Pious Deception

by Susan Dunlap

  “And then you moved to Phoenix,” Kiernan prompted.

  “I got the chance to establish the battered-women’s program here. It’s one of the best in the state.”

  “And Austin showed up?”

  “Without warning. He called me from across town, invited me to tour the church. ‘Tour the mission’ was his phrase. I thought it was going to be a historic monument. Have you seen it? It’s a joke—Saint seven-eleven!” There was no hint of innocence in her face now.

  Kiernan nodded. “And then?”

  “Nothing more like that, but the next thing I know Austin’s offering to help out here. And suddenly Jack, who runs the place, is telling me it would be a coup to have Austin on the board of the women’s center.” She shook her head in disgust.

  “And it would have been, wouldn’t it, Beth? A Roman Catholic priest endorsing a center that must support birth control, abortion, divorce?”

  “Sure, but Austin wasn’t ready to do that. One thing Austin was good at was covering his ass. Even in Mexico I was the only one lying outside the sheets.”

  Kiernan laughed. Beth looked up, startled, and then she smiled. On the wall behind her was an ill-colored poster touting the four essential nutritional groups: violet eggplants, light yellow eggs, orange strawberries, gray bread, and a couple of pale salmon circles that might have been intended to represent lemons or oranges or even apples. But on the faded yellow wall, the poster looked appropriate. “So Austin didn’t actually offer to be on the board?”

  “No, not Austin. He hinted. And”—her fingers dug into the sofa back—“he did do something else for us. But here’s the point, he created a reason to be in contact. I saw him once or twice a month, sometimes more. Sometimes alone. He gave me a key to the rectory so I could get in if he was delayed. I never had to use it. He was always there waiting. But he never touched me …” The black plastic cracked. Beth forced a laugh. “The only time his flesh came in contact with mine was when he helped me on with a coat, something he would have done for any lady in the parish. He never said anything suggestive, per se.” Carefully, she placed both hands in her lap and stared down at them. Despite her tan, a burst of tiny white lines was visible around her tense eyes. “And the question is Why?”

  Kiernan sat motionless, anxious not to break the mood.

  “This is what I think. I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’ve been furious that the man wouldn’t get out of my life. I’ve been disgusted that I couldn’t either get rid of him physically or at least free myself emotionally. I think he was using me to test himself. Just like these guys who beat their wives; they need to have someone to blame for their inadequacies. Austin used me to prove over and over again that he was pure, worthy. I don’t know what he was making up for—impure thoughts, lascivious desires. It was as if he was telling himself that even if he had given in to them, there was a line he wouldn’t cross—me. Giving up sex was a big sacrifice for him. For Austin the time that he spent making love was the one time he wasn’t looking over his shoulder.”

  The air conditioner crackled and a gust of cold air skimmed Kiernan’s shoulders, sending a shiver across her back. Beth’s theory, she thought, could describe a guilt-ridden man who’d been in the habit of hanging himself for pleasure. “What do you mean?”

  Beth leaned back against the sofa arm; her finger strummed meditatively on her skirt, and the look on her freckled face was that of a professor about to deliver a pet theory. “Austin was the most competitive man I knew,” she began. “But in bed he was the best. He knew it. And for once he could relax and not worry about outstripping the competition.”

  “Was there competition? Were you dating other guys?”

  She shook her head. “No, any competition was only in Austin’s head. With him I never had the sense he was competing with other men; it was as if he had already outstripped them and the contest was on a deeper, more personal level. Competing against an ideal he had created.”

  The air conditioner turned off. In the silence Kiernan could hear the murmur of voices in the waiting room. A new client? Before Beth could react to that, she asked, “What else?”

  “Austin was so cerebral. I used to picture the inside of his head as a medieval tower room in which a pair of emaciated scholars carried on a fierce but oh-so-controlled dialogue. The time was twilight, winter. The fire had gone out but they hadn’t noticed. I told Austin about that room once. He accused me of dredging it up from ethnic memory. Of course, we Jews do have a history of dialogue. It’s an important part of our tradition. But for us there’s a joy in it. In Austin’s icy tower room there was no emotion at all. No, that’s not true; there was fear.”

