Why he wanted to keep Monsignor here with him, Father Matt wasn’t entirely sure. He had never liked the man in seminary and truly he had been a royal pain since his arrival. But there was something engaging in him these days, as though the dementia peeled away all the artifice that he used to wield power over his seminary students. All that was left was a man with a wonderful command of the past — at least the long past — no particular worries for the future, and a surprisingly engaging personality when he wasn’t harrying Father Matt for things he missed, eating his food, or misplacing his things. And a faith that was so deep he would never lose it. I need to be around that, Matt thought. At any rate, the desire to keep Monsignor close by and to be his friend was as strong as the call to priesthood had been. He was glad they’d found a way to make it work. The old fellow deserved to die holding the hand of a friend, not a stranger.
Pilar opened the door. She was expecting them and would hold court in Jane’s absence. She wore her best black dress with a crisp white apron on over it. “Come in, come in.”
“Let me introduce Monsignor Jamais,” he said, as he entered the familiar hallway.
Before Monsignor could speak, Pilar took his hands and kissed the palms, an old-fashioned gesture of respect for the office that Father Matt had never witnessed. Monsignor tut-tutted, but a tear slid down his cheek. Seeing it, Father Matt felt a bit guilty for all the times he’d made fun of Monsignor in seminary.
“Dios te bendiga, Monseñor. It is an honor to have you here. Please, come in.”
The whole family was there: Pilar, Lupe, Isa, the children, all in their Sunday best, lined up like a receiving line to welcome him. Cookies, finger sandwiches, and petit fours were laid out on the coffee table and a silver pot — it had to be from the previous owners, as Jane would never have one — sat on a tray with cups, cream, and sugar.
Lupe, the quietest and youngest of the women, escorted him to a chair and settled a small table at his side. The children took turns serving. Pilar directed conversation. First in English, then Spanish when she realized he was fluent. The youngest clambered onto Monsignor’s lap to listen. He smiled benevolently and stroked the child’s black hair as he described in great and glorious detail the time he was sent on an errand to Barcelona and ended up serving in the Sagrada Familia for three months, enjoying the life in Barcelona, cafes and music, and long walks in beautiful gardens. When his cup went dry or his plate was empty, Pilar was there to fill them again.
Father Matt sat off to the side. Please God, let this work, he prayed. He deserves better than I have been able to give him.
When Monsignor was sufficiently full that he waved away his fourth cake with apologies for not eating more, Lupe took him to see the guest suite: a large bedroom and sitting room on the main floor, the one Jane retained as guest quarters for her children when they visited. Father Matt hung back to talk to Pilar.
“It won’t be easy to take care of him, you know. He can be very demanding. He’s on his best behavior.”
“That is only another way of saying he is a man,” she retorted. Then her face became serious. “I know how hard it is. He is not afraid yet, but he will be when he understands what is happening. Then he will be angry, and he will blame us for anything that happens. He loses his pants; we stole them. He cannot find his wallet; we stole it. He will be impatient, demand too much, shout, maybe even throw things. But that will not last long. When he loses more of his memory, he will still be annoying, because he will ask the same thing over and over, but then again, everything will always be new to him. Everything beautiful. Always a surprise. So it was with my husband. I understand. They understand.”
“Understanding is one thing. Living with it is something else. If it does not work, I can move him. And Jane insists that you are to be paid for taking care of him.”
Pilar waved an imperious hand when he mentioned money; he’d let her fight that out with Jane, and frankly, he wasn’t sure who would win that one. Then she looked at him with a gentle expression. “It will work, because we will see that it works. This good man gave up his chance to marry to be a priest, to be our father. What kind of children are we if we do not take care of him?”
Her words stung. “You’d be like me. I can’t take care of him, Pilar. I can’t. He drives me crazy and he makes me angry, even though I know it isn’t his fault. What kind of priest does that make me? I even — God forgive me — wondered whether it might be better for him if he didn’t get better from the overdose.” Father Matt stopped abruptly, horrified at what he was saying, even as he was relieved for having told the truth to someone.
