Pious Deception

by Susan Dunlap

  She stepped out into the parking lot; hot dry air seared her skin. At seven-thirty at night, with the sun setting, it felt as hot as noon. The rental Jeep was waiting. She checked the map and headed for the Maricopa Freeway.

  Chase’s report raised another question. The dead priest had had a juvenile police record. That record had been sealed, and the nature of Vanderhooven’s crime or crimes with it. But that the son of a man as rich and influential as the elder Vanderhooven had a record at all—now, that was suspicious.

  At eight-fifteen she turned off the Pima Freeway at the last exit before the Gila River Indian Reservation and made a left by a blue-and-yellow gas station into a housing development. A left at the next corner brought her outside the brightly lighted palm-lined courtyard of Mission San Leo.

  A man hurried down the path toward her Jeep. Bishop Dowd? In the sharp shadows of the courtyard lights, he looked more satanic than priestly. His ruddy skin had a coating of tan that only years of exposure to the sun could have brought. His reddish hair looked faded, but his thick eyebrows were still dark. As he came closer she noticed hollows in his cheeks, surprising in view of his girth.

  “Miss O’Shaughnessy? I’m Bishop Dowd,” he said as he opened the gate. “I suppose you want to see where I found Father Vanderhooven.” Abruptly, Dowd turned and started down the path toward the white adobe church.

  “I will,” she said, more sharply than she had intended, “but first there are a few things we need to clear up.”

  He stopped. She could see his jaw tightening.

  “Legalities,” she added. “The contract. I understand there are variations in this case. It’s always best to be clear from the beginning. Our agreement states that by Monday—”

  “The funeral is Monday,” he whispered. He glanced nervously around the lighted courtyard. Even though it was clearly empty, he continued to whisper. “I have to know about him before that. He died in a, well, questionable manner, you see.”

  To ease his obvious discomfort, she said, “I have a general picture of how he died.”

  Dowd nodded. “I can’t bury a suicide in hallowed ground. I have to know how he died. But”—he shook his head sharply, as if to clear it—“this investigation must be strictly confidential. We can’t allow this to become common knowledge, have everyone wanting to know how he died, young and healthy as he was, or we’ll have a full-blown scandal here.… If you can’t find out how he died by Monday you won’t be any use to us. And at the rates you charge …” He glanced pointedly at her silk jacket. A man used to sizing up his adversaries, Kiernan thought, but one less than subtle about it. It didn’t fit the picture of the canny, ambitious bishop Chase had painted. She looked at Dowd’s hands; his fingers trembled ever so slightly.

  “I’ve altered the contract to state that my fee is contingent on that. I’ll start with examining the scene of his death, and his body. If I don’t think I can clarify this situation, I won’t take the case.”

  “You don’t waste any time, do you?”

  “I don’t plan to,” she snapped.

  Her retort seemed to stun him. He cleared his throat, and when he spoke it was with the voice of the canny, ambitious bishop Sam Chase had described. “Now, Miss O’Shaughnessy, I understand you used to be a forensic pathologist. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Right.”

  “And that you, eh, left the department—”

  “I believe the phrase you’re looking for is ‘was fired’? And the answer is yes. I was fired.” She fought to keep her voice from betraying her.

  “Surely, you agree I have a right—”

  “If you have second thoughts about hiring me, we can settle up now.”

  Again his brows lifted, but this time his eyes seemed to sink back into his head. “No, we need to get rid of the odious questions about Father Vanderhooven. That’s the important thing. You’ve been a medical examiner. You can look at his body and see what happened.”

  “Well, sometimes. Mostly, the body just shows me the discrepancies. I don’t work miracles.”

