The Death of an Irish Sinner (9 page)

And which sounded very much like the feisty Mary-Jo Stanton that McGarr had known. “You’re religious yourself?” McGarr asked, as they moved back into the wood toward Mudd’s cottage. Above them a murder of crows were contesting a roost, their cries raucous and shrill.

“Jaysus, no. Not a bit of it, which is what bothered them up there most, you know. I’m from the North—Antrim Town—and don’t I know the problems religions like theirs bring.”

“You’re not Catholic yourself?”

“Born and bred, like. But I’ve had enough for a lifetime, I tell you. Which is why”—Mudd stopped and offered McGarr a cigarette—“my days are numbered here, I’m sure.”

Accepting the cigarette, McGarr waited.

“The minute the will is read and they take firm control of this place, I’m out on me arse, count on it. They’ll put one of their own in here, not minding if he don’t know a lily from a daffodil. It’s the believing that matters to them, their style.”

“And their style is?”

“Total, like. You do as they say, work like a divil, and turn over what you make to them. They had one
yoke in here—a bloody numerary, which is like a priest without the collar. He was a surgeon, he was, with an office and all in town. And didn’t they come and demand he turn over his wristwatch, saying he’d become too attached to worldly possessions. It had been a birthday gift from his family.

“Well, sir—didn’t he do the right thing and tell them to feck off. After he left, they tried to ruin him altogether, I’m told.”

Heard tell from whom, McGarr wondered. “Ruin him how?”

“By spreading stories, having him up before some medical review board. They hounded him right out of the country, and it continues over in the States, I’m told.”

“You’re well informed, Francie. May I call you Francie?”

“Anything but late for last call,” Mudd quipped.

“And them—they think just because I’m a bloody agricultural man out here in the bloody wood that I’m a bloody ee-jit. Well, sir—there’s advantages to being out here in regard to the wind.”

And which way it blows, McGarr suspected Mudd meant. “Tell me—who did this thing to Mary-Jo?”

“You mean—you think it’s murder?”

McGarr nodded.

“Them.”

“Why.”

“Her money. Bags of it, the papers say. And then there’s this place, which they’ll never leave. Like rats, they are—once in, never out.”

Back at the cottage, they found Noreen out front, sit
ting on a bench in the sun. “It’s so pleasant here, really warm and springlike.”

“No wind,” Mudd remarked. “Sure, I wouldn’t trade this shebang for the best room in the big house. More’s the pity.”

In the car, Noreen said, “Bachelor digs with a few exceptions—a rather capacious push-up bra and bikini tights drying inside the press. Condoms in the med cabinet and a rather large variety of shampoos and conditioners in the shower for a rural swain such as he. And I found this in the litter bin.”

It was a monthly lid of birth-control tablets, all of them having been removed. “Either your man is a mighty convincing cross-dresser or he has a constant visitor.”

“Or visitors.”

“Him?” Her turquoise eyes flashed at McGarr.

“Please. A yoke like him should dedicate daily novenas to any woman, no matter how ugly or old, who would share his bed.”

But surely not old.

McGarr swung the car up the drive toward the big house.

BY LUNCHTIME
, Ruth Bresnahan had returned home to Dublin to nurse her new baby and to change into something that would catch Dery Parmalee’s eye more completely than slacks and a jumper.

A full but shapely woman before her pregnancy, Bresnahan had discovered to her delight that—after losing the pounds she’d put on before delivering Fionnuala—she’d only added a little padding to her hips.

Standing in front of a full-length mirror, she asked, “Well, then—how do I look?”

“Altogether smashing,” said the nearly gray-haired woman who had a baby under either arm.

Ruth’s smoky eyes flashed at Lee Sigal, wondering if she was having her on. Apart from their relationship being new, it was…well, different, to say the least,
and the two women were still getting used to each other.

Tall and statuesque with good shoulders and shapely legs, Ruth Bresnahan understood that she had probably never been more appealing. Gone were the jejune teens, when she’d felt a bit gawky, and the twenties, when she’d taken little care of her appearance and put on a bit of weight.

Now, at thirty-two, standing five feet eight and weighing a hundred and thirty-two pounds, Ruth knew how to dress her angular frame, and with her auburn hair, which she kept long, and exotic eyes, she knew she could “stop traffic,” as Hughie Ward—her colleague/lover/shared husband—put it.

“What about the skirt?” Bresnahan was wearing a chrome-yellow retro miniskirt and a white tube top that wrapped her torso like a second skin. Her legs, which she’d tanned during a long weekend holiday in Madeira, were bare.

On her feet were a pair of white sandals with block heels. Her nails—fingers and toes—she’d painted the very color of the skirt. “Isn’t it a bit short?”

“Not for the task at hand. I swear, as you stand there you have to be the most gorgeous woman in all of Dublin.”

And you the most compassionate and understanding, Bresnahan thought, stopping at the babies to kiss them before departing.

“What time will you be back?”

“Hard to say. Depends on how much of a ladies’ man ex-Jesuit Parmalee is.”

“You take care of yourself. Somebody murdered Mary-Jo Stanton, and certainly Parmalee was on the scene from what Hughie tells me.”

