Pious Deception (11 page)

“But Beth, you followed him to Phoenix.”

“Followed him! Look, I didn’t follow him. If anything he followed me. I was here months before he ever thought of Phoenix. And don’t start thinking I was front-trailing him like a dog. There was no way I could have guessed he’d be sent out here. He was in seminary back East. His godfather’s brother is an archbishop. Austin got him to pull strings to get him out here.”

“To be with you?”

“How do I know?” Her right hand was braced against the back of the sofa; she looked ready to push off, stand up, and stalk out.

Careful not to meet her gaze, not to challenge her, Kiernan said, “It’s very possible I’ve been given false information. People lie to investigators all the time, Beth.
I
didn’t know Philip Vanderhooven would come here. And believe me, I am not pleased he did. But there’s more to the question of your relationship with Austin. I found a pair of red lace bikini pants.”

Beth dug her fingers into the back of the sofa. “Anybody can buy bikini pants.”

“These had been worn.”

“So?”

“They are yours. From fifteen years ago? From the Mexican trip?”

She hesitated, then nodded.

“How did they get in his dresser drawer?”

“I don’t know.” Another truck rattled by. The plastic quivered under Beth’s fingers, but she seemed not to notice.

“Those pants are a real damning piece of evidence, Beth. How do you think they could have gotten there?”

“Maybe Austin took them. He was the one who bought them. I never cared about them.”

“When would he have been in a position to take them?”

“Look, I don’t know,” Beth snapped. “It could have been any time. I didn’t wear them. They aren’t pants you wear for comfort.”

Kiernan sat silent, watching Beth consider her own danger. Beth ran her forefinger back and forth across the black plastic. Her eyes were half-closed, her lips pressed hard together. In the waiting room the phone rang again. This time Kiernan could hear the murmur of the receptionist’s voice. Then Beth opened her eyes and swallowed. When she spoke, there was no sign of emotion in her voice. “I’m going to tell you about Austin because it’s in my self-interest. And you can believe what I say or not.”

Kiernan nodded.

“I don’t know why Austin came to Phoenix. It’s not that I haven’t given the question thought. Here I am, head of the women’s center. I’m supposed to have my life together.” She gave a forced laugh. “Austin wasn’t sleeping with me. We hadn’t been to bed since college, since the night he told me he was going into the seminary. He took me to dinner, then to a hotel, made love. Austin was always good in bed. I didn’t realize how good until it was over between us and I started dating other guys. But that night it was as if it was the last chance he’d ever get, which of course it was. I just didn’t know it then. Afterwards we sat up, leaning back against the headboard. I remember it was a padded headboard like they had in the fifties. And Austin told me he was going into the seminary.”

“Tantamount to announcing his engagement to someone else,” Kiernan said.

“Worse. Another woman, well, you may not like it, but there’s plenty of precedent, plenty of friends who’ve gone through that and are only too happy to console you. But the Church! It’s not like there’s someone better; he just doesn’t want you!”

Beth’s face had relaxed. In that face Kiernan thought she could see the bewilderment of the college girl Austin Vanderhooven had discarded.

“I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t awful. Maybe I should have known. Probably. But I didn’t. We’d gone together for years. It took me most of the next year to get myself in reasonable shape to deal with, well, anything.”

“But you still wrote to him?”

“He wrote to me. I didn’t answer, not for a long time. Then I convinced myself that answering his letters would be the adult thing to do, that it would prove to me I had gotten over him.”

“And then you moved to Phoenix,” Kiernan prompted.

“I got the chance to establish the battered-women’s program here. It’s one of the best in the state.”

“And Austin showed up?”

“Without warning. He called me from across town, invited me to tour the church. ‘Tour the mission’ was his phrase. I thought it was going to be a historic monument. Have you seen it? It’s a joke—Saint seven-eleven!” There was no hint of innocence in her face now.

Kiernan nodded. “And then?”

“Nothing more like that, but the next thing I know Austin’s offering to help out here. And suddenly Jack, who runs the place, is telling me it would be a coup to have Austin on the board of the women’s center.” She shook her head in disgust.

