Blood Ties (23 page)

“But I want to hear about you,” Madeline said.

“There's really nothing to tell.”

“I'll be the judge of that.” A little wry smile.

To Martha, her own life seemed uneventful, but Madeline nodded her along as she spoke of school, of college, of Foley, Farnum, and Casey, and of meeting Bernard.

“I did catch glimpses of you from time to time, Martha.”

“You did!”

“I couldn't resist it when I found out who the Lynches were and where they lived. No names came up when…”

“You saw me,” Martha said in awe. The desire that had driven her had not been absent from Madeline after all. It was clear that she had been very brave to have her baby, and even braver to give it up, but it was something she could never put out of her mind.

“And of course I wouldn't have caused any trouble to your parents. You have been very fortunate, Martha.”

After Father Dowling left, others had gone past on the walk from time to time. Now someone had stopped. Martha turned from her mother.

“Martha!”

It was Sheila, a prissy little man at her side. Her remark had been prompted originally by surprise at seeing her daughter here. Then she took in Madeline and a look of agony spread over her face. Her eyes darted from one woman to the other.

“This is my mother,” Martha said.

“Your mother! I am your mother. You ungrateful girl.” She actually shook her finger at Madeline. “I will never forgive you for this. After all we have done.”

“Mother,” Martha cried, and both women looked at her.

“Mother?” Sheila said. “Am I your mother?”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, can't you see how wonderful this is? Do you remember Madeline?”

Sheila's angry glance seemed to leap across the years. The little man with her had followed the conversation as if it were a tennis match.

Now Madeline held out her hand to Sheila. “Mrs. Lynch, I have no wish to cause you pain.”

“Pain?” Martha cried. “She should be delighted.”

Sheila slapped her. Her hand moved as if she had no control over it, and when she saw what she had done she stepped back, horror-struck. Then she turned and hurried off down the path toward the school. The little man skipped after her. Martha and Madeline were silenced by what happened.

After a moment, Madeline said, “I understand her reaction. Does she think I have come to take you away?”

“Oh, I wish you would.”

“No you don't, sweetheart. That can never be. You must make it up to her. It won't be long before you go off with Bernard.”

Part Four

1

Father Dowling heard of the arrest of Maurice Dolan from Phil Keegan. “Cy never gives up, Father. What a detective he is.”

“He thinks Maurice Dolan ran over that author?”

“It's not just thinking anymore. Dolan has confessed.”

“Good Lord.” Father Dowling thought of the man he had visited in his hospital room and found this news difficult to accept.

“The man has been in and out of trouble all his life,” Phil said with the air of a man with long experience of the effects of original sin. “Nothing like this, of course, but great oaks from little acorns grow.”

“I don't think that is the meaning of the phrase, Phil. Why on earth would he have done it?”

“Jealousy.”

Phil's initial report was so casual that Father Dowling permitted himself to think his old friend might be mistaken, not that he didn't share Phil's admiration for Cy Horvath's tenacity. It was Amos Cadbury who provided the details that made the story plausible.

“What makes it delicate, Father, is its connection with recent events you and I have discussed. I can tell you that Nathaniel Fleck was the father of the child we know as Martha Lynch. Madeline and Catherine Adams were roommates at Northwestern when Madeline got into trouble. At the time, Catherine was seeing much of Maurice Dolan. Apparently, Fleck then won the young woman's heart. The animosity must have begun then, and yet the three of them remained friends of a sort. When Maurice and Catherine also moved to California, they renewed regular acquaintance with Fleck, and that is when the trouble must have begun.”

“A rivalry?”

Amos nodded. A young man in Amos's firm, James Kilkenny, was representing Maurice, but the accused and then confessed killer of Nathaniel Fleck had, against Kilkenny's advice, unburdened himself to Cy, once the accusation had been made. Catherine's lifelong infatuation with Fleck, episodic until recent years, had increased in California. She was determined to marry the author, so Maurice was out in the cold.

“But didn't they come to Chicago together?”

