The Widow's Mate (21 page)

“Sounds nice.”

“If you like to fish and read and look out at lakes.”

“How could you get tired of something like that?”

Ah, but what would life in California with Wally have been like if he had joined her? Like her father, they would have tried to exist only in the present. Just the thought of being together, untrammeled by the past, had seemed attraction enough, but obviously that could get boring, as Sylvia's remark suggested.

“Oh, he got tired of it.”

“And then?”

Sylvia sipped her daiquiri. “He left me.”

“Oh.”

“So I came back here.”

“Back?”

“It's a long story.”

*   *   *

When Sandra thought of what had happened to Wally, her attitude toward Sylvia altered once again.

“Be careful,” Tuttle told her when she mentioned that she had come to know Sylvia Beach.

“Of what?”

“What do you know of the Pianones?”

“One of them is her guy, isn't he? Marco?”

“That's why I said be careful. Half the unsolved murders in Fox River are ascribed to the Pianones. Rightly or wrongly,” he added. “Maybe it's just the name of the file they put cases in they can't solve.”

“Like Wally Flanagan.”

“That was a twist. A cement mixer.”

Knowledge is supposed to be power, but the more she learned, the less Sandra knew what to do with it. Sylvia was being kept by a Pianone. Had Wally just been in the way and been taken care of in the usual family manner? It was clear to Sandra that the Fox River police would not want to pursue that possibility.

The following morning, as she was going through the lobby, about to start her run, a very large man in plainclothes and a black woman in uniform stopped her.

“Sandra Bochenski?” the woman asked.

“You're Horvath,” Sandra said to the big guy. “We've talked.”

“This is Officer Lamb. Agnes. We want to talk some more.”

“Sure.”

Agnes Lamb said, “We're investigating the murder of your husband.”

“My husband!”

“Gregory Packer.”

Over by his pulpit, Ferret was trying not to make his eavesdropping obvious.

“My former husband.”

“We'd like you to come with us.”

“Why? We can talk right here.”

Agnes Lamb took a sheet from the envelope she had been carrying. It was a warrant for the arrest of Sandra Bochenski.

19

The arrest of Sandra Bochenski on suspicion of murdering her former husband, Gregory Packer, turned everyone into a legal expert, even Tuttle. Phil Keegan passed on to Father Dowling the tantrum the little lawyer had thrown before the questioning began. How could they suspect his client when they had the killer in custody?

“Out on bail, of course,” Tuttle had thundered. “What's a little manslaughter if you're rich and powerful?”

“Will you release Luke Flanagan, Phil?” Father Dowling asked.

“There's a division of opinion. Robertson is for. Jacuzzi is against and threatens to resign and make a public statement if Luke is let off.”

“The famous wrench.”

“Exactly. But Tuttle couldn't keep quiet about the ladder entrance to the garage apartment that Agnes discovered. He told Mervel that Sandra and Wally spent time in the apartment, entering and exiting by the ladder.”

“And jeopardized his client? No wonder Tuttle is angered by the arrest.”

Presumably, the case against Sandra Bochenski would seek motivation in her failed marriage to Gregory Packer. She had fled when he became abusive and resumed her life in Oxnard under her maiden name. He had divorced her, charging desertion, but his subsequent record did not suggest an injured party.

“She seems to have returned to Fox River when she learned that Packer was here.”

“Seeking revenge for long-ago injuries?”

“She hired Tuttle to find out where Wally Flanagan was during his unaccounted-for years. It seems that she and Wally had an affair before she went to California. She expected him to meet her there.”

“And he didn't.”

“Instead she got Greg Packer, Wally's boyhood friend.”

That meeting could hardly have been an accident. But who made it happen?

“Cy thinks that Wally might actually have told Greg about Sandra Bochenski, that she was pretty well off, thanks to his financial advice.”

“And dispatched him as his substitute.”

“He wouldn't have had to put it so baldly. The simple facts would have made her an attractive target for Greg. He had been out of the navy for a time and must have been looking for another meal ticket.”

