Stained Glass by Ralph McInerny

place.
    â€œYou have lots of confessions?”
    â€œThey must go in the suburbs, Roger. I hope.”
    It was pretty clear that Our Lady was vulnerable. Roger suddenly had the thought that he and Sledz and the others were like those
pathetic figures who refuse to leave their homes when a freeway is scheduled to run through it and eminent domain invoked. There was something noble in such protests, not least because they were doomed to failure.
    The local story prompted by Bartelli and his group had contrasted the American situation with the European, where churches stood for centuries. A selective comparison. Many churches had been closed on the Continent. Of course the great historical cathedrals stood, but what had they become in too many instances? Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna had put it succinctly: Our churches have become museums and our museums have become churches. Of course, abbeys and convents and their churches had been knocked down under Henry and Elizabeth in England. “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet bird sang.”
    â€œWe have here no lasting city, Lad.”
    â€œRoger, if they close this place I am going to retire to Florida.”
    â€œI hope it doesn’t come to that.”

10
    Agnes brought the woman to Cy’s office, stood at her side and a little behind, and said, “This is Madeline Schutz, Lieutenant.”
    From anyone else south of the planet Pluto this would have gotten a theatrical reaction, but Cy simply looked at Agnes and at the woman. “Please sit down.”
    Just like that. For days they had been investigating the cruel death of Madeline Schutz, who had been cut down from a strut in
Amy Gorman’s garage, whose mutilated body had been clinically examined by Dr. Pippen in the morgue and whose antecedents Agnes had been assigned to check. This should have been easy. How many Madeline Schutzes are there? Two, as it happened. An elderly woman confined to her bed in a rest home in Shakopee, Minnesota, and the victim. Agnes had actually made the trip into darkest Minnesota—well, greenest Minnesota—and looked at the old woman, who might have been in this world but certainly wasn’t of it. This Madeline Schutz had spent her lifetime on a farm outside Shakopee, had buried her husband fifteen years ago, had lost both her sons in disputed foreign wars, and now sat in her bed with a vague smile as the nurse told Agnes about the bed’s occupant. Madeline had a sweet smile.
    The records in Shakopee were not computerized, and Agnes found checking out the woman in the rest home difficult. Harriet, an Afro-American who was really a minority in that town, came to her rescue, and between them they established that this Madeline Schutz had exhausted all her relations in this world. There were no bloodlines that had ever extended more than thirty miles in either direction from Shakopee, at least in the last hundred years. If there was any connection between this Madeline Schutz and theirs, it was known only to God. Agnes drove back to Chicago.
    â€œYou drove up there?” Captain Keegan asked.
    â€œIn my own car.”
    Keegan mastered his surprise and perhaps annoyance. “What did you find out?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œWell, that ought to help.”
    He wasn’t serious—about it not helping, that is. Most investigations are a matter of canceling out possible explanations. Their Madeline Schutz had lived in an apartment in Skokie, an apartment that was found locked and, of course, unoccupied. The manager of
the building, a little guy named Mintz, had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Not that he talked. He was rendered mute by Agnes’s questions, and his mouth seemed arrested in the act of trying to think of something to say.
    â€œWhat did she do?”
    â€œShe was a writer.”
    â€œLet me see her place.”
    â€œLet you into her apartment?”
    â€œYou can come with me.”
    Mintz thought about it. He