The Widow's Mate

by Ralph McInerny

  She stepped out of the pantry and knelt in the doorway, studying the floor. There seemed to be a rectangular inset in the floor, like the piece of a puzzle that just fit. Did it lift? There seemed nothing to catch hold of. Then she noticed the button attached to the bottom of one of the shelves. She pressed it.

  The inset panel gave a little jerk and then began slowly to lift. Agnes was outside the pantry now, with her flashlight on, watching the panel rise to a right angle with the floor. When she trained her light on the opening, she saw aluminum. The quiet whirring sound clicked on, and then the aluminum moved. Agnes watched it drop and unfold and become a ladder to the garage below.

  Going down it was like climbing a rope in reverse because the sections of the ladder were not rigidly linked. She found herself standing to the right of the workbench. She looked for and found the twin of the button in the pantry. When she pressed it, the ladder folded into itself and lifted. When it was stored, the panel in the ceiling of the garage lifted into place.

  “I thought you went upstairs,” Wimple said when she came out of the garage.

  Agnes just hurried past Wimple to her car and the radio. Wait until Cy heard about that ladder.

  18

  It was the doorman, Ferret, who had put her onto the rental in her old building. Sandra had stopped to greet him when she was out for her run, and he seemed genuinely glad to see her after so many years. Where was she staying? The Whitehall. That was where he sent her the notice of the apartment available for two months. Furnished, of course. Did she want to return to the building she had left long ago with such hopes of a new life? It turned out she did.

  She was closer to her father’s retirement home than she had ever been, and she began to drop by every other day or so, not that he gave a damn. Sandra was his wayward daughter, the one who had let him down. Her sister had been twenty years older and was now gone to God. Her father had been alone so long that Sandra wondered if he even remembered living with his family. She had rescued him from the pits so far as retirement homes went, a one-story L-shaped building that smelled of urine. The occupants had to sit in the hall outside their rooms most of the day, so they could be watched, apparently. None of the staff spoke Polish.

  Her father had sat with his mouth and his fly open, staring across the narrow corridor in which he sat. He needed a shave; he needed a bath. When she rolled him out of there she expected him to cast blessings left and right, like Salieri in the film.

  So she set him up in the high-rise retirement home run by the Franciscans. There was a chapel right in the building and a chaplain always on duty. Throughout all this, her father was passive, registering what was happening, not commenting. When she got him settled in his apartment, nice view both north and east, there was an awkward moment as daughter faced father.

  “Isn’t this better, Dad?”

  “I don’t know anyone here.”

  “You will.”

  “How about you?”

  “I’ll be back.” She put a hand on his arm. She would have liked to lean over and kiss the hairless head, to do something to erase the long years when she hadn’t even thought of him, let alone seen him. “I’ll be back.”

  “What if I want a drink?”

  “There’s beer in the refrigerator.”

  How long had it been since he’d even had a beer? The place from which she had sprung him had boasted its smoke-free and alcohol-free status. She had put a six-pack in the fridge. That became the excuse for her visits, to make sure he had beer in his refrigerator. He liked the place, particularly the shower. He seemed always to be getting out of it when she visited, going naked to his clothes, using the wheelchair as a support. What would the world be like if everyone went around nude? Even her father improved when he was dressed.

  He had no curiosity about where she had been all these years, which was fine with Sandra. He lived in the present, and that was that. If he had had memories, he had discarded them all. Life was today’s game, what was on the menu, and, lately, the friends he had made who took him up the street to a bar.

  Luke Flanagan! She recognized him from the wake, where he’d sat in the front row of folding chairs with the woman that was with him now.

  “We’re lifers, too,” Maud said.

  They cracked one another up, Luke and Maud. Her father just followed their banter as if it were an interruption. What would Luke think if he knew she was the woman his son had planned to run away with to California?

  It was Tuttle who told her the name of the woman Wally had run off with. Sylvia Beach.

  “How did you find that out?”

  He adjusted his tweed hat. “The police are cooperating with me.”

  Had she ever had any illusions about Tuttle? No, doubts and hopes, but no illusions.

  “She’s living in the same building you are.”

  “She is?”

  Tuttle nodded. Any comment he might have made would have been the wrong one; seeming to sense that, he remained silent.

  “Where did they go?”

  “I’m still working on that.”

  What did it matter? She might have asked him to send her his bill—he had done what she asked him to do—but she was curious to learn where Wally had gone. Curious? That made it sound like a neutral piece of information, one that didn’t tear her apart when she thought about it. Since returning to Chicago, the thought of herself waiting in vain in San Diego for Wally to join her filled her with rage all over again. Her life there had evolved; there had been Greg, and there had been Oxnard and all the healing years, or so they had seemed. But in memory she was right back there in San Diego, a dum-dum waiting for the man who said they would begin a new life together. Tuttle’s information removed once and for all the speculation that something had happened to Wally, some injury, something, that prevented him from letting her know why he wasn’t coming. Yes, she did want to know where he had gone with Sylvia Beach.

  “A bimbo,” Ferret whispered when she asked about the woman with the blond crew cut.

