The Death of an Irish Sinner

by Bartholomew Gill

  Reaching for the butter, his eyes shied toward the pantry where the liquor was kept.

  “Allow me to remove that from your sight,” Noreen said, her hand whisking the butter dish off the table.

  Not in the best of moods before breakfast under normal circumstances, McGarr only glared at her. Earlier, when looking in the mirror to shave, he had been shocked at how swollen his face was, and he could scarcely tie his shoes, his left wrist was so sore.

  “Shall I begin?” McKeon asked, shaking out a sheaf of papers. “Chief—that report that you asked for on Opus Dei is there by the side of your plate.”

  A rotund middle-aged man with a thick shock of once-blond hair but dark eyes, McKeon pushed aside a plate that had only recently contained not a little bit of everything, McGarr deduced from the remains.

  McGarr cleared his throat. “Tell you what. I’m not in the greatest form this morning, and I’d like what Bernie had,” he said in a small voice, feeling very much like a character out of Dickens.

  “Now, now—that’ll pass once you get something in your stomach,” Noreen said in a motherly tone of voice. “You know what the doctor recommended, and you agreed to.”

  “Ah, let the poor man have what he wants,” her mother, Nuala, put in. “You can see for yourself, he had a hard go of it last night. I hope you gave as good as you got, lad. Let me freshen that cup for you now.”

  “And me,” said McKeon. “You shouldn’t use me as a model, Chief. Didn’t the sawbones say I had the cholestorol level of a pregnant woman? You saw the numbers yourself.”

  “Maybe that should tell you something,” Bresnahan observed, reaching for the teapot. “Have you been by a mirror lately?”

  “If he starts wearing a nursing bra,” Ward muttered,

  “I’m filing a grievance.”

  “I can et anything I wish,” McKeon continued.

  “Including the occasional platter of crow.” Again it was Bresnahan, banter being the usual tone of morning meetings. She was a tall, statuesque redhead who, as a recent mother, was herself on a slimming diet.

  “Whereas some of us just don’t have the numbers. Didn’t the doctor explain it all to me in a phrase?” McKeon pushed the half glasses down his nose and paused dramatically. “Genetic superiority.”

  “Bad doctor, bad science,” said Ward, reaching for the platter of sausages. Like Noreen, Ward was a trim person who would never be heavy. A former amateur boxer, he still spent a few hours in the gym every second day, working the bags, lifting weights, and sparring a few rounds with younger fighters. His dark eyes avoided McGarr’s as he forked a few sausages off the platter.

  Noreen now cut a thin slice of butter and dropped it into the oatmeal. “It’ll taste almost the same, trust me.”

  McGarr’s eyes flickered up to hers, which were turquoise in color and bright. She had slept well.

  Meanwhile, he could hear her mother in the pantry, where she had gone with his cup. There was a squeak, as of a cork being twisted from the neck of a bottle, and then a few good glugs as his coffee was being freshened.

  McGarr relaxed. At least that part of his day was proceeding according to form; he’d not missed an eye-opener in decades. “Where’s Fitz?” he asked, not having seen his father-in-law.

  “Down in the village,” Nuala said, placing the brimming cup before him. “He thought he’d put an ear to the ground, given what happened. Maybe the locals will loosen up for him what they wouldn’t say to the police.

  “There, now—you drink that while it’s hot and good.”

  “Mammy—you’re just abetting him,” Noreen complained.

  “What? Nothing of the kind. You’ve read the reports that say a little touch now and then is spot on for the ticker. You could do with a drop yourself.”

  “And Maddie—where’s Maddie?”

  “Schoolwork. I thought it might be uncomfortable for her to hear whatever details Bernie’s got for us this morning.”

  McGarr raised the blessed drop to his lips and allowed the hot, peat-smoky liquid to course down his gullet. There now. That was better. “Bernie?” he asked, reaching for his spoon.

  “Not all the news is good,” McKeon began. “In fact, two items are altogether troubling. First is, our chief here might consider treating himself to the odd steak or two of an evening, for strength if not for taste.

