Blood Ties (25 page)

Father Dowling tried desperately to change the subject. “I've just come from seeing Maurice,” he said.

“Who was she?” Sheila asked.

“A woman married to a professor at Northwestern. I knew her all along. We were roommates when she had her baby at the Women's Care Center.”

“Madeline!”

Seemingly unaware of what she had done, Catherine nodded. “So you already know her.”

6

When the report from downstate came in, Phil Keegan was not in his office, so Cy went in search of Dr. Pippen. He found her in conference with Dennis Lubins, the coroner.

“Horvath,” cried Lubins. “What's the news?”

The prospect of business filled the coroner with nervous anxiety. His political party had persuaded him to run for his office. He said yes against his better judgment, but his practice had not been flourishing, and he had been bewitched by the publicity attendant on the campaign. Somewhat to his astonishment, he had been voted in as coroner. He had little to recommend him for the job, and until he persuaded Pippen to become his assistant things had not gone well in the morgue.

“You remember that body found in the trunk of a car in the parking lot of the old depot?” Pippen asked.

“It was dead?”

Lubins laughed his nervous laugh. “Well, I'll leave you young people to yourselves.” Lubins was perhaps three years older than Cy. He skipped out of the room and was gone.

“You'd think you'd come courting,” Pippen said.

“Too late for that.” It was as close as he had ever come to admitting it was not just her mind that attracted him.

“The man died of a heart attack.” She meant the body in the trunk.

“And then crawled in there to die?”

“The heart attack was probably caused by being locked in the trunk.”

“Remember the hit-and-run on Dirksen Boulevard?”

“Of course. You have two people confessing to have done it.”

“It can't have been either of them.”

“How so?”

He showed her the report. The paint from the parking meter that had been knocked over by the vehicle involved did not match the sample Cy had scraped from the SUV rented by Catherine Adams. Pippen suggested they have coffee, but he countered with the offer to buy her a beer in the sports bar across the street.

“Oh, I love that place. All those games to ignore.”

When they had crossed the street and were in the bar, Pippen asked for a nonalcoholic beer. Cy made a face.

“Don't you approve?”

“It's tampering with nature. I'm Catholic.”

“So am I.”

“You are!”

“Yes. I became one when I married my Ojibwa. Is it really against our religion?”

“Some instructions you must have received.” He got her O'Doul's and a Guinness for himself, and they found a booth.

“The priest who instructed me didn't seem to know much.”

“Then it couldn't have been Father Dowling.”

“Let me see that report again.” He gave it to her, and she got out her glasses.

“I didn't know you wore glasses.”

“Only when I read.”

“You didn't put them on before.”

“That's why I wanted to see this again. It looks conclusive.”

“Even if it was inconclusive those two are off the hook.”

“Have they been charged?”

“You can't charge two people with the same crime when each claims to have acted alone. He was arraigned. Jacuzzi is going to feel like a fool, and try to make me look like one. He won't be far wrong.”

“Maybe you should admit to the crime to clear everything up. What will happen to those two?”

“Nothing. Jacuzzi will probably threaten to bring charges against them for something or other, but it will only be a threat.”

“So all's well that ends well.”

“Somebody ran over that guy.”

“Poor Cy. You really do hunger and thirst after justice, don't you?”

“Then I should be glad that Maurice Dolan and Catherine Adams get off scot-free.”

“Aren't you?”

“She's kind of cute.”

“I'll tell your wife.”

It helped some to talk with Pippen about it, which had been the idea when he sought her out in the morgue, but after they parted, Cy went again to Phil Keegan's office. The captain was back, and Phil gave him the news.

“They must have used another vehicle.”

“Well, it was another vehicle.”

Phil shook his head in commiseration. One more unsolved crime to add to all the others. “Want a beer, Cy?”