  “Is her name Sylvia Beach?”

  “That isn’t the name she’s using.”

  How often do you see people who live in the same building you do? The first time she saw Sylvia, alerted by Ferret, Sandra was in her running costume—dark glasses, the bill of her baseball cap curved over her face—so she stood as if recovering from her run, looking at the other woman. She had been at Greg’s wake! The suggestion of a connection with her former husband as well as with Wally was too much. Sandra approached the woman. “Hi. I’m Sandy.”

  “Hello.”

  “You live here, too, don’t you?”

  “I just moved in.”

  “I lived here years and years ago. Now I’m back.”

  The conversation didn’t go anywhere—how could it?—but it gave Sandra a chance to study the woman who had lured Wally from her. Had she and this woman been competitors back then, auditioning for the role? Hating a stranger was a new experience.

  “Hasta la vista,” she said and turned to the elevator.

  “Ciao.”

  Later that day, Ferret told her that the bimbo had been asking about her.

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “What did you call her?”

  “Sylvia Beach.”

  “Okay. She wanted to know all about you. First time she ever talked to me.”

  The next time they ran into one another, Sandra had the sense that it wasn’t an accident. Sylvia was sitting in the lobby when Sandra came in from her run, and she got up and stopped her on the way to the elevator.

  “What a day to be running,” Sylvia said.

  “Did you ever try it?”

  “With every kind of exercise machine right here in the building?”

  “I got the habit in California.”

  “California.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Most stories are.”

  They ought to have lunch sometime, or a drink. Sandra said that would be nice. Sylv
ia telephoned later that day, asking if she was free.

  “Where should we go?”

  “How about my place?”

  “Better.”

  Ferret’s description of Sylvia had not prepared Sandra for the apartment. It was wonderful, the furniture, the pictures, the appointments. She had expected an illicit bower, but Sylvia’s apartment was more tasteful than the one Sandra occupied. California provided the opening gambit, and Sandra told her all about her life in Oxnard.

  “A financial advisor!”

  “It’s a living.”

  “I knew a financial advisor.”

  “I hope you have one.”

  “Let’s say I had one.”

  Sylvia couldn’t believe that anyone from California would want to move to Chicago.

  “I had one earthquake too many.”

  “We have tornadoes.”

  Getting to know Sylvia made it difficult to hate her. It was insane to think that sooner or later they would be able to talk about Wally. Sandra would give anything to know what had gone wrong with the plans she and Wally had made. She just could not believe that he had been deceiving her. It would have helped to think of Sylvia as a bimbo, the dyed crew cut and flamboyant makeup certainly suggested that, but they seemed a disguise rather than what she really was.

  “I came here from Minnesota,” Sylvia said, the second time they got together, for lunch in a restaurant on the Magnificent Mile.

  “Minnesota!”

  “I know, I know. Way up in the North Woods in a town you’ve never heard of.”

  “International Falls?”

  “How in the world did you know of it?”

  “It’s mentioned in weather reports. The coldest spot in the country.”

  “We were south of there. Garrison.”

  “We?”

  “My financial advisor and I.”

  “Your husband was a financial advisor?”

  “He had been. He had made a pile and only wanted to fish and read and look out at the lake.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “If you like to fish and read and look out at lakes.”

  “How could you get tired of something like that?”

  Ah, but what would life in California with Wally have been like if he had joined her? Like her father, they would have tried to exist only in the present. Just the thought of being together, untrammeled by the past, had seemed attraction enough, but obviously that could get boring, as Sylvia’s remark suggested.

  “Oh, he got tired of it.”

  “And then?”

  Sylvia sipped her daiquiri. “He left me.”

  “Oh.”

  “So I came back here.”

  “Back?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  * * *

  When Sandra thought of what had happened to Wally, her attitude toward Sylvia altered once again.

  “Be careful,” Tuttle told her when she mentioned that she had come to know Sylvia Beach.

  “Of what?”

  “What do you know of the Pianones?”

  “One of them is her guy, isn’t he? Marco?”

  “That’s why I said be careful. Half the unsolved murders in Fox River are ascribed to the Pianones. Rightly or wrongly,” he added. “Maybe it’s just the name of the file they put cases in they can’t solve.”

  “Like Wally Flanagan.”

  “That was a twist. A cement mixer.”

  Knowledge is supposed to be power, but the more she learned, the less Sandra knew what to do with it. Sylvia was being kept by a Pianone. Had Wally just been in the way and been taken care of in the usual family manner? It was clear to Sandra that the Fox River police would not want to pursue that possibility.

  The following morning, as she was going through the lobby, about to start her run, a very large man in plainclothes and a black woman in uniform stopped her.

  “Sandra Bochenski?” the woman asked.

  “You’re Horvath,” Sandra said to the big guy. “We’ve talked.”

  “This is Officer Lamb. Agnes. We want to talk some more.”

  “Sure.”

  Agnes Lamb said, “We’re investigating the murder of your husband.”

  “My husband!”

  “Gregory Packer.”