“Is he asleep?” Ruth asked, glancing over the shorter woman’s shoulder at the door that was open across the hall. She couldn’t see into the darkness of Lee’s bedroom, but she knew Ward was in the other woman’s bed.

“Knackered. He was half asleep when he walked in.”

“Well, good-bye, girls.” Ruth gave each of them, including Lee, a bus on the forehead before turning toward the door.

Her “credentials” as a journalist would have to be devised first, before she approached Parmalee directly. But she had an idea how to accomplish that by happy hour at the Claddagh Arms, where—she’d been told—the
Ath Cliath
staff hung.

On the first ring, Father Fred Duggan answered the door at Barbastro.

“Been here by the door long?” McGarr asked. “Or did you avail yourself of the technology?” He pointed at the surveillance camera concealed in the eyes of a plaster nymph that decorated a corner of the foyer.

“I hope you didn’t place any credence in anything that…gardener, or whatever he is, said. Mudd’s a chancer altogether, and he’ll be gone from here soon. Mary-Jo sheltered every class of blow-in, he being the worst by far. Do you know his past?”

McGarr and Noreen had moved into the front hall with Duggan at his elbow. “You mean about prison?”

“He
told
you about that?”

“Perhaps Fred couldn’t read our lips,” McGarr said to Noreen. “Someplace in the States, wasn’t it? He wasn’t specific.”

“Attica. In New York. Hard time for an armed robbery in which a policeman was shot and killed.”

“By him?” McGarr stopped at the stairs to the upper floors.

“Who knows? Could be.” Duggan’s dark eyebrows, which formed a continuous line across his forehead, were now hooded. “Didn’t he grass on the others to save himself. Got off with a six-year sentence reduced to less than two. And then he fled back over here.”

To hide out from those he’d sold out, here in a walled and gated compound with security cameras and a daily regimen as strict as any jail, if Dery Parmalee could be believed. “What’s the connection?”

“Delia Manahan.” Duggan glanced up the stairs.

“His sister.”

“Where’s she?”

“Top of the stairs, take a right, last door on the left. Here—I’ll show you.”

McGarr put out a hand. “No need, Father, thanking you just the same. We’ll find our way.”

“But perhaps you’d like me to introduce you.”

“We’ll manage.”

At the top of the stairs, McGarr and Noreen couldn’t find a light switch, and they had to wait a moment until their eyes adjusted to the darkness.

“This place is vast,” Noreen said as they approached the door, behind which they could hear a woman
speaking or praying. The voice was rhythmical, almost a chant.

McGarr knocked. And a second time, harder.

“Do you think this place is bugged?” Noreen asked.

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to interview people down at the barracks or in town?”

Perhaps. But that might encourage the parties to arrive with a solicitor, which was never helpful. “We’ll see.”

The door opened an inch or two, and a deep blue eye appeared there. It took in McGarr and then Noreen. “Yes?”

McGarr pulled back the placket of his coat to expose his Garda ID, which was fixed to the lining. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?”

“Please.” Putting a hand on the door, McGarr pushed it open.

“And you are?” she demanded.

“Police.”

“I’ve already spoken to the police.”

Delia Manahan was a rather tall woman with a narrow waist and an expanse of bosom. Her hair had either turned a brilliant shade of white prematurely or she took great care of her skin, McGarr judged. The contrast between her smooth and buff-colored skin and her hair—which she kept in a ponytail, à la Mary-Jo Stanton—was startling. How old could she be? McGarr wondered, as she turned toward a wing chair near the hearth.

Dressed simply in a white pleated silk blouse and slacks the same blue color as her eyes, the woman took a seat, crossed her legs, and twined her fingers. “I hope this won’t take too long. I’ve my prayers, and Father Fred is to say mass in the chapel. I hope you can appreciate the importance of that. Today.”

Thirty-eight, McGarr guessed glancing at the back of her hands, the skin of which had only just begun to wrinkle. Unlike her brother’s, Delia Manahan’s nose was not pugged nor her chin weak.

With a slightly aquiline nose and chiseled features, she had the sort of classic good looks that McGarr not infrequently viewed in the art of museums that Noreen dragged him to.

McGarr had the feeling that he had seen the woman before, but it was some time ago, and he could not remember where or in what regard.

Noreen sat on a love seat opposite her, while McGarr moved to the window and looked out at a sweep of terraced lawn ending in a sculptured lily pond. A fountain there was jetting mist into the morning sunlight, while two fat robins tested the wet grass for worms.

In the far distance was the garden where Mary-Jo Stanton had died, and on a table near the window stood a pair of binoculars. McGarr picked them up and held the glasses to his eyes.

And there was Frank Mudd in the haggard that was used as a staging area for the garden, pottering about.

“Do I know you?” McGarr asked, moving back to the two women.

Delia Manahan only glanced at her wristwatch.

Beyond her, the hearth was patterned with small chips of multicolored tiles in the manner of majolica. The scene pictured Christ with his disciples on the pinnacle of some mountain. It reminded McGarr of his own ignorance of matters religious.