  “Fear of what?”

  Beth’s eyes filled. She swallowed. “I don’t know. I tried to ask Austin that, but he would never let me get near enough.” She swallowed again and squeezed her eyes against the tears. “Sorry. The whole thing’s been such a shock. But this conclusion of mine, it’s not as if I reached it ages ago and presented him with it whole. It’s only been in the last year that it’s been clear. And we weren’t having long talks against the padded headboards anymore.” She looked directly at Kiernan. “It wasn’t in my interest to keep poking at his psyche, you see.” Her eyes remained steady, but her gaze diffused so that instead of being the bridge to Kiernan it had become a wall between them.

  “What do you think Austin was so afraid of?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Damnation?”

  In the waiting room a child screamed. A stab of pain ran through Kiernan’s head. She had forgotten about the pain. Despite her role as an investigator, she was probably the only person with whom Beth Landau had been able to discuss Vanderhooven. It didn’t surprise her when Beth went on: “If you’d asked Austin, he would have told you his commitment was to truth, truth within the Catholic tradition. What he would have meant, of course, was what he chose to view as truth. Austin was a master at shaping reality to suit himself. And his inability to really feel for someone else he saw not as a failing but as a necessity for a man whose calling is to move from the body to the spirit.”

  “But he did let you have Hohokam Lodge.”

  Beth stiffened.

  Kiernan wasn’t surprised at her reaction—the sudden jerk back to reality—just at the topic that had triggered it. “That wasn’t a question. I have the information, Beth. And it explains why you couldn’t rid yourself of him. By the same token, if he controlled the lodge, it gives you a motive for keeping him alive. It also brings up the possibility of your clients’ husbands—angry, violent men who want their wives back, who want their control back.”

  “I can’t talk about my clients,” she said, all business now.

  “If one of the husbands discovered that Austin knew where his wife was, he could have gone to Mission San Leo. He could have been planning just to pressure Austin, not to kill him. Killing him could have been an accident.”

  Beth stood up. “I said I cannot talk about my clients. Even in the abstract.”

  She was on the verge of losing Beth, she knew it. She thought of that hollow Latin book of Vanderhooven’s, hesitated, then went ahead and asked, “Did Austin keep any of your clients’ records?”

  Beth’s face flushed. “How many times do I have to tell you—nothing about my clients.”

  Kiernan stood. “Beth, think about it, if one of these guys killed Austin, do you want your client, and her children, living with him?”

  “Just get out!” She grabbed Kiernan’s purse and thrust it at her.

  Kiernan felt her body tense. Instinctively she steeled herself to avoid reacting. She extricated her card and laid it on the desk. “Think about it. I am very discreet. No one would ever know the women’s center was connected.”

  Beth flung the card in the wastebasket. “You’re damned right no one will know. Because I am not saying anything about my clients to anyone, no matter how discreet. And if that means Austin’s murder goes unsolved, well, so be it.”

  Kiern
an hesitated. Beth had trusted her, she knew, and now Beth felt betrayed. Anything she could say, any gesture she might make would only aggravate the situation.

  As Kiernan walked down the hall toward the waiting room, she reminded herself that investigators weren’t supposed to worry about bruised feelings. And they weren’t supposed to let their own be hurt. She thought of what Sam Chase had said, that Austin Vanderhooven was not unlike her. Just what had Sam meant?

  15

  AT FOUR IN THE afternoon Phoenix felt like a barbecue, or more accurately, a steamer. Pre-monsoon weather. Desert humidity. The heat from the sidewalks steamed up, the bright sunlight bounced off glass and chrome. Car windows were rolled up tight to guard the capsule of cool air inside. Kiernan thought of the icy tower, of Austin Vanderhooven’s desperate single-mindedness. It had taken Beth years to get an understanding of Vanderhooven’s mind-set, but for Kiernan it was no problem. The ability to put all else second, a distant second, she understood too well. For her it had been not so much a skill as a need. She had to exonerate Moira, to force Father Grogan to bring Moira back from the patch of dirt to which he had consigned her, to make him bury her in the churchyard, in the hallowed ground where suicides were not allowed. To grab back the way of life that was gone.

