Murder Among the Angels (18 page)

“This church is a replica of an early English Gothic church, which had a crypt where a relic of a saint was displayed. A throat bone, I believe it was. But, of course, we don’t believe in saints.”

Peter explained: “We don’t believe it’s desirable for personalities to be associated with our worship when our thoughts should be only of the Word, which is what we call the Bible. That’s also why we have no cross.”

Jerry nodded, then asked: “When was the last time you were down there?”

“Yesterday,” Peter replied.

“Yesterday!” Jerry exclaimed.

“Yeah. Yesterday. In the afternoon. Around four, I guess.” He looked over at the pastor. “John wanted me to see how many chairs there were. He thought the church might need to buy some more before the concert.”

The pastor nodded in confirmation. “We commandeered three or four dozen of them for use in Tina’s Kitchen,” he said. “It’s a meals program for the indigent that we started last year,” he explained.

“Was the skull there then?” Jerry asked.

“No,” Peter said.

“Then someone must have put the skull there sometime between four p.m. yesterday and nine a.m. this morning,” Jerry said. He addressed Peter: “Were you around much during that time?”

Peter shook his head. “I finished work at four-thirty, and then went up to Corinth. I was back by seven, but I just went to my rooms. I started work again at eight this morning, but that leaves a lot of time in between.”

“Did you see anyone unusual hanging around?”

He shook his head again. “But that doesn’t mean anything. I’m all over the place. Somebody could easily have slipped by me. Also, we have visitors here all the time for the tours. I did give a tour late in the afternoon: a middle-aged couple. Their names would be in the guest book.”

Jerry nodded. “And you, Reverend?” he asked, turning to the pastor, who toyed with his old-fashioned watch chain. “Did you see anyone unusual?”

“No,” he replied. “But the rectory’s out in back.”

Jerry nodded. “You mentioned a soup kitchen for the homeless …”

“We call it a meals program,” the pastor said. “I know it’s just a matter of semantics, but somehow it doesn’t sound as degrading.”

“Sorry,” Jerry said. “A meals program. Would you have been serving meals yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “We serve meals every day but Tuesday.”

“Would you be able to provide me with the names of the people who participate in the program?”

The pastor shook his head. “It’s not that kind of program,” he said. “People don’t sign up, they just come.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Jerry said.

“But Tina—she’s the woman who runs it, or, I should say, the saint who runs it—could probably give you a list of names. She knows most of the people who come personally. I’d like to say, however, that just because …”

Jerry raised a hand in protest. “I know what you’re going to say.”

The pastor looked at him in surprise.

Jerry continued: “Just because someone’s indigent doesn’t mean that person’s a murderer. I’m aware of that, Reverend Cornwall. But I have to start somewhere, and there’s a good chance that one of these people has a criminal record.”

But there wasn’t much chance that any of them would have known that Lily Louria had worn Muguet, Charlotte thought.

The pastor nodded, and then checked the pocket watch that was attached to his watch chain. “Tina should be here by now,” he said. “We can go over to the Parish Hall and talk with her if you like. It’s quite an experience.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tina is an original. We think of her as a benevolent dictator, who manages to keep our sometimes less than genteel crowd of patrons in line with little more than a stern glance,” he said. “She runs her kitchen with an iron fist.”

Peter stood up to go. “I was afraid I was going to miss my lunch.”

Led by the pastor, the four of them passed through the cloister into the Parish Hall, where they found Tina in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. She was a short black woman with gray hair covered by a baseball cap and a no-nonsense manner.

“What’s for dinner?” asked Peter, as he lifted the lid of a pot on the stove and peered in.

“It’s minestrone soup,” she replied, adding the chopped vegetables to the pot. “But it’s not for today; it’s for tomorrow. Today’s is there,” she said, nodding at another pot. “Split pea with ham.”

“What else?” Peter asked, lifting the lid of another pot, an act that earned him a rap on the knuckles with Tina’s wooden spoon.

