Ash Wednesday (14 page)

Eric, the salesman at the Foot Doctor, had discovered the break-in only after he opened up the store and began getting ready for the day. When he went back to the stockroom he noticed that Mr. Burke’s office door was open. Drawers of the filing cabinet were pulled out; the lounge chair had been pushed over, the wastebasket emptied on the desk.

Cy Horvath and Agnes Lamb listened to this tale from the young man, whose Adam’s apple seemed proof of the inerrancy of Scripture.

“What’s missing?” Agnes asked.

Cy could see that she was still trying to figure out why he had decided that they should respond to the patrol car report. Cy had sent Mintz, the officer who had responded to Eric’s call, on his way. “We’ll take care of it.”

Eric didn’t know what was missing. “But just look at this office.”

“You call the boss?”

“It’s not yet noon.”

Cy let it go. He had Jason’s address, and it seemed a good idea to call on him in his native habitat.

“Lock the door of the office,” Cy said. “We’ll be back.”

“I can stay open?”

“Of course. And don’t mention this to any customers.”

“Are you kidding?”

Agnes was driving, and Cy gave her directions.

“That’s public housing,” she said.

“It used to be. The units are up for sale.”

“Being gentrified?”

“If you say so.”

Gentrified? Agnes was full of surprises. She had put in a couple of years at the community college before applying to the police department. She had to take the tests twice, to prove she hadn’t been cheating. Given her score, it was a pardonable suspicion, but there was probably a trace of prejudice in it, too.

“Why do you want to be a cop?” Cy asked her, when she was assigned to the detective division after a stint patrolling with Peanuts Pianone.

“Know your enemy.” But she smiled when she said it.

“Peanuts?”

“Is he retarded?”

“Just a cop.”

The area was several blocks of row houses that still bore the
effects of residents who hadn’t really given a damn about their condition. The buildings had declined to the point where the city had to make a decision between spending a lot of tax dollars to fix them up or putting them on the market. If there had been no takers, they would have been torn down, but there had been takers. The units could be had for a pittance, and a lot of remodeling had gone on, but the row house in which Jason Burke lived was still untouched.

The storm door hung askew on its hinges and was unlocked. Cy opened it, tried the bell, figured it didn’t work, and pounded on the door. He had to pound twice more before there was the sound of a key turning. The door opened slightly, and Jason Burke looked out over a chain.

“Good morning,” Cy said.

“What do you want?”

“Police.”

“I didn’t call the police.”

“Eric did.”

“Eric?” The door closed, there was the sound of the chain, and then the door opened again. Jason was wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. The hair on the sides of his head was wild; his eyes were puffy.

“Can we come in?”

He clearly didn’t want to ask them in, but he did. He stepped aside, and Cy and Agnes walked into chaos. There are kinds of messiness. Some kinds make sense, a sort of haphazard order, but Jason’s place was not of that sort. This was just a mess. Clothes, newspapers, books, plates, and cups. Glasses. The glass beside the couch—a sagging four-cushion affair—still had an inch of drink in it. A nightcap or a morning eye-opener? The place had the feel of a lair.

“What’s this about Eric?” Jason demanded.

“Your store was broken into.”

He absorbed that. “What did they take?”

“You’ll have to tell us that. Why don’t you go back there with us?”

“But I’m not up yet.” It was ten of eleven.

“Thieves wait for no man,” Agnes said. “Nice place you got here.”

“It’s temporary.”

“What isn’t?”

For the first time he smiled and looked like a human being. A nice guy, actually. Agnes had made a conquest.

“We used to live here,” she said. “The next row house, middle unit.”

“No kidding.”

“Why would I kid about a thing like that? We all wept when we moved out.”

“That sad to leave?”

“That glad to go.”

“I’ve gotten used to it,” Jason said.

Cy was trying to figure out why the son of Helen Burke was living in such squalor.

Jason tried to smooth down his wild side hair. “I have to take a shower.”

