2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 (25 page)

Chapter Forty-seven

Blake stared at the grey, overcooked roast beef swimming in a sea of suspicious brown gravy, the side dish of lukewarm applesauce, and the ubiquitous green Jell-O and sighed. Was he hungry enough to eat that or not? Schwartz stepped into the room, bringing with him the distinctive odor of fast food—fried, calorie dense, and nutritionally unsuitable Junk Food. Schwartz looked at the tray, shook his head sadly and said, “I thought so. I hoped I would get here in time.” He picked up the dishes on the tray and dumped their contents in the trash. Then he placed a bag on the tray. Blake peered in—burgers and fries,complete with little pods of catsup, high-sodium dill pickles, and a caffeine-laced Coke.

“You deserve one of those life-saving medals for this, Sheriff. Tell me who to write and I will recommend you.”

“Actually, that would be me. Don’t bother. Unlike you, I have no snappy paneled walls to hang my honorifics on, but I appreciate the thought. By the way, the bullet they dug out of your neck came from the same gun used on Krueger and Bass. No surprise there. You look much better. Anything else come to you?”

“Did I tell you about the voice in the dark? No? It was—it said, ‘It’s me.’”

“‘It’s me’? That’s it? It wasn’t the voice from the tape?”

“It sounded familiar, like I had heard it before, but I couldn’t be sure. It might have been the same one—I don’t know….I suppose it had to be. So, now we have three shootings by the same person. All directed at someone in the church, someone on the staff of the church, in fact. What do you make of that?”

“I don’t make anything of it. Being on the staff isn’t important, I am sure of that, but being in a position to access the files is. They are the answer. Find the files, find the killer. By the way, you notice that the last two followed close on the heels of your sermons? You might want to tone them down a bit. You are driving people to homicide.”

“Very funny. You have any more words of wisdom for me?”

“Three things—we have to find those files. I am sure they still exist and are stashed away somewhere. Whoever is doing the shooting knows it, and thinks you have them or you know where they are. The killer will try again, Blake. I’m putting a guard on the door, by the way. In the meantime, rack your brain. Where might those files be?”

“And the second thing?”

“That list of names—fingerprints.”

“Krueger’s and mine?”

“Just yours.” Schwartz started to leave.

“You said three things. What’s the third?”

Schwartz turned and looked at him.

“No offense, Reverend, but Billy told me the joke you used in church—the one about Moses and the Law.”

“Yes…and?”

“Very funny.”

“I’m glad you liked it.”

“Right. Let me ask you something. If you heard that Rabbi Schusterman told a Jesus joke in synagogue, even if it was very funny, how would you and your congregation react?” He cocked one eyebrow, turned and left. Blake frowned. He’d never really thought about that.

“Out of my way, Billy,” Rose Garroway ordered and pushed past a flustered Billy Sutherlin.

“Sorry, but I have to see some ID,” he said.

“ID? Billy, I’ve known you since you were no bigger than a pup. What do you mean you need to see some ID?”

“It’s all right,” Blake said, “she’s harmless.”

“I don’t know which I resent more,” Rose snorted, “this boy thinking I’m dangerous, or you thinking that I’m not.”

“Good evening to you, too, Rose,” he said.

“Brought you some contraband,” she whispered and produced a thermos of cocoa. “This ought to help you sleep, at least until they come wake you up to ask if you were asleep. Why do they do that, anyway?”

He put the thermos on his table, out of sight behind Sylvia’s flowers.

“I also come bearing news. Are you ready? Here’s the news from Picketsville,” she said in measured tones, mimicking a talking head from the television station. “On the crime scene, Mrs. Grace Franks narrowly avoided arrest today when police, called at her neighbor’s request, arrived to remove her burn barrel. Only the assurance of her beleaguered husband persuaded them to let her go after she tried forcibly to prevent them from hauling away the barrel.

“You know she’s been at that for years. Apparently the thing almost exploded and the smoke and noise finally got to the people across the street and they called the cops. Big brouhaha down at the Franks’. Also of note—our own Amy Brandt, whom we all assumed was several cards short of a whole deck, has been accepted to graduate school. She’s going to study particle physics, whatever that is, and so won’t be able to come to Bible study any more. Our loss, physics’ gain. Speaking of Bible study, we all voted to meet here or at your house if they let you out by Wednesday, so you don’t have to worry about that. And—we are all very sorry about what happened. Do you think God has forgotten us?
”

He smiled at the rush of words and the question.