“You are just a man, Father. A good man, a good priest. But this is our work. It is not for you. That is why you cannot do it. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Thoughts are not acts. You brought him to the clinic, and you brought him to us. It’s enough.” She touched his cheek again, just as she had before. This time the intimacy was welcome, a mother comforting her son. “Leave this to us. Just pray, eh?”
It took a moment for Father Matt to be able to speak. “Dios te bendiga, Pilar,” was all that he could say. Then, when he regained control of himself, he added, “Thank you.”
From across the hall, in the general vicinity of the guest suite, he heard an imperious and familiar voice. “Matthew! Be sure you don’t forget my breviary when you bring my things. I couldn’t find it this morning. Your housekeeper must have mislaid it.”
It was hard to tell who laughed more, Pilar or Father Matt.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
January 17
I was taking my time getting into the office. Mike would be there to handle the incoming, and given the way things were going these days, I wasn’t doing such a great job handling my end of the practice. I made a cup of coffee with the machine in my room and enjoyed it, along with a chapter in the book I was trying to read and a couple of cuts from Stan Kenton’s Cuban Fire until I was sure that the children had finished their breakfasts and were shuttled out the door to the parish daycare. When the noise level abated, I dressed quickly and went downstairs to claim my share of whatever was left from breakfast.
Pilar frowned at me for being so late. She was already clearing the table. Monsignor Jamais was at the end of the counter, finishing a plate of chilaquiles and eggs. I looked at Pilar with hope and apology in my eyes. She mumbled something under her breath, but she dished me a plate of fried tortilla strips covered with red sauce and cheese, topped with two fried eggs. It was a measure of her displeasure that the eggs were fried. She knows I can’t stand eggs unless they’re scrambled. I wasn’t entirely sure why she was put out with me, apart from being late to table. It would pass.
Monsignor, on the other hand, clearly enjoyed her good offices. She took his plate with a smile, refilled his teacup, and pushed a plate of fresh fruit toward him. “Even breakfast deserves dessert,” she said.
“What a delightful thought,” Monsignor said, as he took a couple of pineapple spears and pushed the plate in my direction. “Do you have breakfast here often?” he asked.
Clearly, the details of his current lodging were a bit unclear. “As often as I can,” I said. “Are you well this morning, Monsignor?”
“Wonderful, wonderful. I’m ready for my morning constitutional. I thought I would take a walk before it’s time for Mass.”
The thought of Monsignor loose in town did not appeal to me, especially since I had not yet had time to solve the mystery of his sleeping pill prescription. Pilar broke into my thoughts with one of her own.
“I must go to the market today, Monseñor. Perhaps you would come with me, to help with the groceries? We can be done in time for Mass.”
“Delightful. I would be happy to come. Let me get my coat and hat.” He stood up, puzzled for a minute at his surroundings.
“Across the study, down the hall by the stairs, first door on the right,” Pilar said.
“Of course!” He bustled off.
I smiled at Pilar, and she winked at me. I thoug
ht whatever was bothering her had clearly passed, but her expression became serious again. She refilled my coffee cup and passed me the morning paper. “Cuidado. Bad news.”
I wondered what that might be, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw on the front page. There, above the picture of Eoin Connor, was the headline: Irish Author Arrested for Murder.
It was the same time-stands-still feeling I had when they told me John was dead. This time it was Pilar instead of Quick who caught me, holding me in her strong, brown arms. She stroked my head like I was a child and crooned something, I know not what. My heart heard it, though, and eventually I began to breathe again. And some time after that, my mind returned to its space between my ears, back from the walkabout it took in the land of the living dead when I saw the paper.
The local rag is not the best source of international news, and it generally runs about twenty-four hours behind the rest of the world on that count. Not surprising for a small town paper, and to be fair, this would not have been news here at all, had Eoin not been in residence these past six months. Pilar watched as I read through the article with increasing disbelief. When I put it down, she looked straight at me.
