Authors: Ralph McInerny

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BOOK: Prodigal Father

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My days are like a shadow that lengthens.

âPsalm 102

Horvath carried the little case, slung over his shoulder, when he and Pippen entered the Wackham Building and approached the
desk where Bill Solomon was engrossed in a paperback. Solomon hadn't heard them come in so either what he was reading was fascinating or his ears were worse than they had been when he was on the force.

“That elevator go to the basement?”

The watchman levitated and lost his grip on his paperback. “Cy! How are you?” Solomon looked at Pippen, then pushed his glasses to the tip of his nose for a better look.

All over town, former cops were supplementing their pensions with jobs like thisâsecurity at the mall, at supermarkets, in schools, in downtown buildings. Soft duty, but what good was retirement if you went on working? He felt a sudden compassion for Solomon, bored to death through the night hours, driven to cheap novels to keep his mind from working, he might have been a symbol of Christmas future. He repeated his question.

“That depends on what you mean by basement.”

Pippen said, “What does the word mean to you?”

“There are two basements,” Solomon said brightly, happy to acquaint the uninitiated with the lore of the Wackham. “The basement and the subbasement.”

“We'll start with the subbasement,” Cy said.

“Start what?”

Cy hunched over the desk and fixed Solomon's eye. “Remember when you were sworn in as a police officer, Bill? That oath still stands. We're on a very confidential mission. If anyone hears of this, it will be because you told them. I don't have to tell you what would happen then.”

Solomon seemed to want to know, but Cy stood. “Come on,” he said to Pippen, and started for the elevator.

“It won't work without this key,” Solomon called after them.

Cy returned to the table with his hand out. Solomon reluctantly removed a key from a large ring of keys that swung from his belt when he stood.

“This could mean my head, Horvath.”

“That's what I said.”

“How long will this take?” he asked Pippen when they were in the elevator and he pushed SB.

“The ride down?” Radiant smile, great green eyes, auburn hair pulled back and gathered in a ponytail. She was wearing a long skirt and an open jacket that hung below her hips. Their presence together in this intimate, enclosed space constituted what the nuns had called a proximate occasion of sin. But all they had ever done is innocently flirt with one another. And that is all they would ever do. Virtue is a habit hard to break.

The subbasement was a great rectangle with rough concrete walls and hooded lamps dangling from the ceiling. In its center, enclosed by a screen fence, was what looked like a generator. Otherwise the space was empty. Cy unslung the case. Pippen opened it and withdrew what looked like a stethoscope. There were dials set in the top of the instrument.

“No headset?”

“The dials do it.”

Carrying the case, Cy picked a wall at random and Pippen began to move the detecting device along the concrete, her eye on the dials. The wall was maybe seven feet high.

“Why don't I do that and you watch the dials.”

As she could not, he could hold the porous disk that spoke to the dials to the top of the wall. But if what they were looking for was here, chances are it would not be up very high. Probably
more in the middle. It was a dull task, made interesting by the presence of Pippen, and the knowledge that they were together on a job.

“Isn't this fun?” she said, when one wall had been traversed without results.

“A barrel of laughs.”

They had worked silently up to then, but now she began to talk. Sometimes she wished she were a detective rather than coroner. She was just a year married and Cy would have asked what she planned to do when the children came, but there are questions one does not ask of professional women. Not that he thought of Pippen as one of a type. However efficient she was in her job, she seemed miscast to Cy. He saw her bouncing babies on her knee, a Renaissance Madonna, the essence of womanhood.

She had reviewed her girlhood, college, medical school, her family, the awful men she might have married and how lucky she was to have found the husband she had, and there was one wall left. A wall they might have started with. They had been in the subbasement two hours when the elevator door opened and Tuttle and Farniente emerged.

“Horvath! I heard you were down here.”

Horvath thought of what he would do to Solomon. Obviously the security man had gotten on the phone to spread the news. But Farniente and Tuttle? He would have expected the rat to call Tetzel. Too late, he remembered that Solomon had frequently been under a cloud when he was on active duty, leaking to the press everything he knew, which was never much, but it did not endear him to his colleagues. He should have brought Solomon with them.