  “I’m not asking for miracles, just to have Father Vanderhooven’s name clean.” He veered to the left toward a one-story white stucco building. Pulling open the dark wooden door, he motioned her into a foyer. To her right was a shabby room with a rose-print broadloom carpet and old green leather office chairs with sharp-edged circular depressions in the seats. Kiernan could feel her shoulders tensing. They were all alike, these rooms where Catholics waited while their priests finished mass or sipped their postprandial liqueur. After the death of her sister, Moira, she had sat in one of those sagging green chairs in Father Grogan’s study. She had dug her fingernails into the green leather arm rests, jamming her teeth together as the priest told her to stop lashing out at the Church. She had been twelve years old.

  Dowd motioned her down the hall and opened a door to a study, itself a mixture of two cultures—Old Priest and Old West. The chairs obviously had been a tax-deductible gift, like those in the anteroom, but the floor was covered by a Navaho rug with a geometric pattern in black, brown, and white, and on the walls were Indian sand paintings in the reds and oranges of the desert sunsets. Kiernan knew little about Indian art, but the paintings looked like originals. Apparently, Father Vanderhooven had given some thought to this room he worked in and where his parishioners came seeking comfort.

  Before Dowd could take the seat of authority at the desk, Kiernan settled herself on the couch. Dowd hesitated, then moved to the other end of the couch and sat down.

  She handed him the contract and watched with surprise as he ran a finger down the margin and skimmed the document. She had expected him to look at it, but she doubted he could take much in now. How devastating had the shock of finding Vanderhooven been? she wondered.

  Dowd leaned more heavily back into the sofa. His foot tapped an irregular beat. When he put down the contract, she asked, “Have you notified the police yet?”

  “No. Of course not. I thought you understood everything, with all the time you’ve spent putting every fine point in this.” He waved the contract.

  “I do realize your fears about publicity.”

  “It’s not publicity I’m worried about. It’s Father Vanderhooven. I have to preside over his burial. Where am I going to bury him? He can’t be laid in consecrated ground if he’s a suicide. You know that, Miss O’Shaughnessy. Surely you’re a Catholic.”

  “Was a Catholic. But about the police—”

  “I have to make the decision that stamps Father Vanderhooven’s memory. I can’t leave that decision to the police. I have to know before I call them in.”

  Kiernan hesitated. Dowd seemed much more in control now. There was an element of truth in his explanation, but how much? And how much was he just interested in avoiding scandal? She knew the ramifications of a Catholic suicide only too well. “I take your point. Nevertheless, you must notify the authorities immediately. It’s a criminal offense to conceal a crime.”

  His ruddy face paled. “Crime?”

  “Suicide’s a crime. Attempted suicide, too.”

  “It could have been an accident,” he insisted.

  “Bishop Dowd, the only way it could have been an accident is if Father Vanderhooven strung himself up there and couldn’t get down.”

  “Miss O’Shaughnessy!”

  Kiernan sighed. She felt a wave of sympathy for the bishop, who was so clearly out of his depth. But sympathy wouldn’t help now. What he needed was, alas, a cold splash of reality. If he couldn’t take that, better he, and she, know it now. “Bishop Dowd, what we’re discussing is a priest found hanging from his own altar, with his hands tied behind his back. It’s possible to rig a rope that way but not usual. The other possibility is that someone else did it. That’s what the papers will say if this comes out. The papers will have a field day with that.”

  Dowd gasped.

  Could he not have considered that? “Bishop, you can be arrested for concealing a crime. We’re talking a cla
ss-four felony here; that’s up to four years in prison and a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar fine. As a private citizen, you are liable. The doctor you called could lose his license, and I could lose mine. So if you’re not willing to notify the police, I’ll leave now.”

  Dowd tapped a finger on the arm of the sofa. His eyes rested on one of the green leather chairs as if for comfort. He seemed to be weighing the alternatives, and the process was taking him a long time. Too long.

  She had already had second thoughts about taking this case, twenty-five thou or no. Let the Catholic hierarchy squirm. She could get other cases.