“Is it true?”
Good question. “I cannot imagine that it is,” I said, with as controlled a voice as I could muster. It couldn’t be. Still, the image of a broken bat and two shattered doors kept insisting that it could be.
Pilar sniffed. “I thought he was a good man. Perhaps I was wrong.”
The lawyer in me snapped to attention. “Don’t jump to conclusions. There’s more to this than what’s in the papers.” There had to be. I fought back tears, feeling the same sort of punch-in-the-gut pain I had felt when John was murdered, the same sort of betrayal. I wanted to cry, to throw things, to take a bat to the door of my office, if need be. But I had to be calm and reasonable. It cost me almost more than I was willing to pay, but pay it I did.
One black eyebrow cocked. Pilar was not convinced.
I got up from the table without a word, measuring each movement as though the pain were physical and not emotional. Pilar cautiously hugged me, put a smile on her face, and decided in her own mind that Eoin was innocent. “No man who loves you would do such a thing as this,” she said with finality. For her, it was as simple as that, bat or no bat.
It wasn’t so simple for me. I hid myself in my study for the rest of the morning, scanning the various European news feeds, watching the B.B.C., and just generally trying to figure out what was going on between uncontrollable bouts of crying. It was simply too much, and I did not want to face it, even though I knew I had to, that there was no choice in the matter.
By noon I had cried myself out and gleaned that Fiona and Eoin had been staying in the same hotel in Belfast. They had a loud and very public argument in the hotel bar the night before she was found dead, and Eoin was seen leaving her room only a short while before her body was discovered by an unnamed assistant. Eoin’s fingerprints were found on the poison container, an outdated pesticide called Black Leaf 40, a concentrated solution of nicotine. And I knew that he had a dandy motive for murder. Several, in fact. If I were a cop, I would have arrested him, too.
By noon, the reports were repeating themselves, and I had researched the finer points of nicotine poisoning. I asked Pilar to pack a bag, notified Mike that he was the one-and-only until further notice, and checked into the cost of a trip to Ireland. The charter jet was expensive, but it was available; the airport was open, and it would have me in Belfast by morning. At least now I knew what the next question was. Was I going to go?
I sighed and headed out to my office. I had a few things on my desk to finish sorting there, and it might help me sort my mind, as well. I had not been there more than a few minutes when Father Matt materialized in front of me, dispatched, no doubt, by Pilar.
“What are you going to do, William?” he asked, using his nickname for my warrior persona. William Wallace, wielder of broadsword and pursuer of justice.
I paused in my sorting, measuring my words carefully.
“Do you know what it’s like, Father, to be a medical examiner all your life? To be privy to such terrible things, and have to live them and relive them over and over while the rest of the world gets on with life? Even the families can get past it; they have to. We just have to keep dealing with it.” I wasn’t sure whether Ireland was my ultimate destination, but I was determined to leave the Center, at least for the time being. The packed bag would not go to waste. I would work out the details. Right now I just wanted to flee. Anywhere. Not very much like William Wallace.
A tattered, gray folder lay on top of one of the shelves; my bad habit of stacking things in odd places. I remembered it well and tossed it at Father Matt. It landed on the couch next to him with a minor thud and slid, spilling a few faded color photographs out onto the rug.
Father Matt leaned over to pick them up and then stopped, images in hand, as he realized what they showed. He sat back up slowly and opened the folder to put them back in their place quickly, as though they burned his hands, and closed the gray cover with finality before he looked up at me. His face was pale under the brown of his beard. “What was that?” he finally asked.
I shrugged, matter-of-fact. I had seen those pictures so many times that they had lost much of their power over me, though the smell of rotting potatoes would always bring the scene back to my mind. My first brush with a serial killer. “What’s left of a little girl. She was raped and strangled and stabbed and left in the woods for a hunter to find six months later. We carried what was left of her back to the morgue in a garbage bag.”
