The Prudence of the Flesh Page 16

  She was in uniform, which maybe was a good thing. The combination of her race and the uniform and all the appurtenances of a guardian of the law gave an unmistakable advantage. She pressed the bell and then stood back from the door, the better to be visible from within. A minute went by, then two. She rang again. And again. Then she went around back, and there was Marvin sunning himself, with a beer within reach. Agnes got between him and the sun. His eyes opened, and then he tried to sit up, not so successfully.

  “Marvin?”

  “Who are you? What is this?” The uniform was having its effect.

  “Just a few questions.”

  He was in a seated position now, his hands dangling between his knobby knees. He was in swimming trunks, and his upper body glistened with oil. He put a towel around his shoulders. “Questions about what?”

  “I’ve already spoken with your mother.”

  He groaned and lifted his hands as if in prayer. “She said she was going to drop all that.”

  “Don’t you want to know who your father was?”

  “I know who he was. He was a sailor. I can show you pictures.”

  “Do you know Thomas Barrett?”

  “Barrett. His name isn’t Thomas.”

  “This is his son.”

  Marvin might have been saluting, the way he shaded his eyes. “I heard he has a son.”

  “At least one.”

  “Oh, come on. Not even my mother believes that story. She was talked into it by Mrs. Daley.” He thought. “The Barrett kid did call me.”

  “Did you get together?”

  “What for? It’s all over.”

  “Have you ever heard of DNA tests?”

  He shrugged.

  “A DNA test has been run,” she went on. “The results were positive. Do you know what that means?”

  “Sure. Don’t rely on tests. How could they run one, anyway? They’d have to have something from me.”

  “They did. A toothbrush.”

  He laughed. “How would anyone get hold of my toothbrush?”

  “It’s not missing?”

  “No, it is not missing.” He smiled. “I brushed my teeth an hour ago.”

  “Show me.”

  “Take a look.”

  “I don’t mean your teeth. Show me your toothbrush.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “I’m serious.”

  He got to his feet, not very agilely, and started for the house. She followed him inside. He seemed almost naked in the house. Apparently he felt the same way; the first thing he did when he went into the bathroom was put on a robe. Then he handed her a toothbrush.

  “This is yours.”

  “Of course it’s mine.”

  “You just have the one?”

  “Why would I need more than one toothbrush?”

  “You’re not missing a toothbrush?”

  Agnes felt that she had found what she had come for. If someone was playing a trick, it wasn’t Marvin.

  “Your mother said you’re taking courses online.”

  “In computing science. If I didn’t already know what they’re teaching me, I couldn’t take the course. Would you like a beer?”

  “Sure, but I won’t take one. I’m on duty.”

  “Tracking down toothbrushes?”

  “Did you floss? There’s a law, you know.”

  It took him a while to realize she was kidding. She thanked him and said her colleagues would want him to repeat what he had told her.

  “It’s important?”

  “We think so.”

  In the car, she got hold of Cy and told him what she had learned.

  “It looks like we’ve been had,” he said.

  “What next?”

  “The Barrett boy. Thomas. We’ll go together.”

  12

  Perhaps because she had described it so vividly to several people, the image of Fred Pasquali taking Ned Bunting’s hand, turning away, and then wheeling the tall man through the air and depositing him unceremoniously on her lawn was etched into Gloria Daley’s memory. After the horror of the discovery of Ned’s body in the shallow waters along the shore of the Fox River, her emotions had been in such a turmoil that she had scarcely time to realize that Ned Bunting, whose commanding presence in the center aisle of St. Bavo’s had fascinated her, was no more. Dead. She shivered at the realization now.

  On the way back to town, Fred had suggested that they must not see one another for a few days and should talk to no one, and she had agreed. In the time since, strange thoughts had occurred to her.

  Why had he driven to the parking area known for years as lovers’ lane? It was only the third time that they had been alone together. She remembered looking up through the window in the roof of his car and seeing the weeping willows swaying. His arm had crept around her shoulders. Was it she who had suggested that they walk by the river? She had spent so much time going over Maddie’s memories of long ago, helping her friend recall what she had driven from her mind, and now she found that her own short-term memory was unreliable. Then the dark thoughts came.

  Fred had known that Ned Bunting’s body was in the river. He had taken her there deliberately so that she could discover the corpse. She found herself imagining him dealing more decisively with Ned than he had in front of her house, killing him, and then taking the body to the river, perhaps only an hour or so before he had driven to the parking area with her. If something like that had happened, she was his alibi. Of course he had tried to keep her name out of the investigation—that would have been part of the plan—but he must have realized that eventually it would become known that she had been with him, and then her account would effectively exonerate him.

  The trouble with such thoughts was that they were difficult to entertain when she and Fred were once more together. Fred was free on bail and had asked to be taken immediately to her. All her dark thoughts vanished when she opened the door to him. So short a time ago, she had had two competing admirers. Now she had only Fred. She opened her arms to him, and he trembled as she drew him close.

  “I have never had such an experience in my life,” he whispered.

  “There, there.”

  She offered him coffee, but he wanted something more bracing.

