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Authors: Ralph McInerny

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Oh, do not let the oppressed return ashamed!

âPsalm 74

Tuttle took up his vigil in the lobby of the hotel where Leo Corbett had rented a room and imagined the scenario when Leo came down and found the lawyer he had been avoiding waiting for him. But it was difficult in imagination to go beyond the startled reaction he expected from Leo. An hour passed and Tuttle's stomach began to rumble. There was no restaurant in this hotel, but there was candy displayed on the counter. Tuttle went over to his tweedy counterpart and bought a bag of M&Ms and a sack of potato chips. And then he had a thought.

“Let me use your phone,” he said to the desk clerk.

“There's a booth over there.”

“I'd rather not use a public phone.” Tuttle had allowed the seedy custodian of the desk to believe that he was with the police. That had inspired the usual reaction.

“Hey, there's nothing going on here.”

“We know that. And you know why I'm here.”

The man glanced at a form before him. “Corbett?”

“Right.”

He lifted the phone and put it before Tuttle. Tuttle dialed police headquarters and said audibly, “Officer Pianone, please.”

Peanuts was found napping in the press room and the call was transferred there.

“Tuttle.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing?”

“Working.”

“Good. I need you.”

He gave the name of the hotel and Peanuts asked if he had been thrown out of the office. Tuttle suffered the nasal chortle that followed on this.

“There's a new day dawning, Peanuts. Look, stop at the Great Wall on the way. You know what I like. Get anything you want. I'll pay you when you get here. But you better hurry.”

Peanuts agreed and hung up. Tuttle replaced the phone and stood for a moment as if in thought, then pushed the phone away.

He returned to the shapeless lobby chair and decided it had been wise not to call Hazel. Victory was about to be snatched from the jaws of defeat, at least that was the hope, but the world was a funny place and he did not want to crow before he had his man.

When Peanuts arrived the man behind the desk objected to their turning the lobby into a fast-food place, but Peanuts gave
him an egg roll and he subsided behind the counter beneath his tweed hat. It was like Peanuts not to be curious why he had been summoned, since food was in the offing and Tuttle paid him before they set to.

“Ah, for a six-pack,” Tuttle sighed, when he was restored.

Peanuts nodded.

“Things are going to be like they were, Peanuts. That's a promise.”

“Sure.”

An understandable skepticism, the way he had allowed Hazel to take over his life. His professional life. He had fended off her suggestion that she put a little order into where he lived as well. She had driven by the place.

“That's a nice building.”

“My parents lived there.”

Mention of his parents always quieted her. She could not grasp the piety he felt toward those who had borne and raised him. He discouraged all talk of his personal past. There was a limit. And things were going to go back to the way they had been in his office, too, or he would know the reason why.

The elevator door opened and Leo Corbett emerged. He came up to Tuttle. “They told me you were down here.”

A traitor in a tweed hat.

“Long time no see.”

“There's something I've been meaning to tell you, Tuttle.”

“I was going to say the same thing.”

But before he could say more, the revolving door was set in motion and in walked Cy Horvath.

“You're under arrest, Tuttle.”

“You should stay out of the heat, Horvath.”

“Matilda identified you. Come along.”

“Matilda!”

“The cleaning lady where Charlotte Priebe lived.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She's dead, Tuttle. Matilda found her and ran into the street to find a cop. She described you to a tee.”

Horvath glanced at the desk and at Tuttle's clone and hesitated for a moment. “Peanuts, we're arresting Tuttle.”

“Okay.”

Et
tu, Brute?
Meanwhile, Leo had disappeared. They took turns going through the revolving door, Horvath first, then Tuttle, then Peanuts, coming into the summer heat.

“You'll regret this, Horvath.”

“Tell it to your lawyer.”

“I am a lawyer, dammit.”

Tuttle's car was left where he had parked it, to be ticketed and towed some hours later. On the ride downtown, he asked Horvath how he had known where he was.

