Cat on a Blue Monday

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  Chapter 37

  Resolution and Absolution

  Matt wasn't surprised to find Sister Seraphina waiting in the office at the downtown police station. He was startled to find Peggy Wilhelm there, and so was Temple, he noticed.

  He and Temple must be thinking the same thing: Peggy Wilhelm was tangential to the entire case--to the will, her aunt's death, even to the cat-show atrocity, if shaving a cat could be considered an atrocity by anyone other than a cat fancier.

  Neither of them was surprised to find Father Hernandez absent, as he had been all of last night. Why was Lieutenant Molina drawing out the ugly inevitable, playing cat-and-mouse with all their fears? Had she found new evidence at the rectory? Did she need Matt's testimony on the blackmail letters to make the case? Perhaps that was the issue she would illuminate today.

  Matt watched her with interest. She sat behind a big, cluttered desk in this large but cluttered office that was clearly not hers; the family photos on the long table behind the desk showed rows of smiling black faces. The office must belong to some superior who had been apprised of this meeting, had approved and then vanished to leave the details to Lieutenant Molina--which indicated that her superiors respected her enough to allow the occasional offbeat approach.

  But the lieutenant was nervous, Matt decided, watching her fidget with folders on the desktop and avoid the gathering eyes. She displayed the brusque efficiency of someone who did not like what she was about to do, but saw no other way out.

  Matt braced himself. So far, Lieutenant Molina had shown a talent for unearthing embarrassing facts--lacks--about himself. She had also recently confronted Temple with some unappetizing information about her missing significant other, Max Kinsella. What? Matt wondered. Temple was usually so honest and open, but about Max Kinsella she was a locked-room mystery. The room that occurred to Matt was a bedroom, so his speculations veered quickly away from that unknown territory.

  Lieutenant Molina cleared her throat and tapped a manila folder on the glass-topped desk, a teacher rapping for order and attention.

  They hadn't been talking to each other, idly buzzing back and forth; they needed no formal convening. Maybe Lieutenant Molina did. What did C.R. stand for, anyway? Was that her lack, her secret?

  "This is irregular," she confessed, almost hesitant.

  She didn't like this closed circle, Matt saw, this mystery that was sure to explode like a fragmentation grenade and strike somebody--an entire congregation of shocked and sorrowful somebodies--any more than he did.

  "I am confronted in this case with a number of inexplicable, seemingly unrelated events." Her vivid blue gaze touched every listening face. "Of course they are not unrelated at all. There are also . . . elements that do not seem to make sense. They do. I should warn you that I am not seeking a solution here; I know it. I am hoping that some unclear areas will resolve themselves. As a start, I will report on the solution to the hissing and obscene phone calls to Miss Tyler and the convent, to the attack on the cat Peter, to the shaving of the cat Minuet at the cat show. These, we know, were all interconnected, but the logic linking them was . . . distorted.

  "Before I begin, does anyone here have anything to say?"

  They eyed each other, each looking sheepish and guilty, for each was probably concealing something. Matt knew Temple bore the burden of more knowledge of another person

  than she felt comfortable carrying--but who was her confidante? He shared the same burden of Father Hernandez's blackmail letters. Did Molina know of those; would he be better off admitting their existence now?

  Sister Seraphina had concealed Father Hernandez's flaw--his sudden dependence on a liquor bottle. Did she hide more?

  And Peggy Wilhelm, was she hiding knowledge of her aunt's affairs that would make the elderly woman's death her possible murder--understandable?

  "We think Blandina Tyler was murdered," Lieutenant Molina said. "Her murderer has not confessed, but this was a simple case, in that respect. Whether the suspect is sane or not, a jury will have to decide."

  "Who?" Temple asked, brushing a frivolity of red curls back from her forehead. "If the case is that clear-cut, we deserve to know who."

  Molina's sad, forbearing smile said that she knew, as a priest does, that clear-cut answers are always the most ambiguous at heart.

  "I told you all last night," she went on, "that we held someone you knew and trusted, someone whose name would shock you. Perhaps I shouldn't even be telling you this."

