The Man Who Murdered God (4 page)

“Hi Joe.”

McGuire looked up from her chart to see Gloria watching him. She was smiling, and the clumsy make-up appeared less grotesque. He said hello and held up the flowers for her to see. “Brought you something,” he said. “They got a vase around here?”

She raised her arms to him. “Bring them here, Joe. Please?”

He walked to the side of the bed and handed her the flowers, but she reached for him, and he bent stiffly to let her hug him.

“Thank you for coming,” she whispered, clinging to him. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”

“You look great,” he muttered as he stepped back.

She dabbed at her eyes with a corner of the sheet. “Come on,” she said shaking her head. “I look terrible, and you know it. The least you can give me is honesty.”

He pulled a steel, straight-backed chair next to the bed and sat. Crossed his legs. Folded his hands in his lap. Looked around the room.

“You look terrific, Joe. And that's honest.”

“What the hell happened?”

She shrugged. “I found a lump in my neck about a year ago. They operated, said they thought they got it all. Then, two months ago, I went back for a check-up. I'd put it off because I didn't want them to find anything. But they did. All through my lungs. Spots on the X-ray everywhere. Didn't even open me up. They said they'd try chemotherapy, but all it did was make my hair fall out, and I was throwing up twenty-four hours a day.”

Without thinking he reached across to grip her hand in sympathy, and she squeezed it in return. “What about the guy you married,” he asked. “What happened to him?”

She looked out the window to the river and bit her lip. “He couldn't take it. He never touched me after they found the lump. Said he couldn't stand the idea. Said he'd always had this problem with sick people. When . . . when they did the X-rays, he started disappearing for days on end, leaving me alone in Houston. About a month ago his lawyer came to see me at the house. Said he was representing Richard, and that Richard had moved into another location.”

She looked angrily at McGuire.

“I knew what it meant. It meant he was shacked up with the receptionist from his office. His lawyer said Richard had authorized him to make any settlement, to provide anything I needed as long . . . as long as I was in this condition. I hated Houston, Joe. Always did. Hot and dirty place. I never made any friends there, any real friends. The women I met through Richard's business all stopped coming around when they heard what I had. Just stopped. I'd try to call them, and they were always going out to a club meeting or just packing for a weekend in Phoenix. So I told Richard's lawyer, I said ‘Tell him to send me back to Boston where I can die around real people.'” She held her head up, a gesture of pride. “It took them two weeks to find me a bed here.”

McGuire remained for half an hour while they talked of his life and hers during the years after their divorce. She asked about Ollie Schantz—“I used to resent how he treated you like a son, but now I realize how nice it was of him”—and of McGuire's second wife, a younger woman he had met and married within a few weeks of their divorce.

“She was too young, and I was too set in my ways.” McGuire shrugged. “We both started fooling around on the side, and one night we just faced it and said ‘Let's end this Goddamn mess,' and that was it. I hear she went to Florida, worked in a bar for a while.”

A nurse entered with a tray of capsules. Gloria thanked her and swallowed two with water while the nurse took her pulse and made a note on the chart.

“I'll be pie-eyed in a couple of minutes with these,” she said when the nurse left. She held her arms out again. “Thanks, Joe. I know you're probably busy and all. This really meant a lot to me.”

McGuire said he would be back to see her sometime.

“When?” Desperation in her voice, her hand pulling nervously at the gold chain around her neck.

McGuire shrugged. “When I can.”

“Tomorrow?”

He said he would do what he could.

“Say tomorrow, Joe. Promise me tomorrow, okay? Please?”

McGuire nodded. “I'll see you tomorrow,” he said. “I don't know what time. I've got—” He began to explain that he had a funeral to attend tomorrow, but he caught himself. “We're in the middle of that priest murder, and, you know, Kavander's pushing hard.”

“Kavander's a jerk,” she said. “Always was.”

McGuire smiled. “I'll come back tomorrow. Sometime.”

