The Widow's Mate

by Ralph McInerny

  Melissa called Amos when the news was brought to her, and Amos went with her to McDivitt’s Funeral Home, where McDivitt took Amos aside and advised against exposing Melissa to the horror of the remains. In the funeral director’s office the ring was produced. Mellisa cupped it in the palm of her hand, staring at it, her calmness eerie. Then she held the ring up so she could read the inscription inside. She handed it to Amos. MELISSA AND WALLACE. 14.II.76. Amos could remember the wedding, performed by a trio of Franciscans at St. Hilary’s Church. He stood and put his arm around Melissa, and finally she cried. He felt the shudder of her body beneath his arm; he and McDivitt avoided one another’s eyes. Amos urged Melissa to her feet and led her outside. He held the door of the car open, but before she got in he handed her the ring. She looked at it almost in horror and shook her head. Amos had no choice but to put it into his pocket, get her settled, and drive off. On the way, he telephoned Luke Flanagan.

  “Bring her to the house.” Luke seemed relieved that Melissa had turned first to Amos rather than her father-in-law in her distress.

  Melissa had continued to rely on Amos during the following dreadful days. He made the arrangements with McDivitt and with the friars of St. Hilary’s, making sure that the Flanagans were kept informed. Father Dowling was on retreat and Mrs. Flanagan, a Third Order Franciscan, wanted the friars. On the day of the funeral, Melissa insisted that Amos sit with her in the front pew. Luke was on the other side of the new widow, then his daughters, then Frank Looney. The ceremony had been penitential for Amos. The friars were in the grip of the new view that the departed could be assumed to be in heaven, even now enjoying the beatific vision. A funeral thus became an occasion for rejoicing rather than mourning, beaming faces, bouncy music, and, of course, eulogies afterward. The homily had already canonized Wallace Flanagan, but now a number of friends gave testimonials about the man whose remains—membra disjecta—were in the huge casket in the main aisle. Anecdotes, jokes—it might have been a roast, and then, thank God, one of the speakers broke down and wept. He could not finish what he had wanted to say and finally stumbled back to his pew. Amos learned afterward that his name was Gregory Packer. Outside the church, Amos went up to him and shook his hand wordlessly, but it was meant to thank him for the grief he had displayed. Packer seemed surprised. Then he grinned. “I don’t know what got into me.”

  “Call it a human impulse. And a Christian duty.”

  Packer stared at him. Then once more that unsettling grin.

  At the cemetery Amos mentioned it to Luke.

  “He was a bad influence on Wally.”

  “At least he had the sense to weep at a funeral.”

  Luke shrugged his shoulders. “He was always putting ideas into Wally’s head. Things might have been different if those two hadn’t known one another.”

  Luke seemed to be suggesting that Packer had put the idea of giving up the family business into Wallace’s head.

  “Come to the house, Amos.”

  There were mountains of catered food, as well as Jameson’s for the Irish, who knew what a funeral was for.

  Melissa did not stay long and was soon convoyed away by classmates from Barat. Luke just shook his head when Amos produced the wedding ring. Amos put it back in his pocket and later into his office safe. Eventually, he was sure, Melissa would want to have it.

  But the transfer had never been made. From time to time, Amos noticed the sealed envelope in his safe marked FLANAGAN WEDDING RING. Once he had taken it back to his desk, opened the envelope, and held the ring up to the light. That was when he noticed the legend on the outer surface of the ring. TILL DEATH DO US PART.

  * * *

  Amos shifted on his knees and managed to drive away these memories and attend to Father Dowling’s noon Mass. Afterward, he returned with Roger Dowling to the rectory, where Marie first served an avocado salad that elicited Amos’s praise.

  “Avocado as in lawyer?” Father Dowling said. “This must be one of Marie’s theme luncheons.”

  “I hope not,” Amos said when the salad was followed by an omelet that melted on the tongue. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Is that another reference to my law practice?”

