Last Things (21 page)

Authors: Ralph McInerny

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Last Things

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Jessica took a break from the writing she had begun at seven with a glass of orange juice serving as her breakfast, anxious to get to her computer. She aimed the remote at the television and pressed the Power button, but as soon as it began to hum she hit Mute. She did not really want diversion from her story. Her promise to Thunder no longer seemed unrealistic. She continued to write bits and pieces, scenes, dialogue, in the order that they occurred to her. Unity could wait. She did not foresee that as a problem. What she was writing were pieces of a mosaic that would emerge.

An image on the screen caught her attention. She fumbled for the remote, but by the time she got sound the image of Cassirer had faded. The wide-eyed female reporter with a mindless smile had gone on to the next story. The phone rang.

“Have you heard?” Eleanor. “Someone has killed that dreadful man who has been harassing us all.”

“I just saw a picture of Cassirer on the screen. Killed?”

Even as Eleanor spoke, Jessica switched to the web and brought up the page of the
Fox River Tribune
. Their account of Cassirer's death was as enigmatic as Eleanor's. The body dumped in the street, a color photo of the night scene with police and paramedics and reporters milling about. Quotes from Sipes and Fussell, no speculation on who had killed the hapless professor. A spokesman for the college spoke unctuously of the loss of a
promising young faculty member. But all Jessica could remember was the menace the bearded Cassirer had posed.

“And on the day of the funeral!”

Jessica glanced at the clock. Just after nine. She had less than an hour to get to McDivitt's and join the others as they took her father's body to St. Hilary's, where Father Dowling would say the funeral Mass.

“Eleanor, I'll see you at the funeral home.”

“Of course.”

The phone went dead, Jessica turned off the television. Automatically, she stored what she had written. Words on the screen, how inconsequential they seemed. Knowing that Cassirer had indeed been harassing her family, she was filled with foreboding.

Where did all the people come from who filled the church for her father's funeral? Jessica was pleasantly surprised even though some of the older ones looked like professional mourners. Didn't her mother show up for funerals of anyone and everyone? She sat beside her mother in the front pew, Raymond next to her, then Eleanor, elegant in black. She looked a question. Where is Andrew? Jessica guessed he was unobtrusively in back, with Gloria, not wanting to make her part of the family, even in these circumstances, particularly in these circumstances.

The ritual was not the funereal one Jessica vaguely remembered. All the prayers seemed to assume that her father was safe in heaven. Her mother sat stoically through it all, Eleanor wept continuously, Raymond seemed awkward. Jessica tried to realize that it was her father's body in the casket now covered with a liturgical cloth. At the wake, kneeling at the open casket, she had cried for her father, surprising herself in a way. His illness, the days in intensive care, had inured her to the sense of loss. It was
the thought of her mother all alone now that released the tears. How sweet grief can be, she realized, and how self-centered. She remembered citing Hopkins's line from the poem that begins “Margaret, are you grieving / Over goldengrove unleaving â¦” Not at all typical of Hopkins but her favorite. Untypical too the chiding final lines: “It is the fate man is born for. / It is Margaret you mourn for.” Was it indeed her mother for whom she wept? Suddenly she felt like a little orphan girl whose daddy was gone. That simple truth was sufficient reason to cry.

She had thought of her father as simply gone, not elsewhere, but the funeral underscored the continuing existence of his soul, off somewhere with billions of others awaiting the General Resurrection. Her mother's rosary slipped through her fingers, bead by bead, even during the little homily in which Father Dowling avoided canonizing the deceased, reminding them that his was the fate that awaits us all. However true, it seemed as remote as a report on the chemicals her body contained.

Most of the mourners got into the long cortÃ¨ge of cars going to the cemetery. Snow lay banked along the road and blurred the monuments and markers. Another rite, a sprinkling of the body. Would they now lower it into the camouflaged ground? The answer was no. McDivitt came and took her mother's arm and led her away. Several times Margaret stopped to look back at the grave. Eleanor went weeping with her. And Raymond.

Jessica decided to stop by her apartment and change out of black before going to the house to be with her mother. The phone was ringing when she came in. It was Andrew.

“Are you alone?”

“What a question.”

“You've heard about Cassirer?”

“Yes.”

“Can I get in a back way there?”

“A back way? Sure, what's going on?”

“That's why I want to talk with you.”

She told him she would be downstairs at the back door and let him in.

“I'll be on foot.”

