“Nothing ribald, I hope.”
“Since I don’t know the word, I can’t say.”
“Would you like a beer?”
“Is the pope Polish?”
Father Dowling pressed the buzzer that would sound in the kitchen. Three minutes later, there was a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
“You rang.”
“Phil has been considering your suggestion. He would like a beer.”
“So what’s new?”
Father Dowling repeated Marie’s question after she left the room.
“The usual. A hit-and-run.”
“I read about that.”
“Funny result of the autopsy, though.”
“How so?”
“What killed him was a sliver of glass from the window he went through. Pierced his neck. Of course, it was the vehicle that hit him that sent him through the window.”
“Has the car been located?”
“I am beginning to doubt it ever will be. What usually happens, there is damage to the vehicle, and someone notices, a neighbor, or the owner takes it to a body shop for repairs. Because it was going through the window that killed the guy, there may not even be a mark on the vehicle. Maybe it wasn’t even a hit-and-run. I mean, he might have survived just being hit.”
“People don’t just fly through store windows, do they?”
“Oh, there was a vehicle, and it jumped the curb. The witnesses are useless except for that. But what if a driver just momentarily lost control and climbed the curb and this fellow jumped out of the way, maybe pushing off from the vehicle, thus gaining momentum, and then into the window.”
“That’s pretty imaginative.”
“No, it isn’t. Cy came up with it.”
“And that is the extent of crime in our fair city?”
“Apart from theft, rape, arson, and a car found in the river where it had been for months with a missing person in the backseat.” Phil emptied his glass. “And how is the clerical life?”
“Serene. The altar boy crisis seems to have passed.”
Phil had to think before he remembered. He chuckled. “Sisk.”
“So now he’s back to terrorizing the widows at the center.”
4
On his baptismal certificate his name had been recorded as simply Martin Sisk, but at the courthouse his full name was on record, Martin Luther Sisk—something he had managed to conceal from others, though the fact upset him when he thought of it, which was whenever he filled out a form with his name. He had never acknowledged the Luther, the whim of his father who had fallen out with the priests. Arguments had gone on over his head when Martin was young.
“Luther was a priest,” his mother would say.
“He got married.”
“St. Peter was married.”
“What’s your point?”
“It was a sly trick to pull on the boy.”
His father had named him at the hospital while his mother was still recovering. In those days, women spent a week and more in the hospital after giving birth, and Martin’s father had been free to play his little joke. He didn’t go to the baptism—he was still punishing the priests with his absence—so Martin always had his baptismal certificate to back up the simpler form of his name. He had even kept it a secret from Deirdre.
“What a lovely name,” he had said to her, breaking the ice. He was just starting out as a pharmacist, and she had come in to fill a prescription that indicated she was having menstrual problems.
“Irish.” Her red hair was carroty and frizzled, not a straight strand in the vast halo. A little green ribbon because it was March 17. Her pale skin went with the red hair, but it was her enormous eyes that fascinated Martin. She looked at the plastic tag pinned to his pharmacist’s coat.
“Martin.”
“After Martin de Porres.”
“The black?”
“Was he?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“Maybe it was St. Martin of Tours.”
“The travel agent?”
He made her a cherry Coke at the fountain, and they sat on uncomfortable chairs at one of the little round tables with a glass top. She was a graduate of Barat College and was working up the street in a store that featured religious books, rosaries, and devotional trinkets of all kinds. On their first date they went to a movie, From Here to Eternity, thinking that with a title like that it must have some uplifting message. Deirdre was embarrassed when they came out into the evening air. There had been a lot of adultery in the film.
Martin said, “It was moving when he played ‘Taps.’”
“But it was so violent.”
He took her arm as they crossed the street. Did she move more closely against him? For a moment, he felt like Burt Lancaster to her Deborah Kerr. The pharmacy stayed open until midnight, so he took her there and they sat at their table. She told him she had spent several months in the novitiate, thinking she was called to be a nun.
“I wanted to go to Quigley.”
“What’s that?”
“The first step on the road to the priesthood.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He couldn’t just say girls, so he said, “Because I met you.”
“Sometimes I feel guilty for not staying.”
In later years, Deirdre considered it providential that she had been spared from what convent life became in the wake of Vatican II. She had a somewhat unsavory habit of collecting gossip about errant nuns.
“Luther married a nun,” she said, and Martin jumped. “I mean, when they leave, priests, nuns, they imagine marriage is some kind of orgy, so married they have to be.”
Their marriage hadn’t been an orgy. Deirdre could be classified as frigid according to the books Martin perused between filling prescriptions. He told himself it was a professional obligation to keep up on sexology. Such reading filled his mind with speculation about his women customers. He had opened his own pharmacy, near the courthouse, as if he wanted to keep an eye on the records there. His starched cream-colored coat gave him a medical air, and when he dared he carried a stethoscope in a side pocket. He developed a bedside manner standing behind the counter. A susceptible female could bring him out of his lair in the back of the store. Some women confided in him as if he were a physician, whispering their complaints. Using the stethoscope on their backs was safe, but when he had placed it on the ample bosom of a woman a head taller than himself and turned away like a confessor, his hand had moved and the woman cried out and stepped away.
