Cecilian Vespers (36 page)

“So then you did the cleanup job.”

“What are you looking at me like that for?” His voice was suddenly too loud for the room. “What would you do if you’d been in my place, Collins?”

“I wouldn’t have kept the murder weapon in the house, Bill.”

“It’s not the murder weapon!!”

“Which one?”

“What? Neither of them!”

“Then you had nothing to hide.”

“I did if somebody came in trying to frame me!”

“Who do you think is trying to frame you?”

“I have my suspicions.” “Obviously. Who?”

“That commie!”

“Bleier?”

“Of course Bleier! How many other commies do you know?”

“Well, my father-in-law for one. And there’s my buddy Miguel; I was at a party at his place recently. He’s the current leader of the Communist Party of Canada, and —”

“You can’t be serious!” He looked as if Beelzebub had materialized before his eyes. “These people are communists and you know them?”

“You have to get out more, Bill. Anyway, you were talking about Bleier.”

“Yeah, a cop from Communist East Berlin! Don’t tell me the Folks Police or whatever they called themselves didn’t work hand in hand with the secret police.”

“I’m sure they did, before the Berlin Wall came down. But how does this relate to Schellenberg’s murder? And to you?”

“Why is Bleier here, Collins?”

“Good question. Why do you think he’s here?”

“To murder Schellenberg and then pin it on an American? Could that be why an atheist from an Iron Curtain country suddenly shows up in Canada at a Catholic choir school?”

“Why do you think he’s framing you in particular?”

“Why not? I’m an American. I’m the enemy.”

“You’re not the only American here. Why you?”

“Besides the fact that he knows I’m on to him and I call him on his bullshit every chance I get? He knows I wasn’t out of town on that bus tour when the murder happened. Convenient for him.”

“Where were you that day, Bill?”

“I’ve already answered that question, and I don’t feel like answering it again. Okay? It’s pretty bad when you believe him over me. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given the company you keep.”

“I never said I believed Bleier. Do the police know you wiped down the two axes?”

“Not unless they were assisted by Bubbles, the detergent-sniffing dog.”

There was no sign of Kurt Bleier at the schola. I remembered seeing an announcement of a speaker on Polish Catholicism, and I thought perhaps his wife would be in attendance for that one. I went back to work, then returned to the school a few minutes before the lecture, and caught my first glimpse of Jadwiga Silkowski. She had a handsome Slavic face; her salt and pepper hair was done up in a French twist, and she had black-rimmed glasses on a chain. She skipped up the steps of the building and went inside. Her husband followed at an unhurried pace.

“Colonel Bleier,” I said.

It had started to rain. January in Halifax: it may snow, it may rain, it may do both.

“Mr. Collins. Montague. No questions for me today, I hope.”

“Let’s step inside.” We entered the building and positioned ourselves off to the side of the entrance. I looked him in the eye. “What were you doing at the Logans’ place last Thursday night?”

Not a muscle in his face or body moved. But his mind was working furiously. I could almost feel the concentration of energy. I of course wasn’t certain he had gone out there. But he didn’t know that. A trained interrogator like Bleier knew how counterproductive it could be to lie about something the questioner might already know.

“I was trying to find evidence.”

“Against Logan.”

“Yes. Evidence that your police have failed to unearth.”

“They have a suspect on psychiatric remand.”

“They have the Englishman. I think they should be looking elsewhere.”

“You realize that if our police find out you broke into a dwelling house, you could be facing a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.”

“You’re a lawyer, Montague. I’m a policeman. You and I both know
the crime is break and enter with intent to commit an indictable offence. I had no such intent, I committed no such offence. I did no damage, committed no theft.” He was no fool and he was right, for the most part. The law
presumes
a criminal intent in the absence of evidence to the contrary, but maybe the German cop would be able to raise a reasonable doubt and beat the rap. I let it go.

“Logan knows it was you,” I said, and let it sink in for a moment. “He thinks you were trying to frame him for the murder.”

“I believe there is evidence, somewhere, of his guilt.”

“You’re telling me you truly believe Logan killed Schellenberg.”

“I do.”

“Why Logan?”

“I think the man is unstable.”

