All Our Yesterdays (12 page)

“What’s your name?” Conn said to the patrol cop next to him.

“Shaughnessy, Sergeant,” the young cop said. He avoided looking at the girl.

“Conn Sheridan. You find her here?”

“Yeah. Under the table. The tablecloth was hanging down. Looks like somebody tried half-assed to hide her.”

“Who discovered the body?”

The young cop nodded at the priest.

“Father was down here getting ready for some kind of meeting.”

Conn glanced around the room.

“She been raped?” Conn said.

“Some sort of penetration,” the ME said. “There’s some blood.”

“Usually is, kids her age,” Conn said. “What killed her?”

“Gunshot, I assume,” the ME said. “We’ll know more once we get her on a table.”

“Recent?” Conn said.

“Not today,” the ME said, “more likely yesterday. Something special, though. There’s tooth marks on her right buttock.”

“He bit her on the ass?” Conn said.

“That would be the technical description,” the ME said.

Conn nodded and looked at the young cop.

“Do we know who she is?”

The young cop shook his head.

“Father says she may be in his parish. Says he doesn’t recognize her, but it’s a big parish.”

“And he’s probably a busy man. Call the station, see if she’s been reported missing. Anyone seen her underpants?” Conn said.

The young cop shook his head and headed for a phone. Conn asked the other cops. They hadn’t seen her underpants.

“Look for them,” Conn said.

One of the cops said, “Maybe she didn’t have any, Sergeant.”

“Sure she didn’t. A ten-year-old Irish Catholic girl from Charlestown, in her school uniform, going to a
meeting in the church. Sure she wouldn’t be wearing underwear.”

“How come you know she’s Irish Catholic?” the cop said.

“Because I’m a fucking detective sergeant,” Conn said. “Find the underwear.”

The assistant medical examiner straightened. “You finished with her, Conn?”

“Not yet,” Conn said. “Tell the wagon to stand by.”

The assistant medical examiner started for the door.

He said, “Give them a shout when you’re ready.”

Conn turned to the priest.

“What do you know, Father?”

The priest shook his head. He was round shouldered and dark haired with a permanent shadow of a beard. His cheeks bore a fine filigree of broken blood vessels, and his dark eyebrows were very heavy. When he was close to him Conn realized that the priest was not even middle aged yet.

“You can’t identify the victim.”

The priest shook his head again.

“When’s the last time the room was used?”

“This afternoon. CCD meeting here ended at four-forty.”

“So she arrived here after that,” Conn said. He was talking to himself, but the priest answered him anyway.

“Yes, she would have had to.”

“What was the meeting you were preparing for?”

“The meeting? … oh, the meeting … we called it VASE—Volunteer After School Enrichment. College students would come in to tutor poor children. I’ve canceled tonight’s meeting, of course.”

“How often did it meet?”

“Every weekday.”

“Same personnel?”

“Excuse me?”

“Same college kids teach the same poor kids every day?”

“No. It’s a popular program. We have different teachers and different students every day.”

“Anybody else use the space?”

“No, not really. It’s quite small. Mostly we use the Knights Hall on Rutherford Ave.”

“How old were the kids?”

“Grammar school, ages six to twelve.”

“You got a list?”

“A list? Of what? The students?”

“Students and tutors.”

“Yes. I’m sure we do. I have an enrollment book in the church office.”

“Go get it.”

“Now?”

“Right now.”

“Of course,” the priest said. He went across the small basement and up the stairs toward the church above.

Conn stood silently looking at the crime scene. The room was low ceilinged. The stone walls had been painted yellow. There were folding chairs stacked against the far wall, and several tables with the legs folded leaning against the near wall. Small windows near the ceiling let in a little light, but most of it came from the two fixtures with green metal shades that hung from the ceiling on short cords.

The young cop came back into the room.

“Girl fits her description reported missing last
night, about eleven o’clock,” the young cop said. “Parents last saw her yesterday morning when she left for school.”

“Name?”

“Maureen Burns,” the young cop said.

Conn continued to look silently at the crime scene. One of the patrol cops came back. Nobody could find the girl’s underpants.