“Then Fleck was killed. That seems to have brought them together again. No doubt as Maurice Dolan had hoped.”

“He actually confessed that he ran the man down?”

“Oh, his confession will play no role in the trial. The plea will be not guilty. Kilkenny intends to concentrate on the ambiguity of the accident that killed Fleck.”

“Accident.”

“I know, Father, but you must think in legal terms. Kilkenny wants to make the best case he can. A vehicle out of control, an unintended death. To be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter is preferable to cold-blooded murder.”

Amos's heart was not in this explanation, though. That the law permitted and even demanded fine-grained distinctions was one thing, but to fabricate a story to make a guilty man innocent was something else entirely.

“Has Maurice Dolan agreed to all this?”

“Not yet, I gather, but Kilkenny will doubtless make him see the wisdom of it.”

“I would like to speak to Maurice.”

Amos nodded his approval. Father Dowling could offer consolations unavailable to the law.

An abject Henry Dolan begged Father Dowling to see his son. Henry seemed to have aged ten years under this new burden. His daughter's flare-up when she had come upon Martha and Madeline Lorenzo on a bench near the parish grotto had been the talk of the senior center ever since. Sheila had gone there to find her parents, still hoping to prevent Martha from seeing her birth mother, and Martin Sisk had offered to take her to the church, where the Dolans must have lingered following the noon Mass. On the way, they had come upon the joyful reunion, made into a fiasco by Sheila's hysterical reaction.

“I have spent my life trying to get that boy out of trouble,” Henry said. “There seems no way out of this.”

2

Catherine Adams was staying with the Dolans and getting along just fine with Vivian.

“This used to be Maurice's room,” Vivian said as her guest was settling in.

Catherine looked around. “Where are the golf trophies?”

“Oh, he took such things with him.”

The first morning they sat long over the breakfast table while Henry read the
Sun-Times
in the living room. Vivian was intent on finding out just how matters stood between Catherine and her son. She liked the self-possession of the young lady and how easily she fitted in. In age, she must be close to Maurice, but wasn't that better than his settling down with some chit of a girl?

“So you and Maurice are partners?”

“I'm just a silent partner, Vivian.”

“And what do you do when you aren't silent?”

“I'm a financial counselor.”

Henry perked up at this and came back into the dining room. Catherine smiled at him as he sat. She gave a brisk little description of her work.

“I hope you're managing Maurice's money,” Vivian purred.

“He says he doesn't have any.”

The Dolans laughed in chorus. Henry said, “Most of it is just in prospect, of course. What he now has is in a trust arranged by Amos Cadbury.”

“Well, the sly old thing.”

“Maurice's has been a checkered career,” Henry said.

“Oh, I know all about that.”

Vivian said, “And how long have you two known one another?”

“Forever. I was an undergraduate at Northwestern when we first met.”

“That long ago?”

Catherine laughed. “Don't ask how many years it has been.”

They laughed together, all three.

Catherine said to Henry, “When you came to California to take Maurice back here, Amos Cadbury stayed on.”

“One look at the plane I brought Maurice home in and Amos said no thanks.”

“Such a wonderful man.”

The Dolans took turns telling her how wonderful Amos Cadbury indeed was.

“He seemed intent on finding out about me and Maurice.”

“And what did he find out?” Henry asked.

“He didn't report to you?”

“Report to me? Please don't think I put him up to it.”

“Things have been simplified of late.”

“Oh?”

Catherine leaned toward Vivian. “You would think that the longer you knew a man, the easier it would be. It's not. And my problem was that there were two.”

“Two!” Vivian exclaimed.

“Someone else I had known since Northwestern.”

“Nathaniel Fleck?” Henry said.

Catherine feigned surprise, but only for a moment. “But of course you would know all about what happened to poor Nathaniel.”

“Who is poor Nathaniel?” Vivian wanted to know.

“Sheila lent you one of his books, Vivian.”

“He's an author.”

“Was,” Catherine said, and sipped her coffee with her eyes downcast.

