Blood Ties (6 page)

“He had contacted the mother. She came to me in great distress. You can imagine what she thinks of him—did I say that he abandoned her in her trouble? She was furious that he had looked her up.”

“Then she didn't tell him to see you?”

“She would have done nothing to indulge him.”

“Then how this?” Father Dowling lifted the letter.

“Obviously, he was a very enterprising man. After all, he found the girl. Finding me would have been more difficult, but not impossible.”

Amos sipped his brandy and fell silent. Father Dowling waited for him to speak again.

“You can imagine what I am thinking.”

“Say it.”

“The way the woman spoke of him makes it credible that she would have done anything to stop him.”

“Run him down?”

“Anything. If he had continued to try to see her…”

“Threatening the life she now has.”

“Exactly. So, what must I do?”

Giving advice is more difficult than receiving it, and few are able to do even that. Father Dowling was not eager to tell Amos what to do. The fact was it was not clear what that might be. The lawyer's suspicion that a woman had run over the man who had abandoned her years ago and now had returned to menace the family she had formed was only that, a suspicion. In any case, there was no need to act on it at once, if at all. Nothing would be lost by seeing what course events might take. He put this into words for Amos.

The lawyer listened but did not himself say anything for a time. Then he sighed. “Just to have spoken with you about this has been a great relief, Father.”

“I can easily imagine that.”

“One more reason to be grateful for our friendship.”

“It is a two-way street, Amos.”

“Thank you.”

So the evening ended. Driving home, it occurred to Father Dowling that Amos had not said whether or not he would follow his advice.

3

“Sometimes I think Phil Keegan ought to just move in here,” Marie Murkin said.

“I could never condone such immorality, Marie.”

Off she went in a huff, leaving Father Dowling remorseful for his teasing. Not that he thought Marie would brood about it. Besides, she liked the frequency of Phil's visits as much as he did. Phil had been a class or two behind him at Quigley and had been a casualty of Latin, a must in the preconciliar Church. So Phil had left and been in the service and then became a policeman, rising to chief of detectives in the Fox River Police Department. If Father Dowling could scarcely confide professional secrets in Phil, Phil took satisfaction from keeping the pastor of St. Hilary's au courant with the real world.

“Captain Keegan,” Marie said frostily, when she led their frequent guest to the study.

“What's wrong with her?” Phil asked when she banged the door shut.

“Unrequited love.”

“What's that, not quite love?”

“More or less.”

“Anyone I know.”

“Do you know Martin Sisk?”

“Is he still alive?”

“So he says. How do you know him?”

“He had a pharmacy down by the courthouse. A lovely wife, Deirdre. Gone to God, alas. He always quizzed me about Quigley.”

“He wanted to be my altar boy.”

“If you ever want a server, call on me.”

“I don't. But I would if I did.”

“How do you know him?”

“The senior center.”

“Better warn the widows.”

“Oh?”

“I'm kidding. We did get a few complaints, though. He wanted to play doctor to female customers.”

“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.”

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.