The Prudence of the Flesh (16 page)

“You need a lawyer to write a book?”

“There were those who did not sympathize with his project.”

“Like Quirk.”

“Quirk is an idiot. That piece on Dowling made news, yet he persisted in maligning my client.”

“You think Quirk dumped him in the river?”

“Dear God. Is that what happened?”

In Tuttle's experience it was always wise to seek and not give information. He felt a momentary resentment at Peanuts's refusal to fill him in on Bunting. Then the manner of Bunting's death sent a tremor of fear through him—but what would the Pianone family have against Ned Bunting?

Agnes gave him a laundered version of the finding of the body and its transfer to the Fox River morgue.

“I would like to see his effects,” Tuttle said.

Thank God for Agnes Lamb. She seemed to regard Tuttle as the next of kin. “Come with me.” In the doorway she turned to Cy Horvath. Who could read that Hungarian face? But Cy nodded.

There were two baskets, one filled with what had been found on the body, the other with what had been found in Bunting's parked car. There was also a sheet of plastic and a baseball bat, the murder weapon. Tuttle recognized the tape recorder that Bunting had worn slung from his shoulder as if to announce
WRITER AT WORK
.

“Has anyone listened to that?”

Sportello, the custodian of the effects, lifted his shoulders in a gesture that could have meant anything.

Tuttle turned to Agnes Lamb. “Maybe you should be with me when I see what he had been taping.”

Agnes Lamb signed out the tape recorder and led Tuttle to a
room where he could plug it in. “Go ahead,” she said. “Just return it to Sportello when you're done.”

“Bless you, my dear.”

“Amen.” She closed the door when she left.

Tuttle was electronically handicapped, and it took him some time before he mastered the mechanics of Bunting's machine. He huddled over it, listening to an exchange between Bunting and a woman, the subject Father Dowling. Ah, Marie Murkin. He fast-forwarded and soon was listening to the draft of the piece Bunting had done for the
Tribune
. More fast-forwarding and then silence. That was when Bunting noted the other tapes stashed in the pockets of the case that held the recorder. He had them in his own pocket before he had decided to take them. He sat for a while, pondering what he had done. There seemed little reason to fear any reprisals. Sportello was a zero, waiting out the time until he could retire and go on doing nothing in another venue.

Tuttle rewound the tape that was in the machine and listened again to the clearly delighted Marie Murkin feeding details of the life of Roger Dowling to Ned Bunting. Bunting spoke with the authority of an author, and Marie was clearly impressed. Tuttle listened for several minutes, then rewound the tape and took everything back to Sportello.

“Guard that with your life,” he advised the lazy-lidded custodian.

“What is it?”

“It could be the smoking gun.”

Sportello was still considering this remark as Tuttle sauntered down the hall, where he looked into Cy's office.

“Thank you, Officer.”

Agnes gave a little bow. “Was it any help?”

“Not as much as I had hoped.”

What would Peanuts say if he knew that Tuttle was thick as thieves with Peanuts's sworn enemy? Agnes Lamb had been hired as a gesture toward deflecting feminist and racist charges against the department, but she had soon proved herself to be an excellent cop, much to Peanuts's chagrin. There had been a time when the two of them rode in the same squad car, but within days Agnes was driving and Peanuts sulking in the passenger seat. Then Cy Horvath ordered her off patrol and under his wing, as solid an endorsement as any cop could get. Peanuts regarded it all as a conspiracy. In fact, it was his own presence on the force that was the conspiracy, an olive branch to the Pianone family. Otherwise unemployable, Peanuts drew his pay and was generally kept out of any matter of importance. The way he complained, you would have thought he wanted to earn his money, but his connatural racism and chauvinism explained his reaction to the rise of Agnes Lamb. Still, paragon that she was thought to be, she had made a large mistake in leaving Tuttle alone with the basket of evidence. He should have asked to see the personal effects as well. Maybe another time.

Back in his office, Tuttle asked Hazel if she had something he could play tapes on.

“Tapes.”

“Cassettes.”

“Music?”

“I think voice.”

“I could play them on this.” She pointed to the dictating machine on her desk.

“That's good to know.”

“You want to play them or not?”

“Any calls?”

“Go to hell.”

He went into his office, sailed his tweed hat at the coat stand, made a ringer, locked his door, and sat down carefully in his desk chair. The chair had a mind of its own and was likely to move at the slightest provocation.

There might be nothing on the two cassettes he had lifted from Bunting's case. They might even be blanks. No need to open himself to Hazel's criticism if he asked her to play the tapes and there was nothing on them. He would wait until she was gone and then see what he had.

A tap on the door. “You want coffee?”

“If it's made.”

The door rattled. Tuttle pushed back and his chair carried him to the wall, hit with a bang, and dumped him on the floor. “I'm coming.”

Hazel was framed in the doorway when he opened it. Her massive bosom was supported on her folded arms. “What do you do in there with the door locked?”

“Meditate.”

“The imbecile called. He didn't leave a message. In fact, he didn't say anything. I recognized the breathing. It's like an obscene phone call.”

“Peanuts?”

“How many imbeciles do you know?”

“Don't get me started.”

“Come and have your coffee out here.” She simpered. “I get lonesome.”

She moved back toward her desk, where the coffee awaited, and he followed like a trained animal. He had no real defense against Hazel. Sometimes he thought she was older than himself, sometimes younger.

She had a bad habit of talking about how wonderful it had been with her first husband. “God, what a man he was.”

“How many were there?”

“How many what?”

“You said your first.”

“First and last, Tuttle. First and last. They broke the mold.”

“What happened to him?”

“Cancer. He was gone in a month. You don't know what it's like for a woman to be left alone.”

