Man Who Loved God (32 page)

This time the door did open outward. He burst through it. Another dash down another corridor. His chest heaved; his breath pounded in his ears.
There!
The nameplate he was seeking.

“You can’t go in there—!” But he was past her and into the inner office.

He found just about what he had expected to see.

Tom Adams, jacketless and, for him, disheveled, held a gun pointed squarely at an obviously terrified Jack Fradet. Adams stole a quick glance at the priest and just as quickly returned total attention to the cowering Fradet.

“Tom!” The priest was almost shouting. “Put the gun down. Please! It’s not worth it. He’s just not worth it. There are better ways. You’ll just ruin your life. Everything you’ve worked for will go down the drain. Please. Put down the gun!”

“Father’s right,” said a commanding voice from the office doorway. “There’s a desk in front of you, Mr. Adams. Put the gun on the desk. Carefully please.” The cavalry, in the person of Sergeant Mangiapane, weapon drawn, had arrived. Father Tully breathed a half sigh of relief.

“You don’t understand. You don’t understand what this traitor has done.” Adams, still holding the gun, spoke in an imploring tone.

“I think I do,” said Father Tully. “But the place to settle this is in the courtroom. Not here.”

From the maelstrom of thoughts whirling through the priest’s mind, one was suddenly uppermost: he knew what kind of a person Tom Adams was at his core. “Tom, what you’re thinking of doing is a sin—a mortal sin. It’s murder. You’re going against one of God’s commandments. God does not want you to do this, Tom. I’m a priest and I’m telling you: God wants you to put that gun down.”

He did not turn his gaze from Fradet. But Adams moved slightly. Then, slowly, he lowered the gun and laid it on the desk.

“Now, Mr. Adams,” Mangiapane said in a calm, steady tone, “I want you to step back from the desk.”

Adams did as he was ordered. Mangiapane stepped forward, picked up the gun, then holstered his own. He patted down both Adams and Fradet, the former in a seeming daze, the latter in a state of shock. Mangiapane turned to Father Tully. “What’s going on here, Father?”

“Fraud, I think, at the very least,” the priest said. “And maybe lots more. Sergeant, seeing as how I’m the one who called you in on this, would you humor me? I need a few favors.”

Mangiapane’s cocked eyebrow evidenced his uncertainty.

“Could you give me a little time alone with Mr. Adams, make sure that Mr. Fradet doesn’t leave, and, finally, get my brother over here?”

Mangiapane deliberated. While such a procedure was in no police textbook he’d ever studied, he could find nothing substantially problematic in these requests. Neither Adams nor Fradet was armed. Adams was not likely to step out an eleventh-floor widow. Fradet could be detained in one of the other offices. And, in fact, Mangiapane himself dearly wanted his superior officer here as quickly as possible. “You got it, Father. But make it snappy. Zoo was heading in when I left. I’ll call him now; he should be here in a couple of minutes.”

Mangiapane left the office with Fradet literally in hand. As he made his way through the outer office, he ordered a host of spectators back to work.

“Tom,” Father Tully asked, “what was in the letter?”

“Letter?”

“The letter you just got from Barbara … the letter you’re holding.

Adams slumped into a chair. As he did so, the now crumpled letter fell from his left hand to the floor. The priest bent to pick it up. “Okay if I read it?”

Adams nodded.

Tully read the handwritten letter aloud.

Dearest Tom,

Of course I’ll marry you. I wasn’t quite prepared for all you said today. After I recovered from the surprise and shock, I realized what a generous and loving proposal you made. I’m flattered—and grateful.

But you may not want to marry me after I tell you something I want you to hear from me and from no one else.

Here the handwriting became somewhat less legible. As if she were reluctant to go on—or at least undecided as to whether to go on.

I told you there was no love or lovemaking between me and Al. That is the truth. But I created the impression that you were my one and only partner. That is not true.

While I was with you, I was having affairs with Jack, Lou, and Marty, your three execs. It pains me even to read this as I write it. I honestly didn’t know which one of you four was my child’s father. I notified each of you about my condition. At Al’s wake I made a separate appointment with each of you.

