Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  “The funny thing is, no one has ever suggested I come back.”

  “Would you like me to?”

  Raymond looked at him, unsure what to say.

  “Not that I have any status in the matter.”

  “Can I come visit you at the rectory, Father? Before I leave.”

  Of course he could. Father Dowling thought of warning him about Marie Murkin. God only knew what reception a flown priest would get from her if he showed up on her doorstep. But Raymond had the charm of his father, and Father Dowling did not think Marie could long resist it.

  But it was Jessica who came to the rectory that afternoon. Marie brought a very distracted young lady to the study. Of course, Jessica had just lost her father. “I could make tea,” Marie said.

  But Jessica did not want tea, and Father Dowling never drank it. Nor did she want a cup of the lethally strong coffee that simmered in the study. Marie closed the door on them. Jessica’s expression became more tragic, as if she had been restraining herself in the presence of the housekeeper.

  “Oh, Father.”

  “What is it?”

  “Everything!”

  Well, not quite. He knew that it would be best just to let her say whatever it was in whatever way she chose. But it was surprising when she began talking of the death of the young English professor from St. Edmund.

  “He was threatening us all.”

  “Threatening?”

  “Because of Andrew. Andrew is on the committee that voted against giving Cassirer tenure, and he blamed Andrew. He declared war on the college and on our whole family. He seemed to think that I would convince Andrew to change his vote.”

  “On what basis?”

  “This is embarrassing.”

  “Jessica, I’m a priest.”

  “Andrew is living with a woman. A colleague. It’s not all that unusual anymore, but it is against the rules for the faculty of St. Edmund’s.”

  “They explicitly forbid cohabitation?”

  She laughed. Her spirit seemed to rise with the opportunity to talk. “Oh, it’s generic. They are expected to live in accordance with Christian morals as taught by the Church. Cassirer thought he could blackmail Andrew on that basis.”

  “And he came to you with this story. Had you known about Andrew?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t see him at your father’s funeral.”

  “He wasn’t there.” Her spirits visibly sank. “Have you read the details of the death of Cassirer?”

  The conjunction of Cassirer’s blackmail attempt and his death prepared Father Dowling for what followed. Jessica told the tale Andrew had told her in flat tones, as if she were prepared not to be believed. Did she believe it herself?

  “Oh, yes. He wouldn’t make up something like this. His imagination is not very lively.”

  “Jessica, he has to tell the police what happened.”

  “I know. He agrees, but he hasn’t been able to do it.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “At my apartment. What he expects is that Gloria Monday will call the police and tell them everything.”

  “It would be far better if he did.”

  “What I was hoping, Father, is that you could arrange a meeting with someone like Horvath. I met him, and he doesn’t look as if anything would surprise him.”

  “Call Andrew and have him come here.”

  “I better go get him. He came to my place on foot.”

  “Meanwhile, I’ll call Lieutenant Horvath. Have you met Phil Keegan? Either one would do. Maybe both.”

  Jessica slipped away, but before Father Dowling could make a call he heard the voice of Phil Keegan jollying Marie Murkin. She followed him into the study, carrying a glass of beer, which she put down next to his chair. Phil drank half the glass, smacked his lips, and generally looked satisfied.

  “Where we found Cassirer’s bicycle was definitely the scene of the crime. His glasses. Student theme papers blowing about. The bike wasn’t damaged all that much. It actually came to a stop leaning against a fence.”

  “The blow knocked him off?”

  “He was clotheslined, more or less.”

  Cy had found footprints in the snow he was pretty sure were the assailant’s. “Tennis shoes, size seven, one of a zillion pairs. Maybe no two snowflakes are alike, but every tennis shoe of this make is.”

  “Male or female.”

  “Male presumably.”

  “So whom do you suspect?”

  “Do you know who lives in the building in front of which the assault took place?”

  “Andrew Bernardo.”

  “How did you know that!”

  “Jessica told me.”

  “It turns out that Andrew and Cassirer were blood enemies. Cassirer claimed Andrew was ruining his career. He was threatening him, trying to get him to change his vote.”

  It would have been much better if Phil had learned all this from Andrew himself.

  “Cy is out there now with a court order to look at Andrew’s car.”

  Half an hour later, Jessica returned with an unshaven Andrew. Father Dowling had needed no excuse to keep Phil Keegan at the rectory, and the arrival of the Bernardos came as a bit of a surprise, given what Phil had just said.

  As soon as Andrew was introduced to Phil he said, “Captain, I have done something very stupid.”

  That seemed a mild description of what Andrew had done. Listening to him, watching him as he spoke, Father Dowling wondered if this were the whole story. Certainly Phil would find it difficult to believe that Andrew had simply removed a pesky body from his doorstep, dumping it in the street a mile away.

  “You knew the man who was killed?”

  “Horst Cassirer.” Andrew took a breath. “He hated me. He had vowed to destroy my reputation.”

  “Why?”

  Phil listened patiently to the tale of academic politics. But the question that had been forming in Father Dowling’s mind was put by Phil, dismissing the account of campus vendettas.

  “You couldn’t have dumped the body in the street all by yourself.”

  “I don’t want to involve anyone else.”

