Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  “You should go downtown to be with Andrew,” Jessica said.

  He wanted to protest. In hours the wake for Father Bourke would be held, and he had been looking forward to walking the campus and inviting thoughts of self-recrimination. How ridiculous his life seemed, broken in two with the first part one of rectitude and fidelity, the second one of self-indulgence. Why had be proved so vulnerable to Phyllis’s blandishments?

  It was easy in her absence to imagine that she had been the aggressor. It was she who had begun talk of leaving, taking a perverse glee in the thought that their westward trek to freedom would be financed by the Order of St. Edmund. She had resented her own vocation, felt that she had been entrapped by a romantic dream, a dream that had turned into a hallucination if not a nightmare.

  “It isn’t at all what we expected, is it?”

  He had agreed, comparing the fuzzy promise of their flight with the ordered and disciplined life that was his. At his father’s funeral Mass, at the consecration of bread and wine, he had difficulty recalling his disbelief. He bowed his head and closed his eyes and might have been the idealistic, credulous young man he had been in the novitiate. The thought of not returning to California formed in his mind and had all the allure the thought of flight had once held for him. He wanted freedom from the freedom he enjoyed with Phyllis, which now seemed a kind of enslavement. But he told Jessica he would go downtown to see what was happening with Andrew.

  “I’m his brother,” he told the sergeant at the desk.

  “I’ll call Captain Keegan.”

  The officer nodded as he listened on the phone, then said that Keegan would come get him.

  Keegan was a distracted, busy man, lost in his function, or so it seemed to Raymond, until the captain expressed sorrow at the death of Fulvio.

  “Your family is really taking it in the chops,” he said. “Come on.”

  Andrew was in a consulting room with Ambrose Zwingli, a crew-cut young lawyer from Cadbury’s firm. The name Cadbury had rung a bell, of course. So many bells were rung lately. He seemed to be recovering his past.

  Andrew jumped to his feet when Raymond came in and, as he had at the airport some days before, embraced his brother.

  “What a revolting development this is.” Andrew seemed to be imitating someone.

  Zwingli waited to be introduced, and Raymond could see the flicker of recognition at his name. Not that Zwingli knew him, but he clearly knew of him. The renegade priest.

  “I stopped here on my way to Father Bourke’s funeral.”

  “I am afraid your brother will be arraigned,” Zwingli said.

  “On what charge?”

  “Tampering with the scene of a murder,” he said. “For now.”

  Andrew looked abject. “I am finding it hard to convince anyone of my innocence.”

  Zwingli summarized the situation. Andrew had admitted to moving the body of Horst Cassirer and dumping it in the street. That of course aroused the curiosity of the police. Andrew’s car had been impounded, and it was clear it had been used to transport the body of Cassirer.

  “If Andrew wasn’t innocent he would not have told the police what he did.”

  “Of course they think that was a preemptive strike.”

  “Would they have impounded the car if he hadn’t gone to them?”

  “Certainly not as soon as they did.”

  “If ever.”

  “There was a pretty public feud going on between Andrew and the deceased.”

  “Who was the most obnoxious man I’ve ever met.”

  “You met him?”

  “He pursued me, harassed me. I all but knocked him down to get away from him. He was spouting libelous accusations, threatening to ruin our family.”

  “Yes.”

  Raymond felt that he had inadvertently added to the case against Andrew.

  “Surely they won’t hold him.”

  “At least tonight. I will try to arrange bail in the morning.”

  40

  In his office Horvath was interviewing Gloria Monday, who was explaining her role in the movement of Cassirer’s body.

  “I had no idea Andrew had put him in the car. He asked me to drive him to a pharmacy to get medicine for his migraine. Only when we were underway did he clamber into the backseat. I had no idea why he would do that. He told me to just keep driving.”

  Her face would have been pretty but for the expression that tightened her mouth and narrowed her eyes. The memory of a male barking orders at her was not pleasant.

