Dark Tort (36 page)

Grace’s smile was wan. “My cousin loved magazines. There were five of them in her suitcase, can you imagine? I told her she’d rupture a disk in her back carrying such a heavy load, and she told me she liked having reading material on trips, even if I disapproved. I told her I didn’t disapprove, but I pointed out that she hardly ever traveled, and these days, you can get Woman’s Day and Family Circle almost everywhere. That’s when she said I should mind my own business. But she said it in a nice way. That was the way she was. She said I could throw her reading material away as soon as she was done with it; she’d just buy more at the airport. She knows—she knew— I’m not a pack rat. Far from it, I like clear spaces.” Grace sighed. “Really, though, I haven’t had the heart to throw those magazines away.”

My cell rang again: the caller ID said it was Julian. I threw the phone back in my purse.

Grace frowned. “Your young man is impatient. Shall I get you the magazines? You can take them home if you want. In fact, you can toss them—”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I interrupted, although I couldn’t imagine how women’s magazines would help the investigation. “Thank you. I’ll mail them back to you, I promise.”

She disappeared, and I considered calling Julian and bawling him out. But a moment later, Grace pushed through her screen door holding an old grocery bag. “Thank you for being willing to send them back. I don’t think of myself as sentimental, but I guess I am.”

I stood up and took the bag. Then I hugged her. It was the second time that day that I’d embraced someone who’d lost a beloved relative, and I didn’t particularly like the way it made me feel.

Once I was back in my van, my cell phone began ringing again. What was with Julian, anyway? We had no catering events that night, we weren’t going into H&J in the morning, and we would have plenty of time to prep the food for the next night’s dinner when we got home. I resolved to give him a good ribbing as soon as I picked him up.

Feeling perverse, I reached into Grace Mannheim’s grocery sack and pulled out her cousin’s magazines. Family Circle. Oprah. People. Woman’s Day. And The Living Church, the national magazine of the Episcopal Church. I held each one up and shook it, but no paper with Althea’s reason for attending Charlie Baker’s last show fluttered out. Feeling desperate, I looked for dog-eared pages, too, and in the first four, there were none.

The Living Church did have a dog-eared article, however, and I flipped to it and began to read.

My cell phone began its incessant ringing again. But I didn’t answer it. I couldn’t. I thought my heart had stopped.

The article, from February of this year, was entitled “The Gift That Gives Forever.” There was a picture of a wan and clearly weakened Charlie Baker, his brave smile a tiny line within his moon face. The article talked about the unusual aspects of Charlie Baker’s will. Since Mr. Baker, as the magazine deferentially referred to him, had been an orphan raised by the Christian Brothers, he was bequeathing half of his total estate to the Christian Brothers High School. The other half of Mr. Baker’s considerable fortune would be used to build and operate a retreat house for clergy, tentatively named the Mountain Pastoral Center. Buried at the end of the article was the following sentence, which Althea Mannheim had underlined: “Charlie Baker has named retired bishop Uriah Sutherland, formerly of the Diocese of Southern Utah, to be director of the center in perpetuity, with a salary to match his responsibilities.”

I had known that Uriah was helping set up the pastoral center and had continued the work after Charlie’s death, and I had speculated that Charlie might have left his good friend something in his will. But I’d had no clue that Charlie was granting the bishop a sinecure post as part of his estate. Besides Charlie’s lawyers, only Uriah and officials at the Diocese of Colorado would have been informed of the bequest. Since Charlie’s will was still going through probate, Uriah could not yet officially take up his duties as director of the center, but it wasn’t unusual for the diocese to issue a press release to record a gift that was coming. It makes the donor—the testamentary, if you want to get technical—happy to be celebrated for his munificence during his lifetime.

I didn’t read The Living Church—I didn’t have time—and apparently no one in Marla’s gossip network did either, as we’d picked up no word of Uriah’s windfall. Certainly, his position-to-be had not been publicized in Aspen Meadow. But in Utah, Althea Mannheim had seen the article about it, and had promptly traveled to Colorado and met with Charlie Baker. Which meant that she had indeed been talking about the bishop when she was dying in the Emergency Room. Suddenly the vague possibility of connections had become a live circuit.

