Murder Makes a Pilgrimage

by Carol Anne O'Marie

Where had Pepe gone Friday night after he left the girls in their room? Could he be the one who had left the note for Lisa? Something about a note fluttered on the edge of Mary Helen’s mind, just out of reach.

  Pepe couldn’t be the guilty party—or could he? She leaned toward Eileen. “Do you think Pepe murdered Lisa?” she whispered.

  For an instant Eileen looked startled. “Sh-sh, he’ll hear you,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem the type.”

  “What type is that?”

  “It’s the type he’s not,” Eileen pronounced with certainty. “He’s a mite too charmingly dull.” She thought for a moment. “He’s more likely to bore someone to death with that savoir faire of his than actually to kill them.”

  Clearly not listening, Mary Helen stared out the bus window. “What motive would he possibly have?” she asked.

  “That, too,” Eileen agreed.

  Mary Helen fell back into her thoughts. Motive! That was the crux of the matter. What motive could any of them possibly have? Like Chaucer’s famous pilgrims, they were “a companye/Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle/In felawshipe. . . .”

  Mentally she ran through the laundry list of tour members: Cora and Bud Bowman, Roger and Bootsie DeAngelo, the Fongs, pert, little María José. Each of them had just met Lisa. Or had they?

  Only Heidi admitted to knowing her before the tour. Could Heidi, her childhood friend, have hated her enough to kill her? And if so, why?

  The motive, like the October sun behind mounds of dark, ominous rain clouds, lay hidden.

  Refreshed after his bath, his dinner, and his siesta, Comisario Ángel Serrano sat in his cramped office at the police station, thinking. The top of his desk was covered with papers. With one pudgy finger he pushed them around until he uncovered Victor Morales’s report.

  When the need arose, Dr. Morales, who taught at the Facultad de Medicina, acted as Santiago’s medical examiner. On those rare occasions when his services were called for, Morales filled out his report as if he were addressing a class of backward third formers; that suited Ángel fine. At least the doctor’s findings were stated clearly. Now, if he would only do something about his handwriting.

  Squinting, Ángel skimmed the details. Morales was a stickler for details. “Lisa Springer, female, 5′8″,” etc., etc. He skipped to the cause of death. With interest, he read and reread it.

  “The victim,” Morales had scribbled in his cramped hand, “had a gash on the left side of her skull just above the left ear. The size and shape of the wound fit the size and shape of the corner of the sacred crypt of St. James. Several strands of the victim’s hair were found on said corner. Strands of hair were also found on the ground below the tomb.

  “Although the blow to the head rendered the victim unconscious, the actual cause of death was strangulation. The victim was caught from behind with a———.” Morales had left a blank where a weapon should have been inserted.

  “The victim’s neck,” he wrote, “has a thick bruise across what is commonly called the Adam’s apple. This bruise is wider in the middle, tapering to become very narrow on the ends.

  “I have no idea what the weapon was,” Morales confessed. “It appears to have been soft, maybe padded.”

  Closing his eyes, Ángel leaned back in his chair and rested his heels on the edge of his desk. On the stage of his mind he tried to reenact the scene.

  Lisa meets her assailant in the crypt. They talk. Realizing his intentions, maybe fighting off his advances, she turns to run. The murderer grabs her by her flowing hair. That would account for a few strands of hair on the floor. He pulls her so hard that she falls backward. She hits her head on the corner of the crypt. The blow stuns her. The murderer sees his opportunity, grabs for his weapon, and strangles her with something padded.

  Ángel slammed forward in his chair. Padded? Wouldn’t any murderer worth his salt bring along a wire or a rope if he intended to strangle his victim? Maybe this murder was not premeditated. Perhaps it was caused by the emotion of the moment. He grabs for something, anything, that is handy. Maybe something belonging to the victim, herself. What do men or women—let’s not forget women—wear that is padded?

  In an effort to concentrate, Ángel closed his eyes again, rested his chin in the palm of his hand, and tried to visualize Julietta’s half of the closet. Actually Julietta’s three-quarters of the closet.