  “Whoever was with you is already involved.”

  Jessica said, “For heaven’s sake, tell him. She is no more guilty, or innocent, than you are.”

  “Gloria Monday,” Andrew said in a small voice.

  “And who is she?”

  Andrew glanced at Father Dowling and then at Jessica who said, “If you’re worried about shocking Father Dowling, forget it.”

  “We live together.”

  “And she helped you move the body.”

  “She didn’t know what we were doing. I had put it in the back, and she was driving. Why would she look in the backseat?”

  Gallantry is not dead. Of course there was more. “Has she called you?”

  “Gloria Monday?”

  “She was furious when she realized what I had involved her in. I don’t blame her.”

  “This all comes as news to me,” Phil said. “Which is good for you. If you’re telling the truth.”

  “Captain, I swear to God.”

  Let your speech be yes yes or no no. Do not swear by God …

  Marie, her curiosity too much for her, tapped on the door and looked in. “Would anyone want tea?”

  “Bring me a beer,” Phil said. “I never drink tea on duty.”

  38

  Eleanor went from the Bernardo house, where Margaret was in good hands with Raymond, to Jessica’s apartment. When she knocked on the door it began to move. It was unlocked. Eleanor pushed it open.

  “Yoo hoo. Jessica. It’s Aunt Eleanor.”

  The apartment had an empty feel. Eleanor closed the door behind her, and her eyes fell on the desk. In a moment, she was turning over the papers on it, opening and shutting its drawers, in a flurry of excitement. Where were those damnable letters? Consoling the grieving Margaret had made her more ashamed of her affair with Fulvio than she had ever been at
the time. What a terrible thing to have done to that good woman. This thought lent intensity to her effort to find the letters. Once she had them in her hands, she felt she would destroy them on the spot. Similarly motivated women have lifted automobiles off children, moved rocks three times their own weight. Eleanor felt that at the moment she could tear the metropolitan phone book in half.

  The letters were not on the desk, not in the desk, nor were they among the papers stacked beside the computer. Had Jessica herself destroyed them? She didn’t believe it. Her niece had taken too evident pleasure in annoying her when they discussed them. Eleanor dropped into Jessica’s reading chair, which moved back and forth. What a wonderful chair. If she had earlier thought of how Margaret would regard what she and Fulvio had done, it belatedly occurred to her how she must have seemed to her niece, talking about her candid love letters to the girl’s father.

  A newspaper lay on the floor beside the chair, and Eleanor glanced at it. The photograph of Horst Cassirer glowered up at her. She picked up the paper and read the story avidly. My God. This was the man she herself could cheerfully have throttled. Thrown into the street from a passing car!

  The remote control lay on the floor where the paper had been. Eleanor turned on the television, but it was nothing but daytime blather. She pushed the radio button and WBBM came on. It was thus, seasoned with commercials, a man’s and a woman’s voice mindlessly alternating, that Eleanor got the details of what had happened to Horst Cassirer. On the morning of the funeral she had had no interest in paper or news reports as she decided on a black dress that fell almost to her ankles. It had a matching black mantilla. As she had had occasion to think before, Eleanor realized that she made a most attractive widow. Would she steal the show from Margaret?

  Recalled now, the pusillanimous thought shamed her. But her mind was on that awful Cassirer. Where was Jessica? Where had Andrew been? Eleanor had not seen him at the church—he had not sat with his family—and he was not at the cemetery either. So much for the thought that he was unobtrusively present with his friend. Whatever inconsistency there was in Eleanor’s contempt for the woman who lived without benefit of wedlock with Andrew did not occur to her. But then she would have thought the same of herself if she were not the self who had acted so shamelessly with Fulvio.

  Moral hauteur gave way to thoughts of her nephew. Why would a man not attend his own father’s funeral? All too vividly Eleanor remembered her absurd encounter with Horst Cassirer, the bearded madman demanding that she put pressure on Andrew to vote for him in some silly committee at the college.

  “This is war,” he had cried. “I will destroy the whole Bernardo family if I have to.”

  Her fears about Jessica’s novel paled before this threat. What would she have done if she thought he might learn of herself and Fulvio? But it was Andrew who was vulnerable to Cassirer’s counterattack. Eleanor stopped rocking in Jessica’s wonderful chair. Andrew. Cassirer. Could her nephew be responsible for the death of his nemesis?

  A sound in the hall, and then Jessica came in. She stopped and stared at Eleanor. She glanced at her desk.

  “Did you find them?”

  “Jessica, the door was open. Where have you been?”

  “Oh Eleanor,” Jessica cried, and then she was in her aunt’s arms, weeping uncontrollably. Patting her niece’s back as she embraced her, Eleanor felt more like an aunt than she had in years.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “Andrew!”

  Listening to the incredible tale, Eleanor felt like weeping herself. Dead he might be, but Horst Cassirer was getting his revenge on the Bernardo family. Jessica, under control now, described the meeting with Captain Keegan at St. Hilary’s.

  “Where is Andrew now?”

  “They took him downtown to put it all in writing.”

  What Andrew had done was scarcely credible. Was his the action of a man guilty of more than desecrating a body? She did not have to express the question; it filled Jessica’s mind as well.