“We got an anonymous call about a vagrant doing a sit-in in the lobby.”

Tuttle fell back. The Judas in the tweed hat? Leo? It gave him something to think about while he was taken to be booked. It wasn't until then that the reason for all this soaked in. Charlotte Priebe was dead.

Part Three

My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?

âPsalm 22

Keegan and Cy took turns questioning Tuttle, arresting him having seemed the best way to get his cooperation.

“I was looking for my client.”

“Get tired of chasing ambulances?”

“Leo Corbett had been staying with her. I had the place under surveillance and when he moved out and went to that hotel, I followed him. He had just come downstairs when you showed up.”

The information that Leo had been living with Charlotte Priebe was news, if true. Matilda hadn't mentioned that. They put Tuttle in a cell while he shouted law at them. Give him a little shaking, that was the idea. But Phil Keegan was almost glad to be diverted from the murder of Father Nathaniel. Tetzel wouldn't let up about the slowness of the investigation. He drew attention to the religious persuasion of Keegan and Horvath, intimating that they had some ulterior reason for letting the pursuit of the priest's murderer wither and die. The reporter even supplied information about the percentage of successful arrests and convictions in murders over
the past decade in Fox River. Now the murder of Charlotte Priebe would be front-page stuff.

When the traffic cop called in to say a cleaning lady was reporting a murder, Cy Horvath had gone to check it out. He was taken up to the apartment and let in and found her in the bathtub, submerged. Fortunately Pippen and not Lubins came to check on the body.

“She drowned,” Pippen said.

It was something, standing there beside the comely coroner surveying the nude body of the young woman.

“People don't drown in bathtubs.”

“There could be any number of explanations.”

Photographs were taken, the lab exports went over the apartment with extraordinary care, every once in a while ducking in to look at the corpse.

“Necrophilia is everywhere,” Pippen murmured.

“Something wrong with her neck?”

“No, your head.”

Cy rummaged around in the desk and discovered that she worked for Anderson Ltd. As he was turning over papers, a lab girl said they were going to take the computer downtown. But Cy was wondering what sort of hell Anderson would raise when he found out that a woman who had obviously been high on the corporate ladder was found dead in her bath. He decided that Anderson should hear the news from him.

Anderson's eyes were cold but he was smiling when Cy went into his office.

“What the hell is this about Charlotte Priebe?”

“Did she work for you?”

“Did she? What do you mean?”

“She's dead.”

Anderson sat down and his smile went, but the wrinkles where it had been remained. Cy told him what they knew. Anderson gave an incredulous laugh when told the woman he described as his administrative assistant had drowned in her bath.

“People don't drown in bathtubs.”

“Someone else said that. That's why I'm here. I'm in homicide.”

Anderson looked at Cy's card for the first time. “Okay, Horvath. You're a lieutenant in homicide. I want you to find the bastard who did this. That girl was like a daughter to me.”

“She live alone?”

Anderson exploded. “I won't have you dragging her name through the mud. Just find out who killed her.”

Cy decided not to tell him that Leo Corbett had spent some nights in Charlotte Priebe's apartment. Maybe she took in stray cats as well and there was nothing to it. He asked Anderson if anything related to her work might explain what had happened.

For fifteen minutes, Anderson told him what a genius Charlotte Priebe had been. “Came to work for me and within a couple of years, her office was next to mine. I invented the title administrative assistant for her. Vice president of whatever couldn't have covered it.”

“What had she been assisting you on lately?”

Anderson looked at him shrewdly. “Why did you ask if she lived alone?”

“Tell me.”

Anderson's response was an exercise in circumlocution. He told Cy in great detail about the plans he had developed for the Corbett property, if he could get hold of it. Charlotte worked with
him hand in glove. He couldn't pay her enough for all the things she did.

“For example, Corbett's grandson.”

“Leo Corbett.”