I remembered reassembling the remains on the cold steel of the morgue table. It took most of the day. At the end of it all, I could announce from the remains that it had been a girl of six or seven, fifty inches tall or so. The missing girl — April — had been abducted from a friend’s seventh birthday party, and at her last doctor visit had been square in the middle of the growth chart: 51 inches tall.
Some of the bones were missing. Most of the rest had marks on them, evidence of scavengers at work. I’d been lucky enough to find the tip of a blade embedded in a rib, evidence of the cause of death, and enough to link the girl to her murderer who still carried the clasp-knife in his pocket on the day he was arrested. Fifteen years later, he was still alive, but April was still dead, and I was still giving testimony at his periodic bail hearings. Her parents had divorced — the father remarried, the mother a drunk. The story had been on some true crime television show last year. When they called, I declined to give an interview.
“You hear the sins, Father Matt; I see them. In all their lurid detail, and then I have to talk about them over and over. To the cops. To the D.A. To the defense attorney. To the judge. Sometimes to the loved ones and sometimes to the press. It never goes away. I know all about the dark side of life.” I took a long drink from the overly large glass of water on the shelf and continued pulling books and files out and packing them into boxes. “It’s what I do. Now I have to decide whether the man I....” I paused, sitting back on my haunches to look at Father Matt again, hesitating to say the word. I decided I could not. “Whether Eoin Connor is one of those monsters that I’ve worked to put away all my life.”
Father Matt took a deep breath, as though bringing in enough air might cleanse him from what he had seen. I knew from experience it wouldn’t, but he’d discover that soon enough. “I can’t say I blame you for how you feel,” he finally said. “But must you give up on Eoin, too? Isn’t he worth your doubt, unless something is proved against him?”
I took my glass in hand and folded myself onto the floor, looking up at him, my packing forgotten for the moment. “I’m just acknowledging what is. He was married, and he kept that from me. His wife showed up, and that’s that. He destroyed my doors with a ball bat. Now he’s in jail as a suspect in a murder. He’s wealthy enough to afford a first-class lawyer. Nothing there for me to do.” I paused. “I might be able to find a way to
love a man who lied to me. I can’t love a murderer.”
“You know he didn’t do it.”
I tended to my shelves and answered over my shoulder. I didn’t trust myself if I were to look into those brown eyes. “No, Father, I don’t. He’s more than capable. I saw that myself.”
Father Matt was customarily direct. “You already love him, Jane.”
“Perhaps. I thought so, at least.”
“He came to see me that night, you know.”
“I was down at the police station. Of course, I know.”
Father Matt shook his head, as though to clear it. His expression was impatient. “He came to tell me about you. And Fiona. He was going to ask you to marry him, Jane, to wait for him while the marriage was sorted out. He had no idea she was in town. He was devastated. You were married. You had a wonderful life. Eoin was denied that, but he got to see a glimmer of what might be — in you and your own family. Imagine how he must feel, wanting that kind of intimacy and being denied it because of someone else’s selfishness. Most people don’t think that matters to men, but believe me, Jane, it does. It matters deeply, and the more passionate the man, the more it matters. Just when he thought he might have that — finally, with you —along came Fiona to yank the rug out from under his feet again. ”
“Congratulations, Father. You’ve just outlined a pretty good motive for murder.”
“He gave me this.” Father Matt changed tactics and passed over a slip of lace. I unfolded it and a plain, gold ring dropped out. “His mother’s ring, some of her lace. He had them with him to give to you that night.”
I turned the lace over in my hands, then sat up long enough to place it, folded again, on the shelf, with the ring atop it. When I confronted my pastor again, my eyes were hard, and I could feel the flush rising on my neck. “Do you know why I loved John so much, Father Matt?”
No answer. I didn’t really expect one. Father Matt didn’t budge, still leaning expectantly towards me.
Dying for Compassion (The Lady Doc Murders Book 2) Page 14