It was a curious Jessica who awaited her brother downstairs, looking out at the slushy parking lot, trying not to think the thoughts that came. Then she saw Andrew peering through the hedge that bordered the parking lot. He looked right and left. Jessica pulled open the door, and when he saw it open he scurried across the lot and pressed past her inside. If
distraught
were an adjective awaiting its bearer, it had found him in Andrew. For all that, he stopped and wiped his shoes before they went up in the elevator in silence. As she opened her door, she said over her shoulder, “Eleanor called.”

“Good God.”

Inside, he walked up and down the room several times, looking around. He had never before been in her apartment, but then she had never been in his, the one he shared with Gloria Monday. His curiosity about how she lived and worked was under control, though he did take note of the computer stand and the desk behind it.

“How's it going?”

“It?”

“Aren't you writing that novel?”

“More or less.”

Suddenly he collapsed in her favorite chair. “I have done something extremely stupid.”

“Who hasn't?”

“My fate is in Gloria's hands.”

Jessica sat in her writing chair and waited. She felt that she could have written the narrative that followed. He and Gloria had
dumped Cassirer's body into the street where it was found.

“My God.”

“She drove. At first she didn't even know he was in the backseat. She was nearly hysterical when I told her. I dumped him out before she could head for the police. Him and the bat.”

“Andrew, did you â¦”

“No! But don't you see, that's the point. Everyone would have thought so. I went out to my car and nearly tripped over the body. It was just lying on the walk. I turned him over, and when I saw it was Cassirer I just did it. I opened the back door and lifted him in. And the bat.”

“The bat.”

“It has to have been the weapon. His bike was there too. Dear God, I should have put that in the trunk.”

He had gone in, pled a headache, and begged Gloria to drive him to a pharmacy for some Advil. “She knows my migraines, or she would have thought I was nuts. Once we got going, I told her what was in the back.”

“Andrew, you can't keep this a secret. You're right. It was about the stupidest thing you could have done. Whatever anyone thought before, this puts you in a far worse light. But you have to be the one who tells them what happened. Going to them is the only way to make your innocence plausible.”

“Do you think I killed him?”

She thought about it, then shook her head. “No. I believe what you're telling me.”

He came rapidly across the room and took her in his arms and began to weep. His words just tumbled out. She gathered that Gloria had proved less credulous.

“Would she do anything?”

He stepped back. “Go to the police?” He tried unsuccessfully to dismiss the thought.

“Andrew, you have to tell them first, before she does.”

“They won't believe me.”

“What happened to the bicycle?”

“When we got back I wanted to do what I should have done before, put it in the trunk, but Gloria just pushed me away and went inside. I had to go with her and explain what had happened. That is when the bike was discovered.”

“In front of your building?”

He nodded. She picked up the phone and handed it to him.

“Call Lieutenant Horvath. I've talked with him. He came to the lab. He's okay.”

“Meaning he might believe me?”

“I didn't say that.”

“Would you call him?”

“I have a better idea. Father Dowling seems to know Horvath. Let's go see him.”

“Father Dowling!”

“The man who said Dad's funeral Mass.”

“I wasn't there. Jessica, I couldn't go.”

“Come on.”

There is a superstition that deaths come in threes, and, as will sometimes happen, subsequent events lent credence to this. The death of Fulvio Bernardo was followed, within hours as it seemed, by that of the Edmundite Father Bourke, two deaths that might
be said to have occurred in the fullness of time. Natural deaths, insofar as those who have suffered much under many physicians, in the gospel phrase, may be said to have died naturally. But the death of Horst Cassirer, professor at St. Edmund's, was unequivocally not natural. Any thought that the lethal injuries had been caused by an ordinary bicycle accident had been quickly dismissed.

“Imagine someone riding a bicycle in winter conditions,” Phil Keegan said. “Ice, snow, dry patches, drifts. But that isn't what did him in. Someone hit him full in the face with a baseball bat as he was zooming along the walk. At least, that is the best construction of events.”

“And then carted off the body to dump it in the street a mile away?”

“That assumes that it was the same person. Or persons. The way the body was pitched into the street, and the bat, there had to be more than one.”

There was no note of lamentation in Phil's voice. After weeks of inactivity, his department was at last confronted with a violent death to be explained.

There was no opportunity for the two men to discuss it in their usual manner, at leisure in Father Dowling's study. There was the wake and funeral for Fulvio to occupy the pastor of St. Hilary's. And a collegial visit to the chapel at St. Edmund's out of respect for a priest Father Dowling regretted not having known. Raymond Bernardo was more devastated by the death of the old priest than he had been by that of his father.

