The Prudence of the Flesh Page 3

  There was a scary moment when Marie feared that Barbara would say something about her curiosity, but that, too, passed. Marie resolved to drive the thought from her mind. What on earth difference did it make to her where Ned Bunting went to church and with whom? Then she saw the two of them in the supermarket and managed to keep several aisles between them and herself. Even so, she could hear the woman’s trilling laughter. Why do some women make such a fuss over a man?

  5

  Tuttle of Tuttle & Tuttle did not recognize the name of the man who came to him, but then he had no time to listen to the radio. When does anyone listen to the radio except in his car? As often as not, the car Tuttle was in was driven by Peanuts Pianone, who was on the lowest rung in the Fox River police but nonetheless a valuable source of information for the battling attorney. If Tuttle waited for legal business to come to him, he would have given up long ago. So it was a good day when Hazel informed him that a potential client would be in the office at ten the following morning.

  “That’s a little early, isn’t it?”

  “Not for the birds. Be here.”

  How entrenched Hazel had become since he had first brought her aboard as a temporary. Before her week was out, she had established herself in the outer office. Already you would have thought that he worked for her. Peanuts refused to visit the office now, even when tempted with a promise of a feast of sent-for Chinese food. Now they only enjoyed Chinese food together at the Great Wall restaurant or as now, in Peanuts’s unmarked car. Hazel had reached Tuttle through his cell phone and barked instructions about the next morning’s appointment.

  “That her?” Peanuts asked, delicately holding the chopsticks with which he was transferring sweet and sour chicken to his mouth, meeting it halfway.

  Tuttle nodded. There was no way he could fool Peanuts when it came to Hazel, but it had been a long time since he had even permitted himself to wonder what it would be like without Hazel in the office. Her manner did not intimidate clients as it did Tuttle, one of those little mysteries of life. Another was why she stayed with him. She could have browbeaten a whole firm and made a real name for herself.

  Peanuts already had the name—”Bitch”—but then Peanuts was overtly the male chauvinist that Tuttle was only in petto. Odd that the dumbo Peanuts understood the phrase. Of course, he was Italian. Hazel wasn’t even his least favorite. His real grievance was Agnes Lamb, the black cop who had easily soared beyond him. When racism could be added to misogyny, you had Peanuts.

  The man gave his name as William Arancia. Tuttle knew from the start he was lying. What else are lawyers for?

  “I don’t really approve of what I am asking you to do. I want a person looked into.”

  “Purpose?”

  “Can we just call it curiosity?”

  “Okay. What’s her name?”

  “Madeline Murphy.”

  “Wife? Fiancée? Just friend?”

  “None of the above. She may represent a threat to me and my family.”

  “Ah. Blackmail?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “I could call it anything. What do you call it?”

  “Blackmail.”

  Tuttle took down what particulars William Arancia could give him on Madeline Murphy. Finally he stopped him. “What do you need me for?”

  “That’s what I hope you will find out.”

  Tuttle already knew his first job would be to find out the real name of his client. The man had no hesitation in paying Tuttle a hundred dollars to seal their relation as lawyer and client. In cash. Good. Why confuse the IRS with recorded payments?

  When Tuttle had shown his new client out, warning him that the elevator was temporarily out of commission, he turned to a beaming Hazel. “Tuttle, that man has class,” she said.

  “I wonder what his name is.”

  “I told you his name. Don’t you remember anything?”

  Standing over Hazel’s desk, he called Peanuts and asked what arancia meant.

  “Orange. But your secretary’s a limone.”

  Having hung up, Tuttle asked Hazel, “Would you have believed him if he said he was William of Orange?”

  “Is that his real name?”

  “You don’t know the name of the man all Irishmen hate?”

  “Tuttle?”

  Never apologize, never explain. Arguments with Hazel were pointless. Either she won, and was obnoxious for days, or lost, and was worse.