“Glad you could come,” Cy said. “You know Dr. Pippen.”

Farniente was ogling the coroner with undisguised admiration.

“You remind me of my first wife.”

“What are we doing?” Tuttle asked.

Cy ignored him, starting on the remaining wall. Tuttle and Farniente fell silent, moving along with him and Pippen as they sounded the wall.

“Something in there?”

“You ever read Edgar Allan Poe?” Pippen asked him.

“Does he write for the
Sun-Times?”

“Nevermore.”

With the arrival of Tuttle and Farniente, the futile became farcical. Cy no longer expected that Pippen's gizmo would detect the remains of the late and unlamented Beamish. Charlotte Priebe had taken some sick boasting seriously. Lars Anderson had not made a pile because he was dumb enough to confide in a young woman something that could have caused him real trouble. He reached the corner and looked at Pippen.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Well, now we know.”

He had told her only that they had been given information about a body buried in the concrete.

“Could it be in the basement?”

They headed for the elevator, with Tuttle and Farniente at their heels. The four rose a level to the basement. It was the same dimensions as the subbasement but had a claustrophobically low ceiling. Pippen suggested they switch roles. They did, and she began making great swift arcs with the detector, moving much more quickly than he had. The dials did nothing.

“We going to do all twenty floors?” Tuttle asked.

“As many as we can get to,” Cy said.

“What are we looking for?”

“Promise you won't tell?”

Both Tuttle and Farniente raised their lying hands.

“I made the same promise.”

It was three in the morning when they packed up the equipment and headed for the elevator. A sullen Tuttle and Farniente grumbled as they rose to the lobby.

“Look at it this way, Tuttle. You might still be in jail.”

“They threatened me,” Solomon whined when Cy stopped at his desk.

“I thought I did that.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get you reinstated. You'd make a good partner for Peanuts Pianone.”

“Sorry,” Cy said, when he and Pippen pulled away.

“Sorry that we didn't find a body?”

“Thanks for helping.”

“Hey, what are the long night hours for?”

“Where's Mr. Pippen?” he asked. She had retained her name after her marriage.

She laughed. “Dr. Foley is attending a medical convention in Seattle.”

They stopped for coffee, they ordered ham and eggs. “You never talk about yourself, Cy.”

“Not when I'm on duty.”

She might have taken it as a rebuff, but it was his shield against temptation. And it was tempting to think of them as a couple out on the town, ending up here with platters full of bacon
and eggs and coffee so hot it would have gotten McDonald's a lawsuit. He took the printout of Charlotte Priebe's file from his pocket and showed it to her. She read it while removing egg from the corner of her mouth with a long-nailed little finger. Her brows rose.

“Wow.”

“We just disproved it.”

“I'm glad you didn't tell me before. I thought it was the confession of some convict at Joliet or something.”

“That's about what it was worth.”

“But you had to know.”

Even negative information is a gain. One possible explanation of the death of Charlotte Priebe could be dismissed. Cy was almost sad. It would have been something to present Robertson with a question of conscience, not that he had one. Sometimes he dreamed of Keegan being named chief and the department being made over to his image. It would never happen. Okay. If not Anderson, Tuttle? That was ridiculous. They had just been teaching the lawyer a lesson. A process of elimination went on in Horvath's mind.

“You're thinking.”

And he was. First thing in the morning he would scare up Leo Corbett.

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”

â
Psalm 14

Father Dowling awoke at five in the morning, tried to regain sleep first on one side, then the other, then on his back. Perhaps sleep would have come again, if he had not started thinking. He put his hands behind his head and looked at the ceiling in the first dawn and made his morning offering. Then, with great concentration, he said an Our Father. That done, he reviewed the events of the past week. They almost seemed to have begun with his retreat at the Athanasians. Something in Father Boniface's valedictory air had touched his own soul, not altogether bad when on retreat, but it would not do as one's natural attitude, as Boniface himself had come to see. Mortality was a fact, death would come, and a retreat offered the opportunity to think on the life that led to that definitive moment. As he rarely did, he thought of his early life as a priest, a member of the archdiocesan marriage tribunal, widely regarded as a man on his way up the ecclesiastical ladder. And then he had been brought low, suffering a humiliating debility that altered forever his prospects. His assignment to St. Hilary's had seemed to seal his fate. So thought others, so at first thought
he. But with time he came to see in this apparent reversal a providential reordering of his life.

