The Widow's Mate

by Ralph McInerny

  “Had you found out anything?”

  “Let me put it this way. When you heard Packer was dead, who was the first one you thought might have done it?”

  “Me!”

  “You?”

  “Let me tell you a little secret.” She clutched her housecoat to her breast. “That garage apartment? Wally and I used to go there sometimes. Have you ever seen it? It’s nicer than this place. There we were, his father only a short distance off in the big house, snug as bugs in a rug.” A wistful smile crossed her face like clouds across the sky. “He said he felt like a kid again in that apartment, before his life got complicated, before he got married. There’s a secret entrance, you know.”

  “Secret.”

  “Through the garage, a trapdoor and ladder. We always got into and out of the apartment that way.” She went on to describe that second way into the garage apartment. The memory seemed to brighten her.

  “That would have enabled you to get up there and catch Packer unawares?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t me who killed him.”

  “Of course not. So who could it have been?”

  She looked at him reflectively. “Maybe I would still like you to find out what you can.”

  “Good.”

  “Have you found out anything?” she asked again.

  Tuttle thought of the lobby, he thought of Ferret, he thought of …

  “What do you know of the Pianone family?”

  “Good Lord.”

  “You’ve heard of them.”

  “Wally had all kinds of gory stories about them. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Once, he said that maybe they were the answer to his problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “His wife. Of course, he was just kidding, but when we were up in that apartment above the garage, we were both like teenagers, plotting against the adults. Sometimes I wish we had just left things as they were then. He’d be alive, I would never have met Greg…”

  Her voice trailed away, and Tuttle realized that she might be sitting on top of the world in one sense, in this apartment, and was still a good-looking woman, but she was all alone.

  “You’ve got this place for how long?”

  “Just a few months. I’m going to have to decide on my future during that time.” She looked toward the lake. “My father is not half a mile from here.”

  “No kidding.”

  “In a retirement home. Not that it looks like one. The building is pretty much like this one. It’s the least I can do for him, not that he ever did much for me. A funny thing. The newspaper stories about Wally’s father? He lives there, too.”

  “A small world.”

  “What about the Pianones?”

  “Why don’t I hold that until I learn more?”

  Ferret was out on the sidewalk having a smoke, cupping the cigarette as if he were engaged in an illegal act. Maybe he was. He held it behind him when Tuttle went over to him.

  “When did the bimbo get stashed here?”

  “I’m sorry I told you.”

  “It will go easier for you because you did.”

  “You sound like a cop.”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “That’s worse.”

  “You may be right. Keep the faith.”

  Tuttle went jauntily up the street. He still had a client. He was so elated that he even considered calling Hazel and letting her know—but why spoil such a wonderful day?

  16

  As Melissa Flanagan had insisted, she had as much opportunity as her father-in-law to kill Gregory Packer, but there were several things wrong with that. She had no motive, and it turned out that she had been at St. Hilary’s talking with Father Dowling more or less at the crucial time.

  “Cyril, you know how close St. Hilary’s is to the Flanagan house.”

  “I was raised in that parish.”

  “Then you know I could have seen Father Dowling and gone back to the house, before or after, during that stretch of time.”

  The more she insisted, the guiltier she made Luke look. Even so, it was a nice gesture, throwing herself on her sword for her father-in-law. Jacuzzi, the prosecutor, was eager to get moving against Luke Flanagan.

  “Motive we got, but who cares, we’ve got the weapon, and we’ve got his admission he was there. His prints are all over the wrench. He threw it away. We were lucky to find it.”

  “We?”

  Jacuzzi ignored this. “Murder is hard to make stick, so we go for manslaughter.”

  Robertson, the chief, was equally eager, saying that they didn’t want to be accused of favoritism because Luke Flanagan was such a big man in the construction world in Fox River. The chief’s eagerness was enough to get Phil Keegan to dig in his heels. Robertson was, of course, a political appointee, a lousy cop who had been made chief ten years ago, but politics in Fox River meant the Pianones.

  “Why would they set up Luke Flanagan, Cy?”

  Cy looked at his boss, but the disappointment he felt did not make it into his unchanged expression. No one was less happy about the mess Luke Flanagan was in than Cy, but if this became a pro-and anti-Pianone struggle, they were going to lose. “The Pianones didn’t drive him out to his old house, Phil.”

  “The wrench, Cy. The wrench. The only fresh prints on it are Luke’s. He has an explanation for that.”

  “What if he hadn’t picked it up? There’d be no case.”

  “That was dumb, sure.”

  “Meaning no one planned it, Phil. He wasn’t set up.”

  “You think he killed Packer?”

  “I think we better find out who did or Luke is going to trial.”

  “That’s been your assignment all along.”

  Whatever had happened to Greg Packer seemed connected to the disappearance and death of Wally Flanagam years ago. Cy didn’t know how, and he had been trained not to rely on hunches, but that was the hunch he had. So Cy went back to K&S to talk with Brenda Kelly.

  * * *

  Her head dawned over the counter, a phone pressed to her ear. She smiled and waggled her fingers, indicating it wouldn’t be a sec. She made a face when she put down the phone. “The Dow went down yesterday. You’d think it was the Titanic.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Wanna go for coffee?”