“I’m sorry,” Martin said.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
He hurried back behind his counter and felt panic until the woman left the store. It turned out her husband was a police officer, a stubby little man who came in and asked Martin what the hell he meant, feeling up his wife.
“It’s a professional matter.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Martin stood there, speechless, wishing he had gone to Quigley and removed himself from temptation. The cop shook his head in disgust and left.
“What was that all about?” Louise, his stick-figure assistant with the eager eyes, whispered the question, standing very close. He could have worked his evil will on her in the stockroom any time, so of course she held no attraction for him.
“A male complaint.”
Deirdre was swept away by cancer at sixty-three, and Martin alternated between dramatic expressions of grief and speculation as to whether he would marry again. The world seemed full of widows, but few of them were concupiscible. Even so, it was pleasant to play the Lothario of the senior center at St. Hilary’s. How he envied Henry his Vivian.
“The loneliness is terrible,” he told her.
“I can imagine.”
“I wonder if you can.”
“Have you thought of marrying again?”
“All the attractive women have husbands.”
“There is Grace.”
&nb
sp; Indeed there was. A little hefty, perhaps, but her plush body held promise of carnal delight. Grace had silver hair and moist dark eyes and always spoke as if he were meant to read her lips. The problem was that Martin was sure that one unequivocal move on his part would indeed take him to the altar again. Not a bad thought, when he entertained it at night in his lonely bed, but in daylight he saw the comic side of a man his age as bridegroom. Besides, Grace was in her fifties and might expect things he could not deliver.
“Sanctifying grace,” Martin murmured.
“Don’t blaspheme,” Vivian said.
Well, he had touched some chord in Vivian’s heart. It was Vivian who told him of her granddaughter, Martha.
“Deirdre and I thought of adopting.”
“I’ve come to think it is a great risk.”
She was encouraged by his sympathy, and he got the whole story.
“Wouldn’t it be better if she learned who her mother had been?”
Vivian stepped back. He seemed to have said the right thing. “You’re right, Martin. For all we know, she isn’t even alive.”
“I could find out for you.”
“How?”
He held up his hand and looked wise. “What was her name?”
“Madeline.”
“Madeline what?”
“I don’t remember. If I ever knew.”
“That makes it hard. But not impossible. I’ll get on it.”
“It has to be done very quietly.”
“Trust me.”
“And Martin? Don’t say anything to Henry.”
He locked his lips and threw away the key.
5
Tuttle the lawyer sat in a booth in the Great Wall of China, Peanuts Pianone across from him, the table heaped with the remains of their meal. Peanuts sipped beer. Tuttle, who drank only hot tea when he ate Chinese, had the pot to himself. The two friends were silent, as they often were together. Peanuts was almost autistic, a Fox River policeman thanks to the pull of his shady family. His eventual retirement would bring no discernible lessening of activity. Though not so baldly stated, his assignment was to stay out of the way of serious police work. But he was Tuttle’s eyes and ears in the department and thus key to the possibility of employment of those legal skills not universally appreciated. Peanuts was of little help on the recent hit-and-run, though.
“More run than hit,” Peanuts had reported, and smiled at his own lapidary phrase. He repeated it, in the manner of those who have surprised themselves with wit.
“What’s that mean?”
Peanuts shrugged. He had been debriefed and that was that. So Tuttle, full of food and awash in tea, sat pondering what chances for himself there might be in all this. The dead man had been an author, a fact that had galvanized the literati in the greater Chicago area. A grand memorial service was in preparation for their fallen brother. There had been newspaper accounts of the incompetency of the Fox River constabulary. Obviously, some fanatic foe of the First Amendment was loose, and the police were doing nothing. Tuttle had leafed through some of Nathaniel Fleck’s volumes at the public library and found them unreadable.
He picked up a newspaper from the bench beside him, folded to the story devoted to the great man. There was a photo of the woman described as his companion, come like Niobe, all tears, to grieve for her lost love. Catherine Adams. Tuttle was no more a judge of female beauty than he was of modern art. The woman’s hair seemed to be worn in a crew cut, and she looked undernourished and gaunt, yet her features were praised in the press account. Perhaps, like Fleck’s books, she was an acquired taste. Tuttle found her no more attractive than his secretary, Hazel.
He shuddered at the thought of the female who made his office a place to avoid. She had laughed mockingly at his suggestion that some opportunity for him lurked in these events. The memorial would be held that afternoon, in a chapel on the Northwestern campus, the alma mater of the fallen novelist. Tuttle wavered between taking a nap and attending the affair. A nap meant returning to his office and locking his door against Hazel, always a risky venture when the flood of contempt for her employer rose high in her enormous breast. The memorial it must be.
Peanuts needed help getting out of the booth. He had been thinner when he sat. Peanuts grunted negatively at the suggestion that he accompany Tuttle, so the lawyer set off alone, sleepy at the wheel of his Toyota. Burying the dead, he reminded himself, was one of the corporal works of mercy.
