The Prudence of the Flesh (6 page)

“Maybe I should have you find the woman he's interested in.”

“You haven't told me anything. So I was lucky to look through that brochure before throwing it out, but how can I be lucky if you don't tell me what or who we're after?”

Did she aspire to be one of the Tuttles in Tuttle & Tuttle? Hazel was what is sometimes called a lot of woman, having in abundance those traits that set the female of the species off from the male. Not a beauty by any means, she was a woman who had known disappointments in the romance department (“Don't ask”) but had yet
to throw in her cards and accept existence as a single. Tuttle had not often been the object of unmistakable advances from a female, but Hazel when the mood was on her could be blushingly direct. Only a lifetime of terror of such intimacy had enabled Tuttle to escape being taken into her arms and crushed against her enormous bosom. Still, the danger was always there—a danger magnified by the fact that he began to be curious about what it would be like to surrender. He had already surrendered his office to the woman, allowing her to nag him into a subsidiary position. Could he long resist Hazel the next time the fleshly desires were on her?

Now the softness had gone out of Tuttle's attitude toward her, though. She had made a fool of him, finding out all about his client by the simple expedient of reading her junk mail.

“It's a professional secret,” he said, and it sounded like a whimper.

Then she realized what she had done, and moved toward him with her chiseled face distorted by compassion. She had him by both wrists before he could escape. She pulled him closer, providing empirical verification that the female body is considerably different from the male.

“Did I hurt your feelings, Isaac?”

That did it. He wrested his wrists free, plucked his Irish tweed hat from its perch, and was out the door in a trice. Nobody called him Isaac and got away with it. He wasn't ashamed of the name, not at all, but he wanted to keep it sacred, a secret between him and his deceased parents, particularly his father. He had been kidded about it at school. In law school he used his initials, I. M., but since opening his office he had been simply Tuttle. Tuttle & Tuttle, the second for his father. Or was it the first? No need to distinguish between Abraham and Isaac Tuttle.

From his car, he called Peanuts, and they met at a new all-you-can-eat self-serve Chinese place. There was a flat fee, and one could load up one's plate as many times as one liked. Peanuts told this to Tuttle as they walked from their cars to the brightly painted storefront. The place was not crowded.

“We're early,” Peanuts explained.

“For what? It's going on noon.”

Peanuts ignored him. Maybe part of the attraction of the place was the fact that there were not a lot of people Peanuts had to elbow out of the way as he moved along the hot table, taking something of everything. Tuttle took some shrimp fried rice and a bowl of wonton soup.

Peanuts went back to the table three times before he acknowledged Tuttle's companionship. “What's wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing's wrong.”

“Something's wrong.”

“Peanuts, if something was wrong I'd tell you.”

“It's her, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Get rid of her.”

Did Peanuts have any idea of the human wear and tear firing someone exacted? Of course not. It was wrong to feed Peanuts's animosity against Hazel.

“You want me to take care of it?”

Good grief, what did Peanuts think they were talking about? Too late he remembered that, improbable as it was, Peanuts was a member of the locally famous Pianone family, for whom getting rid of someone might mean a one-way trip to the Fox River.

“No! She's really not that bad.”

“You act like it.”

“Just a bad day.”

“Sure. Want some more?”

And back for more food went Peanuts. In a way, what he had offered was a friendly gesture. To Tuttle, not to Hazel. Not for the first time, it occurred to Tuttle that Peanuts might be his best friend, and vice versa. Usually he thought Peanuts got the better of that deal, but not today.

“Peanuts, I meant that about Hazel.”

“Okay.”

“I mean I don't want to get rid of her.”

“You don't have to do nothing.”

He ended by pleading for Hazel's life, unsure how serious Peanuts was but not daring to find out. “You can do me a favor, though.”

“Name it.”

“I'll tell you on the way downtown.”

It was a long shot, but Tuttle wondered if there might be information on his client at police headquarters. Now that he knew who Gregory Barrett was, he was more than ever surprised at his coming to Tuttle for help. A man like that went to a lawyer like that, not to Tuttle. This suggested a concern of a kind that Barrett would not like to share with a more respectable attorney.

They commandeered an office with a computer and began to check the database. Peanuts could barely read, but he was a whiz with the computer. His fat little fingers flew over the keyboard, and on the screen data were displayed.

“Zilch.”

“It was just a hunch.”

“Wait.” Peanuts leaned toward the monitor, then tipped it toward Tuttle.

“Gregory Barrett,” Tuttle read. “Well, well.”

The name occurred in a list of local priests who had been accused of sexual misconduct. Priests? Barrett wasn't a priest—but there his name was, and the name of the woman he had hired Tuttle to find all about: Madeline Murphy. He seemed to have found the reason Gregory Barrett had chosen Tuttle & Tuttle of all the other law firms around.

Gloria Daley had begun painting when she gave up on ever learning how to draw. Color was her strong point anyway. She dabbled a bit in watercolors but was always afraid to use plenty of water. Oils were all right, but acrylics became her medium. Eventually the problem of what to do with all her pictures arose. She gave a lot away; she rented a booth at the Fox River art fair every spring and had actually sold a picture once. Some of them were on display at the Benjamin Harrison branch of the public library, where her friend Madeline worked. Her house was full of them, and it was a big test when she first asked Ned Bunting to her place.

