Pious Deception

by Susan Dunlap

  “Scrubs are fine,” she said as she headed for the hallway door.

  By the time he opened the office door he was smiling that weary, winsome smile again, a smile that accentuated his thin but sensuous lips and finely chiseled cheekbones. Motioning her to the patient’s chair, he settled himself behind the desk. “Now how can I help you, Doctor? It is really Doctor, isn’t it?”

  Somehow the question sounded friendly. Necri was going to be a hard man to dislike. But she had no intention of letting him run the interview with that charm. Necri would answer her questions because she knew he’d falsified the death certificate—they both understood that. “Really a doctor,” she said. “And really a detective. The first thing you can do is tell me where you were this morning.”

  He looked down at his streaked scrubs. This time he added a shrug to the smile. “Guess you’re better dressed in California. My patients are used to seeing me rush in here from the hospital.”

  “But you weren’t at the hospital this morning.”

  He hesitated momentarily, his dark eyes half closing. Then he shook his head. “No, dammit. Look, there’s no point in my trying to fool you.”

  The smoothly inserted flattery did not escape her. Giving no acknowledgment, she waited for him to continue.

  Still shaking his head very slowly, he said, “I haven’t slept since I saw Austin’s body. How long has that been? Christ, I don’t even know anymore.”

  “What have you been doing all that time?”

  “Worrying, what else?”

  “Worrying about …?”

  “Austin, of course. I’ve been over every conversation we had, on every run. How he could have been involved in something as bizarre as stringing himself up, and never have given me the slightest hint? This is not your standard hand job. I just can’t believe it. And in the church! Austin was really committed to the Church. He would never have done something like that.”

  “But you aren’t sure, are you?”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “And you were willing to endanger your career by falsifying his death certificate.”

  His eyes snapped open. “It was a mistake. Christ! The mistake of my life.”

  “That’s what’s been keeping you up, right?”

  “Both. My friend is dead, and my entire career is swirling in the toilet. Do you wonder I can’t sleep?” Looking directly at her, he said, “I’m counting on you to clear this up.” This time it seemed not just flattery but an implicit trust that a woman would do whatever she could for him. And Kiernan noted with disgust that her first reaction was to rush in and take care of him, she who was not known for her bedside manner. The man was a pro.

  “Tuesday night? Where were you then?”

  If he was surprised by her tone or the question, he gave no indication. “Tuesday night? The night before Dowd called me. Life was still normal then. Austin was still alive—” Necri’s eyes widened. “Or was he? You can’t think that I …” He sighed. “It doesn’t matter. I was up in the mountains, two hours away from here. I had dinner with a friend, Bud Warren. I’m considering investing in an oil shale process he has up in the mountains. Could make mountains of money.” He laughed, but the muscles around his mouth stiffened. Kiernan wondered how long the doctor would hold up. His laughter stopped abruptly. He shivered, and in that shiver seemed to pull himself back together. “Sorry. What you want to know is that Warren can vouch for my time.”

  “Where was the dinner?”

  “At Callahan’s in Globe. I didn’t get home till after two A.M.”

  “I’ll need his address and phone number.”

  “Of course.”

  Kiernan took down the information. Leaning back in the chair, she said, “Let’s move on to Wednesday night. Bishop Dowd called you when?”

  “Seven-thirty, maybe a little before. Dowd was almost incoherent. When I got to the church Austin’s body was still hanging. Dowd was a wreck. He looked like a shoo-in for a coronary. He wasn’t even in the church proper. He was hanging around”—Necri flinched at his choice of words—“standing by the front door, making sure no one came in. It didn’t occur to him that he should cut the body down. He just left Austin hanging there.”

  “So you took him down?”

  “Who else? All Dowd was good for was taking a sedative and going to bed, and he wouldn’t even do that.”

  “How long would you guess Vanderhooven had been dead?”

  He shook his head, more and more slowly. As long as he was following his own train of thought, Necri seemed able to function; it was questions, the need to react, to switch gears, that was throwing him.

  She repeated the question.