  “I slowed the car, and that is when he opened the back door and pushed poor Cassirer into the street. And then he threw out the bat he had picked up near the body. I was furious.”

  Horvath nodded. Who could blame her? His problem was that her story was as self-serving as Andrew’s.

  “Why would he want to move the body?”

  “Why? Apparently it was lying on our doorstep. Horst had vowed to destroy Andrew. I suppose he thought …”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to have to put that question to him.”

  “I wondered if you had.”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  “He thought he would be accused of attacking Cassirer?”

  Reports were coming in from various interviews. Agnes Lamb had spoken with the chair of Andrew’s department and with several colleagues, Lily St. Clair and Zalinski. It was pretty clear that they considered Andrew the guilty party, at least so far as Cassirer’s fate at St. Edmund’s was concerned. The reports provided a basis for further questions to Gloria Monday.

  “Andrew voted to turn down Cassirer’s application for promotion?”

  “It was a committee vote.”

  “Why did Cassirer concentrate his wrath on Andrew?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Cy settled more comfortably into his chair. “I’d like to hear it.”

  “I know this will sound odd to an outsider, but academic quarrels can be very bitter. St. Edmund’s is on the threshold of becoming worthy of its aspirations. There is a division between the new blood that has been added to the faculty and those who represent the past.”

  “Like Andrew.”

  “Horst Cassirer thought so. Andrew does not have a Ph.D.” She might have been reporting the lack of a limb. “That is a fundamental credential for a faculty member.”

  “So how did he get hired?”

  The mouth tightened. “You are getting to the heart of Horst Cassirer’s complaint. He felt that he was being judged by someone without the credentials to make that judgment.”

  “A Ph.D.”

  “Horst, whatever else might he said of him, was a productive scholar whose reputation was being established across the country. I myself told Andrew that he was wrong to oppose tenure for Cassirer.”

  This was the woman with whom Andrew lived, but she sounded like a witness for the prosecution. Cy turned her over to a stenographer and went down the hall to Keegan’s office.

  “Raymond Bernardo is with his brother and Zwingli.”

  Keegan called in Agnes Lamb, and they went over what they had.

  Cassirer had been on his ten-speed hurtling along the walk in front of the building where Andrew and Gloria had their apartment when someone hit him full in the face with a bat, the force of the swing added to the speed of the bike. Given the fact that the bicycle had wobbled to a stop and propped itself against a fence, the blow must have lifted him right off the bike.

  “Wobbled?” Phil said.

  “Tire tracks,” Agnes replied.

  His smashed glasses had ben found in the snow by the curb. Andrew’s admission that he had carted away the body prompted the impoundment of his car. It corroborated his story. But what a story.

  “He expected that anyone would think that he had killed Cassirer.”

  Agnes had tried to form an image of the aspiring tenured professor, but it depended on her sources. Lily St. Clair and Zalinski were agreed that Cassirer had been too good fo
r St. Edmund’s, a young whale in a fishbowl.

  “So why did he want to stay so badly?”

  “It was the only job he had, whatever his promise.”

  The chair of the department and Michael Pistoia gave a very different story. “They don’t think he deserved tenure. He was a lousy teacher and a lousy colleague. That is two strikes. The third is a home run. That’s his scholarship. They admit that. But that didn’t make up for his deficiencies in the other two categories.”

  “They have any guesses who hit Cassirer with a baseball bat?”

  “I got the impression they would have been happy to do it themselves.”

  Cassirer had been told of the committee vote, which was supposed to be secret, and decided not to wait to get the official news. He went on the offensive. He hired a lawyer.

  “Who?”

  “Tuttle.”

  It might have been a punch line. Agnes smiled when she said the name and Keegan guffawed. There was an imperceptible alteration in Cy’s expression that was the Hungarian’s equivalent of Keegan’s derisive laughter.

  “I thought the man was smart.”

  “Tuttle?”

  More laughter from Keegan. Cy blinked his eyes. They settled down and Agnes went on.