He thanked God for this parish, for his pastoral work, for his friends. A bonus had been the renewal of an old acquaintance with Phil Keegan, once a lower-classman at Quigley who had washed out because the intricacies of Latin escaped him. Roger Dowling had the vaguest of memories of Phil as a boy, but to Phil he had been an upperclassman and thus more noticeable. Phil's wife had died, he was a widower who tried to make his work as captain of detectives the whole of his life, and the St. Hilary rectory soon became almost a second home to him. Thus Father Dowling had learned more than he might have wanted to of the seamy side of the city in which he lived.

His retreat had refreshed his memories of Marygrove and the Athanasians so that he had acquaintance with the setting in which bizarre events had then occurred. Boniface had told him of the surprising return of a laicized member, who had lived like a prodigal in a far city but finally asked permission to return to his community. Yet even while on probation, he had become a source of division, something Boniface tolerated because of Nathaniel's role in the restoration of the common office and Gregorian chant. But Nathaniel had started a faction that threatened to bring on more quickly than Boniface feared the end of the Order. The idea of selling off the choice property on which the Athanasians had lived their American existence had appealed to some of the old priests because it appealed to their sense of the demands of their vow of poverty. Their home began to seem a place they unjustly occupied. And not only the Athanasians would be affected by such a sale. The Georges, from time immemorial the groundskeepers at Marygrove, would find themselves unemployed as the land they had so lovingly cultivated was divided into plots and great expensive
houses rose. In a short time, Nathaniel had made many enemies.

And then Stanley Morgan had brought Nathaniel's California past to Fox River. When Mr. George had discovered the corpse of Father Nathaniel on a prie dieu at the grotto, Morgan had been staying in the lodge, there to be a grim reminder to his erstwhile silent partner of past injustice. When Morgan disappeared while the medical examiner and police swarmed over the scene of the murder, he became the obvious suspect. He was arrested in St. Hilary's old school, doubtless given sanctuary by Edna Hospers. Morgan had been a danger to Edna, but that was all. If Morgan had made a sincere confession, there had been nothing untoward between him and Edna. And, equally on the assumption of his sincerity in laying his sins before a priest, Stanley Morgan had not killed Father Nathaniel. Father Dowling had waited for Phil Keegan to look beyond the presumed guilt of Morgan, unable to say anything that was based on Morgan's confession.

The murder of Charlotte Priebe had turned up an ominous file on her computer.
If I Should Die.
Phil Keegan had shown him the printout.

“So what will you do?”

“Proceed with caution.”

“But proceed?”

And then Phil told him of the planned nocturnal visit to the basement of the Wackham Building to be made by Cy Horvath and Dr. Pippen. By now, they should know whether credence could be put in Charlotte Priebe's account of Lars Anderson's story. Discovery is largely a matter of eliminating possibilities and that was what the pastor of St. Hilary's did, ticking off the suspects as he lay awake. All but one.

At five-thirty, Father Dowling got out of bed. His day had
begun, whether he liked it or not. He shaved and showered and dressed and went downstairs. In the kitchen, he drank a glass of orange juice and left a note for Marie Murkin. WILL BE GONE FOR SOME HOURS. BACK FOR THE NOON MASS. Then he went out to his car and drove downtown.

When he entered the hotel lobby he thought it was Tuttle behind the desk, snoozing under his tipped-forward tweed hat. Father Dowling tapped on the counter with his car keys and the figure lurched into wakefulness. The sight of the Roman collar brought him to his feet.

“What room is Leo Corbett in?”

“You want me to call him?”

“Just give me the number, I'll go up.”

Hesitation gave way before the reassurance of a clerical presence. “307.”

“Thank you.”

“Should I let him know you're coming up?”

“Thank you.”

The elevator seemed undecided between upward and sideways movement. There was a strong smell of disinfectant that was lifted with Father Dowling uncertainly to the third floor. The hallway into which he emerged was poorly lit and needed all the disinfectant it could get. Father Dowling started in one direction, then altered course. When he turned, a door opened and Leo Corbett looked out, disheveled and testy.

