Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  She followed Dr. Pippen’s swaying ponytail into a very cold room that reminded her of the archives at Stanford. Drawers along the wall. Pippen leaned over, grabbed a handle, and pulled. The body of Horst Cassirer slid into view. With a little cry Lily blacked out.

  Lily came to in the room where she had identified herself, with Pippen and Lamb hovering over her.

  “Sorry,” Pippen said. “That can be quite a shock.”

  “His face!” Lily cried in horror.

  “You’re his friend,” Agnes said. “What about family?”

  “He had none.”

  “None?”

  “No. He was an only child of aged parents, and they took their own lives two years ago. Rather than face further ravages of age. They were members of the Hemlock Society.”

  “No relatives at all.”

  “That is why I am here. I will make arrangements.”

  “Was he religious?”

  The question seemed serious. She smiled at Agnes. “He was a man of reason.”

  “No funeral?”

  “A ceremony, a few friends. Of course he will be cremated.” Again she thought of Dido.

  “Did you live together?”

  A significant pause. “We kept our separate apartments.” Who could gainsay her claim to have been more to Horst than an academic ally? What heated dreams she had entertained of a Horst Cassirer suddenly aware of her, of her femininity if not her beauty. But he was sullen and self-centered. “Comfort me with apples,” she had murmured once at lunch, offering him fruit as Eve had offered the apple to Adam. He ignored her.

  “The body can’t be released immediately. Have you chosen a funeral director?”

  Lily looked nonplussed. “Could you suggest one?”

  “McDivitt’s?” Agnes said, looking at Pippen.

  “McDivitt’s.”

  “Should I go there?”

  “If you’re in charge.”

  Lily went out to her car and felt one of a long line of heroines who’d had the sad task of burying their fallen lovers. Following Dr. Pippen’s directions to McDivitt’s she began to think of a ceremony in the presence of Horst’s ashes. Catallus’s farewell to his brother? After she recited it, she would translate it for the benefit of the others. What others? Of course the room would be crowded; people attended such affairs out of a sense of duty if nothing else. Perhaps Zalinski would summarize Horst’s scholarly accomplishments. For a frightening moment all that seemed silly, articles in journals that ended up unread on library shelves, the interested praise of others, the whole choir doomed to eventual silence when death came.

  “Was he religious?” Angela Lamb had asked.

  Of course he wasn’t. But Lily wondered if she had completely liberated herself from the Presbyterian girlhood she had known. Perhaps they could sing “Amazing Grace.” No one thought of that hymn as religious anymore; it was like the national anthem.

  Mr. McDivitt, with his rosy complexion and cotton white hair, could not have been nicer. He understood perfectly.

  “We can have the ceremony right here. Come. I’ll show you the room I have in mind.”

  “Not a religious ceremony.”

  He laid a hand on her arm. “Everything will be exactly as you wish.”

  The room would do. There was a stand on which the urn of Horst’s ashes would sit, an arrangement of chairs, a podium. Lily could see herself standing here, a portrait of Stoic grief. Ave atque vale.

  “Cremation is a wise decision, professor. Considering the way he died.”

  She took that thought with her out to her car. She had fainted at the sight of poor Horst in that drawer at the coroner’s. How Andrew must have hated him to do such a thing. No, feared not hated. Horst had represented everything he was not. But would Andrew pay for what he had done? Lily had no experience of law or of the police, of course, but the fact was that the Bernardos were a quintessentially bourgeois family; the courts and the police would rally to Andrew’s side. Lily found it intolerable that Andrew should return to the academic round, no longer troubled by the accusing presence of Horst Cassirer, scot-free no matter what he had done.

  She drove to campus and went to Andrew’s office. Foster answered her knock, and she went in, stopping as his presence made itself known. The air freshener was not on.

  “Lily,” Foster cried, as if she had come to visit him.

  “Andrew isn’t here?”

  A clouded expression. “I think he’s under arrest. Sheer nonsense. He couldn’t do such a thing.”