  That icy tower of Austin Vanderhooven’s described her home then. The single-family row house common to so many soot-gray Eastern towns. Small dark rooms, overcrowded with heavy cherry furniture—cluttered rooms, where every step had to be planned, where voices were lowered to keep from disturbing her father or mother in the kitchen or living room ten feet away. After Moira’s death her parents had barely gone through the motions of family life. They were nothing more than the survivors of a suicide—Walt and Mary O’Shaughnessy, the parents of beautiful Moira, who killed herself. They had failed before the world, before their God, before themselves. If they had not been Irish Catholics, they would gladly have followed Moira. If they had not been Catholics in a Catholic neighborhood, the stigma of Moira’s death would not have destroyed them.

  Kiernan gave her head a shake. It felt as if her brain had broken loose and was clanging against her skull. Aspirin, she needed more aspirin. She climbed into the Jeep, wincing as the heat of the seat cut through her jeans. She started the engine and let it idle, then, gratefully turned the air-conditioning on high and headed back to Howard Johnson’s.

  It was fine to understand Vanderhooven’s mind-set, but that didn’t bring her closer to knowing why he, who could have been the all-American boy, shared her obsessive single-mindedness. And what about him had led to his murder?

  “Stu, I need a woman to get on the women’s center van with Beth Landau tonight. The assignment could take a couple days. She may have to be ‘on’ all the time. There’s a small chance of danger.” Kiernan sat in the old-fashioned phone booth in the Howard Johnson’s. Her booth, she was beginning to consider it. The brown plastic shelf was ample for her wallet but too near the phone to hold her fizzing glass of Alka-Seltzer. That she set on the floor.

  “Patsy Luca?”

  “Can she do it? She’s pretty young, isn’t she?”

  “She won’t get up suspicion.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Don’t worry so much. I’ve got a friend who does the legal work down there; I know how they choose who they take to the mountains. I’ll give Patsy a little coaching. Patsy’ll handle the rest.”

  “Are you sure—”

  “You don’t have much time, Kerry. And I don’t have anybody else to suggest.”

  Kiernan downed the rest of the Alka-Seltzer, willing it to work fast. Her head throbbed as she leaned over to put the glass back on the floor. “Okay. Give me her address.”

  “No need. I’ll call her.”

  Kiernan hesitated. “I need to talk to her too.”

  “You mean you need to check her out.” Wiggins laughed, but there was an edge to his voice that the laughter didn’t quite cover.

  “Okay, personal failing. Give me one, I’ve had a hard day. I’ve called Dowd three times today and he’s never called back. Philip Vanderhooven was out questioning Beth Landau. You know, Stu, I’m getting a real uneasy feeling about this case.”

  16

  BISHOP RAYMOND DOWD SAT on the pale leather couch in Sylvia Necri’s living room, waiting. The woman was taking her time with her “art work.” But he couldn’t rush her, the expert forger.

  Forger! Forgery, maybe murder, how had all this happened? How had he gotten himself so entangled with this woman he didn’t even like and certainly didn’t trust? He still could barely believe he had called Huerta, his parishioner in the sheriff’s office, and gotten the blank death certificate and an interment form, which Sylvia was forging right now. Surely there had been some way short of this to protect the retreat center. He tried to think, but his mind was too foggy. What was taking her so long? He glanced at his watch—4:17. Still plenty of time to get the forms back to Huerta. Dammit, he was an errand boy here! And now with this forgery scheme he was putting his life, his career, in Sylvia Necri’s hands. What would happen if the forms weren’t right, if someone found out? What if … but he couldn’t hold together the strands of possibilities.

  He shifted his bulk on the sofa, shifted his gaze to the framed photo on the wall. The figures were blurry; his eyes were too tired to focus. But he’d seen the photo often enough to know it showed Sylvia Necri’s class of architects at Taliesen West, the bunch of them there with Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Dowd had been to Taliesen. He’d seen pictures of the hard chairs, hard benches, that were Wright’s idea of “form follows function.” Well, Sylvia Necri hadn’t become famous like a lot of the others, but she’d sure learned to choose hard furniture—for instance, this sofa.

