Father Dowling reflected on the irony of recent events.
Harry Paquette, the man accused of pushing his girlfriend to her death in traffic, had had his moment in the sun and then faded from attention. The death of Ruby, the head housekeeper at the Hacienda Motel, confused the issue. Harry had been in jail when the murder occurred, yet Ruby would have testified against Harry and given reasons why he would have killed Linda Hopkins. Perhaps his trial would elicit interest. For the sake of the parents in Appleseed, Wisconsin, he hoped not. Meanwhile, having asked about Harry while speaking to Phil, Father Dowling decided to go downtown and talk to him. He had been prepared for Harry by Phil's description: ponytail, cocky, and defiant.
“I ain't Catholic,” Harry said, coming to a stop just inside the door.
“That's true of most people in the world. What are you?”
Harry seemed surprised by the question. “I don't know. Not Catholic.”
“But Christian?” Father Dowling indicated the crucifix tattooed on Harry's forearm.
“I was drunk at the time.” He pulled a chair some feet from the table and sat. “You the chaplain here?”
“Lieutenant Horvath told me you deny killing that girl.”
“He doesn't believe me.” Harry shrugged. “What do I care? I didn't do it. I wish it had been me was pushed into traffic.”
“You were going to marry?”
“It's the only way she'd have it. I would have done anything for her.”
“Including starting a savings account.”
Harry made a face. “Horvath told you everything, didn't he?”
“He's your best bet, Harry.”
“Horvath?”
“Horvath. I think he does believe you.”
Father Dowling came away sharing the view that Harry Paquette was innocent.
Cy had said, “If he were still on the run and Ruby got killed, I would figure it was Harry, trying to cover his tracks.”
Cy had given him an account of events at the Hacienda Motel. There had been no robbery, nothing other than the murder. The man was hidden in a linen closet behind Ruby's desk, waiting for her. When she settled at her desk, he stepped out and looped the laundry-bag cord around her neck.
“Man?”
“Size-ten shoes. That's about all he left, his footprints.”
Cy had all this in reports from the medical examiner's crew. But his attention now was on the strangling of Agatha. The media had suddenly noticed that three days had gone by and the man who had confessed to the crime had not yet been indicted.
“Would you do me a favor, Father? There's one man I can cross off my list if I could learn one thing.”
“Austin Rooney?”
“That's right, you know about that. I don't want to embarrass him and I sure don't want to give any satisfaction to Fred Crosley, his landlord, but I have to know where he was night before last.”
“That's a pretty delicate matter, Cy.”
“Maybe he was putting in his time before the Blessed Sacrament. Isn't it round-the-clock at the basilica?”
“Or an all-night card game.”
“Anything, just so I can account for it. Skinner has hold of it and he's like a rat terrier.”
With some reluctance Father Dowling took himself over to the Senior Center to talk with Austin Rooney. A call to Edna had assured him Austin was there.
“He was playing cribbage with Maud when I last looked.”
First he would have to separate Austin from Maud, then he would have to rely on inspiration for a way to ask Austin the question. If inspiration did not come, he would forget it. A priest cannot go around like a moral policeman.
When he pushed through the door of the school, a figure burst from the gym, holding a bloody handkerchief to his face, and collapsed on the stairs, moaning.
“Desmond, what happened?”
Desmond O'Toole looked up at the priest. He took the handkerchief from his nose and gasped at the amount of blood.
“I need first aid,” he cried, and began to move up the stairs, half crawling, then stopped, but on his feet, one hand on the railing, the other pressing the bloody handkerchief to his nose.
Austin Rooney and Maud emerged from the gym.
“I did it,” Austin said, and there was pride in his voice.
“Father, he deserved it,” Maud said.
“He insulted Maud.”
“He insulted both of us.”
“How so?”
“He asked a very personal question about where I spend my nights,” Austin said.
Maud dropped her eyes, but crept closer to her hero.
