Pious Deception

by Susan Dunlap

  Kiernan’s breath quickened. “Because that’s what he really wanted, right? To be in a monastery?”

  Zekk dug his toe under a tan T-shirt on the floor and kicked it into the middle of the room. “If he could have done it by his own rules, yeah. He wasn’t likely to put up with monastic bullshit anymore than he was doing with pastoral bullshit. So here he had his very own monastery two days a week.”

  “Where he entertained his old girlfriend?”

  Zekk’s eyes shot open. He reached for the glass, knocked it over. Half of the liquor sloshed out. “Well … hell, whatever he did there was his business.”

  Could Zekk be refusing to rat on his friend? If so, the much-maligned Zekk’s loyalty to his friend was greater than anyone else’s. “Joe, I don’t believe you didn’t know what went on down there. The place is two hundred yards away.”

  He interlaced his fingers and pressed his knuckles together, like stunted hands in prayer. “Hey, I wasn’t Austin’s keeper. He hardly bothered to talk to me when he got here. He just went down there. If I knocked on his gate down there he got pissed. You’d think I was going to contaminate the place. He never let me inside the gate. Me, or anyone else. Whatever he was doing down there he really got into it. Eyes all sunk into his head. He got a call once here and I went to get him. He looked like something from the psych ward. Wouldn’t take the call either.” His hands were shaking.

  “Who was it from?”

  Zekk shrugged. “It was late. I have my own way of passing time.” His hands relaxed and he began twiddling his thumbs. But the stiff deliberateness of the movement betrayed him.

  “Joe, can you tell me where you were Tuesday night? I know you weren’t here all evening, till late.”

  “Figure it out yourself.”

  Kiernan leaned forward. “Joe, I am trying to help you. You don’t understand how much trouble you’re in. And you know no one’s going to help you but me.”

  Without actually moving he seemed to draw slightly closer.

  Kiernan softened her voice. “You’re admitting that you have no alibi for the night Austin was killed?”

  He shrugged.

  Pointedly looking at the shelves of tapes, she said, “You didn’t have money when you got here. You’ve got thousands of dollars in video here. Where’s your money coming from?”

  “There’s the pottery—” He sounded as if he was making up excuses for not doing his homework.

  “What about Philip Vanderhooven? You called him in Maui. What are you selling him?”

  “How’d you know—”

  “What’d you offer him?”

  His thumbs rotated faster, snapping at the web between thumb and forefinger. “Look, I told you Austin was getting screwy. I figured his father should know.”

  “You figured his father would pay you to keep tabs on him.”

  “Well, so? I’ve got to live.”

  “How much, Joe?”

  He stared at his hands. “Another two hundred.”

  “Still not enough. Who else are you getting it from?”

  “No one! I got the tapes discount.”

  Kiernan eyed the shelves of them. “Okay, so you bought them in bulk. Where’d you get the money for that?”

  “Austin. Austin paid me five thousand in the beginning.”

  “Five thousand! For what?”

  Joe grinned, clearly delighted at her surprise. His hands flopped on his lap. “Background,” he said.

  “On …?” She smiled encouragingly.

  “The villagers. Look, it’s nothing sinister. He had a tricky situation with them.”

  “About nineteen thirty-eight, huh?”

  “Yeah. How’d you …? You’d think the sheriff was hounding them, or all those dead Sheltons were threatening to climb out of their graves and get revenge, the way they act. Hard as hell to get them to talk about the shoot-out.”

  She could feel her shoulders tightening in anticipation. “But they did tell you, right, Joe?”

  He grinned and held up his glass proudly. “Me and my friend here.”

  She leaned forward. “Tell me.”

  He drank. “Can’t really blame it on the Church. It’s their own stupid fault, them down there, the McKinleys. They’re Catholic. The Sheltons, they’re the ones in the cemetery, they were some kind of fringe Catholic, but not the real thing. Now, I know I never got the real straight story from McKinley, but the gist of what I got and figured out was that something happened between John McKinley, the old man down there, and some Shelton, and they got to fighting. The whole thing turned into a feud, and then they pretty much formed two camps down there, small as the town is. There was a shoot-out, and the McKinleys won. And after that, mind you, after that the McKinleys started to rationalize and believe they killed off the Sheltons because they weren’t legit, Catholicly speaking.”

