St. Patrick's Day Murder (20 page)

“Not today. We’ll just go for a drive. If you don’t feel like talking, then don’t.”

“I won’t.”

I had no idea where I was going, but as I reached the edge of town I found a road and took it. There were houses that looked suburban and farms that looked traditional, a mixing of generations. We passed cows grazing and fields that had recently been plowed for the spring crop. I wondered if any of my seedlings had sprouted yet.

“What do you want to know?” Sister Benedicta asked. We had been driving for ten or fifteen minutes without exchanging a word.

“Why did you take a leave of absence?”

“That’s pretty old news.”

“I’m interested.”

“I learned something that I couldn’t live with. It was too painful. I had to get away.”

“Something in the convent?”

“In the hospital.” She looked out the window. “It was embezzlement. A few people in the hospital figured out how to steal from the hospital’s funds. I was a bookkeeper in those days and I knew something was going on. I also knew it couldn’t be done without the complicity of one of the nuns.”

That hit home. At St. Stephen’s, while I didn’t love all the nuns equally, I trusted every one of them. “That put you in a terrible position.”

“Think of the position it put her in.”

I almost smiled. I liked her view of the world. “What did you do?”

“I tried to find out as much as I could. I never learned whether the nun actually benefited from the scheme or whether she simply looked the other way—or why she did it. I think she must have gotten something from it. When I had my proof, I took it to the Mother Superior.”

I knew that was what I would have done. “Then why did you leave?”

“The nun committed suicide.”

“Oh, no.” I felt my body convulse as ice went through me.

“A Catholic,” she said. “A nun. I still ask myself how she could have done it.”

“She would have been forgiven,” I said, as though the poor nun were there to hear me.

“She couldn’t forgive herself.”

“You told Harry about it,” I said.

“He was such a nice youngster. He was so patient. He cared. That’s what it amounted to; he cared. We talked, and eventually I went back.”

She made it sound simple, but I knew it had to have been agonizing. She had told me on my last visit that she had remained away from the convent for ten months. I could imagine that she had spent the time thinking about what had happened, her part in it, the poor nun, and asking herself all the obvious questions and rejecting all the obvious answers. “Was this your convent?” I asked.

“This was it. I’ve spent my life here and I’m still asking questions and still hoping for answers.”

“They’ll come,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t consider my words a platitude. It was something I still believed.

“Some have come already,” she said. “Some will never come.”

I thought of the little boy who had died this morning. “Will you tell me about Harry?”

“He was always my favorite. I think he liked to talk to me as much as I liked to talk to him. Even when he married Dottie, we never lost track of each other. He’d been on the force—‘the job’ he used to call it—over twenty years when he had his own crisis. It was so much like mine that I took it as a sign. But it wasn’t some poor little nun this time; it was tough, hard cops who were corrupt. He knew it and he saw it and he told me he didn’t want to work around it.”

“What was going on?” I asked.

“False reports. Petty thievery. Shaking down small businessmen. It was a whole little group inside the precinct. He said he was angry and ashamed and he didn’t want to be part of an institution that was supposed to be a moral example and instead was corrupt.”

It certainly was very similar to her own problem of years before. “How did he work it out?”

“The way I did. He took what he knew to someone he trusted. The men were tried and convicted and Harry stayed on the force.”

“Was there much publicity about him? I mean as a whistle-blower?”

“They kept it quiet, but he said there were rumors. People looked at him as if they knew. They kept away from him. He was transferred to another precinct.”

“Sister Benedicta, before Harry died did he ever tell you about anything going on that could have led to someone killing him?”

“You think someone killed him because he knew something?”

“I don’t know. If Harry was a man who wasn’t afraid to expose corruption, he may have found it again.”

“It’s possible,” the old nun sitting beside me said. “I didn’t think of it at the time, but now it seems possible.”

“A policeman I knew was shot to death in a parking lot—”

“A parking lot,” she interrupted.

“Yes.”

“Harry was killed in a parking lot.”