So the question became, What specifically had Althea known about Uriah and imparted to Charlie? If Uriah had stolen something, as Althea seemed to claim, what was she accusing him of stealing?

K.D. had thought Althea had muttered “a pattern.” Hmm.

As Grace had pointed out, I was an Episcopalian, too, and a longtime one, at that. Plus, I was married to a cop. So I had all kinds of knowledge about the church and its liturgies, and unfortunately, I knew all too well about the valuable ecclesiastical stuff that could be filched. One time, Tom had prosecuted thieves who’d stolen a gold cross from St. Luke’s. After that, Father Biesbrouck had been forced to lock up the church building at night. Another time, a shady husband of a member of the Altar Guild had purloined a jewel-encrusted chalice, and tried to pawn it.

But there was another item of potential value that someone could steal. I doubted that Bishop Uriah, aka Bitch Yoreye, had pocketed a pattern. I conjectured—and maybe it was a leap, but not that much of one—that he’d pilfered a paten, the dish that holds the Communion wafers at the Eucharist.

If the bishop had stolen a paten, and if this had successfully been kept secret, could the bishop have stolen paintings, too?

Although I was trying to wean myself off of cell-phone usage while I was driving, I did put in a call to Tom. If it was possible that Bishop Uriah stole something, and delivering the news had had deadly consequences for Althea Mannheim, then it was time to get law enforcement to bring in Frederica Tuller, ASAP. Perhaps she could be scared into breaking whatever confidentiality she’d felt bound to keep, by hearing about what it meant to be a material witness after the fact.

When I’d given Tom an abbreviated version of my visit with Grace Mannheim and the article in The Living Church, he said he would get right on the phone with law enforcement in Utah. Meanwhile, he said, he was fixing Mexican food for us for dinner. And oh yes, the events planner with the Diocese of Colorado had called, and could we please prepare a separate vegetarian entrée for tomorrow night? Two of the attorneys did not eat meat.

“Not at meals, anyway,” I muttered, but Tom only laughed. I said we should be home in an hour.

“Finally!” Julian cried when he hopped in the car. “I’ve been wanting to tell you something. Whole Foods is having a special on organically raised chicken, and I thought you might want to pick some up for tomorrow night.”

“We could do that, but you’ll be delighted to know you were right. We do indeed need to come up with a vegetarian main dish for a couple of lawyers. And pick up some high-quality whipping cream, would you? We need a multilayered, show-stopping dessert. A dark torte.”

Like Tom, Julian laughed. But at Whole Foods, I gave him free rein to choose ingredients to make whatever main dish he thought would suit the dinner. Then he got serious. And he appeared flattered.

···

A little over an hour later, we were all back in our kitchen, bustling around with our various projects. Arch and Gus were spending the night over at the Vikarioses’ house. All weekend homework had been done, they’d assured Tom, and Gus’s grandparents would take them to school the next morning. I certainly hoped the two boys would not get tired of each other, but Tom assured me that they had quite a few years to catch up on being brothers, and they were going to be just fine.

Julian announced he was going to come up with an Artichoke and Brie Pie for the next night. Once he’d decided on that, he concentrated on slicing Brie and lightly steaming artichokes. He filled a deep pie dish with the egg-laced mélange, placed it in the oven, then hunted around our cupboards for some dried fruits. Once he’d found some glacé apricots, he began melting dark bittersweet chocolate and unsalted butter over the stove and said he would have some Chocolate Lovers’ Dipped Fruits ready to go with, as he disdainfully put it, “your showstopper.”

Yeesh!

For my part, I needed a dark torte, one that did not include chocolate, so the flavors from Julian’s dessert wouldn’t clash with my own. I found some eggs in the walk-in, then worked on pulverizing zwieback biscuits and pecans, locating the most deeply flavored cinnamon money could buy, as well as measuring out ground cloves that were so fragrant they made me want to swoon.