“What do you want?”

Father Dowling walked to the opened door, laid a hand on Leo's arm and gently moved him inside. “We don't want to discuss this in the hallway.”

“What âthis'?”

“Many things, Leo.”

“I don't know you. Are you one of them?”

“Them?”

“Athanasians.”

“No. I'm Father Dowling. I have a parish here in town.”

“Look, I don't want to talk about this or anything else. I'm not a Catholic.”

“Your grandfather was.”

“Senility,” Leo said contemptuously.

It was not a room in which anyone would care to spend much time. The bed looked as if Leo had spent the night wrestling with bad angels. The shade hung crookedly at the cloudy window, the ceiling lamp diffused weak light over the messy scene. A pile of clothing lay in the corner. On the little table beside the bed there was an overflowing ashtray and a small gooseneck lamp with a yellowing shade. Newspapers were scattered on the floor next to the bed.

“Senility? Do you mean his conversion or his transfer of his estate to the Athanasians?”

“They are two ends of the same thought.”

“I see in the paper that you consider yourself to have been disinherited.”

“Well, what would you think if your grandfather was one of the richest men in town and all he left his son was an annuity that ran out when he died?”

“Your father?”

“My father.”

“So you have put yourself in the capable hands of Tuttle?”

“Not anymore.”

“No?”

“Look, why are you here? Is this what priests do, call uninvited on hotel guests?”

“You must be anxious to talk to someone.”

“About what?”

“Father Nathaniel, for one thing.”

“He's dead.”

“Indeed he is. By violence. Why did you do it?”

Leo gave him a look, then smiled sarcastically. “What do I do now, break down and confess?”

“That would be a start. How did you lure Nathaniel to the maintenance shed in the middle of the night?”

Leo looked at him for a long minute, his face registering a sequence of thoughts. Then he got up and locked the door. Lounging on the bed, he said, “Why not? What would you like to know?”

Father Dowling rested his back against the dresser. “I already have a question on the floor.”

“How did I lure Nathaniel to the maintenance shed? I called him up and said we had to talk. You see, your approach works. I told him there was a way to accomplish what he wanted. He told me it was too late, he had lost support. I told him my support was all he needed. It was he who suggested the maintenance shed. Since I was calling from my car, I was there before him and found what I wanted.”

“An ax?”

“A sort-of ax.”

“What was the point of killing him if he no longer presented a threat?”

“Do you think I believed that? Do you imagine I really believed that they would do a deal with Anderson and I would get my grandfather's house?”

“So what was your plan?”

“You realize I'm telling you these things because you can be no danger to me.”

“Your worst enemy is yourself. And then you killed Charlotte Priebe.”

“I don't want to talk about her.”

“Why not? As you say, I'm no danger to you.”

“Don't you know what I meant by that?”

“Given your recent actions, I have a fairly good idea.”

“Aren't you frightened?”

“Not as much as you must be.”

“The police? They're stupid. Besides, they have a confession from Stanley Morgan. Don't you watch the news?”

“Now they can concentrate on what happened to Charlotte. I should tell you the police found a very interesting file on the computer in her apartment.”

“How would you know that?”

“Believe me, they did. A very incriminating document. She spoke of you. She feared for her life.”

“I don't believe it.”

“Why did you flee from her apartment?”

“I'm losing interest in this.”

“She took you in and you killed her.”

“She tried to take me in, you mean. The oldest trick in the world. It was fun while it was lasted, but was I supposed to believe a woman like that had fallen madly in love with me?”

“That was no reason to kill her.”

“She knew too much. And now so do you.”

“I know enough to know that you have destroyed any chance of getting what you think is owed you.”

“I am not working alone.”

“Lars Anderson?”

“Why do you say that?”

“I told you of the statement found on Charlotte Priebe's computer.”

“I think you're making that up.”

“No you don't.”

Leo lurched forward and rose awkwardly to his feet. He was a huge young man, pudgy but powerful. “Come on, we're getting out of here.”

“Where can you hide, Leo?”

“You should be worrying more of what could happen to you.”