  “It’s early for grappa.”

  “Grappa is what I need.”

  So they sat on her couch, sipping the potent liquid, while he told her what he had been through downtown.

  “Tuttle? Why did you call him?”

  “You had mentioned him. The name just occurred to me. How many lawyers do I know?”

  “He hasn’t much of a reputation.”

  “I can believe it.”

  “You can always change lawyers.”

  “Even Tuttle should be able to handle this. The charge is ridiculous.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Have you any idea who could have done such a thing?”

  “I?”

  “You knew him. Who were his friends? Who were his enemies?”

  There was no point in mentioning Monsignor Sledz of St. Bavo’s. “He hated Quirk. He hated Gregory Barrett.”

  “But did they hate him?”

  “I’m afraid that they thought him a figure of fun.”

  “Oh, let the police figure out who did it.”

  He had finished his grappa and wanted more. It was now twilight, and she was not sure she wanted a drunk Fred Pasquali in her living room. It seemed important to change the subject, so she told him about the odd conjunction of events: Maddie had decided not to pursue her accusations; she had forbidden Ned Bunting to write about her.

  “How did he react to that?” Fred asked.

  “He didn’t think it much mattered anymore what she wanted or didn’t want. Now, Tuttle tells me that DNA tests have actually been run.”

  “That should settle it.”

  “But how?”

  “Either way, the police should arrest him.”

  “Gregory Barrett?”
>
  “Who had better motive?”

  Gloria would have preferred a vengeful lover rather than the object of Maddie’s accusations. Fred’s arm had crept around her shoulders. She was about to shrug it off when the promised consolations changed her mind. She turned to him, looking directly into his eyes, then lifted her face to his.

  13

  Tetzel of the Tribune spent much of his day in the courthouse, in the pressroom for the most part. Shreds and scraps of information came to him from the courts, from police headquarters, and in the obiter dicta of politicians, grist enough for him to grind from his computer those authoritative pieces on the affairs of Fox River, Illinois, that had earned him the respect of a large number of readers, if not of his editors and fellow journalists. The latter, like the subjects of his world-weary and omniscient pieces, knew that what Tetzel wrote concerned an imaginary world, a world largely of his own creation. Fiction, of a sort. There were even those who knew of the efforts at a novel stored away on his hard disk, little bursts that never exceeded a thousand words. Real fiction had proved more demanding than journalism.

  Of course, having retained a modicum of self-knowledge, he was his own severest critic; no need to feed the jealousy and envy of his fellows in the craft. He himself knew how flimsy was the basis of his reputation. There were even days when he resolved to engage in the kind of serious reporting he had dreamt of doing in his youth. Such a desire arose with new strength as he picked up bits and pieces of the local version of the clerical scandals that were, in the tired phrase, rocking the bark of Peter, or chipping the rock of Peter, or . . . It was when he was eavesdropping on the ineffable Tuttle that he first heard of the DNA tests allegedly being run to settle the charge that had been brought against Gregory Barrett.

  No need to say that the arrival of Barrett on the local scene, his much touted program on NPR, and the pieces he was occasionally prevailed upon to contribute to the Tribune’s Sunday book page filled Tetzel with mixed emotions. His own reputation had made him skeptical of the reputations of others. Feet of clay must inhabit the highly shined loafers that carried Barrett like a winged Mercury through the Chicago celebrity stratosphere.

  The charges against him were rumors of an elusive kind, difficult to fashion into the sort of all-knowing report that was Tetzel’s trademark. So he had bided his time. That Tuttle seemed to be privy to things hidden from him took the sheen from the rumors, and when the impossibly inept Ned Bunting had been admitted to the sacrosanct pages of the Tribune with a piece on Roger Dowling that would never have made it into the high school offerings that appeared once a week, Tetzel was dismayed. Quirk, of course, disclaimed all responsibility, but Bunting was said to be the confidant of the woman who had brought charges against Gregory Barrett—who, to Tetzel’s surprise, turned out to be a laicized priest of the Chicago archdiocese and who, upon his defection, had descended into the lowlands of southern Illinois, where he had improbably attained the fame that had eventually brought him back to the area. As an instance of clerical scandal, this had the marks of the anomalous.

  Barfield, the lawyer for the archdiocese in these matters, would tell Tetzel nothing that could provide a basis for even one of his imaginative pieces. The woman had allegedly refused compensation from the archdiocese, but this Barfield refused to confirm. If so, what was she up to? Enter the dreadful Ned Bunting. It began to look like something Tetzel would not go near with a twelve-foot pole. Still, he was child enough of his time to be stirred by the thought that an objective test, a scientific test, could decide the matter, and so he had gone to work.

  The lovely Dr. Pippen in the coroner’s office had proved susceptible to his flattery and curiosity. “Of course, it wasn’t the sort of thing I myself could do,” she had said.

  “That difficult?”

  “That different from what we do here.”

  “Ah.” Tetzel did not want to think of the things done there in the morgue. How had such a dream of a woman gotten involved in so ghoulish an enterprise?

  She was a medical doctor married to a medical doctor. “Obgyn,” she explained.