“And the Englishman isn’t?”

“Logan flies into a rage with the slightest provocation. He bears ill will to a number of people in the Roman Catholic Church. Schellenberg was receiving threats —”

“How do you know that?”

“We have — our police force has information about these threats. At least one of them came from America at a time when Schellenberg was planning a trip to the United States. He cancelled the trip.”

“Because of the threat.”

“Correct.”

“Why didn’t you share this information before?” He didn’t answer. A novel and unwelcome experience for a career policeman, being on the other end of an interrogation. “What else can you tell me about Schellenberg?”

“Nothing. Let us return to Logan. Of all the people here, of all those who cannot give an account of themselves for the time of death, Logan is the one I suspect.”

“He suspects you.”

“No. He does not. He pretends to suspect me to divert attention from himself. When I went out there —”

“How did you get there?”

“It is a simple matter to rent a car and read a map. I intended only to look around in the garden shed.”

“How did you know there was a shed?”

“I knew. I hoped it was not locked. But it was, and so I picked open the lock. Did no damage. I did not see anything of interest to me in the shed. There was no one about, so I decided to enter the basement.”

“You’re a pretty skilled man with a lock.” “One learns things over the course of one’s career. I went into the basement and looked around. I saw a small axe and then a larger one. I took them down from the wall to examine them, to photograph them. I took two photographs, then I heard a sound, so I left them on the work table and got out.”

“Where are the photos?”

“I have them.”

“Do they show anything on the axes?”

“I could not see anything.”

“Logan wiped them off.”

“The action of a guilty man.”

“He wiped them after the break-in, not before.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me.”

“And you believe him.”

“You want me to believe
you
. Logan claims you went out there to plant evidence, that you might have put blood or something on one of the axes.”

“Whose blood?”

“Well, it wouldn’t work unless it was the victim’s blood, would it?”

“Where would I get Schellenberg’s blood?”

“From the real murder weapon?”

“You are reaching, Montague. You have no grounds for suspecting me.”

“I wouldn’t say that, Kurt. But I’ll be off now. You and Logan have given me a lot to think about.”

“And so, my Lord, the defendant submits that the plaintiff is a crumbling skull plaintiff and not a thin skull —”

“What are you
saying
, Montague?”

I turned off my dictaphone and looked up. Brennan was standing in the doorway of my office late Monday afternoon, staring at me as if I were a witch doctor.

“Sit down, Brennan. In tort law,” I explained, using the tone of voice he himself used when instructing those who just will not catch on, “a thin skull plaintiff is someone with an underlying condition or weakness that becomes manifest only after his new injury. If he has degenerative changes in his spine or is emotionally unable to deal with adversity, and his reaction to the injury is worse than another person’s would be, too bad for the defendant. We have to take the plaintiff as we find him. But if the person already has symptoms from his underlying condition, that means he would have had problems even without the accident, and so we only pay for the portion of the damage we caused. His skull was already crumbling, so to speak. Crumbling skull plaintiff. Thus endeth the lesson.”

“A lesson I’m not likely to forget.”

“Good man. Now, what can I do for you today?”

“I just took a stroll over to see if we could sit down and talk about grisly death scenes. But, hearing all this about crumbling skulls, I’m not so sure I’ll be able for it.”

“Sure you will. Give me an hour and come back. I’ve got a trial starting on Thursday, a medical negligence case. So I have to get some other stuff cleared away. Like this file, a minor claim. Somebody looking for ‘monetary bandages,’ if you know what I mean. I’ll meet you downstairs at six-thirty.”

I finished my work and met Brennan on Barrington Street outside my building.

“I thought we might talk about the sanctified again,” he said. “And how they died. I can’t escape the notion that there’s a connection between the murder and one or more of the saints.”

“If you had told me a year ago, Brennan, that I’d be looking to the dead heroes of the Catholic Church for clues to a murder, I’d have thought you’d gone simple.”

“No, no, just stepping back and forth between one world and another. Nothing to it.”

“If you say so. Anyway, what we should be looking for is a depiction of their death scenes.”

“I asked Mike, but all he has is Butler’s
Lives of the Saints
, which, as you saw, is not illustrated. The information is out there if we need it; we’ll just have to do some digging.”

