Pious Deception (6 page)

“What are you doing here?” she’d demanded. “You told me you’d be in Acapulco, windsurfing. You’d planned it for months.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Changed—”

“Forget that, Aunt Sylvia. That’s not the problem.” Then he had told her about Vanderhooven’s body, Dowd’s detective, and the death certificate he had signed twenty-four hours earlier.

It was now 4:54
A.M.

“How
could
you be so
stupid?”
she yelled at him, for once unmoved by his handsome face.

“What else could I do? Austin was my friend, I couldn’t tell the world that he’d been found, er”—Elias dropped his gaze—“unzipped, in the church. People would never forget that.”

He wasn’t lying about his concern for his friend Austin. He was loyal, her nephew, sometimes too loyal, and he had come to like the priest. But that was beside the point. “This could mean your medical career, Elias, the career I’ve sacrificed my life to pay for. With the money I spent on your education, I could have bought—no, not bought,
designed
and
built
—a house by Encanto Park, instead of living here in an apartment someone else slapped together.”

With a small grin playing under his dark mustache, Dr. Elias Necri looked around the condominium living room, his gaze resting on the handcrafted coffee table, the twelve-by-eighteen Navaho rug she had commissioned, the framed photo of her group of young architects with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen West. He stared at the window that overlooked Central Avenue, center of Phoenix’s banking and government. “You’re not living in poverty, Aunt Sylvia.”

“Stop it!” she snapped. “Don’t you tell me that because we were raised poor we should be satisfied with crumbs now. You of all people!” She stared at her nephew, fighting even now the allure of his deep, dark eyes, that earnest, hurt, little-boy look. “What else, Elias? You don’t endanger your entire career to protect someone’s memory.”

“Aunt Sylvia, Austin was my friend. We jogged together three days a week.”

“Don’t fool yourself. You were his friend because I asked you to be his friend. How many weeks did you go panting around the streets at dawn so you could run fast enough to keep up with him, so you could
happen
to run into him and suggest you jog together? You’ve always been a liar, Elias—”

“Aunt Sylvia!”

“Don’t look so shocked. Even as a toddler you lied.” Her voice softened. “It was cute then; you were so transparent. Your mother threatened to beat it out of you; it was I who protected you. You fooled her; you fooled them all, but not me.” She tried to read his face, so handsome despite the reddened eyes, the nascent lines of tension, but she couldn’t quite get her bearings. She had always been able to read him; the sharpness of his mind had been no hindrance to her. It was only recently that she had been less aware of his dissembling, and more recently that the startling thought occurred that perhaps Elias had learned to deceive her, too. There had been other things like this supposed trip to Acapulco. Pushing that from her mind, she reiterated, “No one knows you like I do. What is it that could make you falsify a death certificate? What did you say on it?”

“Heart failure,” he muttered.

“Heart failure,” she shouted. “Heart failure! Austin has rope marks on his neck and you say he died of heart failure! An altar boy wouldn’t believe that!”

“Aunt Sylvia, what could I say? If I’d said asphyxia, the sheriff would have demanded an autopsy. The sheriff checks all the death certificates.” He took a final swallow of his drink. Bourbon, bourbon she kept for his visits. Then raising an eyebrow in question—the boy never forgot his manners; it was part of his charm—he walked to the liquor cabinet.

“You could have said no, Elias.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Why not?

“Bishop Dowd insisted. He was beside himself with panic, terrified that word would get out. When I told him I’d have to do a death certificate he turned the color of … this.” Elias scanned the liquor cabinet and scooped up a milk-glass bottle. “He said, ‘Don’t let on about this’—the way Austin died. I asked what he expected me to do. He just repeated, ‘Don’t let on about this.’ ”

“So he didn’t specifically tell you to falsify the death certificate.”

“Well, no.” Elias turned and replaced the bottle. “He was in too much of a frenzy to think that clearly. I don’t know how he’s going to get through this.”

“Bishop Dowd can look out for himself.
Believe
me, Elias, I’ve known the man for years. He’s not the one who stands to lose his career.”

“He won’t be thrown into the poorhouse, if that’s what you mean.” Elias hesitated, then sat on the pale leather sofa, patting the cushion beside him in invitation.