Reading the Bible and knowing its stories had never been part of his education, not in church or in the church-run schools that he had attended. Only knowledge of prayers and some knowledge of the several rituals was insisted on, which, he supposed, all celebrated some aspect of Christ’s life. But because they had been in Latin and only partially explained in English, he remained ignorant of the full canon of biblical belief.

“Please tell me about yesterday. Where were you? What did you do and see?”

“Don’t you have it in your reports? I spoke to Superintendent Ward—at length.”

McGarr sat next to Noreen. He had this information, of course. The Manahan woman said she had spent the day in prayer, rest, and reflection, as she always did on Saturdays at Barbastro, because—in her words—there was a “necessary ritual to the day.”

Said ritual had involved—on the night before Mary-Jo Stanton’s murder—sleeping on boards covered only by a blanket, which she did once a week, “as prescribed.” When Delia Manahan awoke, she resumed the Major Silence that she had entered into during the evening, and she kissed the floor.

A half hour was allotted for washing and dressing,
and another half hour of silent prayer that prepared her for mass in Barbastro’s chapel on the main floor at the east end of the house.

Throughout that time, the Major Silence was still in force but was broken after mass when a communal breakfast was served in the “refectory,” by which Manahan meant the large formal dining room of the house.

“Since on Saturdays I have no work apart from the duties I’m assigned here, I spent the day saying the rosary, reading from the gospel for the commentary I was to give in the evening,” she had told Ward. “Of course, there was the Angelus at noon.”

When questioned about the commentary, the woman had explained how days usually ended at Barbastro and other Opus Dei residences. “After we return from the
work
day, we finish whatever spiritual reading we’re unable to get through during the day, and we spend another half hour in silent prayer. It’s then our apostolic duties commence.”

In the margin, Ward had written “spreading the word, recruiting new members,” as though to suggest that McGarr—heathen that he was—would not know the meaning of the word.

To fulfill her recruitment duties, Manahan presided over a circle of younger men and women who met with her weekly in the library of Barbastro for about an hour and a half.

After that, Manahan’s day ended in the chapel, where the collective conscience of the group was examined through a reading from some sacred text and a commentary given by a different member each night.
“It’s important that the commentary be spiritually appropriate,” she had told Ward, so she usually discussed it beforehand with the director.

“And the director is?” Ward had asked.

“Father Fred.”

After the reading, the Major Silence began again, and the Opusians passed upstairs to their respective rooms for further reflection and prayer before bed.

All on a weekday.

Yesterday being a Saturday, however, instead of commuting into Dublin and her work as a solicitor for the poor and disabled, Manahan had passed the day in prayer and meditation focused on a “spiritual problem that I have discussed only with the director and do not wish to divulge.”

And she had remained in her room until informed by Father Fred about Mary-Jo Stanton, whereupon he had advised her to stay in her room. “So, you see—I was here all day long.”

“Did you leave for any reason?” Ward had asked.

“No.”

“Not even to eat?”

“No. I have not eaten since lunch.”

“Who might have wanted to murder Mary-Jo?”

“I have no knowledge of other people’s unspoken wants, most especially in that regard.”

“Did you speak with Miss Stanton at any time during the day?”

“Yes—I believe we passed pleasantries during breakfast, as was our wont.”

“And she seemed…?”

“Cordial, as always.”

“Then do you know of any unpleasantness in her life recently?”

“If you had known Mary-Jo, you would understand that she did not allow unpleasantness into her life. And if perchance something untoward were to happen around her, she would never so much as acknowledge it, much less speak about it.”

And so the interview had proceeded on the night before, with Delia Manahan taking what McGarr feared would be the “company” stance on the “unpleasantness” of the
cilicio
that had been clamped around Stanton’s neck and tightened down until it drew blood. Before the elderly woman died of a heart attack.

“You reside here?” McGarr now asked.

“Obviously.”

“And you told Superintendent Ward that you did not leave this house at any time yesterday, is that right?”

Manahan nodded.

“Not even, say, to take a turn down the driveway or around the lawn.”

“If you mean did I go into the garden, no, I did not.”

“What about those binoculars? What do you use them for?”

“Birding. I’m an avid birder.”

“Did you bird from these windows yesterday?”

“Not that I can remember. When I pass by the window or hear birdsong in the gardens, then I use them.”

“But not yesterday.”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Not even when the police arrived?”

“That was after dark, after Father Fred informed us
of what had happened and ordered…
advised
us to remain in our rooms.”

“How do you know he spoke to the others? Did you discuss Miss Stanton’s murder amongst yourselves?”

Delia Manahan only regarded him, which was as much of an admission as he was likely to receive, McGarr suspected.

“Who do you think could have done such a thing?”

Again she only stared at him.

“I conclude you have an opinion.”

Her blue eyes neither wavered nor blinked.

“I would surmise, from your involvement in Opus Dei, that you are committed to God and the truth.” McGarr let that sit for a moment or two then. “Well, are you?”

She nodded. “I’m committed to God, Who is the truth.”

“But you’re declining to help me discover the truth in this matter.”

“God knows the truth, which is all that matters.”