“No, Rose, God never forgets. We frequently forget him, but it’s never the other way round. I know that now. Someone in our midst has forgotten, however, and decided to solve her problems without him, and look where it led her. No, God is near and waiting for us to come to him in this.”

“Her? You think the person responsible for all of this is a woman?”

“It seems so. Nothing is positive. Just a voice in the dark, but it sounded like a woman to me.”

Rose looked distressed and left after a few minutes.

Blake lay back and relaxed. He reached for his thermos when Mary entered. She apparently had no trouble with the guard.

“You are just in time for some hot chocolate,” he said. “Rose brought me this.” And he hoisted the thermos.

“Not now,” she said. “Too much caffeine in chocolate. I just came by to say good night.”

“What’s that?” a new voice interrupted. Blake took his eyes off Mary to notice the nurse in the doorway.

“Nothing,” he said, feeling like a schoolboy caught with a comic book in his desk.

“Looks like something to me,” she said and took the thermos, opened it and sniffed the contents. “Ah, a sleeping potion. Don’t tell anybody you have this—there isn’t enough to go around. Here, take this,” she said and handed him a small paper cup with pills in it. He swallowed the pills obediently.

“Visiting hours are almost over, dear,” she said to Mary. “Better drink up before you have to leave.”

The nurse left and Mary sat down.

“You look better than you did this afternoon. Have you been behaving yourself?”

“I’m fine, Mary. Before I forget, I didn’t call the repairman for your organ. I’m sorry.”

“Of course you didn’t. I’ll call tomorrow. It’s not that important, you know, not with everything else.”

They talked for a while and then his medication kicked in. She was still holding his hand when he drifted off to sleep. His last thoughts were not, however, of her, but of his sermons. Ike wanted to know what he’d said that could have caused all this. Ike Schwartz had been joking. Blake wondered if it was a joke after all. Maybe the joke was on him.

Chapter Forty-eight

Wednesday morning Blake managed to ease down the stairs to the basement. He heard the sounds of the Bible Study members on the other side of the door. He let go of the banister and opened the door left-handed. They were all there. In fact, it looked like a lot more than the usual dozen. Twenty or twenty-five people were gathered around a sheet cake. They cheered as he came through the door.

“Please, don’t sing,” he said with a grin. “It will make me cry.”

The cake had been decorated with what looked vaguely like a woman in black pointing a pistol at Quick Draw McGraw.
Ha Ha, you missed!
was scrawled in blue icing across the top.

“I guess this means we will not be spending any time with Matthew this morning,” he said.

“Man does not live by bread alone, Matthew 4:4,” Rose recited, “but he certainly can use a piece of cake now and then. Is that enough Matthew for one day?”

“I guess it will have to be.”

After they had eaten and regaled one another by misquoting Bible verses that absolved them of any guilt for eating a scandalously rich cake, Sylvia asked, “Why would anyone want to shoot at you? I understand the reasons for Millie and Waldo but—”

“What do you mean, you understand?” Rose interjected. “What about Millie and Waldo? Why shoot them?”

Blake brought them up to date on the facts as he and the police understood them. They were shocked about the missing files.

“It’s like a movie,” Minnie said, clearly pleased.

“Hush, Minnie,” Rose said sternly. “This is not a
Murder She Wrote
. This is serious and real.” Minnie tried to look abashed, but failed.

“I miss that show,” she said.

“Is there anything new?” Sylvia persisted. “Do you have any idea why you were shot?”

“Can’t say, for sure. She must think I have the files or know where they are, or, and this is a guess, thinks I will soon find them and figures if I were dead, the case would turn in another direction, away from the files and what they might tell them about the killer, and toward something about me. Maybe they thought they’d get them after I was shot, but the door was locked.”

“So you really don’t have any idea where they might be?” Sylvia
asked.

“Not a clue. But I will tell you this—if I did, I would destroy them immediately and make sure everyone knew it. Then the killing would stop.”

“But you have to find them first. What if the police find them?”

“Then I guess they will be a step closer to the killer. I am positive whoever is behind this is a person with incriminating or compromising material in those files. And I think I have said enough—probably too much. Sheriff Schwartz will skin me alive.”

