Triple Pursuit Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part One

  1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  2

  1

  2

  3

  4

  3

  1

  2

  3

  4

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  1

  2

  Part Two

  6

  1

  2

  3

  4

  7

  1

  2

  8

  1

  2

  3

  9

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  10

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  11

  1

  2

  Part Three

  12

  1

  2

  3

  4

  13

  1

  2

  3

  14

  1

  2

  3

  15

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  16

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part Four

  17

  1

  2

  3

  4

  18

  1

  2

  3

  4

  19

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  20

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  21

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Part Five

  22

  1

  2

  3

  Epilogue

  Also by Ralph McInerny

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Connie

  Better long wed than soon hung …

  Prologue

  A young woman in a yellow raincoat, its hood pulled halfway over her head, stood near the back of the group waiting impatiently for the light to change. Standing on tiptoe, she tried to see across the street, her smile flickering as she searched for him. At last the light turned green.

  Cars began to move at varying speeds, lurched forward, slowed, darted into other lanes to get out from behind trucks that blocked the view of motorists anxious to get home. The timing of the lights did not take into account all these factors, to say nothing of wet weather conditions. The intersection of Dirksen and Lincoln at five-thirty of an autumn afternoon, with the rain falling and the street lamps on, store windows and headlights aglow, would please an observing eye. But cars and pedestrians flowing through the intersection of Dirksen and Lincoln were intent on being elsewhere, not on the aesthetic enjoyment of their surroundings. A distracted glance at most, or a look up at the large clock that stands in front of the First Fox River Bank.

  The clock related the activity at the intersection to the slow revolution of the Earth around the sun whose system forms part of the Milky Way which, like all the other scattered galaxies, is governed by a single set of laws and by its originating cause. Can any part of this vast cosmic order be random or accidental?

  The young woman in the yellow coat, her smiling face uplifted as if to catch the falling rain, moved toward the opposite curb, searching for someone who would be waiting there. She was the last to cross before the light changed. Gears shifted, impatient horns were heard, cars and trucks moved north and south, gathering momentum. On the sidewalk, the young woman was jostled by impatient people who eddied around her, muttering. And then she saw him.

  Her smile broadened and she began to run. Now he saw her and he in turn ran toward her. For a moment they were blocked from one another’s view, but then once more each saw the other, and they seemed to swim through the sea of people into one another’s arms. Suddenly a cry went up. The young woman staggered toward the street, arms wheeling as she tried to regain her balance, and then as if by the force of a push fell into the path of the onrushing traffic. Horns sounded, brakes squealed, but tires found no immediate traction. Cries of piercing anguish went up from the horrified observers who milled helplessly about as vehicle after vehicle thumped over the fallen body on the wet pavement.

  Because a death was involved, the event was singled out and subjected to scrutiny. The police arrived and those who had been in the vicinity were questioned. Did the young woman fall? Did she jump? Was she pushed? Eyewitnesses agreed and disagreed. The investigation fell to the Detective Division of the Fox River Police Department, Captain Phil Keegan presiding. Reasons, causes, culprits must be found. The detective’s universe is as logical as the larger one. Events have causes. Sometimes the causes are actually found.

  Keegan drove his underlings, sparred with the press, grumbled about the case with his old friend Father Dowling, and doubted they would ever find the one responsible for the death of the girl in the yellow coat who had ended like a crushed fallen leaf on the wet pavement of Dirksen Boulevard. Keegan took the problem home, finished his weak whiskey-and-water nightcap, and got into bed on his side although his wife was dead and either side might now be his. He pulled the covers over him and had the eerie sense that Marge was there, that if he stretched out his leg their feet would touch … . The memory of his wife was evoked by death, by sad inexplicable happenings, by the sense that all our hopes and plans sooner or later will be crushed in the traffic of time.

  Part One

  1

  1

  The reaction to the young woman’s death was pronounced at the St. Hilary Senior Center. Apparently being jostled about in a crowd was one of the recurrent fears of the elderly. They were aware of talk about the burden old people represented and of the increasingly positive chatter about euthanasia.

  “What have you learned?” Father Dowling asked his old friend Phil Keegan, who had stopped by the rectory just in time for the evening meal.

  “Well, her name is Linda Hopkins.” Phil took the cigar from his mouth and scowled at it. “Roger, the coroner’s report is no help in determining whether or not it was an accident.”

  “Aren’t there witnesses?”

  There were witnesses, but their testimony conflicted and not all of them would be willing to swear to what they thought they had seen. Perhaps no investigation would have even begun if the local paper had not seized upon the event. Soon accounts of the young woman began to appear, interviews with the women with whom she had worked on the cleaning crew at the Hacienda Motel.