  “The graveyard is full of Sheltons, but only a couple of McKinleys died that year. It doesn’t sound like a very fair fight.”

  He laughed. “Didn’t say it was. John McKinley was no fool. He got himself help.”

  “How?”

  “He said he was smart.”

  “Who helped him?”

  Zekk leaned back and let a smile stretch across his face. “Took me a long time to weasel that out of him. You know where John McKinley got the money to buy the guns that killed all those Sheltons in the graveyard down there? I’ll tell you. He got it from the Roman Catholic Church.”

  Kiernan whistled. Joe Zekk looked so delighted with himself that he was almost appealing.

  Kiernan said, “And that’s what Austin Vanderhooven paid you to find out.”

  “Yeah. And I loved it. Jesus, you should have seen Austin’s face when I told him. I’d have done it for free just to see that look.”

  “Once Austin found out about the Church’s role in the killings, what did he do about it?”

  Zekk’s grin spread across his face. “Not a damned thing.”

  34

  IT WAS NEARLY 3:30 P.M. The drive from Joe Zekk’s place up to the main road, then on a few miles east, past the turnoff to the Warren Works, and onto the deeply rutted dirt road to Hohokam Lodge had taken forty-five minutes so far. For Beth Landau, three quarters of an hour would make rather a pleasant anticipatory interlude on the way to a rendezvous, Kiernan thought. Just enough time to tickle herself with thoughts of Austin Vanderhooven slipping out of his cassock. Kiernan laughed. The man wouldn’t have come to the mountains in full regalia. There in his dome he would have looked like any other reasonably well-built blond unzipping his jeans.

  Kiernan left the air-conditioning off and opened the window. The air was muggy, but the breeze made it almost bearable. Khaki-brown clouds covered the sun and blended into the horizon. She felt as if she were driving into the open end of a manila envelope. The wind sputtered streams of dirt across the hardtop, the dust smacked her face, but the thick spikes of cacti and the round squat cholla stood firm.

  Austin Vanderhooven, the man, was still an enigma. The obsessive monk she could understand. The man who couldn’t give up his lover she could reconcile with that picture. She could even imagine Vanderhooven bringing Beth to his dome, combining his passions. And then there was the retreat. Vanderhooven the financial wunderkind, the fund-raiser, who planned what sounded like the biggest Catholic gathering-spot in the country. He would wield immense influence once it was built. How did Vanderhooven the monk fit with Vanderhooven the host? Why could she not merge the two aspects of him into one picture?

  Momentarily the sun burst through the clouds and illumined an undisturbed peak that drew in sharply from a broad base to a tall obelisklike pinnacle. It echoed the lines of Joe Zekk’s house. Or more accurately, Kiernan thought, Austin Vanderhooven had had the house designed to echo the lines of that peak. And that peak, of course, would be the site on which he planned to build the great retreat. It was half a mile behind Hohokam Lodge.

  In contrast to that peak, Hohokam’s mound seemed as squat as the cho
llas, as did the lodge itself. Behind it a little girl hung face down over a swing, moving lackadaisically back and forth despite the increasing wind. Kiernan noticed a young woman—was she the one in Beth’s office yesterday? But no, that woman had had toddlers. This one carried an infant. Kiernan slowed the Jeep, looking for Patsy Luca. Patsy should have called Stu Wiggins last night. She hadn’t. Stu hadn’t hidden his concern. Patsy was reliable, he had assured Kiernan. Things happen, they had agreed. Still, a glimpse of Patsy would have been comforting.

  She pulled up behind a van and got out. She climbed the three steps to the door. Before she could knock, it opened.

  Beth Landau’s freckled face tightened in anger. She kept her hand on the door. “You! What are you doing here? How did you find this place?”

  Kiernan laughed. “I am an investigator.”

  “Well, go investig—”

  “And I know about you and Austin’s dome. I don’t expect the contributors to the shelter would be pleased to hear about that.”

  “That’s blackmail, isn’t it?”

