The Mouse returned with a very full Rolodex, banging it down without a word on the polished desktop. I picked it up, noting the gouge he had put in the wood with a “tsk-tsk-tsk,” then handed it over to Benjamin Timothy.
“I’d like this held as evidence,” I said.
I’d caught him by surprise.
“All right,” he said.
He held the thing awkwardly, looking down at it, trying to determine its significance. The Mouse was simply puzzled.
I tried all the drawers in Conroy’s desk. They were all locked. I wouldn’t have to keep this up forever.
“Were these drawers all locked when Deputy Chief Conroy vacated his office?”
“Sure they were,” said the Mouse.
“Do you have the key or keys to open them?”
“Course not. You want them opened, you get the keys from him.”
I nodded.
Then I started around the room, tugging at the drawers in the file cabinet, finding them locked, looking into one corner, then crossing over to the other corner, the one where the safe stood. There it was, the cause of all the grief. It was not particularly imposing, about three feet high and not quite as wide, an ordinary Mosler safe. It looked stronger than it was; its walls seemed to be of something between steel and granite. Very impressive. Its door was shut. I pointed at the safe and turned to Timothy.
“Isn’t the safe supposed to be open?”
He came over and stared down at it with me.
“Yes, I believe so,” he said. “It’s probably unlocked. It’s just that the door is shut.”
He bent down and tried the door handle. He tried it to the right, and then to the left. Nothing happened.
“Detective Smerka,” he said. “The safe is supposed to be open, just as it was when the theft was discovered. Clearly”—wiggling the handle to the door—“it is now locked. Do you know anything about this?”
“Me? No, nothing. The safe door was open when the office was closed up. I know that for sure.”
“How do you know that for ‘for sure’?” Timothy demanded.
“Because I looked. Because I saw it.”
“You know the combination, don’t you?”
“Well … yeah.”
“Open it up.”
The Mouse pushed past us and knelt in front of the safe. His big fingers had a surprisingly light touch. He had no difficulty hitting the right numbers on the first try. He smiled up at Benjamin Timothy.
“You want it open?” he asked.
“Of course.”
The Mouse swung the door wide. Both Timothy and I had bent down to look inside. There it was. I guess I’d never seen so much money, so much cash, before in my life. Piles of the stuff—but it didn’t really take up quite as much space as I expected. There was still room left in the safe for another million or two. My God, I thought, look at it!
Benjamin Timothy jerked upright. “Close it up!” he said.
“Shouldn’t we count it?” the Mouse asked.
“No, no, just leave it. Close up the safe. Lock it!”
He was clearly flustered, uncertain how to deal with this development. He was either not in on the scam, or had a great career waiting for him in Hollywood.
Once the Mouse had closed the safe and spun the dial, I rose up and looked Timothy squarely in the eye.
“I’m going to move that charges be dropped,” I said.
He was shocked. This seemed more than he could take. “On what basis?”
“That no crime has been committed. Prove that it has.”
“All that money was gone. It had been stolen.”
“And now it’s back.”
“Conroy could have returned it.”
“How? He gave up his keys to the office when he vacated it. If you check the sheets downstairs, you’ll find he hasn’t been inside this building since then. That I can guarantee.”
“That’s all very interesting, but I think we should get out of here right now.”
“Surely you’re not serious.”
“Of course I am. We’re going to leave it, lock up the room, get out of here, and consider this matter.”
“We’ll do nothing of the kind.” I sounded adamant. I was.
“What do you mean?”
“At the very least, this safe and its contents have become evidence, very important evidence. Do you intend to leave the safe here so that it can be picked clean by some vulture?”
I cast an accusing glance in the direction of the Mouse. He responded, showing no class, by giving me the finger. Benjamin Timothy didn’t see it.
“So what do you propose?”
“That the safe and its contents be held, just as they are, as evidence.”
He looked around the room, as if hoping to find the proper answer in one of its corners.