  Marie ignored this, but she tuned in when Amos mentioned having seen Melissa Flanagan at the noon Mass.

  “She’s a frequent presence at the center,” Marie said.

  “At her age?”

  “You’d be surprised.” Marie did not say how.

  Father Dowling said, “She tells me she has been traveling a lot and now wants to settle down.”

  “The Flanagans never really left the parish,” Marie said.

  “She’s a widow, isn’t she?” Father Dowling asked.

  “Yes.” Amos let it go at that. “Marie, you deserve a cordon bleu.”

  “To go with her black belt?”

  After lunch, Amos called his driver. Father Dowling came outside with him, and they waited for his car. On the playground, groups of the elderly were visible. It was difficult to think of Melissa Flanagan in such a setting.

  3

  Father Dowling sometimes thought that his friend Captain Phil Keegan regarded the baseball season as the secular equivalent of the liturgical year’s Ordinary Time. Several times a week now, Phil came to the rectory to follow the fortunes of the Cubs. Even the smallness of Father Dowling’s television screen no longer drew his complaints, but then baseball is a game that does not wholly absorb the attention of viewers. These were the occasions when the pastor of St. Hilary’s was made privy to the current activities of the homicide division of the Fox River police, of which Phil was the head. It seemed the Pianone family was trying to buy into Flanagan Concrete.

  “How does that concern your department?”

  “It doesn’t, but old Luke Flanagan complained to Robertson about it,” Phil growled. Robertson, the chief of police, was a creature of the Pianones, whose influence in Fox River was pervasive.

  “Hasn’t Luke retired?”

  “His nephew Frank Looney took over some years ago. Luke might have been waiting for definitive news of what happened to his son. I suspect the Pianones made Frank Looney an offer he can’t refuse.”

  Whatever the tainted sources of their money, the Pianones were interested in concealing it with legitimate investments.

  “They already have half the unions. I suppose that’s their wedge, the drivers.”

  “Is that a crime?”

  Another growl. “Nothing will stay legitimate long if the Pianones are involved. They will soon be in control of all major construction in Fox River.”

  It was Phil’s cross to be running the one division of the police force that wasn’t under the Pianone thumb. Of course, he’d had to accept Peanuts Pianone into his division, but Peanuts was regarded as too dim to be used by the family. Phil had agreed to Peanuts as his insurance against any further Pianone incursion into homicide. Into the investigating side of it, that is.

  The young pitcher who had been part of the trade for Greg Maddux was on the mound for the Cubs and hadn’t allowed a hit in four innings. Moreover, he had stroked a homer over the left field wall in the second, putting the Cubs ahead 1–0.

  “And they said that without Maddux the Cubs were dead,” Phil gloated.

  Phil’s remark about the Pianone control of the drivers at Flanagan Concrete disturbed Father Dowling. Earl Hospers, Edna’s husband, had finally been released from Joliet, and he had found employment driving one of the Flanagan mixers. If the Pianones got involved in Flanagan’s, it might be construed as a violation of Earl’s parole. He asked Phil if that was possible.

  “All he has to do is keep his own nose clean.”

  “I’m sure he’ll do that.”

  Phil said nothing. Earl Hospers was something of a delicate subject. Phil had been involved in the arrest and conviction of Edna’s husband, a case so complicated that it was difficult to prove that a murder had been committed. The only one who hadn’t doubted Earl’s guilt was E
arl himself, and he would have felt unjustly treated if he had not been sent to Joliet as an accessory to manslaughter. He had been a model prisoner. Father Dowling had proposed to Edna that she turn the then empty parish school into a center for the increasing number of seniors in the parish, and during the long years of loneliness Edna had raised their children, made the center flourish, and remained loyal to her husband. Now they were reunited, and any possibility that their refound peace could be disturbed was bothersome.