  Later, in his own car, Tuttle turned on the radio and heard the unmistakable voice of his new client. He pulled over and listened to a pretty impenetrable talk on Ronald Firbank. “The title of one of his novels poses the same problem nowadays as the title of one of Conrad’s. Prancing Nigger, like The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ . . .” Tuttle was glad Peanuts wasn’t with him. Not until the end of the program did the speaker identify himself. “This is Gregory Barrett, with End Notes. I’ll be back again next week. Meanwhile . . .”

  Tuttle turned off the radio, then turned it on again to see what station it was. Gregory Barrett. The name meant nothing to him—but it would. He wasn’t going to begin looking into the life of Madeline Murphy until he knew exactly who he was working for. Whom? The program had the odd effect of making Tuttle wonder if he knew the English language.

  6

  Gloria Daley agreed with Ned Bunting about Monsignor Sledz, although on a different basis. She said that the pastor at St. Bavo’s had laughed away her questions about obtaining an annulment.

  “Marriage is permanent, my dear lady. That’s the idea, and it should drive out every other idea.”

  Gloria had tried to appeal to what she read in the papers—annulments were had almost for the asking, in the eyes of critics—but she never even got to ask.

  “An annulment,” Ned repeated. You only needed an annulment if you were married, and he had not thought of Gloria as married. How had he thought of her? A youngish aunt, full of fun, one who didn’t question his claim to be a writer.

  “Fortunately, or I should say unfortunately, it all resolved itself.”

  “How so?”

  “He died. In a far-off land.” Her eyes drifted away as her voice lowered. Then she turned and smiled, and he knew the theatrics were a put-on. “Iraq.”

  “Ah.”

  “You didn’t think I’d lead you on if I were a married woman, did you?”

  Was she leading him on? Ned had little experience of women, and he doubted that experience would have helped with Gloria. How old was she, anyway? The way she poked him in the ribs when she spoke to him might have been just a joke, like the theatrics, but now she was running her hand along his arm, asking him to tell her what Monsignor Sledz had done to him.

  “I told you I’m a writer.”

  “But you haven’t let me see any of your dirty books.”

  It had been a mistake to let her believe that he wrote off-color stuff. That made it more difficult to speak of the treatment his proposal to write a column for the parish bulletin had received. When he did, Gloria’s reaction was a tonic.

  “Why should you demean yourself writing for that silly bulletin?”

  “It was a stupid idea, but I had just finished a story, and the thought came, and I talked to the ineffable Sledz, and here we are.”

  She had been following what he said with bright eyes, and when he said “ineffable” he felt her hand tighten on his arm. He had learned that unusual words triggered deep emotions in her. Now she lifted her face, eyes half closed, and it was the most natural thing in the world to kiss her. He put his lips to hers briefly, then withdrew.

  “The kiss of peace,” she murmured.

  “Don’t be sacrilegious.”

  “I meant that you could get away with that in church.” She lifted her face again. The second kiss would have been inappropriate in church, except perhaps at the conclusion of a wedding. The thought made him wary. Gloria’s talk of an annulment, the lost husband, her undeniable warmth—it all suggested that she was shopping for
a replacement.

  “I’ll never marry again,” she sighed, as if reading his fears.

  “I never have.”

  “Wise man. But then you have your writing.”

  “What I need at the moment is a project, an idea, something big. Henry Drummond?” Drummond, a Former Archdiocesan employee, loudly accused the Cardinal and his minions of injustice.

  If she registered this remark, she gave no indication of it. She wanted to talk about priests and the way some of them were making the news lately. Gloria said she found them less intimidating now that all that dirty linen was being aired in public. For all they knew, Monsignor Sledz . . . The thought ended in hysterical laughter. The laughter subsided, and Gloria sat back and looked at Ned with what he thought of as her significant look.

  “Why not that?” she asked.

  “Why not what?”

  “For your new project. A book on this scandal. It just goes on and on. Don’t forget that even Cardinal Bernardin had to answer a silly accusation. What do you think?”

