Death Goes on Retreat (9 page)

By way of blessing, the monsignor made a wide, airy sign of the cross over the food, which looked to the untrained eye as if he were shooing flies. “Benedic nos, domine . . .” Apparently distraught, he reverted to Latin.

After a ragged “Amen,” they began to pass plates in almost retreat silence. Lack of elbow room didn’t seem a problem since no one was doing much eating. More food was being shoved around the plates than was being shoved into mouths. Only Little seemed to have an appetite.

He broke his French bread. “Where are you folks from?” he began, as if they were all participants at a convention, meeting casually at the luncheon table.

One by one, he drew the priests into conversation. Soon they were all so relaxed that the monsignor—ostensibly
a suspect—not the detective, brought up the subject of murder.

“You know, Bob,” he began. (To Mary Helen’s amazement, they were now all calling him “Bob.”) The monsignor’s handsome face was stony and he played with his unused spoon. “I was wondering about the boy’s mother.”

“Do you know his mother?” Little seemed surprised.

“Yes, indeed. Marva Johnson. She’s one of my parishioners, so to speak. Actually, she lives way out on Geary, not far from the beach. St. Thomas’s parish. I was there, years ago, as an assistant pastor. When I was moved downtown to St. Patrick’s, she switched to that parish.”

“A groupie,” Ed Moreno quipped.

The monsignor’s blue eyes sparked and his cheeks flamed in an unexpected show of temper. Unexpected, that is, by Mary Helen.

“Sorry, Con,” Ed said quickly, “lousy timing.” Obviously, this side of the regal monsignor was well known to Father Moreno.

Clearing his throat, Monsignor McHugh continued. “Marva’s been a widow for years. She lives alone and her only other child, a daughter, moved with her family to Wenatchee.”

Little frowned.

“Washington,” the monsignor added, “where those red Delicious apples grow. The point I am making”— his sonorous voice rose—“is that in my opinion Marva should not receive this news over the phone. If someone could go personally to the house . . .”

Little looked sympathetic. “Gee, I don’t know, Monsignor,” he said in a deceptively bungling way. “I was
going to notify the next of kin right after we’d finished here.”

“You haven’t called his mother yet?” Young Mike Denski looked stricken. Obviously, if he were dead, he’d want his mother to be the first to know.

“I didn’t even know he had a mother yet. A living mother, that is,” Little answered patiently.

“Where on Geary does she live?” Eileen, who was being uncustomarily quiet during the meal, perked up. No doubt she had a plan.

As soon as the monsignor gave the address, Mary Helen knew what it was. Marva Johnson lived very close to Kate Murphy. Kate, a San Francisco homicide inspector, was an alumna of Mount St. Francis College and a close friend of the two nuns. Over the years, Mary Helen’s unfortunate stumbles into murder had really cemented that friendship.

Eileen was right. Kate was a good one to break the news to the poor woman, if there was such a thing as a good one to deliver bad news.

“We have a friend in homicide with the San Francisco Police Department,” Eileen began. Mary Helen wondered what the detective’s reaction would be. Little listened with interest. If he was surprised, it didn’t show.

“She lives on Geary too,” Eileen continued. “Quite close to Mrs. Johnson, actually. Maybe if you called Kate Murphy, Detective Sergeant, she could go to the woman’s home. They may even know one another.”

“If you ask me, that’s the perfect solution.” Andy Carr spoke up. Of course, no one had asked him, but as chaplain to the Police Department, he must have felt that the decision was his business.

Little seemed to be considering Eileen’s suggestion. “Let me think about it,” he said, and everyone, including the monsignor, seemed satisfied to wait.

The food was passed around the table a second time and appetites and conversation both began to pick up. Even Beverly let down some of her guard. One of Eileen’s “old sayings from back home” came to Mary Helen. “Men are like bagpipes. No sound comes from them till they’re full.” At this table it was certainly proving true.