  “I wonder if I should mention this to Edna.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  Of course Phil wouldn’t. Edna’s not wholly reasonable resentment of Phil’s role in Earl’s misfortune had never gone away, and Phil avoided Edna when he visited St. Hilary’s, and vice versa. Father Dowling decided he would mention it to Edna. Perhaps he could devise some parish job for Earl to get him out of harm’s way. He voiced the thought to Phil.

  “This place will be crawling with parolees.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I understand that Gregory Packer has been attending the center.”

  “Packer!”

  Phil looked at him. “You didn’t know?”

  Marie Murkin had appeared in the doorway of the study, bearing another bottle of beer for Phil. She was staring at him. “What was that about Gregory Packer?”

  There were pastors who would have called this eavesdropping, but Father Dowling was not a stickler for protocol. Besides, Marie, for all her nosiness, was an invaluable asset to the parish. True enough, she sometimes acted as if the cardinal had assigned Father Dowling to St. Hilary’s as her assistant, but this was a pardonable consequence of her sense of seniority. After all, she had already been housekeeper for some years when Roger Dowling became pastor. Her relief that the parish had finally been delivered from the Franciscans made her eager to tell Father Dowling stories about his predecessors, but he soon put a stop to that. Phil, of course, was not surprised by Marie’s question.

  Father Dowling asked her if she knew Gregory Packer.

  “He came to see me.”

  “When was that?”

  “You were busy at the time or I would have brought him in to meet you.”

  “Did he want to see me?”

  “He didn’t say. He was an altar boy here long ago.”

  Phil grunted. “Some altar boy.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Marie demanded.

  “He’s had a checkered career. He spent a few years in Joliet at public expense.”

  Marie dropped into a chair, her mouth open. “No!”

  Phil was distracted by the game and leaned toward the set. A long fly to right nearly cleared the wall, but with a heroic effort the fielder climbed the ivy and caught the ball. Phil cheered. The no-hitter was intact. He reached for the beer that Marie still held, but she pulled it out of reach.

  “Tell me about Gregory Packer,” she demanded.

  Phil seemed to have forgotten mentioning him, but Father Dowling was also waiting for him to speak. So Phil told them about the checkered career of Gregory Packer.

  “Five years ago or so, he had been tending bar on the Near North Side in Chicago, and his employer accused him of increasing his salary by failing to put money in the cash register. He had fiddled with the gizmo that prints out bills for the customers—pretty ingenious—but then something made the night manager keep an eye on him. Not only was he undercharging for drinks, he was pocketing other receipts. The manager told the owner, they concentrated a camera on him, and when the thing went to court the trial was over almost before it began.”

  “When did he get out?”

  “Early this spring. Cy Horvath had known the guy years ago, saw an item in the Sun-Times, and looked into it. He noticed him here a week or so ago.”

  Marie had given Phil his beer during his recital, but now she looked as if she wanted to take it back. She stood. “Why are you hounding him?”

  “Hounding him?”

  “Oh,” Marie cried, throwing up her hands and hurrying back to her kitchen.

  Phil looked at Father Dowling. “What’s that all about?”

  “Well, she said he was an altar boy here.”

  “He was, at the same time Cy was.”

  “Cy was an altar boy?”

  “Why not?”

  “No reason in the world. It’s just that I never heard it before.”

  “Cy doesn’t talk about Cy much.”

  “You said this embezzling took place in Chicago five years ago. Was that his first scrape with the law?”

  “Well, it was his first conviction. He had been in the navy and was discharged in San Diego and stayed on. Women liked him, and he seems to have been a kind of gigolo. But then a complaint was filed. He was accused of writing checks on a lady friend’s account, a widow who owned the driving range he managed.”

  “And?”

  “She withdrew the complaint when he proposed marriage.”

  “Did he marry her?”

  “Yes.” Phil sipped the beer, his eye on the screen. “A civil ceremony.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, she divorced him. Got a court order to keep him away from her. That’s when he came back to Chicago and got the job tending bar.”

