Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  “So it seemed.” Tuttle smiled mysteriously at Tetzel. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Horvath gets the case reopened.”

  “On what basis?”

  “So far it’s all confidential,” Tuttle said dreamily.

  “Bullshit.”

  “As you wish.”

  Half an hour later Tetzel left, feeling strangely excited. Of course, he knew all about Tuttle. Normally he wouldn’t credit anything the little lawyer said, but the suggestion that Horvath was reviewing the case with an eye to reopening it was preposterous enough to be plausible. In any event, Horvath’s interest in Nathaniel Green after all these years, after his trial, imprisonment, and now release, promised material for the feature he was writing. Cy Horvath wasn’t much of a talker, but whatever he said could be believed.

  The return of Nathaniel Green had caused a stir—or better, a hush—at the senior center at St. Hilary’s, and it had given the pastor reason to ponder as well. Father Dowling had talked with Nathaniel a few times since their luncheon on Ash Wednesday, but they had amounted to scarcely more than exchanges of greetings. Father Dowling wanted Green to come to him; only then could he have the conversation he now realized he longed to have. But it had to be initiated by Green.

  Father Dowling had talked with Cy Horvath again and been told more of the investigation into the death of Florence Green. Cy had brought along the notes he had taken at the time, and he had been checking things out.

  Cy said, “If there ever was anything to find out, the trail has long since gone cold.”

  “What does Phil think of your going over all this again, Cy?”

  “Father, at the time, neither of us could figure out what Green gained from what he claimed to have done.”

  That was always the basic question: Cui bono? Who benefits from the deed under investigation? All Green had gotten for his pains was a stretch in Joliet—and he very nearly didn’t get that.

  Jacuzzi the prosecutor had insisted that the police look into the matter when Crawford the coroner made out his report and classified the death as natural.

  “Natural!” Jacuzzi was shocked. “By his own admission the husband killed her, and that idiot calls it natural. Look at that gobbledegook.”

  Jacuzzi was excited, his normal condition. His narrow bald head seemed to have pushed through the bushy hair that still adorned its sides and covered the prosecutor’s outstanding ears.

  “All he did was copy things from her medical chart,” Jacuzzi had said with disgust.

  The cause of death, according to Crawford, was the cancer and its attendant effects. Tuttle had been as alarmed as the prosecutor by this judgment since it threatened to deprive him of his client. It was Tetzel, prompted by Tuttle, who had saved the day, running a story on the man who had killed his wife in St. Mary’s Hospital. The death certificate had not been brought up during the trial.

  Were there ever any uncomplicated deeds? What seemed as simple as could be, a husband removing his wife from life support, became ever more complex. Father Dowling paid another visit on Willy Nilly.

  When he had parked at Holy Angels and was walking to Father Nolan’s cottage, Father Dowling wondered if he should disturb the old man’s retirement like this. Father Nolan dismissed the objection when he knew why Father Dowling had come to him a second time.

  “How would you characterize what he did, Father? Morally?”

  “Ah.” Father Nolan nodded for a minute, as if in consultation with his once professional self as moral theologian. “One could say: He killed his wife. True, but that’s not yet a moral description. You can kill another by accident, you can kill another in combat, you can kill another as public executioner, you can kill another in self-defense.”

  “If the hospital had taken her off the life support apparatus, wouldn’t they have killed her?” Father Dowling asked.

  “Of course. In the sense that they had stopped preventing her from dying.”

  “That is all Nathaniel Green did.”

  Willy Nilly hummed and nodded some more.

  Father Dowling said, “If the hospital would have been justified in doing that, wouldn’t it be because the husband asked them to?”

  “I suppose all this was argued at the trial,” Willy Nilly said.

  “His lawyer was more interested in portraying the man as a mercy killer.”

  They went on through the labyrinthine ways of moral appraisal. The gap between the moral absolute that one may never kill an innocent person and the singular deed done that day long ago in a room in St. Mary’s Hospital seemed to widen as they talked.

