The Prudence of the Flesh (19 page)

Hazel had asked if he should bill the son as well as the father, but Tuttle would settle for what he was sure would be the undying gratitude of the splendid young man.

*   *   *

Tuttle had fallen asleep under his tweed thinking hat, so deeply that he did not hear Hazel's buzz. She came in and shook him awake. Tuttle did not come gently into this kind day. He looked wildly at Hazel and pushed back from his desk, sending his chair spinning against the wall. When it struck, it dumped him unceremoniously onto the floor.

“You awake now?”

“Help me up.”

She nearly jerked his arm from his socket when she pulled on it. The motion brought him into a standing position, pressed against her enormous breasts. He could both hear and feel her breathing. Terror gripped him, and he broke free.

“Lieutenant Horvath called,” she said.

“Ah. And what's the verdict?”

“Verdict?”

So Tuttle told Hazel what Thomas Barrett had brought him.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Hazel blessed herself.

“Are you Catholic?”

“No, but I saw the movie.”

Part Three

Cy reviewed the investigation into the death of Ned Bunting. A patrol car checked out the report and verified that it was authentic. Soon the parking area was filled with official vehicles: a fire truck, the paramedic ambulance, half a dozen patrol cars. Officers were keeping back the citizens who had followed the sirens to their destination. Cy got there about the same time Pippen did. People stepped back to let them through. The body had been taken from the water but left close to where it had been found when it was clear the man was dead.

“A tall drink of water,” Pippen said.

“It looks like that's what he had.”

“We'll see.”

Cy loved to watch Pippen in her professional role. She had slipped on latex gloves and knelt by the body, doing this and that. She stood. “Let's take him in.”

So the tall drink of water was poured into a rubber bag and carted up to the paramedics' vehicle, to be taken off to Pippen's morgue. Meanwhile, Cy was examining the cordoned-off area, maybe fifty square feet at the edge of the water. It looked to him
as if the body had been dragged into the water. Along that path? The condition of the bushes and weeds suggested the way he had come to his watery grave. Cy pointed this out to the lab men and then got out of their way. In the woods, some ten yards from the area where the body was examined, he found an old sheet of plastic, four or five feet long, and a baseball bat. He instructed the crew to take those along as well.

Pippen was standing with folded arms in the parking area, watching the vehicle carrying the body being directed through the gathering crowd. “And I was just telling Lubins how slow things have been.”

“That sounds like a motive.”

“I better get back.”

“Wanna race?”

“I'll see you there.”

The identification of the body presented no problems. There was a wallet in his trousers with multiple ID: a driver's license, a card saying he was a lifetime subscriber to
Writer's World,
and some holy cards, apparently memorials of his parents.

“Edward Bunting,” Pippen said into the microphone that dangled from the ceiling over her workplace. Cy was at the observation window. She began carefully to undress the body, failing to find anything of significance in the clothes. “He didn't drown.”

Cy was preparing to go back to his office, not having the stomach for what he thought Pippen would do next. But she lifted the cadaver several times, her arms under the shoulders. “Broken neck,” she said. Then one of her ghoulish instruments began to whirr, and Cy got out of there.

*   *   *

“Bunting?” Phil Keegan said.

“Edward Bunting.”

Phil shook his head. “That must be the Ned Bunting who wrote the puff piece on Roger Dowling.”

“He was found in the river, but Pippen says he didn't drown. His neck was broken. It was pretty obvious that he was dragged down to the water and thrown in. The lab will see what they can find.”

Phil was already on the phone to Roger Dowling. “I can understand your resentment, Roger. It was a pretty bad article, but this is going too far.”

There was a smile on Keegan's tanned face that gave some indication of what he had been like as a kid. He and Dowling were old friends, and the phone call was the equivalent of playground teasing.

Marie Murkin acted as if the death of Ned Bunting were divine retribution for her cooperation in the article on the pastor of St. Hilary's, and Father Dowling did not try to unravel her snarled theory. Meanwhile, over the next several days, he was kept apprized of the ongoing investigation.

The deceased was indeed the author of that memorable tribute
to Father Dowling that had appeared in the
Tribune.
Phil Keegan settled into a chair in the study.

“He thought of himself as a writer, Roger. Quirk said he couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag.”

“Faint praise, Phil. So why did he print it?”