  What of his wife’s was padded? Hangers, pads in the shoulders of her dresses and her blouses. Neither was handy or the right shape. A belt perhaps? Would a belt be padded and tapered at the ends? He would have to ask her. A tie for a blouse? Not padded, not even the right shape. For that matter, a man’s tie, doubled maybe?

  “Tío!” María José’s shrill voice startled him. He felt a strong gust of cold air as she burst open the door.

  “Wake up!” she shouted.

  Ángel did not open his eyes until he was sure that his temper was under control. “I am awake!” He forced the words through clenched teeth. “I am thinking, Ho-Ho. You have heard of thinking, I assume.” He hoped his sarcasm was not lost on his niece. Apparently it was.

  “Tío!” She was all but dancing with excitement. “Let me tell you what happened.” She perched on the corner of his desk.

  Shaking his head, he raised his hand to silence her. “First, María José, in this office, we knock.” His tone was deliberately icy. “We wait until someone says, ‘Pase!’ before we burst in. Finally, we stand until we are invited to be seated; then we use a chair, not the edge of the desk.”

  “I am sorry, Tío,” she said, totally unrepentant. She jumped down from the desk and planted a loud kiss on the top of his bald head.

  Quickly Ángel wiped his crown with his handkerchief. “Don’t ever do that in here again!” he shouted, making a mental note to tell Julietta how lipstick came to be on his hankie. Smoothing down his sparse gray tonsure, he moved across his office and kicked the door shut.

  “What if someone had seen you? Do you want to make me the laughingstock—”

  “No, Tío,” she interrupted. “I want to tell you why you were so wise to send me on the bus.”

  Frustrated, Ángel sat down. His annoyance began to evaporate as María José told him of overhearing the conversation between the two nuns on the bus.

  “She said that someone grabbed her purse, then shoved her?” He was incredulous.

  María José nodded, her eyes wide with excitement.

  “And she didn’t see or hear anyone?”

  “No one. Only Pepe, who caught her.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am positive!”

  “By the way, María José, why did you stay on the bus instead of going into the tower with the others?”

  “I made up an excuse, Tío, that I had seen it dozens of times and that I wanted to nap.”

  “But what is it that you really wanted to do?” he asked, instinctively dreading her answer.

  María José gave a broad, charming smile. “I wanted to look through the things the group left on the bus and see if I could find something suspicious.”

  Ángel puffed out his cheeks, a telltale sign that he was getting angry. He let his breath out slowly through a small hole he made with his lips. Surely his niece watched too much American television. “María José, do you know that you could have been caught and accused of—”

  “But, Tío,” she interrupted. Another bad habit, he thought. “No one caught me.”

  “No matter. It is not what I sent you to do. If you intend to work with me . . .” As soon as the words left his mouth, Ángel wanted to bite his tongue. He stared at her. Her eyes danced.

  “Did you find anything?”

  Laughing, María José shook her head, then glanced at the large clock on his office wall. “It’s nearly seven o’clock, Tío,” she said. “Mama will be beginning to worry about where I am. You and Tía Julietta are coming for Sunday dinner, and I promised her I’d be home to help.”

  �
��Go, Ho-Ho. Heaven forbid that we should upset your mother. And remember, not one word of this to her. Not one word of this at dinner!” He shook his finger for emphasis.

  Nodding, María José opened his office door.

  “Before you go, let me ask you one question.”

  María José’s eyes were alert.

  “What could a woman be wearing that is padded?” he asked.

  “A bra, Tío!” Giggling, María José turned on her heel and left the word to echo through the squad room.

  “Have you no shame?” Ángel roared to her retreating back. He puffed out his cheeks, again, and glared around the room, daring any of his officers to laugh. Discipline must be maintained. All eyes averted his. The glass in his office door rattled from his bang.

  Safely back in his office, Ángel fell into his overstuffed chair, pushed back, and began to chuckle. You stepped right into that one, my lad, he thought, feeling foolish.

  He got out of the chair and walked over to the narrow window facing the Avenida de Rodrigo del Padrón, where he caught a glimpse of his niece’s small figure threading her way down the street. That bizarre hair color made her easy to spot even in a crowd.

