The Widow's Mate

by Ralph McInerny

  “Oh, Earl,” Edna said.

  “I’d rather go back to repairing television sets than have anything to do with that bunch.”

  Mission accomplished without need for a word on his part. There seemed to be a lesson there. But then it was foolish to think that anyone could have more concern about himself than Earl. The sweet taste of freedom was still fresh for him, and he had no intention of jeopardizing it.

  “Not that I think it will happen. The old man, Luke, really chewed out Frank Looney when he heard of it.”

  Marie came and went throughout the meal, more frequently than seemed necessary, her eyes cast down, her manner that of a menial. It did not help when Edna praised the food. Marie gave her a wintry smile and disappeared through the swinging door into the kitchen.

  Marie was vulnerable to Earl’s praise, though, and then he got up to examine the hinges on the swinging door. “I never saw any like these. You got a screwdriver, Marie?”

  Marie found the tool, and Earl proceeded to tighten up the hinges. She asked him to take a look at the back door, too. “It’s not a swinging door, of course, but it seems a little tilted.”

  They disappeared into the kitchen, and Edna looked at Father Dowling. “The house has never been as shipshape as it is since he got home.”

  Marie did sit when she brought Earl back, and she insisted that he have another serving of her pineapple upside-down cake. She beamed at his appetite. “Greg Packer was the same.”

  Earl stopped eating and stared at her. He put down his fork. “Why do you mention him?”

  Too late, Marie seemed to recognize her mistake. Both Greg and Earl had spent time in Joliet. Edna, too, was quietly indignant. Marie retreated in confusion, and when she was gone, Edna told Earl, obviously for the first time, that Greg Packer spent time at the center. Whatever Earl’s thoughts, he clearly had no intention of expressing them.

  After the Hospers left, Marie again fell silent, but it was almost welcome now. It was as if she were giving herself the silent treatment.

  12

  They told Luke Flanagan that on the upper floors of the John Hancock you could feel the building sway. It must be like living on shipboard. His own apartment was on the top floor of the retirement community, and his windows faced the lake. It was better than television. He could sit there, looking out at the constantly altering surface of the lake, metallic gray, streaks of the brightest blue and all the shades in between, and the water just kept rolling in night and day. When he couldn’t sleep, he would sit in the dark and enjoy the lights on the lake, reflections, some passing ship far out, sailboats bobbing in the marina, their masts doing what the Hancock Building was said to do. There was no sway in his building, but the lake offered constant proof of the influence of distant planets on the earth, the tides recording the pushes and pulls from outer space.

  His apartment itself didn’t interest him. There wasn’t a stick of furniture from the house in Fox River, no photographs to invite grief or self-pity; he might have been living in a hotel. What else was the place? Temporary housing on the last leg of life’s journey. There had been one photograph of Dora, but he put it in a drawer after he started fritzing around with Maud.

  “Maud what?”

  She had a square face and what had once been red hair. “You won’t laugh?”

  “Try me.”

  “Lynn.” She waited.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Well, I won’t explain it.”

  Until he did get it, Maud seemed some riddle he had to unravel. He began to spend a lot of time with her in the common recreation room he had hitherto avoided. She seemed genuinely interested in the concrete business.

  “I supplied the cement that fireproofed McCormick Place.”

  “You did?”

  “Remember the fire that nearly destroyed it?”

  He liked her laughter. She liked beer. That got them out of their building and up the street to what Luke began to call their dive.

  “Have you ever seen a Franciscan?” she asked.

  “In here?”

  “Our place is named after them.”

  “That’s because you might just as well take the vow of poverty when you settle there.”

  “I don’t think there are any Franciscans.”

  “Maybe it’s because the place is for the birds. We used to have Franciscans in our parish in Fox River.”

  They never talked much about their families, but he had the sense that she was as disappointed in her offspring as he was in his. Just a long sigh and dismissive wave when she mentioned her three sons. One was in Alaska, another in Santiago, Chile; the third was a Trappist.

  “A monk?

  She nodded. “He went in right out of the army. If I see him once a year, I’m lucky.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Kentucky.”

  There wasn’t much Luke could say to that. Parish priests were mysterious enough for him. He gave her the story of Wally in dribs and drabs. She was a good audience, but then her hearing wasn’t much better than his. The slam and bang of cement mixers had deadened the nerves in both ears. He found hearing aids useless.

  So had she. She stuck a finger in each ear and said, “Digital hearing aids.”

  She was fun. From time to time, there was a wedding in their community, a twilight union between two lonely people.

  “What’s the point?” Luke asked.

  “I’ll buy you a book.”

  “He’s older than I am.”

  You couldn’t watch a golf match on television anymore without being assailed by commercials for Viagra. That must be the explanation.

  “Some people don’t learn from their mistakes,” she chirped. It seemed a rebuff.

  “They’ll save money, anyway. One apartment instead of two.”

  “And he gets a cook and housemaid.”

  “You cook?”

  “Are you proposing?”

