Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  “Has he been coming to the center long, Father?”

  “A month or two.”

  “Just showed up?”

  “Amos, I have to confess I really know nothing about him.”

  The patrician lawyer nodded. “No reason why you should probe into everyone who comes to the center, of course.” It sounded like a criticism. “Let me tell you what I propose to do.”

  What Amos proposed doing was hiring a private investigator to find out all he could about Eugene Schmidt.

  “Is it really that important?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Because of Natalie Armstrong’s interest in Schmidt, and vice versa.

  “It will all be done with a maximum of discretion, of course. I have no idea what Maxwell will learn and what I might or might not do with what he tells me.”

  “Maxwell.”

  “The firm has used him in the past. An utterly trustworthy fellow, despite the unsavory nature of his craft.”

  “You might just ask Cy Horvath to look into it.”

  “I’d rather not. He would be bound to think that I have grounded suspicions about Schmidt.”

  Thus it was that Father Dowling seemed to have given his blessing to hiring Maxwell to check up on the past of Eugene Schmidt. That done, Amos turned to financial matters. Here the great worry was what Jason Burke might do with his soon-to-be-acquired wealth.

  “He is the principal beneficiary of Helen’s will, of course. That alone will provide him with a considerable fortune. And, unless recent events cause Nathaniel Green to change his mind, there will be a good deal more coming to Jason when his uncle dies.”

  The problem was caused by Jason’s dual weaknesses, drink and gambling. “Madeline tells me that he hasn’t darkened a casino door for months. But he has stayed away for months before and then returned with a vengeance. She also says he has confined his drinking to beer.”

  The two men exchanged a look, as if each of them knew of the alcoholic’s claim that beer does not count as drink.

  “That is why I spoke to Carmela, Jason’s wife. Do you know her?”

  “I met her at the wake and funeral. She was at the cemetery with him, too.”

  “She is a very impressive woman, Father. She put up with a good deal, from Helen as well as from Jason. Finally she could take no more.”

  “She left him?”

  “They separated. Helen arranged a sum of money with me, on which Carmela could draw as needed. But she has been very successful in her line of work. Financial counseling. She manages other people’s money. That is what gave me the idea.”

  Father Dowling waited.

  “I can appoint her as the custodian and guardian of Jason’s money.”

  “You can?”

  “I persuaded Helen to write an equivocal clause in her will that can be interpreted as giving me that authority. It doesn’t mention Carmela, of course. Helen would never have agreed to that.” Amos puffed on his cigar. “I allowed her to think that I would be the one exercising that role.”

  “Won’t Jason object?”

  “I nurse the hope that he will welcome it. He knows his weakness; he knows how fragile his resolutions at reform have been in the past. Helen was of little help to him, that has to be said. Now, with her safely gone to God, a great motive for Jason’s profligacy is gone.”

  “And if the couple doesn’t reconcile?”

  “That is not a necessary condition of the plan,” Amos said carefully.

  “Will Nathaniel’s money, when it comes, fall under the same plan?”

  “It will.”

  “Imagine, just leaving everything to his tormentor.”

  “Not everything, Father.” “Oh?”

  “Others will be handsomely taken care of.”

  “Madeline Clancy?”

  Amos nodded. “And Natalie Armstrong.”

  “Ah. Hence the interest in Eugene Schmidt?”

  “Exactly. What was the point of your remark about double effect, Father?”

  “Schmidt has been saying that as a result of the accident, he has become the benefactor of Helen’s and Nathaniel’s heirs.”

  “He should be careful. People will wonder if he swerved into Helen’s lane accidentally.”

  Cy got all the feminine intuition he needed at home and didn’t want it raising its lovely head while he was working. Unless that lovely head belonged to Dr. Pippen, she of the golden hair worn in a ponytail, the enormous green eyes, a young woman vibrant with life who served as assistant coroner. She had taken the job while her husband the ob-gyn finished his residency and then stayed on when he opened his office in Fox River. She herself had qualified in pathology at the Mayo Clinic. Lubins, the coroner, had been a medic in the army and held the post as a gift from the local political powers.

