“Ah, Fred—I’m sorry for you. It must be difficult.”
“’Tis, ’tis—and to think something like this could have happened to Mary-Jo of all people. And here at Barbastro. Still and all, she was a devout, good woman, and I’m sure she’s passed on to the reward that we all seek.”
McGarr noticed that Father Fred appeared to have slept well. His eyes were bright, no bags or sags. And there he was, fully McGarr’s own middle age or older by a year or two.
“Can we give you a lift to the house?” McGarr slid the Rover back in gear.
Duggan glanced at his mug of tea, then down the long drive. “Well…you can, sure. It’s chillier than I thought this morning. There’s a wintry edge to this wind.”
Turning to throw the latch of the back door for the priest, McGarr noticed that tires had patterned the frosted dew on the drive. A car had driven down to the gate, turned around, and returned to the house. Only one person had got out on the passenger side; only one person had walked there since the rime had formed during the night. Fred.
“Did you get any sleep?” McGarr asked, after the man had climbed in.
“Not much with your two colleagues prowling about. But at least I got some. How about yourself?”
“Same. A chap name of Dery Parmalee was waiting for me here at the gate, rather like yourself this morning. Know him?”
In the rearview mirror, McGarr watched Father Fred’s brow glower.
“Indeed. And you say he was here last night?”
“He knew what had happened. Case and point.”
“How?”
“Said his car is equipped with eavesdropping devices that can monitor phone calls, both yours from the house and my cell phone. Said he was around here yesterday because he’s doing an investigative journalism piece about Opus Dei.”
McGarr watched Father Fred’s clear blue eyes dart here and there. “And that Opus Dei is responsible for Mary-Jo’s death, I should imagine,” the priest said.
“Parmalee was with me…oh, I’d say the better part of two hours.”
“Spewing out venom and hate, undoubtedly.” Duggan tapped McGarr’s shoulder. “Now he’s an avenue of investigation—I believe you call it—that you should pursue. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of anybody as purely evil. But Dery Parmalee comes close. Even the Jesuits couldn’t tolerate him.”
“He says you killed John Paul the First.”
“And I suppose Salvador Allende, Roberto Calvi, the financier, and a host of other martyrs to Liberation Theology, pan-socialism, and abortion.”
“He’s not alone in those charges.” The report McGarr had been handed earlier said that many respectable newspapers and periodicals had also either raised questions or made charges about the means that Opus Dei employed to achieve its ends.
They included Corriere della Sera—Italy’s largest newspaper—Newsweek magazine, and both the Sunday Times and the Financial Times in England.
The report also said that, throughout his clerical life, José Maria Escrivá had reiterated to his faithful the maxim “Our life is a warfare of love, and in love and war all is fair.”
Namely, pillería, as Parmalee had told McGarr and the report suggested was true. Nothing was beyond Opusians, it seemed, not even encouraging fiduciary sleight of hand by its members to enrich Opus Dei, and assassinations of convenience to further its agenda, which was one of extreme reactionaryism.
“I know, I know—just like Jesus in his time, we’re not without our accusers, which is why we have to be doubly vigilant and strong. For the record—John Paul, God bless him—died of a heart attack.”
“Myocardial infarction.”
“Exactly.”
Some critics, the report continued, charged Opus Dei with getting rid of its enemies by inducing heart attacks using colorless, odorless, and tasteless digitalis. The report referenced the death of the Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Leningrad—while waiting for an audience with John Paul—from acute myocardial infarction.
“Well—here we are,” McGarr said, pulling up to the front door of the house. “Perhaps we’ll see you later.”
“I don’t understand. Shan’t I accompany you? I know the players, their backgrounds, their experiences with Mary-Jo, their histories here at Barbastro.”
It was the argument that Noreen had made not even an hour earlier. “Problem is, Fred—they know you.”
In the rearview mirror, Duggan’s eyes flashed up at McGarr. “What’s that supposed to mean? Of course they know me. I hope you’re not taking Parmalee’s scurrilous and libelous carry-on seriously. The man is delusional, I’ll have you know. When he was here working with Mary-Jo, he admitted to her he was taking tablets to treat paranoid schizophrenia, which gives you some idea where his papal-assassination and worldwide-conspiracy theories are coming from.”
