Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  “I’ll make coffee.”

  “I want a drink,” Jessica said.

  A drink in the Bernardo house meant wine, and Raymond joined her in a glass. Eleanor made coffee, a huge pot, more than could possibly be wanted.

  “I’ll fix dinner,” she said.

  “I’m not hungry,” Margaret said. “I think I’ll have a glass of wine too.”

  Eleanor joined them. So much for the coffee. Eleanor had claimed Raymond’s seat beside the grieving widow, and Jessica followed Raymond into the kitchen, rolling her eyes but saying nothing.

  “Did you go downtown?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does it look?”

  “Bad. I heard on the radio that he will be arraigned.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “I went on to Father Bourke’s wake. Such as it was.”

  “Everyone is dying.”

  “Not everyone.” He took her in his arms. Some people are being killed. He didn’t say that. Jessica cried quietly, without theatrics, brokenhearted.

  “Do you think they would have found out what Andrew did with that man’s body if he hadn’t told them?”

  “Yes.”

  “So do I.”

  “What a stupid, stupid thing to do.”

  “What will this do to your novel?”

  She stepped back and looked at him. “You’re the central character.” “Ouch. How will it end?”

  “Of course it won’t be you. I can’t know enough about real people to write about them. They become characters.”

  “Thanks.”

  She punched his arm. “How long will you stay?”

  “Trying to get rid of me?”

  “I wish you’d never go back.”

  He looked at her. “Maybe I won’t.”

  “Really!” Her face lit up. “Oh, Raymond, stay. Mom needs you so much now.”

  And what of Phyllis? She needed him too, and he had given her every claim on himself. It was so easy to say that he would never go back, but it was not the sort of thing he could do over the phone. He would have to go back to Thousand Oaks and face Phyllis. The thought made him shiver.

  Later, upstairs, in what his mother called his room, he lay awake and thought of the faith that had returned at his father’s funeral Mass and his feelings in the chapel of Purgatory. What kind of faith was it that could go and come without warning? With Phyllis he would have to explain, and any explanation would be inadequate and open to obvious response. What would he have said if, in similar circumstances, Phyllis told him she wanted to go back to the convent? But there was no convent for her to go back to, as her Order had all but disintegrated. Well, so had the Order of St. Edmund. It occurred to him that if he did go back he would be boarding a sinking ship. But of course in his heart of hearts he thought he could save the Order.

  John had ticked off the names of those residing in Paradiso, all but one of whom he had known, none of them, he thought wryly, among the best. It came as news to him that so many had left, sought and received laicization, or just left. As he had.

  “You opened the door,” John said, not accusingly but as a matter of fact.

  My God, how responsible was he for the sad state of the Order? He thought of returning, perhaps attracting back others who had left, getting the Order back on its feet. Getting its feet more firmly set in the college.

  Raymond seethed when he realized what an insignificant factor the Order now was in the college it had founded. Horst Cassirer was not an anomaly, just an exaggerated instance of the secular mind that dominated the faculty. Why hadn’t Andrew kept him informed?

  That was nonsense. He had not been kept informed of the Order or the college because he had not wanted to be. What did he care for Egypt now that he had entered the promised land? How differently things would have gone had he remained. Father Bourke’s manner had brought home to him that once he had been regarded as the future of the Order, the man who would lead them through the choppy waters ahead. And he would have. He was sure he could have made the Order and college flourish.

  There would have been no maniacs like Cassirer on the faculty, or if there had been, short work would have been made of their insolence. The faculty contractually accepted the mission of the college when they were hired, and actions contrary to it were reasons for dismissal. Father Bourke had insisted on that, had run it by the AAUP, checked with the lawyers; it was tight as a drum, legally. No claims to academic freedom could trump it because it was an agreement freely entered into from the outset. Since no one was owed employment, it could not be regarded as an infringement before one was hired. That meant the means to get the college on course and hold it there were available. What was missing was the will.

  It had been Cassirer’s inspiration to threaten to use that contractual agreement against Andrew. But that would have opened up a can of worms for such faculty members as Cassirer.

  Raymond smiled. How the possibility of academic combat set the adrenalin flowing. But it was all a dream. No one could undo what had been done in the last decade and more. You could not fire half the faculty on the basis of principles that had been largely ignored for years. Cassirer’s ploy had been cynical, a mindless counterattack.

  Was Andrew really in danger? It was incredible that he should he accused of murdering Cassirer, but it was also incredible that he would find the body, put it into the backseat of his car, and trick his girlfriend into driving where he could dump the body and murder weapon. Now Gloria had turned on him, not only protesting her innocence of desecrating Cassirer’s body but stating that she had supported the late professor’s request for a promotion to tenure.

  “We talk of excellence, but we seem to fear it when we find it.”

  Excellence. Cassirer. An excellent professor is not an egomaniac who despises his students and colleagues and writes jargon for the half dozen others in the world who share his desire to make the intelligible unintelligible. Andrew was a thousand times the teacher Cassirer was; Raymond was sure of it. Gloria Monday’s notion of excellence would be the death of higher education.

  It was two in the morning when the telephone brought him awake, and he hunted for the phone, not wanting his mother to be wakened.

