The Widow's Mate

by Ralph McInerny

  “I promised to do him a favor.”

  The favor was to provide proof positive that Wally Flanagan was no more. The question was how to do that. The agreement had not been specific.

  Packing to leave the cabin, she had found the wedding band in the drawer of a bedside table. She looked at it and then dropped it into her purse. When she told Greg, he lit up. “Let me see it.” He turned it over and over with a thoughtful look. “You know, I was best man at their wedding.”

  The idea was to slip the wedding band on some dead man’s finger and have him identified as Wally.

  Sylvia thought it was a crazy scheme. “His wife would have to identify the body.”

  “You’re right.”

  They had both grown up in Fox River, so, of course, their thoughts turned to the Pianones. They would know how to arrange something like this.

  6

  Wally Flanagan’s mention of Sylvia provided a spoor that Agnes decided to follow, and that was how she found out that the woman was back in Fox River and hooked up with Marco Pianone. Agnes was in the lobby, talking with Ferret, when Sylvia swooshed out of the elevator and glided toward the front door.

  “Sylvia!” Agnes called, and the gliding stopped. She looked at Agnes, who was not in uniform, puzzled. Her eyes switched to Ferret, who lifted his arms in a protest of innocence. Sylvia pushed through the revolving door, and Agnes followed.

  “Where can we talk?” Agnes demanded.

  “Who are you?”

  “Do you want to see my police ID, right here in front of everybody?”

  They went to the Starbucks in the next block. Agnes identified herself. “How’s Marco?”

  “That goddam doorman.”

  “Once they start talking, they can’t stop.”

  It helped that Sylvia thought she knew more than she did. Getting the conversation onto Wally Flanagan proved to be a good move.

  “He mentioned me?”

  “That’s why we’re talking.”

  “What did he say?”

  “About you?” Agnes smiled mysteriously. “Life in the woods sounded pretty nice.”

  “Oh, he loved it. And it was nice. Not much happening, you understand, but peaceful.”

  “So why did he leave?”

  Sylvia made a face and sighed. “Men.”

  “In the plural?”

  Sylvia stared at her for a moment. “He mentioned Greg?”

  “Tell me about that.”

  It was a strange story. Sylvia seemed able to transfer her affection easily from one man to another and still retain the thought that she was true blue.

  “And now Greg is dead.”

  Sylvia became wary. For the first time, she seemed to realize that she was blabbermouthing to a cop. She pursed her lips.

  “We’re worried that you could be next.”

  “What!”

  “You must pose as much of a threat as Greg Packer did.”

  Her widened eyes were full of the sequence of thoughts Agnes’s remark had caused. After a minute of silence, she said, “Where could I hide?”

  “Don’t worry about that. We’ll protect you.”

  “That’s a laugh.”

  “You’re not laughing.”

  It took twenty minutes to convince her that she had to get out of the apartment. No need to mention Marco. Who knew Marco better than she did?

  Agnes went to the apartment with her and helped her pack. One huge suitcase and a garment bag did it. Then Sylvia stood, looking around wistfully.

  “The furniture yours?”

  “Who knows? Let’s go.”

  In the lobby, Ferret was all eyes, but only Agnes looked at him. He didn’t seem all that broken up about losing this tenant.

  * * *

  Back in Fox River, in an interrogation room, Sylvia sang like a bird, but she kept coming back to Wally, wanting to know what he had said about her.

  “You make an indelible impression,” Agnes said.

  “Sometimes I wished we had just stayed there, in Minnesota.”

  “Tell me about Marco and Greg.”

  “I had no part in it. It was a deal Greg had made with Wally, and when he found out about me and Marco, he saw a way to do it.”

  What she did know was that Greg had talked with Marco and later a body identified as Wally’s had been found, in pieces, in one of the Flanagan cement mixers.

  “Where can I go?”

  She had mentioned Brenda Kelly, and Agnes wondered if Sylvia’s old friend might not be the temporary solution to Sylvia’s problem.

  Cy Horvath, who had been monitoring the interrogation through the one-way mirror, said he would talk to Brenda. “Good work, Agnes.” Still, he seemed less than happy about what she had discovered.

  The unhappiness was general. Phil Keegan scowled and shook his head. “The Pianones.”

  The only Pianone Agnes knew was Peanuts, and she did not share the assumption that the Pianones were untouchable. Regardless, the decision was to keep quiet about what they had learned and wait on events.

  “What events?”

  “We’ll see what Marco does when he learns he has lost his bimbo.”

  Days went by, and Marco did nothing. Meanwhile, Agnes got to know Ferret better.

  “Where’d she go?” the doorman asked.

  “Who?”

  “Come on. You moved her out of here.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Don’t ask me. She never talked to me.” He began to talk about Sandra Bochenski. There was a real lady. She always stopped to talk to Ferret. “Even after her run.”

  “She runs?”

  “Every day.”

  Jogging on the streets of Chicago among all the exhaust fumes did not seem the road to longevity to Agnes, even with that big lake blowing fresh air into the mix. Agnes was with Ferret when Sandra Bochenski, in street clothes, stopped by to ask why Sylvia didn’t answer her phone. Ferret looked at Agnes.