  “Look at the similarities, Cy,” Pippen urged. They were seated across from one another at one of the very small tables in the cafeteria. She had taken her ponytail from behind her head and was holding it as she talked.

  “And the dissimilarities.”

  “Cy, in both cases, the car was forced over at great speed.”

  He had told her the results of the examination of the car in which the body of John Thomas had been found. The driver’s side of the car told the tale that Pippen was now feeding back to him.

  The young woman posed a moral problem for Cy that no one would have guessed. He tried to think of her as his little sister; he tried to find flaws in her that he could magnify in order to protect himself from the attraction he felt. There had never been any overt expression of this, and there never would be. He told himself that with time he would just get used to Pippen and not even remember feeling this goofy about her. That hadn’t happened. He would have liked to be annoyed at her playing detective if he hadn’t encouraged it in the past as an excuse for sitting like this over coffee. Pippen was pushing the idea that the John Thomas death and the accident in which Helen Burke had died represented the same method.

  “MO,” she said, her lips forming the letters in a way that would have rattled a Trappist. “Isn’t that what you call it?”

  “Business slow?” he asked.

  It was. So how else should she spend her day if not by telling Cy how to do his job? How many hours a day can you spend reading?

  “How is the book club?”

  She made a face. “We never get around to the book.”

  For the next ten minutes, she told him stories of the other women in her book club, all professionals of one sort or another. “All they want to read is best sellers.”

  “Shame on them.”

  Cy felt good about getting her off her big theory about John Thomas and Helen Burke, but when they were parting outside the door of the cafeteria, she whispered, “The same MO.”

  Pippen was getting as bad as Agnes Lamb, with her wide-eyed reproachful look when he joshed away her suggestion that they really had to look into the John Thomas killing. He knew that she knew that he knew what she was suggesting. The Pianones. And she had been in the department long enough to know that they might just as well try to pin a crime on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as expect to get anywhere in the prosecutor’s office with a case against the Pianones. It was no accident that John Thomas had ended up in the river, but Helen Burke had met her death by the kind of fluke that never made it out of traffic.

  Cy checked out a car. When he pulled up out of the garage, waiting for pedestrians to go past, he looked across the street at the Jury Room. Maybe he should have just gone there. No, he decided, pulling into traffic. There he would have to talk, or listen to others talk, and he wanted to think.

  In the privacy of his own mind he could entertain the kind of speculation that Pippen and Agnes insisted on speaking out loud. Of course, it was hard not to think that a guy deciding to open a freelance pizza business in Fox River had better clear it with the Pianones first. They had driven Domino’s and other chains out of the city and kept the pizza business confined to dozen
s of independents. All under the thumb of the Pianones, needless to say. John Thomas might have been one of them, despite the amateurishness of his operation. Maybe he could have struck a deal with the Pianones and been alive today, but a man who held himself to pay off debts of which he had been exonerated didn’t sound like a man who would go hat in hand to the Pianones.

  John Thomas had been sent on his way into the beyond in a more modest way than Helen Burke. Cy hadn’t drawn attention to the obituary in the Tribune, but when he showed up at the storefront funeral home, there was Agnes talking with Mrs. Thomas. The other two in evidence seemed to belong to the staff. They did.

  “The kids couldn’t make it,” Mrs. Thomas said, not meeting Cy’s eye.

  The director, who looked like a retired cop, read from the Bible, having trouble with words. The good news had never sounded sadder. Next to him stood a woman with a long sad face, looking as if they were burying all her hopes. The crematorium was next, and he and Agnes went on with Mrs. Thomas. Where were their kids who hadn’t made it to their father’s funeral? If you could call it a funeral.

  “I’d ask you home …”

  “No, no,” Agnes said. “We’re taking you to lunch.”

  She protested but eventually agreed. “But no pizza, all right? I’ll never eat pizza again.”