  There are moments, and this was one of them, when out of booming buzzing confusion an idea emerges that has the mark of destiny on it. Of course. This was his subject. After years at St. Bavo’s, he knew a thing or two about the clergy. Nothing scandalous there, certainly, but he thought he understood the clerical mind.

  “What there is of it,” Gloria said, wrinkling her nose.

  “The question is how to approach the subject.”

  They went to work on it, the two of them. It was the first brainstorming Ned Bunting had ever engaged in.

  Suddenly Gloria was on her feet. She walked back and forth in her living room, striking her forehead and groaning. “My God, I’ve got it.” She rejoined him on the couch, taking his hands in hers. “I have a friend . . .” She stopped and inhaled. “A friend who is a victim. Isn’t that where to begin, with the victims?”

  Thus it was that Ned Bunting first heard of Madeline Murphy. Later he came to think that Gloria’s sudden inspiration for his new writing project was not as spontaneous as it appeared, owing much to her theatrical ability for seeming so.

  7

  “What bothers me,” Amos Cadbury said to Roger Dowling, “is the way these scandals affect priests like yourself.”

  “Little if at all, Amos.”

  “But surely the way the priesthood is made fun of nowadays is something new.”

  “Maybe overdue, in a way. Oh, these scandals pain me, Amos, but there is also the realization that there but for the grace of God go I. As for being made fun of, there are a lot worse things.”

  “I am beginning to think that Gregory Barrett should have tried to conceal his case in the bundle of them Barfield is negotiating.”

  “Oh?”

  “The woman has been trying to see Barrett’s wife.”

  In this Barrett was unlike the other objects of such accusations: He had left the priesthood, married, and established a career. Perhaps as a former priest he thought he was less vulnerable, but having a family was its own kind of vulnerability. The celibate can suffer alone, whether deservedly or not, but Gregory Barrett had a wife and son and could not ignore the effect on them of the charge brought against him.

  “It may sound cynical to say so, Father, but I think the media prefer to bay after a man who still wears a Roman collar and is involved in priestly work. Someone like Barrett requires too much explanation.”

  They were in Amos’s office awaiting the arrival of Gregory Barrett to discuss the charges against him. When he was announced and came into the office, Roger Dowling thought his classmate looked a good deal less self-possessed than he had a week before at the St. Hilary rectory. He almost collapsed into the chair Amos pointed him to.

  “She telephoned again last night. Mr. Cadbury, I think I should bring a suit against her.”

  “I hope it never comes to that. Actually, these telephone calls may prove helpful.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what they’re doing to us. Can you imagine what it’s like for me to discuss such an accusation with my wife? Of course she believes me, but what a subject to test her trust on. It’s our son she’s afraid for.”

  Roger said, “Does he know your past?”

  “That is the problem. We decided long ago that we would make a complete break. The past would be as if it had never been. That worked in Cairo. It was coming back to the Chicago area that brought this on.”

  “In what way?”

  “That woman must have listened to my program.”

  “Does she have a lawyer?” Amos asked.

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “If she calls again, urge her to acquire a lawyer, someone I can discuss this with.”

  A cadre of lawyers dedicated to exposing clerical scandals moved across the country from diocese to diocese, coordinating their efforts and bringing media pressure on bishops as well as on the accused. Huge sums of money had been paid out, and there seemed no end to the cases that were turned up. One or two had been truly shocking, exhibiting a pattern of perversity extending over many years. It was a tragic thing to see a man in his eighties confronting accusations from decades ago, but in most cases indictment and punishment were long overdue.

  What Roger could not fathom was how a man involved in such behavior could go on functioning as a priest. How could such a one give homilies, hear confessions, say Mass? The thought of a man in a state of mortal sin saying Mass brought back that terrible image from the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, a vision she had of devils swarming around the altar when Mass was being said by a sinful priest. Not that the acts of the priesthood depended on the personal virtue of the priest. Ex opere operato, in the phrase; the priest acted in the name of the Church, not in his own. It was actually a heresy to hold that only a good priest could do the deeds of the priest. For all that, the function called for more than ordinary virtue, for an exemplary life. The faithful had a right to expect priests to be better than themselves, or at least to be trying to be better. We are symbols of more than ourselves, he thought. That is why our misdeeds have such a devastating impact.

