Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  “I’m not a very good driver.”

  She smiled.

  Their entrance caused a subdued sensation, and Amos walked slowly behind his guest to their table, rather liking the image of himself as an aging roué.

  They had shrimp cocktails and a white wine, and Agnes surprised him by talking of John Thomas, the bankrupt who had gone into the pizza business and then into the Fox River, in that order.

  “Of course, that’s roped off from us.”

  “A cordon sanitaire?”

  “Maybe. What’s it mean?”

  He told her. “You’re suggesting that there might be a connection with one of our more prominent families?”

  “The family. Who else controls the restaurants?”

  “This is just speculation,” Amos Cadbury said.

  “We always begin with speculation. Then we see if it can be sustained. But not in this case, or others like it. Oh, we could investigate, even make the case, but nothing would come of it.”

  “That is unfortunate. The world is a most imperfect place, Agnes.”

  She sipped her wine, her eyes never leaving him. “Tell me about Jason and his wife,” she said.

  “It’s all a matter of public record,” Amos said. He might have been reminding himself. He told her what there was to tell, not sparing Helen Burke.

  “Gambling and drink both?”

  “Mainly drink. And now he has stopped.”

  “He told us there had been deliveries of liquor and beer at his shoe store. From whom he didn’t know, or even when it had come.”

  “Any signs of a break-in?”

  She shook her head.

  “And who had keys?”

  “The clerk. Eric.”

  “Yes, I met him.”

  “He denies any knowledge of it. He was the one who ordered pizza from John Thomas, the pizza that never arrived.”

  “Very mysterious.”

  “Who would want him to fall off the wagon, other than liquor stores?”

  “I can’t imagine. There was general relief when his mother’s death turned him around.”

  Agnes said, “Is it true that his wife has control of Jason’s money?”

  “It was his mother’s wish.” He paused. He did not want to mislead this young woman. “No, that’s not quite true. She didn’t want him controlling his money, but she didn’t specify who should control it.”

  “Who decided?” “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “It seemed a way to bring them back together.”

  Agnes made a face. “It’s not working, is it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not ever, I would say. Do you know her partner, Augie Liberati?”

  “I have met the man.”

  “Carmela is the star of the Avanti Group. I think she has been carrying Augie. And of course they’re lovers.”

  “They are!”

  “No doubt about it. I checked it out.”

  “Why?”

  Agnes paused. “Both Cy Horvath and Phil Keegan tell me never to go by hunches. Of course, they do it all the time themselves.”

  “And you had a hunch?”

  “Which proved to be true. And that raised another question. If something happened to Jason, who would get the money?”

  “Surely you don’t think that Carmela …”

  “My hunch is Augie.”

  “Good Lord.”

  Agnes leaned across the table and whispered, “His sister is married to a Pianone.”

  Amos remembered the way Carmela had seemed to divert attention from Augie’s remark that he had a sister in Fox River. He sat back, absorbing what Agnes had told him. And he had thought that she would be seeking information from him. He told her this.

  “I would like to ask a favor of you.”

  “What is it?”

  “We came upon some unidentified fingerprints in Jason’s apartment. On one of the liquor bottles, on the handle of the bat that was used to beat him. There’s a footprint, too.”

  She waited. No need to spell it out. Amos’s admiration for this young police officer was now greater than it had been. Of course, it helped that suspicions were not directed at any of his clients.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Agnes’s smile was almost reward enough. “This is very good wine.”

  “Another glass?”

  “That would be one way you could do it.”

  He nodded. Indeed it would.

  Back at his office, he telephoned Carmela and asked when she would be free to see him.

  “Oh, Amos, today is awful.”

  “I was thinking of a preprandial drink in my office.”

  “I could come at six.”

  “Could you bring your partner?”

  “Augie?”

  “It wouldn’t be just right if I asked you to manage a little money for me.”

  “We’ll be there, Amos.” “Good. Good.”