He might have said he'd just had one, but he didn't. It was when they were approaching the bar that he remembered the vehicle Mark Lorenzo had left parked in front of the place when they went to see the Dolans. Before going on to the hospital, Cy had brought the professor back to the bar so he could pick it up.

All the while Cy was having a beer with Phil, his mind was working. Maybe the hit-and-run wouldn't end up unsolved after all. The thought made him more depressed than he had been. He liked Lorenzo. The more he thought of it, though, the less he found himself able to dismiss the possibility. If anyone had a motive to get rid of that author, Lorenzo did. The man was a threat to his wife and his family's happiness. Cy Horvath wouldn't have been Cy Horvath if he just put the idea out of his mind.

7

Mark Lorenzo had just returned from class when Cy Horvath came to his office. The detective took a seat and then told him about the negative report on the paint sample.

“Thank God!”

“That makes you happy?”

“When I read that she had confessed, I knew she couldn't have done it.”

“How could you know that?”

“Because she was sitting in that same chair when it happened. I was her alibi. I have been trying to convince myself that I would just keep quiet.”

“She was here?”

“Not for the first time. She was a former student of mine, years ago. I told you all that before. Before my marriage, she came to me with what she obviously thought was damning information about my intended bride.”

“What did she want this time?”

“She came twice. The second time was to tell me how glad she was that the threat to Madeline was gone, now that Nathaniel Fleck was dead. The way she put it made me think that she might have had something to do with his death, but she couldn't have. She was sitting right there when it happened.”

“That was during the first visit?”

“When she came back, she seemed to want to take credit for easing the pressure on Madeline.”

“The vehicle involved was an SUV.”

“I know.” Then he remembered the detective's diatribe about SUVs, prompted by the sight of Stephen's car. There was a long silence. “You want to see my son's car.”

“It's just routine.”

“Look, Horvath, if I was talking to Catherine Adams when the accident occurred…” He stopped. “Of course, you only have my word for that.”

Horvath tipped his head to one side.

“I didn't want to be Catherine Adams's alibi, and I don't want her for mine.” He stood. “Come on and take a look at Stephen's car.”

There was no need to involve the son. The SUV was parked behind the residence hall in which Stephen lived. Horvath walked around it several times.

“There's no paint missing,” the detective said.

“Is it the right color?”

“Close.”

“Then take a sample, for God's sake.”

“We might as well be sure.”

“Right!”

“Lorenzo, I'm just doing my job.”

“Then do it.”

Horvath got out his knife and looked for a place where a little scratch wouldn't show.

“He keeps it in pretty good shape.”

“He better. I'm paying for it.”

Horvath scraped a little paint into a plastic bag, then put it in his pocket.

“You're going to get another negative result, Horvath.”

“I hope so.”

The detective walked back with Lorenzo. He had parked his car in a handicapped spot outside the faculty office building.

“What's your handicap?” Mark asked.

“Ten.”

How could you be angry with a guy like Cy Horvath? Lorenzo punched the detective's arm and they parted.

*   *   *

Madeline was a different woman since she had met with Martha, despite the reaction of Mrs. Lynch when she showed up.

“Who can blame her, Mark? She must feel about me the way I felt about him.”

“It's hardly the same.”

“It would be to her.”

“What's she like?”

“Mrs. Lynch?”

“Your daughter.”

She looked at him quickly and then came and put her arms around him. The way he had said it seemed to drive a wedge between them, and he could have bitten his tongue as soon as he spoke. Now he held her wordlessly.

“Mark, it's all over now.”

If anything is ever really over. Years ago, Madeline probably thought her troubles were all behind her when she had her baby and gave it up for adoption. It must have seemed like something that had never happened. That would have been her justification for not telling him. How he wished he had learned of it from her rather than from that vixen Catherine Adams. Madeline's anxiety had returned when first Dolan and then Catherine had claimed to have run down Nathaniel Fleck. She read the newspaper account carefully.

“You're not mentioned, Mad.”

