Prodigal Father (22 page)

Read Prodigal Father Online

Authors: Ralph McInerny

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective

BOOK: Prodigal Father
2.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us.
—Psalm 123
 
The sunglasses that Nathaniel had affected since returning to the community from California were found on the floor of the maintenance shed, beneath a fertilizer spreader where they had come to rest. This was taken to strengthen the likelihood that it had been in the shed that Nathaniel was attacked and that he had indeed stumbled in a grotesque final walk, an ax buried in his back, to the grotto where he fell on his knees and eventually died. There was a note of awe, even of reverence, in Phil Keegan's voice as he told Father Dowling.
“Plus the fact that an effort had been made to clean up the shed. There had even been some hasty painting, but the lab found blood beneath it. Nathaniel's blood.”
“Good Lord.”
“So it looks as if he wasn't attacked when he was already at prayer.”
“The maintenance shed.”
“Andrew George sounded the alarm.”
Silence. Few people had a greater complaint against Nathaniel, given the prodigal priest's campaign that the Athanasians give up their property.
“Sell all they have and give to the poor?” Phil said.
“If only it had been that simple. Nathaniel seems to have had something else in mind. Unless the members of the Order are to be counted among the poor.”
“Divide it among them?”
“It was when the others realized he had that in mind that the tide turned against him.”
“Imagine what each of them would have got!”
“They are all under the vow of poverty, Phil.”
“Then what are they doing living on that choice property?”
“You sound like Tetzel. When it was given to them it was almost as beautiful as it is now, but people weren't clamoring to get hold of it then.”
The moment had arrived for Father Dowling to tell Phil what Father Boniface had confided in him. He had just returned from Marygrove when Phil arrived at the rectory.
 
 
Marygrove was yesterday's news so far as the media were concerned and there was no sign of a police investigation under way. But it was clear that Father Boniface did not think his troubles were beginning to recede. He said what he had to say in a single passionate burst.
Andrew George had come to Boniface with what he himself
realized was a damning revelation. “When I found the body, I ran to the maintenance shed to use the phone there.”
“And called me from there.”
“Yes.”
His next words were spoken with a sob. “Father, Michael was coming out of the shed when I got there.”
What more could the poor man have said? Boniface saw the implications of this immediately, of course, as George had known he would. Neither man had the heart to put into words the thought they shared.
“Have you told anyone?”
“I swore I would never tell even you, yet here I am. If anyone else has to know, you must tell them.”
And so Boniface had shouldered another cross. He embraced the groundskeeper and the two old men wept. The two of them seemed to have lived into old age only to see their world collapse around them. After George left, Boniface sat in silent agony, as Father Dowling could imagine.
“Could anyone else know this?”
“He commissioned me to do with it what I thought I should.” Boniface moved the tips of his fingers down the sides of his face. “Now I commission you, Father Dowling. You are close to Phil Keegan, the man investigating this murder.”
 
 
Now the moment had come for Father Dowling to tell Phil who listened with lifted brows.
“Sounds suspicious.”
“It does indeed.”
“I'll have to talk to the son again, Roger.”
“You can imagine how hard it was for the father to tell Boniface this, and for Boniface to hear it.”
“I'm almost surprised he didn't keep quiet about it.”
“And go on living with his son?”
“I'll have Cy talk to him,” Phil said after a moment. “He can have the kid show him around the maintenance shed, ask about the cleaning up there. Maybe it won't be necessary to let him know how we found out.”
Phil was a father himself, so perhaps this magnanimous suggestion was not surprising. If young George had a guilty secret, no one was more likely to induce him to blurt it out than the stolid Cy Horvath. No need to bring his father into it all, if things went right.
“You're a good man, Phil Keegan.”
Phil was embarrassed. “Right now I'm a confused one. I thought we had our man in Stanley Morgan.”
“What has he said?”
“Just that he's innocent. He is resisting getting a lawyer. He says he knows all about lawyers. The court will have to appoint one.”
“Maybe he is innocent.”
“Maybe the moon is made of green cheese.”
“What about young George?”
“We'll see. If there's really anything there, Cy will get it.”
Out of the depths, I have cried to You, O Lord.
—Psalm 130
 