“Another?”

“You get three squares in the navy.”

If Phil's account of all this seemed lurid, Mervel rose to new heights of uncontrolled prose. From multiple sources, he put together a detailed and tendentious narrative, filled with drama, betrayals, lust, and greed. Wally Flanagan was the spoiled little rich boy whose father had bankrolled him as a financial advisor, thus turning this predator loose on unsuspecting young ladies who had the great misfortune to work with or for him. That this wanton was also a married man only added to his turpitude. Mervel became a veritable poet of marital fidelity in his account. The idea that a young man, with every advantage in the world, with a lovely wife, should embark on such a Don Giovanni campaign, preying on sweet young things who came to Chicago to get their start and no doubt to meet an honest man as well—this would have left Mervel wordless if words were not his stock-in-trade. He was shameless in providing a dramatic scenario for the affair between Wally and Sandra. Mervel asked his readers to imagine the confusion, the sorrow, the anger with which Sandra realized that she had been abandoned in California the way Melissa had been in Fox River. The account came down out of the clouds when Mervel came to the discovery of Wally's body, the old local caution about the Pianones exhibiting itself, but the reporter could not resist a speculative wonder at the fact that Wally had ended up in one of his father's cement mixers.

“We'll have to keep Luke away from wrenches and other blunt instruments, Roger.”

“Poor Melissa.”

“At least he didn't bring up their reunion at the senior center here.”

“Good Lord.”

There was a diagram of the Flanagan garage, with an inset showing the descending ladder that provided an alternative entry and exit to the apartment above. It was up this ladder that Wally took his paramours, sinning within spitting distance of his father's home.

Tuttle tried to file a libel suit against Mervel and the
Fox River Tribune
but got nowhere. The freedom of the free press had long since passed the quaint canons of decency that Tuttle improbably invoked.

“If national security secrets are fair game, how could the reputations of those who figured in Mervel's account provide grounds for libel?” This was Amos Cadbury's melancholy observation when he had himself driven to Father Dowling's noon Mass and accepted an invitation to lunch.

“Surely there is less of a case against Sandra Bochenski than there is against Luke Flanagan.”

“Ah, Father Dowling, you are making the charming assumption that cases are still tried in the courts. That newspaper account could be the sum total of what will be done against either of them. Having been condemned in print and on film, what need is there to bother with a trial?”

“I wonder how Melissa is taking this?”

“You should talk to her, Father.”

“Have you?”

Amos had talked to Luke as well as to Melissa, as friend, as lawyer. “Luke is tough, of course, but poor Melissa. I keep thinking of that wedding ring in my safe.”

“Wedding ring?”

“The ring found on the hand of the body extracted from the cement mixer. It was the basis of identifying the body. Since neither Luke nor Melissa would take it, it ended up in my office safe.”

*   *   *

As Father Dowling returned to his study from seeing Amos off, he heard voices in the kitchen. Curious, he continued down the hall and pushed open the door.

Marie sat at one end of the table, while at the other a bearded man was eating the sandwich she had made for him. The man rose when Father Dowling entered the kitchen.

“I'm sorry to interrupt.”

He waited to see if Marie would say anything, and when she didn't he retreated to his study. Recent events weighed on him, not least because there seemed nothing he could do to lessen their burden on the Flanagans. He pulled the telephone to him and dialed the Flanagan number. What better time than the present to go see Melissa? But no one answered.

Fifteen minutes later, Marie looked in on him. “He's gone.” He realized that she meant the bearded vagrant she had fed. “You don't mind, do you? I could have brought food to him on the back porch.”

“Nonsense. He seemed a pleasant enough fellow.” He paused. “A sort of Franciscan look.”

Marie's mouth became a line, and she glared at him. Then she went back to her kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

20

Luke wasn't all that eager to come back to his apartment, preferring to stay in Fox River with his daughter-in-law, and Maud knew the reason was Boleslaw Bochenski. It had been just a lark the first time they wheeled the old guy down to their bar and made sure he had a couple of boilermakers; it was as if they were young and Boleslaw was old, although Luke wasn't sure that the wheelchair was necessary.

