The Prudence of the Flesh (28 page)

Gregory's initial negative reaction gave way almost to excitement at the prospect. “Do you think the boy would agree?”

“Why wouldn't he? I think you both ought to go to a lab and have them take what they need and settle it once and for all.”

“But it is settled.”

“I meant for your son.”

“How would I find out if Marvin Murphy would be willing?”

“I'll look into it, if you like.”

*   *   *

He talked to Agnes Lamb about it, and she wanted to come along. “This is one weird fella, Father. I want to hear his reaction to the idea.”

Marvin was at his computer, buying and selling, and asked them to go out onto the patio while he finished up. Outside again, Roger lit his pipe, and Agnes leafed through the book on the metal table. “It's all about people who made a zillion in the market.”

“Lives of the saints.”

Agnes looked puzzled. He did not explain. Don't we all need models of what we are trying to become?

“I don't suppose you ever played the market, Father,” Marvin said, when he came out and threw himself into a chair.

“No.”

“I wish my mother were here. She was really impressed by you.”

“It was mutual.”

“You mean that?”

“Of course. She exhibited great courage at a very difficult time in her life. You know that there were those who proposed that she just get rid of you.”

“She might find it more attractive now.”

“I've come to ask a quite particular question. You know how Thomas Barrett set up a hoax of a DNA test.”

“Officer Lamb has told me all about it.”

“How about a genuine test?”

“Genuine?”

“You and Gregory Barrett go to a lab. I don't know what it is they need for a good test. A little blood? They run the test and then we all know—”

“Father, my mother has dropped the whole idea. It really wasn't her idea anyway. She's not a strong woman. I mean, she's very susceptible. She got talked into it, and now she's sorry, and that's that.”

“What Thomas Barrett did is being taken to suggest that all these charges are fantastic.”

“This one was.”

“But the test wasn't a test.” He busied himself with his pipe. “It would be a way of making it up to Gregory Barrett.”

“Making what up?”

“His good name has been subjected to a great deal of abuse. Why do you suppose his son did what he did?”

“So what did happen would happen.”

Roger shook his head. “He thought his father was guilty.”

Marvin thought about that. He wore corduroy slippers with no socks, and his jogging outfit looked as if he had slept in it. His hair was as it had been when he got out of bed. Portrait of a capitalist.

“And you want proof positive that he's innocent?”

“Why not?”

“It would just be one more game. You plan to ask Tetzel along?”

“Will you do it?”

He shook his head. “Did you ever listen to Barrett's program on NPR?”

“Have you?”

“What a know-it-all. He talks about books and authors as if he owned them.”

“Or as if he admired them.”

Again Marvin shook his head. “That isn't the way he comes through to me. I had teachers like him. Real pains in the shall
we say neck. No, he's come out of all this smelling like a rose. How about my mother?”

It was what Roger had hoped he would say.

“She wouldn't like it?”

“I wouldn't like it! The worst part of this whole business is that her name is mud and there isn't any test that can change that. You say she was courageous. Okay, she was. She is. Her life has not been a walk in the park. That zoo of a branch library she works in! She went into library science because she loves books, and she ends up babysitting a bunch of perverts. Gloria Daley kept after her when she learned about me. Who the hell is my father, anyway? There were photographs of a sailor she said was my father, but it turns out she bought the damned pictures at a yard sale. I could wring Gloria Daley's neck. As for Ned Bunting . . .” His voice had risen but now subsided. “Speak well of the dead, right?”

Tuttle brooded. He could not believe that he had been such a bad judge of Thomas Barrett. Oh, he had been fooled in his day. More often than not, if the truth were known. Look at the way Hazel had established herself in his office. She had come in as a temporary. Maybe a day or two, he had told her, just to clean up the files, put things in order, a few letters. A day or two! Before
the first day was out she had taken on a permanent look. Of course, she was nice to him then, very deferential—Mr. Tuttle this and Mr. Tuttle that—and she had been as remote as a nun. It had been the line of least resistance to let the arrangement go on. She was an efficient, docile woman who would be at his beck and call. Once she was established, once he owed her more than he would have wanted to pay in a lump sum, she began to emerge from her disguise.

“I'll put it on the tab,” she said, and her smile had altered. “You can pay me later.”

She had already severed relations with the temporary service that had sent her. She and Tuttle seemed to have entered into a pact. Then she got personal. “Doesn't Mrs. Tuttle ever come to the office?”

“My mother is dead.”

“I meant your wife.”

“Me? Married?” The very thought of it struck terror in his breast. For one thing, girls had always laughed off any advances on his part. For another, he had the model of his parents' marriage, back there on the South Side, two devoted and contented spouses whose love for their son created a warm cocoon against the world.

“Divorced?”

Tuttle frowned. His parents' marriage had become the standard for him. Till death do us part. He never took divorce cases, and he told Hazel that. “You make at least one enemy. Usually two.”

She sighed in a way that lifted her enormous breasts. How mammalian she was. “You're telling me?”

He did not want to know about her personal life. She made it
clear to him that she did not intend to remain single. “That's why I'm a temporary. No long-term career commitments. I've seen too much of it.”

He had been impressed by her résumé. For half a dozen years she had been a legal secretary in a prestigious firm in the Loop.