  Whatever else one could say about María José, Ángel admitted, she was no ordinary young woman. And she wasn’t easy to ignore. Then, again, neither was a migraine headache.

  When they were finally back in their hotel room, Sister Eileen was the first to speak. “I have been mulling over this whole mess,” she said, “and I’ve come to a decision.”

  Sister Mary Helen could tell by the tilt of her friend’s chin that they were in for trouble. “What decision?” she asked cautiously.

  “We’ve an old saying back home. . . .”

  Mary Helen groaned.

  Impervious, as always, to Mary Helen’s reaction to her bits of wisdom, Eileen continued.

  “You’ll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind,” she announced, then let the words dangle like bait.

  “Meaning what?” Mary Helen asked, more for form than content. She knew exactly where Eileen was heading.

  Eileen searched the side pockets of her suitcase until she found a brand-new tube of antiseptic cream. “Lucky I remembered this.” She handed it to Mary Helen, then plunked down in one of the overstuffed velvet chairs and kicked off her shoes.

  From the looks of things, Eileen’s plan was to be long and detailed. Mary Helen followed suit. After a slight struggle with the screw top, she dabbed small squirts of cream on her scrapes.

  “According to our itinerary,” Eileen began, “this evening we are invited to a cocktail party in the Grand Salon, after which”—she read from the brochure—“we are ‘free to enjoy northern Spanish cuisine in one of the many excellent restaurants in this city.’ ”

  “When does the ‘plowed field’ come in?” Mary Helen asked, eager to see if her hunch was correct.

  Eileen blinked. “Oh, right,” she said. “As you well know, old dear, in vino veritas!”

  Mary Helen finished the thought. “So, this evening at the cocktail party, after our group has enjoyed their vino, we mingle and dig for the veritas?”

  Eileen nodded. “Exactly,” she said with a satisfied grin that reminded Mary Helen of a first-grade teacher whose Bluebird Reading Group had just conquered See Spot Run.

  “What we need here is a motive,” Eileen said. “We need to discover who in this group had a reason to want Lisa dead. And we’ll never do that unless we take action. Which was my point.”

  Mary Helen raised her palms to show Eileen the abrasions.

  “Ouch!” Eileen made a sympathetic face.

  “You do realize that one of this group is a murderer?” Mary Helen asked.

  “We don’t know that for sure. Besides, we will never find out which one it is unless we discover a motive. Somebody besides Heidi, who does not seem like a murderer to me, must have known Lisa before.”

  “And how do you propose to find that out?”

  “You sound like a regular Devil’s Advocate.” Eileen let out an exaggerated sigh. “But I can tell by that look, my friend, that you are dying to question these people.”

  “I don’t want to be dying because I did,” Mary Helen said in a feeble attempt both to save and to adjust her face.

  Without any further discussion, they split the group. Mary Helen was to interrogate the DeAngelos and the Fongs while Eileen concentrated on the Bowmans, Heidi, and Pepe. They flipped a peseta for María José, and the lot fell to Mary Helen.

  The music of a string quartet filled the Grand Salon and provided a tranquil background for the hum of conversation. Mary Helen was surprised to find the room crowded. Apparently several tour groups had been invited to cocktails simultaneously. Good, she thought, tossing a thumbs-up at Eileen. Their maneuvers wouldn’t be so obvious.

  Feeling as if she had painted a smile on her face, Mary Helen wove her way across the room toward the DeAngelos. The couple, wineglasses in hand, stood together like matched mannequins. Only the shifting of their eyes gave them away.

  From a distance Bootsie was striking: tall, straight, and slim with a dress of cobalt blue silk that trapezed down from her broad shoulders into flattering folds. The color matched her eyes and exaggerated their size. Her fingers sparkled with rings, and a jeweled comb stood out against the shoe polish black of her hair.

  It was only as Mary Helen drew nearer that the signs of age appeared. Tonight neither the dim light of the room nor the heavy layer of makeup hid the creases that time and temperament had drawn around Bootsie’s tight mouth and at the corners of her frosty eyes.

