EQMM, November 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Craney, now a lieutenant, remembered me. My name alone got me in to see him at the old headquarters building on Berkeley Street. And his first words to me were, “Come to confess to the Knaff killing?"

  Knaff was the murdered nurse, and the case was still open, as I very well knew. “No,” I said, my false confidence running for the exit. “I've come about Dolly Vasti. Not to confess,” I added so hastily that even the hardcase cop had to smile. “To ask about it."

  "Still think you're Sherlock Holmes?"

  "Bernstein and Woodward,” I said, holding up my reporter's notepad and forcing a smile. “I thought I might be able to sell a freelance article about it."

  The policeman gave me a long look. “Your selling needs work,” he said. But he added, “Have a seat."

  Craney wasn't a tall man but he sat like one, his Popeye forearms folded on the desk in front of him. He wore eyeglasses I didn't remember from the ‘sixties and his hair, formerly very slick, was now almost dry. The wet head really was dead if Craney had wrung his out.

  "What do you want to know, kid?” he asked.

  "Anything about the business you don't like?"

  "I'm not crazy about the victim getting up and wandering around after the murderer left her for dead, but I've known cases where that's happened with blunt force trauma to the head."

  So had I. The Kennel Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine came to mind, but I decided not to mention it. “What's Frank Vasti's story?"

  "Doesn't have one, not worth telling. Heard about the attack from the little-old-lady neighbor who called for the ambulance. By the time he got to the hospital, his wife was dead."

  "Where was he during the attack?"

  "On his way to the beach at Revere, alone, to think things out. He claimed he turned around and came back before he got there. No witnesses to any of that, of course."

  "What did he say about Angela Camaselli?"

  "He admitted to the affair. Couldn't very well deny it, not with the records that ex-cop Mrs. Vasti hired kept. But he claimed to be surprised that his wife knew. She'd never gotten around to confronting him, he says."

  "Did he admit to having the handkerchief?"

  "Nope. Said he never saw it before. Luckily, he didn't have time to put Angela wise. She admitted it was hers. We got her to show us a matching one, so she can't have second thoughts on the witness stand."

  "It doesn't bother you that the handkerchief is too pat?” It bothered me. For one thing, I was getting tired of writing the word in my phony notebook. “There was plenty of blood around. If he wanted to sign his name to the crime, he could have used that."

  The policeman was staring at me again, maybe thinking back longingly to the days when I fainted every time I saw him. “Got a better theory?” he finally asked.

  "I've heard that Dolly Vasti was making things hot for a priest named Mullins, who may or may not have done something to a little girl in his parish."

  Craney was impressed. “We heard that, too. But we didn't get very far with it. Father Mullins is on administrative leave at some retreat house down in Duxbury. Not available for questioning, according to the archdiocese."

  "How loudly did you ask?"

  "Not very. Mullins's boss—and I don't mean God—talked to my captain's boss. We have Vasti pretty much dead to rights, so we haven't pushed it. The Church people claim to be investigating the abuse allegation themselves. I met their investigator—they call him an inquisitor, believe it or not—priest name of Walsh."

  He poked around on his cluttered desktop, found a business card, and dealt it to me. “I'd hate to think of you bothering that guy,” he said suggestively.

  I pocketed the card and thanked him for his time.

  "You owe me a murderer from way back,” Craney reminded me when I reached the office door. “I'd settle for knowing we're right about Frank Vasti."

  * * * *

  4.

  I might have headed straight to Duxbury and a chat with Father Mullins, but my usually trusty Volkswagen Karmann Ghia had thrown a rod and I was still saving up for a new, secondhand engine. So I went to see the archdiocese's inquisitor instead, Father Colin Walsh. I called first, from a pay phone at police headquarters that must have handled its share of interesting calls. My call certainly merited that adjective. In fact, I thought it might be way too interesting to the passersby. So I gave the secretary who answered the inquisitor's number the barest summary: I wanted to talk to Walsh about a case of abuse concerning a local priest. That whispered fragment worked wonders. The secretary put me on hold for no more than two drags on a cigarette and then offered me an appointment for that very afternoon.

