Emerald Aisle (18 page)

Authors: Ralph M. McInerny

Tags: #Suspense

BOOK: Emerald Aisle

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GREG WHELAN REVEALED TO Roger Waldo's proximate reason for abandoning his job as curator of the Primero Collection, disguising himself with his razor, and lighting out for South Bend.

“He says Primero knows who stole those items.”

“Dudley Fyte?”

“He says it's far more complicated than that.”

So Roger stopped by Greg's apartment to see Waldo Hermes, being admitted only after a long rigamarole at the door.

“Waldo, it's Roger Knight.”

“I can see that. Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“How do I know?”

“You can take my word.”

A full minute of silence went by before the door was opened, the chain still in place. Finally, Roger was given entry to Greg's apartment.

“Who are you frightened of?”

“Is it true that Joseph Primero is in town?”

“I just had lunch with him.”

“Does he know I'm here?”

“Yes, I told him.”

“I don't want to see him.”

“Waldo, tell me about it.” He paused. “Tell me what you told Greg.”

“Primero led you to believe that I might be the thief, didn't he?”

“Waldo, Bianca gave Dudley Fyte a key to the house so that he could steal those things. The most likely thief is Dudley Fyte.”

Waldo thought about it, working his wide mouth and rubbing his head. Now that his cover had been blown, so to speak, he had returned to the smelly, unlit pipe through which he preferred to filter the air of the world. It bubbled now as he thought.

“Even if it happened just that way, there is more â¦”

“I'm listening.”

“Joseph Primero is right. I am responsible for the theft. I just thank God everything has been recovered.”

“From Bianca's car, Waldo. In a briefcase belonging to Dudley Fyte. Why do you say you're responsible for the theft?”

“Because I told Bianca what items should be taken.”

Waldo looked with wide, unblinking eyes at Roger, his expression one that all of us will wear at the Last Judgment.

“I played the role of Judas.”

“Tell me everything.”

Roger felt like a confessor listening to Waldo's story. It began with the early days of his employment by Joseph Primero.

“He had warned me that his wife would resent my presence, but I was simply to do my job and ignore her. She chose not to ignore me.”

Waldo's eyes grew wider. Roger nodded, indicating he should continue.

“I didn't understand what was going on at first. She seemed interested in what I was doing, wanted to be told all about it. I was new to the collection, she had been living in the same house with it for years, and she was asking me the most basic questions.”

But Bianca's aim soon became clear. She intended to seduce her husband's assistant.

“I was Samson to her Delilah, Roger.”

“Well, you had the hair for it.”

“I didn't wear a beard then, but my hair hung to my shoulders.”

Bianca put Waldo at ease by seeking information from him in the library during the day.

“The first time she looked into my bedroom over the garage, I almost levitated. It was nearly midnight. She said she had a question.”

The oldest question of all. They answered it there on Waldo's bachelor bed. Afterward, from the moment she slipped away and left him to his thoughts, Waldo was riven with remorse. First of all, he had sinned mortally. He had slept with a married woman. He had committed adultery. That it was his first experience with a woman made it seem worse.

“My first and last. I took a vow. I knelt beside my bed and for the rest of the night I prayed. I promised that if I were forgiven, if I could confess my sins, I would live as a celibate for the rest of my life.”

“As a penance?”

“As a penance. I had betrayed God. I had betrayed myself. I had betrayed Joseph Primero, a good man with a bad wife.” Waldo let out an enormous sigh. “And I would betray him again.”

“How did Bianca react to your vow?”

“I told her only that we could never again do what we had done.”

“And?”

“She laughed. She said she had been going to tell me that once was all I got, and I shouldn't make a pest of myself.”

“That must have been a relief.”

“It should have been. I confessed my sins and I have kept my vow. But the presence of Bianca in the house was almost more than I could endure. It soon became clear to me that she traveled in
order to find transient partners. That prompted me to make the biggest mistake of my life. No, the second biggest. I decided to tell Joseph what had happened between Bianca and me.”

“Dear God.”

“It seemed to be the only way I could convince him of Bianca's infidelity.”

“What did he say?”

“It's what he didn't say. I expected to be fired on the spot. I would have accepted that because it would have meant he understood what kind of wife he had. But he only nodded. When he spoke it was softly. He told me to go back to work.”

If he said nothing to Waldo, he must have spoken to Bianca. A frigid silence settled over the house. It ended only when Bianca decided to have her own apartment in Highland Village.

