Ash Wednesday (5 page)

“I grant the resemblance. Here, let me help you up.”

“Don’t you touch me!” She actually shuddered. Nonetheless, she needed help in getting to her feet. Tuttle also picked up the knitting that had spilled from the cloth bag that had been and still was on her arm. She sidled to a chair, looking warily at Tuttle as she did so.

“Nathaniel Green has been released from Joliet,” Tuttle told her, before Tetzel could ruin the news with sarcasm.

“Who in the hell is Nathaniel Green?” Rebecca asked.

“You should read the paper you write for,” Tuttle advised.

This time he got safely out the door and went briskly down the corridor. He was peeved. Peanuts Pianone, his friend on the Fox River Police Department, should have given him a heads-up on Green’s release. Tuttle eschewed the elevator and took the broad winding staircase beneath the building’s dome to the lobby, where he moved across the checkered marble floor like the man who would be king and sailed through the revolving door. Standing in the weak March sunlight, he sought and found his cell phone and put through a call to his office.

“Tuttle and Tuttle,” Hazel said. Her voice gave the impression that his was a thriving practice.

“Is Mr. Tuttle there?” he said, disguising his voice.

“Where are you?” Hazel asked.

“I thought you should know that my client Nathaniel Green has been released from Joliet.”

“Your former client. I know. He called.”

“He did!” No need to feign nonchalance with Hazel.

“He had to explain who he was. You lost that case before I was with you.” She might have been trying to explain the verdict.

“Thank God for grateful clients,” Tuttle said.

“Sure. Both of them.”

“What did he say, Hazel?”

“I made an appointment.”

“For when?”

“If you hurry you can get here before him.”

“Hazel, keep him there if he gets there first.”

He skipped down the steps to the battered Toyota parked in a handicapped spot. The door sounded as if it would come off in his hand when he pulled it open. He eased himself onto the ringlike cushion on the driver’s seat. “I’m sitting on piles” was his answer
to inquiries as to how business was. He started the car and entered traffic to the accompaniment of irate horns. Road rage was everywhere.

He made his mind a blank slate as he drove. No great feat that, but thoughts of Nathaniel Green kept chalking themselves on the board. He tried unsuccessfully to keep hope from rising in him. The Green case had been a bonanza, even if he had lost. If he had won, his client might not have paid the exorbitant bill Tuttle had presented.

Some scofflaw had parked in the spot behind the building clearly marked
TUTTLE & TUTTLE
. He had half a mind to let the air out of the tires. Then it occurred to him that the car might be Nathaniel Green’s. He put the Toyota in a space marked
MANAGER
and hurried into the building.

It was at times like this that he wished the building’s elevator were still functional. Complaints about it had been useless. He had tried to turn the matter over to Hazel with the thought that she could intimidate Jenkins, the slack-jawed lout who spent the day napping in his basement office, but she shook her head. This motion did not disturb her tightly curled and hennaed hair.

“It’s the only exercise I get,” she said.

“You don’t need exercise.”

Hazel had taken it as a compliment and smiled her sweet and predatory smile. Tuttle had darted into his office. Hazel was a force to be avoided when memories of romance were awakened in her massive bosom.

Now, on the second landing, he stopped, huffing and puffing. If this was exercise, why was he overweight? When his breathing returned to something like normal, he continued up the stairs to his floor.

Hazel was banging away at her computer when he came in, in profile, looking very efficient and busy. She turned in her chair.

“Ah, Mr. Tuttle. This is Mr. Nathaniel Green. I was able to squeeze him in.”

Tuttle noted that she had divested Green of his topcoat and hung it in the corner.

“Mr. Green and I are old friends,” he said to Hazel, and to Green, “Unavoidably detained.” He shook Green’s hand. “Come into my office.” Before closing the door, he said over his shoulder, “No calls.”

He hoped the chaos of his office gave the impression that he was swamped with work. He cleared a chair for Green, got him settled, and hung his own coat and hat on a stand that began to tip. He caught it and eased it toward the perpendicular. “The scales of justice,” he said when equilibrium had been restored. Then he settled at his desk and looked receptively at Nathaniel Green.

The years had not been kind to Green. His Joliet pallor would persist if he did not get some sun. He still had the passive doomed air with which he had gone through the trial. When the verdict was read, he had stood with his chin on his chest. The only animation he had shown was earlier when Tuttle got the charge reduced to manslaughter.

“I murdered her,” he had said to Tuttle.

“Not unless the law says so.”

“Which law?” Green asked.

Tuttle had let it go. Never encourage religiosity in a client unless it could prove of use.

Now here, years later, was Nathaniel Green sitting across the desk from him in his office.

“So what can I do for you, Mr. Green?”

“I was told to come here.”

Tuttle smiled as if beneficent hordes were forever directing clients to his door. “By whom?”

“Jerome Paxon.”

Tuttle held his receptive smile. Who the hell was Jerome Paxon?

“My parole officer,” Green said.

“Of course, of course.” Paxon was a yo-yo who considered criminals innocent and the innocent criminals. Green was in good hands if he wanted to be treated like a victim of society and its benighted laws.

Tuttle began to talk about the time when Green had been his client, but let it go, silenced by the man’s indifference.

“So what are your plans?” he asked Green.

Green seemed to have difficulty with the word. After a pause, he said, “I’ve been going to the senior center at St. Hilary’s. That was our parish.”

“Ah. Father Dowling. Good man. Give him my best.”

The hope that Green represented income was fading, but then Green took an envelope from his inner pocket and laid it on the desk.

“That is my will. I want it rewritten.”

Redoing Green’s will might be a foot in the door. Tuttle reached for the envelope and took out the will. As his eyes went down the first page, he asked, “Who wrote this?”

“Amos Cadbury.”