Tuttle had an idea what it was like for a man to be alone with a woman who has been left alone. “You should marry again.”

“And leave you?”

There are modalities of female laughter, and Hazel's registered somewhere around the adolescent giggle. Since she had the build of a lady wrestler, this was incongruous.

“Good coffee.”

“I am thought to be an excellent cook.”

“You do Chinese?”

“Are you kidding?”

“It's my favorite.”

“Stamp out rodents, eat Chinese. Do you know what they put in that stuff?”

It was four o'clock. Hazel left at five. If he sat here with her for an hour she would end up having him in a half nelson.

“I have been down to headquarters to check the effects of Ned Bunting.”

“He never came to the office.”

“He already had a girl.”

She tried to punch him in the ribs, but he got out of range. “Those his tapes you want to hear?”

He laughed. “You think the police would let me walk off with something like that?”

“No. Did you walk off with them?”

“Hazel, I don't have to remind you that everything said in this office is under strict confidentiality.”

“Give them here. I'll put them on.”

So it was that Tuttle heard Bunting's last tapes. The first was a lengthy memo to himself, in which he seemed to be giving himself a pep talk about the book he hoped to write. Several old foes were mentioned, naysayers who would have to eat their words. “Or rather mine,” Ned Bunting's recorded voice said. He repeated the phrase, obviously liking it. “Item. The ineffable Universal Literary Agency, a scam into which I sank five hundred useless dollars. Item. The moronic editor Max Zubiri, raking in money under false pretenses, exacting a fee to insult me. And then the superpompous Gregory Barrett, who acts as if he owns the authors he talks about. Who is he to dismiss my efforts? Quirk. Well, at least he took the piece on Dowling.”

“I'll make a transcript for you,” Hazel said. “In case the police notice they're missing.”

“You can do that?”

“Tuttle, you'd be surprised what I can do.”

Because encountering Tuttle of Tuttle & Tuttle posed such delicate problems of conscience, Amos Cadbury kept those encounters to a minimum. Should the little lawyer loom on the horizon in the courthouse, skating across the great granite floor beneath the cupola, doubtless having descended the great spiral staircase that did not interfere with the ground-level view of the allegorical depiction of justice up among the painted clouds—should Tuttle surprise him there, a simple nod from Cadbury sufficed. If he intended to enter an elevator, he made certain that this was not Tuttle's intention as well. Needless to say, Tuttle did not come to Cadbury's office or, if he did, was told some white lie that sent him away. Was this uncharitable or, as Amos wanted to think, a laudable shunning for the sake of the profession? If Amos had been truly vindictive, he would have pressed for Tuttle's disbarment on the two occasions he chaired the committee looking into Tuttle's activities. The few disbarred lawyers Amos Cadbury knew filled him with compassion. Oh, he believed in punishment for misdeeds, and he did not think life imprisonment was too severe a penalty for certain crimes, but for a man to be cut off
from the knowledge and skills he had acquired in order to earn his bread, ah, that must be a veritable hell. So he had been lenient in judging Tuttle, hoping that the threat of disbarment would prove a stimulus to reform.

Now, dressing formally on the evening of the Fox River bar's annual spring banquet, Amos stood before his dressing room mirror and remembered times when his late wife's arm had lain on the arm of this dinner jacket. By half closing his eyes, he could conjure her up at his side, a replica of a photograph in his den of the two of them formally attired, taken by the ship photographer on the cruise that had marked the fiftieth anniversary of their marriage. The cruise had been aboard a Holland America vessel bearing the same name,
Statendam,
as that on which they had sailed to Europe on their honeymoon. There was another photograph of them with the pope, his bride now veiled in black, when they had attended the private papal Mass with a handful of others who had powerful friends in Rome. Why with his heart so full did he now think of the redoubtable Tuttle?

The reason occurred to him as he was driven to the hotel where the banquet would take place—in the Loop, there being no hotel adequate for the purpose in Fox River. In St. Peter's Square one was constantly accosted by men selling postcards and trinkets, men who would not take no for an answer and trailed along until defeat was certain. They seemed the very model of Tuttle seeking legal business by whatever means was effective. The annual banquet of the bar was the supreme test, since it would never do to snub a fellow lawyer on that occasion. He only wished that Tuttle were selling postcards and rosaries so he could make a purchase and be done with it.

The hour before the banquet was devoted to milling about and
drinking in a huge room adjacent to the one in which they would dine. Amos's firm had, of course, reserved a table, and once there he would be surrounded by congenial colleagues. The social hour, though, was a time of maximum vulnerability, the more so because now Tuttle would not be wearing his trademark Irish tweed hat, which would have been sufficient warning even across the crowded room.

“Amos.” A hand touched his elbow, and he turned to see, almost with relief, that it was Barfield. The two men exchanged greetings, and Barfield, who now had a grip on Amos's elbow, led him off to relative privacy. “So you've seen Gregory Barrett.”

Amos nodded.

“I had hoped that you would enlist his support in having that woman included in the arrangements the archdiocese is making for victims.”

“Would persuasion work? In any case, he thinks it would be blackmail.”

“Who's to say? But surely the aim must be to get such things behind us and out of the press.”

“I can certainly say amen to that.”

“His innocence in the matter is not to be taken for granted, you know.”

“Proving that one has not done something is never an easy matter.”

“You would let the charge go before a judge?”

Amos did not attribute the question to Barfield's well-known habit of bringing about mutually acceptable solutions without having recourse to a trial. Trials there must be; charges must be faced, a judgment awaited, that was the nature of the law—but in the case of wayward priests, the very accusation was a stigma
on their whole order, and a swift resolution of the Barfield kind was a desideratum.