Walking home, the air cold and damp off the river, McGuire remembered the look in Gloria's eyes when she berated Kavander. For a moment they had been the eyes of the first Gloria, the one who had died somewhere during their twelve years of marriage and who had been replaced by the grey-haired woman in the cancer ward who was to receive no heroics.

Black was everywhere against the fresh, green April grass. The only colours were in the splash of flowers heaped around the open grave and in the white and gold raiments of a balding man mumbling against the wind and sprinkling water down onto a coffin.

“The father, he had a lot of friends for a small-time priest.” Bernie Lipson stood sucking at a back tooth and scanning the mourners. “'Course, half of them are from the diocese. Right?”

McGuire nodded, watching the knot near the grave unravel as the mourners trailed their way back to the fleet of limousines parked on the roadway. Someone from the ID squad was recording licence-plate numbers. A waste of time, McGuire knew. They would trace every second car all the way back to the Vatican.

“Well, now you've seen pretty well the whole Boston Catholic establishment in one place,” a man's voice said from behind them.

McGuire and Lipson turned as Kevin Deeley approached. He rested a hand on Lipson's shoulder and nodded to both men in turn.

“How's the investigation coming?” he asked. “Any progress? Any idea why this happened?”

Lipson glanced at McGuire, who continued watching the funeral party scatter towards their cars. “I'm afraid not, Father Deeley,” Lipson replied. “A lot of tips we've got, but nothing substantial.” He spread his hands. “We might just have to wait.”

“Wait?” Deeley demanded. “Wait for what?”

“You know, somebody remembers something they haven't told us, or we spot a guy walking around with a sawed-off. A break like that, you never know where it'll come from.”

The priest frowned and shook his head. “That's it? That's all you're counting on?” He shrugged his shoulders. “That's just luck. You're waiting for dumb luck.”

McGuire turned to Deeley, his face livid. “You got it, Father,” he snapped. “It was Lynch's bad luck to be around when a nutcase called. It'll be our good luck to find the son of a bitch.”

Deeley thrust his hands in his pockets. “I didn't know we solved violent crimes in Boston on the basis of luck,” he said in a cold fury.

“What, we got World War Three ready to start again?” Lipson interrupted. “Come on, you guys—”

“It's hard for me to believe you people are taking this, this
obscenity
seriously,” Deeley said. “I should think you would be talking to the FBI, maybe Interpol. Perhaps there's an international connection of some kind.”

“
Interpol
?”
McGuire snorted. “What the hell, let's get NATO involved.”

Lipson stepped between the two men, touching each lightly on the chest. “You want a beer, Joe?” he asked his partner. “Maybe we just go somewhere for a beer. Father, you can have a beer with a couple of cops, can't you?”

McGuire brushed his partner's hand aside. “Hey, Father,” he snarled, advancing towards the priest. “You want to help us? Maybe you should just try praying your ass off a little more. Maybe you can talk somebody into reaching down from heaven to hand us a Goddamn suspect list carved on a stone.”

“Joe,” Lipson began, and McGuire told him to shut up, damn it.

Deeley grew calm, an expression of distaste on his face. “You have your job to do, and I have mine,” he said.

“Yeah,” McGuire spat out. “Ours is dispensing justice. Yours is dispensing wafers.” Then, dismissing the scene with a wave of his hand, he turned and walked across the grass in the direction of the cars.

“That was stupid, what I just did back there.” McGuire was wheeling the Plymouth through almost impenetrable city traffic back to Berkeley Street. “Really stupid.”

“You got a right to blow off steam,” Lipson said, steadying himself against McGuire's driving, one hand extended to the dashboard. “So's Deeley. He tells me, after you left, he says there wasn't a more popular guy in the whole diocese than Lynch. So the creep who shot him, everybody wants to see us pull him in. Sooner the better. Asks me what would happen if one of our guys got it, a hard-working guy everybody liked. So I tell him, we'd have every cop from here to New York beating the bushes. ‘Well, we feel the same way,' he says.”

