Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  “I’ll tell his wife,” Eleanor said. “She’s in the waiting room.”

  Margaret still dozed in her chair. Eleanor sat beside her. The muted television flickered with inanities. Fulvio was dead. She felt that she had killed him. There are sins of thought, after all. Eleanor had lost two husbands, and now Fulvio was dead. It seemed a shame to wake Margaret. Let her rest. Bad news can always wait.

  33

  Thunder, her agent, called every day now, sometimes with news, but mainly to find out how it was going.

  “I’m on schedule,” Jessica assured him.

  “Did you mean that about three months?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Do you want me to look at what you have done?”

  “I don’t think so. Not yet.”

  She had not written her previous books like this. Those she had begun at the beginning and written through to the end. Now she was putting down vignettes, not even chapters, disconnected, moments in the eventual narrative. Jessica had just started and what she did had not followed chronology or anything like a narrative line, but there were things she wanted to try out, sketch, to get down in some form to see what they looked like, beads on an unchained rosary. She had imagined the scene between Raymond and her father. How could she not adopt her father’s view of what his son the priest had done? The fact that her father had agreed to see Father Dowling, thereby quelling all her mother’s fears, had not been welcome to Jessica the novelist, however it pleased her as a daughter. She had her mother’s visceral identification with the faith. Sometimes, thinking of Eleanor and the vocation Jessica had once imagined, she felt like the girl in Persuasion whose love had been sidetracked by a busybody older woman.

  “It’s a phase every Catholic girl goes through,” Eleanor had said.

  “Did you?”

  Aunt Eleanor ignored the question. “What Order did you think of?”

  “The Carmelites.”

  “The Carmelites! They sound like candy. I have never liked the Little Flower.”

  Jessica had pulled the Carmelites out of a hat. But Eleanor would have reacted the same if she had said the Dominicans or Ursulines or whatever. The truth is that she counted on a negative reaction and did not find it wholly unwelcome. She had not discussed it with her mother because she could imagine a reaction quite the opposite of her aunt’s. Her surprising success as a writer had suggested to her that she was meant to do that all along. It was her vocation, and besides there was her work at the lab, a work that was prosaic and routine yet important, the perfect foil to sitting at her computer and entering the world of imaginary characters. But what she was now engaged in seemed more a documentary than a novel, and getting it right had a very different valence. Her brother’s defection no longer seemed the aberration her parents considered it but somehow emblematic of the times. They thought of him as unique. For Jessica, fidelity was unique, the kind of unquestioning adherence to a promise made that characterized her parents’ marriage, the foundation that sustained all their lives. Did any of them, her brothers or herself, have the character to provide that kind of support for a new generation? She looked at her computer screen and its imagined version of a real-life confrontation.

  “Judas,” the dying father said, his eyes fixed on his errant son.

  “Perhaps I should hang myself.”

  “You wouldn’t have the guts for that either.”

  “What I did took guts.”

  “Is that what you call lust?”

  “Dad, you’ve never even met her.”

  “I’ve met her a dozen times. I know the type.”

  “She’s not a type. She’s my wife.”

  Was the Phyllis Raymond mentioned his wife? He had never said so. Jessica knew about Andrew and Gloria, not because he had told her, but because such things always did become known. That at least was a secret to her parents. Andrew was much more discreet than Raymond. And what did her parents make of her?

  In her father’s case, that was not a compelling question. All he expected of her was that she should find a husband and have children. She knew that this was the object of her mother’s prayers. All prayers are answered, but sometimes, perhaps usually, the answer is no. Walter had suggested dinner and then immediately added that he knew she could not be in the mood for it now. He was so diffident he even refused for her. She was almost disappointed. The truth is that her father’s illness, by ruling out all else, had left her with more time on her hands than usual. Time for her promised novel. She scrolled back to the scene between the runaway priest and his younger sister.

  “I would like to meet her.”

  “I think you’d like her.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  But he seemed oddly reluctant to do so, as if he expected her to disapprove. Did he think she imagined a Jezebel, a femme fatale who had lured him from the altar?

  “She was a nun?”

  “It sounds like a cliché, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose you have a lot in common.”

  (What if I’d become a nun and had fallen in love with a priest and done what Raymond and Phyllis did?)

  “What do her parents think?”

  “She is technically an orphan.”

  “Technically?”

  “Her father is dead, and she is estranged from her mother.”

  “Yet she had a vocation?”

  “She thought so.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “It’s not easy to explain.”

  What view of him did her omniscient narrator have? It was easier to put her parents’ judgment of Raymond into the mouths of characters than adopt it as unequivocally her own.

  “I thought I had a vocation,” she said to Raymond. He was almost shocked. “Eleanor talked me out of it.”

  “If someone could talk you out of it, you didn’t have one.”

  “Did they try to talk you out of it?”

  “Quite the opposite.”

  She knew the pride her parents had taken in their son the priest.

  But as she continued to work in this fragmentary way on her novel, scenes based on her confrontation with Eleanor came forth.