“Well, this has been the most exciting Bible study I’ve ever attended,” said Minnie. “It’s too bad there aren’t more exciting things in the Good Book to talk about. No offense intended, Vicar, but Jesus isn’t exactly Clint Eastwood, is he?”

“Minnie,” Rose protested, “what a thing to say.”

“I’ll tell you what, Minnie, when we finish Matthew we will take up the Book of Judges. Stirring stuff in there—intrigue, murder, war, and betrayal—Sampson and Delilah, Jael and Sisera. I call it ‘The Book of Rambo.’ You’ll love it.”

Cake eaten and coffee cups emptied, the group filed out with goodbyes and wishes for Blake’s speedy recovery. Dorothy Sutherlin lingered.

“Vicar, when we cleaned up after the…you know…after Waldo, we missed some spots of….Well anyway, yesterday I came back with some cleaner Billy said you all used to clean up blood, and I got to crawling around on the floor and under the altar. Some spots we missed were under down there. Well, now, I bumped my head and sort of looked up and there it was.”

“There what was?”

“This here key. It was velcroed up under the edge.” She handed him a key. He took it.

“It looks like a spare organ key. Waldo probably forgot his keys once and put a spare up under the altar in case he did it again. Thanks.” Dorothy left to catch up with the others.

He made his way slowly up the stairs to his office and collapsed into his chair. The wound started to throb and he felt exhausted. He started to put his head down on the desk when he saw the note. Mary had arranged for the organ repairman to come the next day, and would he please try to find the key to the back panel?

He rocked back in his chair and tried to remember—the key? The one on Waldo’s ring locked the organ. What about this new one? Was it possible it did something else? But why would Waldo have hidden that one? He fished the key Dorothy just gave him from his pants pocket. It had gone in easier than it would come out. He had to struggle left-handed to retrieve it. He heaved himself out of the chair and made his way painfully through the sacristy, out into the sanctuary and across the aisle to the organ. He bent over slowly, trying to minimize the pounding in his shoulder. The key fit. He turned it and tugged on the panel. It dropped open quickly, as though it had been opened lately and often. His curiosity led him to pull it aside, and that is when he saw the files. They were stacked in the narrow space between two of the circuit boards. Somehow two or three of them had become dislodged and fallen against the circuitry and, presumably, caused the short that made the organ malfunction.

He forgot the throb in his shoulder and knelt down and retrieved the stack. He carefully replaced and locked the panel. He took the files to his office, shut and locked both doors. His heart pounded in his chest. The locks would not stop anyone who wanted to get in, but they would give him a warning if he had to make a dash out the other door.

He sat and arranged the files into stacks. That was when he discovered that there were other items in the packet besides files: newspaper clippings with dingy pictures that looked vaguely familiar, letters, a large manila envelope, some tape cassettes, computer discs, and folders. He reached into his desk drawer and retrieved the clipping he found in the vicarage. It was of the same vintage and topic and seemed to belong with the others. The thick manila envelope he set to one side. A quick inspection of the folders confirmed them to be Taliaferro’s notes, each with the name of the patient on the tab. There were many more files than names on the list he found in Waldo’s house. He supposed some of them contained no secrets.

He picked up the phone and called Schwartz. The sheriff was out. He told Essie Falco it was urgent and sat back to wait. Next, he turned his attention to the manila envelope. He pried open the clasp and dumped the contents onto the desk. Pictures, dozens of pictures, some of couples in less than innocent situations, taken through windows, some of people, mostly middle-aged men, getting in or out of cars or standing in front of hotels or houses, all taken with, he guessed, a telephoto lens.

He recognized only one person. Mary stood tall and beautiful, fresh from her bath, looking like Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”—only with darker hair. He fumbled through the stack until he found all her pictures. He took them to the shredder and destroyed them. The police, he decided, did not need to see them. He supposed the other pictures were Mary’s neighbors caught in compromising situations. He also found the master draft of a note mixed in with the pictures. Waldo threatened to post the pictures on the Internet, or mail them to spouses or employers.

Schwartz called, and Blake told him what he found and asked him to hurry over. He was feeling a little faint. He checked one more time for any trace of Mary, and, satisfied there was none, replaced the pictures in the envelope and was fumbling with the clasp when he heard the footsteps on the stairs.