Helping himself to more spaghetti, although Mary Helen wondered how he could eat another bite, Ed Moreno told his latest Hillary Rodham Clinton joke. The men laughed uproariously and Mary Helen managed an indulgent smile. If the truth were known, she thought that Hillary jokes were wearing very thin.

Adroitly, Little won their confidence, put them at ease, and knocked down any barriers they might have to being interviewed. Mary Helen would lay odds that this detective with his deceivingly boyish grin was one of the Sheriff’s Department’s leading homicide investigators. He wore the air of a natural confidant, a talent that defied logical explanation, even hers.

On the other hand, his partner, Kemp, did not have such luck. He sat stiffly. Mary Helen watched his cobalt eyes sweep over the priests like searchlights. It was absurd, almost blasphemous, to think that he suspected one of these men. They were upright men, dedicated men, good and holy men.

The monsignor had spent a lifetime of service in the Church. Ed Moreno, quick-witted and always ready for a joke, used his humor to brighten the lives of those of
God’s children who had ended up in jail. Tom Harrington, with his trademark crooked smile and that soothing voice, adroitly spread the Gospel message of love and forgiveness. His radio and television shows went out to literally thousands of listeners and viewers all over the country. Most of them received peace and consolation from his words.

Then there was Andy Carr, whose zeal impelled him always to be available for a chaplaincy. Mary Helen wondered if sometimes, late at night, he lay awake, fed up with the entire bunch of organizations he served, and imagined himself free of them all. Mike Denski, with his whole life before him, had solemnly and generously offered it to God’s service.

It was outrageous to imagine one of them as a murderer, yet she was unable to shake Beverly’s earlier taunt. “I wonder which one of you did it? You were the only ones here.”

After all, they were all human. Under pressure, the monsignor had shown his hair-trigger temper. Tom was a bit too showy and glib to be completely genuine; Andy, too eager to please. Mike had all the earmarks of a mama’s boy, and funnyman Ed would be a psychologist’s delight. Did he use humor to cover his real emotions?

None of them was perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but—murderers? “Corruptio optima pessima,” St. Thomas Aquinas had declared centuries ago. “The best things corrupted become the worst.” And no one had yet proved him wrong, Mary Helen thought gloomily.

Looking toward Eileen, she wondered what her friend
was thinking. At the moment, Eileen was preoccupied with wiping spaghetti sauce off her chin.

Without warning, the door to St. Jude’s banged as if pulled by a fierce wind. All heads turned toward the entrance where Laura Purcell stood frozen.

Her auburn hair billowed wildly around her face, which was as white as the shorts and halter top she was wearing. Her eyes were wide.

“Sorry, Sergeant.” A red-faced Deputy Foster appeared behind her. “I told her no one was allowed in the crime scene, but while I was explaining that to the occupants of the next vehicle, she jumped out of her car and ran by me.”

Little raised one large hand to the deputy, dismissing the slip up as unavoidable. Foster relaxed. “This is one popular place,” the deputy said, truly amazed. “I had to turn back at least twenty cars already this morning. Seems they came for a retreat, whatever the heck that is.”

Before Detective Sergeant Little could comment, Laura was across the room.

“What happened?” she asked with a breathlessness that sounded as if, indeed, she had been running.

“First, ma’am, may I ask your name?”

Laura told him. “I used to be the dishwasher here,” she said, and threw her arms around the unsuspecting Felicita. “Sister”—her voice was almost a sob—“I was so afraid something had happened to you.”

Felicita, cheeks flaming, straightened her rimless glasses. “Thank you, dear.” She patted the young woman’s hand. “I am just fine.”

“Who is it, then?” Laura’s glance shot around the
table. Although it didn’t seem possible, her face lost more of its color. “Is it one of the retreatants?” she asked.

In the empty silence that followed, Mary Helen wondered who should, who would, answer her question.

Beverly narrowed her eyes and Mary Helen could almost hear the wheels of cruelty turning behind her stare. Detective Sergeant Little must have recognized it too.