  "Telling us what?" someone asked from the doorway, someone who had arrived unnoticed.

  Sister Seraphina stood. "Father Hernandez! You're not--"

  "I'm not what?" he asked rather testily. "What is everyone else doing here? And why was I waylaid by Sister Saint Rose of Lima as soon as I returned to the rectory and sent here?"

  "You weren't at the rectory last night," Matt said, dismayed by his unintended, but unmistakably accusing tone.

  Father Hernandez turned to him, then ran a hand through his sleek silver hair. He wore full priestly garb: black slacks and the white notch of a Roman collar at the neck of his black, short-sleeved shirt. Add a black suitcoat and he could play the organ for any memorial service Electra might want to hold, just as Matt had once. Father Hernandez did not look like a murderer. He looked gaunt and weary, but otherwise elegant.

  His brief descent into the hell of a tequila bottle had not harmed him beyond the obvious. The real hell had come through the mail in the neat, damning lines of laser-printed lies. Or were they lies? Denial was the bottom line of most serious human failings. Did Lieutenant Molina even know of the blackmail? Did she know of Matt's concealed knowledge of it?

  "No, I wasn't at the rectory," the priest said, his tone sharp. "Am I supposed to always be at the rectory? I was... in the church."

  "The church, at that time of night?" Sister Seraphina inquired. "All night?"

  "The church is for every time--night or day--though we are forced to keep it locked against vandals at night in these terrible times. Didn't any of you even look there? Can't a priest be in a church? What is the matter with you people?"

  Molina smiled. "Are you on the wagon, Father Rafe?"

  He flashed her a look full of thunder that swiftly became a nervous throat clearing. "I hope so."

  His glance crossed Matt's; they smiled, briefly brothers, no matter what.

  Matt felt momentarily absolved. Absolved of the recent confidence he had borne so unwillingly, absolved of his ambiguous status: ex-priest. He never escaped the word and what it meant. Priest. There are no ex-priests, just as They say there are no ex-Catholics. The Force is always with you, Luke Skywalker, even when you walk--run--away. So are They. So Father Hernandez was not guilty of Blandina Tyler's death at least. Who was?

  Molina finally took mercy on them and ended the suspense.

  "The person who killed Miss Tyler was apprehended last night, Father Hernandez. Yes, sit down; you'll need to.

  We have in custody Peter Burns, church attorney. I understand your shock. I've shared a pew with him at Our Lady of Guadalupe more than once myself."

  Gasps greeted this announcement.

  "He has been a member of the parish for . . . over ten years," Father Hernandez objected even as he sank down obediently on an empty chair. "He has volunteered his services in the church's behalf. There must be a mistake--"

  "Indeed," said Lieutenant Molina. "The matter of Blandina Tyler's will is foremost among these 'mistakes.' We have found, after searching the Tyler house, which, thanks to

  Miss Barr did not burn down"--Temple nearly fainted at this fulsome praise--"seventeen wills dated at various times.

  That's why Burns continued to haunt the house, as it were, after Miss Tyler's death; he knew she stockpiled everything, and other wills might surface to cloud the legitimacy of his quite illegitimate will. That's why he finally decided to burn the house down. Now we have the wills he feared. The will Mr. Burns presented to Father Hernandez as the latest is clearly a fo
rgery based on the previous wills and no doubt commissioned by Miss Tyler, but altered in its terms, particularly as to the disinheriting of the cats. Mr. Burns had a vendetta against cats, among other things."

  "Then he shaved my Minuet!" Peggy Wilhelm said. "But why? I was miles away from my aunt's house, at the Cashman Center."

  "Maybe--" Temple, thinking hard, hit bingo "--that was the idea."

  "Not bad," Lieutenant Molina noted. "With her show cat attacked, Miss Wilhelm would spend the weekend at the Cashman Center guarding against further mischief, rather than visiting her aunt's house twice a day to help out with the cats."

  They all mulled that over.

  "He wanted Miss Tyler alone for the weekend?" Temple asked.

  Despite her protests that Lieutenant Molina intimidated her, Matt noticed that Temple was the only one willing to speculate in the face of what Molina might know. Matt wondered if that was because she was the one with the least to hide.

