St. Patrick's Day Murder (15 page)

I got up and put my coat on.

“I hate this house,” Jean said.

Her comment startled me. “It looks like a pretty nice
place,” I said mildly. In fact, it reminded me a little of my own house, inherited from my aunt.

“It’s awful. My mother never changes anything. The stove in the kitchen is older than I am. The bathroom looks like it was built by the cavemen. She could afford to make it pretty and comfortable but she won’t. I don’t think she’s painted for twenty years. There are stains on the wall in my old room that go back to when my brother threw things at me.”

“Maybe she’s just happy with it, Jean. Maybe she just doesn’t want to go through the trouble of moving furniture and patching plaster.”

“Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the willies.”

I spent a lot of time with her that afternoon. She was struggling with anger and heartbreak and felt she was losing on both counts. For my part, there was little I could say to ease any of her pain or problems, but it didn’t matter; she wasn’t listening, except to the sound of her own voice.

But although it was repetitious and eventually somewhat boring, I forced myself to listen carefully to everything she said, hoping for a slip or a voluntary admission, something that would help to explain the letter she had written to Ray Hansen. It never came, and finally, after a slow lunch and too much coffee, she wore herself out and there was silence.

She sat looking far away, a pretty redheaded mother of two young children now totally devoid of energy. “He took my youth,” she said.

“He didn’t do anything of the sort, Jean. You’re young and you’re gorgeous and you’re going to live and work and raise those kids.”

“Thanks, Chris.” She gave me a wan smile. “You’re the first person who’s let me say it all without interrupting. Everybody else cuts me off, changes the subject, pats me on the head. You listened. I had to say it out loud. I didn’t want to be like the tree in the forest that doesn’t make a sound when it’s falling because there’s nobody there to hear it. I finally got heard.”

“How do you feel?”

“Empty, exhausted.” She laughed suddenly. “Wasn’t I awful?”

“No.”

“Let’s take a walk. It’s a lot warmer out today and I really don’t feel like going home—unless you have somewhere to go.”

“Not till later.”

We had paid our bill an hour earlier, so we put our coats on and left. Jean asked me about Jack, about Jack and me. I didn’t want to say we were engaged because it seemed an inappropriate time to express my own happiness, but from the way she talked, she assumed we would marry. She had known Jack for a long time and had met several of the women he had dated, none of whom she liked as much as me and none of whom she considered worthy of him. I rather enjoyed listening. It was a very different monologue from the one in the coffee shop.

“He’ll make a great lawyer, too,” she said. “He’s very thoughtful and careful. Ray jumps to conclusions and Scotty turned to mush whenever he heard a hard-luck story.” It was interesting the way she always talked about them in threes, always compared them. “Here’s Petra’s building.”

“Really?” It all looked so different in daylight. “She’s close to your mother’s house.”

“Sure. That’s why we all came back here after the parade.” She was suddenly silent again, the parade and its aftermath having intruded on our walk. We had stopped at the entrance to the building.

“I’d ring her bell, but they’re probably in bed together. It’s Saturday afternoon, right?”

“Right.” I didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m completely lost. How do we get back to your mother’s?”

“The way we came.”

We turned around toward the corner we’d just come from. In five minutes we were back at my car.

“So she let it all hang out,” Jack said when we were sitting at a table in a restaurant.

“I guess that’s what you’d call it. She felt better afterward, but I don’t feel I learned anything helpful. I have the name of Scotty’s birth mother, but I don’t know what good that’ll do.”

Jack gave me an impish look. “Maybe she became a nun.”

“You’re a tease.”

“But I take
you
seriously. When do you want to get married?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about a time or a place or anything else.”

“Think.”

“I’d like to be married at St. Stephen’s.”

“My mother’s gonna love this,” he said, his tone of voice indicating his mother had assumed that a woman without a family would be happy to be married in her fiancé’s church.

“You asked.”

“Right.”

“It’s a beautiful place.”

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

We didn’t talk about it the next day because I went home after dinner. I had promised to take my cousin Gene to Easter mass before I became engaged, and I never break a promise to Gene.