I was desperate. I needed money for me and the child. It wasn’t that Al had left me—us—penniless; I wanted enough so we’d never have to be concerned about financial security. The other three were married. What I wanted from them was financial support—not marriage.

As I talked to each of them I fabricated office scuttlebutt that hinted that they were guilty of some banking crime. It was sheer blackmail on my part.

Not only did I strike out on the crime charge, but I learned that two of them are incapable of fathering a child. And the third had no reason to think he was the father.

But one thing may be of immediate importance. In bluffing my way to blackmail, I accused Jack Fradet of financial skullduggery—to provide a golden parachute for himself if or when he was let go. That charge seemed to touch a raw nerve. He looked like he wanted to kill me on the spot. So I backed off, more in fear than anything else. Then he calmed down. Regardless, I think I got close to a major problem for the bank and for you.

I feel better now that I’ve told you; I know you’ll be able to handle it—

“Of course …” Adams interrupted the priest’s reading. “I couldn’t understand why we were showing such a profit. But he wasn’t building a golden parachute. No, more than likely he was creating a false sense of security: he was paving the way for a takeover.”

Father Tully nodded, and returned to the letter.

Any other secret I may have is mine alone. Just please trust that there is no other problem that will interfere with the happiness of our marriage—that is, if you still want me.

None of you four knew about the others. There is always the possibility that they will learn. That’s why I wanted you to hear it from me.

I await your response.

With love,

Barbara

Oh, my! Father Tully had suspected something was going on between Barbara and the executives, but—oh, my!

He puzzled over her statement,
Any other secret I may have is mine alone.
One would think that after the first momentous secret, there couldn’t be too many more. Evidently, the final secret seemingly was not of a nature liable to disrupt an otherwise happy marriage.

Father Tully could not know what only Joyce Hunter’s husband and daughter knew—that Barbara was a lesbian.

“Would you?” the priest asked. “Would you have married Barbara knowing what is in this letter?”

Adams blinked several times as if returning from profound abstraction. “Would I have married her? Of course. She was carrying my child. I am not without sin. Who is?”

Silence.

“I am grateful to you, Father,” Adams said finally, wearily. “You and you alone stopped me from doing something foolish and wrong. How did you know …? How did you know what I was about to do? How did you know where I was?”

Tully pondered the questions. All that was on his mind, all that had come to him in an extended blinding flash was not yet coordinated to the point where he could explain it logically.

But he would try to address Adams’s questions. “The police were working on the theory that if they found the father of Barbara’s child, they would also have her killer—the idea being that the father didn’t want the baby, so he killed both mother and child.

“But when you claimed that you were the father and also claimed that you hadn’t killed Barbara, I believed you were telling the truth. That destroyed the hypothesis that the father of the child had killed its mother. As good a theory as that was in providing a motive for the killing, since you are the father and you did not kill Barbara, there had to be another motive for her murder.

“Then you told me you had just received a letter from her. You said you’d call me right back. When you didn’t, I called you. Your secretary said you’d left your office.

“Why would you have done that? Why hadn’t you returned the call? It had to have something to do with that letter. Barbara had to have written something that greatly disturbed you—enough to force you to some sort of action. Maybe she guessed who her killer would be? Whatever, it was something cataclysmic, I was sure of that.

“I called Sergeant Mangiapane and then I got here as fast as I could.”

The priest had Adams’s attention. “But how did you know where to find me? If you had been a minute or two later, I would have done the most foolhardy thing in my entire life.”

“That was more luck than anything. I was looking on your desk for Barbara’s letter when I spotted the word you had written on a scrap of paper.”

“‘Judas’?”

“Yes—Judas. An odd word to scribble. But it told me you were after someone you felt had betrayed you. I recalled what you had told me at your banquet: how your bank was not one of the conglomerates, but that the big banks were always out looking for smaller banks to devour.

“You were dedicated to keeping the bank financially alive and well. Yours is a family bank and you are dedicated to keeping it that way. You even belong to the Independent Bankers Association to join with other independents who want to avoid forced mergers.