  I was directed not to the chancellery, as I'd expected, but to an old church near Fenway Park, St. Ann's. I inquired for Father Walsh at its rectory, and the housekeeper told me he was in the garden.

  "Saying his prayers,” she added, her tone warning me not to interrupt.

  Sure enough, in a narrow rose garden bordered by high brick walls, I found the priest pacing back and forth, breviary in hand. There was a bench just inside the garden's open gate, and I sat down, moving slowly, the air being full of bees.

  The pacing priest was younger than I'd expected—no more than thirty—but he wore the long black cassock I remembered priests wearing when I was a boy. It accentuated his height and his thinness, a trait we shared. We also had long noses in common, his slightly beaked. His skin was very pale and his short, curly hair a surprisingly vivid red.

  Inevitably as I sat there, I pictured myself in a cassock—or at least in black—pacing a garden like this one, reciting ancient prayers. Not a loner anymore but a member of a huge organization. Perhaps an official investigator, even, and not a very unofficial “overturner of stones,” as a friend had once dubbed me. Father Walsh saved me from those useless thoughts by closing his prayer book and joining me on the bench.

  "Theresa at the office called to say you were coming,” he said, speaking with a soft Irish brogue, a not uncommon accent in Boston. He sat very close and peered into my eyes as though I'd complained about a cinder. I did my best not to blink.

  "This happened when? When you were an altar boy perhaps?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "And what parish? Don't be embarrassed. It's hard to talk about it, I know, but you must."

  "I think there's been a mistake,” I said, up to speed at last. “Nothing like that's happened to me."

  The expression of concern on the priest's long face eased briefly and then darkened again as I added, “I'm here to talk about the accusation against Father Mullins."

  "Are you a reporter?"

  "No,” I said, happy to be done with that disguise at last. “My name is Owen Keane. I'm working for Tessa Tesauro, Dolly Vasti's cousin. She's not sure the police arrested the right man for Mrs. Vasti's murder."

  I thought Father Walsh might make me go through the formal-ity of explaining who Dolly Vasti was, a formality because he had to know all about her death if he'd met Lieutenant Craney. I was drawing breath to connect the dots for him when he spoke up.

  "I think the police are settled in their minds as far as Father Mullins is concerned."

  "Not the one I talked with. He mentioned meeting up with one of these.” I reached back and tapped the brick wall behind my head.

  "You can understand our trying to avoid a scandal if we can. You're a Catholic yourself, Owen?"

  It was my chance to trot out my credentials, the ones Tessa considered gilt-edged. I considered them guilt-edged, and I hadn't planned to share them. But I heard myself say, “I spent a year at St. Aelred's Seminary."

  "In Indiana? A good school that. Only a year? What happened?"

  "I ran into questions they couldn't answer.” Fell into them, I sometimes thought. Fell and kept falling.

  My hands were gripping the bench on either side of my knees. Father Walsh patted the hand nearest him.

  "Some questions are unanswerable,” he said, “difficult as that fact is to face. We'll ta
lk no more of it now. As for Dolly Vasti, you've probably known Catholics like her. I met with her, you know, more than once, and I felt like I knew her from the first. A good Catholic but an old-fashioned one. Thought Vatican Two was the worst thing that had happened to the Church since Luther. She had problems with Father Mullins from the very day he arrived at St. James. He's what you Americans call a lefty. It was inevitable that those two would knock heads, even if the unfortunate business I'm investigating had never been mentioned."

  "How is your investigation going?"

  "It wouldn't be proper for me to say. Or for any word of it to get about in connection with poor Mrs. Vasti's death. Father Mullins was in Duxbury when that terrible thing happened, and he was sincerely sorry to hear of it, thorn in his side though Mrs. Vasti was. Old-fashioned she might have been, but she was a true daughter of the Church."

  I'd been slow to absorb his basic message, focused as I was on accusations and alibis. Then suddenly it broke through. I stood up, almost involuntarily.