“You're an artist!” he cried.

“Well, I paint a little.”

“A little? My God.” When he turned to her, his expression was one she hadn't seen before. Then he was gathering her into his arms.

“Does paint do that to you? Maybe I should dab a little behind my ears.”

“They're abstract, aren't they?”

“My ears?” She punched him. “How much do you know about art?”

“You are the first artist I've ever met.”

“Well, you're my first author. Come, let's get a beer.” She had to practically drag him into the kitchen, plunk him in the booth in her kitchenette, and hand him his beer. “I painted this room, too.”

He just looked at her, shaking his head back and forth, smiling. She figured at the most he was seven or eight years younger. At St. Bavo's, when he was the usher, she had followed him up and down the aisle with her eyes, trying to figure him out. She liked a tall man, but only if he used his height and didn't stoop, and Ned Bunting went back and forth like a sentinel.

The reason she had asked him over was to meet Madeline. If she had guessed what her paintings would do to Ned, she would have postponed the meeting.

“You have to be gentle with her, Ned. It will just come out. That's how she told me.”

Madeline Murphy was a woman of faded prettiness with blondish hair and a doelike wariness in her large brown eyes. She actually tipped her head back to look up at Ned when he held her hand in greeting.

“Ned is the writer I was telling you about, Maddie. He's writing a book about all these priests who, well, you know.”

“Oh, yes, I know.”

The first time was just a matter of getting acquainted. But
later they got down to business. Ned plugged in his cassette recorder, so he wouldn't have to recharge the batteries. Madeline looked at the machine he had put on the coffee table as if she were afraid of it. She looked away. “Is that new?” She was pointing at an unframed canvas propped against the fireplace tools.

“Do you like it?” Gloria asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“Wow, is this my day. You can have it, if you like.”

“Oh, I couldn't.”

Ned turned off the recorder; no need to waste tape on this. Maybe it wasn't a good idea having Gloria here when he interviewed Madeline.

“All you have to do is talk the way you did before when you told me all those things that happened so long ago,” Gloria said to her friend.

“That I had forgotten. I repressed my memories.”

Ned said, “How did they come back?”

Gloria answered. “We were talking about an article on the priest scandal, and about how some women, and men, remembered after many, many years things that had been done to them. Psychological explanations were given, don't ask me what. Anyway, suddenly Maddie just burst out crying.”

“The floodgates opened, and I remembered. A little at first, then more and more.”

It seemed to help that she could tell it all again to Gloria. Once she started, she didn't need much prompting from anyone. She seemed reluctant to pause when he turned over the cassette, and then she was off again.

Ned Bunting felt like Norman Mailer with all those tapes on which to base
The Executioner's Song.
How could he miss? This
story could literally write itself. What else was
In Cold Blood,
literary granddaddy of reality as fiction? Faction. Ned Bunting would be the amanuensis of the victims of priestly predators. Gloria squeezed his arm three times during that sentence and gave him a hug when he was done.

“Logorrhea,” he said diffidently.

“I always take paregoric.”

When did he first see the personal connection with Gregory Barrett? Maybe he had tried to suppress that memory. The suggestion made Madeline Murphy's story seem less implausible. Ned had sent Barrett one of his stories after a program on Malamud, advising that if he liked Malamud he would like the enclosed. No response. Then there was a program on J. F. Powers. Ned had a story on parish bingo that owed a lot to St. Bavo's. He was sure it was his best to date. From Barrett he got a printed slip: We are not a publisher; we do not read unsolicited manuscripts. A variation on the printed slips Ned had been collecting for years. It was the handwritten addendum that made this one different. “Pretty bad.” An enmity was born.

Whereas previously Gregory Barrett had been a genial voice expressing a love of literature, now he was a pompous ass who seemed to think his shapeless thoughts on the things he read could be of interest to anyone other than his psychiatrist. Or words to that effect. Ned printed it out and sent it off to Barrett, then suppressed all memory of him. Who cared about Barrett's opinion? Ned had been rejected by experts.

He filled two whole cassettes with Madeline's memories of then-Father Gregory Barrett. Madeline spoke in a dreamy voice, with her eyelids half closed, and a little smile that alternated
with the frown that brought her brows into a chevron over her cute little nose.

“I spoke to his wife.”

“Spoke to her?”

“I wanted to warn her. Imagine, being married to a man with that kind of past.”

“You don't have to mess up his life, his family, just because of what he did to you.” Even as he said it, he wanted it refuted.

“He denies anything happened.”

Ned would have liked to feel more sympathy with Madeline. Even if you accepted the memory recovery stuff, didn't that argue for the reverse as well, just shutting things out? Or was that the theory Madeline's case was based on? Things suddenly came back after many years had passed. Remembering memories.

“Well, what do you think?” Gloria asked when they were alone.

“She must have been better-looking at sixteen.”

“Oh, you.” A dig in the ribs. “You will write the book, won't you?”

He patted his tape recorder, as if in promise. What would she say if she knew he had never published a word?