“Working here? Parmalee led me to believe that he was having an affair with Mary-Jo.”
“What?”
“That’s what he told me.”
Plainly perturbed, Duggan flung open the door, spilling the tea on himself. “Damn.” He swung his legs out of the car and batted at the milky stain. “I hope that gives you proof of Dery Parmalee’s insanity. I knew Mary-Jo throughout the year or two that she collaborated with Parmalee on that project, and I can attest to the fact that there were no relations of that nature between Mary-Jo and that…ingrate.”
“Attest? How can you attest?”
“I was her confessor. And I know she would wish me to break the bonds of confidentiality to tell you this. As well, Mary-Jo was old enough to have been his mother.”
“Or yours,” McGarr observed in a quiet voice.
Duggan closed the door and stepped up to the driver’s window, which McGarr rolled back down. Again the priest squatted to peer in.
“Peter—I’m going to assume, even through this trying time, that you’ll continue to be our friend and our neighbor. Am I correct in that assumption?”
McGarr only considered the man.
“You’ve spoken to Parmalee, at length, you said. May I ask you this? What are his intentions? Is he planning to make a mockery and a…circus of Mary-Jo’s death? Is that what he intends?”
McGarr continued to hold the man’s gaze.
Finally, the priest looked away, before raising himself up. “Pity he owns that rag he writes for. Otherwise…”
Otherwise, what? McGarr wondered. Otherwise, Duggan and Opus Dei would squelch him?
“The irony is—Parmalee began Ath Cliath with funds that Mary-Jo herself advanced him. ‘Seed’ money, she called it. Some seed, that will now vilify her life, which was holy and above reproach in every regard, I’m here to tell you.”
Again the priest glanced down at his splotched trousers. “Be sure you take Mary-Jo’s life—and not just the manner of her death—into consideration, Peter. You wouldn’t want the opprobrium of a smear campaign to fall on your head.”
There it was—guilt, which ruled all in Ireland. McGarr raised a hand and allowed the car to drift down the drive toward the gardens.
“What does he mean that you’re our friend and our neighbor? Who’s us? Opus Dei?”
McGarr hunched his shoulders.
“Do you still have that report on them Bernie gave you?”
From inside his jacket, McGarr removed the folded report and handed it to her.
“And amn’t I right in thinking he just threatened you?”
McGarr looked over at Noreen and smiled. “Could it be you’re catching on?”
Stopping the car at the murder scene, McGarr got out and described to Noreen how Mary-Jo had been found there in her garden—prone, in a position of utter subjection as though bowing down to whoever had wrapped the cilicio around her neck and tightened it until it drew blood. Before she died of a myocardial infarction, McGarr reminded himself.
“She still had the gardening trowel in one hand,” he mused.
“After having recognized whoever approached her and even having sai
d a few words,” Noreen added.
“Before the security camera was covered up.”
“Where’s that?”
Walking back toward the corner of the garden haggard that a tall, cedar-pole fence enclosed, McGarr wondered if Father Fred was watching them. By his own say-so, he was now the only person who possessed a passkey to the monitoring room.
McGarr pointed to the camera lens, which had been concealed so cleverly it looked like the shaft of an intersecting cedar pole.
“Whoever obscured it was well enough acquainted with the property to know it was there and to know there was a blind spot where he or she could approach Mary-Jo and yet not be recorded.”
That there were probably blind spots in other parts of the property now occurred to McGarr, and he was glad Noreen had insisted on tagging along.
Yet as they stepped back to the car, he had a feeling he was missing something right there at the crime scene. But what?
Like the other outbuildings at Barbastro, the gardener’s cottage was concealed in a sizable copse, not far from the haggard if you walked through the wood, McGarr reflected. But the road itself wound around tall beeches on the periphery of the small forest until it entered an avenue of—could they be?—giant sequoias that cast deep shadows.
