed in a rest home in Shakopee, Minnesota, and the victim. Agnes had actually made the trip into darkest Minnesota—well, greenest Minnesota—and looked at the old woman, who might have been in this world but certainly wasn’t of it. This Madeline Schutz had spent her lifetime on a farm outside Shakopee, had buried her husband fifteen years ago, had lost both her sons in disputed foreign wars, and now sat in her bed with a vague smile as the nurse told Agnes about the bed’s occupant. Madeline had a sweet smile.

  The records in Shakopee were not computerized, and Agnes found checking out the woman in the rest home difficult. Harriet, an Afro-American who was really a minority in that town, came to her rescue, and between them they established tha
t this Madeline Schutz had exhausted all her relations in this world. There were no bloodlines that had ever extended more than thirty miles in either direction from Shakopee, at least in the last hundred years. If there was any connection between this Madeline Schutz and theirs, it was known only to God. Agnes drove back to Chicago.

  “You drove up there?” Captain Keegan asked.

  “In my own car.”

  Keegan mastered his surprise and perhaps annoyance. “What did you find out?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, that ought to help.”

  He wasn’t serious—about it not helping, that is. Most investigations are a matter of canceling out possible explanations. Their Madeline Schutz had lived in an apartment in Skokie, an apartment that was found locked and, of course, unoccupied. The manager of the building, a little guy named Mintz, had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Not that he talked. He was rendered mute by Agnes’s questions, and his mouth seemed arrested in the act of trying to think of something to say.

  “What did she do?”

  “She was a writer.”

  “Let me see her place.”

  “Let you into her apartment?”

  “You can come with me.”

  Mintz thought about it. He didn’t seem to think much of it, and Agnes had no authority in Skokie. Was she going to have to liase with the Skokie police, get a search warrant, all the rest? Apparently not. Mintz overcame his scruples.

  The blinds in the apartment were tipped, and the rooms were filled with a subdued light. Everything looked neat enough in a kind of haphazard way. It was the number of books that you couldn’t help but notice. Books on shelves in every room, books on the coffee table in the living room, books on the table beside the bed and on the floor as well. More books in a bookcase in there. Then there was the other bedroom, which served as a study. A desk, a computer on a separate stand, pieces of paper pinned up on the cork board over the desk, more books everywhere, and a neat stack of paper on the desk. Agnes bent to read the top sheet. Aurora from Photon. The Empyrean Chronicles, Volume Six. M. X. Schutz.

  “I told you she’s a writer,” Mintz said.

  “I know!”

  In the bookshelf in the study were rows and rows of chubby paperbacks with covers to knock your eyes out, volumes in the Empyrean Chronicles. On volume five was the boast “Over a Million Copies in Print.” Agnes made a note of the publisher, whose offices, surprisingly, were in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She left her card with Mintz.

  It was that card that had led the woman calling herself Madeline Schutz to Agnes’s office. “Mr. Mintz said that you have been making inquiries about me.”

  “Your name?”

  “Madeline Schutz.”

  Agnes could never be as phlegmatic as Cy—she wouldn’t want to be as phlegmatic as Cy—but she hadn’t risen screaming from her chair and called a cop. “From Skokie?”

  “Earl Mintz said he let you into my apartment.”

  Agnes took her off to the cafeteria for coffee and the reassuring presence of others. There she told the woman that they were investigating the murder of Madeline Schutz.

  Madeline’s head canted slightly to the right; the beginning of a smile played on her lips.

  Agnes gave her a sanitized version of the condition of the body “It’s in the morgue. I can show it to you.”

  A shudder. “But why would you think it’s me?”

  It was time to take her to Cy Horvath. On the way out, Agnes paused at Pippen’s table and said, “Doctor, this is Madeline Schutz.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “The assistant coroner,” Agnes explained as they left.

  Cy came along when they took Madeline Schutz to see Amy Gorman. The two women looked at each other, strangers.

  Amy listened to the explanation. “Then whose body was found in my garage?”

  So they were back where they had started, only now the investigation turned on a nameless victim.

  11

  There was tension in the pressroom, and Tuttle became an infrequent presence. Tetzel had grown reluctant to pursue the church closings story, since this meant relinquishing the ritual killing of Madeline Schutz to Rebecca, his archrival. Menteur, good chauvinist as he normally was, favored Rebecca if only as a means of putting down Tetzel. Pure jealousy, of course. Menteur was presiding over the decline and fall of the Tribune, and there didn’t seem to be much that he or the publisher or anyone else could do about it. Menteur had a Luddite’s distrust of the paper’s Web site, which was getting more hits a day than there were subscribers to the print edition. Only an idiot could ignore the implications of that, and Menteur qualified. The irony was that Tetzel half shared the attitude of his despised boss. Of course he used a computer. Typewriters were as rare as Edsels now. Tetzel had one stashed in his closet among the shoes and had recently taken it out to revive the sense of satisfaction he had felt banging away at it, but it was slow and clumsy, and manually returning the carriage at the end of each line seemed unbelievably primitive. He put it back in the closet. If he had had an Edsel, he would have hung on to it, too, as in investment.