  "Miss Tyler and her cats." Lieutenant Molina savored those factors. "He did not count on his action at the cat show ensuring that the terminally curious Miss Barr would be sent to the house to feed the cats instead, or that Sister Seraphina--disturbed by the accelerating obscene phone calls to Sister Mary Monica, and finding Father Hernandez. . . removed from parish affairs--would call on her ex-student Matt Devine for aid. Instead of getting rid of one inconvenient niece, Burns ensured the presence of two peripherally involved strangers." Lieutenant Molina regarded Matt and Temple in turn. "I have always found peripherally

  involved strangers to be a pain in the neck. I believe that Mr. Burns is now of the same opinion. Shaving the Burmese cat was his first mistake, although he was not detected at the time."

  "Birman," Temple put in scrupulously. "The cat was a Birman."

  Peggy Wilhelm, in a sort of daze, gratefully nodded her curly head. "They were sacred temple cats in Burma hundreds of years ago. Most . . . prescient, intelligent animals, Birmans, and very sensitive."

  "Burmese, Birman," Lieutenant Molina went on with a trace of annoyance. "The point was not the breed, but the threat. Some of you should have seen from the beginning the significance of the shaved pattern."

  Everyone looked politely mystified.

  "Down the back and around the middle," Matt heard himself saying. "A cross. Father Hernandez had commented on that."

  "A cross." Lieutenant Molina beamed approval at Matt as if he were a prize pupil.

  He felt himself flush at the attention--or perhaps at the approval--and dropped his eyes. This wasn't a classroom exercise. The harassment had turned a number of lives upside down, least of which, his. He didn't want good grades, he wanted an answer, the answer. He had always wanted the one, true answer that was never quite clear. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

  "Under interrogation, Mr. Burns proved to be somewhat obsessive about the topic of religion," Molina said. "Also about old ladies and cats. There's no doubt that he intended to crucify another animal. The black cat, Midnight Louie, would have been found nailed to the church door before Miss Tyler's funeral."

  "Ahhh!" Temple clasped her fists to her chest and looked appalled. "Did he mean to imply satanism?"

  "Possibly. Certainly he meant to abuse an animal. Was your cat on the Tyler premises for some reason, or did Mr. Burns take him from your apartment?"

  Temple obviously had not considered this question. "I don't know. How would this guy even know I had a cat? He didn't know me from Adam Ant. No, Louie . . . Louie's just

  a man-about-town. He's always wandered, and he must have stumbled into this guy's path."

  "Hmm." Molina was not impressed. "I don't buy it, but since the alternative is that your Louie put himself into Mr. Burns's path for some reason, I'll go along with it. Let's say that Midnight Louie happened to be visiting lady friends in Miss Tyler's house when Mr. Burns came looking for a big, juicy cat that no one could miss seeing stapled to Our Lady of Guadalupe's doors."

  "Mr. Burns is Catholic," Sister Seraphina piped up.

  "On the surface, yes. Why do you mention it?" the lieutenant wanted to know.

  'Tacking a cat to the church doors--it's a sacrilegious version of Martin Luther nailing his 'Ninety-five Theses' to the Wittenberg Cathedral door and starting the whole Reformation."

  "Perhaps, Mr. Burns's attitude toward Catholicism seems to be highly antagonistic, given the statement we have recorded."

  "But why?" Father Hernandez demanded. "This young man has been a member of the parish for over ten years. He has volunteered his legal services, both to the church and Miss Tyler. Why would he pose as a loyal parish member for so long? Why?"

  "Four hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars," Lieutenant Molina announced briskly. "The will was fraudulent.

  The monies he represented as comprising Miss Tyler's estate are grossly underestimated. The church would have gotten its pittance; the cats would have been homeless, and Peter

  Burns would have been immeasurably richer. Our fraud unit is still tracing accounts. He handled her financial affairs for the past decade, you see. She was a typical, modest, closemouthed old lady. No one would suspect how much her money had appreciated with shrewd investments, not even Miss Tyler."

  "Except--" Sister Seraphina stopped speaking suddenly.