  It began as a joke between them, but after a while Luke wasn’t sure. Mentioning the possibility of remarriage to Amos Cadbury had been a preemptive strike. He wanted to hear a reaction to the possibility in the real world. Well, in Fox River. One day he drove Maud to Fox River and showed her Flanagan Concrete.

  “You still own it?”

  “My nephew Frank runs it.”

  He parked, and they watched one of the trucks emerge from the gate, the great mixer mounted on it turning slowly. Luke explained to her the process. “I started paving sidewalks and pouring the floors of residential garages. It grew from that.”

  “Your monument.”

  “Set in concrete.”

  Her husband had been a dentist. He had worn false teeth.

  “These are mine,” she said.

  “So are these.”

  A gift horse? She laughed when he said it. She was fun to be with.

  * * *

  He had been alone the time he dropped in at the office and Frank told him he had been approached by one of the Pianones who wanted to invest in Flanagan Concrete. Frank seemed to find the offer attractive. “We could double the business.”

  “Frank, you do that and I’ll can you and take it all back.”

  “It’s just a business proposal, Luke.”

  “Sure it is. How long do you think you’d last if they got a foot in the door?”

  Frank hadn’t thought of that. He had a good head for cement but not much else. Unless he was thinking of returning to the Looney family’s old habits. The fact that gambling was now legal and the Pianones had a lock on the local casinos made them seem legitimate. Luke drove immediately downtown and chewed out Robertson, the police chief.

  When Luke mentioned the Pianones, Robertson grabbed his arm and pulled him into an inner office, shutting the door. “For God’s sake, Luke, pipe down.”

  “If they try to muscle into my business, I’m holding you responsible.”

  Robertson went pale. Of course, he was chief of police only because the Pianones had put him there. The mayor wa
s another Pianone puppet. Ye gods, what a town.

  Luke went down a floor and talked with Cy Horvath, who listened to him with an unchanged expression. If you could choose sons, he would have picked Cy. Why the hell hadn’t Wally been influenced by Cyril Horvath rather than Greg Packer?

  Cy said, “If they’re serious, they’ll apply pressure.”

  “What kind of pressure?”

  “You got any weak spots?”

  After he said it, Cy fell silent. They were both thinking of Wally. Was that the meaning of the discovery of his body in a Flanagan cement mixer? The way Wally had died, along with the Pianone interest in Flanagan Concrete, suggested dark possibilities. Cy Horvath seemed to be having the same thoughts.

  The real mystery was where the hell Wally had been during the years between his disappearance and the finding of his body. Luke had put Amos onto that.

  13

  Most of those staying at the Whitehall were out-of-towners, tourists intent on exploring the Magnificent Mile or Navy Pier, taking guided cruises on the Chicago River, and patronizing the city’s restaurants and theaters. Not a few managed to get baseball tickets when either of the two Chicago teams was in town. The dress code in the Whitehall dining room was, given all this, informal, and Tuttle in his wrinkled seersucker suit stood out. The little lawyer had been tardy in his arrival, mumbling something about the interurban train he had ridden from Fox River. Now they were ensconced at a corner table, Tuttle on the banquette. Behind it was a huge mirror, but no multiplication of the man could have instilled the confidence Sandra Bochenski longed to feel in him. She reminded herself that this was the lawyer Melissa Flanagan had relied on to conduct a search for her husband.

  “The trail has grown cold after all these years,” Tuttle said when she asked if he had begun his investigation.

  “He had to be somewhere!”

  “Very likely far from here. Given all the publicity, anyone who recognized him would have informed the police.”

  Sandra thought of Ferret, the manager of the building in which she had lived before leaving for California. Surely Ferret would have recognized the man who was such a frequent visitor at her apartment if he had come upon a photograph in the newspaper.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you told me. About the plan the two of you had to begin life anew in California.”

  “He never showed up.”

  Tuttle moved the bottle of beer he had ordered when the waiter took their order for drinks. “Let me tell you what the police would probably think.”

  “Have you told them?”

  Tuttle shook his head. “You sure they don’t already know about you and Flanagan?”

  “How could they?”

  “One of Flanagan’s classmates is a police detective. Cy Horvath.”

  Just like that the memory came. She had met Wally in their favorite Loop bar, and there was a man with him, a man he later told her a bit about. He was a detective with the Fox River police. That had been months before she and Wally had decided to go off together, but she had sensed the disapproval in that hulking figure. The name could have been Horvath. Sandy was suddenly sure that was his name. Wally had also mentioned that Horvath, like half the men who knew her, had a crush on his wife. Surely a detective would have remembered that encounter when Mrs. Flanagan reported her husband missing.

  “What would the police think?”

  “That the two of you did meet in California. Years passed, and there was a falling-out…”

  “I married another man.”

  Tuttle opened his notebook and waited, pencil poised.

  “Gregory Packer. He may have had something to do with what happened to Wally.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he seems to be courting Melissa Flanagan now.”

  Tuttle’s hand went out to the tweed hat that was on the banquette beside him. She could see that the money she had given him was still inside. Would he put it on? He seemed to decide against this. He turned to a fresh page in his notebook. “I want to have as detailed a record as you can give me of your years in California.”