  Sounds in the hallway indicated that Marie was listening in. Father Dowling raised a hand and nodded toward the door. Phil understood. Not that he wanted to go on talking about Gregory Packer. In the eighth inning, a grounder scooted by the second baseman, and the batter was safe on a close call at first.

  “Damn,” Phil commented.

  4

  When Phil Keegan told Cy Horvath of Marie Murkin’s reaction to learning about Gregory Packer, there was no alteration of expression on the lieutenant’s Hungarian countenance. Telling Phil that he had known Greg Packer when they were altar boys at St. Hilary’s had been meant to explain why he had checked on Greg, but Phil seemed to find nothing odd about his curiosity. The truth was that the memory of Greg had been playing at the edges of Cy’s mind for years, ever since the gruesome killing of Wally Flanagan. Wally, too, had been an altar boy, and he and Greg had been thick as thieves until Greg went off to the navy, and they had all been infatuated with Melissa. It was in the hope of getting a glimpse of her that Cy had driven out to St. Hilary’s and parked on the street next to the school and waited. He had learned from Luke that she was back in the parish, living in the family home Luke had turned over to her when he rented a retirement apartment near the Magnificent Mile.

  “What’s she doing now?”

  “She likes that parish center Father Dowling started. I went there just once. Bunch of old bastards reliving their lives.”

  “Why would Melissa like a center full of seniors?” She was Cy’s age.

  “I never did understand that woman.”

  So Cy had driven out there and parked and, sure enough, caught a glimpse of Melissa. She was as beautiful as ever. He immediately recognized the guy she was with, too. Greg Packer. Cy had thought Greg was still in Joliet. He must be the reason Melissa liked the center, but neither of them was in the age group of the people that hung around there. Seeing the two of them invited him to put two and two together in a way all his police training warned against, but he couldn’t help it. Nor could he help thinking of the person missing from that scene, Wally Flanagan.

  * * *

  More murders go unsolved than are ever solved, of course, and in Fox River there were investigations that ran into the protective net with which politicians had surrounded the Pianones. If the body in the cement mixer had been anyone other than Wally Flanagan, a possible Pianone connection would have been Cy’s first thought, but that made no sense. Wally had been set free by his father when Luke turned over to him years in advance what he would have inherited. Wally had no interest at all in the cement business that explained all the money he received. So he had bought a membership in a brokerage firm, Kruikshank and Sharpe, and soon became the hotshot of the office. In a few years, he set himself up
as an independent financial counselor and went about enriching his clients and adding to his own wealth. During that period, Cy had seen Wally only once, in a Loop bar where he had stopped after checking something out with Chicago homicide. His old friend had exuded prosperity, but what they had in common was the fact that they had been kids together.

  “Missie wants to move into the old parish, Cy.” He meant Melissa.

  “It’s changed.”

  “Of course it’s changed. Everything changes.” He looked almost glum when he said it. “So what are you doing?”

  Cy told him.

  “Hoping to last long enough to get your pension? Listen, Cy, let me have a thousand and I’ll get a portfolio started for you. Add regular amounts and I all but guarantee you your retirement will come years sooner and be a helluva lot more comfortable.”

  In those days, the thought of handing over a thousand dollars to start an investment portfolio had all the never-never quality of winning the lottery. Cy told Wally he would think about it.

  “Don’t forget, I have a lot of concrete experience.” He punched Cy’s arm to make sure he got the joke.

  That’s when the blonde joined them. She was tall and suited and gorgeous, and only an idiot would doubt that something was going on between the two.

  “This is Sandy,” Wally said. He added, “Another client.”

  Sandy laughed. Cy got out of there. In his line of work, nothing surprised him much, but the idea that the man who had won Melissa would fool around with even a dish like Sandy almost shocked Cy. Of course he remembered the woman when Wally disappeared. During the investigation, he got access to Wally’s office records and identified her. Sandra Bochenski. When he went to her address, a posh apartment house on the North Shore, he learned that she had moved.