  She was from a small town in Wisconsin, a hundred miles north on the Fox River, and had come to Chicago to escape the limitations of life in her native Appleseed. She had done this against the express wishes of her parents, and her father took his daughter’s death as confirmation of the wisdom of his prohibition. It was when Anton Hopkins refused to accept responsibility for his daughter’s burial that Cy Horvath asked Father Dowling to accompany him on a visit to the parents.

  Appleseed, Wisconsin, might have been Fox River, Illinois. Apparently Linda had been somewhat overwhelmed by Chicago itself, and migrated west to Fox River where, in a replica of the town she had fled, she took a job she never would have taken at home. On the driv
e north through falling snow, Cy told Father Dowling what he had learned from interviews with members of the cleaning crew at the Hacienda Motel.

  “I think they wondered what she was doing on that crew. Not that they didn’t like her. From Ruby Otter, the head of the crew, on down, they have nothing but good to say of her.”

  “Do they think it was an accident?”

  “They think it was murder.”

  “Do they have a murderer?”

  “A guy she was going with.”

  “Have you talked with him?”

  “We can’t find him.”

  “Maybe they’re right.”

  The body of Linda Hopkins was taken to the local morgue while Father Dowling and Cy went immediately to the Hopkins home, a frame house whose driveway was cleared of snow. A face appeared at a window when Cy drove in and, when Father Dowling got out of the car, a man emerged from the house and stood looking at the priest who came toward him.

  “I’m Father Dowling from Fox River, Illinois.” He extended his hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, Anton Hopkins took it. His eyes now went to Cy. “This is Lieutenant Horvath.”

  He asked them in, still reluctant, and they found Mildred Hopkins seated at the kitchen table, eyes red from weeping and wide with confused grief. “Did you bring her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God.”

  It seemed the resolution of an argument the bereaved parents had been having, but Anton too seemed relieved that the decision had been taken from his hands.

  “She should have stayed home,” he said, but there was little conviction in his voice. Perhaps he thought he had lost Linda the day she boarded the bus for Chicago, defying his wishes, going off on what he had been certain would be a fateful trip. Whatever consolation he had derived from knowing that the worst had happened deserted him now. He sank into a chair across from his wife. She in turn rose to welcome these unexpected visitors. Soon they were all seated at the table, coffee before them, and Cy was telling them what he knew of the death of Linda. Father Dowling was grateful Cy neglected to say that witnesses of their daughter’s death thought she had been pushed into traffic on Dirksen Boulevard. However it had happened, their daughter was gone and this official notification had the finality they must have longed for. Rumor had become fact and their grief was unalloyed. Father Dowling noticed the parish calendar on the wall and suggested that they call their pastor.

  Mildred looked at Anton who said nothing. She nodded to Father Dowling.

  Father Kommers was in his seventies and his gruff unsentimental familiarity calmed the desolate parents. He called the funeral director who had provided the parish calendar and arrangements were made to transfer the body from the morgue. While Cy talked to Mildred about her daughter, Anton withdrew to the living room with the two priests.

  Half an hour later, Father Dowling walked down the driveway with Kommers.

  “You in the Chicago archdiocese?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So she didn’t end up in Chicago after all.”

  “We’re to the west of the city.”

  “Young people don’t stay here now if they can get away.”

  “What kind of girl was Linda?”

  Father Kommers thought about it. “A good girl, as far as I know. It’s a good family.” He rubbed his chin with the heel of his hand. “They lost a son in Desert Storm.”

  “Any other children?”

  He shook his head. “Was she in your parish?”

  “Not registered. Apparently she went to Mass there.” He was relying on Marie Murkin’s word for this.

  “Good. Good. Did you tell the parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Had that been their fear, that she would go off to the big city and shuffle off all they had tried to give her? Cy was pensive on the drive back, but then he always seemed pensive. The visit to the Hopkinses might have induced thoughts of the futility of life, the sadness of parenthood. At least Anton Hopkins had stopped thinking that his daughter had followed the path of the Prodigal Son. Up to a point. Linda would never walk up that shoveled driveway again.

  “Is there any hope of finding the boyfriend, Cy?”

  “We’ll find him.”