  "Thank you for your help, Father,” I said.

  "Have I been any then?” the priest asked, surprised.

  "I think so."

  * * * *

  5.

  I'd been given conflicting information on one point of the Dolly Vasti story. Maniman had told me that she was planning to divorce—and impoverish—her husband. The private eye had even speculated that the divorce announcement had caused Frank Vasti to snap and murder his wife. But Vasti had told the police that he'd had no idea his wife had found out about his affair, which meant she couldn't have threatened to divorce him over it.

  I hadn't considered that discrepancy to be very important. Vasti, fighting for his life, would naturally deny that he and his wife had discussed divorce, since he was also denying that a fatal confrontation had taken place. Now Father Walsh's portrait of Dolly had brought the divorce business to the top of my list of questions to be resolved. If Dolly had been a strict, Pre-Vatican II Catholic, how could she have been planning a divorce? The Church, changed beyond recognition in some areas, still wouldn't recognize divorce, though more and more Catholics were ending their marriages.

  Father Walsh might have painted Dolly's nose an especially bright blue to explain away her antagonism toward the liberal Mullins. Or the shock of her husband's infidelity might have caused Dolly to jump the rails spiritually. Or what? I thought my employer might be able to clear up the point, and I headed for McNab's on Beacon Street as fast as public transportation could carry me.

  Tessa wasn't there. The man in charge, a lifer named Gibby, said she was helping a niece get ready for graduation. He didn't know the niece's name or phone number, so I was stuck.

  Then I thought of another person I could ask about Dolly, someone who had never seen her, probably, but was likely to be an authority on the subject of Dolly and divorce: Angela Camaselli, the other woman. She lived in Newton, according to Maniman. That town wasn't very far away, but it wasn't served by a trolley line. After looking for and finding Camaselli's address in the store's phone book, I grabbed the keys to McNab's delivery vehicle, a rusting Rambler sedan, and headed out. When Gibby protested about my use of the car, I told him to address his complaints to Tessa.

  Camaselli lived in an apartment complex just off Commonwealth Avenue, a sprawling place with the grandiloquent name Versailles Villas. It was late enough for tired office workers to be dragging themselves home, and I had to fight for my parking space.

  Angela Camaselli had just gotten home herself. Or so I deduced from her attire, a dark purple skirt and a light purple blouse, half untucked, and from the fact that she'd lost her shoes but not her hose. A second possibility, that she was entertaining yet another straying husband, I eliminated due to her worn makeup and the unromantic atmosphere. In the living room beyond her metal front door, which I was not invited to enter, a television was blaring the evening news.

  "What do you want?” she asked, running the words together in her disinterest. She was young, even by my standards, but her bloom was currently wilted. Her blond hair was as dull as Christmas manger straw, and her big, almost violet eyes were half closed.

  I told her the same true story I'd told Father Walsh, but she was less ready to accept it. I thought the problem might be me, that she knew a moonlighting delivery boy when she saw one. Then she said, “Why would Dolly's cousin want to help Frank?"

  "They go back to grammar school,” I said. “But I don't think she wants to help him as much as she wants to get the real killer."

  "It wasn't Frank. He couldn't hurt anybody, especially Dolly. He was afraid of her. We'd be together now if he'd been able to walk out on her."

  "Suppose she wouldn't give him a divorce?” I said, getting us to the point of my visit.

  "Suppose?” Camaselli asked. She laughed, sounding less sincere than the newscaster behind her. “She never would have. Never. We knew that. She was a lay nun, practically. But you can't keep a man chained to you these days. It's not the ‘fifties. We knew we'd have to force a divorce on her. We'd have done it by now, only Frank couldn't tell her."

  "Because of her money?"

  "No. He didn't care about that. But he didn't want to hurt her. So what about hurting me? I cried my eyes out that last night, the night before she was killed. Embarrassed Frank because the waitress could hear me."

  "You were in a restaurant?"

  "Yeah, over in Weston."

  "Did you use your own handkerchief to dry your eyes?"