“Well, I do have somebody on the case. I asked Normie to look through her collection of holy cards to see if she has any of the people we’re interested in. She’ll be home from school by now. Maybe it’s time to ask for her report.”

“Let’s hope the death scenes aren’t shown in any detail! You wouldn’t want the child seeing that.”

“They’re holy cards, Brennan. Not slasher films.”

So we walked to my car and drove to Dresden Row, where Tom and Normie were just finishing a meal of spaghetti and meatballs, and butterscotch pie for dessert.

“Evening, Stormie. Mr. Douglas.”

“Hi, Father.”

“Where’d you get the pie?” I asked, ogling it. “Mummy bought it,” Normie answered.

“Can we have some?”

“Okay, but if you take the last piece you have to buy a new one. I didn’t mean you, Father Burke!”

“Why not him?” I demanded. “I’m giving him the smaller piece, then.” I cut modest slices for myself and Brennan.

“Where’s Mum?”

“At Fanny’s with the baby.”

Tom asked: “Are you guys going to be here for a while? If I can have the car, I can go get Lexie and bring her over.”

“Sure. Go ahead, Tommy.”

I handed him my keys, and he took off.

“Okay, Normie. Time to get to work. We need the results of your research.”

“It’s all done! I have cards for some of the ones you asked for!”

“Great. Let’s move into the dining room. Put your cards on the table.”

She pounded up the stairs to her room, ransacked the place by the sounds of it, then came flying down the stairs and didn’t stop till she hit the dining room table. Her cards were clutched in her fist. Seeing her with them reminded me: I had not yet taken my film in to be
developed. I wanted the photo of the Angelicum for her T-shirt. I made a mental note to get it done. She put the cards on the table in a pack, then squinted at the one on top.

“Where are your glasses?”

“I don’t know.

I don’t need them.” This battle had been going on for five years, but now was not the time for fresh hostilities, so I let it go.

“All right. What did you find?”

“Saint Joan of Arc.”

“The saint beloved of Jan Ford,” I noted for the record. “Saint Joan led the French army in all kinds of battles and did a really good job. Then she was captured and they said she was bad and burned her to death! They said she was a heretic. That means somebody who’s not a good Catholic. But they found out it wasn’t true and she was really a saint.” The card showed the maiden warrior in armour; fortunately, she was not depicted going up in flames.

“Who else have you got, Normie?”

“You wanted Saint Clare; I have two Clares!”

“Brilliant!” Brennan exclaimed. “Lou Petrucci rescued the statue of a Saint Clare, Santa Chiara, from the modernized church in New Jersey. Before he set fire to it. Give us your Clares.”

“Clare of Rimini and Clare of Assisi. The Rimini one was dis-solute,” my daughter said. “Dissolute?” She stumbled over the word, then looked up at me. “What’s that mean?”

“She probably partied a lot.”

She turned to her priest. “It was a sin to go to parties back in the thirteen hundreds?”

“Em, well, there’s partying, and then there’s
partying
.”

She waited for enlightenment but none was forthcoming, so she went back to her card. “She enjoyed
sinful pleasures
, it says here. Then she stopped sinning and opened a convent. And it says —” she bent over until her face was about eight inches from the card. “‘She practised penances that would have been thought extreme even in medieval times.’ What do they mean by that?”

“I have no idea,” Burke lied.

“Okay.”

“How did she die?”

“Of natural causes,” Normie read from the card.

“Or unnatural penitential practices,” the priest muttered.

“What does ‘natural causes’ mean?”

“It means nobody killed her,” I replied.

“But you want someone to kill her, right?”

“Well, that’s probably what we’re looking for.” “Let’s see,” Burke said, peering at the card. “Oh, this Clare has been beatified, but not canonized. So she’s called ‘blessed,’ not ‘saint.’ Who’s the other Clare?”

“Saint Clare of Assisi,” Normie answered and showed us the card. The saint was pictured in the brown and black habit of a nun. “She liked music. She was born rich, but started a group called the Poor Clares. Natural causes again,” she said with disgust, and pushed the card away.