  2

  Colleen Gallagher’s Aunt Ruth had taught her a little prayer when Colleen was a girl, long before there was any reason to think that she would still be single at the unsettling age of thirty-two. She had added the prayer to her little repertoire of devotions, orisons murmured hurriedly as she dressed in the morning, but it scarcely engaged her mind until she reached thirty. It was just a little jingle like “Now I lay me down to sleep,” to the tune of which she drifted off into maidenly dreams. Eventually something like desperation crept into her saying of Aunt Ruth’s prayer. Good Saint Anne, get me a man as quick as you can. On Sundays, after communion, she knelt with hands clenched in prayer, eyes tightly closed, and sent up her petition to Saint Anne. She wasn’t quite clear who Saint Anne was, but Aunt Ruth had told her the prayer was surefire.

  What a joke the petition had seemed all those years ago, with the future stretching ahead in all its green promise. Colleen had no one she cared to ask to the senior dance when she graduated from Holy Angels Academy, but neither did Jane, who was the most beautiful girl in the class. It was a source of amazement to Colleen that she and Jane were such good friends. The reason, it turned out, was her brother Tim, who was a student at Georgetown and not at hand to be asked to take Jane to the dance. But Jane’s fastidious patience had paid off; she too went off to Georgetown and it was there, rather than in Fox River, they fell in love. Colleen was a bridesmaid at the wedding and at the reception, her full lips moist with champagne, Jane said, “I owe it all to Saint Anne.”

  Colleen had told her about Aunt Ruth’s advice and Jane had wanted to know the prayer.

  “I said it every day until it worked,” Jane confided, all radiant on her wedding day.

  After that, Colleen repeated the prayer so often she would sometimes find herself murmuring it without realizing what she was doing. But her petition went unanswered and she felt almost betrayed by her patron. It seemed unfair that she had told Jane the prayer with much girlish giggling and now Jane was a wife and mother while Colleen rose each day to hurry downtown to the offices of Mallard and Bill where she worked hard as a paralegal as if to drive away the thought that she was doomed to do this into spinsterly old age. And then Mario Liberati joined the firm.

  He seemed to be all those wonderful Italian singers rolled into one, with dark wavy hair, olive complexion, romantic eyes, and a smile which lit up the office.

  “You’re a marvel, do you know that?” he said to Colleen about her legal research.

  “It’s my job.”

  “You make mine easier to do.”

  Mario’s forte was the courtroom. In Britain the barrister is distinguished from the lawyer, and Mario would have been a barrister there; increasingly he was the preferred man to argue a case in court. Judges were as susceptible to his persuasion as were juries and he won cases Mallard and Bill had been prepared to lose.

  “I think you’re the one who’s considered the marvel here.”

  Their first lunches together were in his office, food sent for so they could continue working, but after one signal triumph he had asked her to dinner. They would go directly from the office, but she noticed he too had come to work dressed for the evening ahead. Colleen had taken a lot of kidding about her ankle-length skirt and spangly blouse but she laughed it off and all day long murmured her prayer to Saint Anne like a mantra. When they left together, Aggie, a spanking new lawyer, watched them go with envious desolation. But the dinner was a battle, not the war, and Colleen knew that the bright and breathtakingly endowed Aggie was her most dangerous rival with Mario.

  Colleen had been prepared to lie about her age, assuming Mario was younger than she. She found it difficult to tell how old he was, since he had reached a peak of manl
y perfection that would no doubt endure until retirement. He could have been any age. It turned out he was older than she, thirty-five. This surprised her because at the time he had been with Mallard and Bill for only three years.

  “I was a late bloomer,” he said, displaying his perfect teeth. After college, he had spent several years in a broker’s office before entering law school at Northwestern.

  “You would have been wasted in anything but the law.”

  “Some people expected me to go into criminal law.”

  “Oh, no.” It was much more fitting that he should represent the victims of others’ negligence or malice and bring them to justice.

  After that, at the office Aggie brought out the heavy artillery. Her skirts became shorter; she had a way of crossing her legs that seemed designed to expose her thighs, a trick doubtless learned from watching women on television. She was shamelessly predatory. Aggie had thick brown hair, a perfect nose, and lips that in repose might have been those of Michelangelo’s David. Colleen too stepped up her campaign. Thus it was that she stopped by St. Hilary’s rectory and asked to see a priest.

  “You mean Father Dowling,” the housekeeper said. “There’s only one.

  “My parents were in this parish. Is Father Dowling a Franciscan?”

  Mrs. Murkin scowled. “Certainly not. What is your business?”

  “I want to have a Mass said for a special intention.”

  This softened Mrs. Murkin and she forgave the allusion to Franciscans. Friars had the parish before Father Dowling came, and for Marie Murkin the change had been one from cheery incompetence to the serenity of a well-run parish. Of course Marie took some credit for that, her genius as a rectory housekeeper having been unleashed by the going of the Franciscans.