The Man Who Murdered God (3 page)

McGuire stood at his apartment window staring across Van Ness at the lights of Fenway Park burning white in the darkness. He was thinking of Ollie Schantz, retired homicide detective. And of Thomas Lynch, dead Catholic priest. He avoided thinking of Joseph Peter McGuire, middle-aged member of the Boston Police Department and the remaining half of the most effective homicide team in the department's history.

“Well, you're no longer a cop,” somebody had said to Ollie Schantz at his retirement party.

“Garbage,” Ollie had replied. “After thirty-five years you never stop being a cop. When I'm old and blind and senile, sitting on some Goddamn porch in the Berkshires, I'll still be a cop. Listening to people talk. Thinking about motives. Suspecting everybody new. Memorizing voices. You think you can turn it off just because you retire? You can't. I sure as hell won't.”

McGuire turned from the glare of the lights at Fenway and raised the volume on the FM radio tuned to a Cambridge jazz station. He loved the jazz of his youth, the improvised music that had flowered just when the world began to accept rock and roll. In high school he had played trumpet and considered a career in music, a life of one-night stands in smoky nightclubs, leaning against the piano and sipping Scotch, waiting for his turn to solo. But he had chosen security. Or at least as much security as a big-city cop could enjoy. Somewhere in the apartment, which he had furnished ten years earlier from a Sears catalogue, were hundreds of jazz records waiting to be played. He hadn't heard most of them in years, but it never occurred to him to sell or trade them.

Who was that playing now? Desmond? Yeah, Paul Desmond. He's dead, McGuire told himself without emotion. He shook some instant coffee into a mug, ran hot water from the faucet until it was steaming, and filled the cup. One thing about being a musician, you make records, and years after you're gone people can still hear you play. He turned the volume up another notch, and the sound of Desmond's alto saxophone soared higher and stronger than before. “Not like a cop,” he said, collapsing in the chair. A cop dies, they have a round of beers for him downtown, and years later maybe somebody comes across his name in an old file. “Look at this son of a bitch,” they say. “What a lousy writer.” Or they think, “I must be getting old. I can remember them talking about this old bastard around here.” And that's it.

Musicians have it better, McGuire decided. He leaned back and sipped the coffee. For one thing, you don't start your day off by looking at somebody's guts spilled on a church floor.

He was thinking of Ollie Schantz again.

“Somebody said there are only seven basic plots in fiction,” Schantz had told McGuire soon after they became a team. “Actually, my wife told me that. Me, I never read books.” Ollie's wife had taught English in high school for several years. “Seven basic plots,” Ollie had repeated. “That's interesting, because I figure there are only seven basic reasons to commit murder, too. You've got jealousy, you've got revenge, you've got escaping arrest or custody.

Then you got your greed, your self-defence and your sexual reasons. Last of all you've got your psychotics. You figure out which slot to put your murder into, the one you're working on today, and you follow the pattern. Just get the slot, and you've got the pattern.

“Because all murders follow patterns, Joe. Nobody's less imaginative than a murderer. Bam, they kill. Slam, they go. That's it. Understand that, and our work gets easy.”

McGuire believed it. He was convinced they would discover something in Thomas Lynch's past, something the priest had said or done, which led to his death. “We are agents of our own misfortune” was a creed McGuire clung to. He placed no belief in faith or fate. He believed only in what people did to themselves and others, acting on their own needs and their own emotions. Love. Hate. Fear.

The Desmond record finished, and a Duke Ellington tune began. McGuire drained his cup. A cheer erupted from the direction of Fenway. The Sox got a hit. Or an out. McGuire thought about the early season baseball crowd gnawing on hot dogs and huddled together in the evening chill. He thought about inviting Ralph Innes to join him at a game some evening. Or better still, one of the women at work.

He thought about the last time he had enjoyed a woman's company for more than three evenings.

Then he clicked off the radio and went to bed.

“You got nothing, right?”

It was mid-afternoon, and Jack Kavander was leaning on the door frame of McGuire and Lipson's cubicle. A toothpick was being worked frantically around his mouth, in and out, from side to side. After twenty years Kavander had finally stopped smoking by replacing cigarettes with various surrogates. Pencils, paper clips, peanuts, usually a toothpick.