“Must have taken them,” Conn said. “Souvenir.”

The priest came down the stairs with a brown-covered spiral-bound notebook in his hand. He gave it to Conn. Conn opened it and glanced down the names. One of them was Maureen Burns.

“Do you think it’s one of the students?” the priest said. He seemed less vague than he had been. Conn smelled the whiskey on his breath.

“Yeah.”

“Is that why you want to see the list?”

“The cellar of the local church is not the first place you think of if you’re planning to molest a ten-year-old girl, you know?”

“God have mercy,” the priest said softly.

Conn smiled faintly.

“Hasn’t shown much so far, has he, Father?”

“No.”

Conn had expected a cliché about the Lord’s mysterious ways. The priest was better than he’d expected.

“Go talk to the parents,” Conn said to the young cop.

“I gotta tell them?” the young cop said.

“Take the priest,” Conn said.

G
us always liked how high the ceilings were in church. Though the Mass bored him, he liked the feeling of elevated space in the room, and the vague participatory sense of tunneling back through time. The feeling was strongest at Christmas, when Gus could feel an almost tangible connection between himself and the manger in Bethlehem.

His mother kneeling beside him seemed the exact opposite. Hunched ecstatically over her rosary, she appeared to shrink in upon her spirit, hugging the sacred mysteries into her imploded self. Tight, narrow, impacted, her faith intensified by reduction, she fumbled her beads throughout the Mass like an amulet, even as she listened to the sermon, nodding her head in rapt assent.

Gus liked the jeweled colors of the stained glass too, although the bright windows always seemed to him like a painting of a painting, the figures in them rendered from statues.
On the other hand, where you going to get a real saint to pose?

He noticed when he was quite young that no one in the church art appeared happy, not the statues, nor the stained glass, nor the carvings, nor the bas-relief stations of the cross. As a small boy he simply noticed this, as he got older he wondered about it. Shouldn’t they be happy? What about eternal bliss? He wanted to ask his mother about it, but he didn’t. He knew
intuitively that the answers would not make sense to him, and that the question itself would be condemned.

Gus’s father never came to Mass. Not even Gus’s first communion. Gus avoided the subject with his father because Conn always seemed scornful of it, and it made Gus feel disloyal to his mother. He looked at her now, kneeling beside him, her eyes shut, her hands fondling the rosary, her lips moving.
At least she’s got something to do
, Gus thought. The Latin Mass was largely meaningless to him. He hadn’t been to parochial school. On the other hand he’d gone regularly to catechism on Saturday mornings, while the Protestants slept, without learning to understand the Mass. And most of his friends who had been to parochial school didn’t know what was going on in church either.

Sometimes he stared at Deirdre Mulvoy’s frolicsome bottom, kneeling in front of him. Usually she wore her school uniform, but on Sundays she dressed up for church, and the dress, which Gus thought was silk, hugged her backside. Looking at her made Gus feel hot. He feared he would go to hell. He looked away, at the windows, at the stations of the cross, at the languishing Jesus crucified above the altar. But still he felt the hotness, and inevitably he would look back at Deirdre’s bottom, as she knelt in prayer.

His mother received communion every Sunday, and insisted that Gus receive with her. Which meant that every Saturday he had to go to confession. Usually Gus had only the same venial sins to confess, that he had confessed to last week. He would enter the darkened booth to speak to the priest sitting invisibly beyond the partition, the curtained window between them. Gus would kneel, and say the words.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was a week ago, and these are my sins. I have impure thoughts, sometimes. I swear. I disobey my parents, sometimes.”

“Say three Our Fathers, and three Hail Marys, and make a good Act of Contrition,” the priest would say from the dark.

And Gus would begin, “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee …”

And the priest would say it along with him in Latin. When he finished he would leave the confessional, walk to the front of the church, kneel at the altar rail, and say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys as carefully as he could, trying not to run the words together, smelling the permanent church smell of incense and empty space.

He always left the church feeling safe in the knowledge that if a truck were to run him down now, he would avoid the flames of hell.