  “How about lunch?”

  “Great. I’ll save the one I brought for tomorrow.”

  He took her to the Great Wall. She began to sing something from The Mikado when he asked her if she liked Chinese.

  “Isn’t that Japanese?”

  “They all look alike.”

  “Careful, careful.”

  They ordered, their food came, and they began to eat.While they ate, they talked about Sylvia.

  “She didn’t go on with you to K and S, so where did she work?”

  “Oh, she left town.”

  “Don’t tell me she went to California.”

  “Oh, no. Minnesota.”

  “Minnesota? Why Minnesota?”

  Brenda took a bite of an egg roll, watching him as she chewed. “Why all the questions?”

  He developed it for her, against all his rules, a little possible scenario. Wally Flanagan had planned to go off with one woman, at least that’s what he told her, but then he disappeared. He never showed up in California. Sylvia left town. “Maybe she and Wally went off together.”

  “Do you think I didn’t think of that?”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “How could I just ask a thing like that?”

  “What you could do is find out where in Minnesota she lived.”

  “There’s only one problem, I can’t get in touch with her. I don’t have a phone number, and she doesn’t answer my e-mails. That’s how I got in touch with her before. By e-mail. When I saw her at the wake, I tried to talk with her, but she and her man just buzzed out of there.”

  So that went nowhere. With all the cooperation in the world from Minnesota police, it would be a difficult thing t
o find out where Sylvia Beach had spent those years. If she did go off with Wally, what name would he have used? Cy remembered the suspicion he had when they first turned up that California marriage license with Gregory Packer as groom. Well, Gregory Packer had been Gregory Packer, not Wally Flanagan. So he asked colleagues in Minneapolis to see if they could turn up a Gregory Packer living in the state up until a few years ago. It was like dropping money down a well—but two days later he got a message. A Gregory Packer had lived just outside Garrison, Minnesota. He looked it up. Garrison was way up in the North Woods. He got in touch with the county sheriff and faxed him a photo of Wally Flanagan. In a matter of hours he had confirmation. The picture was of the Gregory Packer who had lived near Garrison.

  “How the hell did you find that out?” Phil Keegan said, obviously delighted.

  “Just routine investigating.”

  “Good work.”

  So now they knew where Wally Flanagan had spent those years. Now, if he could only get hold of Sylvia Beach, he could fill in the picture. She ought to know what had brought him back to Fox River all those years ago, presuming he had arrived alive.

  17

  Agnes Lamb had made it as a cop, as a detective. Phil Keegan knew it; even more important, Cy Horvath knew it; and above all, she knew it. At first it was only that she was better than Peanuts Pianone, but that wasn’t saying much. Peanuts was a constant reminder of the limits within which they worked, thanks to the influence of the Pianone family and more proximately because of the fact that said family had Chief Robertson in its pocket. That was one constraint. Another was the untouchables, people with such standing in the community that they were treated with kid gloves. Agnes did not know which of these two constraints grated on her more.

  Jacuzzi was anxious to move forward and bring Luke Flanagan to trial, but now Robertson advised caution. After all, Flanagan was a self-made zillionaire, and even if he had moved to a posh retirement community in Chicago, he remained a Fox River biggie. Also, there was the tragedy of Wallace Flanagan, which remained as a great mute rebuke to the department. They had been unable to locate Luke’s son when he was missing, and when he turned up dead in one of the Flanagan cement mixers he went into the bulging file of unsolved murders. Ever since she had found that wrench in the weeds at the back of the Flanagan property and the lab had identified the prints on it as Luke’s, Agnes had closed the case in her mind. Almost.

  Of course, Luke Flanagan said he was innocent, even though he had volunteered the story that he had been at the garage apartment, discovered the body of Gregory Packer, and then fled. He hadn’t mentioned the wrench then, but after Agnes found it and his prints were identified, he added the detail that he had just picked up the wrench when he tripped over it going up the stairs to the apartment, realized he was still holding it when he fled, and on an impulse heaved it beyond the compost pile into the weeds.

  The story was implausible enough to be true. It might have been Amos Cadbury who picked up that wrench when he went up those stairs later, and he might have done the same thing Luke had—gotten rid of it, or thought he had—but Cadbury at least had reported finding the body. Putting Luke on trial was going to be almost like putting Cadbury in the dock. Agnes wondered if she was unconsciously operating under one of those two constraints when she began to think of extenuating circumstances helpful to Luke Flanagan.

  Forget about the wrench. Think of that apartment, which at the moment of the crime had been the bachelor pad of Gregory Packer. The lab had gone through the place and found only a couple of Packer’s prints.

  “You check those dishes?”

  “We checked those dishes.”

  There wasn’t a dirty dish in evidence. If they had been washed, someone had to stack them in the cupboards, and how are you going to stack dishes without leaving prints on them? The thumb of one of those rubber gloves in the kitchen sink seemed to be at someone’s nose, the fingers waggling at her. Someone had wiped that place clean as a whistle. Agnes could imagine a lawyer making the case that the nature of Luke’s prints on the wrench was compatible with his having picked it up, as he said, but not with his having used it as a weapon. So maybe they weren’t just showing deference to a local icon. Robertson might have been bought and paid for, but Keegan and Cy Horvath weren’t. If that wrench and some mouthing off Luke Flanagan had done about Gregory Packer were their case, they were as likely to lose it as win it. Where did that put them?