Unfolding himself from his chair, he took a deep breath and put his arm around the girl’s shoulder. Reassuringly, he walked her out of St. Jude’s.

Laura’s screams reverberated down the mountainside. Mary Helen shivered. Like the keening of a banshee outside the door, she thought, letting us know that death has visited the house and that Detective Sergeant Little has just broken the news.

Inspector Kate Murphy slammed the car door, covered her ears with her coat collar, and waited for her partner, Dennis Gallagher, to come around from the driver’s side. She was freezing. A thick, drizzly fog covered Geary Boulevard all the way from 25th Avenue to the beach. Everything was wet and dark.

It was only two-thirty in the afternoon and already lights shone in windows on both sides of the wide street. The houses with no lights probably had nobody home. A perfect giveaway for after-school burglars, Kate thought, stamping her feet to keep warm.

The two homicide inspectors had left the Hall of Justice in downtown San Francisco, where a weak summer
sun had managed finally to burn off the fog. They had driven out into this pea soup and on the way Kate had tried to explain their mission to her partner.

“Detective Sergeant Bob Little from the Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Department called,” she said.

“Called you? Why would he call you?”

“That’s what I’m trying to explain,” Kate snapped. This task was going to be difficult enough without getting the needle from Denny.

“Just asking, Katie-girl. No need to bite my head off.”

“Sorry,” she said, and she was. It was not his fault that she found herself in this predicament. “A young man by the name of Gregory Johnson was found murdered in Little’s jurisdiction. It so happens that his mother lives on Geary, very near my house. Little asked if I’d do him a favor and go over and break the news to her in person. It’s not the sort of thing a mother wants to hear over the phone.”

Or at all, Kate thought, wondering just how she could bear it if someone came to tell her that her son, John, was dead. The very idea catapulted her stomach into a spasm.

She had been teary for three full days after she took him to the baby-sitter for the first time. Her decision to go back to work was an agonizing one, but one she felt was right for all of them. Once it was made, she wrestled for weeks with child care. Her mother-in-law was still a little cool about her choice of Sheila Atkinson. But Kate felt that Sheila was best for John. She was an old friend. John liked her and enjoyed playing with her children. Plus, they lived only a few blocks away. Kate knew that
her tears were ridiculous, but she had shed them nonetheless.

Even now, eight months later, she still felt a pang when she dropped him off. Perhaps the cruelest blow of all was that John enjoyed being there. Each morning, he threw her the briefest bye-bye kiss and ran cheerfully down the front walk to Sheila’s without ever looking back.

“Do you know the Johnson woman?” Gallagher interrupted her woolgathering.

“I don’t really know her,” Kate admitted. “I know who she is and when we meet in the Safeway or at the cleaner’s, we say ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ She’s lived in that pink house up the block forever. In fact, my father used to call it the ‘pink palace.’ Maybe because it’s two stories high and painted what he considered an odd color for a house.

“Anyway, I’ve seen Marva Johnson around the neighborhood since I was a kid. As far as I can remember, there never was a mister. Only the two kids, Janice and Greg. Both went to St. Thomas grade school, although neither one was in my class. Both are younger than I am.”

Kate was going to say “much younger,” but maybe that wasn’t true. When you are in elementary school, the age difference between first-graders and eighth-graders is light-years. Somehow, when you’re twenty-nine and thirty-six, the difference doesn’t loom as large.

Gallagher turned his head to peer at her over his horn-rimmed glasses.

“What is it?” Kate wished he’d keep his eyes on the traffic.

“Do you know this Little?” he asked, running the light on yellow.

Kate shook her head.

“Then, this guy has got to be the luckiest damn cop in Santa Cruz—no—in the whole state of California. Or maybe he’s one of them psychics. Don’t they have a lot of psychic types over there in Santa Cruz? I mean, Kate, if you don’t know each other, how in the hell did he manage to pick you out of all the cops in San Francisco to call? How did he manage to hit on a neighbor of the victim’s mother to ask to do this particular favor?”