  “What did the man intend to do?” Willy Nilly finally asked. “In the end, that is the heart of the matter, morally.”

  The answer to that at least was simple. Nathaniel Green had intended to bring about his wife’s death.

  “That brings it under the moral absolute, Father Dowling.”

  “So he is a murderer?” Father Dowling asked.

  “Are we talking legal description or moral?”

  They were talking about a man’s soul.

  Finally Nathaniel Green came to bare that soul to Father Dowling.

  “Can a lapsed Catholic go to confession, Father?”

  “Do you want to?”

  Nathaniel Green looked at Father Dowling with his haunted eyes. “Do you know what you miss most about going to confession? Being able to reveal yourself to another and know it will go no further.”

  “You’re revealing yourself to God when you confess,” Father Dowling said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Father Dowling nodded. “I know what you mean. How long has it been since your last confession?”

  “Are we beginning?”

  For answer, Father Dowling opened the drawer of his desk and took out a stole. Nathaniel Green watched as he put it on. Father Dowling waited. Some minutes are longer than others, but then time is a measure, and what was being measured here was a man’s deciding to do what he had avoided doing since the death of his wife. That established how long it had been since his last confession.

  “I never stopped believing in God, Father. I tried to, but I couldn’t.” A crooked smile. “I even prayed that I could stop believing.”

  “You and your wife were practicing Catholics, Nathaniel?”

  “Oh, yes. Mass every Sunday and holy day, confession every month or two. Florence said the rosary.”

  “Did you?”

  “I took it up again in Joliet.”

  “You’re a strange lapsed Catholic, Nathaniel. Why didn’t you take up confession again? There’s a chaplain at Joliet.”

  “I attended his Mass, Father. Lots of us did, just to break the routine.”

  “Was that your only motive?”

  “Not really.”

  “You’ll have to state the serious sins you committed.”

  “Mortal sins?” Green said it as if bringing up an old memory.

  “We’ll start with those.”

  “Father, I think it would be harder to figure out what I’ve done right.”

  “Why don’t I just run through them?”

  So he went through the capital sins, feeling that he was starting at the top of Mount Purgatory and descending to the level where Dante’s souls were doing penance for murder. For all his self-reproach, Nathaniel’s life was not that of a hardened sinner, or of much of a sinner at all. Then Father Dowling put the question that explained why they were here.

  “Murder?” he asked.

  A long silence. “You mean Florence?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t murder her, Father.”

  Father Dowling had the sinking feeling that he was being drawn into the maze he had gone through with Willy Nilly.

  “But you killed her?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand,” Father Dowling said.

  There were tears in Nathaniel’s eyes as he went on. “It’s why I didn’t want to go to confession, didn’t want to be in the Ch
urch. That would have separated me from her more than her death had.”

  “Did you remove her life support system, Nathaniel?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No.”

  “But then who did?”

  Nathaniel looked at the priest from the melancholy depths he had occupied all these years. He spoke in a whisper. “She did.”

  Part Two

  The human mind is a marvel and a mystery.

  “Where do thoughts come from?” Tuttle asked Peanuts Pianone as they sat in a booth in the Jury Room, the pub across from the courthouse. Peanuts gave him a feral look over his mug of beer and said nothing.

  Tuttle did not really expect his old buddy to say anything. Whenever Tuttle felt depressed by his status in the local bar, he was heartened by the realization that Peanuts was even less esteemed in the police department. After a dozen years there, Peanuts was still a patrolman. He was unlikely ever to rise higher. So there was affinity between them, but also a comforting hint of Tuttle’s somewhat superior status.

