2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 (26 page)

Chapter Forty-nine

A tap on his door. Blake froze.

“You in there, Vicar?”

He was alone in the church, could not move his arm, and a potential murder suspect stood outside his door.

“Vicar? I need to speak to you,” Dan Quarles said.

Blake glided silently across the room to the other door. He could slip out and hide in the sanctuary. Dan knocked again. As Blake reached for the knob, he heard the sound of car doors slamming and children’s voices. He glanced out of his window and saw them—Cub Scouts—a whole den of small boys in blue uniforms. Soon the basement would be alive with them. He was safe.

“Just a minute, Dan,” he said and gathered the files and envelopes together and put them in a pile under his desk. He unlocked the door and gestured Dan in.

“Sorry for the delay. I got caught up in some paperwork.”

“I’m glad I found you, Vicar. I have to tell you something. I meant to tell you sooner, but we couldn’t meet Sunday, and then…well, then you were in no condition to see me. How are you, by the way?”

“I am fine most of the time. To tell you the truth, I could use some rest about now. Could we make this quick?”

“Sorry, yes. Well, it’s this way…do you mind if I sit? I resigned as Mission Board chairman. You probably heard that by now. I wanted to explain why.”

“Dan, I don’t see—”

“Vicar, bear with me. Do you remember me asking about confession?” Blake nodded. “I asked you that question because I have a confession to make. But when you told me of the exceptions to the Seal of the Confessional, I hesitated.”

Here it comes, Blake thought. He is going to tell me about Waldo.

“It’s not about Waldo,” he said. “Although in a way it is. I am not doing this very well. Look, I did you a great disservice. Because of that, I cannot continue as chairman.”

“Disservice?”

“Yes. See, years ago I was accused of child abuse. It was when I was in seminary. Nothing happened, I swear to you, but at the time, many people, including my own family, turned against me. It was the worst time of my life. I will not go into the details, but it is enough to say that the child who accused me of terrible things made a convincing case. I had to drop out of seminary….I do not know why she did it, and if it had not been for her brother’s testimony, I might be in jail today. But he realized that the joke they played on me had gone too far, and when he understood what the consequences to me might be, he finally told the truth. Even so, many of my friends and neighbors would never look me in the eye again. I moved out of state and started my life over.

“You understand the situation, of course. You were accused and, though cleared, had to leave your home and career. And that’s the problem. You see?”

“I’m afraid I don’t, Dan. I understand how you feel but don’t see what this has to do with today.”

“I was your severest critic, Vicar. When we got those letters, we did not want anything to do with you. Bournet insisted and made it clear we would accept you or he would close the church. You see, I should have known, or at least suspected, the accusations might have been trumped up. I, of all the board members, should have shown some mercy, but I did not. When we finally got the letters in the mail, it hit me. I am
like the reformed smoker who is the hardest on the person with a cigarette in his hand. I came to say I am sorry and to ask your forgiveness.”

Blake slumped in his chair. Fatigue washed over him.

“Of course, I forgive you, Dan. But let me ask you one small question. You know about the missing files. Your name appeared on a list we found in Waldo’s house, and I gather you were seeing Taliaferro for counseling or advice. Can you explain why Waldo listed you?”

Dan stared at the floor for a moment and then, quite unexpectedly, pounded his fist on the desk.

“Someone sent me a blackmail note. I assume now it must have been Waldo. I did not know it at the time. The note came anonymously and demanded money in return for silence about the incident.”

“But nothing happened; what could you be blackmailed for?”

“You know how it is when an accusation is made. It never goes away. Besides, there were the notes in the file.”

“Notes?”

“I haven’t told you all of it. Even though I never touched that child, never even went near her, I thought about it. Do you understand? Children have a way of knowing about adults, and that child instinctively knew that I was the perfect victim for her lies, because in my heart, it was not a lie. So I was guilty, in a way. I never could deal with that part. Dr. Taliaferro was helping me with those feelings.”

“Dan, thank you for being so open with me. I want you to reconsider your decision to quit. I think I am going to need someone like you in my corner in the future.”

“But I understand Sylvia Parks has already been appointed in my place.”

“Sylvia can wait. Amy Brandt is going to graduate school soon, and Sylvia can have her place. Please stay.”

Dan stood and shook his hand. He said he would pray on it and let Blake know soon. He passed Schwartz on the stairs.

“You look terrible,” the sheriff said good-naturedly, “and I gather you have some news for me.” He sat and placed a thick folder that he had brought on the floor beside him.

“The files. I found the files.”

Blake told him about the organ and finding the files. He pulled them from under the desk and placed them in a stack on the desk. Schwartz sifted through them. He opened the envelope and raised his eyebrows at its contents. He rifled through folders, clippings, and letters. Finally he sat back and stared at Blake.

“This the lot?”