  “I believe him, Eleanor. I want to believe him. The wonder is that Gloria Monday hadn’t turned him in before he went to the police himself.”

  Jessica made coffee, and they sat drinking it. This was more somber than Fulvio’s wake. They might have been mourning the death of the Bernardo good name.

  “Who’s with my mother?”

  “Raymond.”

  “Oh, thank God he is here.”

  Jessica had been looking across the room, unseeing, but then her eyes took in her desk.

  “You didn’t find them?”

  The letters. How inconsequential they now seemed. Her affair with Fulvio was a long-ago peccadillo compared with the plight Andrew was in.

  “No.”

  Jessica got up and went to a bookshelf. The letters were there, behind some books. She brought them to Eleanor and handed them to her. Eleanor hesitated, then took them. How the long sought loses value when it is in one’s hand.

  “Did you read them?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Destroy them, Eleanor.”

  She nodded. The main thing was that they cease to exist so that there would never be the chance that Margaret might see them. The letters were stapled to the envelopes in which they had arrived. Had there been so many? She looked at Jessica.

  “What you must think of me.”

  39

  Attending to his mother, Raymond felt that he was beginning to make up for all the years when his absence had broken her heart. He felt like an orphan, fatherless anyway, and twice over; first his father and then Father Bourke. Tomorrow would be the funeral for his old mentor, in the campus church. Raymond felt almost as much obligation to be there as he had to attend his father’s funeral.

  “Did your father talk to you about practical matters?” his mother asked.

  “No.”

  “Eleanor looked over his papers here.”

  “Eleanor!”

  “She said you children asked her to.”

  Raymond said nothing, and his mother added, “Jessica looked things over too.”

  Were they worried about whether Margaret was well provided for? Raymond had never doubted this and did not now, but he found it somewhat distasteful that Jessica and Eleanor had been rummaging through his father’s effects. Looking into the home office, which in recent years had been his father’s only office, Bernardo’s Nurseries having been sold when neither son could carry it on, he felt no desire to sit at that desk and see what might be there. But if any of them was practical enough to appraise their mother’s situation, it was Jessica. And Eleanor too. She had had experience of losing a husband and probably had learned a thing or two.

  Occupying a front pew with his family at the funeral—all but Andrew—Raymond had followed the liturgy as if it were something wholly new to him. Roger Dowling said Mass with great concentration and devotion, and his homily had been just right. How completely pastoral the priest was. And he could not have been nicer to Raymond. Had former priests become so commonplace that they raised no questions in others? Dowling, like Father Bourke, was so immersed in his vocation that it was impossible to imagine him having doubts or hankering after the fleshpots of Egypt.

  He smiled. What a way to think of Thousand Oaks, California. It had been days since he had talked with Phyllis. What did she make of his silence? He did go into his father’s office then and called her.

  “We buried him today,” he said.

  “When will you return?”

  “Soon.” But it sounded like a question. “I’m with my mother.”

  “Oh good.”

  “She’s taking it quite well.”

  “And your brother and sister?”

  There was an edge to her voice, the question a statement that there were others to look after his mother, that he should be on his way home to her.

  The conversation was inconsequential, echoing with things unsaid. It was a relief to put down the phone. It rang almost immediately and he answered it.

  Jes
sica said, “Has Mom heard the news?”

  “What news?”

  “Didn’t you say that Cassirer came to see you?”

  “Well, I ran into him on campus. Quite a jerk.”

  “Raymond, he’s dead.”

  Her voice had dropped to a whisper as if she thought their mother might overhear.

  “Tell me about it.”

  But of course it was what Andrew had done that explained why she worried that their mother might turn on the television and find that her son was making a statement to the police about the strange death of Horst Cassirer.

  “I felt like pushing him in the face when he accosted me, I can tell you. What an abrasive man he was.”

  “I know, I know. He called on me too. And on Eleanor.”

  “Eleanor!”

  “Raymond, I’m coming over to spell you, and we can talk some more.”

  “I would like to get away for a while.”

  The wake for Father Bourke would be held in the little chapel in Purgatory. Raymond no longer felt ill at ease with the thought of revisiting his old haunts. No one other than himself seemed to see his situation as he himself did. Of course he waited until Jessica got there, by which time his mother had lain down for a nap, the strain of the past week taking its toll.

  “Did you tell her?”

  He shook his head. “I wish she didn’t have to be told. What will they do with Andrew?”

  “Father Dowling has asked Amos Cadbury if someone in his firm could represent Andrew.”

  “And?”

  “I got the impression he would do anything for Father Dowling.”

  “That’s a break.”

  “Just so it isn’t the kind of clown Cassirer hired. A man named Tuttle.”

  Raymond had not even considered telling his mother what Jessica had called to tell him. Did she even know that Andrew shared an apartment with a woman? He was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the dissolution of the house of Bernardo. His father had apparently made a good end, but seeing Eleanor had reminded Raymond of the flaws in his father’s character. He and Jessica were sitting in the very room, that was the couch, where he had surprised his father and Eleanor in all but flagrante delicto. How coolly his father had taken it, doubtless practiced in deception.