“The safe is on casters,” I said, “it shouldn’t be too hard to move. Detective Smerka, you wouldn’t mind giving us a hand in getting this thing down to the evidence room, would you? Oh, and Mr. Timothy, don’t forget the Rolodex.”
It was their move. I retired to my corner—up 1-94 to Pickeral Point—feeling, if not exactly jubilant, at least well satisfied with the morning’s work. The money was back in the safe. I was fairly certain the Mouse himself had served as courier, and the safe was now locked away. But I’d also demonstrated to the young assistant prosecutor that his star witness could be made to look pretty bad in court before the jury. Once he’d had a chance to sit alone and consider, Timothy would see that the only sensible thing to do was to drop the charges against Mark Conroy. Pressure from the mayor might not even be needed.
Mission accomplished.
So when I breezed into my office, I was in a buoyant mood, much in need of communication. I picked up the phone and dialed the Hermitage. The hotel operator informed me that Mr. and Mrs. Conroy had checked out. I asked her to connect me with the dining room. I asked the headwaiter if Mark Conroy could be paged. Conroy was at the phone in less than a minute.
“Sloan?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Listen, everything went just the way we wanted. It was as though I’d written the script myself.”
“You practically did, didn’t you? The …” He hesitated. “The stuff was back where it belonged?”
“That’s right, and I got them to put it and the safe in the evidence room.”
“You know who put it back?”
“I’ve got my ideas about that. We’ll talk about it later.”
“So now what do we do?”
“We wait. Don’t say anything. No remarks to the press. Don’t get flattered into going on TV. Don’t even talk to friends about what may or may not happen next.”
“Okay. Agreed.”
“Work on your resignation statement. It should be as positive as possible. Maybe I can give you some input. But nothing gets said until charges are dropped.”
“I understand. And so that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Okay, Sloan, and … thanks.”
After I had hung up, it occurred to me that, coming from Mark Conroy, that “thanks” I got would be like a tearful speech promising undying gratitude from anybody else. I’d have to be satisfied with what I got.
I started through the pile of call slips Mrs. Fenton had left me, wadding up two from Sue and filing them in the basket. I came across one that made me curious. Bud Billings had called a little before noon from county police headquarters. I dialed the number, and he picked up immediately.
“I guess you’ve heard by now, Charley.”
“Heard what?”
I still had my mind on the Conroy business. Nothing would have been made public on that yet. Besides, Bud wouldn’t have called me about Conroy, no matter what the news.
“The Evans kid was shot dead.”
“What? Sam Evans? Who did it, his father?” I wouldn’t put it past that nut case.
“No, Delbert was confirmed clear over on the other side of the county. It happened right
on the Evans place around ten o’clock. The kid’s mother was looking out the window at the time and saw him go down like he’d been knocked over with a baseball bat. It wasn’t any baseball bat knocked him down.”
“What did?”
“It looks like it was a 30-30 fired from quite some distance away. There’s a grove of trees about five hundred yards from where the kid was hit. They figure it came from there. I’ll tell you, it was a great shot at that distance, and it went right through his heart. Mrs. Evans didn’t hear it, but from five hundred yards away, and with her inside the house, she wouldn’t have, not necessarily.”
“Where’d you get all this information?” I asked. “You weren’t there, were you?”
“Oh, no, they’ve still got me pushing papers here at headquarters because of the false arrest suit.”
“So they know where you were at ten o’clock this morning.”
“Yeah, thank God,” he said. “It was Sue Gillis who called it in. They’re tying it to the other murders. They sent her and Antonovich out to the crime scene.”
“How does that figure? I don’t quite see the connection to the murders.”
“I hate to say it, but they’re examining the possibility that maybe one of the fathers of the children was so convinced that Sam Evans did it, he decided to play judge and jury. Sue’s out talking to Catherine Quigley’s father now.”