I picked him up, admired his suit and new tie, and we went to church together. Afterward, I took him for lunch and then dropped him off at Greenwillow.

It was the last day of March, and like the old saying, the month was going out like a lamb. That mysterious something
that signals spring was in the air, and I was so delighted to breathe it, I had to work to keep from hyperventilating. When I turned into Pine Brook Road, I spotted Melanie Gross working around the shrubs in front of her house, I pulled into her driveway to say hello.

“Stranger!” she called, clapping her cotton-gloved hands together to brush off the earth. “It’s good to see you. Whooping it up in New York?”

“Oh, Mel, that’s not an easy yes-no question.”

“Nothing I ask you is. Listen, I’ve got a pot roast in the oven. Can you come to dinner?”

“I’d love to. I think I’ll do some gardening first and work up an appetite.”

I did exactly that. A neighbor had rototilled a rectangle behind the house, and I had packages of seeds ready to be planted. In twenty minutes I was dressed for work and had the wheelbarrow out with Aunt Meg’s old rake and trowel and spade and a new bag of five-ten-five fertilizer. It was time to sow the cold-weather vegetables—peas, lettuce, and broccoli—and I spent a refreshing afternoon doing just that. When I finished, I went inside and planted my indoor seeds—tomatoes, eggplants, and green peppers. I had been told to do that on March fifteenth, and it was now two weeks late, but I promised myself I would talk to my seedlings and urge them along. Maybe that would be worth a fourteen-day push.

My house is equipped with the proverbial sunny window, in fact quite a number of them, and I had bought a starter kit that was like a miniature greenhouse. Using some good potting soil that I lightened with a little vermiculite and sphagnum moss, I planted seeds in small square plastic containers, using a sharpened pencil to dig the hole in the center of each. When I was finished, I had such a sense of satisfaction you would have thought I’d harvested a ton of vegetables rather than planting a few ounces of seed. Before I went to bed that night, I must have checked the containers half a dozen times, although I can’t say I really expected to see any sprouts. But it was another first for me. Like the homesteaders of the last century, I was laying claim to my land by enriching it, by making it produce. By the end of the summer I might have
a new husband and a first crop. That, I decided, is what happiness was made of.

Hal Gross took the kids out for an early fast-food treat, leaving dinner in the dining room for the grownups. The smells in the house were enough to make me run out and buy a shelf of cookbooks and devote myself to a life in the kitchen. Although she was about my age, Mel had somehow managed to learn culinary secrets that I usually attribute to women twice her age, probably some faulty reasoning on my part. A square tin of brownies emitted an aroma from the kitchen table that threatened to make a child of me. The fast-food dinner had not caused even temporary amnesia in her own children. Two of the sixteen cut squares were conspicuously absent, and it appeared to me that the kids had somehow divined which two pieces were a microounce larger than all the others.

We ate and talked and eventually the Grosses asked what I was working on, and I told them.

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of things going,” Hal said. “A murder the police think they’ve solved, an anonymous informant who doesn’t show up for a midnight meeting, a missing handgun, and a nun who won’t come clean.”

I laughed at his brief summary. “If you can believe it, there’s even more. Scotty McVeigh wasn’t born Scotty McVeigh, he lied about serving in the military, and his wife never knew a thing about it till he died.”

“How terrible for her,” Mel said.

“I’m sure she wants to know about his birth family. When she finally got his birth certificate, she started calling people in the phone book with his mother’s last name.”

“Where was he born?” Hal asked.

“Brooklyn. Kings County Hospital.” It was a sad irony that he had died, at least officially, in the same place.

“I’ve got a paralegal going over to Brooklyn to the Records Center tomorrow to research something for me. It’ll only take an extra few minutes for her to look up the woman’s address.”

“Hal, that would be a great help. I didn’t even know there was a place that had that information.”

“Oh, definitely. It’s a very ugly building over on the Flatbush Avenue Extension in Brooklyn. New York has been keeping records for a long time, and if you’re investigating something, they’re helpful. I can have the information tomorrow evening.”

