The Widow's Mate (26 page)

Everyone ran from the Pianones. On her way home, Agnes thought of that body that had been found dismembered in the cement mixer. She turned around and headed for Flanagan Concrete.

Frank Looney wasn't in his office. She asked Myrtle if she knew where he had gone.

“He said he went to see a priest.”

7

When Marie Murkin looked into the study to tell Father Dowling that Frank Looney had come to see him, she added in a whisper, “It's his real name.”

“Where is he?”

“In the front parlor.”

He went to the parlor to find a seated Frank Looney staring out the window.

The visitor got to his feet when Father Dowling came in. “I'm Wally's cousin.”

“Ah.”

“I'd like to see him.”

Father Dowling could have just said that Wally was back in his father's house, in the garage apartment, but instead he asked Frank Looney to sit. The priest took a chair behind a desklike table.

“I manage Flanagan Concrete.”

“So I've been told.”

“It's what my uncle wanted Wally to do. When he refused, Luke put me in charge.”

“I know a Jesuit named Looney.”

“My brother.”

“You haven't talked to Wally yet?”

“Why did he come back?”

“I had better let him tell you that.”

“What's the secret? Look, I've been thinking, Father. If he's changed his mind, I'll step aside. I've already told Luke.”

“That's very generous of you.”

“Luke is the one who's been generous.”

“He seems very pleased with you.”

“He said that?” Looney seemed genuinely surprised.

“His only criticism was the Pianone matter.”

Looney lifted from his seat and then collapsed back into it. “Of course he was right. I was a damned fool. I guess I thought if my family could change, so could the Pianones. It made sense that they would want to invest in a legitimate business. Until you thought about it, that is. No, it was stupid on my part. I learned my lesson.”

“You don't think the Pianones have changed?”

His eyes drifted away. “Wally had the right idea. I'd like to just disappear, the way he did.”

“To a monastery?”

“Away from Fox River.”

Father Dowling told him then that Wally was no longer staying at the rectory.

“Where is he?”

“He's gone home.”

Looney was on his feet.

“He's staying in that apartment over the garage.”

Wally no longer looked like a vagrant, although he had kept the beard. He was surprised that he could wear clothes he had worn years ago, but there was no way he could move back into the Flanagan house with Melissa living there. There had been no reunion. They had talked, but whatever had passed between them was not something Wally wanted to reveal.

“Of course, she's right. I never expected it could be the way it was.”

Marie had reacted by expressing the fear that they had a permanent guest in the rectory. It was his father who suggested the garage apartment.

“They have to get used to one another,” he said to Father Dowling. “All those years he was away…” His voice drifted off, as if Wally had been overseas with the army rather than living in isolation without any apparent concern for the wife he had abandoned. Luke clearly thought the couple would eventually reunite.

“What did he want?” Marie asked when she found that Looney had left the rectory.

“He wondered if we had a spare guest room.”

“Any more of that and you can get someone for my apartment.”

“I can't have that sort of thing going on in the rectory, Marie.”

*   *   *

The turn events had taken cast gloom over Phil Keegan. He chewed on an unlit cigar and glared unseeing at the television screen, where a semblance of baseball was being played by the Cubs. Everything they had learned pointed to the Pianones, and that meant impasse. Sylvia had told Agnes Lamb that Greg Packer had consulted Marco Pianone for help in carrying out his promise to Wally to stage his death and thus free him forever from his past. The mangled body in the Flanagan cement mixer seemed the obvious result of that collaboration. The wedding ring that had been the basis of Melissa's identification of the body had been brought from the cabin in Garrison.

“Have you talked with Marco?”

Phil's scowl deepened. This obvious move was one he could not make. If he did, the chief, Robertson, would intervene. There was even the possibility of demotion, and then who would run the detective division? No doubt someone with no scruples at all about the dominance of the Pianone family. Phil's decision not to proceed thus looked to be the choice of the lesser of two evils.

“Where is Sylvia?” The question sounded like a line from a poem.