  34

  Cy Horvath had been struck by the lab report on the amount of alcohol found in the bloodstream of Alfred Wygant, a level seldom reached by the most dedicated alcoholic. In the quantity the late insurance tycoon must have consumed it, alcohol could be a poison. His widow had been indignant when he questioned her about this.

  “All that happened years ago. This is harassment.”

  “Was your husband a secret drinker?”

  “If he was I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  “From what you did know, what would you say?”

  “Alfred was a notorious teetotaler. He made a point of announcing it. He made it sound like a religious obligation. I sometimes wonder if that wasn’t a cover.”

  “For his drinking?”

  “Well, apparently you saw the lab report. Presuming that it is accurate …”

  “Do you deny that?”

  “I am incapable of judging.”

  “It was Sorensen’s Lab that did the testing. Isn’t that where your niece works?”

  “Did you talk with her?”

  “As a matter of fact I did.”

  “Did she put you up to this?”

  “Up to what?”

  “Digging up dirt on Alfred.”

  “A lab report isn’t dirt, Mrs. Wygant.”

  “Well, what do you want from me?”

  “I have been trying to understand how your husband died. The police report was routine, and the newspaper stories just called it a tragic domestic accident.”

  “That is just what it was.”

  “He fell?”

  “Over the upper hall railing onto the floor below.” She said this angrily, but having done so emitted a little cry. “It was so horrible.”

  “You were there?”

  “The sound wakened me. This
happened in the dead of night.”

  “The police report said three in the morning.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “There was some conjecture that he was sleepwalking. Was he a sleepwalker?”

  “I might have said that. I was desperate for an explanation.”

  “What was the explanation?”

  “A tragic domestic accident.”

  “And he was drunk.”

  “That is what I was told. I found it unbelievable then, and I find it unbelievable now.”

  “The amount of alcohol in his blood was astronomically high.”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  “He was your second husband, I understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “And before that you were married to Giuseppe Bernardo.”

  “Joseph.”

  “Sad news about Fulvio Bernardo.”

  She burst into tears.

  “He seems to have died suddenly.”

  “Nonsense, Lieutenant. I was at the hospital when he died, in the room. He had a final heart attack. You could say this was the result of medical treatment. There was some kind of emergency, and doctors and nurses flew into the room and frightened him to death. Quite literally.”

  “You were there at the time?”

  “I drove Margaret Bernardo to the hospital. Fulvio was my brother-in-law. I’ve stayed close to the family.”

  So what did he have for his pains? The mysterious death of Alfred Wygant, but doubtless what it had been called, a tragic domestic accident. A man married to Eleanor could be excused for drinking into the wee hours—if he were a drinking man. Cy hadn’t liked Eleanor Wygant. And the sobbing seemed phony as could be. Well, they couldn’t charge the departed Alfred Wygant for being drunk in the privacy of his own home, and they were even less likely to hale Dr. Rocco into court for malpractice.

  That was the trouble with a slack period. You wasted time wasting time. But when he got back downtown, he was told to call Phil Keegan right away.

  “We’ve got a murder,” Phil said almost gleefully. He was in his car on he way to the scene.

  “Who?”

  “A professor at St. Edmund’s. Horst Cassirer.”

  “He’s the murderer?”

  Phil paused. “He’s the victim. Meet me there, Cy.”

  35

  The radio went on when Peanuts started the car and Tuttle, about to turn it off, stopped and listened to the account of the body that had been dumped in the middle of Pulaski Street from a passing car.

  “Let’s go.”

  Peanuts grunted. He was understandably reluctant to show up unasked at the scene of a crime. Even Peanuts understood that he was more an honorary cop than anything, tolerated because of the influence of his family, allowed to while away his day pretty much as he saw fit. Keegan told Peanuts that he was on a roving assignment. Tuttle reminded him of this.

  “So let’s rove.”

  Tuttle himself was still licking his wounds from his meeting that afternoon with Eugene Box, college counsel. His intention in going had been to put the fear of God into Box, convince him that the college had far more to gain by bending a few rules and granting Cassirer tenure than by being guided by his jealous colleagues in the English Department.

  “The decision is still pending,” Box said. “I wouldn’t presume to predict what it will be.”

  “The departmental committee has voted him down.”

  “How could you possibly know that? Such meetings are completely confidential.”

  “I know the result.”

  “Well, I don’t. Certainly not officially. There is nothing to discuss.” As a concession, Box added, “Yet.”

  “Let’s discuss it as a hypothetical then. The department committee turns him down. Why? The man is a genius, nationally recognized, an adornment to the faculty.” How easily the words came after his interviews with his client. Tuttle had encountered self-confidence before. He had known an inflated ego or two, but usually such people were deluding themselves. The annoying thing about Cassirer’s boasting was that it seemed well grounded.

  “I never discuss hypotheticals.”

  Tuttle, always slow to anger, felt his resentment alter to a desire to disturb the smugness of Eugene Box. He ticked off the points on the fingers of his left hand, spreading the fingers as he did so, giving the process the look of a series of obscene gestures.

