Ash Wednesday (8 page)

After a couple of hours’ effort in the courthouse pressroom, Tetzel got an opening paragraph that he liked and went down to the paper to get a go-ahead from Menteur the features editor. It would take a little digging and footwork to do the piece on Nathaniel Green, and Tetzel was unwilling to undertake it without assurance that it would be used.

“Who would be interested?” Menteur asked. He must have had a full package of gum in his mouth, which he chewed ferociously in the now smoke-free premises of the
Fox River Tribune
.

“I’ll make them interested,” Tetzel said.

“All this took place, what, eight, ten years ago?”

“The story is his release. The past as prologue.”

“That’s catchy,” Menteur said with weary sarcasm. He was always finding clichés in other people’s prose.

“The Return of Nathaniel Green.” Tetzel might have been reading the headline off the ceiling above them.

“What’s he doing now?”

“You see? You’re curious. What does a man who killed his wife do when he gets out of prison?”

“Remarry?” More sarcasm. You had to know Mrs. Menteur to understand the features editor. “Any other Pulitzer possibilities, Gerry?”

“Is that no?” Tetzel asked, annoyed.

Menteur chewed his cud, then shrugged. “Write it. But it better be good.”

“With me, that’s second nature.”

Heads turned throughout the room at the unfamiliar sound of Menteur laughing.

The laughter stopped abruptly when Menteur screamed, “Don’t light that!” Tetzel had unthinkingly plucked a cigarette from one pocket and a plastic lighter from the other. “We can’t smoke here anymore.”

“Just chew gum?”

Menteur shook his head and hunched over his desk. “I never thought I’d live so long. Honest to God, I think Prohibition will be back before I die.”

“We can smoke in the courthouse,” Tetzel said.

Menteur lurched into an upright position. “But it was the city council that passed the ordinance!”

“They exempted the courthouse.”

Menteur fell back, his open mouth revealing the pink wad of gum. He turned and spat it into a wastebasket.

“Write
that
up, Tetzel. Skewer the hypocrites.”

“Watch your language,” Tetzel said.

“I mean it, damn it. I want a piece on the danger of secondhand smoke to anyone who enters the courthouse.”

Tetzel rose. “Good idea. Right after I do the Nathaniel Green story.”

“Skewer them, Tetzel. Skewer them.”

Wondering eyes followed his departure, Menteur’s vindictive commission ringing in his ears. Fat chance he would complain about being allowed to smoke in the courthouse pressroom. That would be like fouling his own nest. He wondered if they let the inmates at Joliet smoke. He would put the question to Nathaniel Green.

For two days, Tetzel pursued his project furtively, lest Rebecca learn what he was working on and steal his thunder. Not for the first time, he felt that he had hit on a story that would captivate his readers and make his name a household word among the dwindling subscribers to the
Fox River Tribune
. The one story that would never run in the
Tribune
was the paper’s falling circulation. Menteur might see the demise of newsprint before he saw Prohibition return.

In the pressroom, Tetzel angled the screen of his computer so others would not see that he was consulting decade-old issues of the
Tribune
. He had been a callow youth in those days, and sitting in traffic court and other courtrooms was part of the apprenticeship. So it was that he had sat through the trial of Nathaniel Green,
his unattributed reports moving from the front page to page two, then three, always heavily edited, until the verdict came and he was briefly back on page one, and above the fold.

He read his youthful prose with the eyes of the craftsman he felt he had become, and found it good. Not that there wasn’t a lot of Menteur in it. Even so, the story on the verdict bore his name, Gearhart Tetzel. It was the first time other reporters learned what “Gerry” stood for, and he was teased mercilessly. “What
is
the heart of a gear, Gerry?” That sort of thing. He brushed this minor assault aside. He knew jealousy when he saw it in others. Now an older, less naive Tetzel read his early story with a moist eye. By God, he’d been good.