“I know. This was about three weeks ago. I can’t find any reason why he should have been killed. A friend of his has been charged with the murder, but there’s no reason why he should have done it. When I was here last time, I asked you if you recognized the name of the victim, Scotty McVeigh, and you didn’t.”

“No. I never heard it.”

“He was in a parking lot with a friend when it happened. The friend’s name was Jack Brooks.” I waited.

“You asked me that one, too. Harry told me about—I think Harry mentioned the name.”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“It had nothing to do with the corruption,” she said. “He was talking about a young fellow in the precinct. That’s all. He used to talk about the people he worked with and I talked about my patients and the nuns. We were a couple of old gossips.”

I smiled. “But he did more than gossip. He told you things that bothered him.”

“Yes. He always told me those things.”

“That’s why you think he found something going on before he was killed.”

“Something was going on, I’m sure of it. Someone came to him for advice, someone he’d known a long time ago.”

I had reached a crossroad and I made a wide U and started back. “What kind of advice?”

“It was about drugs. They were selling drugs.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The police. The defenders of society. They had become the criminals.”

“But Harry only heard about it. He hadn’t seen it for himself.”

“No. This fellow told him. He wanted to know what to do.”

“What did Harry tell him?”

“To do what he did. To go to someone he trusted. Harry said he’d back him up.”

“When did this happen, Sister Benedicta? Was it just before he was killed?”

“No. It was before that, weeks before, months before. That’s why I didn’t think about it as a cause. It was just someone who talked to Harry.”

I glanced at her. She had turned toward me and her face was anxious. “Did he mention it only once?” I asked.

“Maybe more than once. Maybe he said something a second time.” She sounded more eager now, her interest aroused, her mind challenged.

“Do you remember the name of the man?” I asked it softly, hoping.

“Irish,” she said. “A very Irish name.”

“McMahon,” I said. “Jerry McMahon.”

“Oh, no. Nothing like Jerry. It was just very Irish, the first name, I mean.”

The first name. Scotty, Ray, Jack, Jerry. What kind of first name was Irish? When it came to me, I knew it had to be the right one. “Gavin,” I said, almost triumphantly. “Gavin Moore.”

“Gavin. That’s it,” Sister Benedicta said. “The young man’s name was Gavin.”

“Just tell him to call Chris,” I said to the very polite man who had answered Jack’s phone. I hung up and watered the brown squares of earth in which my intended seedlings were still hiding. Then I took a piece of paper and sat down at the dining room table, where I had left my notes and doodlings.

Jack had looked through the histories of all three policemen who had died in unsolved homicides and hadn’t found any place where their lives overlapped or where they crossed Scotty’s. But Sister Benedicta had said Harry had known Gavin Moore from a long time ago. Somewhere their paths had crossed, they had gotten to know each other, and Moore had developed a respect for Donner so great that he turned to Donner when he learned something he couldn’t deal with. Somehow we had to find that point of crossing.

Jack didn’t call till after six. “Hi,” he said. “Just got your message.”

“I saw Sister Benedicta this afternoon. Harry Donner knew Gavin Moore.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. Moore talked to Donner a few weeks or months before Donner was killed. Something was bothering him. It was about cops selling drugs.”

“Jesus.”

I didn’t even wince. “We have to find out how they knew each other. Maybe somehow Scotty was part of it.” I filled him in on what Sister Benedicta had told me.

“The problem is I can’t get hold of Donner’s or Moore’s personnel files. Those are like top secret documents, and unless you’ve got a friend at Personnel—and I don’t—you just don’t have access to them. Their superiors do, but I don’t
know them. It’s not something I can punch up on a computer.”

“I’ll try Sharon Moore,” I said. “Maybe somehow she’ll be able to dredge something up out of her memory. If we can figure out where Donner and Moore met, maybe we can get Scotty into the picture.”

“I hate to put a damper on your theory, Chris, but one of those guys they arrested last Friday really seems to be part of the gang that killed Moore. He’s named names and come up with details that only the killers could have known.”

“You’re telling me everything’s a dead end.”