Together and one at a time, taking turns, Phil Keegan and Cy Horvath, had talked with Stanley Morgan. Everything the man said contributed to the case against him. He had been shafted by Nathaniel, whom he knew as Richards, in California and had been left holding the bag when the financial consulting firm they jointly owned came under suspicion. Morgan could provide no proof of Richards's involvement and himself became the object of an investigation for diverting investor's money. The books showed that a significant sum had been transferred to a Zurich account, which Morgan explained as his partner Richards's share of the profits. It was impossible to gain access to the Swiss bank account. Richards, according to Morgan kept the books, but again he had no proof of this. The secretary of the firm gave ambiguous testimony that hurt Morgan more than it helped him. He was persuaded to plead guilty to an innocuous charge, but the publicity had labeled him a defrauder of the elderly. So he spent a year in a minimum-security, white-collar crime institution near Fresno, easy duty as prison time goes, but more than enough solitude for him to reflect on what Richards had done to him.
“You wanted revenge?” Cy asked.
“Of course. Though not in the sense you probably mean,” replied Morgan.
“What do I probably mean?”
“I didn't kill him. I intended to do him no physical harm. I wanted simply to confront him, to let him know that I had survived and that I was in the world.”
“You thought that would trouble him?”
“He was a funny guy. After he told me he'd been a priest, I thought I understood him.”
“How so?”
“Whatever he did, he wanted to retain his reputation. The way he explained leaving the priesthood was a good example. It wasn't that he had abandoned it, but that it had failed to live up to his expectations. Everything was like that. His wife was different.”
“You knew her, too?”
“The three of us were very close. And then she died.”
The wife had been a nun, and she like Richards thought that the religious life had let her down, taken her best years under a false assumption. It got murky then, and neither Phil nor Cy could follow Morgan.
“So you served your time, got out, and tracked him down in Fox River. You showed up at Marygrove under a false name and asked to make a retreat.”
“It was my chance to confront him.”
“And how did that go?”
“What?”
“When you confronted him.”
“I never did. That was the irony. Once I settled in—they put me in the lodge with the Georges—I was in no rush. I had the
luxury of being able to move slowly. He was there, I was there, it would happen.”
“Cat and mouse?”
“Cat and mouse.”
“And then you confronted him.”
“But I didn't.”
“And then he was killed.”
“I was astounded. But before that happened I went back to Father Boniface and told him my name really wasn't Sullivan, and that I had known the man he called Father Nathaniel in California. That way I felt certain that he would know I was there. And he would know others knew.”
“You expected him to seek you out?”
“Whatever. One way or the other, it seemed inevitable that we would meet, living there at Marygrove.”
“Look, if you went to all this trouble to find him, it stands to reason that you went ahead and did what you had come to do.”
“But I didn't. I waited. Do you think I'm not sorry I did?”
“Are you?”
“Now it is something that can never be resolved. For the rest of my life …”
“Morgan, you are going to be indicted for the murder of Father Nathaniel. Everything points to you.”
“I didn't do it.”
“So who did? Murders are seldom complicated, you know. It's usually pretty obvious who did it. In this case, the obvious one is you.”
“I'm innocent.”
“You better get a lawyer.”
Morgan laughed. He was a pleasant enough guy, but unreal.
He said what he said with apparent sincerity yet at the same time did not expect to be believed.
“You'll get a lawyer whether you want one or not.”
“It won't be my responsibility. So I go back inside. I almost miss it. Staying there with those priests was like being back. Maybe that's why I was in no rush. I felt at ease again.”
“He's a goner,” Phil said to Cy after they let Morgan return to his cell where maybe he could feel at ease.
“Funny guy. California must be a strange place.”
It helped not to feel vindictive toward the person you were investigating for murder. The newspaper accounts of the slaying of Nathaniel treated it as particularly horrible because the victim was a priest. The way Judas was a priest, Phil thought. He got nowhere with Roger Dowling when he vented his anger at priests like Nathaniel who went on leave, got married, then wanted to come back as if they could shuck the intervening years like skin. It wasn't that he thought Morgan had the right to kill Nathaniel because he'd been a renegade priest, but it didn't have the same shock value as it might have if Nathaniel had spent his life where he belonged, living the life of a priest. Of course, none of this would have happened then.
And now came the twist that young George had been seen by his father coming out of the maintenance shed when he went there to report finding Nathaniel at the grotto with an ax in his back. The ax was from the maintenance shed. There were oddities about the shed that Pippen had turned up. Someone had cleaned it up, someone had hurriedly painted the corner of the work bench. When Nathaniel's sunglasses were found in the shed, the paint was removed and found to cover some of Nathaniel's blood. All this pointed to the attack having been made in the maintenance shed. Young George popping out of there at the crack of dawn
when his father came running to use the phone, sounded like good news for Morgan. So why didn't Cy Horvath think so?
“There's more physical evidence pointing toward the boy than in the case of Morgan, isn't there, Cy?”
“We don't have any physical evidence against Morgan.”
“So why don't these facts shake your convictions?”
“I want to talk to the kid.”
Roger had interpreted his reaction to the news as some kind of heroic virtue. Well, Phil didn't want the kid to know that his father had brought suspicion on him, if he could help it. But part of that was the unlikelihood that, in the crunch, a father would be a witness against his son. And so far at least it was only the father's testimony that put young George in the maintenance shed at a suspicious time.
You have shown your people hard things.
—
Psalm 60
 