“I knew from talking to Jack Fradet and others at your dinner that his job as comptroller of this bank is, among other things, to gather information and to assess the financial status of the bank. If he gave you the wrong information, misinformed you, the bank could be weakened—a ready victim for a takeover.

“He’s the one who could best play the traitor. You went looking for him. I went looking for you.”

Adams nodded slowly. “When I read in Barbara’s letter about Fradet’s reaction to her bluff, everything fell into place. I had thought the bank was having some extraordinary good fortune. That misinformation led us into one mode of business while we should actually have been going in the opposite direction. He deliberately set us up for disaster.

“After I read her letter I immediately checked the books. Now that I was looking for it and knew what to look for, I saw what Jack had done. I could have killed him!” He shook his head sadly. “I almost did.”

“And this gives the police a different motive for Barbara’s murder,” said Father Tully. “She died not because she was carrying the killer’s child, but because the murderer believed—falsely—that Barbara Ulrich was onto his game.”

“Now … if only they can prove it,” Adams said.

“What’s going on here?” A demanding Zoo Tully stood in the doorway.

His brother looked up brightly. “Have we got some stories to tell you!

Twenty-Six

More than he could express, Father Tully deeply appreciated this farewell dinner.

This was by no means his first send-off celebration. In his twenty years as, in effect, a missionary priest, he had periodically been transferred from parish to parish.

Such priestly passages could prove financially rewarding, as soon-to-be-former parishioners sponsored a party at which gifts were given. But congregations in parishes serviced by a Josephite priest usually could afford only gifts of prayer and affection—actually sufficient for just about any truly dedicated priest.

This evening’s leave-taking was especially significant because the participants were those with whom Father Tully had bonded to varying degrees in his brief stay in Detroit.

There was Father Koesler, back from vacation and eager to get back to the helm of his parish. Inspector Koznicki and his wife, Wanda, were the hosts. Rounding out the company was Lieutenant Tully—the brother who had become a brother—and Anne Marie, who was all a real sister should be.

The dinner bore Wanda’s hallmark: good plain food prepared and served with love. As the clambakers in
Carousel
sang, “The vittles we et were good, you bet/The company was the same.” Throughout, all joined in the conversation, which was, by turns, warm, witty, thoughtful, and stimulating.

When eventually the plates were empty, still no one made a move to leave the table, which was being cleared by Wanda and Anne Marie, assisted by the lumbering Walt Koznicki. Dessert and coffee were coming up.

Father Koesler had been surprised, indeed amazed, that his standin had been involved in a murder investigation. Was such clerical assistance in police work, he wondered, endemic to St. Joe’s? Or was it just to a Koesler pastorate?

It must, he decided, be the latter. For in succeeding parishes, Father Koesler had been involved in this sort of thing almost as an annual adventure. And here was Father Zachary Tully at a Koesler parish for only a few days and,
voilà!
in a mystery up to his collar.

So much had been going on with Tom Adams and Jack Fradet and the Adams Bank people, as well as with the police and the prosecutor’s office, that Koesler had a lot of lingering questions. With the table clearing causing a temporary lull in the conversation, he was finally able to get a question in. “What puzzles me most about all this excitement that’s been going on in my absence is this business of equating Mrs. Ulrich’s killer with the father of the child. I thought that a pretty good motive—”

“And in the light of that—” Father Tully interrupted.

“Yes,” Koesler plowed on, “in the light of that, why would you reject that theory simply because Mr. Adams admitted that he was the child’s father, but claimed not to have killed the mother? Why in the world did you believe him? True, he acknowledged paternity … but wouldn’t most criminals deny the major crimes they commit while admitting the minor ones? I know you were eventually proven correct. But what—a lucky guess? Blind trust in Mr. Adams?”

Father Tully looked as if he’d hit a home run in Tiger Stadium on his birthday. “Thank you for finally asking that question, Father Koesler. I’ve been dying to explain. But I’d like to explain it in the form of a game.”