“No, I’m not. I’m intrigued by the Moore-Donner connection. I think it may mean something. I wish I could figure out what. I’ll do the best I can to find out where they could have met. Did she say when this happened?”

“I don’t think she knew exactly. Donner told her it was a long time ago.”

“This is a crazy one. I have to admit, I didn’t think that nun was going to yield anything.”

“Nuns always yield something,” I said.

“You got it.”

I went back to the dining room table and looked at the scribblings I’d made before he’d called. Coincidences, things that happened without explanation, without good reason. Two of the dead cops had been killed in parking lots. Moore told Donner about some cops involved in drug selling a few months or weeks before Donner was killed. It had occurred to me at about this point that I wasn’t sure when each of those men had died. In my early notes I had written “three years ago” for both of them, but nothing more. I didn’t have a specific date for either one. The night Jerry McMahon had intended to see me near Lincoln Center, the killer of Gavin Moore was suddenly arrested. That was a most intriguing coincidence. So was the disappearance of Mr. Joo’s handgun the day after St. Patrick’s Day.

Suppose all the victims wore black shoes, Jack had said. Maybe the .44-caliber guns were the black shoes. Maybe all the coincidences were just that. Many times in my life I have looked around and seen someone for the first time in many years and not attributed any sinister meaning to the meeting.
But I was dealing with a homicide here, with several homicides. No coincidence was a happy event and nothing could be considered chance. Maybe Sharon Moore would remember a meeting between her husband and Harry Donner. Tomorrow.

Sharon Moore opened the door seconds after my ring. She invited me in but excused the appearance of her house. The vacuum cleaner was in the middle of the living room floor and the furniture had all been moved away from the walls so that the room looked as if she was half moved in or out.

“It’s what I do best when I’m depressed,” she said. “When they called last Friday to say they’d arrested the guy that killed Gavin, I pulled out the Lysol and Brillo and got to it.”

“I’m sorry. I wanted to come earlier in the week, but I couldn’t get here. I kind of thought it would rake up all those old memories.”

“And then some. Sit down. I’m ready for a break and the kitchen’s as clean as it’ll ever be.”

She was right about that. The windows looked like panes of crystal and the sun shining in on the sink made the faucets look like sterling silver.

“I hear this guy Hansen had a thing for McVeigh’s wife,” Sharon Moore said.

“Where did you hear that?”

“The wives talk.” She sponged the table. “I baked. Can you eat a piece of apple pie?”

“Sure.”

“If the kids left any. Oh, there’s enough. I’ll make some coffee.” She filled a percolator and tossed some coffee into the basket with the careless expertise of someone who did it all the time. In a minute the pot started making bubbling noises. “You didn’t really come to say nice things, did you?”

“Mrs. Moore—”

“Sharon.”

“I’m Chris.”

“I remember.”

“I thought you might be feeling—the way you feel. But something happened yesterday. I found something out. I have to talk to you about it,” I finished uncertainly.

“I don’t know what there is anymore. I told you how I thought Gavin died. Now it looks like I was right.”

“Sharon, some time before Gavin died, he talked to Harry Donner.”

“The other cop who was killed?”

“That’s the one.”

She moved her shoulders. “He never told me about it. He never even told me they knew each other.”

“Do you remember which of them was killed first?”

“Sure. It was Donner. He died in the spring. Gavin was killed in September. The kids had just gone back to school.”

That made sense to me. If Gavin Moore had needed encouragement from a mentor, there was a good chance he wouldn’t do anything on his own if Donner was murdered. Also, he might not have thought there was a connection. But from what I had learned about Donner, I felt strongly that if Moore had been killed first, Donner would have gone public with what he knew from his conversation with Moore.

“You look as if you’re thinking very hard,” Sharon said.

“I didn’t know it showed.”

“Was that so important? Who was killed first?”

“I’m not sure.”

She poured two mugfuls of coffee and cut two slices of her pie. “Gavin was killed by a bunch of rotten punks who had nothing better to do that night. How can there be any connection between that and Donner’s killing?”