  Over by his pulpit, Ferret was trying not to make his eavesdropping obvious.

  “My former husband.”

  “We’d like you to come with us.”

  “Why? We can talk right here.”

  Agnes Lamb took a sheet from the envelope she had been carrying. It was a warrant for the arrest of Sandra Bochenski.

  19

  The arrest of Sandra Bochenski on suspicion of murdering her former husband, Gregory Packer, turned everyone into a legal expert, even Tuttle. Phil Keegan passed on to Father Dowling the tantrum the little lawyer had thrown before the questioning began. How could they suspect his client when they had the killer in custody?

  “Out on bail, of course,” Tuttle had thundered. “What’s a little manslaughter if you’re rich and powerful?”

  “Will you release Luke Flanagan, Phil?” Father Dowling asked.

  “There’s a division of opinion. Robertson is for. Jacuzzi is against and threatens to resign and make a public statement if Luke is let off.”

  “The famous wrench.”

  “Exactly. But Tuttle couldn’t keep quiet about the ladder entrance to the garage apartment that Agnes discovered. He told Mervel that Sandra and Wally spent time in the apartment, entering and exiting by the ladder.”

  “And jeopardized his client? No wonder Tuttle is angered by the arrest.”

  Presumably, the case against Sandra Bochenski would seek motivation in her failed marriage to Gregory Packer. She had fled when he became abusive and resumed her life in Oxnard under her maiden name. He had divorced her, charging desertion, but his subsequent record did not suggest an injured party.

  “She seems to have returned to Fox River when she learned that Packer was here.”

  “Seeking revenge for long-ago injuries?”

  “She hired Tuttle to find out where Wally Flanagan was during his unaccounted-for years. It seems that she and Wally had an affair before she went to California. She expected him to meet her there.”

  “And he didn’t.”

  “Instead she got Greg Packer, Wally’s boyhood friend.”

  That meeting could hardly have been an accident. But who made it happen?

  “Cy thinks that Wally might actually have told Greg about Sandra Bochenski, that she was pretty well off, thanks to his financial advice.”

  “And dispatched him as his substitute.”

  “He wouldn’t have had to put it so baldly. The simple facts would have made her an attractive target for Greg. He had been out of the navy for a time and must have been looking for another meal ticket.”

  “Another?”

  “You get three squares in the navy.”

  If Phil’s account of all this seemed lurid, Mervel rose to new heights of uncontrolled prose. From multiple sources, he put together a detailed and tendentious narrative, filled with drama, betrayals, lust, and greed. Wally Flanagan was the spoiled little rich boy whose father had bankrolled him as a financial advisor, thus turning this predator loose on unsuspecting young ladies who had the great misfortune to work with or for him. That this wanton was also a married man only added to his turpitude. Mervel became a veritable poet of marital fidelity in his account. The idea that a young man, with every advantage in the world, with a lovely wife, should embark on such a Don Giovanni campaign, preying on sweet young things who came to Chicago to get their start and no doubt to meet an honest man as well—this would have left Mervel wordless if words were not his stock-in-trade. He was shameless in providing a dramatic scenario for the affair between Wally and Sandra. Mervel asked his readers to imagine the confusion, the sorrow, the anger with which Sandra realized that she had been abandoned in California the way Melissa had been in Fox River. The account came
down out of the clouds when Mervel came to the discovery of Wally’s body, the old local caution about the Pianones exhibiting itself, but the reporter could not resist a speculative wonder at the fact that Wally had ended up in one of his father’s cement mixers.

  “We’ll have to keep Luke away from wrenches and other blunt instruments, Roger.”

  “Poor Melissa.”

  “At least he didn’t bring up their reunion at the senior center here.”

  “Good Lord.”

  There was a diagram of the Flanagan garage, with an inset showing the descending ladder that provided an alternative entry and exit to the apartment above. It was up this ladder that Wally took his paramours, sinning within spitting distance of his father’s home.

  Tuttle tried to file a libel suit against Mervel and the Fox River Tribune but got nowhere. The freedom of the free press had long since passed the quaint canons of decency that Tuttle improbably invoked.

  “If national security secrets are fair game, how could the reputations of those who figured in Mervel’s account provide grounds for libel?” This was Amos Cadbury’s melancholy observation when he had himself driven to Father Dowling’s noon Mass and accepted an invitation to lunch.

  “Surely there is less of a case against Sandra Bochenski than there is against Luke Flanagan.”

  “Ah, Father Dowling, you are making the charming assumption that cases are still tried in the courts. That newspaper account could be the sum total of what will be done against either of them. Having been condemned in print and on film, what need is there to bother with a trial?”

  “I wonder how Melissa is taking this?”

  “You should talk to her, Father.”

  “Have you?”

  Amos had talked to Luke as well as to Melissa, as friend, as lawyer. “Luke is tough, of course, but poor Melissa. I keep thinking of that wedding ring in my safe.”

  “Wedding ring?”

  “The ring found on the hand of the body extracted from the cement mixer. It was the basis of identifying the body. Since neither Luke nor Melissa would take it, it ended up in my office safe.”