“Old Jack's just trading one disease for another,” Ollie Schantz had observed a few months earlier. “He gave up cigarettes because he was afraid of emphysema. Now he's chewing so many toothpicks, he's liable to get Dutch elm disease.”

“Am I right?” Kavander growled from the doorway.

McGuire tossed a pencil on his desk and leaned back, his hands behind his head. “We've got a partial print and an approximate time,” he said, staring back at Kavander. “We've got a reasonable guess at the weapon, and we're pretty sure he was using Remington shells.”

“What else?”

“The woman who found him, Mrs. Kelley,” Lipson added before McGuire could reply. “We talked to her.” He shook his head. “No help at all. Said everything was normal. Didn't see or hear anything unusual.”

“Like I said, you've got fuck all.” Kavander pulled the toothpick from his mouth and gestured with it as he talked. “I'm getting flak from a lot of corners. The bishop's upset, the mayor's concerned. People don't like the idea of priests getting their guts blasted in Boston.” He studied the mangled end of the toothpick before returning it to his mouth. “Give me something to feed them. Anything.”

“We're working on two theories,” McGuire said. “One, it was a revenge killing. Something Lynch said or did, maybe in the last few days. Two, it's a psychotic, somebody who just felt like blowing a guy away, and the priest was handy.”

“You getting any leads? Anybody calling in?”

“So far, three,” Lipson answered. He glanced at a sheet of paper on the corner of his desk. “This one guy over at City Hospital, tried to take out his own appendix with a pocketknife. Phoned up to confess, but the hospital says no way he's been out of bed in three days. Got another guy said he killed the priest just like he killed Kennedy and shot the pope in eighty-one. He's a regular. Give the mayor a parking ticket and this yo-yo says he's responsible. Then we got a woman in Quincy, calls up, tells us she's sure her neighbour did it because he's never liked Catholics and says nasty things about them.”

“You check that one out?”

“Yeah. Turns out the guy is suing her because her mutt dug up his rhododendron last month or something. His wife and kids claim he was home in bed at the time. Went to work at eight o'clock, everything checks out normal. He's never owned a shotgun, and now he's going to sue the broad next door for slander as well as having an unleashed animal trashing his garden.” Lipson shrugged. “Nothing there, but we'll keep checking it.”

The phone rang, and Lipson reached for it, saying “Here comes another one, I'll bet.”

Kavander turned to McGuire. “Which motive do you like? Revenge or a psychotic?”

“Neither.”

“What the hell?” Kavander exploded. “You give me two motives, and then you tell me neither one fits?”

“I'm saying they're the only two we've got.”

Lipson, his hand over the telephone receiver, said “Joe, it's for you.”

McGuire dismissed him with a wave of his hand, and Lipson spoke softly to the caller.

“I don't like revenge,” McGuire said, “because this guy Lynch sounds like he was a damned saint. And I don't like the psychotic angle, because everything was too well planned. Ambush the priest in the morning, leave without anybody seeing a thing. He even took the empty shell with him so we couldn't trace it. That sound like a nut case to you?”

“Joe?” It was Lipson again, the receiver still in his hand.

“You better get that, McGuire,” Kavander said. “Could be a tip. Sounds like you could use all the help you can get.” He turned on his heel and left.

“Who the hell is it?” McGuire snapped as he swung around to look at Lipson. The other detective was cradling the receiver against his chest.

“Personal,” Lipson replied, looking uncomfortable. He waited until McGuire had seized his telephone before gently lowering the receiver and busying himself with a sheaf of reports on his desk.

“Lieutenant McGuire.”

For a few seconds McGuire heard only laboured breathing. Then a female voice, scratchy and strained, said, “Joe? It's me. Gloria.”

McGuire frowned. “Gloria who?” he demanded impatiently.

This time the voice was stronger. “How many Glorias were you married to?”

McGuire slumped visibly in his chair and swung to face the wall away from his partner. “What the hell are you doing calling me? You're supposed to be living in Houston with some Goddamn real estate developer. Where you calling from?”

She answered with a long sigh followed by a voice that climbed steadily in pitch until it became a weak, pain-ridden cry. “I'm at Mass General. I've been here a week and I'm not leaving, because I've got the cancer, Joe.”

