Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  “Order up,” Wiley, the smiling proprietor, cried, and soon waitresses were scooting about in response to eager calls. Wiley himself brought Tetzel’s usual, a triple bourbon with very little water. Tuttle and Peanuts had to wait for the waitress to come around.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Tetzel said.

  “You can afford it.”

  It was then that Tetzel realized that this celebratory round was on him. The hell with it. It was worth it. He took a long salubrious pull on his drink. Over the next fifteen minutes happy drinkers came to congratulate Tetzel, and he held court with dignity. The waitress had trouble getting Tuttle’s root beer and Peanuts’s brown ale onto the table.

  When the tumult and the shouting subsided, Tuttle said, “I hear Helen Burke wants to sue.”

  “No kidding.” The prospect of further fallout from his story pleased Tetzel, and his pleasure did not diminish when Tuttle explained that he was the object of her wrath.

  “Get a good lawyer,” Tetzel advised.

  “Hey.”

  A day begun like that had nowhere else to go but down. Tetzel remained when Tuttle and Peanuts took their leave. The thought of the tab he had already run up by that round for the house and what he added to it during the following hours filled him with an odd elation. The bar emptied, then filled again, over and over, and still Tetzel stayed on, his soggy whistle wetted to a fare-thee-well.

  In midafternoon, the melancholy thought occurred that this could be the high point of his journalistic career. He had scored a coup, no doubt of that, but with familiarity the thought began to lose its power to lift his spirits. He lifted the spirits in his glass, but they no longer brought on a renewal of his sense of triumph. An idea grew in him. He must follow up the Nathaniel Green story with another equally impressive. But what would it be?

  His thoughts were jumbled now. He decided to leave and half an hour later acted on this resolve. Outside, sunlight and the chill in the air lightened his head. He stepped into the street but was pulled back from the path of a careening taxi. Then he went with the crowd across the street to the courthouse.

  The ride up in the elevator was a solitary one. He emerged from the car and walked with careful deliberation to the pressroom. Only McGonagle was there. Tetzel sat at his computer. There was an e-mail message from Menteur he could not make out, even when he closed one eye.

  “Hey, kid,” he said to McGonagle. “Come here.”

  McGonagle came.

  “Read that to me. I got something in my eye.”

  McGonagle leaned toward the screen and read. Would the message have seemed less annoying if it had not come in the piping tones of the teenager?

  “Get going on the story about smoking in the courthouse.”

  Dr. Pippen, the assistant coroner, was in the cafeteria, a cup of yogurt in one hand, plastic spoon in the other, and the Tribune open before her. Cy sat down across from her, and she looked up, distracted, and then her eyes brightened and he got the big smile and toss of the head he needed.

  “What do you think of it?” he asked. Of course she was reading Tetzel’s story.

  “Where did he take creative writing, Cy?”

  “Tuttle.”

  “Will there be a retrial?”

  “There might have been an appeal, years ago, I suppose.”

  Pippen folded the paper and pushed it aside. “Is it true that you’re reexamining the whole thing?”

  “It’s a slow time.”

  Pippen sat back, and a ray of sun caught her golden hair. “That’s what you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bring your coffee. I’ll show you.”

  Cy followed her out of the cafeteria, and they took the elevator down to her office in the morgue. Lubins, the nominal coroner, wasn’t there, of course. Some years before, Lubins had been defeated as county commissioner and then, all unqualified, been given the nomination for coroner. He had had the good sense to hire Pippen to do the job he had been elected to do.

  “You ought to oppose him in the primary,” Cy said.

  “And end up on one of these slabs?”

  She had taken him into a frigid room, the centerpiece of which was a kind of operating table over which hung various instruments suggestive of the Inquisition. Cameras were trained on the table, and a microphone hung over it. Pippen went to one of the drawers along the wall and pulled it out. The body was blueish, shriveled, an overweight middle-aged man.

  “Where was he found?”

  “In the river, in a pizza delivery car. The light on the roof was still on.”

  “Was the pizza still warm?”

  She punched his arm.

  “What a way to go,” Cy said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Drowning.”

  “If only he had rolled down a window, he might have escaped. I don’t suppose you think too clearly in such circumstances.”

  “Got any more bodies?”

  She leaned toward him. “Do you know, I almost wish there were. I don’t know what I’d do without crossword puzzles.”

  “Are you still in the reading group?”

  She crossed her eyes. Cy could have hugged her. Sometimes it was difficult to think of Pippen as if she were his little sister.

  “We’re actually reading The Godfather. All we do is compare it to the movie.”

  Cy shrugged. Maybe even the Pianones could be turned into sympathetic characters with the right treatment.

  After he left Pippen, Cy checked out the body in the pizza delivery car. The case was still being treated as an accident. He had Phil Keegan have everything transferred to the detective bureau. He began reading the reports of the patrol squad that had been at the scene when the car was discovered and pulled out of the river. Apparently it had not submerged. No doubt that was why the roof light was still burning. It was the light that attracted attention and triggered a 911 call. Cy had shaken the victim’s effects onto his desk when Agnes Lamb came in.

