by Jane Langton
“It was probably just the beginning of the collapse, a timber snapping, but I thought—” Alan braced himself and said firmly, “Someone shot at me. First there was a shout, and then I heard a shot. The bullet struck one of the organ pipes about a foot over my head. It made a hole in the pipe. Then everything fell down. But the expended slug must still be there somewhere. And if I’m right, somebody must be under all that rubble, whoever fired the gun.”
Mallory stared at him, then turned away abruptly and gave an order.
They found Oates first. His body had been crushed by the collapse of the easternmost vault, but his face had lain in a hollow. It was white with dust, but unhurt.
Alan knelt in the cleared space around the shattered body. Oates’s eyes were closed, his mouth curved in a smile. It was a strange smile, not a grimace, not one of the cruel grins with which Alan was so familiar.
“This is the man who fired at you?” said Lieutenant Detective Campbell. “Do you know him?”
Alan stroked Oates’s thin hair in sorrow. “Of course I know him. It’s Harold Oates. He was the greatest organist in the—oh, Harold, Harold.”
“Uh-oh,” said Campbell, “what have we got here?” He brushed the white dust from Oates’s forehead, revealing a small hole. “I thought so. Look at that. Twenty-two-caliber, same as the slug in that organ pipe. Point-blank, probably. Where the hell’s the firearm?” He turned to the men who stood at one side, looking on grimly. “There’s got to be somebody else under here. Can’t be far away. Keep looking. Hands only, no machinery.”
The driver of the backhoe threw up his hands. “Christ! When can I get to work?”
By the time the second corpse was uncovered, Homer Kelly had arrived on the scene. He stood in the rubble with Alan and Martin, looking down silently at the crushed bloody body and the broken skull, as Campbell inspected the shattered target pistol beside the smashed right hand.
“Who is it?” whispered Homer, who didn’t recognize the flattened face.
“Friend of mine,” murmured Alan. “You met him, Philip Tower.”
“But why would he fire at you?” said Kraeger.
“And Oates?” said Homer. “Why would he want to kill Harold Oates?”
“I’m not sure why he wanted to kill me. But as for killing Oates”—Alan looked at Homer gravely—“I think Pip shot him because Oates was trying to save my life.”
CHAPTER 71
A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing …
Hymn by Martin Luther
Kraeger and Alan and Homer sat hunched on folding chairs in Donald Woody’s basement office. Woody handed around cups of steaming coffee.
“He was listening,” said Alan. “Remember? Pip was sitting at the organ when I told you about the noises on the cassette.”
“Of course,” said Homer. “I remember him now. And he heard you tell me you’d hidden it in Rosie’s apartment. So he went there and ransacked the place.”
“But he didn’t find it, so he went back later and tried to set the apartment on fire, hoping to burn up the cassette along with everything else.”
“And when that didn’t work either, he came after you with a target pistol.”
Martin Kraeger laughed grimly. “It reminds me of the martyrdoms of saints. What do you do with an aggravating and disagreeable saint who won’t stop being a pain in the neck? You throw her in the fire, but unfortunately she refuses to burn, so you dump her in the water, only she won’t drown, so you stick her full of arrows like a pincushion, but she goes right on praying, so in desperation you cut off her head, and that always works.”
Alan’s hand trembled on his coffee cup. “I owe my life to Harold Oates. He must have come to the church to help me with the voicing, and then he saw Pip getting ready to fire, and he shouted at him—I heard him shout—so the shot missed me. So Pip killed him, and then he would have fired at me again, but the vaults came down.”
“But how could it have happened?” said Woody. “Everything collapsing like that? It couldn’t have been the organ. I mean, you hear about high notes shattering glass, but I never heard of a pipe organ shaking down a building.”
“I suppose it was the pilings,” said Kraeger, gloomily shaking his head. “The pilings must have dried out.” He looked at Donald Woody, trying to keep the note of accusation out of his voice. “Have you checked the water level lately? I suspect it must have gone way down.”
Woody looked at him, bewildered. “Pilings? What pilings?”