“He helped her get it. He had built the place. He is still part owner. That seemed to indicate that he was repudiating her. But it was she who was doing the repudiating. And he colluded with her. I tried to think of it as Christian, but it was craven. He was aiding and abetting her infidelity.”

Primero seemed to Waldo to become ever more supine. His passivity merely increased Bianca's misbehavior, which now seemed to have the public humiliation of her husband as its goal. It was this that Waldo had hoped to bring to an end. He wanted Primero finally to see what Bianca was and to repudiate her once and for all.

“That is why I betrayed him again.”

He managed to get in touch with Bianca, overcoming her reluctance to talk with him. Waldo had kept au courant on her activities, something easy enough to do she was so brazen about it. He knew about her prolonged liaison with Dudley Fyte.

“When I did talk with her, I told her I was leaving her husband's employ. This appealed to her curiosity. She wanted to know why.”

Waldo's story of his disaffection with the job, his resentment at his treatment by Joseph Primeroâall his complaints imaginaryâseemed music to Bianca's ears.

“So why are you telling me this?”

“I have been thinking of a dramatic departure.”

And so began the great betrayal that was motived by loyalty to Joseph Primero. Bianca had used Waldo; now Waldo would use Bianca. She saw immediately how the theft of the most precious items in Joseph's collection would devastate him.

“You'll pass them on to me?”

“That wouldn't be convincing. No, they have to be taken from the house and while I am not there.”

“You expect me to go there? I wouldn't know what to take.”

“Is there someone you could trust?”

She thought for a moment. “Perhaps. But how would he know what to take?”

“Do you have a pen?”

He dictated to her the items and their location. Then there was silence. He assumed she would enlist Dudley Fyte in the escapade. In subsequent days, he became aware of Bianca's Jaguar driving slowly past, usually with a passenger. And then the young man drove by alone. How could Waldo be out of the house if he did not know when the theft would take place?

He learned about it only after it had taken place. One morning he went into the library and saw the telltale gaps in the shelves. He went immediately to Joseph Primero. “And he got in touch with your brother.”

“Well, your plan seemed to have had the desired effect. Not that the end justifies the means.”

But the whole object was compromised by Primero's decision
not
to tell the police that he had been robbed. That seemed symbolic of his denial of Bianca's flamboyant infidelity.

“Roger, I thought the items would be recovered immediately from Bianca's apartment and that would be it as far as Joseph and Bianca were concerned. Maybe it wouldn't matter that the police weren't involved or that criminal charges were not brought. He would no longer be able to ignore what she was.”

But the items had not been recovered in Bianca's apartment, but in her car in Dudley's briefcase, pointing the guilt to him. Waldo tried not to sound critical of the Knight brothers, but his disappointment was obvious. He had told them Bianca was responsible; they should have proceeded full steam ahead.

“But you dithered. Or Phil did.”

“Did you expect him to break into her apartment?”

“Isn't that the sort of thing private detectives do. Anyway, I decided to add fuel to the fire.”

“And sent those Newman letters to Notre Dame?”

“Now you can understand why I fled Minneapolis. I could no longer face the man I had betrayed twice. And, coward that I am, I feared for myself. He was bound to accuse me, and then I could only get it off my chest.”

Instead, he had made a bare face and a bare head of it and headed for South Bend, the ultimate destination of the treasures whose custodian he had been.

Phil sat on the edge of his chair, his bottle of beer dangling between his knees, listening to Roger's report on Waldo's claim that it was the custodian who had initiated the theft from the Primero Collection.

“That's hard to believe, Roger.”

“Not when you hear him tell it.”

Phil sent a message to Swenson, asking him to call. There might be a big breakthrough in the Bianca Primero case.

“What the hell do you mean, âbreakthrough'?” Swenson asked when he called later that night.

“Maybe Dudley didn't kill her.”

“Maybe? Look, we have built a strong case; the prosecutor is eager to try Dudley and is convinced he can get a conviction.”

“He may be right.”

“All right then?”

“But you want to be sure that he did what he would be convicted of.”

“He won't confess, I'll tell you that. He insists he is innocent, but what's new?”

Phil patiently laid out for Swenson the elements of Waldo Hermes's account. The theft had looked like an inside job from the beginning, drawing suspicion to the curator.