“Agnes stashed her with an old friend. Brenda somebody. The two of them worked for Wally years ago.”

Clearly Agnes and Phil thought that the woman was in danger. If the death of Greg Packer pointed to the Pianones, and if the woman Sylvia had been the one who linked the two, she might well be silenced in the way Greg Packer had been.

If Phil was despondent, Cy Horvath, for all his impassivity, was even more so. One afternoon, he came to the kitchen door, and Marie, after unsuccessfully trying to discover what the purpose of the visit was, came to tell Father Dowling that Cy was in the kitchen.

Cy wanted to talk, and Father Dowling suggested they go outside, much to Marie's annoyance. How could she eavesdrop from a distance? They sat on a bench just outside the sacristy door, under a walnut tree. Before sitting down, Cy picked up one of the green walnuts that littered the lawn. They sat in silence for a time, and then Father Dowling said, “Phil is feeling pretty low.”

Cy shrugged. “Wally solved the big mystery of his disappearance, and Sylvia gave us the solution to the death of Greg Packer.”

“And you're stymied?”

“The Pianones.”

“The untouchables.”

This explanation of Greg Packer's death made the famous trapdoor ladder irrelevant. If Greg had relied on Marco, the man's appearance at the garage apartment would not have caused him concern and he would have admitted his murderer unawares.

“The wrench?” Father Dowling said.

Cy turned to him and almost smiled. “Just what I've been thinking. How did he get hold of that? It came from the bench in the garage. All the tools were very carefully stowed, a place for each. A missing place from which the wrench had come.”

“And only Marco Pianone can explain that?”

Cy grunted. “Or why he risked a daytime visit to the Flanagan house. The Pianones don't take risks like that.”

“You think he might have been seen?”

“Agnes looked into that.” He tossed the walnut, and it bounced along the walk. “Not that an identification would matter.”

Every avenue seemed blocked by the power of the Pianones.

“Agnes Lamb thinks we're cowards. She's right. But what good would courage do? Even if we brought Marco in, nothing would follow. He wouldn't tell us anything; Robertson would go ballistic; Phil and I would be back on a beat.”

“Maybe a good soluble crime will come up.” It seemed hollow consolation.

“That's the only thing that could distract Agnes.”

“What do you mean?”

“She's still pursuing it. Phil absolutely forbade her to approach Marco, so she is concentrating on Flanagan Concrete. Her idea is, if she could find unequivocal evidence of Marco's involvement in putting that body in the mixer, we would have to proceed.”

It was clear that Cy admired Agnes's tenacity, however doomed to frustration it seemed. When they stood, Cy made a soccer kick at one of the fallen walnuts, and it sailed twenty yards onto the lawn.

*   *   *

“This can't go on, Father,” Luke Flanagan said when he telephoned. “There she is in the house, and he's in the garage apartment. They really haven't spoken to one another yet.”

“Give it time.”

Luke took hope from this. “You think they'll get back together?”

“Stranger things have happened.” What a reservoir of inanities he seemed to have.

“Would you talk to them, Father? All they need is a boost.”

Who could blame the old man for hoping that the weird events of recent years could terminate in the status quo ante, his son back with his wife, everything as it had been? Greg Packer seemed not to enter into Luke's thoughts. Reluctantly, Father Dowling agreed to talk to Melissa and Wally.

When he got to the house, he found that Luke and Maude Lynn were also there. Had Luke wanted to be on hand for what he hoped would be the great reconciliation? Melissa took Father Dowling onto the sunporch, which was filled with potted plants.

“Some of these go back to my mother-in-law.” It was an odd thought, a woman's plants living on years after she was dead.

Father Dowling feigned interest. “What kind is this?”

She laughed. “It's called mother-in-law's tongue.” There were little spikes at the tips of the long tonguelike leaves. Whatever neologisms botanists devised, they did not replace such traditional names for plants.

“What do you think of Maud, Father?”

“What should I think?”