  “I don’t know. I’m not the medical examiner. Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

  “I’m asking your opinion.”

  “Well, he was good and dead by the time the bishop called me, if that’s what you’re asking. His eyes were bulging; the blood had settled in the extremities; they were purple. And his penis! Christ, it looked like a hard-on to last through eternity!” A shrill spurt of laughter escaped. His cheeks reddened. “Excuse me. But you don’t know what I’ve been through. I can barely think straight.”

  She had assumed the air-conditioning would ease her headache. It hadn’t. The hum of the machine was setting her on edge, or was it the underlying sense that Elias Necri, as exhausted as he was, was still hiding something? “Tell me about Austin Vanderhooven. What was he like?”

  He stared over her shoulder. His finely etched face seemed to sag under the weight of betrayal. “I was his friend, or I thought I was. We ran together five miles a day, three days a week.”

  “And you called each other in between, right?”

  Necri pressed his fingertips into the desk, but his melancholy expression didn’t change. “We were in similar positions. You know how it is, as a doctor you can never be yourself. You’re expected to keep up a standard. You’re always on. Of course, it’s even worse for a priest. I was one of the few people Austin could relax with. Or so I thought.”

  What he said suited his expression, but there was an edge to his voice that belied both. What was he still concealing? Kiernan took a stab, “Did Austin talk about sex?”

  “Only in the abstract.”

  “What about you? Did you tell him about yourself?”

  “Well, yes. I mentioned my dates occasionally.”

  Kiernan leaned forward. She let the ten years she had on him show in her voice. “Elias, we’re both adults. How graphic were you when you talked to Austin Vanderhooven?”

  Avoiding her gaze, he said, “Well, I may have described a mammary gland or gluteal protuberance. But I was careful at first. Then, after a while, with Austin there in shorts and a T-shirt like any other guy, I’d forget about him being a priest.”

  “How did he react? Did he encourage you? Did he press for details?”

  “He just listened. If you want to know, I had the feeling that part of what attracted him to me was that he liked being a voyeur on my life, not just my sex life, but the whole shtick of being a young doctor—the car, the trips, the parties, the business deals. He was always interested, I could tell. But he never asked. It was like he was testing himself, only allowing himself to enjoy what I gave him, not demanding more. I’ll tell you, once or twice it made me feel uneasy. When Austin died, I realized how little I knew him.”

  Necri seemed more comfortable, more in command of himself now. His description of Vanderhooven, Kiernan was willing to bet, was not what he was lying about. “It sounds to me,” Kiernan said slowly, “as if he censored what he said, but he managed to find out a great deal about you.”

  Necri flushed. “It wasn’t like he was peering through a one-way mirror into my soul,” he said angrily. “I’m not that naive.”

  So that was Necri’s Achilles’ heel, worrying that Austin had manipulated him. Manipulated the manipulator. Outmaneuvered him at his own game. And what prize had Elias been playing for? “Did Austi
n ever mention Beth Landau?”

  “Beth? Sure.” He smiled, showing his skill at recovery. “Nice woman. Runs the women’s center at Self-Help. Austin told me they were friends before he entered the seminary.”

  “Just friends?” she asked, reacting to the tiny hint of a smirk that he couldn’t, or didn’t, restrain.

  His smirk melted into a self-satisfied expression. “Of course, I guessed there had been more. I’ve done enough diagnoses to read between the lines. It didn’t take a master diagnostician to find it odd that Beth followed him to Phoenix, and then asked him to be on the board of the women’s center.”

  That, she thought, didn’t sound like the actions of a long-ago girlfriend. “How did Austin react?”

  Necri leaned back in his chair. “He wanted to help Beth. But being on the board of a center that supports the right to abortion, birth control, and divorce would have gotten him in hot water with the Church. Another guy might have felt caught between the two, forced to choose. But Austin found a path down the middle. He agreed to help, but just with the battered women’s shelter. You know it’s not easy to rent a building to be emergency housing. Those women have irate husbands who could shoot up the place if they found it. Once the landlords realize that, they’re not so anxious to rent. So Austin did Beth a big favor. He let her use a building the church owned out of town for her families to hide out in. And the church could hardly complain about it, not without looking real bad.”