  How had he gotten involved in all this? A bishop of the Church. Was he willing to break his vows for the power the retreat would bring? He looked desperately out the window. He wasn’t going to lie to himself—sure he wanted the power. Sure he’d been disappointed that he hadn’t seen the big-time possibilities young Vanderhooven had and that it was Vanderhooven who’d almost cashed in on them. And—he wasn’t going to deny it, not to himself—the fact that the kid’s death gave him back control of the retreat was okay by him.

  But it wasn’t just the power. No. No matter who would think that. And there would be plenty—business types, lawyers—who would never see beyond that. It was for the Church. The Church in Arizona had to have that retreat. Without it the Church would calcify. Already the clergy were dividing into the petrified forest of hardliners and the brushfire liberals, who demanded the ordination of married women. Among the laity, the basis of Church, many were giving up in disgust or despair—they were just plain tired of waiting for the Church to adjust to the twentieth century. Vatican Two—they’d seen those reforms tossed aside. Maybe if Dowd became archbishop … But he’d made his choice. He’d thrown in his lot with the retreat and there was no turning back. The retreat would bring liberal Catholics from across the country, the world. With their money and their press they would resurrect the Arizona Church for the people.

  He’d given his life to the Church. The Church was his life. Men carried on about their wives, their children; they didn’t know what commitment meant. He would not let his Church be maimed. No matter what sacrifices that involved.

  Dowd inhaled deeply and pulled himself up straighter on the hard sofa. What kind of woman had cushions so damned rocklike in her own living room? No wonder she was an old maid.

  He checked his watch again—4:19. He stood up. Once he got these forms back to Huerta he could go home and sleep. His hands were shaky; he could barely see straight. He needed the sleep.

  “Here you go.”

  Dowd looked up, startled. He hadn’t heard Sylvia Necri walk in. He stood and took the papers from her without looking at them.

  “Bishop! You’ve got the death certificate and the interment permit there. Don’t get them mixed up.”

  He glanced at the top form and n
odded.

  “If I do say so myself,” Sylvia Necri did say, her voice surprisingly soft, “I did a helluva job on both of them. And, Bishop, if your man does his job right, once the interment permit is in place we—you, me, and the Church—are home free.”

  “And your new death certificate? That saves your nephew’s hide, right?”

  “Not just Elias. It clears the Church; it clears you. And if there’s any blame it’ll fall right back on Vanderhooven’s detective.”

  17

  KIERNAN PULLED UP IN front of the address Wiggins had given her for Patsy Luca, in a development in south Phoenix that backed up against the base of the jagged mountains. The houses here might have been mass produced, Kiernan thought, but their yards were certainly statements of individuality.

  The yard to the right of Patsy Luca’s sported a decorative white ironwork fence around a carpet of thick green grass. Here and there ceramic rabbits poked their noses warily up through the dewy mat. A giant cedar shaded a quarter of the yard; a Norfolk Island pine drooped over another.

  On the other side, was a “westernized” lawn that looked like a quilt of pebbles and cacti and bricks. No drop of water wasted here.

  Probably the only thing that kept the neighbors from each other’s throat was their common disgust with the yard between them—Patsy’s place. Kiernan climbed from the Jeep down into the hundred-and-ten-degree heat and made her way across the barren yard. No grass, no trees, no cacti, not even a weed was still alive. The dry scaly ground was cut with crevasses the size of earthquake faults. Kiernan rang the bell, and waited on the unshaded stoop.

  The sun pierced her thick hair and seared her scalp. Her throat felt like parchment. She rang again. Still no answer. Where was the woman? Irritably Kiernan looked at her watch. She was cutting it close anyway, without spending her time baking out here. She could have handled this on the phone and spared herself forty-five minutes of fuming in the rush-hour traffic; she could have trusted Stu Wiggins’s endorsement of Patsy Luca. He hadn’t led her astray before. But if Patsy Luca couldn’t even get to the door …