  She should have been prepared for this, but it unnerved her to have him scribbling away while she reconstructed her California years—San Diego first, meeting Greg, their marriage.

  “What happened?”

  “He hit me.”

  Tuttle frowned.

  “I realized that all along he was after my money.”

  “What money is that?”

  She told him about her portfolio and the way it had increased under Wally’s tutelage. “It was to be our nest egg.”

  “Who knew of that?”

  “No one.”

  “But you told your husband.”

  “I don’t know how he could have, but I came to believe he already knew.”

  “How could he have found out?”

  “I don’t know. Have I mentioned that he had known Wally when they were kids?”

  “He did?”

  “They went to the same school.”

  “DePaul?”

  “The same grade school, their parish school.”

  “St. Hilary’s.”

  “Yes.”

  Tuttle sat back and looked at her. “You wanted to know what the police would think? You have to understand their mentality. They are going to wonder if maybe you and your husband didn’t decide to get more money out of Wally Flanagan.”

  “He had disappeared!”

  “They’ll wonder if he really did.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  This was no way to enjoy a meal. Eventually the waiter took away their scarcely touched entrées. Sandy asked for a manhattan.

  “Another beer,” Tuttle said to the waiter’s inquiry.

  They fell silent while they waited. When the drinks came, Tuttle looked at the bottle of beer and shook his head. “I could buy a six-pack for what that is costing you.”

  She smiled. “I can afford it.”

  “Good.”

  “Look, Mr. Tuttle, you are making your job seem to be investigating me. I am hiring you to find out where Wally was all those years.”

  “And you think your former husband knew?”

  “I think he found out.”

  “And killed Wally?”

  It was a terrible thing to accuse someone of, but yes, she did think that.

  After a time, they withdrew to the lounge. Tuttle went over the chronicle he was constructing of her years in California: San Diego, then Oxnard, where she resumed her maiden name.

  “He might have located you.”

  “I doubt that he even tried. He found someone else.”

  It seemed a useless exercise, but other memories came, filling in the chronology he was creating. None of it seemed to have the least importance, apart from her ill-considered marriage to Gregory Packer.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he cautioned her, “but I’ll have to verify all this. It will be your protection if the police get interested.”

  She did not object, because guilt had been her companion from the time she and Wally had decided to go off together. He had assured her that he would leave his wife amply provided for, but that didn’t lessen the awfulness of what they were doing. The ease with which he talked of leaving his wife had given her pause, as if she had some intimation that he would do the same to her. She had felt an odd closeness to his wife when she gave up waiting in San Diego, knowing Wally would not come to her. If he could betray his wife, he certainly could do the same to her. And he had. Of course, there were her investments, but then he had left his wife well provided for, too. How could she not wonder where he had gone, what he had been doing, during all those years before his body was found in one of his father’s cement-mixing trucks?

  “If I were you, I would begin with Gregory Packer,” she said.

  “I’ve already found out a thing or two about him.”

  “Oh.”

  “He spent three years in prison, right here in Illinois
.”

  “He did!” It seemed best to pretend surprise.

  She wanted all the details, and Tuttle gave them to her. Her sagging confidence in the little lawyer reversed itself. Maybe he would find out where Wally had been and what had happened to him at the last. Apparently he hadn’t found out about Greg’s marriage to the woman who owned the driving range. It was her all-too-convenient death that made Sandra sure Greg could have had something to do with Wally’s horrible end.

  Alone in her room, a thought she realized she had been avoiding formulated itself. What would it be like to sit down with Wally’s wife and talk about what he had done to the two of them? She imagined them commiserating with one another. That was crazy, of course. How could Melissa Flanagan feel that their cases were at all similar? Besides, Melissa had renewed her old acquaintance with Greg Packer. Sandra sat perfectly still. Melissa ought to know what a monster Greg was.

  14

  Marie Murkin had mounted the steps to the back porch, grocery bags dangling from both hands, and was confronting the obstacle of the door when there was a clatter of steps behind her, a hand reached around her, and the door was opened.

  “Madame!”

  She looked up into the smiling face of Gregory Packer. “Have you been into the altar wine again?”

  “Ho ho.”

  He followed her into the kitchen and helped her put the groceries on the table. She took off her hat, picked up the phone, pressed a button, and told Edna she was back. Father Dowling was on his monthly retreat, and Marie had asked Edna to monitor the rectory phone in her absence.

  “No calls,” Edna said.

  “Thank you, dear.” Marie turned to Greg. She tried to look stern but began to melt under the power of his boyish grin. For weeks, she had been resenting the fact that after his initial visit she had seen him only from afar, usually in the company of Melissa Flanagan. “And how are you getting on with the Widow Flanagan?”

  He laughed in delight. “Is that what you call her?”

  “That is what the other old ladies call her.”

  “Other than yourself.”

  He ducked when she took a playful swing at him.

  While she put away the groceries, he sat at the table looking on benevolently. “Do you know what I like about being back? Nothing has changed. It’s like a time warp. Here you are, doing what you’ve always done, peaceful and serene while all around you everything else is going to hell.”