  “The guy in the river?” she asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “Pippen told me.”

  Agnes pulled up a chair and watched as Cy dealt money and plastic-encased cards and other odds and ends from the wallet onto the table. The change had probably been in the man’s pocket. Along with the rosary. Agnes picked up the driver’s license.

  “The family been notified?”

  Cy looked at her. “Check with accidents.”

  She pulled his phone toward her and made the call. Her eyes widened, and the corner of her mouth went down. She shook her head at Cy.

  “Thank you. We’ll take care of it.”

  She picked up a pencil and made a note of the address on the driver’s license. Then she just looked at Cy. “They said they called several times and no one answered.”

  “We’ll go together,” he said.

  If nothing else, it was a change from stirring up the ashes surrounding the death of Florence Green. Reconstructing events that had occurred that long ago wasn’t easy, especially if you weren’t sure it was even remotely important. Nathaniel Green had been tried and convicted, which was what he had wanted; he had served his time and was now out. His release might have passed without notice if it hadn’t been for that idiot Tetzel, no doubt urged on by Tuttle. What really irked Cy was the suggestion in Tetzel’s story that the Fox River police, specifically Cy Horvath, were determined to get to the bottom of the matter at last. The implication was that Nathaniel had been wrongly accused and sentenced and a reversal was in order.

  It was old Gleason, the doctor who had been the Green family physician and stayed close even after his patient was turned over to the oncologists, who cast a kind of light on things. When all hope had gone, the experts disappeared, and Gleason had checked on his patient daily, sometimes several times a day.

  “They were friends as well as patients,” he explained to Cy, lighting up a cigarette. He noticed Cy’s surprise. “Nine out of ten doctors smoke Camels.”
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br />   “I remember that.”

  “So does the surgeon general.” He shook his head. “Where do they find these people?” He meant the surgeon general.

  “Did Nathaniel take his wife off the life support system?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you Catholic?”

  Cy nodded.

  “Okay. Florence is moribund, despondent, close to despair. When the hospital chaplain came by, she just waved him away. Nate told me this. Finally he got her to agree to the last rites, from their parish priest. So now she was ready to go through the pearly gates. I think Nate feared another bout of despair.”

  Gleason drew deeply on his cigarette and then expelled inhaled smoke from his nostrils as well as his mouth. Cy watched the old doctor’s ears to see if any smoke would come out of them.

  “Nate would have thought he’d bought her a first-class ticket to heaven.”

  It was fanciful but to a Catholic plausible. Of course, his wife’s inevitable death provided motive enough to just get it over. If Nathaniel had pulled the plug, that is. One of the curiosities was that the oxygen petcock had been turned off. Before or after the mask was taken from Florence Green’s mouth? How, after all these years, could you find the answer to that? Did it matter, since Nathaniel took responsibility for both?

  “Do you know Helen Burke, Doctor?”

  “She was my patient, too. Maybe impatient would be the best word. Her husband, too, poor devil.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “What’s there to tell? A completely bland character, a financial wizard who was beaten into submission by Helen Armstrong, as she once was. She only married him because Nathaniel married Florence. Life is a soap opera, Horvath. Never forget that.”

  Cy promised to keep it in mind.

  “Some people just will themselves to die. Burke was one of them.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “He had a cold. He went to bed. It developed into pneumonia. He said nothing, and by the time Helen noticed it was far advanced. He was a goner by the time I got him to the hospital.”

  “What did he do for a living?”

  “Clip coupons. I think that was their main recreation.”

  “Money of his own?”

  “Piles. Do you remember Burke Cleaners and Dyers? The buyer changed the name of the chain.”

  “And Florence had money of her own?”

  “Money is never the answer.” Gleason was full of epigrams.

  “What’s the question?”

  Gleason squinted through the smoke. “Why did God make me?”

  The only thing going against the consensus of those who still remembered that Nathaniel had done what he said was the chronology Cy had drawn up. If it was accurate—and who could be sure of memories after all this time?—Nathaniel must have been down the hall in the bathroom when the alarm went off at the nurses’ station, indicating that Florence’s life support system had been detached. The pizza car in the river, its driver drowned, was a welcome distraction from all this ancient history.

  The name on the driver’s license, James Thomas, and the address brought Cy and Agnes to an ancient apartment building in the middle of Fox River. The outside door was open; in the entryway was a bank of mailboxes, each with a button to push and a little grid to speak through. Agnes ran her finger over them and stopped at the last one. She pressed the button. There was no name on the little slip on the door of the box, only MGR. It took three pushes on the button before a voice crackled through the little grid as if it were coming from outer space.

  “Police,” Agnes said.

  Fifteen seconds went by. “Again?

  Cy leaned toward the speaker. “Police,” he said in a very loud voice.

  “Okay, okay.”

  They waited by the locked inner door, but it was the street door that opened. The man weighed about a hundred pounds. He wore corduroy pants and a sweatshirt with NOTRE DAME on it. He kept the street door open as he looked over Agnes and Cy.