Surely the towering trees from the Pacific Coast of North America had been planted as a curiosity in other gardens and demesnes in Ireland, and the species had thrived in the damp, mild climate. But only within this vale, where the service structures of the estate were located, was their great height apparent.
“Magnificent, aren’t they?” Noreen said, as though reading his thoughts. Which she could, she sometimes insisted and McGarr always denied adamantly on the grounds that there had to be some limit to intimacy.
“That must be the gardener there,” she added.
Before them was a tall, thin man loading sacks of fertilizer onto the bed of a wagon yoked to a tractor. Catching sight of the car, he moved toward an outbuilding, which was where McGarr found him on the phone.
The man covered the mouthpiece with a hand. “Moment, please. I’m on the phone.”
McGarr nodded but did not move, Noreen now entering the small office behind him.
“I said—I’m on the phone. It’s personal and private.”
So is murder, McGarr thought.
“I’ll be out in a moment.”
McGarr scanned the cramped room, which had one small window and an interior door leading farther into the building. It was open.
The desk was heaped with bills and brochures from gardening suppliers; sacks of grass and other seed sat on a pallet in one corner. Not cleaned in years, the floor was caked with a meringue of dried mud from the door to the desk, and the tight space reeked of both the barnyard and the ashtray in front of Frank Mudd, McGarr assumed, the more than aptly named gardener, who was an old thirty-five.
A rather ordinary man with a bulbous nose and a windburned face, Mudd had not shaved recently, and his face was stubbled with a reddish beard. A battered fedora shadowed his brow.
Removing his hand from the phone, Mudd said, “They’re here right now.” He listened, then, “Oh, aye. Aye. I will. Be sure of it.” His eyes, which were some unlikely shade of blue, flashed up at McGarr, taking in—McGarr could tell—the swelling on the side of his face, the eye that was turning black-and-blue from the blow he had received the night before. “He’ll not railroad me.”
Which was a term McGarr had not heard in some time. Railroad, the verb, was an American term and at one time prison slang, he believed. Otherwise, Mudd’s voice was deep and raspy, because of the cigarettes, and carried a slight Northern burr.
Mudd slid the receiver into its yoke. “You’re Peter McGarr?”
McGarr nodded.
“That was my solicitor. He’ll be right over, and he says I’m not to speak to you until then.” Mudd reached into his jacket and took out a packet of smokes.
“Really? Why?” McGarr pulled back the only chair, so Noreen could sit. “I’m interested.” Easing himself onto a corner of the desk, McGarr watched the man light the cigarette—the fine blue smoke jetting toward the ceiling—and he could feel a kind of anger welling up. “Are you afraid you’ll tell us the part you played in Mary-Jo’s death?”
Mudd’s head jerked back slightly, and he opened his mouth, but he said nothing. Surely a gaunt man, Frank Mudd nevertheless had wide, well-muscled shoulders, and his hands—now cupping the cigarette that was snaking smoke toward the ceiling—were large and gnarled from work. One thumbnail had been injured sometime in the past and was black and cracked right down to the cuticle.
“I said, I’m not to say nuttin’.”
“Have you something to hide?”
The hand with the cigarette came up to his mouth.
“Me? No.”
“Perhaps you’ve been to prison.”
As though needing something for the other hand to hold, Mudd now reached for the stub of a pencil, and his eyes, which seemed almost purple in the shadowed light, snapped toward the window. Body language, telling all.
“Of course we’ll check,” McGarr continued in an easy, confidential tone of voice. “Today. Count on it. Here, the Continent, over in the States. Mudd your real name or just something…generic, I’m betting. Know what?”
The man’s eyes returned to him. “I’m also betting Mary-Jo gave you this job when nobody else would—here behind the walls and gates of this place where few would ever see you.”
McGarr let that sit for a moment. Above Mudd’s head, an old clock in a wooden case was ticking loudly. Silk Cut, the face said. It was a brand of cigarettes. McGarr slipped a hand into his jacket pocket where his own were kept. But for Noreen, he would have lit one up.