  “Pistoia said that Cassirer had been visiting members of the Bernardo family. We’re going to have to talk with them.”

  “Visiting them?”

  “Threatening them.”

  Keegan made a face. “Maybe one of them did it.”

  “Andrew says it wasn’t him.”

  Horvath said, “They will have the same alibi.”

  “What?”

  “Fulvio Bernardo’s wake.”

  “Was Andrew there?”

  Phil Keegan shook his head. “He didn’t show up for his father’s funeral either.”

  Cy said, “We should talk to Tuttle.”

  “Not me,” Agnes said.

  “I’ll do it,” said Cy.

  41

  From the street Cy saw the light on in Tuttle’s office, but when he climbed the four flights he found Hazel Barnes. She seemed to be packing up.

  “He is an idiot,” she said when he asked where Tuttle was. The inner office door was closed.

  “He in there?”

  “Probably asleep at his desk.”

  “Was he representing Horst Cassirer?”

  “Ask him. I’m out of here.”

  “I want to ask you a few questions.”

  “Me?”

  Hazel looked like the woman who was Groucho’s foil in the old Marx Brothers movies. She was built like a refrigerator, her arms out from her body, her hair done in a style Cy hadn’t seen for years. A permanent. She sat and looked slack jawed at Cy.

  “Tell me about Horst Cassirer.”

  A hooded half-length coat, waterproof, hung from a hook like a western villain; a pair of tennis shoes stood beneath them. Hazel had on spike heels.

  “Whatever I know Tuttle knows.”

  “Are you a runner?”

  “What?”

  “The tennis shoes.”

  She looked at them. “I wear them to and from work. I walk.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “This is outrageous!”

  “Would you like to have your lawyer with you?”

  For answer, she leapt up and pounded on the door of the inner office. She rattled the knob. It seemed locked. She went to her desk and picked up the phone and punched a button.

  “The police are here and want to talk to you.” She looked angrily at Cy. “What’s your name?”

  “Horvath.”

  She listened, then held the phone toward Cy. He heard Tuttle’s voice as from the bottom of a well.

  “He is hiding from me,” she said.

  She took off her heels and put them in a plastic bag and began to tug the tennis shoes over her silk stockings. When she stood, she seemed to have shrunk. She got into the coat and pulled the hood over her permanent, put the plastic bag with her shoes in it under her arm, and picked up the shopping bag she had been filling.

  “I am leaving.” She hesitated as if he might not let her go.

  “Better leave that.” He nodded at the shopping bag. She let it drop. It tipped to its side, and its contents slid from it as from a cornucopia. It was tempting to detain her, but he wanted to talk to Tuttle. He stepped aside, and she swept from the office, her tennis shoes making rubbery sounds as she headed for the stairs. Keegan tapped on Tuttle’s door.

  “It’s Cy Horvath, Tuttle.”

  Silence. And then a whisper. “Is she gone?”

  “Yes.”

  A key turned, and the door opened on a darkened office; Tuttle in silhouette as he surveyed the outer office. Then he flicked the switch, lighting the room.

  What a contrast with the outer office. Tuttle circled the desk and sat in the chair that tipped back when he did so. He grabbed the desk to prevent himself from rolling to the wall.

  “That’s quite a secretary, Tuttle.”

  “She’s temporary.”

  “Everyone is. Tell me about Horst Cassirer.”

  Tuttle leaned forward and scrubbed his face with his hands, pushing back his tweed hat in the process. “I saw the body,” he told his palms.

  “I know. You left pretty quick.”

  “Peanuts wanted to go.”

  “Is that how you heard of it, police radio?”

  Tuttle took away his hands and looked at Cy. He nodded. Cy cleared debris from a chair and sat.

  “Doesn’t the Amazon clean up in here?”

  “She made this mess. She was tearing the place apart. She is demented. I threw her out and locked the door.” He paused and remembered with fleeting pleasure this moment of courage.

  “She looking for something?”