“And it would have been, wouldn’t it, Beth? A Roman Catholic priest endorsing a center that must support birth control, abortion, divorce?”

“Sure, but Austin wasn’t ready to do that. One thing Austin was good at was covering his ass. Even in Mexico I was the only one lying outside the sheets.”

Kiernan laughed. Beth looked up, startled, and then she smiled. On the wall behind her was an ill-colored poster touting the four essential nutritional groups: violet eggplants, light yellow eggs, orange strawberries, gray bread, and a couple of pale salmon circles that might have been intended to represent lemons or oranges or even apples. But on the faded yellow wall, the poster looked appropriate. “So Austin didn’t actually offer to be on the board?”

“No, not Austin. He hinted. And”—her fingers dug into the sofa back—“he did do something else for us. But here’s the point, he created a reason to be in contact. I saw him once or twice a month, sometimes more. Sometimes alone. He gave me a key to the rectory so I could get in if he was delayed. I never had to use it. He was always there waiting. But he never touched me …” The black plastic cracked. Beth forced a laugh. “The only time his flesh came in contact with mine was when he helped me on with a coat, something he would have done for any lady in the parish. He never said anything suggestive, per se.” Carefully, she placed both hands in her lap and stared down at them. Despite her tan, a burst of tiny white lines was visible around her tense eyes. “And the question is Why?”

Kiernan sat motionless, anxious not to break the mood.

“This is what I think. I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’ve been furious that the man wouldn’t get out of my life. I’ve been disgusted that I couldn’t either get rid of him physically or at least free myself emotionally. I think he was using me to test himself. Just like these guys who beat their wives; they need to have someone to blame for their inadequacies. Austin used me to prove over and over again that he was pure, worthy. I don’t know what he was making up for—impure thoughts, lascivious desires. It was as if he was telling himself that even if he had given in to them, there was a line he wouldn’t cross—me. Giving up sex was a big sacrifice for him. For Austin the time that he spent making love was the one time he wasn’t looking over his shoulder.”

The air conditioner crackled and a gust of cold air skimmed Kiernan’s shoulders, sending a shiver across her back. Beth’s theory, she thought, could describe a guilt-ridden man who’d been in the habit of hanging himself for pleasure. “What do you mean?”

Beth leaned back against the sofa arm; her finger strummed meditatively on her skirt, and the look on her freckled face was that of a professor about to deliver a pet theory. “Austin was the most competitive man I knew,” she began. “But in bed he was the best. He knew it. And for once he could relax and not worry about outstripping the competition.”

“Was there competition? Were you dating other guys?”

She shook her head. “No, any competition was only in Austin’s head. With him I never had the sense he was competing with other men; it was as if he had already outstripped them and the contest was on a deeper, more personal level. Competing against an ideal he had created.”

The air conditioner turned off. In the silence Kiernan could hear the murmur of voices in the waiting room. A new client? Before Beth could react to that, she asked, “What else?”

“Austin was so cerebral. I used to picture the inside of his head as a medieval tower room in which a pair of emaciated scholars carried on a fierce but oh-so-controlled dialogue. The time was twilight, winter. The fire had gone out but they hadn’t noticed. I told Austin about that room once. He accused me of dredging it up from ethnic memory. Of course, we Jews do have a history of dialogue. It’s an important part of our tradition. But for us there’s a joy in it. In Austin’s icy tower room there was no emotion at all. No, that’s not true; there was fear.”

“Fear of what?”

Beth’s eyes filled. She swallowed. “I don’t know. I tried to ask Austin that, but he would never let me get near enough.” She swallowed again and squeezed her eyes against the tears. “Sorry. The whole thing’s been such a shock. But this conclusion of mine, it’s not as if I reached it ages ago and presented him with it whole. It’s only been in the last year that it’s been clear. And we weren’t having long talks against the padded headboards anymore.” She looked directly at Kiernan. “It wasn’t in my interest to keep poking at his psyche, you see.” Her eyes remained steady, but her gaze diffused so that instead of being the bridge to Kiernan it had become a wall between them.

“What do you
think
Austin was so afraid of?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Damnation?”