  “Geraldine Breen—the woman who put him in the condition we see him in this morning and whom he put in hospital—she absconded last night, replacing herself with the Guard who was securing her room. And a big fella, by all accounts.

  “It’s thought his back might be broken. The nurses assumed we’d removed the Guard, and seeing a form in the bed, they didn’t realize she was gone until a few hours ago.

  “We’ve issued an ‘all points,’ of course. But no trace of her yet.

  “As for the second revelation—preliminary findings indicate Mary-Jo Stanton was murdered around four in the afternoon. That coincides exactly with the event that was taped on the security monitor, the one that views the section of garden where her corpse was found by the priest, Father Fred”—McKeon turned to another page.

  “Duggan,” Ward put in.

  Mary-Jo Stanton’s “keeper,” if what Dery Parmalee said about Opus Dei and Barbastro was factual, McGarr thought.

  “However—and this is the big however—Mary-Jo Stanton was not killed by the device that was found around her neck. At least not directly, since the wounds and pattern of bleeding indicate that the punctures from the barbs occurred before her death.” McKeon glanced up over his half glasses. “The wounds from the—I’m going to call it—‘silly-sea-oh.’”

  “Thee-LEE-thee-oh,” corrected Ward, who spoke Castilian rather well.

  “Exactly. But that device was not the cause of death, it says here. What killed her was a myocardial infarction.”

  “A heart attack?” Bresnahan asked.

  “Then she died of natural causes?” Noreen asked, taking a seat at the table.

  “Natural enough, if you dismiss the—”

  “Cilicio,” Ward supplied.

  “Which could have brought on her death,” Bresnahan mused.

  “Well, certainly Mary-Jo didn’t wrap the blessed thing around her own neck and tighten it until it drew blood.” Noreen reached for the platter of eggs.

  “The postmortem is by no means complete, of course. But perhaps we should view it like that, until we receive the final report.” McKeon glanced over at McGarr, who nodded.

  “Moving on to the guests and residents of Barbastro…” McKeon glanced up from his notes.

  “What is it about the sound of that name that gives me the willies?”

  “That’s easy,” Bresnahan put in, now doodling on her notepad. “You find the bar part enticing, given your proclivities. But one letter further, it’s ouch. Then there’s the a, s part that’s pronounced ‘ass,’ which, of course, never applies to you, Bernie.”

  “Yet,” Ward muttered. “Give him time.”

  “Bast, of course, is half of bastard. But again, that’s not you. And finally there’s the astro, which is five-eighths of castrato. Little wonder you’re concerned about your willy.”

  “Barbastro, I’ll have you know, is the small city in Aragon where José Maria Escrivá—the beatified priest who founded the Opus Dei order—was born,” said McKeon, shaking out his notes. “Father Fred Duggan told me that. He was and is a resident in the house, along with Geraldine Breen, who is a member of the sect—”

  “Order,” Bresnahan corrected. “In a Catholic context, sect implies heresy, and from what I know, Opus Dei is more than simply mainstream. They’re at the very center of the Church, since they control the money.”

  Spooning up some stirabout, McGarr took note of Bresnahan’s knowledge of the—

  “Order,” McKeon repeated. “Father Juan Carlos Sclavi, who has also been resident in Barbastro for the last month and was there yesterday afternoon, is a priest of same. Little English, we w
ere told by Duggan, less it seemed when I spoke to him and, later, Hughie in his native lingo.”

  “Wouldn’t say anything without Duggan in the room,” Ward added. “Kept looking at him for a wink or a nod, whenever I asked the question.”

  “As well,” McKeon continued, “one Delia Manahan spent the day and the night at Barbastro. She too claims an affiliation with the Opus Dei order, although she told us she lives and owns her own house on Killiney Bay.”

  Another monied person, thought McGarr; property values on Killiney Bay had skyrocketed in recent years. Many of the houses were large, the view of the bay and Bray Head to the south were magnificent, and the commute into Dublin by high-speed train was quick.

  “Duggan claims to have been away from the property at the time—around four in the afternoon—when the surveillance camera was obscured, which the pathologist estimates was the time of Mary-Jo Stanton’s death.