Edna waited anxiously to be confronted with the fact that she had provided Stanley Morgan with a hiding place in the old nurse's office on the third floor of the school, but nothing happened. When Cy Horvath discovered Stanley Morgan, he had said nothing to Edna and she had found this ominous, as if he did not want to
dilute the arrest of Morgan with taking her to task for what she had done. When Stanley was taken away it came home to her that what she had done could be construed as a crime, even if at the time Stanley was accused of nothing. How then could she be said to have harbored a criminal? Or a suspected criminal?
But all the excuses she thought of made her dread having to state them aloud in self-defense. And she was sure that it was Father Dowling who would ask for an explanation. And then, with the passage of time, it became inescapable that Cy Horvath had not said anything to anyone. Edna did not know quite how to react to this. But, of course, it was Marie Murkin who fussed about the circumstances of Stanley Morgan's arrest.
“On the third floor of the school!” she cried, in a simulated state of shock.
“In the nurse's office.”
“How on earth did he think of hiding there?”
“You must have made him feel at home here.”
Marie looked at Edna sharply, then saw it as a compliment. “That's true. But, Edna, imagine him knocking at the rectory door when I knew they were looking for him.”
Marie was soon caught up in this possible drama and wanted to explore the many and various reactions she might have had.
“I don't think I could have turned him away,” she said.
“But where could you have hidden him?”
Marie fell silent, perhaps thinking of various hiding places in the rectory. “If I did hide him, I could never have turned him in.”
“I suppose the question is, why did he want to hide anywhere?”
“Oh, that's obvious. And I don't mean he's guilty. But if you'd been through what he has, no matter how innocent you were, you'd run, too.”
“I suppose.”
Later, it was Marie who relayed to Edna the news about the groundskeeper finding his son in the maintenance shed when he had gone to sound the alarm after finding the body.
“Now, Edna, this is absolutely confidential. The boy mustn't dream that his father made this known.”
Edna crossed her heart and hoped to die.
“But how can one feel relief? This lets Stanley Morgan off the hook, but only because Michael George now looks like the one.”
“But why on earth would he have killed that priest?”
There was no doubt that Marie got more information at the rectory than Edna could ever get at the school, thanks largely to the frequent visits of Captain Phil Keegan. Edna had always felt ambiguous toward Keegan and Horvath because of her experience with the police when Earl fell afoul of the law. All the more reason for her surprise and gratitude that Cy Horvath did not press her on how Stanley Morgan happened to be hiding in the nurse's office on the third floor of the school. He must have sensed, when he appeared in the doorway, that Edna was talking with Stanley in a conspiratorial way. Now with her fears lifted and with Marie Murkin accepting the suggestion that she herself was the target of Stanley Morgan's seeking refuge at St. Hilary's, she realized how she had been governed by her feelings rather than by her head when Stanley Morgan appeared in her office and put himself in her hands. How foolish that had been. How long could Stanley expect to elude the police. And why had Cy Horvath shown up at the nurse's office?
It was inescapable that the fact that she had had dinner with Stanley Morgan, that she had allowed him to take her and the kids to a ball game, was anything but a secret. Had that been enough for Lieutenant Horvath to decide to check out the school?
But now when she thought of the son of the groundskeeper she was certain she would act equally foolishly to help him, and she did not even know the boy. Instinctively, she found herself sympathizing with anyone in trouble with the law. Well, not anyone.
The newspaper reports omitted any mention that Stanley Morgan had been arrested at St. Hilary's. Marie reacted to this strangely.
“I suppose it's just as well,” she said, and sighed.
“How so?”
Marie looked at Edna, then let her eyes drift away. For heaven's sake. Edna felt a girlish impulse to tell Marie which of them Stanley Morgan had really been interested in. Instead, she hurried back to the school. If she didn't watch out, she would become another Marie Murkin.

Other books

Seizure by Robin Cook
Empire Under Siege by Jason K. Lewis
A Taste for Scandal by Erin Knightley
Eve of the Emperor Penguin by Mary Pope Osborne
The Right Thing by McDonald, Donna
Black Karma by Thatcher Robinson
Breakheart Pass by Alistair MacLean
Phoenix Rising by Kaitlin Maitland