  “She thinks I keep secrets from her. She’s right.”

  “About clients?”

  A tragic look disfigured Tuttle’s face. “Beware of good luck, Horvath. I thought Cassirer was my ticket to …”

  The preposition pointed to some vague possible world in which Tuttle would flourish and prosper.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “A real son of a bitch. He hated everything but himself.”

  “He wanted to sue St. Edmund’s?”

  “He wanted to destroy it. And the Bernardos. He was out to get Andrew Bernardo for blackballing him.”

  “What were you supposed to do?”

  “Good question. He rode around on his bicycle harassing the whole family. Even Eleanor Wygant.” Tuttle paused. “Why aren’t there more women like her? They broke the mold, that’s why.”

  He made Eleanor sound like penicillin.

  “How mad do you think he made them, the Bernardos?”

  Tuttle caught the implication. “Cy, anyone who knew that guy would want to take a baseball bat to him. I could have done it myself.”

  “To a client?”

  “How would you like to sit in the office of Eugene Box the college counsel and make a case for someone like Cassirer? It can’t be done. I would have switched sides in a minute to see him get his.”

  “He got it. Were you and Peanuts together before you heard the radio report?”

  “We had dinner at the Great Wall.”

  “Tuttle, who do you think did this?”

  “It could have been anyone who knew him.” He thought better of it. “No there were a couple of professors who took his side.”

  “Who?”

  “A man named Zalinski. Lily St. Clair. They were in the same department.”

  “English.”

  “They were on the committee with Andrew Bernardo, but they voted for Cassirer’s promotion.”

  “Two to one?”

  “There were two others who voted with Andrew. Pistoia and the chair, Anne Gogarty.”

  “Did Cassirer threaten them?”

  “His argument was that he was so goddamn better than the rest of them that he threatened them all. A real sweeth
eart.”

  “So they got rid of him.”

  “Well, they voted not to promote him.”

  So why hit him with a baseball bat if he wouldn’t be around long anyway? Cy looked at the mess of Tuttle’s office.

  “What was she looking for?”

  A sly look came over Tuttle. He took off his tweed hat and rummaged in it, and came out with a check. He showed it to Cy. Made out to Tuttle for five hundred dollars and signed Horst Cassirer.

  “Better cash that before they close his account.”

  Tuttle sprang to his feet, wild-eyed. “I never thought of that.”

  He came around the desk, grabbed his coat from a stand, and looked at Cy.

  “Thanks for telling me, Cy. I gotta run.”

  Out the door, through the outer office, then pounding down the stairs. Cy took one more look at the shambles and turned off the light. In the outer office he sat in Hazel’s chair and looked through the shopping bag. Reports from a paralegal named Barbara and a file with Horst Cassirer on the tab. Cy took the shopping bag with him when he left.

  42

  Lily St. Clair had assumed the mien of a widow, and Zalinski conceded her the role of chief mourner for Horst Cassirer. Not that she felt Zalinski had ever liked Horst. He had simply been an ally in Horst’s campaign to separate himself from the deadwood of the St. Edmund faculty. When Lily went to the morgue to see about the body, there was a young black officer there with the assistant coroner, both women and, she hoped, sisters in the feminist sense. The officer was Agnes Lamb, black, a double basis for solidarity, and the assistant coroner Dr. Pippen.

  “I was a colleague of Horst Cassirer.” She dropped her eyes. “And his friend.”

  “Do you want to see him?”

  Lily shuddered and looked from one woman to the other.

  “Can I?”

  “If you want.”

  After a moment she nodded. The thoughts that filled her mind were not those of the feminist she claimed to be. When Aeneas sailed away, the abandoned Dido had climbed onto a pyre and gone up as burnt offering to her fleeing lover. Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae. Horst hated the classics, but he knew them thoroughly, cursing the retrograde education that had immersed him in the dead languages. For all that, they could discuss them, something he could not of course have done with Zalinski. English was Zalinski’s notion of a dead language.