  Rebecca sauntered into the pressroom, spun her chair around by bumping it with her hip, and collapsed. “Madeline Schutz isn’t Madeline Schutz.”

  Tetzel held up a staying hand, leaning toward the screen of his computer. His head tipped back, his eyes closed, and then, the creature of inspiration, his fingers danced on the keys for a moment and he fell back in his chair with a sigh of satisfaction. Slowly he turned to Rebecca. “Is there any pleasure keener than finishing a story?”

  “Still on the endangered churches story?”

  “You wouldn’t believe the ramifications. How’s the ritual murder going?”

  Rebecca replied with words that ladies seldom use. “I told you. The body isn’t the body of who they thought it was.”

  “It’s just as dead, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but whose is it?”

  “You got anything here or should we go across the street?”

  Rebecca got up and hipped the door shut. Returning to her desk, she withdrew a bottle of Johnny Walter Red. Tetzel produced two foam cups, shocking Rebecca. Scotch from a foam cup? She had glasses.

  “You’re getting fastidious.”

  “Even though I eat like a bird.”

  He let it go. Where would any of them be without Roget’s Thesaurus? Or maybe Rebecca’s hearing was going. The thought of Rebecca succumbing to the ravages of age, tottering toward the horizon, filled Tetzel with cheer, and he accepted her scotch in the spirit in which it was offered.

  “Did you ever hear of the Empyrean Chronicles?”

  “Sounds familiar,” Tetzel lied.

  “They’re written by the real Madeline Schutz. Six in print, the next one already written.”

  “Six novels?”

  Rebecca nodded while sipping, her eyes brightly on Tetzel. It had been his boast and now it was his shame that he was writing a novel. A novel! On his hard drive, filed under ULYSSES, were various bits and pieces of what he called his novel. Why had he told others about it? What might have been merely a consoling private dream had been turned into a public failure.

  “Science fiction. Fantasy.”

  Tetzel snorted. “I can’t read that sort of thing.”

  A sigh of disappointment from Rebecca. “I had hoped you would interview her, Tetzel. One novelist on another, rapport, special insights …”

  Tetzel watched her narrowly as she spoke. She was setting him up, he was sure of it. Then he wasn’t sure. Did he really have status as a novelist with Rebecca? “Tell me about her.”

  Listening, Tetzel felt his imagination emerging slowly from disuse. Rebecca and the police were baffled by the apparently random use of the identity of Madeline Schutz for the body hung in the garage. The woman whose house it was, Amy Gorman—Tetzel was taking notes in a casual way—had no connection with the writer in Skokie. Nor had Madeline, the science fiction factory, ever heard of Amy Gorman.
There was absolutely no direct link between them.

  “A dead end?”

  Rebecca nodded. “The police may fiddle around with it a bit longer, but they’re going nowhere.”

  “They’ve looked into religious sects?”

  Rebecca frowned, then laughed. “Do you know what I thought you asked?”

  “Menteur will keep you on it.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “So why should I interview a novelist who has nothing to do with the story you’re dropping?”

  “That’s your hook, Tetzel.”

  Well, they had both been drinking. Rebecca certainly wasn’t stingy with her scotch, but maybe she thought offering Tetzel more justified herself having another. He shrugged noncommittally and lifted his glass. “Here’s to crime.”

  “To hell with crime.”

  Tuttle breezed in but at the sight of Rebecca came to a stop. He adjusted his tweed hat. “I got your call,” he said to Tetzel.

  “What call?”

  “The one you promised to make. You said you’d keep me posted. Hazel is frantic.”

  “Who’s Hazel?” Rebecca asked.

  “Tuttle’s mistress.”

  There are many kinds of laughter, but Rebecca’s disdainful cackle was the only kind she had. She rose, bumped Tuttle aside, and went off down the hall to the ladies’ room.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Don’t get me started.”

  “Ah, the course of true love. Tetzel, a thought. Do a feature on Angelo Menotti, the artist who designed the stained glass windows at St. Hilary’s. It turns out the guy’s famous. He has a studio in Peoria; we could go together. He has issued a statement.”

  “I’m on a special assignment.”

  Tuttle took a chair. “Tell me about it.”

  Tetzel rose, steadied himself, and assumed a mysterious air. “I wish I could.”