“That’s all I found, except one clipping, the one about missing kingpins. I found it in my house before, if you remember. But otherwise that is it.” Blake was aware of the shredder in the corner and felt his collar get hot.

Schwartz picked up his own folder and opened it. He placed copies of most of the pictures in a pile on the desk next to the originals. He scooped up the pictures of Mary and handed them across the desk.

“You’ll want these, too,” he said. “Don’t say anything. I would have done the same thing. Now, let’s see where we are. We have the list, so we can eliminate all the folders of people not on it. We can assume these pictures,” he sorted some into one group, “are from Krueger’s neighborhood, and the clippings and these other pictures are related to his other life in San Francisco. You don’t recognize any of these guys, do you?”

“One or two look familiar, but that could be coincidence. All those guys look like they should be called ‘The Silver Fox,’ don’t you think?”

“Well, the ones with hair, anyway. The rest look like the cast of
The Sopranos.
No names,” he said, “too bad about that. There are some numbers, though. They must correspond to a list somewhere. Did you happen to see a list?”

“No, I got distracted with….” He looked sideways at the shredder.

Schwartz pushed a pile of letters at Blake, copies of the Philadelphia letters. “Except for that bullet you took, these would have kept you on the suspect list. So now we do police work. I will have to interview most of these people.”

“How on earth will you ever sort them out?”

“Oh, it shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll ask them to supply an alibi for all three shootings. It’s possible they may not be able to account for their time for one or two of the shootings, but the likelihood that more than one of them will be unable to account for all three is pretty slim. When we find that person, we have—” His cell phone interrupted him in mid-sentence. He scowled and muttered into the phone, and then his face brightened. He disconnected and turned back to Blake.

“You’ll never guess what they found in the bottom of Grace Franks’ burn barrel—a .32 caliber Colt automatic.”

***

Ike welcomed Grace Franks’ arrest, but something still nagged at him. Something someone said, something they weren’t supposed to know. He called Ruth from his car.

“Late date?”

“Maybe a beer on the porch, but that’s it, Ike. Bad day.”

“More money problems?”

“Same money problems.”

“Your people tentatively okayed a new tenant for your art storage facility,” Ike said. “That should ease the strain a little.”

“I’m afraid to ask. Who is it?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Not your old CIA pals? Please tell me it’s not them.”

“Hey, it could be worse. They’re discreet, tidy up after themselves, and are willing to pay a bundle to bury something in a place where no one would think to look.”

“You really know how to put me on the spot, don’t you?”

“For the good of women’s higher education, not to mention your career—eat the crow and take the cash.”

“Could they have a name?”

“You mean something like,
The Institute for the Advanced Study of Geopolitical Resources
?”

“Yeah. Something like…my God, that
is
the name, isn’t it?”

“You have to admit, it has a nice ring to it.”

“I’ve been had!”

Chapter Fifty

Thursday morning started warm and sunny. As the morning moved toward noon, it turned hot and humid as only that part of the country can. Summer made one last stand before being banished south and away for the next six months. Blake smacked the antique window air conditioner and breathed a sigh of relief when the compressor chugged back to life. He settled into his chair and sipped his coffee, his third cup for the day. The doctor told him to cut back, that the caffeine would elevate his blood pressure and cause his wound to throb. The doctor did not lie. He popped four ibuprofen and shuffled through the mail. He had neglected it for days, and gunshot wound or no, he still had a job to do. Sylvia poked her head around the door and said good morning.

“You here? I thought you were done with cleaning up those files,” he said, slitting open an envelope, glancing at its contents and dropping it into his wastepaper basket.

“I was, but I figured with your bad shoulder and all, you could use some help for a few more days, although I can’t promise you anything. I may have to go out of town.”

“Well, I appreciate it. I guess you heard about Grace?”

“Only that the police think she is the person who shot you, Millie, and Waldo. What happened?”

“Schwartz will be here in a minute and can fill you in. Frankly, I probably don’t know as much as you.”

As if on cue, Ike Schwartz climbed the stairs.

“Well,” he said, sitting in the only other chair in the room, “it certainly looks like a wrap. We have Grace Franks in custody and have a pretty tight case against her. It will be up to that son-in-law of yours to put her away,” he said to Sylvia, who had pulled a chair in from the other room and seated herself by the door.

“You want to walk us through it, Sheriff?” Blake asked. “I still can’t see her as a killer. I suppose she was one of Waldo’s blackmail victims.”

“You all understand that anything I tell you here can’t leave this room. Are we all clear on that?”

Blake and Sylvia nodded.

“I guess you two earned it. When the deputies took Mrs. Franks’ burn barrel, their only thought was to haul it away and toss it at the county landfill. One of them noticed a hole in the base, a round hole. The metal around its edge was still bright—that meant it was a new hole. It looked suspicious. Remember, the neighbor who complained and called the office said she thought she heard an explosion. That is what drew her to the window first, not the smoke from the barrel.”