“So you read the papers. Young man couldn't find his rear end with both hands. He had fallen into the hands of a shyster lawyer named Tuttle and it was Charlotte's aim to free him from the association. I just learned that she had hid him in her apartment, so Tuttle couldn't get at him. She came up with an idea to break the logjam with those priests who own the property. Do you know Amos Cadbury?”

“Yes.”

“The lawyer?”

“I know him.”

“Talk to Cadbury and he'll tell you about it.”

“So who would want to kill her?”

“Well, one guy who had a pretty good motive was Tuttle. Do you know him?”

“He's under arrest.”

“Already? Good. Good. Lieutenant, anything I can do.”

So later, when he was questioning Tuttle, Cy asked him what Lars Anderson had against him.

“Who's Lars Anderson?”

“Funny.”

“I don't know the man.”

“He knows you. He says you talked Leo Corbett into being your client. Tuttle, we know Tetzel got the idea for that series from you. A real scorched-earth policy. Anderson says the girl you drowned in her bathtub had come up with a compromise and that meant getting Corbett away from you.”

“Horvath, I was never inside that apartment. Scout's honor.”
Tuttle raised his left hand and tried to touch his little finger with his thumb.

“Just talked to the cleaning lady?”

“That's right. Ask her if I went upstairs.”

“You camp in the lobby there, too?”

“I waited in my car.” Tuttle flipped off his hat. “Talk to Farniente, he'll back up everything I say.”

“Farniente!”

“Ask him. You got to let me out of here.”

“Know any good lawyers?”

Tuttle, who never swore because his father never had, swore now. “Let me call my office.”

“Did you find him?” Hazel cried.

“I'm in jail. I've been arrested.”

Her mocking laughter invaded Tuttle's ear like a gas. “Mentally?”

“If I want jokes, I can listen to the cops.”

“What did you do, run a red light?”

“Charlotte Priebe is dead.”

“Miss Efficiency?” Like all dominating women Hazel despised other women.

“In her bathtub.”

“You're kidding.”

“I went there, trailing Leo Corbett, and the cleaning lady fingered me.”

“Why don't you start at the beginning?”

Where is the beginning? And what was the point of telling her all this? But he did, in as much detail as he could summon, wanting to use every moment of phone time they would allow him.
The cell gave him the creeps. He had visited clients who had been arrested, he had watched them taken away after the interview and never really given a second thought to the door clanging on them. Hazel had about as much sympathy for him. He would like to lock her up and throw away the key. Tuttle listened to himself telling Hazel what had gone on since last they met. He recognized a boondoggle when he heard it.

“What hurts is, just as I had him, the police barged in and made this ridiculous charge and the next thing I know Leo Corbett has vamoosed.”

What did staking out the Priebe woman and tailing Leo have to do with one another?

“He had been staying with her?”

“Leo?” Again that noxious laughter. “She must have been really hard up.”

“It really helps to talk to you.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Get hold of Farniente. Tell him to come down here and clear me.

“He should be a big help.”

“Do it.” He hung up. The silence of the cell was better than talking to Hazel. Who did she like, anyway? She had contempt for Peanuts and thought Farniente was a joke. She wasn't leading any cheers for him, either, so why had he gotten stuck with her?

Farniente, when they brought him in, was the soul of prudence. Cy thought he would deny he even knew Tuttle.

“All right, he hired me.”

“What for?”

“This guy Leo Corbett? He was giving Tuttle the dodge. He wanted to locate him. So he called me in.”

“And you found him?”

“He was shacking up with this woman who got herself killed.”

It was difficult to establish a timeline on the basis of either Tuttle's or Farniente's stories. And then Pippen came through with her preliminary report.

“Overdose.”

“Of what?”

“Sleeping pills.”

“Suicide?”

“Looks like it.”

Cy went over to the lab to see what they had. They had dusted the whole apartment but come up empty.

“Nothing anywhere. The place had been wiped. There were only a couple fingerprints of the woman.”