  He felt devious, of course, but that feeling was dimmed by the thought that he was doing a favor for Agnes Lamb. Carmela came, with Augie, Amos poured their drinks, and then they chatted about what could be done with a small amount, fifty thousand, say, managed not too safely but not too cavalierly, either. Carmela let Augie respond.

  Amos took notes. He looked thoughtful. “Give me a day or two.”

  “Of course,” Augie said, lifting his glass in a toast.

  When they were gone, he called Agnes and told her what he had for her.

  Agnes Lamb brought the plastic sack containing the glass Amos Cadbury had given her to Cy Horvath’s office, and together they went off to the lab with it. Agnes had played a hunch. Now it would be tested. Would Agnes drop her suspicion of Augie Liberati if the tests proved negative?

  Lester Coe’s white lab coat looked like a dinner jacket, maybe because of the shirt and necktie he wore beneath it.

  Agnes placed the plastic bag on the counter between them. “Prints,” she said.

  He waited.

  “Check them against those found at the scene of the assault on Jason Burke.”

  Lester took the bag by a corner and held it up as if were a rabbit. “How soon?”

  Cy said, “How about now?”

  “That urgent?”

  “It’s important.”

  “You want to wait, is that it?”

  “Not for long.”

  Lester lifted his chin, turned, and retreated to his lab.

  Agnes was trying to be nonchalant, but Cy knew how much this meant to her. To himself, too, of course. For weeks they had been chasing down one dead end after another. First, the revival of the death of Florence Green because of Nathaniel’s release from prison. Nathaniel’s claim to have killed his wife had seemed odd at the time—killing a dying person?—and rechecking on the basis of his notes after all the time that had passed did not make it any less odd. But why would he say he killed his wife if he hadn’t? Maybe Dr. Gleason was right. Maybe it was a mercy killing in a sense other than Tuttle’s. His wife was shriven; while she lived there was the danger that her despair would return, so Nathaniel prevented that happening by cutting off her life support and letting her die. For that he had wasted years in Joliet, welcoming the punishment.

  The great flaw in Nathaniel’s account was that by the time the mask was removed from Florence’s face, the oxygen tap on the wall had been turned off. Nothing was flowing through the plastic tubing. Removing the mask deprived Florence of nothing. Weird.

  Nathaniel had just listened when Cy explained to him about the oxygen tap. “It was closed. Shut off.” He waited for a response.

  Nathaniel said, “Yes, I did that. I shut it off.”

  Convicted for a crime he didn’t commit. Should whoever shut off that oxygen tap get the same treatment? Discovering who that had been, after all these years, seemed a definition of the impossible. The nurses were out; Cy had talked to every nurse who had worked on the floor at that time. There was no way any of them would have deprived even a dying patien
t of life support. Had it been turned off by accident? The monitors at the nurses’ station would alert them to such a shutoff. But how soon had that been noticed? Apart from the possibility that some visitor had popped into Florence’s room and shut off the oxygen while Nathaniel was down the hallway, the only explanation of what had happened was Nathaniel. His including turning off the tap in his confession seemed only a way to keep himself guilty.

  Agnes said to Cy, “I should have asked Lester how long it would take.”

  “Want to go for coffee?”

  Agnes looked into the lab and then at Cy. “I’m not nervous.”

  “I know.”

  “Either they match or they don’t.”

  “That’s right. Let’s go for coffee.”

  They went for coffee. Dr. Pippen joined them.

  “Work, work, work,” she said. She placed her coffee on the table, unbuttoned her lab coat and sat.

  “We’re waiting for the outcome of a test,” Cy told her.

  “Mine were positive.”

  Agnes widened her eyes and sat back. “What test?” Cy asked.

  “Oh, Cy,” said Agnes.

  Pippen was pregnant. She was radiant. Cy felt ambivalent. Would this exorcize his fascination with the assistant coroner?

  “When?” Agnes asked.

  The date she mentioned was nearly to Christmas.

  “Will you go on working?” Cy asked.

  “Of course. Why not? Oh, I’ll take maternity leave.”

  Pippen as mother. Cy decided he liked the idea. Lester appeared in the doorway, looking around. Cy raised his hand, and Lester joined them.