There was a stunned silence. “The pilings under the church,” said Kraeger. “The whole Back Bay is built on pilings, wooden pilings, because it’s all filled land.”
Woody’s face turned gray in the light of the fluorescent ceiling fixtures. “I never heard of any pilings. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But I wrote it all down. Last summer, before my vacation. I wrote a whole big thick—You mean you never got my list of directions?”
“Directions? You didn’t leave me any directions. I had to work everything out for myself. I remember, I was kind of surprised that nobody told me what to do.”
Martin stared at him. “But I gave them to Loretta. She was supposed to give them to you. You know, type them up and give them to you when you came in, on your first day at work.”
“Well, she didn’t. I asked her if there was any sort of job description, to sort of tell me what to do, and she said maybe I’d find some down here in my office, but there weren’t any.”
“For Christ’s sake,” murmured Homer.
Kraeger jumped up and strode across the room to Woody’s fish tank. The goldfish were circling idly behind the sparkling glass, unconcerned with the fall of the church. It occurred to Martin insanely that they were nondenominational goldfish who didn’t give a damn whether the church remained standing or fell straight to hell. He shook his head in wonder at the consequences of his failure to fire the abominable Loretta.
Then he turned to Woody, who had risen and was standing with a stricken face. Martin pointed at one of the metal lids in the floor.
“Look,” he said gently, “that thing in the floor, there’s a pipe under it, going down into the fill. It’s an observation well. You lower a measuring tape into it, so you can find out where the water table is, and if it’s below the tops of the pilings, you raise the level with a hose, so they don’t dry out. You mean, you didn’t know what the metal disks were here for? And the manhole in the furnace room?”
Donald Woody had been a solid rock of support all morning. He had been a good right hand to the police department, the firefighters, the building inspector, the street crew from the Water and Sewer Commission. Now he was shattered. “Christ, no, I didn’t know. Nobody told me. I’m from Kansas. We build on stone foundations in Kansas.” His knees buckled, and he had to sit down. “Oh, God, it’s my fault. All those people last night, they could all have been killed, and it’s my fault.”
“It sounds to me,” said Homer wisely, “like somebody else’s fault, namely that woman Loretta Fawcett’s.”
“No, no,” said Kraeger, “it’s not anybody’s fault but mine. I should have fired her long ago. I gave her the handwritten list of directions to type up, only she didn’t type them up because she was too busy embroidering pussycats or something, so she never did it, so you never got the list, and then I never checked with you because you were doing such a bangup job of keeping the place in perfect running order. I should have realized Loretta never does anything right. It’s all my fault.”
“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” said Homer. “What matters is what to do now.” He looked at Alan. “You’ve still got the cassette?”
Alan patted his pocket. “I sure do.”
“We’ve got to get it unscrambled. We’ve got to find out more about this kid Philip Tower. And we’ve got to find Rosie. Come on, Alan, it’s ten-thirty. There’s a lot of stuff we’ve got to do.”
“Ten-thirty!” Kraeger leape
d up. “My God, it’s Easter Sunday.”
Homer gaped at him. “Somebody tell this man his church fell down.”
“No, no, it’s all right. Come on, Woody, let’s work something out.”
Outside in the park across the street, they found the entire congregation of the Church of the Commonwealth. Some were dressed in their Easter finery, having come to church without knowing what had happened. Everybody was there—Edith Frederick, Barbara Inch and her singers, all the deacons, all the members of the committees for music, religious education, outreach, stewardship, all the church school teachers, and of course all the ordinary parishioners who came to church every Sunday, and also the ones who seldom really got there, having decided to stay home in bed. There were whole families swarming in the park with their fidgeting excited children. Even people who thought of the church only as a place to be married and buried had come running to see it in ruins.
They were all shocked, and some were weeping. They craned their necks to see across the street the rock-filled hole that had once been their church, while around them the impacted traffic clogged the avenue and police whistles shrieked above the mutter of engines idling in low gear and the disgruntled blowing of horns.