McGuire grunted and turned into the parking ramp.

“Listen, Janice wants to know when you can come out for dinner,” Lipson said, changing the subject. “You know, she'd like to meet you. All the guys I work with, she wants to meet them. Says she wants to know who's covering my ass for me. Helps her sleep better. So what do you like? Gefilte fish? Matzo soup? She makes her own corned beef, too. It'll melt in your mouth, Janice's corned beef . . .”

McGuire jerked the car into the first open parking space. “She make me a ham sandwich, Bernie?” He pulled the key violently out of the ignition.

Lipson watched his partner open the door and step out. “Joe, you don't have to say that,” he said sadly. “Janice, she's a good woman. Me, I'm just a dumb cop trying to help.”

“Help?” McGuire asked, his hand on the door handle. “What the hell's to help?”

“You, Joe. If you need it. Everybody needs help sometime.”

“When I need it, Bernie, I'll ask.” McGuire wrenched the door handle and leaned his weight against it. “Until then, don't bother offering.”

“Aw, what the hell,” Lipson replied as McGuire stalked up the stairs and out onto Berkeley Street.

Gloria had prepared herself more elaborately for McGuire's second visit. Her make-up was applied with delicacy and discretion, and she wore a colourful kerchief, which concealed her limp, thinning hair. On the table beside her, McGuire's flowers stood proudly in a green glass vase.

They spoke in short flurries of conversation, recounting tales of former friends and relatives, until McGuire noticed the steadily growing tension behind her eyes. Finally, after he had been with her for several minutes, her arm reached out and she slapped a panel on the headboard of the bed. She lay back, breathing in short painful gasps, watching him. In seconds a nurse appeared with a shiny tray of instruments, and as McGuire remained silent, Gloria was injected with morphine to push back the wall of pain that had been about to engulf her.

“I go somewhere when I get these injections,” she said, her voice already growing thick as the nurse was leaving.

“Yeah, you go to sleep.” McGuire smiled at her.

“No, no. I mean in my head, I go somewhere. I imagine that I'm someplace, not here. Because when you're sick like I am, it's different when you go to sleep. See, Joe, it's not a relief like real sleep is. It's just an interruption of what you're going through. . . .”

“Gloria—”

“Let me finish, Joe. Please.” She slid further under the covers, folded her hands on her chest, moved her head until it was comfortable. “And you know that you're getting closer to the time when you'll go to sleep and never wake up. So you know where I go?” Her eyes were closed, and she continued speaking without waiting for McGuire's response. “Remember when I finally dragged you to Hawaii for a holiday?”

McGuire grunted. “We'd been married what? Five years?”

“Something like that. I remember it cost us so much we had to live on hamburger for a month when we got back. Anyway . . . God, I loved it there. It was the best vacation we ever took. Didn't you think so? Didn't you think it was the best vacation of all?”

McGuire nodded and smiled. “It was good, Gloria,” he agreed.

“There used to be a little restaurant in Lahaina . . . right on the shore. . . . And we'd sit there and have drinks and seafood and watch . . . watch the sun go down. And I'd try to get you to dance with me. It was so pretty. I think about it a lot. When I'm drifting off. . . .” She forced her eyelids open to look at him. “Come back tomorrow, Joe? Please?”

McGuire smiled and squeezed her hand. Then he sat in the chair and watched her sleep while the light through the windows dimmed to grey.

In the same gathering greyness Father Nick Surani locked the door of the Xavier Seminary Library behind him and set off down the path to St. Steven's Hall. The paved trail led from the modern library complex into a small creek bed, which paralleled the roadway across the shallow valley and back up the hill to the stern Victorian architecture of the main faculty building and dormitory.

