Blood Ties (11 page)

He had asked Hazel to his place for popcorn and a movie—prompting Tuttle's warning and her contemptuous response.

“What exactly has he hired you to do?” Hazel asked her boss.

“Just a routine matter.”

Hazel gave him a look. “Well, I knew it couldn't be a federal case.”

So he told her nothing and began exploring the antecedents of a young woman named Martha Lynch. At first, Tuttle thought Martin was pulling his leg. Everyone knew Dr. George Lynch and wife. But Martin had put his arms on Tuttle's desk and whispered, “Martha Lynch was adopted.”

“There's no law against that.”

“I want you to find her mother.”

“Mrs. Lynch?”

“Her birth mother. The woman who bore her.”

Tuttle pulled a legal tablet toward him and licked the end of his pencil. “Go on.”

The adoption had taken place twenty-two years ago. Martha had been born in Fox River, her mother having resisted the idea of an abortion thanks to the support of the Women's Care Center. Tuttle was to find the woman.

“There has been no contact between her and the Lynches since?”

“Vivian Lynch has no idea what became of the woman.”

“And when I find her?”

“You're sure you can?”

Tuttle chuckled.

“Good. Just give me the information. Don't talk to the woman, don't let her know she has been found. Just let me know. The Lynches will do the rest.”

“And Amos Cadbury handled the matter?”

“Yes.”

Someone with more standing in the profession would simply have gone to Cadbury and talked it over, lawyer to lawyer, but this path was closed to Tuttle. If Cadbury had his way, Tuttle would have been disbarred the first time he had come under review by the local bar association, but Tuttle senior had intervened and that evil day had been avoided, twice. The mention of the Women's Care Center suggested an alternative. Within an hour of talking with Martin, he had pulled into a parking space at the center and bustled inside. His entrance caused a stir. A woman rose from behind the reception desk and hurried to him, a worried look on her face.

“Can I help you?”

“Are you the manager?”

She took his arm and led him out of the reception area with its obviously distraught young women. In the corridor, she stopped. Her name tag read
MARJORIE.
Tuttle took off his tweed hat and fished out a card and handed it to her. She read it with concern.

“Whatever your business, you should take it to our legal counsel, Mr. Amos Cadbury.”

“No need for that. My business concerns something that happened twenty-two years ago.”

Marjorie looked relieved. She led him into a small room. “Twenty-two years ago.”

“Obviously, you wouldn't have been working here then.”

“Hardly.”

Tuttle spelled out the problem for her algebraically, using no names. She followed what he said with a stern expression. Before he was well into his tale, she was shaking her head.

“We don't give out that kind of information.”

“Would you stand in the way of that woman coming into a fortune?”

The question suggested that some fortune was in the offing, but Tuttle could not be responsible for how she interpreted his words. When they sank in, Marjorie's manner softened. She looked at his card and then at him, almost kindly. “I still think you should see Mr. Cadbury.”

“Good idea.” He took his card from her and returned it to his hat. “I just thought we could speed up matters. I only hope the delay has no negative effect on her chances.”

“I can't do it, even if I could. It's a matter of ethics.”

“I understand.”

“See Mr. Cadbury.”

Outside in his car, Tuttle thought. He had only the vaguest idea of the procedure for an adoption. He would have to pick someone's brains. He thought of the girl Hazel sometimes employed to gather materials, a paralegal by training. He searched for and found the odious cell phone. The second bit of luck came when he had turned it on and dialed his office.

“I've made an appointment for you,” Hazel said without preamble. There was something like excitement in her voice.

“You know I'm busy.”

“Not too busy for this.”

“While I've got you, Hazel, get in touch with whatshername, the paralegal. I want everything on adoptions.”

“Okay, okay. But listen.”

He was to meet a young man in the Loop, in Water Tower Place, at the top of the escalator. “Bernard Casey.” Hazel inhaled. “The way he talked, I looked him up. There is a Bernard Casey at Foley, Farnum, and Casey on Madison.”