  “I thought you were in a rush.”

  “Boy or girl?” Cy asked.

  “They match, if that’s what you mean.”

  Agnes let out a little whoop and pushed away from the table. Cy stood.

  “What’s going on?” Pippen asked. She was a little peeved, as if she had been upstaged.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Cy said.

  “Tell me now.”

  “Lester can explain.”

  They brought the news to Phil Keegan. The fingerprints on the glass Amos Cadbury had supplied, the glass Augie Liberati had used, matched the few prints that had been found in Jason’s apartment.

  “Bring him in,” Phil said.

  On the way to the offices of the Avanti Group, Agnes babbled joyfully. How would she have taken it if the prints hadn’t matched? A moot question now.

  “You know what I would like, Cy? I’d like to tie him to John Thomas, too.”

  “The pizza man?” Cy frowned.

  “Don’t get carried away.” “Did you know that Augie’s sister is married to a Pianone?”

  “Let’s settle for the assault on Jason. That we can get an indictment on.”

  The receptionist told them Mr. Liberati was not in yet. Was Carmela there? As if in answer, Carmela emerged from her office. Her welcoming smile faded slightly when she saw Cy and Agnes. Then it was altogether gone.

  “Has something happened to Jason?”

  It seemed an odd question. Jason was out of the hospital and ensconced in the house in which he had been raised, occupying the room he’d had as a boy. Only Amos Cadbury had raised a question about the propriety of this.

  “Amos,” Madeline said, “there is a nurse on duty all day.”

  “And at night?”

  Madeline, according to Edna Hospers, had been almost pleased at this suspicion. Amos’s question might have suggested that Jason was no safer in the Burke house than he had been in his slovenly apartment.

  “When do you expect Augie Liberati?” Agnes said.

  “Come into my office.” Carmela stepped aside, and in they went. She closed the door before going to her desk. “Please be seated.” Then, “Why do you want to see Augie?”

  Cy detected apprehension in her voice. Did Carmela guess why they were here?

  “Some routine questions,” Agnes said.

  “About what?”

  Cy said, “The attack on Jason.”

  The handsome competent professional financial advisor morphed into a frightened woman. “What have you found?”

  “What you think we have,” Cy said. Agnes looked at him in surprise.

  “Oh my God,” Carmela murmured. She reached for the bottle of water on her desk, then let her hand drop.

  “You’ve been expecting this, haven’t you?” Cy asked, telling himself it wasn’t a hunch, he was merely reading the significance of Carmela’s reaction.

  There was the sound of conversation in the outer office, followed by a tap on the door.

  It opened, and a grinning Augie looked in. “I’m interrupting,” he said, backing away.

  Cy had risen and went to the door, opening it wide. “Come on in. We were just talking about you.”

  “Me?” Several expressions flitted across his face. Cy took his arm and led him into the office. Augie shook Cy’s hand free and looked at Carmela. “What’s going on?”

  “We want to talk with you about the attack on Jason Burke,” Agnes said, rising. Cy had remained standing, between Augie and the door. He pushed the door shut.

  “Talk away.”

  “You should have a lawyer present.”

  “A lawyer!” Augie tried to laugh. He looked an appeal at Carmela; he glared at Cy. “I don’t have a lawyer.”

  “Amos Cadbury,” Carmela said. “I’ll call him.”

  She made the call; she was put through to Amos. She explained the reason for the call and then listened. And listened.

  “I understand, Amos.” She put down the phone.

  “Try Tuttle,” Agnes said.

  Tetzel seemed to have been the last one to learn that Augie Liberati’s prints matched those found in Jason Burke’s apartment, on a liquor bottle and on the bat that had been used in the assault. Tuttle, fresh from a conference with his client, seemed unperturbed by all this.

  “I doubt that it will come to trial.” He collapsed into Rebecca’s chair in the pressroom, the picture of unruffled confidence.

  “Because of the incompetence of the defense counsel?”