  “Finally, we have the gardener, the aptly named Frank Mudd, who on first blush appears to be a three-monkeys kind of guy.”

  “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil?” Noreen asked.

  “No. If you groom me, I’ll groom you. If not, I’ll go to the third monkey, who’ll pay for the pleasure.”

  “I don’t get it.” Noreen reached for McGarr’s coffee cup.

  Said Bresnahan, “He wants to know what’s in it for him.”

  “‘Without Miss Stanton, I’ll be put out of here by the priests, who’ll bring in one of their own,’” Ward put in. “‘It’s time for me to start thinking of meself.’”

  “Could be he’s afraid of something.” Noreen sipped from the cup.

  “Us, maybe.”

  “How can you?” she asked McGarr, her hand rising to her throat. And yet the cup remained in her hand.

  “Otherwise, the videotapes that we watched?”

  “Interminably,” said Ward.

  “They show nobody else on or about the property at the time the ‘silly-sea-oh’ was clamped down on the poor old crone’s neck, maybe or maybe not causing her death.”

  “But at least we can assume she was attacked by somebody she knew and did not fear,” Noreen mused, obviously having perused the reports that now sat in the middle of the table. “There’s the tape of her turning around to see somebody approaching her, then somebody or bodies placed something over the surveillance camera, and when that thing was withdrawn, there she was, dead, with the device wrapped around her throat.”

  “God bless us and save us from all harm,” Nuala whispered, turning away to the sink with tears in her eyes. “To think that such a thing could happen to an elderly lady—and very much the lady—tilling the soil in her garden.”

  “Any other surveillance cameras malfunctioning?” McGarr asked, finishing the porridge and reaching for the cup, which Noreen handed him.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “One along the wall that borders the main road into the village. Another in the kitchen.”

  “Focused on what?”

  McKeon glanced at Ward.

  “What had been the servants’ staircase, when there were servants. It leads up to the quarters of the victim on the third floor.”

  And it was the staircase down which whoever ransacked the victim’s apartment could have fled, thought McGarr.

  “But there was a servant—the mannish woman, Geraldine Breen,” Nuala managed. “She waited hand and foot on Mary-Jo, day and night now for…at least for a decade that I can remember. There was even talk that the two might be a, you know, couple.”

  “Although there was talk like that of Mary-Jo and Father Fred.”

  As well as a statement from Dery Parmalee that he had been involved with her romantically in the past.

  Nuala flapped a hand. “Ach—people talk. Yap. We know that.”

  “Finally, the car you had us impound, Chief?” McKeon continued. “The one registered to a Dery Parmalee. It’s just a car—no electronic equipment, no tapes, not even a cell phone.”

  Lie one, thought McGarr, now curious to learn how Parmalee had otherwise known of the woman’s murder. He pushed back his chair and stood. “You two get some sleep,” he said to McKeon and Ward. “Ruthie—you work on Parmalee. I want to know everything possible about him, including your personal assessment.”

  “Meaning I don’t need to identify myself.”

  Why, to a liar. McGarr wondered how much Parmalee had misrepresented Opus Dei; perhaps a second opinion would be helpful in viewing Duggan, Sclavi, and the Manahan woman. “I’m especially interested in how he found out about the murder.”

  “What about me? What do I do?” Noreen asked.

  “Remember, I grew up here. I know the turf and the players.”

  Which was a point, McGarr decided, as he picked up the report on Opus Dei. “What about our daughter?”

  Said Nuala, “Sure, that’s what grandmothers are for.”

  “Give me a moment to freshen up,” Noreen said.

  “You’ll have a chance to read your report there.”

  “But I hope you’ll remember—you’re with me as a resource.”

  “To look and listen but not be heard.”

  McGarr could not have it be said—and said in a court of law—that his wife had taken an active part in the investigation. “Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  McGarr carried the report over to the window.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE DAY WAS a spring ideal with wind and sun locked in a pitched battle for weather dominance, McGarr realized, as he stepped down the drive toward the stables and his car.