From the legal lowlands where he dwelt, Tuttle had often considered the great names in the law who practiced in the Chicago area. Foley, Farnum, and Casey represented an alpine peak. Hazel's excitement communicated itself to him.

“How will I know him?”

“He will know you. I mentioned your tweed hat.”

“I'll be there.”

Parking in the Loop meant two possibilities, either parking in the street and risking being towed away or putting his car in a garage and coming up with would have been a down payment on its replacement. It was with the sense that his fortunes were turning that Tuttle nosed his car into a garage and then had to rise level after level until he was on the one called Ireland. The seventh level. Seven was his lucky number. It had taken him that many years to get through law school. He wedged his car into a narrow space, got out, pulled his tweed hat firmly onto his head, and went down in the elevator to the street.

He was two blocks from the Water Tower, the landmark that gave its name to the huge edifice across Michigan Avenue from it. With his topcoat flapping, Tuttle negotiated the traffic, weaving among the maniacal drivers and then given interference by a city bus. Through the revolving doors and up the escalator he went, craning his neck as if to make his tweed hat more visible. No one awaited him at the top.

He paced; he removed his tweed hat and put it on again; he paced some more. The thought grew on him that someone had used Hazel to play a practical joke. Was it possible that Hazel herself … He had pulled out his cell phone and switched it on when someone spoke.

“Mr. Tuttle?”

Tuttle whirled, his hand on the brim of his hat.

“Bernard Casey.” He put out his hand. Tuttle took it. The young man exuded success. The dark suit must have cost five hundred dollars; his tie was richly tasteful. His expression became dubious, but then he overcame his doubts and suggested they have coffee.

Casey brought their cups to the table where he had ensconced Tuttle and lifted his in a toast. Tuttle sipped, scalding his mouth. He cried out.

“I'll get some water.”

“It's okay,” Tuttle managed to say.

“I should have warned you.”

“Maybe I can sue.”

Laughter. Casey brought up the suit against McDonald's some years before. Hot coffee had turned out to be against the law. This broke the ice.

“You practice in Fox River.”

Tuttle nodded. Casey would have had to know this to contact his office.

“I apologize for not coming to you, Tuttle. I should tell you that I am a lawyer myself. What I need done has to be done in Fox River. It would be impractical to send one of our people out there.” He paused. “No. Truth time. What I want to find out is for a friend of mine.” Casey sipped his coffee with care. “Have you had anything to do with adoptions?”

“As a matter of fact, I have.” Tuttle crossed his legs instead of his fingers.

“Good. I'll try to make this as concise as I can.”

There was a young lady who had been adopted. She had been born in Fox River and given up to her foster parents at birth. She wanted to find her real mother.

“Of course, the mother may no longer be alive. She may long since have moved out of the area. If she married, who knows what her name might be?”

Tuttle lifted a hand. “Just leave all that to me. Your friend's name?”

“Martha Lynch.”

Tuttle's heart leapt. Somewhere in the next world, his father must be guiding events. Through Martin Sisk, the Lynches had hired him to locate the mother of their adopted daughter. Now Bernard Casey, acting for the daughter, was asking him to do the same thing.

“I'll get at it.” He hesitated. Bernard Casey drew a wallet from his inner pocket and put a hundred-dollar bill on the circular table. Tuttle covered it with one hand and shook Bernard Casey's with the other.

“I suppose it's all on record.”

The image of the Fox River courthouse loomed in Tuttle's mind, the scene of so many of his defeats and his few small triumphs. He wished he had thought of that earlier. They exchanged cards, Casey somewhat surprised to see Tuttle's emerge from his tweed hat. He was glad he had retrieved it from Marjorie. It occurred to him that he could soon afford to have a new batch printed.

“I'll want all this to be just between the two of us,” Casey said.

“Of course.”

Casey had the look of a man who had accomplished his mission. “Do you know Amos Cadbury?”

“Everyone knows Amos Cadbury,” Tuttle said carefully.