  Cy had been trained by Keegan, and she had been trained by Cy, so she knew that an investigation did not consist of making up stories about what might have happened. A little logical jump or two was okay, but the jump had to be from fact to fact. On her way out to the Flanagan house, to take one more good look at the garage apartment, Agnes found herself dwelling on the presence of Marco Pianone at the wake for Gregory Packer.

  “Why was he there?” she asked Cy.

  “He came with that woman.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Sylvia Beach. She worked for Wally Flanagan before he disappeared.”

  “What’s that got to do with Packer?”

  “Showing sympathy with the Flanagans?” He said it as if he dared her to believe it.

  Maybe if she had come alone you could believe that, but if she had come alone who would have given her two thoughts? It was showing up with Marco Pianone that made her noticeable.

  “Is Marco your brother?” she asked Peanuts.

  He looked at her with his little pig eyes. She didn’t get his answer the first time and asked him to repeat it.

  “Cousin!”

  “What’s he do?”

  “Ask him.” He turned and waddled away.

  Marco, she learned, managed a large portion of the Pianone gambling casinos, on land and water, all perfectly legal. Before long the Pianones would be as legitimate as the Looneys had become, what was left of them. Luke Flanagan’s nephew Frank, the one who took over the cement business when Luke’s son decided on high finance, was a Looney. You couldn’t get any straighter than Frank Looney. Agnes had talked with him when they revived the investigation into Wallace Flanagan after the discovery of his body.

  “Why here?” she had asked Frank.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why would the body be jammed into a cement mixer owned by his father? It looks like a message.”

  Frank just shook his head, saying how awful it was.

  She had heard about Luke Flanagan reading the riot act to Robertson because the Pianones had expressed interest in investing in Flanagan Concrete. Now she asked Frank if that was true.

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  “Were they interested?”

  “We talked, sure, but nothing came of it.”

  “Who is we?”

  “They came to me.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Marco Pianone.”

  Maybe if you knew enough, everything in the universe was connected with everything else, all pieces of a huge puzzle that only seemed unrelated. She could jump from one fact about Marco to another, but where did she jump from there?

  * * *

  At the Flanagan house, she pulled into the driveway and parked. A four-bay garage! Well, it went with the house, which looked like a mansion to Agnes. She got out of the car. The site was still ribboned off, and Wimple was on duty, her hips fighting with her uniform skirt for supremacy. She was smiling and moving about. Agnes saw the cord of the earphones crawling up Wimple’s bosom. Even with an iPod this was pretty boring duty. Wimple came toward her, removing the plugs from her ears. “Am I relieved?”

  “To see me?”

  Wimple’s shoulders slumped. “Oh well, only a couple hours left in my shift.”

  “Anyone been nosing around?”

  “Only some woman and Tuttle, the lawyer.”

  “Did you get her name?”

  “I recognized Tuttle.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Just wanted to go into the garage.�
��

  “What for?”

  “The garage isn’t part of the site.”

  “How long were they here?”

  Wimple shrugged, her badge lifting and falling. “Fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour.”

  A side door of the house opened, and Luke Flanagan and Maud Lynn emerged. Agnes went up to them. They were both smiling like a couple of kids. Geez. Melissa Flanagan was standing in the still-open door, and Luke called to her to open the garage door. “If you don’t mind, we have to bail out, Agnes. I’m taking Maud to the airport.”

  They went into the garage, car doors slammed, and soon he was backing out. It was a little tight, with her patrol car there, but he made it. Melissa waved good-bye.

  “Leave the garage door open, will you?” Agnes asked.

  Inside the garage, Agnes looked around, wondering what Tuttle and the unnamed woman had been doing here. She used her flashlight at first, before finding the lights. Only one car was parked here now, in the fourth bay, farthest from the house. There was a workbench with all kinds of tools. Had the wrench come from here? If so, whoever had used it would have had to enter the garage to get it. The sound the garage door made going up should have let Greg Packer know he had company.

  “I’m going up,” she told Wimple when she came out.

  “Want me to shut that door?”

  “Leave it up for now.”

  Agnes lifted the yellow tape and went around to the back of the garage. There was a tag on the door. That was another thing: There had been no prints on the handle of this door, nor on the one upstairs. Both Packer and whoever killed him might have been ghosts.

  She turned on the stair light and mounted slowly, studying each step for anything that might have been overlooked. Nothing. Then she was in the apartment. She went through it systematically, room by room. In the bedroom, the bed was made, neat and tight. Were bachelors such good housekeepers? In the kitchen, she looked at the sink—the gloves were at the lab, of course, not that they had told them anything—and then once more at the neat stacks of dishes in the cupboard. She pushed open the door to the pantry, realizing that she had previously written it off as unimportant. She turned on the light and went in. The main smell was faint: coffee. The shelves held some canned goods. It was when she turned to leave that her shoe caught, and she looked down.