  “I don’t see Thomas’s name on any of the boxes.”

  “You from bankruptcy court?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Talk to Mrs. Thomas. If she’s in.” He let the door close behind him, went to the bank of mailboxes, and pressed the button on unit four. “Better let me talk,” he said to Cy.

  A woman’s voice was heard, and then the manager was telling her there was someone here to see her.

  “The police?” came a voice.

  “How did you know?”

  “I called them. Send them up.”

  The manager shook his head and unlocked the inner door. “My place is downstairs,” he explained.

  “What’s your name?” Agnes asked.

  “Charlie Brown.”

  “Come on.”

  “It is. And it was before that damned cartoon.”

  Apartment four was on the first floor. Why had she said to send them up? Probably because she thought Thomas was calling from the basement. The door was open. Mrs. Thomas stood in it.

  “Well, that was fast,” she said, stepping aside and waving them inside. “I hope you can find Jack as quickly.”

  The apartment was filled with a delicious aroma. Cy let Agnes do the talking. Mrs. Thomas had just called in a missing person report on her husband.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “He took out an order two nights ago.”

  “An order?”

  “We started a pizza business.” Apparently in the kitchen, by the aroma. She seemed to be waiting for Agnes’s reaction. “It was Jack’s idea.”

  “How long have you been at it?” Agnes asked.

  “A month, a little more. So far, we’re relying on flyers and word of mouth.”

  “How’s it going?”

  She looked from Agnes to Cy and back again. “We’ve had threats.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “A phone call. Then someone let the air out of the car’s tires. Can you imagine anyone thinking of us as a threat?”

  “Why pizza?”

  “You ever taste one of mine and you wouldn’t ask.” She slumped inside her voluminous dress and took a hankie from the pocket of her apron. “We declared bankruptcy.”

  “I thought you said you were doing okay.”

  “Oh, not the pizza thing. We’re doing that because Jack is determined he is going to pay back every penny we owe. Even though the court wiped it all out.”

  Cy marveled at the way Agnes managed to turn the conversation to the fact that they wanted Mrs. Thomas to come along with them.

  “Where?”

  “Downtown.”

  Her eyes became wary. “You’ve found him.”

  She began to weep then, as if she knew what lay ahead. Agnes comforted her and not long after was leading her out to the car. Cy followed, thanking God he had not come alone. Good old Agnes.

  After Mrs. Thomas had identified the body and been sustained by both Pippen and Agnes, Cy escaped to his office. The pizza was in a kind of thermal satchel. That was when Cy noticed where the order was meant to go. The Foot Doctor.

  Eric, the salesman at the Foot Doctor, had discovered the break-in only after he opened up the store and began getting ready for the day. When he went back to the stockroom he noticed that Mr. Burke’s office door was open. Drawers of the filing cabinet were pulled out; the lounge chair had been pushed over, the wastebasket emptied on the desk.

  Cy Horvath and Agnes Lamb listened to this tale from the young man, whose Adam’s apple seemed proof of the inerrancy of Scripture.

  “What’s missing?” Agnes asked.

  Cy could see that she was still trying to figure out why he had decided that they should respond to the patrol car report. Cy had sent Mintz, the officer who had responded to Eric’s call, on his way. “We’ll take care of it.”

  Eric didn’t know what was missing. “But just look at this office.”

  “You call the boss?”


  “It’s not yet noon.”

  Cy let it go. He had Jason’s address, and it seemed a good idea to call on him in his native habitat.

  “Lock the door of the office,” Cy said. “We’ll be back.”

  “I can stay open?”

  “Of course. And don’t mention this to any customers.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Agnes was driving, and Cy gave her directions.

  “That’s public housing,” she said.

  “It used to be. The units are up for sale.”

  “Being gentrified?”

  “If you say so.”

  Gentrified? Agnes was full of surprises. She had put in a couple of years at the community college before applying to the police department. She had to take the tests twice, to prove she hadn’t been cheating. Given her score, it was a pardonable suspicion, but there was probably a trace of prejudice in it, too.

  “Why do you want to be a cop?” Cy asked her, when she was assigned to the detective division after a stint patrolling with Peanuts Pianone.

  “Know your enemy.” But she smiled when she said it.

  “Peanuts?”

  “Is he retarded?”

  “Just a cop.”

  The area was several blocks of row houses that still bore the effects of residents who hadn’t really given a damn about their condition. The buildings had declined to the point where the city had to make a decision between spending a lot of tax dollars to fix them up or putting them on the market. If there had been no takers, they would have been torn down, but there had been takers. The units could be had for a pittance, and a lot of remodeling had gone on, but the row house in which Jason Burke lived was still untouched.

  The storm door hung askew on its hinges and was unlocked. Cy opened it, tried the bell, figured it didn’t work, and pounded on the door. He had to pound twice more before there was the sound of a key turning. The door opened slightly, and Jason Burke looked out over a chain.