  “She moved,” Agnes said.

  “Who are you?”

  Ferret answered. “A Fox River detective.”

  Sandra took a closer look. “I recognize you.”

  Agnes had sat in when Cy interrogated Sandra.

  “Any other old girlfrends of Wally Flanagan’s in the building?”

  This was meant to annoy, but it didn’t. “When are you going to find out who killed Greg Packer?”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “It wasn’t Mr. Flanagan.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  Sandra had talked with Luke at the retirement home where he and her father and Maud lived.

  “Have you talked with Wally?”

  She thought about it. “I don’t want to. I’m going back to California.”

  Ferret groaned, and Sandra patted his arm, causing the little guy to beam.

  Marco never showed up. The man who did went through the lobby as if he knew where he was going. He took the elevator to the floor of Sylvia’s apartment. He came down again in fifteen minutes. He started toward Ferret, looked at Agnes, then turned toward the door. No doubt he would take Marco Pianone the news of Sylvia’s departure.

  “So what are we waiting for?” Agnes asked, standing in front of Captain Keegan’s desk.

  “With the Pianones you never know.”

  “You mean we’ll do nothing?”

  “What would you suggest.”

  “Bring in Marco.”

  “Not yet.”

  Meaning not ever. Agnes left the office, mad. She ran into Peanuts and said, “How’s your cousin?”

  “Which one?”

  “How many you got?”

  “I’d have to count.”

  Did he know how?

  Along came Tuttle. He doffed his tweed hat and asked, “What’s up?”

  “She’s asking about my cousin.”

  Tuttle’s expression changed. “Got to run,” he said, and he did.

  Everyone ran from the Pianones. On her way home, Agnes thought of that
body that had been found dismembered in the cement mixer. She turned around and headed for Flanagan Concrete.

  Frank Looney wasn’t in his office. She asked Myrtle if she knew where he had gone.

  “He said he went to see a priest.”

  7

  When Marie Murkin looked into the study to tell Father Dowling that Frank Looney had come to see him, she added in a whisper, “It’s his real name.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the front parlor.”

  He went to the parlor to find a seated Frank Looney staring out the window.

  The visitor got to his feet when Father Dowling came in. “I’m Wally’s cousin.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’d like to see him.”

  Father Dowling could have just said that Wally was back in his father’s house, in the garage apartment, but instead he asked Frank Looney to sit. The priest took a chair behind a desklike table.

  “I manage Flanagan Concrete.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “It’s what my uncle wanted Wally to do. When he refused, Luke put me in charge.”

  “I know a Jesuit named Looney.”

  “My brother.”

  “You haven’t talked to Wally yet?”

  “Why did he come back?”

  “I had better let him tell you that.”

  “What’s the secret? Look, I’ve been thinking, Father. If he’s changed his mind, I’ll step aside. I’ve already told Luke.”

  “That’s very generous of you.”

  “Luke is the one who’s been generous.”

  “He seems very pleased with you.”

  “He said that?” Looney seemed genuinely surprised.

  “His only criticism was the Pianone matter.”

  Looney lifted from his seat and then collapsed back into it. “Of course he was right. I was a damned fool. I guess I thought if my family could change, so could the Pianones. It made sense that they would want to invest in a legitimate business. Until you thought about it, that is. No, it was stupid on my part. I learned my lesson.”

  “You don’t think the Pianones have changed?”

  His eyes drifted away. “Wally had the right idea. I’d like to just disappear, the way he did.”

  “To a monastery?”

  “Away from Fox River.”

  Father Dowling told him then that Wally was no longer staying at the rectory.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone home.”

  Looney was on his feet.

  “He’s staying in that apartment over the garage.”

  Wally no longer looked like a vagrant, although he had kept the beard. He was surprised that he could wear clothes he had worn years ago, but there was no way he could move back into the Flanagan house with Melissa living there. There had been no reunion. They had talked, but whatever had passed between them was not something Wally wanted to reveal.

  “Of course, she’s right. I never expected it could be the way it was.”

  Marie had reacted by expressing the fear that they had a permanent guest in the rectory. It was his father who suggested the garage apartment.

  “They have to get used to one another,” he said to Father Dowling. “All those years he was away…” His voice drifted off, as if Wally had been overseas with the army rather than living in isolation without any apparent concern for the wife he had abandoned. Luke clearly thought the couple would eventually reunite.

  “What did he want?” Marie asked when she found that Looney had left the rectory.

  “He wondered if we had a spare guest room.”

  “Any more of that and you can get someone for my apartment.”

  “I can’t have that sort of thing going on in the rectory, Marie.”

  * * *

  The turn events had taken cast gloom over Phil Keegan. He chewed on an unlit cigar and glared unseeing at the television screen, where a semblance of baseball was being played by the Cubs. Everything they had learned pointed to the Pianones, and that meant impasse. Sylvia had told Agnes Lamb that Greg Packer had consulted Marco Pianone for help in carrying out his promise to Wally to stage his death and thus free him forever from his past. The mangled body in the Flanagan cement mixer seemed the obvious result of that collaboration. The wedding ring that had been the basis of Melissa’s identification of the body had been brought from the cabin in Garrison.