At once Martin was engulfed in tearful embraces. Momentarily, at least, his sins were forgotten. Disentangling himself, he turned to Barbara Inch. “I’m not going to preach,” he told her. “Why don’t we just sing?”
So Barbara ran into the office building to collect the discarded hymnbooks stored in the music room. Coming back down with a teetering pile she almost collided with Woody, who was dragging a trolley of folding chairs. In a moment the books were passed from hand to hand and the older parishoners settled in chairs. Barbara whispered to Martin, “What about hymn number three-six-three?”
Among the motorists stuck in traffic on Commonwealth Avenue were a husband and wife from Brookline, trying to make their way into the North End to visit their daughter. “Oh, Henry, look,” said the wife, “it’s the church that fell down. We just heard about it on the radio. Listen, they’re all singing. See that? They’re singing on the sidewalk. Isn’t that dear?”
Her husband snorted. “What’s that they’re singing, ‘A Mighty Fortress’? Some fortress! Look at it, it’s a pile of rubble. I don’t know what they’ve got to sing about. The place is totalled. You couldn’t build a structure like that this day and age for twenty million dollars. No way.”
Henry was a building engineer, and he spoke from experience. But he reckoned without the treasurer of the Church of the Commonwealth, Kenneth Possett.
Ken was a changed man. While the other men and women of the congregation sang with Barbara Inch and prayed with Martin Kraeger and embraced one another, sobbing, in a transport of emotion, Ken stood at one side doing figures in his head. When the impromptu service was over, he marched up to Kraeger and clapped him on the back. “Martin, old man, don’t worry about a thing.” Ken’s cheeks were like cherries, he beamed as though a thousand tons of rock were not lying in a hole across the street, along with a million shards of stained glass and the splinters of a hundred pews and the smashed remnants of an antique pulpit and the wreck of a dozen marble memorials and the tatters of the precious painting of the divinely inspired Walter Wigglesworth.
Martin was stunned. He couldn’t believe it. Was this the same Kenneth Possett who had opposed him at every meeting of the church council, who had cavilled at every expense and taken him to task over the repair of Oates’s teeth, who had jibbed at bills for hundreds of dollars and gasped at expenses of thousands, and accused him of hiring a prostitute and molesting his little daughter? Somehow the disaster had turned the man around. Ken was in his element, he was galvanized, he was ready to go.
Mrs. Frederick was at Ken’s side. “Dear Martin,” said Edith, her old voice trembling, “we’re forming a committee.”
CHAPTER 72
They who take to force, give a great blow to the Gospel.
Martin Luther
In one of Philip Tower’s blood-soaked pockets Lieutenant Detective Campbell found a driver’s license with his address. “Anybody know he’s got a wife? If there’s relatives, I got to inform them what happened, and then somebody’s got to talk to them. You know, find out what they know.”
“I don’t think he’s married,” said Alan doubtfully.
“Well, whatever. I’ll find out if there’s anybody. Usually everybody’s got somebody.”
In Philip’s case the somebody turned out to be a mother, Mrs. Howard Tower, living at the same Brookline address.
“Jesus,” said Campbell, hanging up the phone, “I wish to God somebody else would interview the woman. She went ballistic. Screamed at me.”
“Well, what do you expect?” said Homer reasonably. “You told her her son is dead.”
“Sure, I know, but this was—I mean it was really—Hey, Homer, how about it? Why don’t you handle it? Right away, okay? We need a report right away.”
“Me?” Homer was taken by surprise. His curiosity rose to the surface. “Well, all right. I’ll bring Starr along. Friend of the deceased. Where does Philip’s mother live?”
Campbell wanted a quick report, but even Homer Kelly didn’t have the gall to interrogate Mrs. Howard Tower on the very day of her son’s death. “We’ll go tomorrow,” he told Alan. “Tell you what, we’ll bring Mary along. She’s good at soothing tortured souls and comforting the bereaved.”
Mary didn’t want to go. “Oh, Homer, the idea of talking to the mother of a recently deceased murderer doesn’t appeal to me at all. She’ll be in a pitiful emotional state.”
“My dear, that’s why we need you.”