  "Yeah."

  "Any chance you left it behind?"

  Those violet eyes were perfectly dry now. And fully open. “I didn't miss it until the police said they'd found one. I didn't tell them about leaving it in the restaurant. I was afraid Frank had picked it up."

  "Not him,” I said, and thanked her for her time.

  * * * *

  6.

  I took it easy driving back to Beacon Street, thinking things over as I went. One item on that agenda was the Judas clue. Something about that had bothered me from the start, some echo of grammar-school religion classes taught by patient nuns. Now the clue made perfect sense. Nearly everything did.

  To knock the rough edges off one of the last pieces, I stopped at a pay phone near my old campus and tried to reach Lieutenant Craney. He was gone for the day, but that didn't bother me. In fact, it felt right. It would be better to call him in the morning, after I'd had a chance to talk to Tessa.

  She was back from her graduation errand and in her usual place of honor behind the chest-high counter. As soon as I walked in, she told Gibby to call it a day. Something about my expression had told her that I wanted to chat.

  Once we were alone, she said, “You've learned something."

  "Nearly everything,” I said. “You can tell me the rest."

  "Me?” Tessa slammed shut the cash drawer she'd been counting down. “What can I tell you?"

  "Why did Dolly hire Seamus Maniman?"

  "She thought Frank was up to something. She—"

  "I mean, why Maniman? Why did she choose him?"

  "Oh,” Tessa said. “Dolly's known him forever. We were all in school together."

  Maniman had told me that himself, but I hadn't picked up on it at the time. He'd said that Frank Vasti had been sweet-talking Dolly since high school. That was more background than Dolly would have shared with a P.I. He had to have known it already.

  "Could he have been in love with her?"

  Tessa's eyes went wide—with the enormity of the implication, I thought. Then the little bell over the store's front door tinkled and Seamus Maniman walked in. He looked even bigger than I remembered, and he was wearing gloves, as threatening a sight to me on that hot June day as a drawn gun.

  He turned the door's deadbolt before addressing me: “You've figured it all out, haven't you?"

  Tessa ignored the interruption and answered my last question, though I would have been just as happy if she'd waited a day or two. “This one was always mooning after Dolly in the ol
d days. She'd never have anything to do with him."

  "Not till she needed me to tail a cheating husband,” Maniman said.

  "Not even then,” I said. There was no point in holding back if Tessa wouldn't. “Not the way you wanted her to. You handed her Vasti's head on a plate, all the proof she needed to be rid of him forever. You even had a handkerchief the other woman had left in a restaurant. You thought you had it all at last. Dolly and her money. Then she told you no. How did that feel? Like a sock full of wet sand?"

  That was pushing him hard, especially given that, for my theory to be right, Maniman had to have a temper. But I wanted his eyes on me just then and not on Tessa.

  It worked. Maniman took a step my way and then reined himself in. “Who'd you call just now from that phone booth on Commonwealth?” he rasped.

  "How did you know about that?"

  "I've been following you since Kenmore Square, kid. I watched you work it out, stop by stop."

  "I never saw you."

  "You never even looked. Innocent people never do. Frank Vasti had his head on a swivel, the weasel, and he still never spotted me. So who'd you call?"

  "Lieutenant Craney, to tell him about you."

  "I don't think so. You weren't on long enough. I think you didn't get him. Maybe you called to tell him about me or maybe to ask him why I'd left the force. I was kicked off. For leaning too hard on a suspect."

  That was exactly the information I'd been after, but I stuck to my story. “Craney's on his way here right now."

  "Nice try, kid. But you can't bluff without cards in your hand. Anyway, I'll have to take the chance."

  He started to reach inside his coat.

  Tessa said, “Don't move, Seamus."

  Ever since her husband had died in that holdup, Tessa had been a believer in the right to bear arms. She kept a shotgun, cut down, behind the high counter. It would fire right through the partition's thin paneling in an emergency, but that wouldn't be necessary now. She had it raised to her shoulder and pointed at Maniman's broad stomach.