With over sixty acres of grounds Xavier Seminary was the largest and most prestigious in New England. Visitors were stunned to see the expanse of land, which remained rustic and unspoiled, land surrounded on three sides by manicured middle-class houses and on the fourth by Boston College, all of it within a few miles of Boston Common itself. Succeeding bishops over the years had insisted on maintaining the rugged grandeur of the property. Granite outcroppings remained as they were when the land had been prime hunting grounds for pre-Puritan Indians. Hardwood stands of oak, maple and ash still remained healthy and uncut, separating and isolating the various seminary buildings.

Together they made Xavier an appealing site for exploring or contemplating vexing theological questions. Throughout the daylight hours students, faculty members and visiting church administrators could be found strolling through the grounds, trading gossip or grumbling about a new diocese policy.

“In the midst of Xavier we are in the midst of the glory of nature and of God himself,” one cardinal had written about the seminary.

In the shallow valley of the creek that flowed through the seminary property the glory of nature had been embellished somewhat for the greater glory of God. A granite shelf, exposed by slow erosion from the creek's waters, had formed a shallow vertical cove in the face of the valley. Years before, a bishop had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary standing sheltered within the cove, her hand raised in blessing upon all the seminary students and faculty and administrative personnel who passed by. On the bishop's instructions a marble statue was commissioned, a life-size replica of a shrouded woman with downcast eyes, upraised hand and beatific smile. The bishop saw it and declared it perfect.

But if the statue had been created in perfection by the artist, the setting had been flawed by nature. The granite cove was simply not deep enough to frame the Virgin in a manner reflecting the bishop's vision, and so contractors were hired to extend the cove outwards to make it deeper, using smoothly finished structural concrete.

It was clearly a compromise solution. The rough red granite, which might have formed an attractive contrast with the white marble of the statue, was now capped with cold grey concrete extended in a parabolic arch above the Virgin's slightly bowed head.

“She looks like a jack-in-the-pulpit now,” whispered some unimpressed faculty members when the bishop unveiled the shrine to their critical eyes. The description stuck. To faculty and students alike over the years the statue had been referred to cynically as The Virgin Jill.

Father Nick Surani was among those who considered the hillside shrine a minor folly. A few of the older members paused to genuflect and cross themselves whenever they passed the site. Most, like Surani, simply gave it a quick glance and a quiet smile, if they acknowledged its presence at all.

In the dusk of this grey spring evening Father Surani was too concerned about restructuring one of his theology classes for the next semester, “The Ecclesiology of Latin Christianity,” to give any thought to the shrine. He was unhappy about a newly issued text on Augustine and was framing in his mind a rationale for retaining the old edition, when a disturbing metallic sound interrupted his thoughts.

He stopped to look to his left and behind him, back to the small footbridge he had just crossed. Nothing seemed amiss. He turned to his right, towards the shrine, narrowed his eyes, then straightened up and barked an order.

“You there,” he said with the command of someone familiar with the discipline of younger people. “What are you doing in there? Come out. Now.”

The figure, slight and dressed in dark clothing, had been crouched in the small space between the statue and the plastered granite wall. Now it stood, something long and dark hanging stiffly at its side.

“Are you a student here?” Surani demanded. He walked to the edge of the path, determined to either discipline the wayward seminary student or send the trespasser on his way. “Speak up, young man.”

The figure moved slowly out from behind the stone Virgin, stepped gingerly to the ground and walked toward the priest.

Surani narrowed his eyes further to study the details on the young man's face. Blond hair, slight build, barely into his twenties, he determined. Certainly not a Xavier student. He would raise the question of grounds security at the next management meeting.

“Look, young man,” Surani began, indicating a junction in the pathway leading back to Commonwealth Avenue, “just be on your way out of here and don't return. This is not a public park. . . .”

The priest turned back to see the figure raise the long, dark object to its shoulder. Calmly he recognized the noise he had heard just moments before: the sound of a pump-action shotgun being cocked. Quietly he lifted his hand up, his palm facing the figure, a benediction and a futile barrier to the charge that exploded before him, filling his eyes first with glowing fire and next with silent, eternal blackness.