  On Andrew’s desk lay his palm top, propped in a little tray that connected it to his computer. Lily sat at Andrew’s desk, a handkerchief held discreetly to her nose. Did Foster never bathe? There had been a masculine aura around Horst, the result of the pace he kept, always rushing around, but Lily had always found it an aphrodisiac. With Foster she had the gagging sensation passing a gymnasium could bring.

  “I am arranging for a commemorative ceremony.”

  “For Horst?”

  “Yes.”

  Foster seemed about to say something, then decided against it.

  “I will say a few things. Zalinski too perhaps.”

  “There should be some representative of the administration.”

  “Never! I would bar their way if they tried to force themselves in. How lovely your books look.”

  Foster turned to the shelf behind him, and Lily put the palm top in her purse. She rose.

  “I will let you know the details later.”

  In the hallway, she breathed deeply. How had Andrew managed to sit in that terrible place with Foster? It would probably make prison less unpalatable to him.

  In her car, she drove carefully to where poor Horst had been attacked. While she was there she would pay a call on Gloria Monday.

  43

  Phil Keegan had to sit in on the meeting between Pendle, the prosecutor, and Zwingli as they discussed the fate of Andrew Bernardo. Zwingli seemed to see himself more as an officer of the court than as Andrew’s defender. Eugene Box, the college counsel, was there, hoping to keep the connection of all this with St. Edmund’s to a minimum. Not that he put it that way. He was there to lend such support as he could to employees of the college.

  “Both of them?” Phil asked.

  “Both.”

  “Victim and accused?”

  Zwingli said, “Let’s not beg any questions.”

  Phil was never sure what that phrase meant, at least as it was often used. Did Zwingli doubt there was a victim and that they were here to talk about prosecuting Andrew Bernardo?

  “Go though this with us, will you, Phil?” Pendle held the summary Keegan had hoped would make his presence here unnecessary. Well, at least he had a script. He went through the items that pointed to Andrew Bernardo as the one who had killed Horst Cassirer.

  1. By his own admission, Andrew Bernardo was responsible for removing the body of Horst Cassirer from his front door and throwing it into the street a mile away.

  2. Inspection of Andrew’s car had confirmed that it was the vehicle in which Cassirer’s body had been transferred.

  3. Gloria Monday, his live-in girlfriend, denied any foreknowledge of what Andrew had tricked her into doing.

  4. The rivalry between Cassirer and Bernardo was attested to by any number of colleagues. Cassirer had declared a state of war. One of his weapons was to expose the living arrangements of Andrew and Gloria, which was in clear violation of the code that faculty agreed to live by when they signed a contract with St. Edmund’s.

  5. Andrew could not account for his whereabouts at the time someone had smacked Cassirer in the face with a baseball bat and then clobbered him on the back of the head. Gloria Monday refused to corroborate his claim that he had been with her in their apartment at the time.

  “No prints on the bat?”

  “No.”

  “Any physical evidence linking Andrew to the scene of the crime?”

  “Well, he lived in the building. And there are the
tennis shoes.”

  “Tennis shoes.”

  “The assailant wore tennis shoes. Size nine.”

  “You found such a pair of tennis shoes in Andrew Bernardo’s apartment?”

  “The problem is I could find identical pairs all over town. They’re not like fingerprints. Gloria Monday had a pair just like them.”

  “But the size.”

  “We’re guessing size nine, but the prints don’t enable us to say with exactness. Fairly big feet but not large.” Keegan crossed his legs, as if to display his scuffed size eleven shoes.

  “So it’s all circumstantial?” Zwingli said.

  Pendle said, “I wish he hadn’t confessed to moving the body. If you had found that in the course of your investigation without his help …”

  Phil went on to an item that was not on the list.

  “There’s something else. The officer assigned to the murder site found something that had been overlooked before. Half-buried in the snow but even so we should have seen it earlier.”

  “What is it?”