  “Raymond?”

  “Phyllis. I was asleep.”

  “For days? Why haven’t you called?”

  He propped up his pillow and got into a seated position in the dark room. The snowy world outside provided a kind of lunar light. He felt that he was in some crawl space between the real and unreal.

  “You wouldn’t want to hear it all.”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  “Two funerals, Phyllis. Not a barrel of laughs. My brother has been indicted for murder.”

  “Oh stop it!”

  “I’m serious. A colleague who hated him was killed, and Andrew has been accused of doing it.”

  “Raymond, you poor thing. You have to get away from all that. Come home now.”

  “It will take some days to get my mother’s things in order. The loneliness is beginning to sink in, the fact that she is all alone now …”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “Phyllis, cheer me up. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

  A prolonged sigh. “I have spent more time with Julia than I should have. Now she has a crush on me.”

  “Be careful.”

  “She is cute.”

  “So are you.”

  “That’s what she tells me.”

  How Californian it all sounded. Life lived on the frothy surface: movement, diversion, fun, sex. The ribbons of highway seemed to symbolize a state whose population was always in transit, hurtling along, paying the price in road rage.

  “I’m going to Catalina, Ray. I’d hoped you’d be here to come along.”

  He urged her to go. He did not want to think of her pining for him in Thousand Oaks.

  “Who’ll crew for you?”

  “We’ll go in Julia’s boat.”

  After he hung up and lay
fully awake he decided that all this talk about Julia was meant to do what it did, make him jealous. Jealous of that little neurotic?

  45

  Tuttle was a resilient man, but to have been seen by Horvath cowering in his office while Hazel raged without was worse than humbling. The silver lining was that, having changed the locks on the door, he seemed at last rid of the dragon who had occupied his outer office. He closed his account at the bank, delighted with the balance—Hazel had a business head on her shoulders, no doubt of that—and opened an account at another bank. He had feared that she would wipe him out with a single check, but if she tried that now she would get a surprise. Tuttle still had a card or two up his sleeve.

  But he was ashamed to face Horvath, assuming he had regaled the department with stories of Tuttle huddled behind the locked door of his office. On the other hand, what might Hazel not have carted off if Cy hadn’t surprised her filling that shopping bag?

  Sitting at Hazel’s desk, trying to figure out what she might have taken away, he fiddled with the phone, and old messages began to play. He let it go on. It was like having the radio on when you worked. Most of the calls were from Barbara the paralegal, reporting on her work. Hazel had gotten her money out of that girl, presuming she had been paid. He was startled to hear the distinctive snarl of Cassirer coming from the machine.

  “I’ve decided I don’t need a lawyer. Send me a bill.”

  Hazel burst into the message, answering the phone, and so she had been recorded too.

  “Professor Cassirer?”

  “You get that? I’m dropping Tuttle. I don’t need a lawyer. What can he do I can’t do anyway?”

  “Now listen. We have done a great deal of work for you, engaged outside help, run up expenses.”

  “Send me a bill.”

  “It’s not just the money! Your case represents a rich new field for Mr. Tuttle.”

  Tuttle was nodding and he liked that. How could Cassirer resist her honeyed tones? This was not the voice with which Hazel called him an idiot. But that voice came more and more into play as the conversation went on. Hazel was not going to let Cassirer go.

  “Hey, that’s it. It’s over, okay? Send me the bill. You want to sue me for dropping a lawyer, go ahead.”

  “You idiot!” Hazel finally said, but Cassirer had hung up.

  There was another side to Hazel, no doubt of that. Insubordinate, pushy, a pain in the neck, but loyal in her way. She had been his champion with Cassirer. Mr. Tuttle. Tuttle would have dropped the guy in a minute, glad to get rid of him. He wondered if Hazel had gotten around to sending him a bill. It would never be paid now. Too bad. Hazel would have really socked it to him.

  Eventually Tuttle’s courage returned, and he was seen again in the haunts of men: the pressroom at the courthouse, across the street sipping a Diet Coke with Agnes Lamb, his eye on the door lest Peanuts find him consorting with the enemy. But it was because his self-esteem had not fully returned that he passed on the information to Agnes.

  “You had a stakeout on Andrew Bernardo’s apartment?”

  “Right. Cassirer was my client. Andrew was his enemy. You never know what a stakeout will turn up.”

  “So what did it turn up? You weren’t there when it happened, were you?”

  “Not at the time, no. Peanuts and I had gone to dinner. Before we went Mabel Gorman showed up and went inside.”

  “So?”

  “She was wearing tennis shoes.”

  “Everybody wears tennis shoes.”

  “I don’t. You don’t. But didn’t the one who clobbered Cassirer leave tennis shoe prints in the snow?”

  “I’ve talked with Mabel Gorman. She tried to see Andrew Bernardo. She’s just a little bitty thing.”

  “You don’t have to be Sammy Sosa to swing a bat.”

  “She was on Andrew’s side, wasn’t she, in the big academic battle?”

  “Have you talked with Lily St. Clair?”

  “Tuttle, we have talked to them all, and we will talk with them some more.