  Kiernan laughed again. “Merely the threat of blackmail.” Then she sighed. “You want Austin’s killer caught. I want the same thing. Can we do it with a little less drama? I’ve had a hard day with the inhospitable McKinleys in Rattlesnake. And with Joe Zekk,” she added, watching Beth’s reaction. “I could use a sane conversation.”

  Beth stood fingering the collar of her Florida shirt. She had it tied at the waist, exposing a brown triangle of skin above denim shorts. Her arms and legs were deeply tanned, and the freckles across her cheeks looked like a spray of chocolate. She stepped back abruptly. “Come in, for now.”

  After Zekk’s house, the main room of Hohokam Lodge, with its blanket-and-toy-strewn floor, looked merely homey, a comfortable place to end this long, hot, exhausting day. She flopped down on the end of a flowered couch. “Are all your guests outside?”

  Beth sank onto the other end. “Not all of them. Look, I’ve let you in but this isn’t a social visit.”

  Kiernan forced herself not to straighten up. “Fine,” she said. “Let me start by telling you what I’ve discovered about Austin and the retreat and the shoot-out.” She summarized Zekk’s comments, barely finishing before Beth laughed.

  “And there,” Beth said, “you’ve got Austin Vanderhooven’s character in a nutshell. He knew the holy Roman Catholic Church was behind a massacre—”

  “I didn’t say they orchestrated it.”

  “But they condoned it,” Beth insisted. “Same thing. And Austin knew and chose not to do anything. And you know why? Because of his high-powered Catholic retreat and monastery out here. Every person in the state of Arizona could have been killed and Austin would have walked over their graves to break ground for his place.”

  For Kiernan, the exhaustion of the day vanished. She loved this part of an investigation, when things came together. “Beth, you said retreat and monastery. Was he planning to build a monastery out here, too? A monastery where he was in charge?” That made more sense with what she knew of Austin Vanderhooven.

  “You got it, or part of it,” Beth said. “Let me tell you how outlandish his plans were. He wanted to build a monastery with the retreat to support it. He figured he’d have to put up with the bigwigs only a few times a year. The rest of the time he could board himself up in the monastery and unearth the Truth. And yet”—she drew her legs up under her—“he wanted to hedge his bets, in case there really was no Truth.” She leaned forward, digging her elbows into her thighs. “Listen, this is how out-of-touch Austin was. What he suggested was that we, the women’s refuge, could stay here at Hohokam. He would build the retreat up on the hill back there, and the monastery on the far side. Then the refuge would be the monastery’s charity. Can you believe that?” She uncrossed her legs and smacked her feet to the floor. “I mean, the man missed the point all around. How many times did I tell him that the key thing about a refuge is that its location is secret? A secret, and he’s planning to build a retreat next door to lure hotshots from all over the country!”

  “How did Austin respond when you told him that?”

  Beth pulled her legs back up under her.

  No wonder the couch is so threadbare, Kiernan thought. If Beth were any more indignant, we’d be sitting on bare springs.

  “Austin reacted like he always did,” Beth said. Her foot was already twitching toward its next move. “He shoved the argument aside. He said he’d work it out. Like he was God. He just couldn’t let the facts get in his way. He told me it would be a good opportunity for me to meet wealthy men. He said he’d introduce me to ones likely to take an interest in me. Like I was some kind of on-campus whore!”

  “And you said …?”

  “I told him he had the makings of a fucking, or more to the point a nonfucking, voyeur. But that was a mistake. Austin ate it up when I got angry and used ‘unpriestly’ words.”

  The windows rattled in the breeze. Kiernan shifted, turning toward Beth. She said, “Austin had financing for his retreat, right?”

  “Oh yeah. Austin had connections, and one thing he never forgot was how to use them.”

  Beth’s face was still pinched with anger, but her anger was focused on Vanderhooven now, Kiernan thought, not on herself. As she had the day before, Beth was spitting out something on which she had chewed till it made her sick. And there was no one she could tell but Kiernan. Kiernan said, “So it would have been no big deal for Austin to build a monastery too.”

  “He didn’t seem to think so. Not that that’s proof. But I can’t see why it would be a problem. The retreat was to draw Catholic men, Kennedy types. As long as Austin wasn’t planning to have the monastery encroach on the putting green or the sauna, or the bar, there’d be no problem.”