Picking up a plate, Tina proceeded to load it with a huge serving of baked chicken, mashed potatoes, and collard greens. Then she topped it with a slab of buttered corn bread and handed it to Peter. “Now get out of here,” she said.

Charlotte’s mouth was watering.

“This is Tina Furman,” the pastor said after Peter had gone, and proceeded to introduce the cook to Jerry and Charlotte.

“Pleased to meet you,” Tina responded with a wide smile.

Unlike the pastor, Tina took no offense at their request, and proceeded to provide Jerry with as many names as she could remember. While she talked, she dished out plates of food, which were served by church volunteers.

She had just finished with her list of names, which included thumbnail sketches of each personality, when Peter returned to the kitchen through the swinging door, holding out his empty plate in his one remaining hand.

Tina looked up. “If you think you’re getting a second helping, you’d better think again,” she said, gesturing with her wooden spoon for emphasis. “I’ve got other mouths besides yours to feed.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You managed to fill me up. I don’t know why,” he added. “It was a pretty stingy serving.” Peter set the plate down on the counter. “I must not be hungry today.”

Tina rolled her eyes to the ceiling and went back to her work.

Peter turned to Charlotte and Jerry and the pastor, who was helping to pass the plates to the church volunteers. “I just remembered,” he said. “I did notice something unusual.”

“What?” Jerry asked.

“When I was giving that tour late in the afternoon, I noticed that there was a key missing from the key cabinet. Now that I think about it, I think it might have been the key to the door of the undercroft.”

“What time was that?” Jerry asked.

“Just before I quit.”

“But wouldn’t you have had the key to the door of the undercroft?” Charlotte asked. “You’d just been down there to count the chairs.”

“I have my own set of keys,” he said. He reached down to jingle the key ring that hung from his belt loop. “The ones in the key cabinet are just for display. That’s why I noticed that one was missing; they’re usually all there.”

“Is the key still missing?” Jerry asked.

“I have no idea,” Peter said.

A few minutes later, they were standing in front of the key cabinet in the Parish Hall foyer. As far as Charlotte could see, none of the keys that were displayed against the background of purple velvet was missing. At least, none of the hooks appeared to be empty.

Holding the handle of the cabinet door with a plastic evidence bag, Jerry proceeded to open it. “They look like they’re all here now,” he said. He turned to Peter. “Do you remember which one it was?”

Peter stepped forward and pointed to a key in the second row from the bottom. It was one of the smaller keys, with a head in the shape of a diamond. He was about to remove it from its hook when Jerry lightly touched his wrist.

“Allow me,” he said. Using the evidence bag as a mitt, he lifted the key off its display hook. Then he closed the door and turned to Peter. “Do you have your key to the undercroft?” he asked.

Reaching down to his key ring, Peter started sorting through the keys, which were like the keys in the cabinet, but without the ornamental heads. When he found the one he was looking for, he held it out.

Moving around next to Peter, Jerry held the post of the key from the cabinet next to the post of Peter’s key. They were identical. Jerry turned to the pastor. “Is this cabinet kept locked?” he asked.

The pastor shook his head. “We open it to display the keys almost every day. The key cabinet is one of the first things we show to visitors. To illustrate the point that there are many doors to God,” he added.

“So anyone could have taken the key,” Jerry said.

The pastor nodded.

“But how would someone have known it was the key to the undercroft?” Charlotte asked. “The keys in the cabinet aren’t labeled.”

“Good question,” the pastor replied. “There’s a diagram in here.” He reached down to open a drawer at the bottom of the cabinet, and was stopped by Jerry. “Sorry,” he said, with a contrite expression.

Opening the drawer with his plastic mitt, Jerry withdrew the diagram, which was sheathed in plastic. It showed the layout of the keys in the cabinet and told which of the church’s doors each key opened.

“In order to have known which key to take, the person who took it would have to have known that the diagram was in the drawer,” Jerry said. “Which means that he must be associated with the church.”

They all thought about this for a moment.

Then the pastor said: “I think that’s quite likely, although it’s possible that someone from outside the church could have assumed there would be a diagram, and gone looking for it. The drawer would be a natural place to look.”