  All eyes turned to Peggy Wilhelm, who was shaking her moplike head.

  "No, not me. Aunt Blandina was of a generation that believed that her age, her financial position and the state of her soul were equally sacred. She said nothing about any of them to me. I was still a child to her. Her forever-childish niece; useful, but untrustworthy, except with the cats. I was good enough to take care of her cats, but not her financial affairs, not anything else."

  Temple winced at the self-disgust buried in Peggy Wilhelm's bitter words. Matt wondered again who had cast Temple in the role of confidante. Like Molina, he had his suspect.

  "Mr. Devine."

  The lieutenant's voice made Matt jump as if he had been fingered in a crime. He liked being the observer, the judge, the confessor. He didn't like being the subject, the focus.

  "You were the wild card," she said. "Sister Seraphina drew you from the deck; you were a student of hers in Chicago--" he nodded "--and you came onto the scene with a kind of unholy innocence. What forced her to turn to you? The obscene phone calls?"

  He nodded again.

  "Why not Father Hernandez? The drinking?"

  He nodded yet again, not looking at anyone.

  Molina smiled grimly, satisfied. "So we have Sister Seraphina and Mr. Devine trying to protect Sister Mary Monica, and Father Hernandez by default."

  Father Hernandez pressed his lips together, tempted to defend himself and his sudden alcoholic turn. No, Matt willed him. The rest of it may not have to be revealed. Let her suppose, and we will dispose . . . we priests, who serve the greater good, which sometimes is not served by full disclosure. Their glances clashed and slid away.

  "And we have Miss Temple Barr," Molina said, "who is trying to protect cats."

  Temple, too, controlled herself, remaining silent while

  Lieutenant Molina went on.

  "Mr. Peter Burns had not planned on these interlopers. He had planned on Miss Wilhelm being absent. The crucified cat was meant to distress Miss Tyler, and did. It was not meant to have other witnesses than she. Essentially, we believe, and Burns has indicated, he intended to weaken and harass Miss Tyler into a grave illness. He was tired of waiting; he wanted her dead. He wanted her money. He wanted the cats killed, one way or another--by his own hand, or by being cast out undefended in an unwelcoming world."

  They listened to Molina and shook their heads. Peter Burns, whom they had hardly known, seemed mindlessly demented.

  "But why?" Sister Seraphina's astute eyes were unsatisfied.

  "Money doesn't motivate the acts of mischief and terror he performed."

  "He had a motive beyond greed," Molina conceded. "Retribution. Mr. Devine?"

  Matt looked
up again. He was beginning to resent being called "Mr. Devine." Was Molina taunting him for the absence of the old honorific, "Father?" Father Devine. Father

  Matt.

  "You suggested that I investigate the background of everyone in the case," Molina went on. "You knew how thorough I could be, from your own experience."

  He nodded.

  "I did as you said. And I found ..." Molina sighed as if exhausted. "Miss Wilhelm, would you care to tell us about it?"

  "About what?" Her voice was stiff, ungiving.

  "About what happened at Our Lady of Guadalupe thirty six years ago."

  Peggy Wilhelm's eyes stabbed toward Temple.

  "No," Temple said. "I never did. Honestly."

  Peggy Wilhelm's hands became helpless fists on her knees, her stubby, middle-aged knees covered by cotton culottes.

  Finally, Peggy Wilhelm spoke.

  "Thirty-six years ago. You think I'd forget? You'd think everyone else would forget--why can't they? I lived here for a while, in this parish. At my aunt's house. None of you were here then. None of you would know. Lieutenant . . .!"

  "It's the key." Molina's tone was not uncompassionate.

  "You must know, and they must know."

  "Why? It's been such a secret all these years!"

  "Because he knows."

  "He?" Peggy Wilhelm seemed utterly confused. "But he never knew, the father. That was the whole point. We all . . . conspired to make sure that he never knew. It was our

  business. Family business. My fault. My sin. Not his. He was irrelevant. But not me. My heart magnified the Lord, and so did my body. They kept telling us what the Virgin Mary was like, so young, so pure. I was fifteen and I hardly knew how it happened.