“How many partners are there?” he asked. What a comedown for her to be working for a freelance attorney who had to scrounge for a living.

“Dozens. And more hands than partners, if you know what I mean.”

Tuttle didn't know what she meant. She explained. He blushed.

“I knew right off that you're a gentleman.”

By degrees she became the tyrant of his office. The first casualty was Peanuts Pianone, the one true friend Tuttle had, even though the officer was all but autistic. They got along. They had often sent out for Chinese food and pigged out in Tuttle's office. Peanuts was Tuttle's conduit to what was going on at police headquarters, suggesting what ambulance he might chase. It was Peanuts who had told him of Agnes Lamb's theory, overheard when she was talking to Cy Horvath. Of course, Peanuts thought it was crazy.

“Either he goes or I do,” Hazel said when she was cleaning up after one of their impromptu lunches. Styrofoam boxes, balled-up napkins, beer cans, bottles, a mess. This ultimatum might have been Tuttle's last chance at freedom. How could he not prefer Peanuts to Hazel?

“Get rid of her,” Peanuts advised. It might have been another ultimatum.

Ah, how he would recall with sighs those happy bachelor
days. Hazel made him feel like a married man. No wonder he was determined to remain single. Now Peanuts came no more to the offices of Tuttle & Tuttle. It softened the blow to think of it as Peanuts's decision as much as Hazel's.

So he had been wrong about Hazel. She had led him up the garden path. Thomas Barrett was different, though: a clean-cut youth, top of his class, on the wrestling team, admitted to Notre Dame, though that came after the boy had come to Tuttle. It was Thomas's concern for his father that touched Tuttle's heart. Here was an emotion he understood, one of the purest known to man. Thomas wanted to exonerate his father. He had collected materials so that a DNA test could be made. He entrusted them to Tuttle, and the rest was history.

It had been a trick. Thomas had provided materials from his father and from himself, and of course they matched—but that was taken to mean that Gregory Barrett was the father of Madeline Murphy's son. The accusation had been withdrawn, but now tests had proved it true. Tetzel took the ball and ran with it, only to find that he was heading for the wrong goalposts. So Tuttle brooded.

The one catch in the whole scenario was young Barrett's claim that it was Marvin's toothbrush. Tuttle had not asked him how he had managed to get it. He gave Thomas a call. “Tuttle here. Where can we talk?”

The direct approach always put the other person at a disadvantage. But Thomas laughed and said, “So you can give me hell for misleading you?”

“Oh, that's ancient history now. This is something else.” He had crossed his pudgy fingers.

“You could come to the house, I suppose.”

And run the risk of having to confront father and son together? “Do you know a restaurant called the Great Wall?”

“Never heard of it.”

“I'll tell you how to get there.”

Thomas took the instructions and repeated them as if he were writing them down, but Tuttle was not confident he would come. Not that it would be a complete loss. He could have lunch anyway.

They were to meet at one o'clock. The hour came and went; Tuttle ordered. Then Thomas arrived. Tuttle waved his chopsticks, then his red paper napkin, and Thomas came to his booth.

“I thought I'd get started,” Tuttle said.

“You're going to eat all that?” Thomas was genuinely surprised.

“Didn't you ever eat Chinese?”

“That sounds like cannibalism.”

“Oh, the meat is some kind of rodent.”

“Let me just have a little of the rice.”

Tuttle pushed the bowl of rice across the table. “There are chopsticks there.”

“I'll need a fork.” Thomas unzipped his jacket and tried to tuck a napkin into his turtleneck. His hair seemed damp. “Fresh from a shower. I run on Wednesdays.”

“No classes?”

“Reduced classes. I'm a senior.” Also, Tuttle had learned, the class valedictorian.

Thomas finished the bowl of rice and looked speculatively at the other dishes. Tuttle gave him samples from several, and soon those were gone.

“You ought to order now,” Tuttle suggested.

Thomas shook his head. “That will hold me. So why are we meeting?”

“So I could assure you I'm not as dumb as I am. I didn't even ask you how you got hold of a toothbrush of Marvin Murphy's.”

“I would have lied.”

He was quick, Tuttle had to give him that. “Did you ever meet him?”

“Why would I?”

The reasons Tuttle thought of might seem romantic. A hitherto unknown half brother?

“Father Dowling has come up with an ingenious idea.”

This information was one of the bonuses of knowing Peanuts. Peanuts dismissed the idea, since Agnes was involved, but Tuttle liked it.

“You staged a fake test; let's have a real test.”

“The test was real enough. The results were misinterpreted. My DNA matches my father's. Big surprise.”

“By real, I mean testing Marvin and your father.”

“To prove they aren't related?”

“Exactly.”

“We already know that.”

“No. We know that you and your father are related.”

Thomas sat back in the booth, his shoulders pressed against it. A big kid, 175, maybe 180 pounds, and no fat—but he was a runner, and a wrestler.

“You're making this up, aren't you?” He tried to get an answering smile from Tuttle. “I don't believe anyone seriously proposed such a test.”

“Marvin's against it, too.”

Thomas seemed surprised, but he thought about it. “That makes sense. Who needs more bad publicity?”

“Did you ever meet him?”

Thomas looked at Tuttle. “Did he say we met?”

“I haven't asked him.”

“I'll save you the trouble. We haven't.”