The Christmas Night Murder

by Lee Harris

  When I had left the Corcoran house a little while ago, Warren Belvedere was trying to explain to Bud that he was just going inside to water the plants, as his wife had forgotten to do it for several days, something I knew firsthand was a lie. As I saw it, Tom, after hearing my Mary Teresa impersonation, had come home to clean up the third floor before the police nailed him for kidnapping Hudson. He must have told his parents about it and his father decided he would enter through the front, where he might avoid being seen by the police guard in the rear. Fortunately, we had caught him.

  And with Mike of the auto body shop, I now knew how Tom’s car had been retrieved from the rest stop. All Tom had to do after securing Hudson in the third-floor apartment was drive back, attach one car to another, and continue home. If the toll collector complained that his ticket didn’t mention a trailer, he could easily say it hadn’t been noticed when he got on in Buffalo and simply pay the difference.

  I drove back for what I hoped would be my last visit to Hawthorne Street. There was still one police car in front of 211 and one in the driveway. I walked to the back of the house, where I ran into the second officer.

  “Bud’s next door with the guy who was trying to get in the front way,” he said in answer to my question. “There was a lot of screaming and yelling. We’ll have to see if he left any prints on the third floor, where it looks like he kept the priest for a while.”

  “It’s his son,” I said. “The father was just coming over to clean up for his son.”

  “You know what he did it for?”

  “Love. What else?”

  —

  Bud let me in the Belvedere house. Marilyn Belvedere was crying; Warren was trying to explain that he had nothing to do with Father McCormick’s kidnapping, that all he wanted to do was water some plants and he wouldn’t say anything else till his lawyer came.

  “He didn’t do it, Bud,” I said. “It was his son.”

  “You folks have a son?” Bud said, turning to them.

  They looked at each other as though they weren’t sure.

  “He’s probably upstairs. He came home about half an hour ago, just before you found Mr. Belvedere at the front door.”

  “You want to call him down, ma’am?”

  Marilyn got up, dabbing at her eyes, and went to the foot of the stairs as her husband watched speechlessly. She looked up for a long moment before she called, “Tom? You want to come down, Tom?”

  There was a muffled answer and a door closed. I looked at him closely as he came down the stairs, a tall, handsome man in his late twenties or early thirties, four or five years older than Julia. He stopped when he saw the uniform.

  “Is something wrong, Officer?” he asked politely.

  “I just have a few questions to ask you,” Bud answered, equally politely.

  “Don’t say anything, Tom,” Warren called. “Don’t say a word.”

  “Can you tell me what this is about?”

  “This lady thinks you were responsible for kidnapping Father McCormick.”

  “I don’t even know who he is,” Tom said quietly.

  “He was Julia Farragut’s friend and confessor at St. Stephen’s Convent,” I said.

  “I hardly knew Julia. That was a long time ago.”

  “You not only knew her, you were in love with her. She gave you the key to the third-floor apartment and you used to go over there to see her and let yourself in.”

  “Where did you get this crazy story from?”

  “She talked about you to friends. She wrote letters. I read some of them this afternoon.” I didn’t elaborate. It was enough that he knew I knew the truth.

  He looked a little less sanguine. Bud had taken out a small notebook and flipped it open.

  “Tom, you shouldn’t be saying anything,” Marilyn said.

  “I haven’t said anything, Mother. This woman is doing all the talking.”

  And Bud was writing. I wanted to give him enough that he could get a search warrant to look for the key to the third-floor apartment. I was pretty sure Tom hadn’t used the downstairs key because the door at the bottom of the third-floor stairs had been locked. He had come and gone through the door on the third floor.

  “You must have met Sister Mary Teresa when Julia died,” I went on. “And you gave her that collect number to your apartment so you could keep in touch with her. You wanted information on Father McCormick and she could give it to you. You found out from Mary Teresa that he was coming east for Christmas and she also told you where he would be the night before. You followed him on the thruway till he stopped to change his clothes and you kidnapped him.”