  Next to her stood Roger, lean, hollow-cheeked, bearded. Except for his eyes, which were a little too close to his nose, he was the perfect television stereotype of a professor.

  Mary Helen half expected to smell the soft leather smell of elbow patches. Instead, as she drew closer to the couple, she smelled the unmistakable odor of stress.

  The waiter passed with a full tray, and Mary Helen accepted a glass of wine. To set the stage for casual cocktail chitchat, it was best to be armed with a cocktail.

  “Good evening, Bootsie,” Mary Helen called cheerfully. “Don’t you look lovely this evening!”

  “Why, thank you, Sister,” Bootsie drawled, with a stiff little smile that went no farther north than her nose.

  “And how are you, Roger?” Mary Helen smiled up at him. “Tired from our outing?”

  Roger DeAngelo, momentarily distracted by his own thought, hesitated as if to ponder her question.

  “A little,” he said finally.

  Better than a grunt, Mary Helen thought, but not much. “You are a professor, I know,” she said, “but I don’t remember your mentioning what your subject is.”

  “History.” Roger gazed down his nose at her.

  “What a coincidence! That’s my field, too. Where did you study, Roger?”

  “University of Southern California.”

  “USC! I did my graduate work there, too,” Mary Helen said with genuine astonishment, then noticed the horrified expression on his face. “But long, long before your time,” she added hastily, in case he thought that she thought they were contemporaries.

  A sticky silence followed. This conversation was going nowhere. One word at a time and I’ll be here all night! she thought, turning back toward Bootsie. Her mind did a quick search for a question that demanded at least a sentence-long answer.

  Bootsie’s bright red mouth was pursed into what looked to Mary Helen like the adult version of “Lock your lips and throw away the key.”

  The couple was visibly relieved to see a waiter appear with a white towel in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.

  “Señor? Señoras?” He offered the bottle.

  Quickly both DeAngelos extended their glasses for a refill. Smiling, Mary Helen declined. She needed to keep her wits about her.

  Maybe the problem was that there was not yet enough vino to produce the desired veritas. Later she’d come
back to the DeAngelos.

  Excusing herself, Mary Helen searched the room for the Fongs. She spotted Rita first. The tiny woman was talking animatedly, almost nervously to a young fellow from another tour group.

  Neil hung behind her, apparently enjoying the conversation, although he wasn’t actually participating. Instead he surveyed the room from over the rim of his half glasses. Like Argus with the hundred eyes, Mary Helen thought, moving toward the trio. Unlike Argus, the giant, however, Neil Fong was a short, slight man.

  Just about my height, she thought, easing up beside him.

  “Hello, Sister.” He gave her a genuinely friendly grin.

  Mary Helen was encouraged. So far this interview was more promising than the last.

  Rita stopped chattering long enough to introduce Mary Helen to the young man, who was quickly developing the haunted look of a captive. He extended his hand, and after a sinewy grasp that made Mary Helen’s palm sting, he slipped into the crowd.

  Without warning all of Rita’s energy was unleashed on Mary Helen. Almond eyes darting, Rita began to babble about her family, about her education, about her job.

  Within minutes Mary Helen knew that Rita Fong was a fifth-generation San Franciscan, that her great-great-great-grandfather had been brought from China to labor on the Central Pacific Railroad, that she and Neil had known each other since childhood, that both had attended the University of California in Berkeley, and that they had married while Neil was still in school.

  She knew that the couple had four children of high school and college age, that they actually lived not in San Francisco but down the peninsula in Burlingame, and that Rita worked because she liked to, not because she had to. She even knew that Neil was distantly related to Edsel Ford Fong, the stand-up comedian, who once had worked as a waiter at Sam Wo’s in Chinatown.

  To Mary Helen’s way of thinking, none of these facts seemed remotely like a motive for Lisa Springer’s murder.

  “Before you came on this tour, did you happen to know any other members of our group?” she asked when Rita stopped for breath.

  Rita shook her head. The coarse black curls that were cleverly piled on the crown of her head wobbled precariously. “No one,” she said, her eyes suddenly wary. “Why do you ask?”