“Knight, I couldn't care less about those books. My worry is that the coroner is going to do another flip and decide that Bianca Primero's death was suicide.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY AT eleven-thirty, Roger drove his golf cart to Sacred Heart Basilica and slowly climbed the stairs to the main door. He levered it open and stepped inside. As the great door closed softly behind him, he looked over the massive font of holy water just inside the inner doors and then up the aisle toward the sanctuary. There was an altar facing the congregation, as was typical after Vatican II, but beyond it was the preâVatican II altar that Father Sorin had brought back from a eucharistic conference in Philadelphia. It had been love at first sight; Father Sorin knew immediately that such an altar belonged in the campus church at Notre Dame. So he bought it and had it shipped home and placed where it had stood ever sense, a baroque golden dream of an altar, with towering tabernacle and carved saints and angels occupying positions of honor on its lower and upper levels. The glittering altar, matching the gilt decorations of the church, did not completely arrest the eye, which went on to the statue of the Virgin set in its niche above the Bernini altar at the far end of the apse. It was a breathtaking sight, and Roger never saw it without a leap of the heart.

He took a seat. A lector was in the pulpit, and the readings of the day echoed in the acoustically unfriendly church. Fr. Peter Rocca, the rector of the Basilica, was the celebrant. He sat at the right of the altar, following the readings. Perhaps they were audible to him. When he took the pulpit to read the Gospel of the day and give his
homily, every word was clear and audible. It was when the congregation stood for the reading of the Gospel that Roger saw Joseph Primero in a front pew.

When Mass was over, Roger waited for Primero, who made a lengthy thanksgiving. Afterward, he walked toward the front of the church, wanting to see the baroque altar in the Lady Chapel, all white and gold, looking edible. He would have to come back through the sanctuary, so Roger rose and moved toward the front of the church, seating himself conspicuously in the front row. Even at that, he had to stand in order for Joseph Primero to notice him.

The collector came toward Roger smiling. “Don't tell me I'll have the pleasure of taking you to lunch two days in a row.”

“No. I will take you.”

They went in Roger's cart to Cafe de Grasta, a restaurant on the first floor of Grace Hall, now full of administrative offices.

“More modest than The Morris Inn, but the food is good.”

They carried their trays to a table looking out on the snowy campus. Primero was delighted to be shown another aspect of Notre Dame.

“It is the past of the place that interests me even more than its present,” Roger said.

“Its history.”

“Yes. Have you visited the grave of Orestes Brownson?”

“He is buried here?”

“In the lower church, in the main aisle.”

The critic of Cardinal Newman's theory of the development of doctrine had been a favorite of Father Sorinâthough not for that reason.

“I must look up what he had to say of the
Apologia,”
Roger mused. “If he was alive when it appeared.”

“He could hardly take exception to that.”

“What a relief it must be to have your first edition safely back.”

“Yes.”

“Odd that it should have shown up where it did. In the trunk of your wife's car.”

Primero did not answer. Three chattering secretaries at the next table provided background music.

“Have you been following the fate of young Dudley Fyte?” Roger asked.

A look of pain. “The worst thing about the loss of Bianca is that it does not stop. There is the constant reminder.”

“Fyte still insists that he is innocent.”

“Of what? Does he admit any guilt?”

“He is not being accused of adultery.”

“That was the source of his troubles.”

“And your wife's.”

“It would be a terrible thing if he were found guilty of the wrong crime.”

“If there is a crime.”

“What do you mean?”

“Swenson, whom you've met, told Phil last night that he fears the coroner may still declare the death a suicide.”

“That's nonsense!”

“It could save Dudley Fyte.”

“They told me they were sure he was guilty.” Primero was disturbed and excited.

“We are all guilty.”

This unassailable theological truth received a contrapuntal laugh from one of the secretaries. La Grasta was not the best place for a conversation about crime and punishment. They finished their meal and rode back to The Morris Inn in silence, wending their way through students, many of them with heads down against the chill
wind. Primero said something Roger did not hear but waved it off when he asked him to repeat it. When he got out of the cart at the door of The Morris Inn, Roger asked Primero what he had said.

“I said this is as cold as Minnesota.”

“Sure as God made little green apples. Do you know the song?”

Primero shook his head. “Would you ask your brother to come see me?”

“Of course.”

Three hours later, when Roger was at his computer in communication with a semioticist in Helsinki, Phil called.

“Roger, an astounding thing. Joseph Primero has confessed.”

“To what?”

“He says that he killed his wife. He wants me to go back to Minneapolis with him so he can turn himself in.”