  “This is ridiculous,” he said.

  “Your friend Mike at Mike’s Auto Body Shop lent you his car so you could retrieve your own car at the rest stop because you drove Father McCormick’s ATV to Riverview.”

  “Where he left it at the curb,” Bud said, “so we’d think the priest was giving us some kind of message.”

  “But he didn’t leave it on the street till the night after Christmas. Maybe he thought he’d let Father McCormick go if he cooperated. Maybe he just hadn’t thought the whole plan through to the end. But the first night he must have parked the vehicle in the garage, where no one could see it. He knew how much time he had to work with because his parents were friends of the Corcorans and knew when they were returning from their vacation.”

  “Who is this Sister Mary Teresa?” Bud asked.

  “She was an older nun at St. Stephen’s Convent. She was murdered between Saturday night and Sunday morning. She must have realized that the man she talked to on the telephone from time to time, the man she had given all that information about Father McCormick, was the one who made him disappear. So she called and left a message.” I turned to Tom. “Did you have the call forwarded to this number or did you check your answering machine?”

  “This is all a fabrication,” Tom said, but he had lost his cool. “You can’t prove any of this.”

  “The telephone company will have a record of every collect call from the St. Stephen’s number to yours. She was such a lovely, caring old woman. I don’t know why you had to kill her.” I said it with the full force of my grief.

  “I didn’t kill her,” he said, his voice breaking. “I was just trying to keep her quiet. She started shouting and screaming and I covered her face to shut her up and suddenly she slumped. She just fell through my hands.”

  “Tom,” his mother wailed.

  “Tom,” I echoed. “How long have you been talking to Mary Teresa?”

  “I met her at the funeral. I told her I was Julia’s cousin. I let her in on some details so she would trust me and we wrote to each other sometimes. A few years ago I gave her the free number to the phone in my apartment. She would call me every couple of weeks and we’d talk. She liked to talk to me and she would tell me little things about Father McCormick when she heard them. I told her I wanted to meet him if he came back to visit, and finally it paid off. A couple of months ago she called and said he was coming for Christmas.”

  “But you didn’t just want to have a conversation with him,” I said.

  “I knew about the charges against him and I wanted him to tell me if they were true. I wanted to know what the hell had gone on between him and Julia, if he was hurting her because he had control over her. I wanted to know if she’d told him about Foster and, if she did, why the hell he didn’t do anything about it. I hated him for that, that he knew and didn’t do anything.”

  “I think he was trying very hard to help her,” I said. “It wasn’t his decision to send her away from St. Stephen’s. It was someone else’s. And he couldn’t disclose to you or anyone else what she told him in the privacy of the confessional. Even her death doesn’t change that. I think it’s yourself you’re angry at, Tom. You’re the one who could have helped her. You’re the one who could have blown the whistle. Instead you took it all out on a priest who really tried and a nun who loved her selflessly. Why did you meet her that night
?”

  “She called and said she had to see me,” he said, his voice low now, resigned. “She didn’t exactly threaten me, but I knew if I didn’t show up, there’d be trouble. She’d put together the priest’s disappearance and her telling me when he was coming. Then she just went crazy. She started accusing me of killing Julia. She said she would go to the police and tell them it was me. I was scared. She was a sweet old nun, she was believable. Who was I? I was already in trouble with the priest, who wouldn’t tell me a damn thing, and if this nun went to the police, the Farraguts would—”

  “Tom!” Marilyn was on her feet.

  “What would the Farraguts do?” I asked, addressing all of them. “You told me you’d lost contact with them, but Mrs. Farragut was here tonight, just an hour or so ago.” I looked at my watch, surprised at how late it had become. “She was here when I was here.”

  There was a lot of silence, but I could almost hear the deafening roar underneath it. Something had gone on between the Belvederes and the Farraguts, and these three people knew what it was and were all part of it.