M
aureen Burns’s father was a longshoreman. Her mother was a waitress. They identified the remains of their daughter, age ten years and seven months. The priest was unable to comfort them. Maureen’s father said to the priest, “You pray, Father, all you fucking want to. But if I can find the son of a bitch I am going to kill him.”

The priest glanced at Conn.

Conn said, “I got no problem with that.”

The priest nodded slowly.

“God forgive me,” the priest said. “I don’t either.”

Conn nodded a slight acknowledging nod at the priest, and turned and walked away, out of the morgue, along the drab corridor, out of City Hospital, into a bright April day. On Harrison Avenue, he sat in his parked car, with the window down, reading the coroner’s preliminary report. The full autopsy would come now that the parents had ID’d the body.

The blood was the same blood type as the victim’s. Evidence of penetration but, so far, no trace of semen. Cause of death was apparently the gunshot wound in her head. The progress of rigor indicated that she had probably been dead at least eight hours when she was discovered. If this was in fact the case, it meant she had been killed elsewhere and brought to the church basement. Conn put the report aside.

He took a folded sheet from his inside pocket and
opened it. It was the names of the tutors that the priest had given him. It could have been someone else. It could have been a random killing. But it was hard to imagine the killer riding around with the corpse in the car until he found an open door in a strange church. It was pretty surely someone who knew the church. Could be the priest. But, the tutors were a good bet. There were fifteen college students on the list. Thirteen of them were girls. That figured—most boys didn’t teach grammar-school kids. Except maybe child molesters. He didn’t completely eliminate the girls. He’d heard of cases where the molester was a woman, but not often. Conn didn’t take the idea very seriously. He licked the tip of his pencil and drew a line under the names of the two males: Alden E. Hunt, and Thomas J. Winslow, Jr.

Conn stopped breathing. The shock of the name jagged through him as if some interior fabric were ripping. Thomas J. Winslow, Jr., Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Conn took some air in slowly through his mouth, and let it out, and took in some more. Thomas J. Winslow, Jr. He knew it might not be Hadley’s son. He knew there were many Thomas J. Winslows in the world who might send their children to Harvard. He’d seen the name in the papers now and then, though he never knew if it was the same Winslow or another Winslow, and he never wanted to. But he didn’t know it wasn’t Hadley’s son. And if it were? This time it was thrust upon him. This time there was no way not to know. He felt his throat tighten. He felt his solar plexus clench. For a moment he felt disoriented, as if this Boston spring day were taking place in some alternative state of being, and he was a confused observer. The street blurred and he
realized his eyes were tearing. He took in more air, and wiped his eyes, and wrote the number 1 beside Alden Hunt’s name. No need to rush. Maybe Hunt was the guy. Beside Thomas J. Winslow, Jr., he wrote the number 2.

I
t was a Thursday morning. Knocko was back from court, and he and Conn were drinking coffee in a diner on Kneeland Street.

“I’m in court for a week,” Knocko said. “The jury convicts him. The judge suspends the sentence. And the asshole strolls without any time to do.”

He took a bite of his doughnut.

“Shoulda shot the bastard when we grabbed him,” Knocko said.

Conn nodded.

“Let’s think about that,” Knocko said. “We find the perp in that Charlestown killing.”

Conn stared down at his coffee. It was in a thick white mug that was showing signs of age.

“I’m on that alone, Knocko,” Conn said.

Knocko ate the rest of his doughnut. He drank some coffee and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin.

“Something I should know, Conn?”

Conn shook his head. Knocko drank the rest of his coffee, put the mug down, and stood. Conn stood with him. Knocko said, “Thanks, Vinnie,” to the counterman and they left without paying.

From his desk, Conn made some phone calls. He learned that Alden Hunt was a member of the Tufts Glee Club and had been singing close harmony in Brunswick, Maine, during the time that Maureen
Burns must have been killed. With his pencil stub, Conn drew a line through Hunt’s name.

Conn talked with Thomas J. Winslow, Jr., in his room on the second floor of a Harvard dormitory on Memorial Drive.