  “So then, the only problem was this, the women’s refuge. Why didn’t he just evict you?”

  “Well, he did eventually. When they set a date to break ground, we go, if we don’t find another place before that. Just as well—this place was a mistake. It’s too hot, too isolated. We’ve had a prowler on and off, or maybe Peeping Tom is a better description. These women have made the hardest decision of their lives; they need, they deserve, a safe house that’s safer than this.”

  Kiernan leaned forward. “You want out of here; your guests want out; the refuge was a roadblock in Austin’s plans. Why did he keep the refuge here this long?”

  Beth swiveled and smacked her feet to the floor. “I thought I made that clear to you. You know, you’re just like Austin.” She got up and paced toward the windows, hitting the floor with heavy staccato steps. At the window she turned and started back toward Kiernan. “I think I’ve gotten through to you. I think you really see something, and then I realize I might as well be explaining to this—” She reached down and grabbed a small, fuzzy panda off a chair. “You don’t get it any more than Austin did. He wanted the refuge here because I’m in charge of the refuge. He wanted the monastery to run it so he could have an excuse to come by here.” Angrily she propped a foot on the sofa arm.

  “Because you were still sleeping with him,” Kiernan said. She held up a palm. “Don’t waste time denying it. I know about his dome over by Zekk’s. You may have slid by Zekk when you met Austin in there but not by the local teenagers. I’ve got a kid who can describe the strap marks on your back and the curve of your butt.”

  Beth flushed. Her toes curled against the frayed sofa arm and she laughed—hard, humorless waves of sound that left her increasingly breathless and gagging. “You know, Austin would have loved that. He would have spent nights fantasizing. And more nights flagellating himself for his fantasies. How many times do I have to tell you that there was nothing physical between Austin and me? Nothing! I made a mistake accepting his help. He wanted power over me, like a possession he’d lost control of. And he wanted to be sure that I had no power over him, that he could dismiss me at any moment.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Sure it sounds ridiculo
us. But that’s how Austin was, all or nothing. You only have power if you have no attachment, he said. He needed to prove to himself that he had no attachment to me.”

  Kiernan shook her head in disgust. “Beth! The teenager saw you in the dome!”

  She laughed, more normally now. “Yeah, he did all right. Me. But not Austin. You know Austin’s not the only man in the world. I didn’t take a vow of celibacy when he chose the monastery.”

  Kiernan sighed, this time in disgust with herself.

  Beth laughed harder. “Jumped to a conclusion, huh? Lots of pitfalls for you hotshot detectives.”

  Kiernan bit back a retort. In the back of the house a door banged. Women’s and children’s voices mingled. The refrigerator door slammed, then slammed again. A gust of wind rattled the windows, and dirt blew in under the front door. “Beth,” Kiernan said, “you may have been sleeping with someone else. But to do it in Austin’s dome, his private monastery, you can’t tell me there isn’t a little revenge involved in that.”

  Beth grinned. “Better believe it! From the moment I got the idea of using it, I loved it. I loved every moment of every hour there. I loved feeling a man’s hard body on mine while I looked at Austin’s altar. I loved the whole idea of using Austin’s little prayer dome with the pink glass window like a cheap motel.”

  Austin’s little prayer dome with the pink glass window, she’d heard those words before. To Beth she said, “It couldn’t have been easy sneaking past Joe Zekk. Or was Joe Zekk in there with you?”

  She glared down at Kiernan. “Zekk! That slime! I wouldn’t be in the same room with that revolting creep.”

  “Were you paying him too?”

  “Paying him! Hell, no. But Austin was, huh? I knew it!”

  “What was he paying him for?”

  “To spy on me. What else?” Beth began to pace again. In the kitchen, the refrigerator door slammed again, a pan clanged. At the windows Beth spun on the ball of her foot and started back. Her brow was wrinkled, her hands on her hips. She seemed oblivious to the clatter of the windows and the sounds from the kitchen. “Who do you think it was sneaking around here week after week, peeping in the windows? Once he even broke in. And last night, you know what the goddamn fucking slime did?”