  So they went to the Great Wall of China, where Mrs. Thomas ate with gusto and then, prompted by Agnes, talked about her husband, how good he had been, how honest. She looked at them. “But not practical, you know. Not at all practical.”

  Cy had felt superfluous. All Mrs. Thomas needed was another woman’s ear, and she had that in Agnes.

  Now, driving aimlessly, he crossed the bridge to the far side of the Fox River, the high side, and followed the river road north to a parking area from which there was an unrivaled view of the city in which he plied his trade. Life has a different look to a police detective, of course. He was often struck by the innocence with which others commented on local happenings. A cop got to know that the public and private faces of people often differ, that the mildest of people turn violent and the nicest kids can spiral into disaster. Where did that put John Thomas?

  What did they have but a guy whose wife made pizza in her kitchen that he delivered to those hooked by a pretty primitive flyer? It occurred to Cy that all they knew, or thought they knew of John Thomas, had come from his wife. No need to doubt it, of course, but who knew what lay behind the bankruptcy and the kids who couldn’t make it to his funeral? The next time Agnes nagged him about Thomas, he would point this out to her. It might keep her busy for a while.

  And Helen Burke? It was ridiculous to liken the way she had been forced into that bridge abutment to John Thomas’s going into the river. He thought of Eugene Schmidt, dancing around the accident site, blaming himself for what had happened, a real pain in the colon. Cy had asked about him, but nobody seemed to know much.

  “I thought he was another product of Joliet,” Nathaniel Green told Cy. “I suppose because he’s friendly with Herman.”

  “You talk with him?”

  “Oh, it’s largely listening. My family seems to fascinate him.”

  They sat in silence on the bench, Cy’s stretched-out legs extending almost to the opposite side of the walk. He would have liked to ask Nathaniel why he had turned off the oxygen petcock before removing the tubes from his wife.

  Nathaniel said, “I can’t say I much like the attention he pays Natalie.” He was still talking about Eugene Schmidt.

  Now, sitting at the wheel of the car, looking out over Fox River, Cy promised himself he would look into Eugene Schmidt if Agnes decided to check out John Thomas.

  Tetzel kept away from the editorial offices of his paper, and from Menteur, who had developed a fixation about a story exposing the way in which the courthouse had been exempted from the draconian antismoking ordinance that had slipped through the city council on a busy day. It had been Tetzel’s own offhand mention of this exemption that had ignited poor gum-chewing Menteur, who like most newsmen his age had been cured like a ham in clouds of tobacco smoke. The puritanical ascendancy of these late years had done little for his disposition. His bite had become as bad as his bark. Perhaps if he had just quit smoking entirely he could have gotten used to abstinence. But Menteur lit up as soon as he was in his car, he smoked four cigarettes on the way home, he would have had a cigarette smoldering next to his dinner if Mrs. Menteur had permitted it, he finished the pack and began another before going to bed, and, the following day, he smoked all the way to the paper, where he had to distract himself with bubble gum until he could flee at noon for a half hour’s reprieve from this enforced abstinence. Then to learn that all the crooked politicians, and Tetzel, too, puffed their way about the courthouse with impunity! Wars have been declared with less provocation.

  “What good will it do you if they ban smoking in the courthouse, too?” Tetzel asked.

  Menteur’s eyes shone. “Justice.”

  The only way he could escape Menteur’s demand for the story was by coming up with something else, something sufficiently big to distract his editor from his longed-for vendetta. But what would it be? In the pressroom, Rebecca was writing a story on the quality of food in the county jail.

  “Can they smoke in the jail?” Tetzel asked her.

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t mention it in your story.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Menteur will excise it. The man has become a fanatic.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “He chews bubble gum,” Tetzel whispered. Rebecca’s brows flew up and were lost behind her bangs.