“He was the reason I joined the Order.”

Father Dowling had encountered Raymond several times at the hospital but could not say that he knew the man whose abandonment of the priesthood had had such a profound effect on his family.

“My mother especially,” Jessica had confided as he sat with her in the waiting room down the hall from her father's room in intensive care. “He is ten years older than I am. In a sense, I never knew him.”

But her expression belied this. How can an older brother fail to loom large in the mind of a younger sister? Father Dowling felt that, next to her mother, Jessica had been most struck by her brother's defection. Fulvio's reaction had been harder to assess. He seemed to think that it was he who had been betrayed, not the priesthood, and he had made a fated effort to blackmail his son into recanting his recanting. And of course Father Dowling had heard the dying man's confession, thus becoming privy to things not even his family could know. The bravura with which Fulvio had ticked off his sins of the flesh might have been a kind of valedictory chest thumping, a macho adieu, but his enigmatic remark about Alfred Wygant, after he confessed bilking the man out of a large sum of money, had been difficult to discount.

“I killed that man, father. I might as well have murdered him.”

Nothing that Father Dowling had learned of the death of Wygant lent credence to this, but there is a literal as well as a deeper version of events, and morally speaking Fulvio could well regard himself as a murderer even though he had not been there in those early morning hours when Alfred Wygant, legendary teetotaler, but for the occasion asea in alcohol, had pitched over the railing on the second floor of his house and fallen to his death below. It was clear that one of Fulvio's adventures had involved Eleanor.

A priest does well not to dwell on what is told him as confessor. It is not an occasion when one person is speaking to another but when a sinner is speaking to God and the priest is there to represent the divine mercy. But Fulvio had been vivid in his account of his misdeed and ignored Father Dowling's caution that there was no need to name names.

“She talked him into it against his better judgment.”

“Did you quarrel about it?” They were on the topic of the vast injustice of Fulvio's taking Wygant's money under the pretense that it was an investment. To some degree, it seemed to be revenge on the man who had claimed his erstwhile mistress. Except that Fulvio took credit for having urged her to marry Wygant.

How could Father Dowling not think of Eleanor's visit to the rectory in which she had expressed her concern about the novel Jessica was writing, one based on her family? Fulvio's confession had provided a good basis for the alarm this caused in Eleanor. Raymond, on the other hand, seemed unconcerned about any role his actions might play in this fictional drama.

“No one could judge me more severely than I judge myself.”

Was this a change since his arrival home? Raymond had told him of his visit to St. Edmund's and his talk with Father Bourke, what had been a dreaded confrontation turning out to be anything but, the old priest more forgiving than Raymond expected, or than he knew he deserved.

“The quality of mercy is not strained,” Father Dowling said.

Raymond smiled. “There are phrases one has known all one's life and never really understood, until â¦”

Until he had reconciled with his mother, until he had spoken with Father Bourke.

“I suppose you will return to California now,” Father Dowling said.

This was at the cemetery. They had moved away from the gravesite, and Raymond came to Father Dowling and tried to slip an envelope into his pocket.

“No, no. That's not necessary.”

“You've been a great support to my mother.”

“A priest sometimes derives as much support as he gives.”

Raymond looked away, his expression pained.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to â¦”

Raymond smiled. “Remind me that I am a priest? It has been very difficult to overlook that since I came home.”

“Jessica said you had a good reunion with Father Bourke.”

“The funny thing is, no one has ever suggested I come back.”

“Would you like me to?”

Raymond looked at him, unsure what to say.

“Not that I have any status in the matter.”

“Can I come visit you at the rectory, Father? Before I leave.”

Of course he could. Father Dowling thought of warning him about Marie Murkin. God only knew what reception a flown priest would get from her if he showed up on her doorstep. But Raymond had the charm of his father, and Father Dowling did not think Marie could long resist it.

But it was Jessica who came to the rectory that afternoon. Marie brought a very distracted young lady to the study. Of course, Jessica had just lost her father. “I could make tea,” Marie said.

But Jessica did not want tea, and Father Dowling never drank it. Nor did she want a cup of the lethally strong coffee that simmered in the study. Marie closed the door on them. Jessica's expression became more tragic, as if she had been restraining herself in the presence of the housekeeper.

“Oh, Father.”

“What is it?”

“Everything!”

Well, not quite. He knew that it would be best just to let her say whatever it was in whatever way she chose. But it was surprising when she began talking of the death of the young English professor from St. Edmund.