It was reading his magnanimous tribute to Tuttle’s efforts on Nathaniel Green’s behalf that sent Tetzel now to the little lawyer’s office.

At the building, he wasted five minutes punching the button for the elevator before giving up and mounting the stairs to the door bearing the legend
TUTTLE & TUTTLE, ATTORNEY AT LAW
. He pushed through, and a bosomy Amazon turned from her computer, her face radiant with expectation.

“Is Tuttle in?” the reporter asked.

“Do you have an appointment?” Sweet but firm.

“I’m Tetzel of the
Tribune
.”

Her radiance increased. “The
Chicago Tribune
?”

Tetzel did not correct her. “Just tell Tuttle I dropped by.”

An inner door opened, and an unmistakable tweed hat was visible in the crack. Then the door opened completely, and Tetzel was looking into the wary gaze of the little lawyer.

“Got a minute, Tuttle?”

“Mr. Tetzel is from the
Chicago Tribune
,” the receptionist gushed.

“Thank you, Hazel. No calls. Come in, Gerry.”

The inner office was unbelievably chaotic. Presumably there
was a desk beneath the debris over which the now seated Tuttle regarded his caller; the floor was littered with open law books, newspapers, magazines, and old Styrofoam containers.

“I like a neat office,” Tetzel said, having sat on a container that had once held fried rice. He threw it into a corner, spread his handkerchief on the chair, and sat.

“E pluribus unum,”
Tuttle said mysteriously. “As the poet says.”

“I want to talk about Nathaniel Green,” Tetzel said.

Tuttle pushed back from the desk, and his chair continued to the wall. When they collided, Tuttle grabbed his hat and managed to stay in the chair. He put the hat on again. “You, too?”

“What do you mean?” It was Tetzel’s turn to be surprised. Although how could other reporters fail to see the human interest in the Nathaniel Green story? Tetzel looked abjectly at Tuttle. “Who else?”

“Cy Horvath,” the little lawyer said.

Relief flooded through Tetzel. Cops didn’t write for newspapers. Then second thoughts brought back anxiety.

“What’s Horvath up to?” he asked.

“A little nostalgia, I think. He was young when he worked on that case. Maybe he’s trying to regain his youth.”

“Since when did you become a counselor, Tuttle?”

“What else is a lawyer?”

“Don’t get me started. Tell me about Horvath.”

“He wanted to talk about the trial. He wondered if I had a transcript. I was lucky to find one for him.” Tuttle looked benevolently around his office.

“What would he want with that?” Tetzel asked, excited.

“I suspect that law students study my defense in that trial.”

“You say Horvath was on that case?”

“He never missed a day in court,” Tuttle said, as if cherishing a fond memory of better days.

“I don’t remember seeing him there,” Tetzel said.

“You would have been concentrating on what was going on in the front of the courtroom. Of course, Horvath had to be there on call,” Tuttle conceded.

“Why would the detective division still care about a case like that? The guy was guilty from the word go.”

“So it seemed.”

“What do you mean?”

Tuttle tipped back his hat and then, with great carefulness, his chair. He clasped his hands behind his head. “It was all circumstantial evidence.”

“Circumstantial evidence!” Tetzel cried. “He was sitting there with the tubes in his hand, he said he did it, no one else could have done it.”

“So it seemed.” Tuttle smiled mysteriously at Tetzel. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Horvath gets the case reopened.”

“On what basis?”

“So far it’s all confidential,” Tuttle said dreamily.

“Bullshit.”

“As you wish.”

Half an hour later Tetzel left, feeling strangely excited. Of course, he knew all about Tuttle. Normally he wouldn’t credit anything the little lawyer said, but the suggestion that Horvath was reviewing the case with an eye to reopening it was preposterous enough to be plausible. In any event, Horvath’s interest in Nathaniel Green after all these years, after his trial, imprisonment, and now release, promised material for the feature he was writing. Cy Horvath wasn’t much of a talker, but whatever he said could be believed.