  “Andrew Bernardo’s palm top. That’s a little gizmo, a handheld computer …”

  But they all knew what a palm top was.

  “He could say he dropped it when he was picking up the body.”

  But Pendle seemed to be imagining a lie that Andrew might tell.

  “Of course it’s more likely to have come out of his pocket when …”

  “Exactly.”

  Pendle had decided to prosecute even without the palm top, but learning of it had him beaming. “That will hang him.”

  Keegan returned to his office. How did Pendle keep his faith in the courts? Phil Keegan had lost his long ago as criminals were set free on technicalities, lawyers pled the cases on courthouse steps to gaggles of reporters, sentences were never fully served. Except for Earl Hospers. Phil hoped that Cadbury could get a parole for Edna’s husband. The television repairman had not benefited from his crime, if that is what it had been. Impulsively hitting an old woman with a package of frozen meat did not put Earl among true criminals, not in Phil Keegan’s book. No, Roger Dowling was right. Hospers had paid his debt. The money? It had all been recovered.

  He picked up Cy and headed across the street for a Guinness. In the booth he told Cy of Pendle’s decision. “They check that palm top?”

  “Wally says they went over that site with a fine tooth comb. He can’t believe they missed the palm top.”

  “It’s no bigger than your hand. A lot smaller than yours. Anything on it?”

  “The usual stuff, addresses, phone numbers, Aristotle’s Poetics.”

  “A book?”

  “That little thing has an amazing capacity. And notes.”

  Only Keegan, from long experience, would have noticed the change in Cy’s voice.

  “Notes.”

  “A summary of the committee meeting and an account of a visit Cassirer paid him.”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “Pendle is going to love it.”

  Not even Guinness could lift the gloom Phil felt. Why did he think Andrew was innocent? From the sound of it, Cassirer had been asking for a smash in the mouth. But with a bat? Andrew Bernardo? This was heresy, of course. Anyone can do anything, if the circumstances are right. Or wrong. He and Roger Dowling were agreed on that. There is no criminal type.

  “You might as well say sinners are a type, Phil, rather than all of us,” he’d said.

  “I’ll leave that to you, Roger.”

  Besides, why did he think the Bernardos were so special? Fulvio had acted like an alley cat when he had the chance. Raymond had abandoned the priesthood and run off to California with a nun. Andrew was shacked up with a woman who sounded like she would testify against him at the trial.

  “How’s Jessica Bernardo taking this?” Phil asked Cy.

  “She’s the best of the lot, Phil. Pippen says she’s read her novels.”

  “No kidding.”

  Once he had kidded Cy about Pippen, and the reaction had assured that it would be the only time. Anyone can do anything. Cy looked ready to deck him with that hamlike fist of his.

  “Want another?”

  Cy shook his head. “Maybe I’ll check and see how she’s doing?”

  “Jessica?”

  Careful, careful.

  44

  When he left Andrew to go on to the wake at St. Edmund’s, Raymond felt that he was letting his brother down. He had come home to be with his dying father as the family pariah, and now Andrew had usurped the role, actually suspected of murdering a colleague—if such a civilized term could be applied to Horst Cassirer. The unreality of police headquarters, the improbability of the accusation, seemed a basis for optimism. Andrew would be dragged like a trophy through the media, but eventually they would find the one who had killed Cassirer and it would pass away like a bad dream. But hope came hard.

  Snow was falling as he drove to the campus, soft, fluffy, descending like a benediction on the city, transforming it into unreal houses, their edges softened by the snow, and creating expanses of virginal purity. On advice from John, he rolled down the window and, with wet flakes swirling into the car, told the guard he was going to the wake at Domus Sanctae Marthae.

  “The retirement home for priests,” he added, when the guard looked puzzled.

  “Purgatory?”

  “That’s the place.”

