Liturgical Mysteries 01 The Alto Wore Tweed (13 page)

“I’ll do my best.”

I poured a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter. I tried to act nonchalant, but couldn’t pull it off.

“I’ve got to ask you something, JJ.”

“Well, go on then,” she said, stirring the pot with her canoe paddle.

I took a sip, then said, “What do you know about oleander?”

“Oh, hell!” she said, stopping for a moment and looking at me, then turning her attention back to the soup. “I knew someone would find out sooner or later.”

I was shocked. Almost as shocked as when Ardine gave me JJ’s name in the first place.

“JJ, I’ve got to tell you, I think you should get a lawyer.”

“Why? Is that crazy woman going to press charges?”

“It’s out of her hands,” I said, thinking that Herself probably wouldn’t hesitate in letting JJ walk. There was no love lost between Willie and Mother Ryan. “It’s our jurisdiction, but an indictment will have to be brought.”

“An indictment? What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about oleander poisoning.” I said, as seriously as I could.

“Yeah, well. I guess I’m guilty then.” JJ said. “But I’ve got to tell you, I was just sick and tired of it.”

“I understand,” I said, nodding and not understanding at all. “What was the final straw? The wine?”

“The wine? There wasn’t any wine. I just thought it was time I did something.”

“So you used the oleander?”

“Well,” she said, “It’s virtually untraceable. And it’s only dangerous to the thing that consumes it. If we ate the meat afterwards, there wouldn’t be any risk and no one would ever know,” she said matter-of-factly, as she continued to stir the soup.

“If we...ate the meat...
afterwards,
” I said, slowly, trying desperately to make sense of this conversation.

“Yep,” she said, reaching down beside the counter and picking up a wrinkled brown grocery bag with the top rolled down. She handed it to me. It weighed close to twenty pounds. “I wasn’t going to tell anyone.”

I opened the bag and looked in.

“Hedgehogs?” I asked, not really believing what I was seeing. “You were poisoning Mrs. McCarty’s hedgehogs?” JJ lived next door to the eccentric pet breeder.

“They’re all in my yard and they’re crawling in my heating ducts. There was one stuck in my dryer last week. It crawled up through the vent and lodged itself in the heating unit. It cost me a hundred-and-twenty bucks to get the dryer fixed, and my clothes all smelled like roast duck. That’s when I came up with the idea.”

“What idea?”

“Roasted hedgehog soup.”

“Ahhh. Come to think of it, I don’t think Igull be here for dinner this evening.”

“Well, don’t tell anyone. Almost no one knows and I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

“Almost no one?” I asked.

“Yeah, last week when I was mixing up the oleander, Mother Ryan was in here getting some coffee. I might have told her I had some pests I needed to get rid of. She might figure it out.”

“I doubt it,” I said smiling. “She’s got bigger problems.”

• • •

The boy’s descent which lifted up the world.

It bothered me, that last line.

• • •

Mother Ryan was getting ready for her fifteen minutes of fame. She had finagled the bishop into allowing her to host a conference for women priests. Of course, on the brochures it said
wimmyn
priests and she had contacted all the appropriate news groups to make sure the conference was well-covered, at least in ecumenical circles. She discovered when she spelled womyn with a “y,” the reporters came running.

The first week of Advent was when her conference was to take place.
ReImagining God the Mother in the Twenty-First Century
was the cognomen the wimmyn had chosen to celebrate their collective ecufem consciousness. Three days of speeches, seminars and services. Along with the three leaders, there were twenty-three women priests signed up and at least that many reporters booked into the B&Bs. The priests were staying with parishioners. The reporters were on expense accounts. And although I was ordered by Herself to be present to play for the services, I was planning on staying as far away as possible.

I knocked on Mother Ryan’s office door and waited for the requisite “Come!” uttered as a command rather than a polite request. I think she heard the fractured greeting in a police drama on television and decided it demonstrated her authority. Hearing the dictate, I opened the door and entered her rather masculine study, which she had appointed herself and charged to the decorating committee’s budget, much to their consternation. Leather and walnut—a nice combination.

“Yes?” she asked curtly as she looked up from the papers on her desk. “I’ve got a lot of work to do before Monday. Can this wait?”

“Well, not really, Loraine,” I said in my sweetest voice. “You see, I still have to find out who murdered Willie.”

“Do you have any information?” she asked, going back to her work.

“Well, yes I might. We got the lab report back and we know how Willie died. It was oleander poisoning.”

Perhaps the only indication that she heard what I said is that the mechanical pencil in her hand snapped in half. Still, I was a trained detective and I notice these little things, especially since it sounded like a firecracker going off.

“So do you know anything about th?” I asked innocently.

“Why would I know anything?” her voice rasped.

“Apparently, JJ was mixing up a concoction in the kitchen for some...mmm...pests. She was using oleander leaves.”

“So you think JJ did it?”

“No. JJ didn’t do it. But she mentioned that you were with her in the kitchen.”

“No, I don’t remember that,” she obviously lied, her eyes dropping back to the papers in front of her.

“Well, JJ remembers it pretty well,” I said, still sweetly. “I don’t think she’d forget something like that.”

“I said I don’t remember. That’s all,” she said dismissively, waving me out without looking up.

I closed the door behind me, wondering what she was up to. She was guilty as original sin and in this up to her ears, but I still didn’t know her role in the drama. Shoot. I didn’t even know all the players. Did she kill Willie Boyd? Maybe. Could I prove it? Not yet.

• • •

As usual, the first Sunday of Advent fell on the first Sunday in December. The first Sunday of Advent was actually the closest Sunday to the Feast of St. Andrew, which was on November twenty-eighth and marked the beginning of the church year. It was our custom to begin the season of Advent with the Great Litany chanted in procession and led by the priest. We only dragged the thurible and the incense out of the closet a couple of times a year, but this was the big one. All the smells and bells as they say in the biz.