  He let it go. It was part of his professional manner never to reveal his ignorance. “So who ran the tests?”

  A laboratory right here in Fox River, as it happened. Pippen added that she probably shouldn’t be telling him all this. He assured her it was only deep background, and he left her with the name of Fenwick Labs. A sense of destiny came upon him when he remembered that Larson, a serious drinker and sometime companion in alcoholic revels, worked at Fenwick.

  Tetzel found him bellied up to the bar of the Tempest and elbowed his way in beside him. “Let’s sit in the corner so I can buy you a drink.”

  “I’ve got a drink.”

  “I meant the next one.”

  Like Pippen, Larson was a person of great professional propriety. Pippen had only the pardonable weakness of a woman, but Larson’s Achilles’ heel was a debility Tetzel shared. The juice of the grape—or more literally, single malt scotch—made Larson vulnerable to Tetzel’s subtle inquisitiveness, but patience was the watchword. An hour and a half had passed before Tetzel asked, as if out of the blue, what Larson thought of DNA testing.

  “Personally, it sounds to me on a par with consulting the entrails of birds,” the reporter said.

  “Not at all, my dear fellow. Not at all.”

  “But in these circus trials of recent years, so-called experts on the matter have disagreed profoundly.”

  “There is no possibility of disagreement if the test is done correctly.”

  “Have you yourself ever done such a test?”

  “Strange that you should ask.”

  The test Larson described was without doubt the one that interested Tetzel: a Band-Aid on the one side, a toothbrush on the other. “More than sufficient.”

  “For what?”

  “A match.”

  “Positive?”

  “Beyond dispute.”

  “Do you have time for another?”

  Does the bear sleep in the woods?

  It was early in the morning when Tetzel sat down at his computer in the pressroom of the courthouse. At that hour, he had the place to himself. Was this how Woodward and Bernstein had felt when they recounted the confidences of Deep Throat? They were probably sober when they wrote—all kinds of types got into journalism nowadays—but Tetzel had been careful to nurse his drinks as he sat with Larson, keeping refills for the intrepid scientist coming. When he rose to go, Larson said he might have a nightcap. It was certain he had a snoot full. Tetzel, on the other hand, found his mind sharpened by the relatively small amount he had drunk. His fingers were a little rubbery on the keyboard, causing any number of mishits and typos, but with spell check he could clean them up in a trice. And so he began, conscious that what he was writing was many levels above his ordinary output.

  He finished a draft of the story; he honed and refined it. He printed it out and with one eye closed read it critically. He sat back. Like God in Genesis, he saw that what he had made was good. He sent it as an e-mail attachment to Quirk and went home to a bed that had a tendency to spin. He had suggested a headline, always risky with Quirk: GREGORY BARRETT PROVED FATHER OF ACCUSER’S SON.

  14

  Gregory Barrett reread Huckleberry Finn at least once a year, and he was rereading it now. As the raft on which Huck and Jim were floating to freedom neared Cairo, Illinois, Barrett held the book open against his chest and found himself wishing that he had stayed in Cairo. His apparent good fortune in being invited to move to the Chicago area had been no more than apparent. His program was now heard from coast to coast on the publicly supported network, so the promise that had brought him back home had proved true, but his return now threatened to be his undoing.

  A woman he could not remember accused him of sexual misbehavior while he was still a priest. The woman had heard him on the air and, she had told Barfield, the archdiocesan lawyer in these matters, suddenly drew forth from the darkness of me
mory horrible events she had suppressed. She had dismissed with disdain the suggestion that she receive compensation and let bygones be bygones. The accusation, never made quite public, ticked like a time bomb that must surely eventually explode. Nancy knew him better than any other human being, and he could see the effect the accusation had had on her. So he had gone to see his old classmate Roger Dowling.

  What a basis for an otherwise pleasant reunion! He had always liked Roger, and liked him more when he saw how he had emerged from his own difficulties. St. Hilary’s seemed to Barrett the kind of parish they had dreamed of having during their seminary years. Roger had been wonderfully reassuring. If only the matter could be kept on such a humane basis. But Barfield had insisted that he see Amos Cadbury, an unpleasant duty made more tolerable by Roger Dowling’s involvement. Barrett could tell, though, that neither the venerable dean of the Fox River bar nor his canon-lawyer classmate could see any easy way out of the matter.

  Then the charge, Barfield informed him, had been made more serious still: He was accused of fathering the woman’s child. Whether wisely or not, Barrett had enlisted the support of the seedy Tuttle, in the shameful hope that he could find some compensating dirt about his accuser. What Tuttle had turned up was records that increased Barrett’s difficulty. To his horror, he found that now he could remember the woman and those long-ago events. What he had done then had been the right thing to do, and it seemed Kafkaesque that his sympathetic pastoral help was now turned against him.

  Roger Dowling had surprised him by suggesting that this was actually a turn for the better: A charge of parentage was one that could be put to the test. In the event, the test seemed unnecessary. The woman, surprisingly, withdrew her charge. Prayers were indeed sometimes answered. He could feel the relief in Nancy when he held her in his arms.