“Let me guess. It turned out to be a bullet hole,” Sylvia said.

“Right the first time. So they rolled the barrel over to a clear place in the parking lot and dumped it. Lots of old half-burnt papers, ashes, and junk. And at the bottom—this.”

Schwartz fumbled around in his pocket and produced a plastic bag with a discolored automatic in it. “This your gun, Reverend?”

Blake inspected the pistol through the plastic and shook his head. “I don’t know, Ike. It could be. It certainly looks like my gun, or what’s left of it. So you think Grace got in my house and took the gun?”

“I guess she must have. She has been lugging this thing around in that purse of hers for weeks. It has a clip that holds eight bullets, you know. Figure one chambered for a total of nine. Krueger gets two, Bass, three—that’s five. You get one, two in the door—that leaves one chambered in the pistol. She thinks eight and out, drops it in the barrel and, bang. Anyway, we checked the ballistics and it is the gun used on you, Waldo, and the Bass woman. Now our lawyer friend here will probably say, ‘Anyone could have put that gun in the barrel. What other evidence do you have?’”

“You got that right,” Sylvia said. “You better have a tight case or I might take poor Grace on as a client and defend her. It would be a real hoot beating that wet-behind-the-ears son-in-law of mine in court.”

“Well, in that case, I probably shouldn’t say anything more.”

“I’m kidding, Sheriff. Given what I’ve done so far, I’d have to recuse myself anyway. Proceed, please.”

“Well, we hauled her in and questioned her. She swears she didn’t know anything about the killings or the gun. She said, ‘Why would I take his gun when I have one of my own?’ A good question, by the way.”

“She didn’t want a traceable piece,” Sylvia said. “I mean, if she had one of her own, there would be some trace on it, some history, wouldn’t there? But if she uses someone else’s, it introduces the element of reasonable doubt.”

Schwartz eyed her steadily for a moment, his expression blank, dark eyes unblinking.

“There is that, of course,” he said slowly. “Well, anyway, she did not have an alibi for any of the times when the killings and shootings took place. I should add she is an excellent shot with a handgun, Blake. You’re lucky she missed the first time. Her father collected guns, all kinds, and taught her how to shoot, and about ammunition, safety, and so on.”

“It’s still circumstantial,” Sylvia pressed.

“Then there are the fingerprints,” he continued, ignoring her interruption. “We found them in the sacristy, Bass’ house, on some of the papers in the office, and—this is the clincher—a partial we are sure will be hers, on the gun.”

“How could there be a fingerprint left on it?” Sylvia asked. “It has been in the fire. Look at it. The grips are melted and it’s a mess.”

“Well, that’s an interesting point. It seems some people, in high-stress situations, excrete more electrolytes, salt and organic compounds in their perspiration than others.” He looked at the quizzical expressions on their faces.

“I learned all this from the kid in the lab. Anyway, this salty stuff will precipitate out on the metal. When it is heated, like in a fire, it etches the metal like acid. So we have a partial.”

“That’s pretty definitive,” Sylvia said, frowning. “You’re sure about that print?”

“As sure as I can be, given the state of the art. There’ll only be a few identity points, four maybe, I think, and six is sort of the accepted minimum needed to convince a jury, but when you put it all together….”

“Sounds like you got your killer,” she said brightly.

“But why, Ike? What drove her to it? What did Waldo have on her that drove her to murder?” Blake asked.

“It seems she was having an affair with the guy next door. Poor man has an invalid wife. Mrs. Franks has a clod for a husband. They sympathized with one another and then, well, you can imagine. Funny thing about that—Franks, the husband, said he knew all about it and they were working it out. He took her to the beach recently to talk it through. But I guess she’d gone too far by then.”

“I still don’t see how she’s connected to Waldo,” Sylvia said. “I thought he worked anonymously, somehow.”

“Why did you think that?”

“If he hadn’t, as soon as he got shot, you would have heard from at least one of his victims and you would have had a motive. The FBI might never have been called in the first place.”

“Very astute. Actually he did. She admitted she received a note from someone threatening her and giving instructions to leave money in a certain place. She did, and she must have followed him back here. She denies it, of course, but I don’t see any other way.”

“So she follows him back here, waits for the moment and shoots him,” Sylvia said. “You left out the business with the water bottle.”

“Yeah, why did she use the bottle?” Blake said.

Schwartz paused and seemed to study the two of them. “She must have picked it up from the trash on the way in.”

“Then she thought her problems were over until she hears something that Bass said that convinced her that the files, and therefore the potential blackmailer, had moved. There must have been a confrontation, and that explained the next killing.”

“But why me?” Blake asked. “Surely she didn’t think I had the files. I told the Board that. Bob Franks is on the Board, and though he was not at the meeting, he knew. Dan Quarles told him.”

“That part I think I can figure out,” Schwartz said. “As I said, she spent the evening denying everything, but she did say that you, Reverend, were the cause of all her problems.”