  Tom broke the silence, a silence that was seven years old. “I’m not going to jail for something I didn’t do. I don’t care what that old woman says.”

  “I think I should advise you of your rights,” Bud said, and I wondered whether, in this small, quiet town, it was the first time in his three years in the police department that he had said it.

  “Hang my rights,” Tom retorted. “Foster Farragut killed his sister seven years ago and those people have been protecting him since it happened.”

  “Tom,” Marilyn said, “I beg you.”

  “If we’d spoken up then, we’d all be better off.”

  I wasn’t sure he was right, but at least he was finally accepting responsibility. “Did you see him do it?” I asked.

  “I saw them through the window of her bedroom. I was coming up the stairs to see her. He had the rope in his hand, behind his back, and he was shouting at her. He was a crazy son of a bitch and he’d been jealous of her all her life. I ran up to the third floor and got my key out to open the door, but it was so damn cold, I dropped it and it went through the boards down into the snow. I ran down and found it and raced back up, got inside, and went down to her room on the second floor. She was hanging from the rope.” He stopped, his face contorted as the pain the memory had brought to the surface hit him. “I grabbed her and tried to lift her, to get the pressure off her throat, but I could see it was too late. It was too late. I was too late to save her.” He wept into his hands.

  “What happened then, Tom?” I asked gently.

  “I got the rope untied. I laid her on the bed and tried mouth-to-mouth. There was nothing I could do to help her. I ran to find the grandmother. I said, ‘Foster killed Julia.’ I’ll never forget her reaction. Her eyes opened wide and she said, ‘That’s nonsense. Foster isn’t even home.’ I’ve never seen such cold-blooded presence of mind. We ran up to Julia’s room and she called the police and asked for an ambulance. She said her granddaughter had attempted suicide.”

  “Where was Foster?”

  “He sure as hell wasn’t in the house. He came back later, a lot later.”

  “Did Mrs. Farragut take anything out of Julia’s room?” I asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “What did she take?”

  “The papers on Julia’s desk. She just grabbed them and took them away. And she said to me, ‘Young man, I know what was going on between you and my granddaughter. If you make any accusations, I will see to it that you are charged with her murder. You and that priest both defiled her.’ I remember she used that word, defiled. I didn’t defile Julia, I loved her.”

  I turned to Bud. “If you can keep this quiet, you may be able to get a warrant to search Mrs. Farragut’s apartment for the diary. Julia wrote it as though it was a letter to her dead mother, telling her the truth of how her brother abused her. But if Mrs. Farragut gets word that you’re after it, she may destroy it to protect her grandson.”

  “How do you know she still has it?”

  “She talked to me about it. From what she said, I had a strong feeling she had kept it.”

  He unsnapped the leather loop on his belt, unlatched the handcuffs it held, and said to Tom, “I’m going to have to take you in, sir. I’m arresting you for the kidnapping of Father McCormick. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right…”

  The wail from Marilyn Belvedere drowned out the rest of the Miranda warning.

  30

  I went to the hospital to see how Hudson was doing. Four of the nuns from St. Stephen’s were there, including Angela.

  “The doctor said he hadn’t eaten for several days, hadn’t had much to drink. He’s very dehydrated and he spent the last twenty-four hours in that beastly-cold shed without warm clothing. And because he was tied up, he couldn’t move around much. He was very near death, Chris.” She said this last in a low voice, as though speaking such words softly might prevent them from becoming true.

  “I know. I wish I had put it all together sooner.”

  “You found him. No one else was even looking for him.”

  I went over and talked to the other three nuns. They would spend the night here, hoping for good news to telephone to Joseph. I longed to get into that room, to see if he looked better than when they had taken him from the shed, but no one was allowed in on orders of the doctor. I was relieved to see a police guard posted outside the door. Foster had not yet been arrested, but the Riverview police assured me they were working with the local police in Mrs. Farragut’s town. It was a messy, complicated case and there was still plenty of resistance in the Riverview Police Department against reopening the suicide of Julia Farragut. But if there is such a thing as resting in peace, I felt that Julia and her mother now had that chance. I went back to St. Stephen’s.