She didn’t move.

He sighed. “Aunt Sylvia, if I had said Austin was asphyxiated, the coroner would be looking at his body right now. There’d be a scandal. Dowd would never get to be archbishop. He wouldn’t even remain in charge of Mission San Leo. A scandal would dredge up everything. It would ruin his chances. And ours.”

Under his trimmed mustache, his lip quivered infinitesimally. “And?” she prodded.

His shoulders slumped; his head dropped, and a lock of thick, wavy hair flopped over his forehead.

Again she resisted the urge to go to him. “Elias, I don’t have all night.”

Looking up, he said, “Okay, okay. If I hadn’t signed that certificate, Dowd would have fired me. My job with the archdiocese is three-fourths of my income. I can’t afford to lose that business, or Dowd’s friendship. You, of all people, should know that. I have my mortgage, the payments on the boat, the car, the country club, the golf club, and the Rotary, and all those organizations I have to belong to. You know, Aunt Sylvia, you can only be up-and-coming so long. If I don’t make it now, in five years it’ll be too late. I can’t hang around till
I’m
fifty-two waiting for my ship to come in.”

Sylvia fought to keep the signs of fury off her face. Never before had the boy stung her like that. She
had
waited too long before she made her move.

Fifty-two, and not one notable commission. She’d assumed competence would be rewarded, because she worked harder than the men around her, because she could be counted on. She’d been a fool. It had taken her nearly thirty years to realize it. And it had taken the boy, what? Three? Or maybe he’d always known. She said, “And?”

Elias flushed again. “I was his friend, Aunt Sylvia, his best friend.” He dropped his gaze. Almost in a whisper he added, “If he died like that, what would people think of me?”

“Forget ‘people,’ Elias. The only person you need to worry about is right here. I asked one thing of you, and you didn’t do it.”

He glared at her. “What do you mean? I ran fifteen miles a week. I listened to Austin carry on about his goddamned church, about the bishop, about Beth and the blowout they had when he dropped it on her that he was going to throw her out. If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have known anything had changed. You would have sailed along blindly.”

“But you didn’t get me the one thing I need, did you, Elias? And when you were at the church, falsifying the death certificate—instead of windsurfing in Acapulco, like you told me—did you think to have a look in Austin’s rooms?”

“The bishop was right there. What was I going to say? ‘Excuse me, Bishop, let me root through Austin’s things before I go?’ ”

Sylvia Necri turned to face the picture window. To the east the sun was rising over Camelback Mountain, coming up over the house of her up-and-coming nephew. It wasn’t unusual for her to be awake at dawn. Seeing the clear yellow sun rise in the cloudless sky, so absolute, so perfect in its form, its presentation, renewed her will to face the duplicity everywhere beneath it. But today, though the sun peeked coquettishly over the hump of Camelback, it did not entrance her. She spun to face her nephew. “Elias, we have too much involved to stand back and wait to see what Dowd’s detective turns up. She has to be stopped. You have to get me what I need. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said with a determination she had never heard in his voice, “I understand completely.”

K
IERNAN LEANED BACK IN
the metal chair. At ten
A.M.
it was almost too hot to sit outside, even under the restaurant awning. There was an otherworldly quality to this desert city. Despite the carefully nurtured lawns and lakes in development after development and the fountains downtown, it had a space station look. In mid-morning not one person walked along the sidewalk or crossed the street. People were encapsulated in cars or, in the case of this restaurant Stu Wiggins had chosen, behind the plate-glass windows in the air-conditioned interior. “No one else’ll chance the patio,” Stu Wiggins had assured her as he settled into the chair by the street. “It’ll be as private as a conference room.” Although Wiggins had had breakfast with some other lawyers three hours ago at seven, he had managed to down two blueberry muffins and half the bacon on Kiernan’s plate.

Wiggins had been a courthouse fixture for nearly forty years. “Saf” Wiggins, his cronies called him, the master of “slip and fall” cases. “Tell you what they say about me,” Wiggins had announced after closing the first of the two other cases he’d done with Kiernan in Phoenix. “The produce manager in the Hi-Qual market goes on break; a gal he fired comes by the plums and plops one on the floor; a man slips on the plum, and before his knee hits the floor, Stu Wiggins is there.” He’d thrown back his head and laughed. “I’m not that fast anymore. But the way I figure is people’ve got a responsibility to their neighbors. My job is to remind them of that. Getting paid on contingency keeps me honest. And it gives me time off to hire out on cases like yours.”