This broke the ice. Father Dowling asked Maud if she would excuse them for a moment and she released Austin reluctantly. The
priest took Austin into a onetime classroom, not yet remodeled, recalling the original purpose of the building.
“I think I was in this room, in third grade.” Austin looked around as if in a time capsule, then moved down the row of desks nearest the window and stopped. “Here. I sat here.”
“Austin, you should know that Desmond has been making trouble for you. He called your landlord and was told you were not at home the night that girl was strangled and he has got it into his mind that you killed her.”
Austin's laughter, more cheerful than derisive, was welcome. “But I have an alibi.”
Nothing more. Father Dowling, who had a logical mind, did not choose to frame the question that suggested itself.
“You must stop hitting people, Austin.”
“They have a common thread, Father: Maud.”
“I'll let you get back to her. And think what you'll say if the police ask you where you were that night.”
“Maud is my alibi.”
No need to comment on that. The trouble with this answer, Father Dowling reflected on the way back to the rectory, was that no one was likely to believe it. Maud would say anything Austin asked of her. Plus the skepticism that two people of that age should be spending an illicit night together. But then he thought of Jack Gallagher's enduring machismo. When does the folly of the flesh subside?
“How will you make any money from a client like that?” Hazel wanted to know.
“I'll be court-appointed. The county pays the bills.”
“Welfare!” Hazel snorted. “You have to start advertising.”
Tuttle shook his head. “It doesn't work.”
“Of course it works.”
“I've tried it.”
“It's how you state the message. We'll call you âFox River's most experienced lawyer.'”
“That's Amos Cadbury.”
“It's only an ad. And you have to appeal to women.”
What had he done to deserve Hazel? Had he even hired her? She paid herself out of the dwindling office account, of which she had taken charge. Her efficiency was formidable.
“Officer Pianone called.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you were busy and would try to get back to him.”
“He is my contact downtown. He keeps me informed.”
“You could learn more from the janitor.”
Tuttle closed the door of his office, picked up the phone, and dialed the Detective Division. Something about the line suggested that Hazel was listening in. She had ordered a new phone system, so that all incoming calls went through her.
“Detective Division.”
“That you, Agnes?”
“Who's this?”
“Tuttle. Is Peanuts around?”
“I don't see him.”
“Tell him I called. Oh, Agnes, you working with Cy on the Agatha Rossner murder?”
“Sort of. I am checking up on Ruby to get some lead on who might have killed her.”
“Don't forget to tell Peanuts.”
She hung up but Tuttle still held the phone when Hazel's voice emerged from it.
“Who's Agnes?”
He slammed down the phone.
He found Peanuts at the Great Wall, sitting morose and alone in a booth, the shells of a fortune cookie before him. He held the little ribbon of paper on which the message was printed. When he saw Tuttle, a great smile spread over his face. Tuttle slipped in across from him.
“These things are never wrong.”
The message read,
You will find an old friend
. Tuttle was touched.
“Did you fire her yet?”
“It's not that easy.” It was why he didn't like to handle divorces. There was always one party who resisted.
“I'm not going there until she's gone.”
“Have you eaten?”
For answer, Peanuts opened the menu and began to read it greedily. Tuttle would not risk mentioning Agatha until they had eaten. He did not think of what he was doing as withholding information, since Horvath ought to know as much about the young lawyer's car as he did. He had got to the garage first and he must have seen that the car had just been washed that morning. Tuttle knew what Horvath could only guessâthat the woman had parked that car outside Jack Gallagher's condo on the fatal night. Tuttle himself had watched her pull over, cut the power and lights, and then pick her way delicately through the snow to the shoveled walk and then go like a model on a runway to the door. The car was still there when Peanuts relieved him. Peanuts had brought a bag of tacos and enchiladas, still reasonably hot.
“She's been inside since seven-thirty.”
