Stained Glass by Ralph McInerny Page A

didn’t seem to think much of it, and Agnes had no authority in Skokie. Was she going to have to liase with the Skokie police, get a search warrant, all the rest? Apparently not. Mintz overcame his scruples.
    The blinds in the apartment were tipped, and the rooms were filled with a subdued light. Everything looked neat enough in a kind of haphazard way. It was the number of books that you couldn’t help but notice. Books on shelves in every room, books on the coffee table in the living room, books on the table beside the bed and on the floor as well. More books in a bookcase in there. Then there was the other bedroom, which served as a study. A desk, a computer on a separate stand, pieces of paper pinned up on the cork board over the desk, more books everywhere, and a neat stack of paper on the desk. Agnes bent to read the top sheet. Aurora from Photon. The Empyrean Chronicles, Volume Six. M. X. Schutz.
    â€œI told you she’s a writer,” Mintz said.
    â€œI know!”
    In the bookshelf in the study were rows and rows of chubby paperbacks with covers to knock your eyes out, volumes in the Empyrean Chronicles. On volume five was the boast “Over a Million Copies in Print.” Agnes made a note of the publisher, whose offices, surprisingly, were in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She left her card with Mintz.

    It was that card that had led the woman calling herself Madeline Schutz to Agnes’s office. “Mr. Mintz said that you have been making inquiries about me.”
    â€œYour name?”
    â€œMadeline Schutz.”
    Agnes could never be as phlegmatic as Cy—she wouldn’t want to be as phlegmatic as Cy—but she hadn’t risen screaming from her chair and called a cop. “From Skokie?”
    â€œEarl Mintz said he let you into my apartment.”
    Agnes took her off to the cafeteria for coffee and the reassuring presence of others. There she told the woman that they were investigating the murder of Madeline Schutz.
    Madeline’s head canted slightly to the right; the beginning of a smile played on her lips.
    Agnes gave her a sanitized version of the condition of the body “It’s in the morgue. I can show it to you.”
    A shudder. “But why would you think it’s me?”
    It was time to take her to Cy Horvath. On the way out, Agnes paused at Pippen’s table and said, “Doctor, this is Madeline Schutz.”
    â€œGet out of here.”
    â€œThe assistant coroner,” Agnes explained as they left.
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    Cy came along when they took Madeline Schutz to see Amy Gorman. The two women looked at each other, strangers.
    Amy listened to the explanation. “Then whose body was found in my garage?”
    So they were back where they had started, only now the investigation turned on a nameless victim.

11
    There was tension in the pressroom, and Tuttle became an infrequent presence. Tetzel had grown reluctant to pursue the church closings story, since this meant relinquishing the ritual killing of Madeline Schutz to Rebecca, his archrival. Menteur, good chauvinist as he normally was, favored Rebecca if only as a means of putting down Tetzel. Pure jealousy, of course. Menteur was presiding over the decline and fall of the Tribune , and there didn’t seem to be much that he or the publisher or anyone else could do about it. Menteur had a Luddite’s distrust of the paper’s Web site, which was getting more hits a day than there were subscribers to the print edition. Only an idiot could ignore the implications of that, and Menteur qualified. The irony was that Tetzel half shared the attitude of his despised boss. Of course he used a computer. Typewriters were as rare as Edsels now. Tetzel had one stashed in his closet among the shoes and had recently taken it out to revive the sense of satisfaction he had felt banging away at it, but it was slow and clumsy, and manually returning the carriage at the end of each line seemed unbelievably