  But this room of Vanderhooven’s, with its statement of respect for the people who made up the shabby little parish, intrigued her. The contradictory man who had created it intrigued her. The suggestion of similarity to herself had hooked her, as Chase had known it would. And, she realized with a start, she didn’t want Vanderhooven banished in disgrace, as Moira had been. A quarter of a century later, the accusation of suicide still stung. “Bishop Dowd,” she said, “you don’t have a choice about maintaining secrecy. Vanderhooven’s burial will involve too many people. The word is bound to come out. The only question is when, and how much trouble it will cause you.”

  Dowd kept his eyes on the chair, offering no acknowledgment of her statement. Finally, he sighed. “All right; I’ll deal with it. But in the morning. One of the men in the next parish is on day shift. I’ll report it to him.”

  She pointed to the contract. When they had signed and taken their copies, she said, “You’ve talked to Vanderhooven’s parents?”

  “To his father. I had to call him in Maui. They were vacationing. I didn’t get him till two in the afternoon. They’re on their way here now.”

  “Did you tell him the whole truth?”

  Dowd winced. “I said young Vanderhooven had been hung.”

  “Did you mention that his hands were tied?”

  There was a hesitation before he said, “Of course not. Telling a man his son died a suicide was bad enough.” Absently, he rolled his copy of the contract into a tight cylinder and squeezed it between his hands.

  “And how did Mr. Vanderhooven react to what you did tell him?” Kiernan asked, glancing from Dowd’s tightening fingers to his tense face.

  “Disbelief. Outrage. What do you expect?”

  Outrage wouldn’t be a parent’s first reaction to his son’s suicide. And a bishop wouldn’t automatically hire a detective. “And he referred you to me?”

  Slowly, Dowd twisted the contract. Then with the smallest possible movement, he nodded.

  Kiernan didn’t know just what Dowd’s fears about Vanderhooven’s death were, but she could see why he was so unnerved. Her own suspicions were getting clearer. She said, “Show me where you found the body.”

  4

  SHE FOLLOWED BISHOP DOWD through the sacristy, glancing at clerical garb on hangers. The white dress the priest wore over the black one, what was that called? Alb. And the black one was the cassock. The purple robe, the flowing outer one, that was the chasuble. Surprising how those terms she hadn’t thought of in twenty-five years came back. There was a time in her childhood when setting eyes on the room where priests dressed would have been a coup. How disappointingly ordinary this one looked now. Without the robes and the stole the priest wore around his neck, it could have been any other dressing room.

  Dowd opened the far door, reached around it, and flicked on a light.

  Kiernan glanced in at the altar. It wasn’t at all like the one at St. Brendan’s in Baltimore. The pale brown-and-green statues beside the main altar seemed to blend into the gold that covered the wall. Subtle, tasteful, this altar had none of the gaudy blues and magentas of St. Brendan’s.

  The acrid smell of incense hit her, momentarily obliterating the differences between the altars, erasing the past twenty-six years. She stared with a twelve-year-old’s bewilderment, despair, and fury. She could feel her father’s hand on her arm, restraining her as she started toward the coffin; she could feel his shaky fingers pressing into her flesh. She could almost see the angry tears running down his cheeks as he looked at the corpse of his beautiful red-haired daughter.

  Swallowing, she turned back to Dowd. “Where was Vanderhooven’s body?” Her voice sounded sharper than she’d intended.

  “Over there.” He seemed unable to move. There was no mistaking the sincerity of his reaction. He stared beyond the altar rail to a side altar in the nave. “He was there, hanging there.”

  “From the altar.”

  Slowly, Dowd nodded.

  She moved down through the opening in the railing toward the side altar. Four painted wooden columns about five feet tall rose from the altar table, framing the statues of three saints and supporting a kind of cornice with an upright carved ornament at each end. The altar table itself was narrow, and the bases of the columns left barely enough space for a man to clamber up and loop a rope around one of those ornaments. But even from where Kiernan was standing she could see where the rope had scraped some of the flaky paint off the right-hand ornament.

  Fine place for a suicide, Kiernan thought. And if Vanderhooven had strung himself up here, he certainly had danced on the edge of disaster to get his kicks. Dowd could have walked in any time, as he had Wednesday evening. No ordinary priest, indeed. She could certainly see why Bishop Dowd was so nervous.