Peanuts had continued to chew on an enchilada. You never knew whether Peanuts understood or cared what he was doing on such occasions. He would be asleep ten minutes after Tuttle left him but the hope was that anything like a car starting would wake him up. That night it hadn't. Nor had the arrival of the 911 paramedics. Only their flickering lights had disturbed his slumber and when the police arrived, Peanuts had had the sense to get out of there.
The woman's car was gone and she was found lying dead in the snow. So who had driven her car away and taken the trouble to run it
through a car wash before putting it in her garage stall? Someone who knew where she parked the car. Or would there have been something in the car that told him where to put it? But why not just leave it? And how had the man who took the car gotten there in the first place? One thing was clear: Find the man who took Agatha's car back to her garage and you would have the man who strangled her and left her lying in the snow.
And that man was surely not Jack Gallagher. When would they let the guy go and get him off center stage so the media wouldn't keep waiting for him to be brought before a judge? Even Judge Farner had said something that was interpreted as surprise that Jack Gallagher had not yet appeared before her.
“How's Cy doing on the big murder case?”
Peanuts shrugged.
“I mean the woman lawyer who was strangled.”
Peanuts moved his head from side to side.
“Agnes working with Horvath?”
Tuttle was ready for Peanuts's usual reaction when reminded of the young black woman who had been hired on the basis of affirmative action but had turned into a first-rate detective, quickly advancing beyond Peanuts, no great feat, but gaining the confidence and even praise of Captain Keegan. And Cy Horvath seemed to want her on any investigation he conducted.
“He dumped her.”
“No kidding.”
“She's on that motel thing.”
“Motel thing.”
He meant the girl who had been killed in traffic on Dirksen. She had been a housekeeper at the motel.
“Doing what?”
Peanuts grinned. “Keeping out of his way.”
Rawley looked over his book, slyly, the way he was telling George Hessian he had looked when Lieutenant Horvath asked about the Alfa Romeo.
It had occurred to George's hirsute friend that when you thought of his testimony, you had a very interesting mystery on your hands. Rawley would swear on a stack of Bibles that the young lawyer's Alfa Romeo had been parked in the development when he came on duty and that the car had gone past the guard shack sometime in the early morning. That was why the car was not there when police cars and an ambulance came roaring up to the gate and found the body of the woman lying in the snow.
“But her car was gone.”
“So she left during your watch?”
“I already told you that.”
“Did you call the police?”
The whiskered face was still and Rawley's eyes drifted away. The two men were crammed into the guard shack, with the Mr. Coffee burbling and the windows steaming up. Rawley's answer was scarcely audible.
“No. God forgive me, no. But I had no idea ⦔ He looked at George like a fugitive peering through foliage, his massive beard twitching from side to side as if he were working his mouth.
“You didn't call them.”
“You could get the answer by asking the police.”
“If they know.”
Rawley was in the mood to invest his job with mystery and danger. In retrospect, at least, he enjoyed the thought that waves of violence and mayhem lapped at the guard shack, and that his presence there was the one sure thing that prevented the encroachment of the jungle on this more or less peaceful little island. But sometimes the gate was breached, and the world crept in, with fatal results.
“What gets me, George, is someone drove her car right past this shack. If I had been looking out that window I would have seen him.”
“Don't blame yourself.”
“What are you talking about? I'm not blaming myself.”
“Who knows how many people drive in and out of here without your noticing.”
Rawley didn't like that at all, but George was a little sick of the way his friend sought to dramatize his marginal connection with the death of the young lawyer. He had stopped here on his way to visit his mother with the hope that he could talk about his writing. He got to his feet and then nearly doubled over. There was a cramp in his leg from sitting so long in a less-than-comfortable position.
“Where you going?”
“Over to see my mother.”
“Stop by when you leave.”
George did not speculate that he could drive out without Rawley noticing. On the way to his car, he walked off the cramp. Stopping to visit with Rawley had been a way of postponing the visit to his mother. Now he looked forward to it. She would listen to him talk about his writing, even if she didn't follow what was said to her.