Tom was putting the finishing touches on a sauce made of fresh tomatoes, chilies, and onions that he intended to pour over a dish of fat cheese enchiladas that he had already made for us for dinner. About halfway through mixing up the torte, I had some trouble stirring all the ingredients into the batter I’d concocted. So I asked Tom for help.

“I’m making a dark torte, husband. Could you help?”

“A tort like a wrong, or a torte like a cake?”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Miss G., with you there’s no telling.”

Honestly, that man. The three of us were having so much fun working together in the kitchen, I began to ponder the age-old question posed by the same folks who came up with the chicken-and-egg conundrum: Which is more fun, cooking or eating?

Well. As soon as I sank my teeth into Tom’s juicy, fat, sizzling enchiladas, with their filling of three luscious melted cheeses spurting out beneath his savory topping of chilies, onions, and tomatoes from our own plants, I knew the answer to that one. And it wasn’t that cooking was more fun.

“You haven’t asked how I did with Utah law enforcement,” Tom said, when we’d all oohed and aahed over his enchiladas.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d have heard back this quickly!” I exclaimed.

“Oho, Frederica Tuller sang like the proverbial Arizona cardinal.”

“She’s in Utah,” Julian reminded him.

“Yeah, but I couldn’t think of a good—”

“Tom!”

“Take it easy, Miss G. All right. To escape possible prosecution for obstruction of justice, Frederica Tuller told us the whole story. The reason Althea Mannheim probably was reluctant to tell her cousin Grace why she was visiting is that it was something belonging to their mutual grandparents that had been stolen. An antique gold chalice and paten, used for Communion services on Holy Days there at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. But they were found at Bishop Sutherland’s residence. When he was apprehended, he said the chalice and paten had been given to him, not to the cathedral. Which of course was baloney, since they’d been used at the cathedral since long before he’d gotten there.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“Well,” Tom interjected, “for the church’s sake, everything got covered up. Because once Bishop Sutherland was caught, he worked out a deal with the Diocese of Southern Utah. A confidential deal, with the only people participating being the bishop-elect, the chancellor, who’s their lawyer, I guess—”

“That’s right,” I said.

“And Bishop Sutherland.”

“How did they ever apprehend him?” I asked.

“That’s where our friend Althea Mannheim comes in. You see, she’s on the Altar Guild. And even though Bishop Sutherland had counted on getting away with this, he hadn’t counted on Althea Mannheim discovering the loss . . . and breaking into his house and searching it until she found them!”

“I’ve heard of taking the law into your own hands,” I said.

“This is the Wild West,” Julian said. “What did they do to Althea?”

“You ever try to arrest an elderly woman who’s just uncovered, via breaking and entering, a three-million-dollar heist?” Tom asked mildly. “Piece of advice: don’t.”

“Three million dollars?” I repeated, incredulous.

“Black-market value of antique gold chalice and paten,” Tom said ruefully.

Julian asked, “Did the church get their stuff back?”

“Yes,” said Tom. “And Uriah Sutherland claimed he had heart problems. That’s how he got out of Utah with his reputation more or less intact.”

“Less and less,” I said, “the more I know. Do you think Uriah Sutherland ran down Althea Mannheim?”

“We don’t know,” Tom said. “But we’re working on that, too.”

The next morning, it snowed. Gus and Arch called to say how ticked off they were that CBHS was still having classes. But as Gus’s grandfather drove oh-so-slowly down to Denver, the radio announced that CBHS had been closed after all. Arch called us, gleeful, from the road.

The plumbing contractor who’d been working on the lines at the Roundhouse called to say he had good news and bad news. The good news was that the plumbing lines were done and that the Roundhouse was good to go for our dinner tonight. The bad news was that his subcontractors had tracked in “quite a bit” of mud over the past couple of weeks. If we were going to go ahead with the dinner in the Roundhouse that night, we might want to come in and do some cleaning.

I said, “You can’t win.”

Tom announced that they’d called from the department asking him to come in early, but he could stave them off for a few hours to help with the cleaning. I told him to go on, deal with Louise Upton. I’d rather clean.