The return of Nathaniel Green had caused a stir—or better, a hush—at the senior center at St. Hilary’s, and it had given the pastor reason to ponder as well. Father Dowling had talked with Nathaniel a few times since their luncheon on Ash Wednesday, but they had amounted to scarcely more than exchanges of greetings. Father Dowling wanted Green to come to him; only then could he have the conversation he now realized he longed to have. But it had to be initiated by Green.

Father Dowling had talked with Cy Horvath again and been told more of the investigation into the death of Florence Green. Cy had brought along the notes he had taken at the time, and he had been checking things out.

Cy said, “If there ever was anything to find out, the trail has long since gone cold.”

“What does Phil think of your going over all this again, Cy?”

“Father, at the time, neither of us could figure out what Green gained from what he claimed to have done.”

That was always the basic question:
Cui bono?
Who benefits from the deed under investigation? All Green had gotten for his pains was a stretch in Joliet—and he very nearly didn’t get that.

Jacuzzi the prosecutor had insisted that the police look into the matter when Crawford the coroner made out his report and classified the death as natural.

“Natural!” Jacuzzi was shocked. “By his own admission the husband killed her, and that idiot calls it natural. Look at that gobbledegook.”

Jacuzzi was excited, his normal condition. His narrow bald head seemed to have pushed through the bushy hair that still adorned its sides and covered the prosecutor’s outstanding ears.

“All he did was copy things from her medical chart,” Jacuzzi had said with disgust.

The cause of death, according to Crawford, was the cancer and its attendant effects. Tuttle had been as alarmed as the prosecutor by this judgment since it threatened to deprive him of his client. It was Tetzel, prompted by Tuttle, who had saved the day, running a story on the man who had killed his wife in St. Mary’s Hospital. The death certificate had not been brought up during the trial.

Were there ever any uncomplicated deeds? What seemed as simple as could be, a husband removing his wife from life support, became ever more complex. Father Dowling paid another visit on Willy Nilly.

When he had parked at Holy Angels and was walking to Father Nolan’s cottage, Father Dowling wondered if he should disturb the old man’s retirement like this. Father Nolan dismissed the objection when he knew why Father Dowling had come to him a second time.

“How would you characterize what he did, Father? Morally?”

“Ah.” Father Nolan nodded for a minute, as if in consultation with his once professional self as moral theologian. “One could say: He killed his wife. True, but that’s not yet a moral description.
You can kill another by accident, you can kill another in combat, you can kill another as public executioner, you can kill another in self-defense.”

“If the hospital had taken her off the life support apparatus, wouldn’t they have killed her?” Father Dowling asked.

“Of course. In the sense that they had stopped preventing her from dying.”

“That is all Nathaniel Green did.”

Willy Nilly hummed and nodded some more.

Father Dowling said, “If the hospital would have been justified in doing that, wouldn’t it be because the husband asked them to?”

“I suppose all this was argued at the trial,” Willy Nilly said.

“His lawyer was more interested in portraying the man as a mercy killer.”

They went on through the labyrinthine ways of moral appraisal. The gap between the moral absolute that one may never kill an innocent person and the singular deed done that day long ago in a room in St. Mary’s Hospital seemed to widen as they talked.

“What did the man intend to do?” Willy Nilly finally asked. “In the end, that is the heart of the matter, morally.”

The answer to that at least was simple. Nathaniel Green had intended to bring about his wife’s death.

“That brings it under the moral absolute, Father Dowling.”

“So he is a murderer?” Father Dowling asked.

“Are we talking legal description or moral?”

They were talking about a man’s soul.

Finally Nathaniel Green came to bare that soul to Father Dowling.

“Can a lapsed Catholic go to confession, Father?”

“Do you want to?”

Nathaniel Green looked at Father Dowling with his haunted
eyes. “Do you know what you miss most about going to confession? Being able to reveal yourself to another and know it will go no further.”