  No need to dwell on the prurience of the media in reporting the stories. No need to point out that other professions were not targets of the effort to discredit and extort huge compensatory payments. The priesthood was a target unlike any other. That members of it had behaved like libertines was in its way a unique story. Still, Gregory Barrett’s case was atypical, and Amos seemed to think it could be handled in a delicate way.

  In the elevator, going down, Greg said, “I wonder if he is the type of lawyer one needs in a situation like that.”

  “Amos is the best.”

  “Has he ever been in a gutter fight? Wouldn’t it make sense to find out what we can about this girl?”

  “The accuser?”

  “Yes. What kind of person claims to remember such things long afterward? Do they just pop into the mind? I don’t understand all this suppressed memory stuff. It sounds to me like the result of suggestion.”

  “Memory is an odd faculty.”

  “When it comes down to it, I think we are going to have to fight fire with fire. Or mud with mud.”

  They had arranged to meet Greg’s wife for a drink at the Palmer House.

  It was difficult to think that Nancy Barrett had ever been a nun. Her hair was silver gray, but her face was as youthful as Greg’s. She put out her hand when her husband introduced Father Dowling, and as he took it he looked into her cool blue eyes. In the bar, the Barretts ordered martinis and Father Dowling mineral water. Almost immediately they were discussing the great topic.

  “I never before wanted to kill someone,” Nancy Barrett said. She paused. “I suppose I can want to now only because she is a stranger.”

  8

  William Arancia had turned out to be Gregory Barrett, adjunct member of the faculty at Loyola and a regular on NPR radio.

  “Married, one son, one wife, and a home on a wooded lot.” Tuttle asked Hazel ho
w she had found all this out. She tossed a brochure to him almost disdainfully. It was a promotional piece from NPR, and pictured there among other regulars was Tuttle’s client.

  “Maybe I should have you find the woman he’s interested in.”

  “You haven’t told me anything. So I was lucky to look through that brochure before throwing it out, but how can I be lucky if you don’t tell me what or who we’re after?”

  Did she aspire to be one of the Tuttles in Tuttle & Tuttle? Hazel was what is sometimes called a lot of woman, having in abundance those traits that set the female of the species off from the male. Not a beauty by any means, she was a woman who had known disappointments in the romance department (“Don’t ask”) but had yet to throw in her cards and accept existence as a single. Tuttle had not often been the object of unmistakable advances from a female, but Hazel when the mood was on her could be blushingly direct. Only a lifetime of terror of such intimacy had enabled Tuttle to escape being taken into her arms and crushed against her enormous bosom. Still, the danger was always there—a danger magnified by the fact that he began to be curious about what it would be like to surrender. He had already surrendered his office to the woman, allowing her to nag him into a subsidiary position. Could he long resist Hazel the next time the fleshly desires were on her?

  Now the softness had gone out of Tuttle’s attitude toward her, though. She had made a fool of him, finding out all about his client by the simple expedient of reading her junk mail.

  “It’s a professional secret,” he said, and it sounded like a whimper.

  Then she realized what she had done, and moved toward him with her chiseled face distorted by compassion. She had him by both wrists before he could escape. She pulled him closer, providing empirical verification that the female body is considerably different from the male.

  “Did I hurt your feelings, Isaac?”

  That did it. He wrested his wrists free, plucked his Irish tweed hat from its perch, and was out the door in a trice. Nobody called him Isaac and got away with it. He wasn’t ashamed of the name, not at all, but he wanted to keep it sacred, a secret between him and his deceased parents, particularly his father. He had been kidded about it at school. In law school he used his initials, I. M., but since opening his office he had been simply Tuttle. Tuttle & Tuttle, the second for his father. Or was it the first? No need to distinguish between Abraham and Isaac Tuttle.