  “Numero uno. Andrew Bernardo is not exactly a poster boy for this college. The mission statement in the bulletin is very explicit, and the faculty manual more so. Andrew Bernardo, for reasons of his own, had decided to torpedo my client’s chances.”

  “Individual professors do not act for the college.”

  “A committee meeting of the department is just the collective act of individual professors. Second,” Tuttle said, closing point one, “on the basis of the shift toward business and the like, the college can be charged with false advertising. You bill this place as a college of liberal arts. I am informed that you could shoot a cannon through the Arts & Letters Building and never hit a liberal art. This is the atmosphere in which my client has to achieve tenure.”

  “Tuttle, this is all bushwa. If they turn him down, he is turned down. That’s it. It’s not a high crime or misdemeanor. It would be simply ordinary academic procedure.”

  Box stood. He looked at the clock on his desk. He punched a button on his phone and his secretary swept in.

  “See you in court,” Box said.

  “If you’re lucky.”

  His exit would have been more satisfying if it had not been accompanied by derisive laughter, Box’s and that of his secretary. Probably something going on there too. Sometimes it depressed Tuttle to find that everywhere he looked the world seemed to be falling apart. Where were the men of integrity, men like his father? In a better world Tuttle himself would have been a better man, he was sure of it.

  A uniformed officer tried to stop Peanuts from entering the street. It had been blocked off temporarily by a glow-in-the-dark sawhorse and the cop. Peanuts nearly knocked the sawhorse over trying to drive and show his ID. at the same time. But the cop finally recognized Peanuts and danced out of the way, waving him through.

  Tuttle was out of the car immediately and mixing with the group at the curb. The body bag had just been zipped up. Tuttle took Horvath by the arm.

  “Who was he?”

  Horvath lost a debate with himself and answered. “A prof from St. Edmund’s.”

  Good Lord. Tuttle’s first thought was that Cassirer had cracked and done in Andrew Bernardo.

  “Got a name yet?”

  “Cashew. Cassel. Carrier.”

  “Cassirer!”

  “You know him?”

  “Know him. Horvath, he’s my client.”

  His client in a rubber bag was being carried out to the M.E. vehicle for transportation to the coroner. Tuttle ran into the street and stopped those carrying the gurney. Pippen recognized him.

  “What is it, Tuttle?”

  “I want to identify the body.”

  “We know who he is.”

  “I have to see.”

  She shrugged and pulled on the zipper of the body bag. Tuttle stepped back. The beard, the Cro-Magnon hairline, sufficed, but the nose and eyes, well, Tuttle was glad he had already eaten.

  “Know him?”

  “Horst Cassirer.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was he a client?” Pippen’s voice was gentle.

  Tuttle nodded and turned away. The opportunity of the half century seemed zipped into that body bag. Pippen patted his shoulder. He could have wept.

  Horvath gave him what they knew, and Tuttle listened. But what difference did any of it make now? His ticket to fame and fortune, his entry into academic law, was gone. Game canceled, no refunds. What did he have to show for his pains? The dollar he had taken from Cassirer to seal their bargain.

  He had Peanuts drop him off at the office. He didn’t ask Peanuts up; the wa
y he was yawning he might fall asleep while driving home. Tuttle slowly mounted the steps to his office, let himself in, settled behind his desk, and pulled his tweed hat over his face. He would get drunk, but he didn’t really like alcohol. And vice versa. He tried to doze and perhaps he did, but in that sleep what dreams did come as images of the smashed-in face of Cassirer rattled around under his tweed hat.

  Maybe the college had hired a hit man to rid themselves of this pesky professor.

  But his thoughts kept coming back to Andrew Bernardo. From the first time Tuttle had talked with Cassirer, Andrew had been identified as his sworn enemy. Talking with Andrew, it was hard to believe this. Cassirer had almost as many enemies as he had acquaintances. Zalinksi and Lily St. Clair were exceptions, but they were about as lovable as Cassirer himself. Lily probably had amorous designs on her bearded colleague. Half asleep, halfawake, Tuttle was chuckling over this when the ringing of the phone brought him to with a start and he nearly fell out of his chair. This was no time of the night to answer a business phone. If he had been alert he would have realized that.

  “Tuttle? I figured you were hiding there.”

  It was Hazel. He eased the receiver back onto the phone and sat tensely for half a minute until it began to ring again.

  “I know it’s you,” she cried.

  “I was just checking to see if it was a crank call.”

  “Have you heard about Cassirer?”

  “I was there.”

  “What do you mean you were there?”

  “Why in God’s name are you calling at this hour?”

  “Why in God’s name are you snoozing in your office when any fool can see what has to be done?”

  “What do you see?”

  “Tell the police what you know. No one at that college will give them a clue.”

  “Snitch?”

  If Hazel were docked for insulting her employer she would owe him a fortune. Tuttle hung up and then took the phone off the hook. Was marriage like this? He refused the thought, thinking of his sainted parents. Both his mother and father had assumed mythic status with the passage of years. But Tuttle could not regain even the half sleep that had been his before Hazel’s intrusion.