As she studied the diagram, Charlotte noticed that one of the keys was marked “exterior tower” and had another thought. “What about the other doors?” she asked. “The door to the bell tower, and the door to the staircase?”

“They would have been locked,” Peter said. “We don’t want kids climbing up to the belfry. But Lothian Archibald would have unlocked them when she came to ring the bells just before six o’clock.”

“For cocktails,” Jerry said.

“But only one key was missing—not three,” Charlotte said. “Which means that the person who took the key to the undercroft knew that the other doors would be unlocked while Lothian Archibald was ringing the bells.”

“Which points to a member of the church again,” Jerry said. He turned to Peter. “Does she always lock the doors when she leaves?”

“Sometimes she forgets, although she didn’t forget yesterday,” Peter replied. “The doors were locked when I made my rounds at ten.”

Jerry nodded. “Which means that somebody probably put the skull in the undercroft while she was ringing the bells.” He went on to ask the pastor who else worked at the church, a list that included half a dozen employees.

Then they thanked Peter and the pastor and left. They still had to talk with the other church employees, but that could wait until after lunch. As Jerry had said, it was important to keep one’s priorities straight.

And eating came first.

9

As they drove back to the police station, Charlotte and Jerry discussed the developments in the case. Jerry’s list of things to look into now extended to two pages: follow up on Dr. Louria’s alibi, talk to the lawyers for Lily’s estate, interview the other church employees, check to see if the patrons of Tina’s Kitchen had criminal records, check for fingerprints on the key to the undercroft and on the key cabinet—the list went on and on. But it seemed to Charlotte that the solution of the case depended on something much more ineffable than what could be offered by these possible clues, and that was the mind of the murderer. The case was like one of Jack Lister’s reconstructed faces: you could glue the fractured pieces of the skull back together and you could reconstruct the face according to scientific averages for the depth of the flesh, but without an intuitive sense of what the victim was like, the reconstruction wouldn’t come alive. In the case of Lister’s reconstructions, it was clues like the circumstances in which the skull was found and the bits of clothing and personal possessions that were found with it that gave him the material on which to set his intuition to work. In this case, there were also such clues in the form of the circumstances in which the skulls had been found, and the things that had been found with them, namely the bouquets of lilies of the valley. However bizarre and illogical the murderer’s actions might appear, there was a logic behind what he had done and how he had done it. It was buried in this twisted logic that the key to his identity lay.

Though Jerry didn’t discount the value of routine police work—it was through such tedious work that most cases were solved, he pointed out—he agreed that it was important to figure out why the murderer had acted as he had. Why had he preserved only the skulls? Why had he bleached them white? Why had he left them in consecrated places? Why had he left the flowers with them?

A few minutes later, they had arrived at the police station. As they pulled into Jerry’s parking spot, which faced the adjacent vacant lot, Charlotte noticed a colony of lilies of the valley growing under an oak tree. Unlike the lilies of the valley that had been growing by the path leading down the embankment, these were already in bloom.

She was thinking about picking some to take home when she was struck by a sudden thought. “Jerry!” she said. She turned to face him. “Where did the murderer get the lilies of the valley for the bouquets?”

Jerry gave her a look, and she realized she was shouting.

She lowered her voice. “This time, he could have picked them. They’re in bloom now. But the first skull was found in September, and the second in April. They’re not in bloom then. Also, they’re not the kind of flower that you can pick up from your local florist.”

“They’re not?” Jerry said.

“No, they’re not. That’s why you need woman cops,” she teased. “What’s a guy from Bensonhurst know from lilies of the valley?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea where he might have gotten them.” he replied. “But I’ll tell you how you can find out, and you can do me the favor of checking it out. Is it a deal?”

“It’s a deal,” she said.

“Winter Garden Florist,” he said. “In Corinth. If you don’t succeed there, try Anderson’s. Or McNabb’s. Corinth used to supply the roses to the New York florist trade; there used to be acres of roses there under glass.”

“What happened?” she asked.