  “How could he do that? Doesn’t the archdiocese control church property?”

  Necri shrugged. “Probably, but this particular place, Hohokam Lodge, belonged to Mission San Leo. So Austin was in charge. And since no one was using it, why not? It’s a couple of hours east of town, up in the mountains, and pretty run-down.”

  Kiernan could feel her pulse quickening. Hohokam Lodge! “Is there a phone up there?”

  “Must be, but Beth was very secretive. I guess she’d have to be. I know she would have been pee-oh’d if she knew I knew.”

  “Did Austin help run the place?”

  “No. That was part of the agreement—no church influence.”

  “What would the phone-bill listing be for a call up there?”

  “I don’t know. Globe, maybe. Miami? Superior? You take a road out of Superior. It’s almost another hour on a back road into the White Bone Mountains.”

  Wht.Bn.Mtn.! Kiernan smiled, recalling Vanderhooven’s phone bill. “Now, tell me, would Beth be likely to call Austin collect from up there?”

  “I can’t think why.”

  “Someone did. If not Beth, who?”

  “I don’t …” Elias Necri smiled. “Of course. Joe Zekk. If you hadn’t said collect, I might not have thought of Zekk.” There was a note of disgust in his voice as he pronounced the name.

  “Who is Joe Zekk?”

  “Some deadbeat friend of Austin’s. A dropout from the seminary. He was always after Austin for something.”

  “Influence?”

  “No, that was too subtle for him. He was after money. Austin had family connections and ways to get money when he needed it. Austin told me that.” One side of his nose pulled up as he spoke, and there was anger, too, in his voice.

  “I don’t know for sure what Zekk was up to,” he continued. “But he did push Austin to contact his father for him. And Austin told me that meant money. By the way, ‘deadbeat’ was Austin’s term, not mine.”

  Kiernan waited, hoping Necri would let slip why Zekk’s manipulative behavior, or Vanderhooven’s acquiescence to it, had gotten his own back up. Was it rage at seeing someone playing your own game, performing your routine, and doing it better? Kiernan knew that reaction only too well from her years of gymnastics. She could still feel her anger as she watched a first-prize trophy being handed to a rival.

  Did that explain Necri’s anger—he and Zekk were after the same prize? She leaned forward. “Austin Vanderhooven didn’t admit much to you, but he did talk about money. Don’t you find that odd, Elias?”

  Necri shrank back almost imperceptibly.

  “Could it be because that was what you asked him about?”

  For the first time he seemed unsure of his next move.

  “Is that what you needed from Austin? Money?”

  Necri looked up, clearly unsure now.

  “Joe Zekk had gotten money from Austin’s father. Why shouldn’t you, right? You need it more than some deadbeat in the mountains, right? You’re a doctor, not a financier.”

  He sighed. “I should have gotten a financial manager. My aunt keeps telling me that. And as soon as I get on my feet I will, believe me. I just need a shot in the arm to pull me through this period. Austin thought he could help me out.”

  “How?”

  “Well, he said that I could be the doctor at the retreat in the mountains—”

  “Hohokam Lodge, where Beth is?”

  “No, that place is pretty run-down, as I said. He was going to put up a new building. There’s enough land for that. The problem is the water. In this state the first guy who used the water got the rights. The head of a village near there controls them. He lets the church use as much water as they want, has for years. But he’s too stubborn to transfer the rights legally, not till he dies. Austin saw the old man’s will and the transfer was in it. No problem about that. But Austin was waffling about breaking ground with just an oral agreement.”

  “So he might not have built that retreat for years, then.”

  “The old man liked him. He would have worked out something.”

  “But for the time being that hardly solves your financial problems, does it? You needed Austin to contact his father now, right?”

  Necri nodded.

  “And did he?”

  “He couldn’t get him. His father was in Hawaii. Austin must have forgotten that.”

  “He got through to him for Joe Zekk.”