Jesus. Weren’t four murders of innocent children in one small county enough for anyone to bear? Now there was the possibility that a vigilante was out there, a father deranged and destroyed by grief seeking revenge. If someone murdered my daughter, Lisa, would I do the same? I had never taken the life of another human being, but under similar circumstances, would I be able to kill?
“I thought I would call you and let you know. Evans was your client, after all. Oh, and by the way, it’s working out fine for me with John Dibble. You were right. He’s behind me all the way. I don’t know how the kid’s death is going to change things, though.”
Billings and I said our good-byes and hung up. Stunned by what I’d just learned, I sat nearly immobile, staring out into the middle distance. Swinging my chair around to face the river, I knew I needed to do some thinking. Some very serious thinking.
21
I don’t know how long I sat there, utterly lost in thought. Looking back, it must have been nearly two hours. Mrs. Fenton came in from lunch, and I told her to hold all my calls. I just kept staring out at the river, mesmerized by its tranquility. How many ore boats went by? I have no idea, and I was feeling anything but serene.
The more I thought, the more often I came back to Father Chuck. And the more I came back to him, the more often I veered away.
How could he? How could a priest, a man of God, do such an ungodly thing? Certainly they were right in thinking Sam Evans’s murder was tied to the deaths of the children, but not in the way they thought. They’d find that Mr. Higgins, Mr. Quigley, and Mr. Bartkowski were all at work at ten o’clock. No, not Bartkowski; he wouldn’t even be questioned. He couldn’t possibly be a suspect; Sam Evans was in the lockup when Billy Bartkowski was murdered and his body laid out beside Beulah Road. None of the fathers would be suspects.
But what about Father Charles Albertus?
I’d learned a lot from Father LeClerc: that Father Chuck’s housekeeper was wrong when she told me that he had been away at the retreat that whole week; that he could have easily been in Hub City at the time the first murder took place, and that he was almost certainly back from the retreat that ill-fated night Catherine Quigley was killed. That, as I had persuaded myself, didn’t prove that he had committed the unthinkable crimes, only that he could have.
And what about the van that had eluded the cops out on Copper Creek Road? It could have been the one I’d seen parked by the rectory on my two visits to Father Chuck, and the same one in which, according to Doris Dieberman, the priest would pick up the children from school for special activities at Our Lady of Sorrows.
And it was funny that Bud Billings hadn’t mentioned it, but he had had the strong feeling during the interrogation of Sam Evans that the kid had recognized the driver of the car out there on Clarion Road, the one who had placed the body of Catherine Quigley by the side of the road. Because of Bud’s own feelings about Sam’s father, he had suspected that it was Delbert Evans that young Sam had seen out there. Well, clearly it was not. Clearly, it was somebody else.
Just say that it had been Father Chuck who he had seen out there that night; why would Sam Evans have held back? First of all, because of the false accusation he had earlier leveled at Father Chuck. Who would believe him after that if he were to point the finger at him a second time? The boy cried wolf. What else? Could Sam have conceived of blackmail in that little pea brain of his? Perhaps. He’d certainly gotten the idea from his father that people would pay to keep certain matters secret. That would have given him a reason to keep it quiet, to hold it back from everyone, perhaps even from his father. This would be Sam’s enterprise and nobody else’s.
And who but Father Chuck fit Mark Conroy’s tip so well? Conroy had said it had to be someone that the kids could trust, that kids would naturally trust. Then he had told the story of the bent cop. That was what confused things. Sue—and maybe even me, too—had taken it too literally. But later on, the next day in fact, Conroy had reiterated the principle: It had to be someone the children would be drawn to. And who were they going to trust more than good old Father Chuck in his Roman collar? Two of the children who had died were in some way connected to Our Lady of Sorrows.
Motive? I’d gotten that during my so-called debate from Father Chuck himself. He’d stuck by that nutty idea that the children were better off dead because they wouldn’t be exposed to all the sin and misery that would have been their lot if they had lived out their lives.