Henry went into the living room and returned with a copy of
The Long Good-bye.
Vivian looked at the book. “Oh, I hated that story. I couldn't finish it.”

Henry had opened the book. “He dedicated it to you,” he said to Catherine.

“Yes.”

“The book just came out.”

“Books are written at least a year before they come out.”

“Ave atque vale.”

Catherine nodded. “We had finally agreed to part.”

Vivian was trying to make sense of this. “Had you been engaged to this other man?”

“Engaged? Oh, nothing so formal. No more than I am to Maurice.”

Having brought things to this point, Vivian was determined to go on. “No more than?”

Catherine put her hand on Vivian's and smiled. “You will be the first to know. As I said, things are different now.”

“With Fleck gone?”

“Exactly.”

Vivian had to settle for this, but she was content. Henry was now used to the close-cropped hair on the shapely head of the young woman.

“I have met George Lynch but not your daughter.”

Vivian looked grave. “Sheila has been going through a very difficult time.”

“Oh?”

Henry took his paper back to the living room. Vivian's whispered account was audible where he read, but he made no effort to follow what she was saying.

Catherine repeated Madeline's name when Vivian said it.

“Yes.”

“A lovely name.”

“And she is a lovely woman. As is Martha.”

“Martha I met. At the hospital. And her young man.”

“That is what precipitated it all, her coming marriage. She just had to know who her mother was.”

“No wonder Sheila is upset.”

This was in the morning. In the afternoon, they heard that the police had visited Maurice. By the time Henry and Catherine got to the hospital, he had confessed to striking Nathaniel Fleck with a car on a downtown street.

3

Cy Horvath had been surprised when Maurice Dolan reacted as he did to the questions put him. He had listened silently, following closely what the detective said.

“You rented a car?”

“I think you already know that. I suppose you located it?”

“We did. It had been rented to Catherine Adams.”

Maurice had sat up slowly and swung his legs off his bed while Cy talked. Now he looked out the window for a time, then smiled.

“That little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky. Do you know the phrase?”

“No.”

“It's from ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.'”

“I'll take your word for it. Who drove the rental car, you or Catherine Adams?”

“We both did. Not at the same time, of course.” His smile had become almost wistful. “All right, Lieutenant, you got me.”

“Got you?”

“I did it.”

“Did what?”

“I ran down Nate Fleck with that car.”

“It's not a joking matter,” Cy said.

“Indeed it's not. I'm perfectly serious.”

“Tell me about it.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and then began. He had been parked on Dirksen, waiting, and when Nathaniel Fleck came along the walk, he moved after him. “When I saw my chance, I jumped the curb, struck him and then sped away.”

“He went through the window of a coffee shop.”

“I read all about it.”

The newspaper accounts could have provided all the details of Maurice Dolan's story, and Cy found himself skeptical. Maurice Dolan's confession came too easily, and for all his melancholy manner as he spoke, he did not seem sorry for what he claimed to have done.

“I suppose you had a motive.”

“Oh, yes. The usual thing. Jealousy.”

“What were you jealous of?”

After hearing it himself, Cy got on the phone and called Jacuzzi, the prosecutor. Jacuzzi brought a stenographer, and Maurice went through it all again, for the record.

Maurice had taken Catherine out while she was an undergraduate at Northwestern and he was an ABBA. Asked to explain the acronym, he said it meant that he had acquired college credits but no degree. All but BA. The affair had gone on peacefully until Catherine was attracted by a fellow student, Nathaniel Fleck. Thus began what Maurice called a “scrimmage à trois” that lasted for years. For a time, Catherine was his, but Fleck then would steal her away. Two years ago, the contest seemed over. Catherine, weary of her way of life, was determined to settle down and marry Fleck. The difficulty was that Fleck, having triumphed, found victory less than he had expected. His ardor cooled. It was not helped when he lost a good deal of money following Catherine's advice. Then a rival emerged against whom Catherine had no chance. “It's all in his last book, the one he dedicated to Catherine, giving her the final kiss-off.”