“And here she’s been murdered in her old age, and you’ve got nothing to say.”
Mudd again drew on the cigarette and looked down at the pencil in the other hand. The tiny office was now a fug of smoke. “Aye, but she’s dead and I’m here. Like I told yous last night, like my solicitor just said—it’s time to think of meself.”
McGarr had suffered through this conversation countless times in the past but seldom with so much gorge rising—he could feel it—because of his need. For what? A cigarette, of course. “Think of yourself and what’s in it for you?”
Mudd—or whatever his name was—only eyed him.
“Apart from a clean conscience and knowing you’ve done the right thing, perhaps a little sympathy, although”—McGarr raised a hand—“I promise nothing. If it’s murder or kidnap you’ve done—over there, here—I can’t help you. Bank robbery, felonious assault, anything with a gun.” McGarr shook his head. “Was it any of that?”
Mudd said nothing, but he looked suddenly relieved.
Turning over the cigarette packet in his coat pocket, McGarr noticed the rime of dried salt around the band of Mudd’s fedora. “Tell me, now—you work hard around here. Maybe too hard. Because mainly you’re alone. Sure, Fred lets you hire in some help now and again when a big tree comes down or there’s a washout or to cut all the lawns in summer. But—”
Stubbing out the cigarette, Mudd shook his head. “No, not the lawns—I do the lawns myself.”
“What about the gardens?”
“Them too.”
“And yesterday you were doing the gardens.”
Mudd shook his head. “Like I told yous, I’ll not say a word about that. My solicitor—”
“What else would you be doing now in spring?” As a stratagem, McGarr told himself, he pulled out his packet of cigarettes and offered one to Mudd, who took it. McGarr lit his own and slid his gold lighter, which had been a present from Noreen, across the desk.
Breathing out the blessed smoke that tasted—as only the first cigarette of the day always did—of fresh fields, toast, and taffy. “And then, of course, your solicitor’s right—you don’t have to say anything. Not a word. Since we have it all on camera.”
McGarr watched as Mudd’s head
went back and his eye again shied toward the window.
“So, after you took care of the animals, you went up to the garden where Mary-Jo had asked you to meet her.” Here McGarr was guessing, but in spite of her good health, he could not imagine a woman of her age having turned over the soil in the large patch of garden where she had been found. “You carried up the flat of peonies, you tickled the beds, then smoothed them for her.”
Now smoking steadily, Mudd only regarded him.
“An hour went by, maybe two, while she made steady but slow progress planting the bed. She asked you for this or that, but mainly you busied yourself with other work—pruning rosebushes or pottering around in the haggard there.
“Did you break for lunch?”
Mudd closed his eyes, as though agreeing.
“When did you see her next?”
The eyes opened. “You’ll remember this?”
McGarr’s hand—the one with the cigarette—swung to Noreen. “With a witness.”
Shaking his head, Mudd began: “I had no lunch, none at all. I had to go hunt up some mulch. Sure, we’ve got plenty of perfectly good mulch here, but for the Miss it had to be peat mixed with vermiculite and nothing else. And I had a hell of a time finding the premix, since she wanted it now, ‘With no excuses,’ says she to me. ‘We’ve got to get the annuals in the ground.’
“So, I got back around…three, I’d put it.” His eyes met McGarr’s. “And haven’t I been thinking about it ever since? I covered what she’d planted and then came back down here for a quick bite and a cuppa. I’d a few calls to answer.” Mudd pointed to an old dust-laden answering machine by the phone. “And”—he pulled on the cigarette until the head glowed—“when I got back up there, maybe three-thirty, there she was down where she was found, dead.”
“How’d you know she was dead.”
“I just knew it from the way she was bowed down. Nobody Miss Jo’s age could lay like that.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I went right up to her, of course. I says, says I, ‘Miss Jo, you okay?’ a coupla times. And I think I was a bit scared, like—you know how you get when something’s happened, and you’ve got to do something, got to help, got to decide what to do?
The Death of an Irish Sinner Page 8