  Joseph was waiting up and we sat together with a pot of hot tea.

  “Jack called at some point,” she said, as though time had become a variable. “He was out on a case that took hours.”

  “A lot of them do.”

  “Look how long this one took. Another day and we would have lost Hudson.”

  “Tom Belvedere’s first mistake was leaving Hudson’s car in front of 211 Hawthorne. It drew me to the house. It made me feel the house was the place to look for answers.”

  “Your instincts are good. Even when you’re personally involved, you don’t sacrifice your good sense.”

  “If I had only realized there were two killers.”

  “We weren’t even sure how many crimes there were, Chris.”

  “Too many as it turned out. And poor Mary Teresa got herself in the middle. Tom told her he was a relative of Julia and he wanted to talk to Hudson if he came east. When she put things together, she must have been mortified to think she had unwittingly become part of his kidnapping. I have to admit she was pretty gutsy to meet him alone at night, especially when she suspected he was also guilty of murdering Julia.”

  “The villa’s full of tough old women,” Joseph said. “You know that.”

  “I do know that. I’m very proud of it.”

  “So am I. Go to bed, Chris. We have a big day tomorrow.”

  —

  We buried Sister Mary Teresa in St. Stephen’s churchyard the next morning. The sun was out and the snow glistened on top of the tombstones. Generations of St. Stephen’s nuns were buried here, some of them people I had known during my fifteen-year tenure, all of them strong and memorable women. Mary Teresa would be in good company.

  Detective Lake was waiting in the Mother House when we came back from the cemetery to give a formal report to Joseph. Tom Belvedere had been arrested for the murder of Sister Mary Teresa and the kidnapping of Father Hudson McCormick and was being held in the county jail. A search warrant had been executed and Mrs. Farragut’s apartment had been searched. This was in still another town, Detective Lake pointed out, but the various departments were working together. For
a change, I thought with some bitterness. Papers had been found in her apartment that might shed light on the apparent suicide of Julia Farragut seven years ago. So they had found the diary. And not unexpectedly, Tom Belvedere’s lawyer was looking to make a deal with the district attorney. Tom had some evidence he wanted to give on the death of Julia Farragut and the involvement of her half brother, Foster. It would take time to make sense of the whole case.

  The word from the hospital was noncommittal. Hudson had not yet regained consciousness and his condition was described as critical. It looked as though he might lose several toes and possibly some fingers to frostbite, but it was still too soon to tell if he would pull through.

  It was New Year’s Eve and I had finished my work. I took Joseph’s advice and went home. I was so exhausted, I took my clothes off and went to bed. We were expected at a party at the Grosses’, and I remembered, from what seemed half a lifetime ago, I had promised to help get things together. But I had had very little sleep and the pressure of the last days all crashed down on me as I reached home. I slept.

  My wonderful husband, fresh from the outdoors, woke me when he sat down on the bed and kissed me.

  “Oh Jack,” I said, “have I missed you.”

  “It’s only six o’clock. We could make up for it.”

  “That would be good.” I pulled him down, feeling his cold cheek against my very warm one.

  “I’m still dressed,” he said.

  “I don’t remember that was ever a problem. For long.”

  “Not for long.” He kissed me. “Boy, have I missed you, sweetheart.”

  I unbuttoned his shirt and moved my face against his chest. “I’m glad to be home.”

  —

  The party was terrific. We met a lot of Oakwood people and a lot of people the Grosses knew from other places. And the food was the best I’d eaten in ages. Melanie had been cooking and freezing for weeks—how had she ever managed to take time off to help bake Christmas cookies?—and everything was superlative. At midnight we had champagne and more food and sang “Auld Lang Syne,” which I have always felt was a very necessary element on New Year’s Eve.