I gave him the name and Scotty’s birthday. With an address, I could ask neighbors if they remembered the Hanrahans, even if the Hanrahans no longer lived there. New York apartment dwellers tend to live in the same place for a long time, especially if their rents are controlled or stabilized. A girl becoming pregnant in the early sixties was something people might remember more easily than if it happened today.

At nine, I got up to go. Like the gardener I believed I had already become, I promised Mel all the tomatoes she could eat next summer. It gave me such a feeling of munificence to make the offer that I immediately recognized more than a flicker of the sin of pride. But beyond that, and sinlessly, I felt again the happiness of using the land. The house on Pine Brook Road had been the home of my aunt, uncle, and cousin since I was a child. I never doubted their right to own it and never questioned my own ownership when I inherited it last spring. But ownership is a legality. What gave ownership a meaning to the people along my road was the shrubs and trees and grass that they planted. I walked along the dark street, inhaling the scent of spring, of peat moss, even a little manure, which made me wrinkle my nose, and I felt part of them, these homeowners who were my neighbors.

Inside my comfortable little house, I took a last look at the brown earthy squares where my seeds were spending their first night on the road to germination and went up to bed.

I knew when I awoke on Monday morning that I wanted to see my friend, Sister Joseph. Besides being my dearest friend in the world, she is smart, clever, levelheaded, logical, and imaginative, a combination of traits that make her a remarkable leader. We have known each other since the night I entered St. Stephen’s as a frightened fifteen-year-old, and our relationship has necessarily changed over those years. Before taking the series of steps that led to my leaving the
convent, it was Joseph that I consulted with most, and most frankly.

I had visited the convent several times since leaving, but I had never invited her, or any of the nuns, to visit me. It isn’t that I hadn’t thought about it. I had, but something always stopped me. Now I decided to rectify that.

An early morning call brought her to the phone. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you,” she said, with spirit. “Have you been to the Dominican convent?”

“Yes, and I left with more questions than I came with. But that’s not what I’m calling about. I want you to visit me.”

“That sounds like a wonderful idea. Did you have some date in mind?”

“I want you to choose the date. There’s nothing except my Tuesday morning class that can’t be changed.”

“Well, that is certainly an offer I can’t turn down. By chance, I’m going to New York tomorrow. I had thought I’d go by train, but if I drive, I could stop off in Oakwood.”

“You could stay overnight, Joseph. I’d really like you to.”

“Mm. That is a lovely idea. It might keep me from falling asleep at the wheel.”

“Let me tell you how to get here,” I said.

I was as excited as a child. The first thing I did was call Melanie and ask her to suggest something I could cook for dinner. A true friend, she offered to do the cooking for me, sneak it into my house, and let me pass it off as my own.

My laughter cut her off before the entire plot unfolded. “This is a friend,” I assured her, “not a future mother-in-law.”

“Well, there may be one of those soon, and my offer stands.”

“It’s also a person that I have an open, honest relationship with.”

“Chris, you’re so adorably old-fashioned. So all you want is a recipe?”

“For something that won’t take all day to cook. I’m teaching in the morning.”

“All right, let’s see.” She went through a monologue of murmurs and mutters punctuated with a lot of, “No, that’s no good” and “That takes too long.” Finally she said, “I think
a stir-fry is your best bet. You can get most of the real work done in advance and put it all together at the last minute. It’ll look good and it’s fail-safe. We’ll throw in snow peas and a red pepper and the colors alone will enchant her.”

“Mel, you’re wonderful. Fail-safe sounds like what I need. I’ve got my pencil. Dictate.”

We worked it all out, including a dessert of apple cobbler that she assured me would be a smashing success and
no work at all
. It sounded wonderful. I could shop today, prepare almost everything after my class, and go into production while Joseph and I carried on a conversation. Too good to be true, perhaps, but worth a try.

When she had finished dictating, Melanie said, “I’d love to meet her some time, Chris. You’ve met my mother and mother-in-law, but I’ve never even laid eyes on anyone from your deep, dark past. Except for Margaret Wirth, of course.”