  * * *

  Across the street in a back booth nursing a scotch and water, Tetzel remembered the success of his story about the return of Nathaniel Green. Unusual as the response to that story had been, Tetzel liked to think that it characterized his work. Like a duffer who makes a lucky shot, he thought he had finally hit his level. In his mind, he reviewed possibilities. Expose local political corruption? A damning portrait of Lubins the coroner? A mean smile twisted his lips. The police department? But that would take him back to the Pianones, and that was a no-no, personal as well as professional. Once only had he dared such a story, and it had meant an ignominious apology to Rocco Pianone and a retraction in the paper. It did not help his mood when Tuttle sauntered in with Peanuts Pianone in tow. The little lawyer might have gladly enlisted with the Pianone forces, but their business went to a Chicago law firm that had opened a branch office in Fox River the better to serve their shady client. A headline moved across the addled surface of Tetzel’s mind. LOCAL FAMILY’S MANY CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVIC LIFE. A paean of praise to the Pianones. Had it come to that?

  Tuttle and Peanuts slipped into the booth across from him, and Tetzel scowled.

  “I didn’t see you at the funeral,” Tuttle said, adjusting his tweed hat.

  The order Tuttle had called to the bartender as he passed him arrived. Brown ale for Peanuts and a shandy for Tuttle. Wilma called out what she had brought, put it before Tetzel’s unwanted companions, and returned to her post.

  “Who died?”

  “Come on. Nathaniel Green’s sister-in-law.”

  “Did you go?”

  “The cream of the city was there. And Rebecca Farmer. Why did she draw the assignment?”

  Rebecca! This was news to Tetzel. Was her claim to be writing about the food in the county jail a ruse? He thought of returning to the pressroom and quizzing his colleague, but the thought fizzled away. He could believe that Menteur was exacting revenge by letting Rebecca enjoy the fallout from Tetzel’s great story.

  “She does the routine things. Tell me about it.”

  “You’ve seen one funeral, you’ve seen them all,” Tuttle said. Did the little lawyer suspect he would be pouring salt into the wound?

  “How’s Hazel?” Tetzel asked.

  “She always asks about you.”

  Tetzel thought of the well-endowed Amazon
who dominated Tuttle’s office. Peanuts muttered an obscenity. Tetzel knew how the arrival of Hazel had disturbed the even tenor of Peanuts’s life.

  “Was Nathaniel Green there?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I suppose he’ll want you to change his will now.”

  The tweed hat swung in a negative motion. “No reason for that.”

  “How can a dead women inherit money?”

  “She can’t, Gerry. But her son can.”

  Jason Burke. Tetzel knew the man’s reputation. The thought of a drunk and a gambler coming into a fortune was depressing. Or would have been if a dim bulb had not gone on in Tetzel’s mind. The heir of Nathaniel Green?

  “Tell me about him.”

  “He’s reformed.”

  “Sure he has.” Tetzel had the weakling’s skepticism about moral reform.

  “He told me he intends to go on with the Foot Doctor.”

  Tetzel looked blank.

  “His business. In the mall. Shoes.”

  HEIR VOWS TO KEEP TO SIMPLE LIFE? “Tell me about it.”

  While Tuttle talked, Wilma arrived with another drink for Tetzel. He almost sent it back. He didn’t. “Could you bring me a cup of coffee, Wilma?”

  “Coffee?” He had surprised her.

  “Black.”

  Tetzel sat on after Tuttle and Peanuts left. He finished his second drink and ordered another black coffee. He would have wished that he had not come here except that coming here had brought Tuttle and what Tetzel considered a lead to a story that would get Menteur’s mind off all the smoking going on in the courthouse.

  He drove to the mall, slowly and carefully, and found the Foot Doctor after cruising around the parking lot. He pulled into a space, turned off the motor, and stared at the storefront. SCION OF PROMINENT LOCAL FAMILY MAKES MODEST FOOTPRINT.

  He got out of his car, slammed the door, and inhaled deeply. He nearly passed out. His head cleared, and he took in the normalcy of the mall, eager consumers going from store to store, families, ordinary people. Readers. He made his way to the entrance of the Foot Doctor.