  “Have you talked with Marco?”

  Phil’s scowl deepened. This obvious move was one he could not make. If he did, the chief, Robertson, would intervene. There was even the possibility of demotion, and then who would run the detective division? No doubt someone with no scruples at all about the dominance of the Pianone family. Phil’s decision not to proceed thus looked to be the choice of the lesser of two evils.

  “Where is Sylvia?” The question sounded like a line from a poem.

  “Agnes stashed her with an old friend. Brenda somebody. The two of them worked for Wally years ago.”

  Clearly Agnes and Phil thought that the woman was in danger. If the death of Greg Packer pointed to the Pianones, and if the woman Sylvia had been the one who linked the two, she might well be silenced in the way Greg Packer had been.

  If Phil was despondent, Cy Horvath, for all his impassivity, was even more so. One afternoon, he came to the kitchen door, and Marie, after unsuccessfully trying to discover what the purpose of the visit was, came to tell Father Dowling that Cy was in the kitchen.

  Cy wanted to talk, and Father Dowling suggested they go outside, much to Marie’s annoyance. How could she eavesdrop from a distance? They sat on a bench just outside the sacristy door, under a walnut tree. Before sitting down, Cy picked up one of the green walnuts that littered the lawn. They sat in silence for a time, and then Father Dowling said, “Phil is feeling pretty low.”

  Cy shrugged. “Wally solved the big mystery of his disappearance, and Sylvia gave us the solution to the death of Greg Packer.”

  “And you’re stymied?”

  “The Pianones.”

  “The untouchables.”

  This explanation of Greg Packer’s death made the famous trapdoor ladder irrelevant. If Greg had relied on Marco, the man’s appearance at the garage apartment would not have caused him concern and he would have admitted his murderer unawares.

  “The wrench?” Father Dowling said.

  Cy turned to him and almost smiled. “Just what I’ve been thinking. How did he get hold of that? It came from the bench in the garage. All the tools were very carefully stowed, a place for each. A missing place from which the wrench had come.”

  “And only Marco Pianone can explain that?”

  Cy grunted. “Or why he risked a daytime visit to the Flanagan house. The Pianones don’t take risks like that.”

  “You think he might have been seen?”

  “Agnes looked into that.” He tossed the walnut, and it bounced along the walk. “Not that an identification would matter.”

  Every avenue seemed blocked by the power of the Pianones.

  “Agnes Lamb thinks we’re cowards. She’s right. But what good would courage do? Even if we brought Marco in, nothing would follow. He wouldn’t tell us anything; Robertson would go ballistic; Phil and I would be back on a beat.”

  “Maybe a good soluble crime will come up.” It seemed hollow consolation.

  “That’s the only thing that could distract Agnes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s still pursuing it. Phil absolutely forbade her to approach Marco, so she is concentrating on Flanagan Concrete. Her idea is, if she could find unequivocal evidence of Marco’s involvement in putting that body in the mixer, we would have to proceed.”

  It was clear that Cy admired Agnes’s tenacity, however doomed to frustration it seemed. When they stood, Cy made a soccer kick at one of the fallen walnuts, and it sailed twenty yards onto the lawn.

  * * *

  “This can’t go on, Father,” Luke Flanagan said when he teleph
oned. “There she is in the house, and he’s in the garage apartment. They really haven’t spoken to one another yet.”

  “Give it time.”

  Luke took hope from this. “You think they’ll get back together?”

  “Stranger things have happened.” What a reservoir of inanities he seemed to have.

  “Would you talk to them, Father? All they need is a boost.”

  Who could blame the old man for hoping that the weird events of recent years could terminate in the status quo ante, his son back with his wife, everything as it had been? Greg Packer seemed not to enter into Luke’s thoughts. Reluctantly, Father Dowling agreed to talk to Melissa and Wally.

  When he got to the house, he found that Luke and Maude Lynn were also there. Had Luke wanted to be on hand for what he hoped would be the great reconciliation? Melissa took Father Dowling onto the sunporch, which was filled with potted plants.

  “Some of these go back to my mother-in-law.” It was an odd thought, a woman’s plants living on years after she was dead.

  Father Dowling feigned interest. “What kind is this?”

  She laughed. “It’s called mother-in-law’s tongue.” There were little spikes at the tips of the long tonguelike leaves. Whatever neologisms botanists devised, they did not replace such traditional names for plants.

  “What do you think of Maud, Father?”

  “What should I think?”

  “I think they’ll marry.”

  “That’s not the marriage that is uppermost in Luke’s mind.”

  She looked away. “I know.”

  “You should talk to Wally.”

  She bristled. “Why doesn’t he talk to me? There he is, out there in that garage apartment, and he can’t bring himself to come to the house.”

  “Would you want him to?”

  Again she looked away. “I don’t know.”

  “You have to realize how guilty he feels.”

  “Poor Wally!”

  “I’m going to talk to him.”