“He said it was an off day.”

More people remembered Ned Bunting as an usher at St. Bavo's than as a writer. Apparently he'd had some sort of tiff with the pastor there.

“Monsignor Sledz,” Roger said.

“Yes. Barbara Blaisdel, the housekeeper, said it had something to do with the parish bulletin. Bunting had offered to do a weekly column for it, and Sledz laughed him out of the rectory.”

“He had been coming to Mass here.”

“With a woman,” Marie said from the hallway. She looked in and said to Phil Keegan, “Ask Barbara who she was.”

“I thought you wanted to be a priest, not a detective.”

Marie's eyes lifted to the ceiling, and her lips moved in prayer. Marie Murkin was the last of the male chauvinists when it came to the role of women in the church. How many of the apostles were women? This observation provided all the argument Marie was likely to make. How do you argue for the obvious?

“Thanks, Marie,” Father Dowling said.

“You're welcome, I'm sure. I don't know about whatshisname there.” She was gone.

“Bunting was with a woman when she came here, according to Marie.”

“I'll talk to Barbara Blaisdel.”

When Cy had talked to Gloria Daley, he learned that Bunting's great project was a book about the priest scandal.

Pippen's report on her examination confirmed that Bunting had not drowned but had died of a broken neck. Only then had he been put into the water.

“He was a big guy,” Phil said. “Putting him in the river would have taken quite an effort.”

The examination of the scene at the edge of the river confirmed Cy's guess that the body had been dragged through the underbrush to the water. There were several pretty obvious paths, but they had been avoided. The question was, where had the fatal injury been inflicted? The parking area was impossibly contaminated by all the official vehicles and then by the curious who had come to the scene of the discovery of the body of Ned Bunting.

Cy had been there when the lab crew went over Bunting's residence. It was a small bungalow in which he had been raised by his parents and where he had stayed on after their deaths. Two bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen. The place looked as it must have looked when Bunting was a boy, very old-fashioned but neat as a pin.

“The basement was the thing.”

The furnace, hot water heater, and washer and dryer were housed at one end of the basement, in a room built especially to keep them from view. The rest of the area was covered by indoor/outdoor carpeting. A long table ran the width of the short wall, and on it were a massive computer, a printer, a fax machine, a telephone, and a television set hooked up to a video and CD player. The lighting over the work area was provided by fluorescent lights. The rest of the area was devoted to comfort. There were several bookshelves, a couch, an easy chair, and a large coffee table strewn with publications. A massive ashtray was within easy reach of the chair. It was here that Ned Bunting had
nursed his ambition to be a writer. On the walls were portraits of his heroes: a bearded Hemingway, a forlorn Scott Fitzgerald, Philip Roth making the most of what hair he had, John Updike looking a bit like a rabbit.

“No sign of a struggle.”

“Not in the physical sense.” You never knew when Cy was being less than serious. The basement room would be subjected to close analysis, the results of which would take time.

Meanwhile there was the question of Ned Bunting's funeral, and that concerned Father Dowling more directly. Gloria Daley came to the rectory, spoke at length with Marie, and then was led in to the pastor.

“I think it would be wrong for Ned to be buried at St. Bavo's,” she began, and told the story of the treatment to which Monsignor Sledz had subjected Bunting. “Now he claims him as an ideal parishioner, the best of ushers.”

“Was he registered at St. Bavo's?”

“Father Dowling, we had been attending your Mass here. He had shaken the dust of St. Bavo's from his feet.”

“Who are the next of kin?”

“I don't know anyone who was closer to him than I was.”

“And she prefers here,” Marie said.

“I'll talk to Monsignor Sledz.”

Gloria was looking around the study. “If there was anyplace to hang it, I would give you one of my paintings.”

Marie led her away.

Roger Dowling had no intention of getting into an argument with Sledz about the funeral of Ned Bunting. Sledz was a member of the Polish Mafia in the archdiocese and, like the rest of them, the salt of the earth. Imperious, of course, one who did not
suffer fools gladly and who assumed that most of the laity were fools. It was easy to imagine his reaction to his usher's suggestion that he write a column for the parish bulletin, thus claiming parity with Sledz's weekly written address to his flock.

He telephoned Sledz and asked what he knew of the woman who had come to him with the request that Ned Bunting be buried from St. Hilary's.