She could picture him in court—a wiry sun-weathered man in a tan suit, tails of a bolo tie splaying out over a budding beer belly, spindly legs so bowed that she could almost see the overstretched external lateral ligaments on the outside of his knees. Before the judge he’d describe the chain of causation between the untended Hi-Qual produce counter and the broken kneecap. Then he’d slouch into the chair beside the crutch-laden plum victim, head thrust forward as if to ferret out the judge’s reaction precious seconds before the judge announced it.

For Kiernan, Wiggins served a double purpose. Wiggins had the reputation, according to Sam Chase, of knowing all there was to know about everyone worth knowing about in Maricopa County. What facts he didn’t possess he’d make it his business to get. And, although he assisted her on cases, their contract stated that it was she who worked for him, the lawyer; for an out-of-state investigator, that provided an element of legitimacy.

A truck rattled by, sending a gush of hot dusty exhaust across the patio. Aversion to heat was apparently not the only reason Phoenicians steered clear of the patio, Kiernan thought.

Before she could mention that, Wiggins helped himself to her last piece of bacon and said, “So, Kerry, what kind of pretzel positions did you get yourself into this morning?”

No one outside her family had ever called her Kerry, and even the family had stopped doing so, as if by unspoken accord, after Moira’s death. But despite the fact that she had worked with Wiggins for less than three weeks altogether over the last three years, coming from him, the nickname seemed right. She smiled at him. “I did back flips, Stu, twenty of them—backbend to handstand to forward bend.
Viparita Chakrasana,
the Wheel, the yogis call it. I figured I’d need all the energy I could get today.”

“So that’s why you always want a ground-floor room, because you’re banging around doing your gym stuff?”

“Sometimes when I’m in really good shape, I get an upstairs room and see if I can do it without disturbing the people below. But I’ve been known to misjudge.” She laughed.

A heavily loaded pickup made its way up the street. The driver’s weathered skin and the sand-worn finish of his truck marked them both as desert dwellers. A rusted bumper dangled precariously from the bed, slipping with each movement. Ten yards past the patio it banged to the street.

Kiernan sat back and chewed thoughtfully on a blue corn muffin. “Did Austin Vanderhooven string himself up and die, intentionally or accidentally? Or did someone murder him? And if so, why would he be worth killing? If someone just wanted Vanderhooven dead, why kill him in church? It took time; it was hard; it was dangerous. Why this way?”

Wiggins lifted his chin in question.

“Okay,” Kiernan continued. “I asked myself what it accomplished. For one thing, silence. The church is trying their best to cover it up, and the parents certainly aren’t going to mention how he died.”

“Kerry, I don’t know a whole lot about young Vanderhooven, but I’ll tell you about Raymond Dowd. He looks like he spends his days sitting in the confession box—or don’t they use those anymore?—guzzling hooch, right? But he’s got a taste for money; plays golf with the Camelback set—for the most part that’s old money around here. And in a business where you don’t get promoted till someone dies, Dowd’s done right well. He’s gotten himself on a heap of boards and committees. He should be in solid. But there’s something not quite right about him. Bitter. Must have expected more. He came here from Boston, and the powers in the church here have never trusted the guy. It’s like they’re afraid one night he’ll gather up all those holy bones they keep in their altars and cart them back East.”

“But why?”

“That I don’t know. You let me check. The lawyer for the archdiocese is a buddy of mine.”

“They’re all buddies of yours, Stu.”

“You know how it is with us old boys, Kerry.” A grin crossed Wiggins’s thin leathery face.

Brakes screeched as the driver of a beige Cadillac came within inches of the fallen bumper. The big car bounced, and through its closed window Kiernan could see a white-haired woman jolt forward against her shoulder harness. In San Diego or San Francisco, Kiernan thought, all conversation would have stopped and people would have stared. But here there was no one on the sidewalk to do either. The streets were always empty.