“We’ll wait.”

He shrugged and disappeared, pulling a door shut behind him.

“You think he’s got someone in there?” Agnes whispered.

“Shame on you.”

“He’s kind of cute.”

“His family has money. This doesn’t make sense.”

“He fits right in.”

Agnes had picked up an ashtray with a casino logo on it. “Gambling as well as booze,” she said.

“They go together.”

“Like a horse and carriage.”

She walked around the room, avoiding the mess, an odd expression on her face.

“Boy, does this bring it all back.”

“How long did you live here?”

“I don’t like to think of it.”

All the residents would have been black then, Cy thought. It was odd how you learned things about people you worked with. Well, what did Agnes know of him?

Jason wasn’t quite transformed when he emerged, but his appearance had improved. You could almost mistake him for a man who owned a shoe store.

“We’ll follow you,” Agnes said when they went outside. “You didn’t lock the door.”

“I only lock it when I’m inside,” Jason said enigmatically.

He drove a clunker whose motor had to make up its mind to respond to the starter. Finally it clattered into life. He put out a hand and waved and then started off.

“His family has money?” Agnes asked.

“Lots.”

“Maybe he’s just eccentric.”

“Being gentrified does that to you.”

When they entered the Foot Doctor, Eric was sitting on a stool watching a kid try on tennis shoes. He started to rise, but Jason told him to go on with what he was doing. Eric seemed disappointed.

Jason unlocked his office, stood in the doorway, and looked around. “What’s the problem?”

Agnes looked at Cy. Well, considering the condition of the place in which he lived, the office looked almost neat.

Jason went in, pushed the file drawers shut with his hip, and righted the chair. “I should have done that before I left.”

“You tipped the chair over.”

“I’m kind of clumsy.”

“The wastepaper basket?”

“I was looking for something, and I thought I might have thrown it out.”

“You’re saying this is a false alarm?” Agnes asked him.

“Eric is a good kid, but excitable. Did he say the door was locked when he got here?”

Agnes said, “I’ll ask him.”

When she came back, she said, “It was locked.”

“There you are,” Jason said, giving her a big smile.

It would be pretty hard to persuade someone who denied it that his place had been broken into.

Cy said, “What’s in back?”

“The stockroom. A john. Another room.”

“Show me.”

The stockroom was just metal shelving filled with shoe boxes. The john was a john. In the other room Jason checked the little fridge.

“Nothing missing,” he said. He had hesitated.

“You sure?”

“This is a false alarm, Lieutenant.” He was addressing Agnes.

“I’m sorry.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” Agnes said.

He came with them to the front door and stood in it while they went out to the car. Before she got behind the wheel, Agnes waved good-bye. Jason waved back. She settled behind the wheel.

“Why is he lying, Cy?”

“Good question.”

Amos Cadbury was now seventy-eight, and aging had seemed to move him ever further from the era of rectitude, civility, and sanity in which his career had begun. There had been a time when the back cover of the telephone directory was not aglitter with the advertisements of law firms eagerly seeking business, usually from those with alleged injuries from accidents or complaints against the products they freely bought and consumed and then turned on in remorseful wrath. Gluttons sued the fast-food chains that catered to their appetites, likening the multicolored photographs of cholesterol-filled offerings to criminal and culpable temptations. Eventually someone would sue God rather than blame his troubles on his own weakness. Lawyers could be found who were not only willing but eager to aid and abet such nonsense. Against this background, Nathaniel Green’s new will, leaving all but everything to his vindictive sister-in-law, carried a note of nobility that cheered Amos. Helen had come to him demanding that he bring a suit against Tuttle.

“What would be the charge, Helen?” Amos asked patiently. What a contrast the woman was to her brother-in-law.

“Don’t lawyers have an ethical code? He told that reporter about work he had done for Nathaniel. Confidential work.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nathaniel might have released Tuttle from confidentiality in the transaction.”