He stood at the back of the chapel and tried to follow the tributes spoken from the pulpit by a series of writers whose obscurity spurred them to oratorical excess. The star of the proceedings was Catherine Adams, who turned out to be tall as well as thin. Her crew cut was covered by a kind of turban, and she wore a flowing dress that almost seemed a vestment. She remembered when she and the deceased were students on this very campus. She recounted with tasteful indirection their liaison, which had spanned the years since their graduation, irregular but continuous. She said this demurely, and there was a murmur of approval for her brave defiance of bourgeois morality. She ended with a poem, and when she had finished the congregation rose as one to applaud her. Tuttle wished he hadn’t come.
In his car, he got out his mobile phone and turned it on. Hazel had been trying to reach him. He called his office.
“Where have you been, you idiot? And don’t say the Great Wall. I tried there.”
“I’ve been to a funeral.”
“Of your career? A client will be here in half an hour. Be here.”
She hung up. Tuttle turned off the phone and fought the impulse to throw it out the window. Was it for this that he had struggled through law school, taking most courses at least twice, and failed the bar exams until the third attempt, when he had come with his sleeves full of notes? But “client” is a magic word. He started the engine and headed to his office.
6
Even as he talked with Vivian, Martin had thought of Tuttle, to whom he had sold antacids for years when he kept his pharmacy. A wiser choice would have been someone like Amos Cadbury, but Martin had no wish to incur great expense. His hope was that he could get Tuttle to look into the matter of the mother of Vivian’s grandchild pro bono. Unlikely, but Tuttle’s fees could not be high. This thought was strengthened when he found the elevator in Tuttle’s building out of service. He climbed the dingy stairs to the third floor and stood before a door bearing the legend TUTTLE & TUTTLE. He entered and found himself confronting a woman who made him wish he’d brought his stethoscope.
“Martin Sisk. I called.”
Her smile was carnivorous. “Mr. Tuttle will be free shortly.”
The door to the inner office was closed. Martin took the chair the Amazon pointed him to.
“You ran the pharmacy near the courthouse,” she said.
“Yes, I did.” He spoke warily, but he could not have forgotten such a woman.
She coughed. She smiled and coughed again. “I really ought to see a doctor about that.”
Martin assumed a professional air. “How long have you had it?”
“Would you take a look?”
He was standing beside her chair, looking into the great cavern of her mouth, when the door opened and Tuttle came in. The little lawyer seemed unsurprised by the scene he had come upon. Martin danced away from the woman.
“Still at it, Martin?”
Tuttle opened the inner door, flicked on the light, and went inside. Martin hurried after him. Tuttle sailed his tweed hat at a coat rack in the corner and it spun briefly on the top, then fell to the floor. Tuttle ignored it, sinking into an unoiled chair behind the cluttered desk.
“Close that door, will you?”
Martin pulled the door shut and sat. This visit seemed a vast mistake. He had planned to condescend to Tuttle, but the little lawyer had him at a disadvantage, bursting in on him while he examined his secretary’s throat.
“So what can I do you for?”
“Tuttle, I don’t think even you can be of help on this.�
��
“Try me.”
Where to start? “Does the name Dr. Henry Dolan mean anything to you?”
“Go on.”
Martin plunged in, finding his own account garbled. Tuttle listened in silence, encouraging him from time to time with a judicial nod. When Martin mentioned that the matter had been handled by Amos Cadbury, Tuttle sat forward.
“Why didn’t you go to him?”
“I decided to come to you.”
“Wise move. Cadbury would interpret your interest as a criticism. What is your interest, by the way?”
“Vivian Dolan came to me with the problem. She is greatly vexed by it. The whole family is.” He gave Tuttle as much of the story as he knew.
“So what is the point of finding the real mother?”
“To warn her off seeing the daughter she let out for adoption years ago.”
“Delicate,” Tuttle said. “Delicate.”
“Yes.”
“There has been no contact with the mother over the years?”
“Apparently none.”
“Nor any notion where she may be living?”
Martin shook his head, feeling he was contributing to the description of an insoluble problem. “Could you find her?”
“Of course. Not that it would be easy. But adoptions are legal transactions. They are recorded. Once the mother is identified, we can track her down.”
Relief came to Martin Sisk. When he had suggested to Vivian that he would find the birth mother of her granddaughter, he had been prompted more by a desire to have that lovely woman in his debt than by the prospect of success. Failure would have the opposite effect. But now Tuttle spoke of the matter as a mere bagatelle, routine.
“So you want to employ me?”
“I hope it won’t be expensive.” If it were, he could always dun the Dolans.
“Let’s hope not. Meanwhile, I will need a retainer.”
Martin took his checkbook from his inner pocket. Tuttle followed this action with interested eyes, then seemed to have second thoughts.
“No need for that at the moment. A token amount will make you my client. Do you have twenty dollars?”
Blood Ties Page 5