  She glanced back at Dowd. His ruddy skin had paled and his eyes stared blankly. “Bishop Dowd, how was Vanderhooven hanging when you found him?”

  Moving his head slowly side to side, he said, “He was in front of the altar. Here. But not facing it. His back was to it. His feet had slid out behind him, soles up. His toes were against the altar. His body was arched way forward. His knees were almost on the floor. Like he’d been in prayer and then he lurched forward and …” Dowd looked beseechingly at Kiernan. “He could just have slid one foot forward, stood up and walked away.”

  “But he didn’t. Or couldn’t,” she said softly. “Why not? That’s the issue, right?” When he nodded, she said, “Now tell me about the rope, how did it go? What kind of knots did he use?”

  “The rope? I don’t know much about knots. Never was a Boy Scout. Didn’t bother with that sort of thing when I was a boy. Don’t sail.” He shrugged awkwardly. “You can sail in Arizona. There are lakes, plenty of man-made lakes, big ones behind the dams. You’d never know they were man-made. Little ones in the nicer developments. Ornamental lakes. I used to hang around the docks when I was a kid, in Boston, you know. Looked out to the ocean. Never could get up much interest in a lake after that.”

  Giving Dowd time to stop rambling, Kiernan stared at the altar. Vanderhooven wouldn’t have had to climb up there. The ornament was only eight or nine feet above floor level. He could have tossed the rope over it. Lassoed it. Without turning, she said to Dowd, “You were going to tell me about the rope.”

  “Well, it’ll be specifics you’re wanting, more than I could tell you, so … well, here.”

  She turned to find him holding out a proof sheet. A photographic proof sheet! She stared in amazement. What kind of man, what kind of bishop, would take a roll of pictures of his subordinate, hanging dead in his own church? Kiernan struggled to keep the evidence of shock from her voice. “You took pictures?”

  “Someone might ask how he was. I knew that, you see,” he said quickly, almost stumbling over his words, as if had rehearsed his explanation and now was trying to remember it. “But I couldn’t leave him hanging. From the altar. He was dead. His skin was clammy, and his arms”—Dowd shivered—“were already stiff. His face was gray. It was like all the blood had drained out of his head. Only color was in his tongue.” He swallowed. “You can see that from the pictures, even as small as they are.”

  A cold shiver of horror went down Kiernan’s back as she looked down at the proof sheet. Three images on the glossy, dark sheet. Views from the front and both sides. The slight, pale figure, was hanging, tongue distended, eyes bulging. Kie
rnan held the sheet closer, squinting in the dim light. Another shiver iced her back. The priest’s fly was unzipped. The rope crossed there between his legs, extended up his back to encircle his neck and from there—pulled taut—to the wrists.

  She had considered the possibility of autoerotic asphyxia, but that did nothing to lessen the shock now that she saw the evidence. It wasn’t the act itself that shocked her; she had heard tales of autopsies done on men who had tied themselves up, tightened the noose in hopes of that ultimate sexual thrill, and failed to get loose in time. She had done an autopsy herself on one such case. It was not even that this act had taken place in the church and been photographed there. It was the sudden, clinical betrayal implicit in Dowd’s presentation of the photos.

  She looked back at the bishop. There was no sign of embarrassment or outrage or even awkwardness on his face. She took a breath and asked, “Did you develop these yourself?”

  “I have a dark room. Photography’s a hobby of mine. I—”

  “How much can you enlarge these?”

  “And still keep the clarity?” He took the edge of the sheet, held it closer to his face, and stared down intently. She could see his jaw relax as he contemplated the familiar, the manageable. “I had to use a flash, of course. And it’s four-hundred film, faster than what you’d be using for vacation photos. I’d say eight by twelve, maybe eleven by fourteen, but that’ll be getting grainy. You’ll still see the ropes, all right. Any larger than that, no.”

  Taking the sheet back she asked, “How soon can you have them for me?”