“Womanly sympathy, is that it? Well, why can’t men by sympathetic?” But she gave in.
They picked up Alan at the church. It was only the day after Easter, but already a scaffolding had been erected. Huge diagonal timbers buttressed the tower and the one remaining vault.
“There he is,” said Mary, pointing up at the balcony where Alan and Donald Woody were struggling with huge sheets of plastic, draping them over the organ console and the pipes, protecting them from the weather. The plastic sheets kept flapping up in the wind, refusing to be fastened down.
Alan glanced down at them and yelled, “Just a sec.”
“I’ve got it,” said Woody. He grasped a loose corner and stapled it to the floor with a bang.
Alan crowded in next to Homer on the front seat of Mary’s car. “Thank God, now I can stop worrying about the organ.” He pointed down the avenue. “Straight on. Take Beacon Street at Kenmore Square.”
Mary glanced at him as she pulled away from the curb. He was obviously wrought up. His fingers gripped his knees. Reaching across Homer, she squeezed his arm. “Do you think they’ll know what happened to Rosie?”
Homer made a discouraging noise. “Pip Tower’s mother may not know anything at all. How many first-degree murderers talk things over with their female relatives? I doubt they sit down and chat about things over the teacups.”
Homer was half right and half wrong. Philip Tower’s family had not discussed things quietly at teatime—they had screamed them at each other, day in and day out. Mrs. Tower was expecting them. Her small face was elaborately made up, her great hips shrouded in yards of fleecy fabric. She led them into the kitchen and introduced another member of the family, her daughter Helen, who sat in a wheelchair and looked up at them with eyes puffy from crying.
“Lieutenant Detective Campbell has spoken to you, I believe,” said Homer to Mrs. Tower with formal politeness.
At once she began to talk. “He didn’t understood a thing. He didn’t understand my boy at all. I told him Sonny was a genius, but do you think he was listening? All he wanted to know was where Sonny worked, the copy center and Boston City Hospital, and then he kept asking about fires, things like that, and I just kept saying, God, I didn’t know, what did I know? I didn’t know anything! But he kept asking and asking. Police! I should have known. Wh
at can you expect from law enforcement in the city of Boston? God!”
Homer stopped listening. He was mesmerized by Mrs. Tower’s large staring eyes. They reminded him of someone. They were rimmed with black, and her eyelashes stuck stiffly up like wires. Of course, she was like the woman who guarded evidence for the Boston Police Department, the one who had demonstrated the uses of the cosmetics in the scorched and blackened pocketbook.
The cosmetics must have belonged to Mrs. Tower. It was she who had supplied the contents of the pocketbook. Homer turned his attention back to what she was saying. Words gushed out of her, whining words of self-pity. The girl in the wheelchair crouched with bowed head while her mother poured out the misery of her life, the injustice of her lot, the sacrifices she had made for others.
“Of course my children get all their talent from me. I was a coloratura soprano, I sang for the Boston Pops when I was seventeen, but then I made the mistake of getting married, and after the kids were born I lost my beautiful voice. The anesthetic, you know, it ruined my voice. I could have sued for malpractice. I could have gotten millions.”
Homer felt bewitched. He unstuck his eyes from Mrs. Tower’s and looked at the ceiling. At once she transferred her gaze to Mary. “My husband was not a good provider. I had to work as a practical nurse. I lived for my children. They were both so gifted. Helen played the violin. She was a genius, my poor little girl.”
There was a murmur from the young woman in the wheelchair. Mrs. Tower glowered at her. “What did you say?”
“I said, stop, please stop.”
Mrs. Tower did not stop. She turned her headlamps on Alan. “Oh, we had problems. Did any woman ever bear such a cross? My husband, did you hear about my husband? Huntington’s disease! He had Huntington’s disease for fifteen years before he died. Look at Helen, she’s got it now, she got it from him. She’ll be a basket case too, just like him. Bedpans, how would you like to spend your life changing bedpans?”
Homer tried to turn the agonizing monologue in a useful direction. “Mrs. Tower, can you tell us anything about Rosalind Hall?”