They parted there with another handshake. Tuttle eschewed the escalator and bounced down the stairs to the street. He had half a mind to call Hazel, but it was a thought easily rejected. At the garage, he ransomed his car with a credit card, but his manner was insouciant. Soon all his bills would be paid.

15

When Father Dowling mentioned the death of Nathaniel Fleck to Phil Keegan, Keegan said he would have Cy Horvath drop by the rectory. “I told you it wasn't exactly what we thought it was.”

“What exactly was it?”

“Let Cy explain.”

Since talking with Amos, Father Dowling had pondered the lawyer's normal dilemma. Madeline Lorenzo, the adoption of whose out-of-wedlock baby Amos had handled years before, had appeared in his office greatly upset by the reappearance of that child's father, who had abandoned her when she found she was pregnant. A familiar story, alas, the male refusing responsibility for his deed while the poor woman carried within her the result of their liaison. How many men had walked away from such a situation and thought of it no more. That Nathaniel Fleck, however belatedly, had felt the pangs of conscience was commendable, but his reappearance threatened the life that the mother had since built; she had a husband, a professor at Northwestern, and four children born of their union. A sense of responsibility that would have been welcome to her long ago had become a menace, and clearly Amos feared that she had been tempted to remove the threat to her marriage.

When Cy arrived, Marie showed him in. Father Dowling, feeling somewhat duplicitous, told the stolid Hungarian that he found himself still wondering about that strange event of the death of Nathaniel Fleck.

“I'll tell you what we know, Father.”

Father Dowling had had many occasions for understanding the confidence Phil Keegan had in Horvath, assuring the pastor of St. Hilary's that Cy was worth half a dozen of his other detectives—“meaning the rest of the department.” Cy still had the look of the football player he had been before an injury his freshman year at Illinois had sidelined him for good. In the service, he had been an MP; when he was discharged, he applied for the Fox River police. Phil had recognized the name from Cy's stellar career as a high school player and would have hired him on that basis alone. That Cy had turned into such an excellent detective was frosting on the cake.

Cy's description of the way the accident had altered from hit-and-run to something more ambiguous was familiar ground to Father Dowling. Having summed that up, Cy looked at the priest. “Of course, I wondered what he was doing in Fox River. He lived in California. There was a memorial service, you know.”

“I heard.”

“I went. Nothing said there explained why he was in the Chicago area, let alone Fox River.”

“I suppose there could be a hundred explanations.”

“One of them I found out. He had been at the alumni center at Northwestern—he was an alumnus—asking about a former classmate.”

“Did he find him?”

“Her. I figured that, if he looked her up, she might know what he was doing here. Maybe she was the reason.”

“Ah.”

“Men get into their forties, they remember past loves. Maybe that was it, and he just wanted to see what the woman looked like now.”

“So you were able to identify her.”

“She's married to a faculty member at Northwestern. Mark Lorenzo.”

“Did you talk to her?”

Cy shook his head. “Maybe I should have. But I talked to the husband. His office reminded me of this room.”

“How so?”

“The books. Maybe more than you have.”

“Well, after all, a professor. And what did you learn?”

“Fleck had got in touch with her, and she hadn't liked it at all. She refused to talk to him. Then he wrote her a letter. It looks as if he wasn't going to take no for an answer.”

“What was the question?”

Cy shrugged. “As I said, men in their forties get romantic. Maybe he thought things could be as they had been.”

“And she didn't.”

“You can see how that got my mind going. Here's a man who shows up after all these years to see a happily married woman and makes a pest of himself. She panics. He is a threat. Then someone jumps a curb and he dives through a window and ends up dead. Naturally, I wondered who was driving that car.”

“I can see that.”

“Well, it couldn't have been her. Or him, for that matter. Their car couldn't be more different from the one the witnesses described.”

“You checked it out?”

“Their car is a little compact. The vehicle that jumped the curb was an SUV. The Lorenzos have only the one car and don't use it much. Their life is pretty much lived on campus, and they can walk everywhere.”