Putting myself back in that trophy room of his where we had our discussion, I saw the deer heads on the wall, the mounted rifles and shotguns. Did one of the rifles have a telescopic sight? If not, one could have been mounted. Surely one of those rifles was a 30-30. He could probably have dropped Sam Evans easily at five hundred yards. He may not even have needed a telescopic sight.
He had it all: the “motive” to kill the children, twisted and perverse though it was, the skill to kill Sam Evans, and a possible reason. But he would have to be deeply disturbed to do such things. But hadn’t he shown that to me? Wasn’t his drinking a sign of something? Maybe he downed all that whiskey to keep a lid on it. Or worse, maybe he drank to empower himself, to permit himself, to let himself go.
And it was at this point that I always stopped and sorted through things all over again. Who could believe this of a priest, a man of God, a celibate, a man who hated sin? How could such a man commit such sins? Who would believe it? Certainly not Sue. She had been inspired, uplifted, just talking to Father Chuck. It would do no good to pass any of this on to her. No, I told myself again and again, I’d better rethink this, and I did. But each time I came up with the same conclusion.
Finally, I turned away from my view of the river, got up from my desk, pulled on my trenchcoat and gloves, and walked out to Mrs. Fenton.
“You’ve certainly been deep in thought in there,” she said. “Or have you been taking a little nap?”
“It doesn’t matter much, one way or the other. Look, I’m going out for a while. I don’t really know how long. If I’m not back by the time you go, just put the messages on my desk with the others. I’ll come in later to check them.”
“One of your nocturnal visits?”
“Yeah, I seem to be making a lot of those lately, don’t I?”
All the way out Clarion Road to Hub City, I asked myself why I was going and what I hoped to accomplish. Did I intend to confront him? With what? My suspicions? Only in Perry Mason do murderers crumble before stern accusation. I should probably have gone to Bud Billings and voiced my thoughts about Father Chuck to him. He’d take me seriously. He’d understand how it all fit t
ogether. I could still do that. All I needed to do was find a nice wide spot on the road and make a U-turn.
But I drove on.
What was it that made me continue? In some sense, I think, it was that I saw something of myself in Father Chuck. There was what I perceived as his alcoholism. We shared that, certainly, though I acknowledged it in myself, and he was still in denial. Perhaps subtler and more complex but even more important was the fact that he was a priest, the Catholic Church personified. He represented, if anyone did, the values, the attitudes toward sex and women, the qualified system of rewards and punishments, with which I’d grown up. I’d put all that behind me because I soon learned out in the great world that it was many times more complicated than that. In my profession, that all became very clear. But growing to maturity as I did in the old Church had certainly left its mark on me, probably an indelible one. And each time I was face-to-face with Father Charles Albertus, I saw not so much myself in him, but the representative of all that had held such powerful sway over me when I was young, all that I had eventually rejected.
I was aware, too, that perhaps I had rejected too much. I needed something. I knew that. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, I seemed to be moving through a sort of low-grade spiritual crisis. It first made itself known to me that night nearly a month ago when I’d driven Sue out this very road to the place where Catherine Quigley’s body had been placed by her murderer. Looking at that little body in the snow had had a traumatic effect upon me. It had made me physically sick, but that was the least of it. The conversation with Bob Williams that same night at Benny’s, which I remembered so vividly, had done nothing to help. All it did was bring to the surface the questions that had been deep in my mind for who-knows-how-long. Was there a Higher Power? Was He all-powerful? If so, how could He allow such monstrous things as the murder of a little child to happen? There was the horror of that experience at the autopsy and the lost weekend that followed, an eruption from deep in the soul, a cry for an answer to these paralyzing questions. My talk with Father LeClerc hadn’t helped that much. I felt a reluctance to seek the old remedies for problems that were new to me. Yet Phil LeClerc was a good priest. I recognized that.
The Judgment Page 40