Herself had not ever practiced chanting the Great Litany and this was her first Advent processional at St. Barnabas. When I mentioned to her, on Sunday morning before the service, that I’d be happy to go over it with her—a magnanimous gesture on my part, I thought—her reply was smug and to the point.

“I’ll just let the Holy Spirit take care of it.”

“Why don’t you give me ten minutes of rehearsal and we’ll let the Holy Spirit worry about something else this morning,” I fired back.

She didn’t take the hint. Added to the fun of the procession was the sound of bells being rung around and about the church and a cloud of smoke from the incense pot that would do credit to the Santiago de Compostela. I—yes, even I—think they may have overfilled the incense pot just a tad.

The man in charge of the incense was our resident thurifer Benny Dawkins and he, unlike the current priest, took his job very seriously. He began practicing in September, diligently getting the hang of swinging the smoking thurible. He would start slowly with a straight swing which he called the Tallulah Bankhead in honor of the sardonic actress’s famous quote “Dahlin’, your gown looks fabulous, but your purse in on fire.” The rest of September would be spent perfecting the Big Ben and the Cross Your Heart. He’d practice every day in October until he had finely honed the Around the World and the very difficult Walk the Dog. In November he put the final touches on his ultimate maneuver, the Doubly-Inverted Reverse Swan, which he had only attempted once in plic and where he, unfortunately, had knocked out poor Iona Hoskins when the heavy, smoking pot caught her behind the left ear and set her wig on fire. Other than that one incident, which many in the congregation viewed as a blessing due to the change in Iona’s attitude after the accident, Benny had an unblemished record, in services as well as in competition. At the International Thurifer Invitational in London, he entered in the Singles, No Side-Boat division and was awarded second place for the tricks portion of the event, a highly respectable third in freestyle and won the Bronze medal in the overall, losing only to the legendary Alaister Hewish from Yorkminster and an upstart wunderkind from St. Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Benny would incorporate all his signature moves and several improvisations into his procession, all the while walking in strict time, looking straight ahead and never losing a grain of incense. It was a pleasure to watch him work.

Mother Ryan took a big breath to begin the procession. The Great Litany is a rather long recitation and apparently the Holy Spirit wasn’t helping her out: she was lost before the first paragraph was finished. Then she panicked and started hyperventilating. I could tell this, as could the rest of the congregation, because she was walking right behind Benny and when she started to gasp for breath, what she got was smoke—and a lot of it.

The smoke that burning incense produces is very pungent and is manufactured that way purposely so the fragrance will carry throughout the nave of the church, following the old testament edict “Let my prayers rise as incense.” On this, the first Sunday of Advent, the smoke to rector ratio was very high.

As soon as Herself inhaled a billowing cloud of smoke, I knew she was finished with the “Great Litany in Procession.” As she started choking, Elaine, who was leading the choir behind her, sat her down in the end seat of one of the pews. I immediately took over, chanting the text from the balcony as the thurifer, the crucifer, and the choir made their way around the church. It was a pretty good transition and the only people who noticed anything amiss were the choir—and they were used to changing horses in the middle of the stream.

“She turned green pretty quickly,” Elaine told me afterward. “I would call the color somewhere between ‘Julep Ice’ and ‘Frogbelly Mint.’” Elaine took pride in her interior decorating skills.

Herself managed to get through the first part of the service once the procession was over. I noticed that her sermon was shorter than usual and she didn’t really get any of her normal color back. Still, I thought she might make it to the end of the service. I was wrong.

It was the communion ritual that finished her off. She managed to get through the liturgy, but when she had to drink the wine, it was more than her queasy stomach could endure. She left the Lay Eucharistic Ministers to administer the bread and wine to the congregation, and quickly disappeared behind the hidden door into the sacristy. I was beginning to play something appropriate for communion when I detected the first hint of what will probably become one of the legendary services in the history of St. Barnabas.

The control board for the sound system at the church was located up in the choir loft. Down in front were two reading microphones on the lecterns and a wireless mike—what we called the “walkin’ mike”—clipped to the rector’s frock and turned off and on at his or her discretion by means of a toggle switch on the battery pack. Unforttely for Loraine Ryan, she had left the toggle on.

I looked up at Bob Solomon, one of the basses, who was nearest the amplifier. The rest of the choir was heading down for communion and he was the last to leave. My eyebrows arched as I continued to play, asking the wordless question. There, in front of him as he looked down, clearly marked, was the dial on the amp that would silence the walkin’ mike. He looked back at me and smiled with an innocence belying his black heart, patted the amplifier affectionately, gazed briefly toward heaven as if asking forgiveness, and followed the rest of the choir, closing the door to the choir loft behind him.

Mercifully, it didn’t last too long. But most of the parishioners will never forget hearing, as they knelt to receive the sacrament on that first Sunday of Advent, “The gifts of God for the people of God.”

“Hurrrrraaachhh!”

“Take in remembrance...”

“Urrrrallllccch!”

“And feed in your heart by faith...”

“urrgh...”

“with thanksgiving.”

“Bluhreaaaarch!”

• • •

Six weeks after the murder and Megan was still on the case.

“What about the 911 tape? Have you forgotten about that?”

I was chopping some chives for our salad. I had some pork chops on the grill outside, but they would be working for another half hour or so.

“No, I haven’t forgotten about the tape. I have a copy right here somewhere,” I said, pointing with my knife to a pile of debris which was creeping across the sideboard like so much administrative kudzu. “I just haven’t listened to it for a while.”