  “Check their tennis shoes.”

  “I’m not that kind of girl.”

  “You think because she was a woman she and Gloria Monday saw eye to eye? No way. Lily was after anything with shorts.”

  “In tennis shoes?”

  “She even had it for Zalinksi.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A woman scorned!”

  Agnes finished her Coke. “Pretty farfetched, Tuttle. How’s Hazel?”

  Oh no. Even Agnes knew. Had he become a figure of fun to everyone? He had half a mind to call Hazel and tell her to get to hell back to work. He needed a buffer against his enemies.

  46

  Father Dowling noticed that Raymond Bernardo came with his mother to the noon Mass but did not come forward to receive communion, as he hadn’t at the funeral Mass for his father. The laicized priest is no longer an uncommon phenomenon, but still it was odd to have one in the pews of his own church. It used to be said that a nun could be recognized at a hundred yards no matter what she wore, a jab at the alleged poor taste in clothing on the part of those who doffed the habit. The habit did not make the nun, nor did the collar the priest. Whatever Raymond’s status, laicized or not, he was a priest forever, in the words of ordination that would have been pronounced over him. What did he make of his brother Andrew?

  “You think he killed that man?” Father Dowling had asked Phil Keegan.

  “He admits to getting rid of the body.”

  “To divert suspicion from himself.”

  “And then he wanted to tell us he had done it. You know that.”

  “Because he thought better of what he had done.”

  “Roger, it’s out of my hands now. I’m neither judge nor jury; I just tell them what we’ve found out, and the trial can decide who did what.”

  Father Dowling looked at his old friend. “You’re being disingenuous.”

  “I don’t even know what it means.”

  “I can’t believe you haven’t formed an opinion of your own.”

  “Of course I have.”

  “What is it?”

  “Andrew could have done it. Roger, we found his palm top at the scene of the crime.”

  “Outside his own front door.”

  “He says he didn’t carry the palm top with him often. He thought it was on the desk of his campus office.”

  “Was it?”

  “Roger, he could say it had been stolen, and I wouldn’t know if he were telling the truth.”

  That afternoon Father Dowling drove to the campus. The guard halted him, saw the collar, and waved him through.

  “I wonder where I would find faculty offices.”

  “All over the place. It depends on the department.”

  “English.”

  “You want Henley Hall, Father. Who you looking for?”

  “There’s something I want to check. Thanks.”

  “Anytime, Father.”

  There were lots of places not to park on campus, unless one were handicapped. We seem to have become a nation of the halt and lame, considering all the special places reserved for them. Of course handicapped has become an analogous term. After locating Henley Hall and circling it several times, Roger Dowling saw someone leaving a space and was able to claim it before anyone else did.

  Henley Hall was not one of the new buildings. Built of roughly hewn granite blocks it rose to its green tile roof, which extended out over the walls, giving the three-story building a squat look. A ramp had been added to the wide old-fashioned entry—for the handicapped. Smokers huddled under the dripping eaves. The temperature had risen, and yesterday’s snow had begun to melt. Great icicles had formed on the rain gutters of Henley. Inside he found a glass case with a list of who and what the building housed. Bernardo, Andrew, 203.

  The stairway was wide with a smooth granite ledge on which the hands of millions had moved on the upward climb. Room 203 was in a corner of the building, and the frosted glass in its door was illu
mined from within. He had considered searching the list in the entryway to see if anyone else was in 203. The lighted door might be his answer. He tapped on it.

  “Advance to be recognized,” a voice boomed from within.

  Father Dowling went in, stopping after three paces. The room was redolent of new and old body odors. Their source was obviously the smiling bearded man seated at one of the desks.

  “You share this room with Andrew Bernardo?”

  “Take a pew, Father. Yes, I do. Terrible what’s happened. You a friend of the family?”

  “I know them.”

  “You said the Mass for his father.”

  “So you were there.”

  “In the back.” He identified himself as Foster, then pointed to the nameplate, as if to show they matched. He seemed to want to add more to his statement as to why he had been in St. Hilary’s the morning of Fulvio Bernardo’s funeral. Father Dowling sat at Andrew’s desk. There was a photograph of Jessica, of his parents, and of a lovely young woman he recognized as the Gloria Monday who had been vocal in separating herself from what Andrew had done.

  “There were empty seats,” he said.

  “The usher said there weren’t.” Had this white lie been a corporal work of mercy for those already in the church? How had Andrew managed to share an office with this fellow?

  “What’s that?”

  “A kind of air conditioner. Andrew always had it on. Asthma or something.”

  Father Dowling turned it on. There was a hum but not a noisy one. Breathing became less penitential.

  “Do you think Andrew killed that man?”

  “Cassirer? I don’t think so. I will testify for him if he asks. Cassirer was slandering him, of course, but Andrew was not easily provoked. He is the only officemate I’ve had who lasted more than a semester. I must rub people the wrong way. But he never complained.”

  What would a jury make of such a testimonial?

  “It’s all circumstantial,” Foster added. “A good lawyer should be able to get the case thrown out.”

  “There is some evidence.”

  “What?”

  “His palm top was found at the scene of the crime.”