Death Goes on Retreat (22 page)

Loody must have sensed his presence. All at once, he raised his head. Their eyes met and Loody’s smile twisted into the beginnings of a smirk. Or so it seemed to Little. Unless that annoyingly complacent expression was because the guy’s schnozzola was set high on his face, making him perpetually look down his nose at you.

He can’t help that, Little thought, feeling a surge of sympathy. He smiled and waved.

Loody lumbered to his feet. All the leather on his uniform creaked to attention. He pushed back the screen door. “You need me for something, Bob?” he asked, all spit-and-polish politeness. Yet Little sensed something taunting in those narrow agate eyes.

“No . . . no, thanks, Eric,” Little heard himself stumble. What was it about this man that made him so uncomfortable? “Finish your coffee break,” he said. “Today’s going to be another scorcher. You’ll need all the breaks you can get.” For some reason, his words sounded sarcastic, even to him.

Loody’s face darkened, but he bit back any reply.

Turning slowly in her chair, Beverly viewed Little with a bright metallic stare like a volcano ready to erupt.

That lady is the one who ought to make me squirm, Little thought, giving her his friendliest smile.

Beverly continued to stare. Where had he seen her
before? She looked so familiar. Maybe if he interviewed her again, she’d say something to spark his memory.

Loody cleared his throat. “Sergeant, I’ve been doing some nosing around, asking some questions.” His voice was deep and swollen with importance. “I need to talk to you later. Alone. I feel that what I’ve uncovered will prove helpful.”

The pomposity of his stance and the macho arrogance of his tone needled Little. He felt the prickle of sweat on his forehead. It was already too hot to put up with this know-it-all, although he guessed he’d have to sooner or later. With any luck at all, tomorrow Loody would receive another assignment!

Little mopped his face and tried to regain his good humor. “Great, Eric,” he forced himself to say, “but right now I want to talk to the guys from Crime Scene before they get called away. To see if they’ve come up with any admissible evidence.” As soon as the words left his mouth, Little regretted them. He really hadn’t meant them to sound like such a put-down. After all, they were all on the same side.

Loody studied him. His eyes blazed, but he said nothing. The perfect police officer, always in control. “Right!” With an expressionless face, Loody checked his wristwatch. “After lunch, then?”

With a feeling of reprieve, Little agreed to a one-thirty meeting in St. Colette’s gift shop.

“And Miss Benton.” He met her stare.

“Ms.,” she corrected, ice dripping from the capital
M.

“Excuse me. Ms. Benton, I need to talk to you, too, before you leave today.”

“I’m not staying past three o’clock.” She swiped at
her face with a soiled paper napkin. “It’s too damn hot to fix a big dinner. As far as I’m concerned they’re too pampered anyway. Tonight they can all fend for themselves.”

Little wasn’t sure if she meant the priests, the nuns, the Sheriff’s Department, or all three, nor did he want to know. “Two-thirty, then,” he said pleasantly, “in the gift shop.”

“I told you I was leaving at three,” she said, her fleshy face glowing.

Little gave her his “kill ’em with kindness” smile. “I only have a few questions,” he said, although at the moment he’d be damned if he had any idea what they were.

What the hell is the attraction? Little wondered, watching Sergeant Loody stride across the kitchen and once again take his place opposite an eager Beverly. Whatever she was telling him, Loody was impatient to hear. Would he be privy to it at one-thirty? Would he have to listen to that oversized blowhard recount everything Beverly should be telling him? He caught himself. After all, they were on the same team. Weren’t they?

Little was glad to see Dave Kemp waiting for him outside St. Philomena’s Hall. He was curious to know how Dave felt about Loody. Was this strong aversion strictly his problem? He wanted to ask, but it sounded too much like gossip. He hoped that one of these days, while they were having a beer after work, Kemp would bring it up on his own.

At the far end of the parking lot, the three-member crime scene team stood in a tight group, waiting for them.

“Where the hell have you been?” one of them called out, “we’re melting here.”

“Who’d have thought you guys would work fast?” Kemp quipped. “Find anything?”

Much to Little’s disappointment, the trunks of the priests’ cars revealed very little that the team thought criminal. They had, however, collected bits of hair and fiber, dirt and and leaf samples, small fragments of whatever they hoped might turn up anything. Now they were ready to go.

“No sign of blood from the guy’s head, huh?” Little asked, although he really hadn’t expected there to be. Any perp with an ounce of sense would wrap the victim in a tarp or plastic—anything that could safely be destroyed or disposed of.

Just once, he’d like a nice easy case with a dumb murderer; one where he opened the trunk of a suspect’s vehicle and found the victim’s bloodstains and the murder weapon thrown in for good measure. That only happened on television, and even there, much less often than it once had.

“Find anything else? Something that might be cause for suspicion?” At this point, he’d take any lead.

One of the team laughed. “The only thing I found that could remotely be called suspicious was in”—he consulted his notebook for the name—“in Father Tom Harrington’s trunk.”

Little’s blood quickened. That guy Harrington was awful slick. “Yeah?” He tried not to sound too eager.

“The padre is carrying nearly a case of booze in his trunk. Funny thing, it’s in a box marked ‘Will and
Baumer Sanctuary Lamps.’ Hell, he’d be lit up all right!”

Bob Little tried to laugh at the joke, but he was disappointed. The priest could have liquor in his trunk for any number of reasons. And even if he was planning to drink it all himself during retreat, that made him an alcoholic maybe, but not a murderer.