“Good man.” Actually Fox River’s best. He remembered a scary moment during his first interview with Green when he had said Cadbury was his lawyer.

“Why didn’t you go to him?” Tuttle had asked.

Green had fallen silent, and Tuttle prepared for a reference to his own status in the local bar.

“He said I shouldn’t plead guilty.”

Tuttle had danced away from that. Of course Cadbury was right. It was then that he learned that his client had no wish to be exonerated.

“You’ve come to the right man,” Tuttle said, then wanted to withdraw the equivocal remark.

Green had shown no interest in his own defense; he wanted to be executed for what he had done. Tuttle explained the Illinois ban on capital punishment. The ban was sometimes cynically referred to as the Illinois Investment Statute. He had to explain the feeble joke to Green.

His client’s fatalism had lightened Tuttle’s task. He could not lose by losing in this case.

Now Tuttle drew a legal pad to him, unearthing it from the debris before him. “Tell me what changes you would like in your will, Mr. Green.”

“I want most of my estate to go to Helen Burke. My sister-in-law.”

Tuttle was surprised. Helen had demanded Green’s scalp for what he had done to her sister.

“A magnanimous gesture,” Tuttle said.

“She hates me.”

“I remember.”

“It’s mutual,” Green said.

After the interview was over and Green was gone, Tuttle donned his tweed hat, pulled out a lower drawer, and put his feet in it.
It’s mutual
. He pondered the significance of the remark. Could generosity be a form of revenge?

Edna Hospers attributed the treatment of Nathaniel Green by the others at the senior center to the fact that he was an ex-convict, and it was that, even if she might otherwise have been willing to ignore the shunning on the assumption that it would fade away, that enlisted her on Nathaniel’s side.

“It’s Aunt Helen,” Madeline said. “Florence was her only sister.”

“Florence?”

“Nathaniel’s wife. He killed her, Edna.”

Edna sank into the chair behind her desk. Most of the regulars at the center had known one another before coming here, some of them all their lives, and others were relatives of one sort or another, but it was an unwritten rule that newcomers unknown to the others must not be quizzed about themselves. Whatever they wanted to tell of their past lives—and few elderly people could be silent for long about that—okay, but there should be no pumping. In the case of Nathaniel Green, Edna seemed to be the only one unaware of his tragic history.

“Killed her?” Edna managed to say.

“His lawyer called it a mercy killing,” Madeline said. “The actual verdict was manslaughter. Aunt Helen attended every session of the trial, sitting there like Madame Defarge. If he had been
found innocent, I think she might have strangled him in the courtroom.”

Edna’s husband, Earl, had served a sentence in Joliet for what was called manslaughter, although how it could be seen as anything other than a bizarre accident had always baffled Edna. The trouble was that Earl had considered himself guilty of the death of Sylvia Lowry and almost longed to be punished for it. So it seemed to have been with Nathaniel Green.

“He confessed,” Madeline recalled. “He wanted to plead guilty. His lawyer didn’t dare put him on the stand or he would have confessed again in court.”

Now Nathaniel seemed almost to welcome the cold shoulder the other old people gave him. It broke Edna’s heart when the weather was fairly clement and she looked out her window to see him sitting solitary on a bench, reading.

“How long will this go on, Madeline?”

“Till hell freezes over. Helen is an avenging angel.”

“She’ll drive him away.”

“That’s her hope, Edna.”

Still Nathaniel showed up almost every day. Edna made a point of talking with him, but she couldn’t spend the day with him. Madeline looked bleak when Edna suggested she take her turn in making Nathaniel feel welcome.

“Helen would never forgive me.”

So Edna asked Helen to come by her office. She entered bright as a button, looked around with a nostalgic smile, and sat. “I remember being summoned here for a scolding when I was a student in the school.” She looked at Edna. “Is that what this is?”

“Helen, you have to stop treating Nathaniel Green this way.”

“What way is that? I avoid him entirely.”

“That’s what I mean. Helen, whatever he did, he paid for it, and now he’s back. He is here at Father Dowling’s suggestion.”

“It happened before Father Dowling was pastor. He doesn’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Edna, just look at the man. Woebegone, shuffling around like Oedipus, as if he were the victim. He adopted that role from the beginning, as if the tragedy were not one he had caused. He never once expressed the least bit of sorrow for what he had done. I was not impressed by his self-dramatization at the time, and am even less so now.”

“What would you expect him to do?” Edna asked.

“If he doesn’t know, my telling him wouldn’t help.”

“Then tell me.”

Helen fell silent, working her lips. Suddenly tears began to leak from her eyes. “I know what I sound like. Who am I not to forgive a sinner? Who am I to judge him? What I’m doing is a sin and I know it and I blame it on him.”

“Have you talked with him, Helen?”

“No!”

“Helen, I can’t have this going on in the center. It is souring the atmosphere.”

“Then tell him to stay away!”

“I can’t do that.”

“I understand.” Helen lifted her chin and stared over Edna’s head at the bookshelves behind her.

“What do you mean?” She was referring to Earl, Edna was sure of it.

“Is my scolding over?” Helen asked.

Edna was on the verge of exploding at this insufferably smug woman, but she managed to control herself, barely. “Go back to the others.”

For five minutes after Helen had gone, Edna sat seething at her
desk. She stood, looked out her window, then went downstairs and through the former gym. Voices seemed to die down as she went by. Outside, she slowed her walk as she approached the bench where Nathaniel Green sat, his coat collar up, engrossed in a book.

“What are you reading?” she asked, sitting beside him.

“Shelby Foote. This is volume two.” He lifted the large volume, then let it drop on his lap.

“Shelby Foote.”

“His account of the Civil War,” Nathaniel Green explained.

“We have a little civil war going on right here, Nathaniel.”