Ash Wednesday (7 page)

“Anything I can get for you?” she asked.

“How about some recent magazines?”

She smiled when she decided it was a joke, then scampered away. Some of the tattered magazines in the room looked as if they could have been lying with curled corners on the table since the last time he was here.

Cy had come to the hospital directly from a visit with Father Dowling, who had asked him to drop by and tell him about the investigation of Florence Green’s death. That had been almost ten years ago, but Cy only had to refresh his memory. Of course, his memory had been stirred by the release of Nathaniel Green from Joliet.

What an enigma that guy had been, Cy remembered. Green had
sat right here in this waiting room and said in a flat voice, “I killed her.”

“Wasn’t she dying?”

“What difference does that make?” Green had asked.

“Not a lot. How did you do it?”

“She was on a life support system. All I had to do was pull the plug.”

“And you did?”

He looked pleadingly at Cy. “I couldn’t take it anymore. More important, she couldn’t. The loss of all hope is a terrible thing.”

“I understand she was in a coma,” Cy said.

“She might have come out of it. Now she won’t.”

Green didn’t call it a mercy killing. That had to wait for the trial, when Tuttle brought it in as if it were an item from the Sermon on the Mount.

“When did this happen?” Cy had asked Green.

“When?”

“What time? The nurse went into your wife’s room when she noticed the monitors on your wife were down. That was at 2:17.”

“It was before that,” Green said.

Cy observed a half minute of silence. “How long before?”

“I didn’t look at my watch.”

“How long had you been keeping vigil in your wife’s room?”

“Ever since I had to bring her back here.”

“I meant today.”

“All day.”

“There’s no bathroom in your wife’s room,” Cy said.

Nathaniel Green had looked blankly at him.

“Most people have to go once in a while. You must have left the room in order to go to the john.”

“I was only gone a few minutes,” Green said.

“How many times?”

“What are you getting at?”

“The way the nurse described it, you were practically on a liquid diet. Ice water, soup, juice. There were half a dozen plastic cups with sipping straws angling from them on the bedside table.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with anything,” Green said impatiently.

“Probably nothing. I’m just trying to establish a timeline.”

“Officer, I confess. I did it. What’s the point of an investigation?”

“Mr. Green, I want to determine when you pulled the plug.”

Green gave it some thought. “The nurse said she came in at 2:17? It was after two.”

“Good. So we have fifteen minutes, maybe a little more. Where is the restroom?”

“I don’t believe this,” Green said, shaking his head,

“How many times have you confessed to murder? This is just routine. Come, show me where the restroom is.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“I want to know what it is I’m believing.”

Green didn’t want to help. He just wanted to be hanged, and as quickly as possible. He was learning it wouldn’t be quite that easy.

Cy had clocked Green on the way to the restroom and back, maybe a minute each way, adjusting for a hurried going and more leisurely return. Give him a few minutes to do his business. That was when Cy told Green he had been observed going toward the restroom at maybe 2:10. No need to tell him it was just a maybe identification.

It had taken a while to get used to the gradations among the staff, doctors, nurses, nurse’s aides, various helpers of a lesser sort, some voluntary, janitors. The grades seemed color coded. It was a volunteer wearing one of the off-blue pajama-like outfits who had answered Cy’s routine question with the statement that she had seen Green going off to the restroom at maybe 2:10.

“That’s pretty pinpoint,” Cy had said to the woman. For answer
she displayed an enormous wristwatch. “I was taking magazines around. I do this wing at two o’clock.”

“Do you suppose anyone else saw him at that time?” Cy asked.

“Is this important?”

“I doubt it.”

The point of routine is that you don’t decide about importance before the fact. For all the apparent fuss he had made about it, Nathaniel Green’s trip to the restroom before the plug was pulled on his wife, and the exact time of each, dissolved into vagueness. Yet sitting here again in the creepy waiting room brought it all back. Of course, he was consulting his old notes as he sat here.

He had been less informative with Father Dowling. Remembering all those years ago, all the questions he had asked, noting them down, writing it up when he went downtown, all that recorded trivia retained somewhere in the great maw of police records, he had a fleeting sense of the futility of detective work. By and large. What difference did it make to establish as precise a timeline as he could to determine when a man who was eager to be punished had killed his wife? Cy had sat through the trial in the courtroom. Jacuzzi the prosecutor had asked him to, on the off-chance he might need his testimony. He didn’t. How many hours had he sat in courtrooms for no eventual reason? He had almost longed to be questioned by Tuttle.

Cy realized too late that he was responsible for Green’s choosing Tuttle. The little lawyer had slipped what looked like a used business card into Green’s hand, and Green had asked Cy about him.

“Not a fastball pitcher,” Cy said carefully.

“What do you mean?”

“That you could do better with anyone else.”

That had amounted to a recommendation. After all, Green hadn’t wanted a lawyer at all; he thought he could go into court, tell the
judge he was guilty, and be sentenced then and there. If he had to have a lawyer, he didn’t want a fastball pitcher. Cy should have realized that. Tuttle, to give him credit, had tried. Mercy killing. Well, it probably saved Green from the far longer sentence he deserved.

“They destroyed him,” Jerome Paxon, the parole officer, said to Cy. “They broke his spirit. He’s like a zombie. His only interest is in writing a will and leaving everything to his sister-in-law.”

“Helen Burke?”

Paxon nodded vigorously. “His nemesis. The harridan. Madame Defarge. What a virago.” Paxon might have been consulting a book of synonyms. But he was right about Helen. She had acted as if Florence Green were in the pink of health and Nathaniel had cut her off in the bloom of youth. Cy felt that he himself had been consulting a book of clichés.