It was an odd position for Amos to occupy, defending the ineffable Tuttle. The little lawyer frequently skated near the increasingly fuzzy line that separated ethical from unethical behavior. He had often been brought before the local bar, threatened with the loss of his license. Amos had served on those boards. In another time, he might have landed on Tuttle like a Torquemada, but now Tuttle’s behavior scarcely differed from that of many of his fellow lawyers. In the dark of night all cats are black.

“You don’t know that,” Helen said.

“Would you like me to find out?”

Helen threw up her hands. “I suppose he would lie.”

“Putting that to one side, what do you think of the provisions of the new will? Of course, I know only what I have read in the paper.”

“He wanted it made public, Amos Cadbury,” Helen said, undermining the claim that had brought her to his office.

“He is being very generous,” Amos said.

“Generous! It’s Florence’s money.”

“Isn’t this what you once demanded he do?”

Helen looked around the office with wild and angry eyes.

“That’s what makes it so. …” She could not find the word. “He wants to humiliate me.”

Amos had heard from Father Dowling of the treatment of Nathaniel that Helen had enforced at the parish center. He had heard, too, of her tearful admission to Edna Hospers that her conduct was reprehensible. Amos felt a wave of sympathy with Helen that was strengthened when he thought of her son.

“How is Jason? This will affect him, too, eventually.”

“When I am dead?” Helen said in the mournful tones of one
who did not seriously believe in her own mortality. “Can you imagine what he would do with money, without restraints?”

“How is the shoe store going?”

“The Foot Doctor!” Helen cried. To such disfavor had the Burkes come.

Amos had done the legal work for this new enterprise, as he had for Jason’s earlier entrepreneurial efforts. The location was good; people would always need shoes. With an accountant and reliable help even Jason should be able to make a go of it.

“Has he overcome his weaknesses?”

Helen seemed about to deny that her son drank and gambled. “As far as I know,” she said finally. It was as good an answer as any. If things went bad, she would be the first to know, confronted by a contrite Jason in need of maternal bailing out. Helen had reacted with horror to Amos’s suggestion, after Jason’s last debacle, that she simply leave her son to his fate.

“They’d put him in jail!”

“Helen, that might frighten him into serious resolution.”

“If I could believe that, Amos, I would be tempted.”

Unblessed by children of his own, Amos alternated between envying those with children and grandchildren and seeing the benefit he derived from not having any. Of course, that was selfish. Annoying as Helen Burke was, she continued to support her wayward son.

“Perhaps, if he and Carmela …”

“No! I trace all his troubles to her.”

“I don’t think that’s fair, Helen.”

“You don’t know her as well as I do.”

Actually Amos knew Carmela a good deal better than Helen did. At first, Carmela had drawn sparingly on the money that had been placed in Amos’s care for her when she and Jason separated, but in recent years, once she had become a financial
planner, she had become, if not a frequent, then a regular caller. It was usually an investment prospect that brought Carmela to Amos’s office.

“You might want to invest in it yourself, Amos.”

He smiled.

“Who does handle your investments?”

“You make that sound like a task. I take care of things myself, Carmela.”

The years of wanting to amass more and more wealth were long behind Amos. He had never fully accepted the thought that money should earn money, at least in the way that was done in the stock market. One of his professors at Notre Dame had reviewed medieval theories on the matter and ended by asking if the class thought the ban on usury had been abrogated. The consensus was that the medieval economy and the modern economy were so different that those old strictures no longer applied. Amos had neither agreed nor disagreed, but throughout his long life he had often surprised in himself a medieval disdain for the antics of Wall Street. In his private restroom here at the office he had hung a framed photograph of Wall Street traders frantically waving slips, buying, selling. They all looked mad, in both senses of the term. Now Amos had almost everything in tax-free municipals. It simplified his income tax and gave him the comforting sense that he was benefiting communities rather than profiting from their debts.