  On his back the sun felt so warm he would have removed his jacket but for the gusts of wind—still cool off the nearby mountains—that buffeted him.

  He had to hold on to the brim of his fedora to keep it from blowing off. Overhead, brilliant puffs of the purest cloud were tracking across a cerulean sky.

  “So who done it, Chief?” Noreen asked, climbing into the car. Two patches of color had appeared on her cheeks, and her eyes were bright; she was enjoying herself.

  “I would have thought you’d still be upset by the news of Mary-Jo’s death,” McGarr observed, wheeling her Rover down the drive.

  “Oh, I am, sure. Mary-Jo was a saint. So good to all and sundry. Did you not read the bio Dery Parmalee did of her in Ath Cliath a year or so ago?”

  McGarr hadn’t, but he made note that he should.

  “Mary-Jo was not merely a world-class biographer, she was also extremely generous. Didn’t she build the school in the village and contribute to charities here and abroad, always anonymously?

  “And she did all of that while living herself like a hermit, there in Barbastro, with that order of hers clinging to her money like a pack of avaricious leeches. They scarcely let her out of their sight.”

  “According to Dery?”

  “According to everybody, if the village can be believed.”

  Who wished only the worst—which was the best—class of gossip, McGarr knew only too well.

  “How difficult could it have been to dispatch an elderly woman kneeling in her garden? And how craven, since it’s plain she knew her attacker and had no fear. As your report reads, it was as though she didn’t resist at all.”

  McGarr raised an eyebrow; how did she know that? Noreen had obviously gone through McKeon’s files closely.

  “The murderer only had to draw a bit of blood with that horrific instrument plumbed from the depths of Dark Age zealotry, and she succumbed. Was it murder? You can bet your last farthing it was—worked by some heinous hypocrite in her immediate circle who espoused her heartfelt beliefs but whose true motivation was get-and-gain, you’ll see when her will is read.”

  “A bit purple this morning, are we?” McGarr asked, as they drove through the village.

  “You mean the jacket?” It was a plum-colored merino jacket over a puce jumper and black slacks. He glanced down at her ankles, which—like the rest of her—were finely formed, and his hand
moved off the shift to her thigh.

  “Please—I’m thinking,” she complained, but she did not remove his hand.

  McGarr rather enjoyed his wife’s enthusiasms. She was, he decided, much like the day—blustery, visceral, yet warm and bright too. Apart from her beauty, what had attracted him was Noreen’s capacity for life in all its forms.

  And McGarr—without question jaded from his decades of police work—enjoyed the perspective that she often brought him. Mainly, it was her conception of humanity: that there might be, in fact, people who would never, ever resort to murder. Or anything else brutal and disgusting.

  Yet, at the same time, she was attracted to his endeavors.

  Turning his head, McGarr let his eyes play over her copper-colored curls, which had just begun to take on some gray now in her fortieth year. Her high cheekbones, the thin bridge of her nose, the angle of her head, which had dipped to one side as she pondered the few facts uncovered thus far. In that pose she looked like a pretty bird who had turned an ear to the ground.

  “I know, I know,” she continued, “I shouldn’t rush on. But one thing is definite. Mary-Jo knew and did not fear whoever slew her.”

  Or at least, whoever had placed the cilicio around her neck and left her for dead.

  Which could not be debated. At the murderer’s approach, she had turned her head to him or her, then looked back down at her work in the garden. No worry, no perceived threat.

  It seemed almost as though Father Fred Duggan were waiting for them just beyond the heavy metal gates of Barbastro, and he hadn’t been there for long, McGarr could see. Steam was rising from the cup in Duggan’s hand, and he was lightly dressed for the chilly morning.

  Could he have known they were on the way? All it would take was a helpful villager seeing Noreen’s car, which was well known, wheeling by.

  “I thought I’d take the air this morning,” Duggan explained when McGarr rolled down the window. A fit dark man, whose freshly shaven cheeks looked almost blue in the hard spring light, he squatted down lithely, so he could see into the car. “How ya, Noreen. Been a long time.”