“He was threatening us all.”

“Threatening?”

“Because of Andrew. Andrew is on the committee that voted against giving Cassirer tenure, and he blamed Andrew. He declared war on the college and on our whole family. He seemed to think that I would convince Andrew to change his vote.”

“On what basis?”

“This is embarrassing.”

“Jessica, I'm a priest.”

“Andrew is living with a woman. A colleague. It's not all that unusual anymore, but it is against the rules for the faculty of St. Edmund's.”

“They explicitly forbid cohabitation?”

She laughed. Her spirit seemed to rise with the opportunity to talk. “Oh, it's generic. They are expected to live in accordance with Christian morals as taught by the Church. Cassirer thought he could blackmail Andrew on that basis.”

“And he came to you with this story. Had you known about Andrew?”

“Yes.”

“I didn't see him at your father's funeral.”

“He wasn't there.” Her spirits visibly sank. “Have you read the details of the death of Cassirer?”

The conjunction of Cassirer's blackmail attempt and his death prepared Father Dowling for what followed. Jessica told the tale Andrew had told her in flat tones, as if she were prepared not to be believed. Did she believe it herself?

“Oh, yes. He wouldn't make up something like this. His imagination is not very lively.”

“Jessica, he has to tell the police what happened.”

“I know. He agrees, but he hasn't been able to do it.”

“Where is he now?”

“At my apartment. What he expects is that Gloria Monday will call the police and tell them everything.”

“It would be far better if he did.”

“What I was hoping, Father, is that you could arrange a meeting with someone like Horvath. I met him, and he doesn't look as if anything would surprise him.”

“Call Andrew and have him come here.”

“I better go get him. He came to my place on foot.”

“Meanwhile, I'll call Lieutenant Horvath. Have you met Phil Keegan? Either one would do. Maybe both.”

Jessica slipped away, but before Father Dowling could make a call he heard the voice of Phil Keegan jollying Marie Murkin. She followed him into the study, carrying a glass of beer, which she put down next to his chair. Phil drank half the glass, smacked his lips, and generally looked satisfied.

“Where we found Cassirer's bicycle was definitely the scene of the crime. His glasses. Student theme papers blowing about. The bike wasn't damaged all that much. It actually came to a stop leaning against a fence.”

“The blow knocked him off?”

“He was clotheslined, more or less.”

Cy had found footprints in the snow he was pretty sure were the assailant's. “Tennis shoes, size seven, one of a zillion pairs. Maybe no two snowflakes are alike, but every tennis shoe of this make is.”

“Male or female.”

“Male presumably.”

“So whom do you suspect?”

“Do you know who lives in the building in front of which the assault took place?”

“Andrew Bernardo.”

“How did you know that!”

“Jessica told me.”

“It turns out that Andrew and Cassirer were blood enemies. Cassirer claimed Andrew was ruining his career. He was threatening him, trying to get him to change his vote.”

It would have been much better if Phil had learned all this from Andrew himself.

“Cy is out there now with a court order to look at Andrew's car.”

Half an hour later, Jessica returned with an unshaven Andrew. Father Dowling had needed no excuse to keep Phil Keegan at the rectory, and the arrival of the Bernardos came as a bit of a surprise, given what Phil had just said.

As soon as Andrew was introduced to Phil he said, “Captain, I have done something very stupid.”

That seemed a mild description of what Andrew had done. Listening to him, watching him as he spoke, Father Dowling wondered if this were the whole story. Certainly Phil would find it difficult to believe that Andrew had simply removed a pesky body from his doorstep, dumping it in the street a mile away.

“You knew the man who was killed?”

“Horst Cassirer.” Andrew took a breath. “He hated me. He had vowed to destroy my reputation.”

“Why?”

Phil listened patiently to the tale of academic politics. But the question that had been forming in Father Dowling's mind was put by Phil, dismissing the account of campus vendettas.

“You couldn't have dumped the body in the street all by yourself.”

“I don't want to involve anyone else.”

“Whoever was with you is already involved.”

Jessica said, “For heaven's sake, tell him. She is no more guilty, or innocent, than you are.”

“Gloria Monday,” Andrew said in a small voice.

“And who is she?”

Andrew glanced at Father Dowling and then at Jessica who said, “If you're worried about shocking Father Dowling, forget it.”

“We live together.”

“And she helped you move the body.”

“She didn't know what we were doing. I had put it in the back, and she was driving. Why would she look in the backseat?”