  Tuttle laughed indulgently. When Peanuts Pianone came in, the reason for Tuttle’s insouciance became clear.

  “How is Augie related to you, Peanuts?” Tuttle asked, watching Tetzel for his reaction.

  “His sister is married to my cousin. Let’s go eat.”

  “A splendid suggestion,” Tuttle said, scrambling to his feet. “Will you join us, Gerry?”

  “I’m fasting.”

  Tuttle looked puzzled only for a moment. “Ah. Holy Week. Good man.”

  Out the door the two went, the most modest representatives of law and order. Tetzel felt sick. He looked at Rebecca’s desk, at the gray eye of her computer. It was there that she had sat, tapping out the story that was all over the front page of the Tribune. What a sly witch she was; never a murmur about what she was writing. The way she had hummed as she worked should have warned him. He glanced at the paper, winced, and turned it over. All the while he had been devoting himself to a story on Jason Burke, a follow-up on the assault without a single new fact, a story Menteur had hardly glanced at before consigning it to the circular file.

  “Old news, old boy. Old news.”

  He should have read more into Menteur’s attitude than he had. The bastard had obviously been conspiring with Rebecca, keeping her big story a secret until it burst upon the reading public of Fox River and on all those, near and far, who consulted the paper’s Web page. Tetzel was not fasting, Holy Week or not, but it was like a Lenten penance when he turned over the paper and looked at the odious headline. VAGABOND LOVER STRIKES IN FOX RIVER.

  A more magnanimous colleague would have admired Rebecca’s story on Eugene Schmidt. The name was always in quotation marks in the story, and no wonder. Rebecca had scared up court records in Charleston, where one Marcus Matthews had legally changed his name to Eugene Schmidt. And why would Marcus Matthews change his name? Because Ma
rcus Matthews was not his name. The little man who had been a frequent presence at the St. Hilary senior center had been born in Durham, North Carolina, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Collins. Their son had been baptized Thomas. Photocopies of the relevant documents accompanied the story. Allusion was made to Tom Collins’s lucrative if brief career as an evangelist on the margins of the Bible Belt. The swath that “Eugene Schmidt” had cut at the senior center was described at length. Tetzel noted that Natalie Armstrong was not named, and an unnamed widow in Detroit had refused to be interviewed. A sequel was promised for tomorrow, “the first in a series of follow-ups to this remarkable story.”

  Tetzel flung the paper away, aiming at the wastebasket, missing, and it lay scattered on the floor. Rebecca—Rebecca!—had eclipsed him. Menteur had called him “old boy,” as if he were over the hill, but Rebecca was at least as old as he was. Now Tuttle was patronizing him. Where would it all end?

  Across the street, as it happened, in his favorite booth in a back corner, a triple bourbon and water before him on the scarred surface. The oblivion alcohol promised beckoned. Any self-respecting man would go on a weeklong toot in circumstances like these. Where had sobriety ever gotten him? Tetzel drank, he brooded, and then down the dark tunnel of his mind a weak light went on. It grew brighter and brighter. My God! Out of the nettle of despair he plucked the flower of hope. The ineffable Tuttle had dropped the means of redemption in his lap, and he had not recognized it. He straightened in the booth; he strove for consecutive thought. The idea that had come to him, while dangerous, was a natural, a smasharoo.

  Augie Liberati had been indicted for assault and battery committed on Jason Burke, but the the motive for this action had so far been left vague. Why would Augie beat Jason Burke to a pulp and take the trouble to make it seem that Jason had been drunk as a lord at the time? What was Jason Burke to him or he to Jason Burke? Think, Gerry, think. Jason had just come into a bundle of money, money controlled, however, by his estranged wife. Augie Liberati was Carmela’s business partner. Business partner? Tetzel had listened while Maxine Flood, a gofer in the detective division, had said in a carrying whisper to those at her table in the cafeteria that there had been something going on between Augie and Carmela. But Carmela was still married to Jason. Jason was thus an obstacle to Augie’s uniting himself with the custodian and doubtless rightful heir of all Jason’s money.