“It sounds as if her grudge is with death, not her brother-in-law,” Father Dowling had commented when Cy gave him a short version of those long-ago events.

“You may be right. Every doctor called to testify said that Florence had been dying, that nothing could save her.”

“Then why would her husband kill her?” Father Dowling reasonably asked.

None of Nathaniel Green’s explanations made sense. He wanted to save her further suffering, but she was already in a coma. To which he had replied that she might come out of it. Why hadn’t he waited to see if that would happen? An oddity of the circumstances was that the oxygen petcock on the wall had been turned off. Green had been annoyed when Cy pointed this out. Then he made a face and said he had done that after he took the mask from his dying wife’s. Lest oxygen be wasted? Green asked Cy if he had ever sat by a deathbed. A rhetorical question, but Cy could have answeredyes.
He had stood by his father’s bed when he breathed his last breath; he had been holding his mother’s hand when her eyes widened, her grip tightened and he watched her wondering eyes dim as she slipped into eternity.

“What ever happened to the nephew?” Cy asked Paxon.

“Jason?” Paxon shrugged. “At least he tried to get his mother to shut up.”

“How does Nathaniel Green spend his time?”

“Do you know the senior center at St. Hilary’s?”

Yes, Cy already knew of Nathaniel’s persistent attendance there, despite the shunning engineered by Helen. His nemesis, his Madame whatchamacallit. The virago. Paxon was contagious.

When he left the parole officer’s cluttered quarters, Cy thought he might see if Jason was still in town. It was a slow period in the Fox River detective bureau.

Herman the German was surprised that Eugene Schmidt had never been in Joliet or a place like it in another state. Eugene said that he had moved to Illinois from Michigan, but he seemed to have lived in lots of places, if you could believe him, something about which Herman was not sure. The guy reminded him of several in the place, bunco artists, con men, sure they were smarter than everyone else until finally they were outsmarted themselves. Herman thought of Wendel, who had sold forged lottery tickets and thought that nickel-and-dime operation put him in the big time.
Well, it put him in Joliet, where he spent all the time he could trying to apprentice himself to real con men.

“Wendel, think of it. They’re here. Why do you think they’re smart?”

“A fluke. Do you know how much McGough made before he got caught?”

“A lot of good that does him now.”

Wendel leaned toward Herman, his whisper emerging with exhaled smoke. “He stashed it. It’ll be waiting for him when he gets out.”

Oh, the stories one heard. Listening to Eugene Schmidt, Herman was reminded of all those guys, mad to make money any way but honestly, for whom a term at Joliet was just a bump on their road to unheard-of wealth. One stay in Joliet was all Herman wanted, which was why he had jumped at this job at St. Hilary’s.

“So what did you do before you retired?” he asked Schmidt, making conversation.

Eugene liked to come down to Herman’s apartment for a smoke, and up to a point Herman enjoyed his company. If only to find out what made him tick.

“Who said I’m retired?”

“Come on. You’re here every day.”

“Ah, these widows.” Eugene rolled his eyes and sent a series of perfectly formed smoke rings across the room.

Herman laughed.

“A cat among the pigeons, Herman.” He frowned at his own remark. “I’m kidding, of course. The luck I’ve had with women, I should join the monastery.”

“Pretty bad?”

“A trail of broken dreams.”

The guy talked that way, half shutting his eyes, looking sad, but his eyes never lost their twinkle.

“Tell me about Nathaniel Green, Herman.”

“It’s all in the papers.”

“Did you know him …” Eugene delicately left the question unfinished.

“Not really. You don’t really get to know anyone in a place like that.”

“Cellmates.”

“Cellmates least of all. Most of them are trying to rob you blind.”

“What did you have to steal?”

You couldn’t explain it to an outsider. Stuff that wouldn’t mean a thing anywhere else loomed large behind those walls, and thieves never lost their habit of wanting what they did not have.

“Tell me about the widows,” Herman suggested, wanting to get off that subject.

Eugene developed his theory for Herman. People grow older, sure, but they never grow up. Particularly women. Good-looking women, and not only the good-looking ones, never got rid of the idea that they were women. And what do women want? A man. That never stops.

“I’ll tell you what this place is, Herman. We’re in a school, right? Outside is a playground. Okay, we’re all kids again. The women think they’re girls. They can’t help it.”

“And you’re a boy?”

A boyish grin. “That’s what they tell me.”

Already Eugene and Natalie were the talk of the place, either chuckled over or envied or both. Herman had to admit that Natalie was a fine-looking woman, that silver-gray hair, that unlined face, the nose with a little hump in the bridge. He felt half in love with her himself. That was why he kept an eye on Eugene, to see what progress he was making.

“Everything’s on schedule,” Eugene said. “She’s interested in my soul.”

“You don’t have one.”

“That’s what I told her. She’s determined to save me.”

“From what?”

“We haven’t gotten around to that yet.”

What a guy. Just like some at Joliet, Eugene found anywhere he was a stage on which to perform. The senior center at St. Hilary’s wouldn’t attract many men Eugene’s age, but, as he said, here he was a cat among the pigeons. Herman couldn’t believe that Natalie Armstrong didn’t see him for the little con man he was.

“You play them like a fish, Herman. Why am I down here? Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Keep them off balance, that’s the thing.”

Herman felt like a snitch when he asked Edna Hospers what she thought of Eugene.

“Everyone seems to like him.”

“A real ladies’ man.”

She laughed when he said it. Well, if she wasn’t worried, why should Herman be?