  Needless to say, Peanuts did not meditate on his station in life. His family—the term had a Sicilian ambiguity in this case—having found Peanuts useless in any of their enterprises, had, thanks to the Pianone on the city council, palmed Peanuts off on the Fox River Police Department. There he had vegetated ever since, shuffling toward retirement. If the Pianones had thought Peanuts might be a source of inside information on any investigation into their activities, they would have been disappointed. Peanuts had a very limited interest in his surroundings. One thing only had stirred him into resentment at his status, and that was the coming of Agnes Lamb to the department. At first, Peanuts and the young black officer had been paired, a sufficient prod to Peanuts’s racism, but when Agnes was taken into the detective bureau and soon became the rising star of that division, Peanuts was devastated.

  “They’re all dumb,” he protested to Tuttle.

  “I’m told she scored highest on the entrance examinations.”

  “A fix! You ever hear of affirmative action?”

  Tuttle was surprised that Peanuts had. In any case, he had been a beneficiary of it. When after an hour of trying Peanuts had failed to find the right indentations into which to fit the different-shaped wooden blocks, this elementary intelligence test was waived. No one intended to rely on Peanuts’s mind. Tuttle was amused, but did not show it, that Peanuts should consider himself a member of the master race.

  “You will wonder what idea I have in mind,” Tuttle continued. He was drinking a shandy, a drink he had trained Wilma, the bartender here, to make.

  “Where’d you ever hear of it?” Wilma asked.

  Tuttle laid a finger alongside his nose. He had learned that gesture along with the recipe for shandy from a 1930s-era English movie shown on television during one of his insomniac nights.

  He sipped his drink and half aloud, half in his mind reviewed his great idea. It was bound to get him a mention in the story.

  Peanuts finished his beer and shook his head at the offer of another one. “Gotta go.”

  It was a strange thought that Peanuts had some sort of private life.

  “Who is she?”

  Peanuts just looked at him, then got up and shuffled toward the exit, one of the bit players in the drama of life. Tuttle still hoped to emerge from the spear-carriers and sing a song or two.

  The thing about a shandy was that you could make it last. An hour after Peanuts left, Tetzel came in. Of late, the reporter had adopted an air of importance. He stopped inside the door and waited as if for applause. Tuttle hailed him, and, having no better offer, Tetzel joined him.

  “How’s it going?”

  “What?” Tetzel asked, almost alarmed.

  “Rebecca told me,” Tuttle lied.

  “Bullshit.”

  “That’s what she said. I may be able to help you.”

  Tetzel couldn’t decide whether or not Tuttle actually knew of the great feature he was writing on Nathaniel Green. The mention of Rebecca had been an inspiration. Tuttle had overheard her on the phone in the pressroom trying to convince her editor that a story on the paroled wife killer made sense.

  “We’re already doing one?” she said in her husky voice.

  After a while, she hung up, obviously disappointed. Tetzel was her rival. Tuttle put two and two together. The plus sign was the visit Tetzel had paid to Tuttle’s office.

  Tetzel took a pew and tried to get the attention of Wilma. He shouted his order to her twice before she got it.

  “Nathaniel Green has made a new will,” Tuttle said in a lowered voice.

  “Yeah?”

  “Leaving everything to Helen Burke.” This was a flagrant breach of confidentiality, but he could always claim that Tetzel must have got the information as a result of journalistic digging because the will was registered. Green had insisted on that, as if to prevent himself from changing his mind. Tetzel’s reaction was everything Tuttle had hoped. Not that he was surprised. After all, it was he who had been able to tell Tetzel that Cy Horvath was reviewing the long-ago investigation of the death of Florence Green.

  “Save my seat,” Tetzel said and went to the bar to get his double bourbon and water, unwilling to wait. When he returned with it he was trying to adopt a nonchalant expression. “Did you say everything?”

  “The whole kit and caboodle.” Well, almost.

  “Why the hell would he do that?”

  “Ah. That’s the story behind the story.”

  Tuttle had Tetzel’s undivided attention when he told him of the efforts of Helen Burke and her son, after the conviction, to take possession of the money that Florence had brought to her marriage. Nathaniel had killed Florence; he shouldn’t be allowed to benefit from his crime. At the time, it had sounded like a good argument to Tuttle. Unfortunately the Burkes had first tried to enlist Amos Cadbury in their cause.