  “He was trying. Maybe the old man wasn’t in Hawaii when Zekk needed him.”

  “And all those calls he made to you this week?”

  Necri swallowed. His voice was barely audible as he said, “Returning mine.”

  No wonder the doctor is upset about his friend’s death, Kiernan thought. “Did you expect, Elias, that if you falsified the death certificate, Austin’s father would reward you?”

  Necri didn’t raise his head. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  12

  IN THE HOWARD JOHNSON’S across the street from Elias Necri’s offices, Kiernan sat in a phone booth—one of the old-fashioned ones with the black dial phone and the brown corner shelf beneath it, with a seat and an accordion door—and tore open two packages of Alka-Seltzer. She dropped the tablets in water, half-aware that she was counting the seconds till they dissolved, just as she’d seen patients on morphine silently tick off the minutes till their next shot. In those medical-school days, the patients’ faith in chemicals had been topped only by that of the students. Wearing their white medical jackets, called Doctor by their anxious patients, they had watched in fear and awe as the real doctors prescribed a shot or pill from their cabinet of miracles. As interns, many had trusted caffeine and nicotine to keep them awake for the first twenty-four hours of their thirty-six-hour shifts, and amphetamines for the last twelve. It wasn’t till Kiernan took her residency in forensic pathology that she began to categorize nicotine as a poison. And it was then, too, that one of the interns died of an accidental overdose. He had been one of her first autopsies.

  Five years of autopsies had erased her illusions about drugs. Then two years in Nepal, India, Thailand, and Burma had changed her view of Western medicine altogether.

  But not of aspirin.

  She downed the Alka-Seltzers, dialed Stu Wiggins, and left a message on his machine that Dowd had not notified the sheriff.

  Diesel fumes filled the air in the bus depot. The heat steamed up from the macadam. When would the damned bus pull out? Bishop Dowd wondered. As if things weren’t bad enough, now he had to get rid of th
e Sheltons and get to lunch halfway across town with Sylvia Necri, all in forty-five minutes. What the hell did Sylvia want?

  He pushed the thought of Sylvia Necri out of his mind. In less than a minute he felt his eyes closing. If he had slept more than ten minutes at a time during the last two nights his nerves wouldn’t have been so raw, vague thoughts wouldn’t have floated unbeckoned through his head. He would have been able to steel himself against that smoky, sweet smell of diesel, of adventure, the smell that had marked the beginnings of family vacations at the ocean, of adolescent weekends with cousins in New York, Saturday afternoons in the bleachers in Ebbets Field, and Saturday nights picking up girls at Coney Island.

  He shook his head; there was no time for that now. He had to keep his wits. But his mind wandered. He saw himself climbing aboard the Greyhound cruiser and heading east, sitting by the window, listening to the crackle of wax paper from the seats behind him, inhaling the spicy aroma of fried chicken, the garlicky smell of roast-beef sandwiches. He could feel the scratchy wool of a sweater wadded between the window and his neck as he let his eyes close and the rumble of the bus lured him to sleep. The dark safety of the bus, broken by pinpoints of light here and there. Then the bus would jolt, and he would shift in his seat, open his eyes, and suddenly outside would be the gray of dawn. And he would look out not at the endless miles of sand and dirt that had been his prison all these years, not at that dry landscape that sucked the life out of a man, but at green: lush green grass, pale green dogwood, dark green pine trees, trees with canopies of green leaves so thick they nearly blocked out the sky, leafy azalea bushes just ready to bloom, miles and miles of rolling green hills. The desert would be behind him. Austin Vanderhooven would be behind him. Philip Vanderhooven would be behind him. Sylvia Necri would be in his past. Bishop Raymond Dowd, the sun-seared shell he had become, would be gone.

  Forcing his eyes open, Dowd looked at Jesse Shelton, his wife, his child, the family’s three cloth suitcases, two cardboard boxes, and a carry-on satchel with a frayed plaid blanket sticking out. Did they have any sense of the promise of escape here? Or were they too young, too much the Chevy pickup generation, to know the possibilities the bus depot offered?