“He just likes to be pushed around,” Luke asserted.

“He's a man.”

Luke hadn't liked the way Boleslaw whined about how his daughter neglected him. If she ever had in the past, she was making up for it now, so they got to know Sandra, too, she and Luke. That, of course, was the problem. Luke had treated Boleslaw the way he had probably treated employees, and now to find that Sandra Bochenski had had an affair with his dead son, that they had planned to run away together, hit him hard. The fact that his son had run off with another woman, thus stranding Sandra as well as Melissa, didn't register with Luke. Before those stories appeared in the Fox River paper, Maud would have said Luke liked Sandra, admired her. Unlike her father, she had independence. She clearly wasn't dependent on anyone else.

“Anyone but Tuttle,” he said. “I would have warned her if she had asked me about Fox River lawyers. Tuttle is a joke. I would have set her up with Amos Cadbury.”

That would have been a pair. Maud half expected that Cadbury would have the family crest embossed on the door of the car in which he was driven around. Aristocratic, deferential, aloof, although he always talked to Maud as if they shared a secret. It turned out that Luke had told the lawyer that if he ever got married again, Maud would be the girl. Girl! Well, Luke hadn't exactly asked, so she hadn't answered, but that seemed another idea that was a casualty of these awful revelations about Luke's family. The fact that his son had used the garage apartment for a rendezvous, taking Sandra there, might have been sufficient to keep him away from the apartment here for which he had paid through the nose. The fact was that Maud was lonely.

She had returned from her trip to Kentucky to visit her son the monk. A few days was all of it she could take. Jimmy—she could never think of him as Brother Peter—accepted her visits as if he were doing penance. He had put her and the world behind him, but, of course, it was his duty to honor his mother. Maud didn't want to be honored, not in that way. She didn't know what she expected from Jimmy, but it wasn't his dutiful presence when he spent time with her in the guesthouse.

One day they had taken a long walk, along a road that went through the monastery woods to the hermitage that, he said, was famous because Thomas Merton had spent so much time there. Merton had been a monk at Gethsemani, and Jimmy seemed to have ambiguous thoughts about him. Not that he would criticize anyone. What kind of conversation could you have with someone who was determined to see only good in other people? Another guest, the one with the beard, was already at the hermitage, sitting on the front porch, looking off into the hills in the distance. The man got up as they approached, ready to leave the hermitage to them, but Jimmy insisted they didn't want to disturb him.

“How long's he been here?” Maud asked when they started back.

Jimmy didn't know. What is time when all your thoughts are on eternity? She told Jimmy about Luke Flanagan, and he listened politely, but he might have been hearing the music of the spheres.

The first time Maud saw Boleslaw's daughter after she was taken in for questioning and the news about her and young Flanagan broke, she just went up to her and put her arms around her, no need to say anything.

There were tears in Sandra's eyes. “I didn't do it.”

“Of course you didn't.”

“Of course? Oh, I could have. There were times when I would have found it easy. He needed punishment, but I didn't want to be the one administering it.”

“We all need punishment.” She might have been expressing Jimmy's thoughts.

“I think he killed Wally Flanagan.”

“No.”

Her story rivaled the one that had appeared in the paper. It made soap operas seem hard realism. Maud would never have dreamed when she met Luke and they became friendly that she would find him and his family involved in all these gothic horrors. The only ghost she had in her own closet was a son who was a Trappist monk.

“What will happen next?” Maud asked Sandra.

“To me? My lawyer doesn't think they'll dare to bring charges.” She had been taken in for questioning, held for a while, and then released. She wore dark glasses now, even indoors, no doubt fearful that she would be recognized. She said that when this was over she might go back to California.

“I thought you took an apartment.”

“Just a sublet for a few months. To be near Dad.”