  Cadbury had pointed out that the money was Nathaniel’s before and independently of the crime he had been convicted of. That was when Jason Burke came to Tuttle, wanting a second opinion.

  “The claim has merit,” Tuttle said carefully.

  “You think we can win?”

  “Only if the case is properly handled.”

  Helen Burke had been furious with her son when he told her he’d taken their case to Tuttle. Jason called to tell Tuttle it was all off.

  “It’s only money,” Tuttle said. He was thinking of his fee.

  Jason groaned.

  “Now, of his own volition, the paroled killer is turning his fortune over to Helen Burke and her son.” Tetzel seemed to be composing the sentence as he pronounced it.

  Tuttle shook his head. “Just the mother. Helen.”

  “What’ll he live on?” Tetzel wondered.

  “Nathaniel? What does everybody else live on?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Social Security. It may not be much, but it’s certain.”

  Tetzel looked as if he were about to dispute that.

  Even without the bourbon, Tetzel would have been excited by learning this new twist in the story he was writing. It wasn’t just about the past. The future had intervened in the form of a will. The bar was getting noisier and noisier, and Tetzel cocked his good ear toward Tuttle, trying to hear.

  “We could go to my office,” Tuttle suggested. Hazel would have left by now.

  “You got anything there?”

  “Pepsi.”

  “Let’s go the pressroom.”

  That was closer, and Tetzel had a bottle in his desk. Tuttle refused the offer of a drink. He took one taste of the coffee he had poured, then put it on the desk. Rebecca’s desk. He was in her chair and swung toward Tetzel.

  Tetzel put down the glass after taking a long pull. He turned to his computer. “Now tell me the whole thing again.”

  “In my own words.”

  “Monosyllables will be fine.”

  Like Tetzel earlier, Tuttle felt he was composing as he talked, Tetzel banging away at the keyboard wi
th a minimum of fingers.

  “Meanwhile Nathaniel has possession of the money?” At the thought, Tetzel stopped writing.

  “While he’s alive,” Tuttle conceded. “He said he wouldn’t touch a penny of it.”

  “He could change his mind.”

  “He could die in his bed tonight.”

  Tetzel thought about that, then nodded. “It doesn’t matter. He’s still doing now what he’s doing.”

  “Done,” Tuttle corrected. “The will is registered. That’s how you found out about it.”

  Tetzel nodded. “What’s his motive?”

  “I told you. He doesn’t want to benefit from his wife’s death.”

  “Who’ll believe that?”

  Tetzel was obviously thinking what Tuttle himself had thought. This was Nathaniel’s way of getting back at Helen, for her attitude during the trial, for her attempt to take from him her sister’s money, for the shunning at the St. Hilary parish center. “Tell me about that.”

  Tuttle told him what he had heard from Herman the German.

  “Who the hell is Herman the German?”

  “Janitor at St. Hilary’s. A classmate of Nathaniel’s.”

  “Joliet?”

  Tuttle nodded.

  Tetzel shook his head. “How does Father Dowling get these guys paroled to him?”

  “The chaplain at Joliet. Jerome Paxon is their parole officer.”

  “Both of them?”

  “You might talk to him.”

  Tetzel said something noncommital.

  “Tell me how your story is shaping up.”

  “I have to protect my sources,” Tetzel said pompously.

  “I don’t want protection.”

  Tetzel understood. He nodded.

  “What’s the name of Helen Burke’s son?”

  “Jason.”

  That had been two days before, and now Tetzel’s story had appeared. Tuttle liked it. If only Tetzel had claimed to learn of the will because it had been registered.

  After he had read the story, Tuttle took the paper to the outer office and dropped it casually on Hazel’s desk. He returned to his own office and waited at his desk, tweed hat pulled over his eyes. Suddenly there was a great whoop from the outer office and then Hazel appeared in his doorway.