“Do you know the joke about the dyslexic mother against drunk driving who said she belonged to DDAM?”

When Madeline remembered a joke, she never felt very funny.

“You said it. It's all over.”

She nodded, but she must have been thinking what he was. There was another joke that proved it.

“I'll never be my own worst enemy while Catherine is alive,” Madeline said.

He didn't tell her about Horvath and the paint sample taken from Stephen's car.

8

Tuttle's bank account, presided over by Hazel, had been refreshed by recent events. Both Martin Sisk and Bernard Casey had paid what Tuttle regarded as the exorbitant fee Hazel had billed them for. Still, it was difficult to see Hazel as a blessing. When he had handed her the check Martin had scribbled in the car, she said, “I'll get this right into the bank. That rascal may try to stop payment.”

Within days of the other bill's going out, payment was received from Bernard Casey as well.

“We're in clover, Tuttle.”

Why didn't he feel elation? It wasn't just that, apart from the twenty dollars he had taken from Martin on his first visit, all the proceeds of his labors were in Hazel's control. The misgivings he had expressed to Martin before trying to deal directly with the Dolans had been almost sincere. He did feel tainted by helping to dredge up past events best left forgotten for the good of all concerned.

Hazel pooh-poohed such moralizing. “You're a hired gun, Tuttle. Every lawyer is. You ought to know by now what legal ethics amounts to. Cover your rear.”

He thought she had said “ear,” so he cupped both his with his hands, waiting for her revelation about legal ethics. Hazel had worked for years in a firm that specialized in criminal law, the office joke being that the phrase was an oxymoron. Hazel had considered them all morons, defending rapists, defending killers, helping flown fathers escape responsibility for their families. It wasn't so much that she thought these things wrong as that they seemed a personal affront. It was too easy to imagine herself the victim in such cases. So she had come to Tuttle, first as a temporary and then, by a process he could never reconstruct, a permanent presence in his outer office, a tyrant with amorous tendencies. Tuttle was often thankful he could lock the door of his inner office when the tides of romance rose in Hazel's enormous breast.

“Something wrong with your ears?”

“Just covering them.”

She found this witty. A warm look came over the face that would have done Mount Rushmore proud, and Tuttle skedaddled. Had his hope of diverting her attention to Martin Sisk been completely dashed?

“I feel like celebrating,” Hazel crowed when she came back from the bank after depositing Casey's check.

“Don't let Martin turn it into a dutch treat. The man should always pay.”

“Martin!”

“He seemed wistful the last time I talked with him.”

“He always seems wistful. Imagine, a man his age watching the same movies over and over. And pictures of his late wife all over the place.”

“Well, if you want to throw in the towel, Grace Weaver will walk him down the aisle.”

“She the one who called me?”

“The same.”

Hazel pondered this. Whether it was attraction to Martin Sisk or the prospect of losing him to a rival that decided her would have been difficult to say. “Well, I know the way to his heart.”

“Please.” He covered his ears.

She went on. “I'll buy him a movie, DVD, that's what he prefers. Any ideas?”

He left the door of his office open a crack and listened to her when she got on the phone to Martin. She had found the most wonderful movie for him.
Meet Me in St. Louis.
Apparently Martin was wild about old Judy Garland movies. Hazel seemed to have received a favorable response.

“My place or yours?”

She began to hum the title song. St. Louis in this case seemed to be Hazel's apartment. Tuttle closed his door.

*   *   *

Peanuts didn't know much about developments at headquarters, but Tetzel's lengthy accounts in the Trib kept Tuttle informed. First one person confessed to running down Nathaniel Fleck, then another. It seemed an obvious ploy to make both confessions useless. Peanuts did bring him the information about the report from downstate. That got the confessing couple off the hook. So who had run down the author?

Tuttle went to the courthouse and poured himself a cup of coffee in the pressroom. Tetzel's star was in the ascendant, and he was enjoying his moment. He even returned Tuttle's greeting.