“Oh, Jesus,” McGuire whispered. “Jesus, Gloria, I'm sorry.”

“Will you come and see me, Joe? Please? I'd love to see you.” She was sobbing now, her voice tight and fearful.

“Sure I will,” McGuire answered. “Maybe tonight. How's tonight sound?”

“Oh, Joe, that would be great!” Her voice was stronger. “That would be just great. You can come anytime. They let visitors come any time on this ward. It's ward twelve.”

“How about your husband?” McGuire's voice was softer, deeper. “Is he with you?”

Another sigh. “He's back in Houston. I guess. I don't know. His lawyer handled everything. Said . . .” She began sobbing again. “Said I could have anything I wanted, money wasn't an object. So I said . . . I said I wanted to go back to Boston to die, and they flew me up and here I am.” Her voice resumed its tragic pleading. “Joe, I'm so damned lonely and scared. You'll come and see me, won't you?”

It was McGuire's turn to sigh. “Sure,” he said. “Sure I will. Tonight for sure.”

He placed the receiver gently back on its cradle. Looking up, he saw Lipson watching him intently.

“Trouble?” his partner enquired.

McGuire nodded. “I guess so. What else do you call it when an ex-wife wants you to come and help her die?”

Dead ends. Tips from little old ladies, which revealed nothing except rampant paranoia and senility among the elderly. Anonymous telephone callers, whose first few words signal a cop's experienced ear to hang up and go back to bending paper clips and staring out the window. Brief flurries of excitement, when a connection seemed to appear, then vanished. All part of every murder investigation in a big city. And the more sensational the killing, the greater the number of tips that led only to frustration.

In the midst of making telephone calls, reviewing forensic reports and talking to acquaintances of Thomas Lynch, the memory of his ex-wife's telephone call withdrew neatly, obediently, to the back of McGuire's mind. Once, while listening to Lipson reciting details of a vacation trip the priest had taken the previous summer, McGuire recalled Gloria's words, hearing them again in her shattered voice for the first time since she had called.

Trying to visualize Gloria, McGuire would picture two different people. The first was a young woman wearing shirt-waist dresses, her hair in a long dark ponytail that swung like a pendulum as she walked. He saw her dancing at a house party, laughing at his jokes on the Common, riding with him to a picnic near Lexington, looking up at him wide-eyed from a bed in a Cape Cod motel, smiling through a flurry of confetti.

The other face was an older woman's, her hair straight and unbrushed, tears streaking her face, speaking to him in a dull voice from behind a cigarette, which remained poised near her mouth. A mouth that sagged from the pull of gravity and disillusionment.

They were two different people to McGuire. Both named Gloria. Both of them his first wife. They had both died years ago in a dingy apartment in the Back Bay before the area became fashionable again. Now the Gloria who had replaced them was in a hospital ward for terminal cases, dying her own death.

I'm responsible for the first death, McGuire admitted to himself. With all my lies and my screwing around, I killed the first Gloria, the one who smiled so easily. But not this one. This one they can hang on somebody else.

In the evening he nodded good night to Lipson, gnawed savagely at a sandwich, bought flowers from a street vendor, walked to Mass General.

The ward nurse directed him to Gloria's room—two beds with a window facing the river. One bed was empty, neatly made and standing silent. In the other an old woman dozed, propped up on pillows, a plastic tube leading from her nose to a mechanical device that hummed with a droning indifference. Under his breath McGuire swore at the nurse for sending him to the wrong room.

A second look at the woman before he left. A closer study of the cheeks, under awkward smears of make-up. And the hair, thin and greying, tied back from a face with etched lines not even sleep could conceal.

McGuire leaned over to examine the chart at the foot of the woman's bed. Mrs. Gloria Arnott. He shook his head and continued reading. His name was written next to hers. Address: Boston Police Department, Berkeley Street. A list of medications followed, and under Special Instructions he read, written in a neat feminine hand with a bold felt-tip pen,
NDP
,
NH
.
He recognized the code.
No Doctor Purple.
Forget about hitting the emergency button when she begins to go.
No Heroics.
Let her die.