Something had to break soon. He and Terry were planning a few days in the mountains. Terry had promised not to bring work and he wanted this case solved and off his mind so that they could concentrate on each other.

He took off his jacket. Rings of sweat had already formed at his armpits. The blacktop burned right through the soles of his shoes and he felt its heat on the balls of his feet.

One of the deputies shaded his eyes from the full, hot sun. “If you let us go so we can get this stuff analyzed, then we will all have some answers!” He sounded irritable. Little chalked it up to the persistent heat.

“They sure got out of here in a hurry.” Kemp watched the crime scene car round the corner, slow down, then merge onto the road back to their air-conditioned headquarters in Santa Cruz.

For some reason, the fiery red taillights reminded Little of Beverly’s angry stare. Beverly! He shut his eyes in exasperation. He should have asked the team to search her car while they were here. That was stupid! When he’d put in the request, he hadn’t expected her to be at St. Colette’s.

He ran across the parking lot shouting, but their car was already well out of earshot. He’d wait until they got back to headquarters to call. They’d have to come back and, three o’clock or no, Beverly wasn’t going anywhere until he said so.

I’ll deal with Loody first, he thought, wondering if he was still with Beverly. What was it she was telling him? The thought of that pompous stuffed shirt looking down his nose and filling him in on his murder case. This is my case! Loody should stay the hell out of it. The more Little thought of it, the madder it made him; mad enough to question and requestion everyone connected with this case until he found a motive.

He’d save that for the afternoon. Before it got any hotter, he’d take the whole hillside apart, board by tree if necessary, in search of something, anything that might give him a lead.

“Take off your jacket, Dave,” Little said more roughly than he intended. “And for God’s sake, get rid of that damn bow tie!”

After breakfast Sister Mary Helen settled herself on the wide sundeck that wrapped around the buildings. By scooting her chair back under the eaves, she was able to enjoy the panorama of the valley beyond—and stay out of the direct sun.

The view was full of surprises. She supposed that no matter how many times you took in a view this vast, you’d always discover something new. Like that English holly stretching up between two orange trees. And the
bench hidden around the corner, built entirely of black enameled horseshoes. Or those three yellow rosebushes. She hadn’t noticed them before.

She shaded her eyes. In the distance row after row of fir trees shimmered with heat against a cloudless blue sky. At her feet, the cherry-red dahlias planted in redwood tubs along the porch rail had burned and faded since yesterday. Even the sweet William was wilted. No wonder. No one watered them. Undoubtedly, no one even thought about them. Everyone, especially Felicita, who was the most logical waterer, was too involved with death to think of such small bits of life.

“How about a morning trot around the property?” Eileen’s question startled her.

“Trot?” she stared in disbelief. “Have you any notion how long it’s been since I trotted around anything?” Good night nurse! Today she felt as if she could barely stroll. Let alone trot!

“I remember way back when you were the best turkey trotter in the Order,” Eileen said with a mischievous glint. Raising her toes and rocking on her heel, she hummed something between “If You Knew Susie” and “Don’t Bring Lulu.”

Despite herself, Mary Helen laughed. Usually she hated Eileen’s “remember way back when” stories. “Living in the past is a sure sign of aging,” she contended time and time again. But at the moment, the past seemed comforting. Much easier surely than dealing with the present.

Encouraged, Eileen sat down beside her. “Come on along, old dear,” she coaxed. “A walk will do us both good.”

Mary Helen’s stomach pitched at the thought of her last walk around St. Colette’s: the angry insects buzzing, the dogs, stiff and staring. She closed her own eyes, trying to block out the memory. “You go on,” she said, forcing herself to picture only the ageless redwoods and the tranquil horizon. “I’ll just sit here and think.”

“Suit yourself.” Eileen sighed. Without another word, she left Mary Helen alone on the sundeck.

Sister Mary Helen felt the sun warming the tips of her walking shoes. Studying them, she noticed that they were covered with soft, fine dirt and small dried bits and pieces of needles and twigs, and crushed pinecones much like the cone stuck in Greg Johnson’s tennis shoe.

She wiggled her toes, trying to blot the gruesome scene out of her mind. Before long the sun would creep across the entire porch, making it impossible to sit there without melting. She tucked in her feet and gazed out over the vista. There was such peace, such quiet, it seemed impossible that a brutal murder—actually three murders if you counted the animals—had taken place here.

Who was responsible for them? And why? That was what she had better think about while she had time. With supreme effort, Mary Helen focused her mind on the situation and called up her mental list of those most unlikely to be guilty.

Laura. She had talked with Laura and determined, once again, to her own satisfaction that the girl was telling the truth. Laura Purcell was dramatic surely, but the girl had no reason and no heart to murder Greg Johnson. Mary Helen supposed that she’d be hard-pressed to convince Sergeant Little of this since she had no positive
proof whatsoever. But there was just something in the way the girl acted and reacted, in the way she spoke . . . Just a “gut feeling.”

Sister Mary Helen knew well how poorly policemen— oops, policepersons—reacted to gut feelings as a reason to pronounce a suspect innocent—or guilty, for that matter. She strongly suspected, however, that they had gut feelings of their own.

Her best bet was to uncover Greg’s murderer herself. That way she wouldn’t need to prove anyone’s innocence.

Sister Felicita was in the clear too. Mary Helen had never considered her a serious suspect. Too nervous! And again, what motive? She barely knew Greg Johnson, or so it appeared.