  A snarled smile, the barrier lifted, and he drove into the winter wonderland of the campus. It had been years since he had seen snow, not counting a trip to San Bernadino with Phyllis, but like so many other things it was not knowing winter that seemed strange to him now, all the years when the past had been deliberately forgotten. How easily he could imagine that this was a winter when he had driven along the campus roads as an insider, Father Raymond, the young man from whom so many things were expected. And he had betrayed them all.

  The chapel in Purgatory was designed for the elderly, the halt, and the lame. There were half a dozen armchairs with comfortable-looking prie-dieux before them and ample space on either side for wheelchairs. When Raymond entered, there was an old fellow dozing in one of the chairs, another in a wheelchair staring fixedly ahead as if he were trying to get his bearings. And visible in the open coffin the profile of Father Bourke pointing toward heaven.

  Raymond stood for a moment and, as he had not for his father, wept. His father had not been able to restrain the anger he felt— “Judas!”—but Father Bourke had been like the father in the parable, welcoming home the prodigal, finding excuses for his absence. Raymond lowered himself onto the kneeler and not thinking of what he was doing prayed for the repose of the soul of Father Bourke. The words came easily nor did his words fly up and his thoughts remain below. He lifted his mind and heart to God, who had been there all along, and asked pardon and peace for the old priest. And for himself. Without drama he thought, I have come home.

  A sound came from behind him, and he turned to see John settle into a chair. He nodded at Raymond, who got up and took a chair as well. He could relinquish it when others came. But five minutes went by, and there were no new arrivals. The man in the wheelchair was snoring peacefully, and the other old fellow still dozed. It might have been the Garden of Olives. After a time, Raymond slid back his sleeve and looked at his watch. He leaned toward John.

  “When do you begin?”

  John smiled. “This is it.”

  “Aren’t the others coming?”

  “Others? Haven’t you heard?”

  Is this what had become of the Order of St. Edmund? He stared at John. Of course Purgatory was for old and retired priests, but wasn’t the other building—the name Paradiso had never caught on—full? John took his arm and led him outside.

  “Raymond, there are only eight of us left. Not counting those here, of course.”

  “Eight!”

  “It could be worse. Not that I counted on being the junior man for so long.”

  “No vocations?”

  They wa
ndered into the refectory and filled paper cups with coffee.

  “They don’t stay.”

  No wonder. Good Lord.

  “Now you can see why Father Bourke was so happy you came back.”

  There seemed no arrière pensée in what John said. Did he think Raymond would seek reinstatement, move into Paradiso, get back to work as a priest? The thought filled him with odd excitement. Would it really be so easy? At the moment, no thought of Phyllis disturbed these oddly happy thoughts.

  “The funeral is at ten.”

  “In the campus church.”

  “Of course. The cardinal will be here.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  It sounded as if he wished to speak to the cardinal archbishop of Chicago, the wanderer returned, seeking reinstatement.

  The car was covered with snow, and when he got inside it was like an igloo. The wipers swept the snow off the windshield, and the breeze that came up sent snow swirling after him. As he drove, the other windows cleared.

  When he got home Jessica was there, and it was clear that his mother had heard about Andrew.

  “Raymond, what does it mean?”

  “Amos Cadbury got him a lawyer, thanks to Father Dowling.”

  “Father Dowling! Oh, everybody knows.”

  Had that been her thought when he ran off with Phyllis? As far as he knew, there had been no media coverage of his defection, because the Order had not raised a fuss about it.

  He sat beside her, but Jessica was her main consoler. He marveled at the little sister he knew and yet did not know. He had been impressed by her novels; even Phyllis was impressed and a little jealous. Why do women resent the success of other women? Inevitably, Eleanor came, just walking in with a tragic expression and standing before the couch and looking down at the three of them.

  “How horrible to accuse Andrew of such a thing!”

  Jessica said, “What he admits to doing is bad enough. I thought that if he told them …”

  “You advised him to tell the police?”

  “Father Dowling agreed.”

  “Father Dowling!”

  “It was the right thing to do,” Raymond said. “Imagine if they had discovered that by themselves.”