“I think they'll marry.”

“That's not the marriage that is uppermost in Luke's mind.”

She looked away. “I know.”

“You should talk to Wally.”

She bristled. “Why doesn't he talk to me? There he is, out there in that garage apartment, and he can't bring himself to come to the house.”

“Would you want him to?”

Again she looked away. “I don't know.”

“You have to realize how guilty he feels.”

“Poor Wally!”

“I'm going to talk to him.”

“Please give him my regards.”

“I will.”

*   *   *

The last time Father Dowling had been in the garage apartment, he had given conditional absolution to Greg Packer. He climbed the stairs and found the apartment door open. Wally was at ease in a very comfortable-looking chair, reading. He looked up, unsurprised, when Father Dowling said hello.

“Dad said you'd be coming.” He put a marker in his book.

“What are you reading?”

Wally held up the book. It was
The Kreutzer Sonata
by Tolstoy.

“A pretty grim story.”

“Life can be grim.”

“Your cousin Frank came to see me.”

“He told me. He was here.” A wry smile. “He actually thought I had come back to replace him at Flanagan Concrete.”

“And you reassured him.”

“I don't know. He talks about getting away. Doing what I did.”

For the first time, it occurred to Father Dowling that Frank Looney was in as much danger from the Pianones as Sylvia was. Marco must have arranged with Frank for the body to be found in one of the Flanagan mixers.

“What's he got to run away from? Dad says he's been doing a great job managing the business.”

Father Dowling decided to tell Wally the explanation the police had hit on of Greg Packer's murder.

Recalling the grisly deed that had been done there seemed to alter the aspect of the apartment. As he listened, Wally looked around as if seeing the place for the first time. “Frank wouldn't sit down when he was here. Just paced up and down, looking at everything, checking the cabinets in the kitchen. He acted as if he had never been up here before, but, of course, he must have been thinking of what happened to Greg.”

“He had been here before?”

“Oh, sure. When we were young. There was talk of him living here after I was married. Maybe if he had, I wouldn't have become involved with Sandra in the first place.” He shook his head. “What a thoughtless guy I was. Just a stone's throw from my father's house.”

“Frank might have been involved when Greg decided on the way to fulfill his promise to you.”

“What promise?”

“To stage your death.”

Wally seemed genuinely puzzled. “I don't know where he got that idea. Believe me, when I heard I was dead it was the surprise of my life.”

“You mean the way Greg did it?”

“When I heard, I didn't know he was involved.”

“How did you expect him to arrange it?”

“Father, there wasn't any arrangement. Why Greg did it, I don't know, but it was his own idea.”

“But your wedding ring.”

“He must have found it in the cabin at Garrison. The place in Minnesota. Of course, I had stopped wearing it.”

“You didn't ask him to stage your death?”

“No.”

“Then why…”

Wally thought about it. “Maybe it had something to do with his relationship with Sylvia. She had quite a nest egg. I had seen to that. With me definitely out of the picture, or seemingly so, the coast was clear for him.”

“But she was mixed up with Marco Pianone.”

“She was never a good judge of men.” Another wry smile.

*   *   *

One piece of the theory as to how Greg Packer had died had to be rejected, but that left the theory intact. What difference did it make whether or not Greg was fulfilling a promise to Wally? It was what he had told Sylvia, but Wally's suggestion about Greg's designs on Sylvia's money, given his previous track record in California, made sense. In any case, Greg had arranged with Marco Pianone for a dismembered body to be found in a Flanagan mixer with Wally's wedding ring as basis for identification. Greg had paid the price of his association with the Pianones, and Sylvia remained vulnerable. So did Frank Looney.

Father Dowling spent a sleepless night, unable to drive from his mind the sequence of events that had led up to the murder of Greg Packer. At two in the morning, he went down to the kitchen and heated some milk. He sat at his desk in the study, sipping it, hoping sleepiness would come. What came instead was the thought that Phil Keegan's theory was all wrong.