In the waiting room a child screamed. A stab of pain ran through Kiernan’s head. She had forgotten about the pain. Despite her role as an investigator, she was probably the only person with whom Beth Landau had been able to discuss Vanderhooven. It didn’t surprise her when Beth went on: “If you’d asked Austin, he would have told you his commitment was to truth, truth within the Catholic tradition. What he would have meant, of course, was what he chose to view as truth. Austin was a master at shaping reality to suit himself. And his inability to really feel for someone else he saw not as a failing but as a necessity for a man whose calling is to move from the body to the spirit.”

“But he did let you have Hohokam Lodge.”

Beth stiffened.

Kiernan wasn’t surprised at her reaction—the sudden jerk back to reality—just at the topic that had triggered it. “That wasn’t a question. I have the information, Beth. And it explains why you couldn’t rid yourself of him. By the same token, if he controlled the lodge, it gives you a motive for keeping him alive. It also brings up the possibility of your clients’ husbands—angry, violent men who want their wives back, who want their control back.”

“I can’t talk about my clients,” she said, all business now.

“If one of the husbands discovered that Austin knew where his wife was, he could have gone to Mission San Leo. He could have been planning just to pressure Austin, not to kill him. Killing him could have been an accident.”

Beth stood up. “I said I cannot talk about my clients. Even in the abstract.”

She was on the verge of losing Beth, she knew it. She thought of that hollow Latin book of Vanderhooven’s, hesitated, then went ahead and asked, “Did Austin keep any of your clients’ records?”

Beth’s face flushed. “How many times do I have to tell you—nothing about my clients.”

Kiernan stood. “Beth, think about it, if one of these guys killed Austin, do you want your client, and her children, living with him?”

“Just get out!” She grabbed Kiernan’s purse and thrust it at her.

Kiernan felt her body tense. Instinctively she steeled herself to avoid reacting. She extricated her card and laid it on the desk. “Think about it. I am very discreet. No one would ever know the women’s center was connected.”

Beth flung the card in the wastebasket. “You’re damned right no one will know. Because I am not saying anything about my clients to anyone, no matter how discreet. And if that means Austin’s murder goes unsolved, well, so be it.”

Kiernan hesitated. Beth had trusted her, she knew, and now Beth felt betrayed. Anything she could say, any gesture she might make would only aggravate the situation.

As Kiernan walked down the hall toward the waiting room, she reminded herself that investigators weren’t supposed to worry about bruised feelings. And they weren’t supposed to let their own be hurt. She thought of what Sam Chase had said, that Austin Vanderhooven was not unlike her. Just what had Sam meant?

A
T FOUR IN THE
afternoon Phoenix felt like a barbecue, or more accurately, a steamer. Pre-monsoon weather. Desert humidity. The heat from the sidewalks steamed up, the bright sunlight bounced off glass and chrome. Car windows were rolled up tight to guard the capsule of cool air inside. Kiernan thought of the icy tower, of Austin Vanderhooven’s desperate single-mindedness. It had taken Beth years to get an understanding of Vanderhooven’s mind-set, but for Kiernan it was no problem. The ability to put all else second, a distant second, she understood too well. For her it had been not so much a skill as a need. She had to exonerate Moira, to force Father Grogan to bring Moira back from the patch of dirt to which he had consigned her, to make him bury her in the churchyard, in the hallowed ground where suicides were not allowed. To grab back the way of life that was gone.

That icy tower of Austin Vanderhooven’s described her home then. The single-family row house common to so many soot-gray Eastern towns. Small dark rooms, overcrowded with heavy cherry furniture—cluttered rooms, where every step had to be planned, where voices were lowered to keep from disturbing her father or mother in the kitchen or living room ten feet away. After Moira’s death her parents had barely gone through the motions of family life. They were nothing more than the survivors of a suicide—Walt and Mary O’Shaughnessy, the parents of beautiful Moira, who killed herself. They had failed before the world, before their God, before themselves. If they had not been Irish Catholics, they would gladly have followed Moira. If they had not been Catholics in a Catholic neighborhood, the stigma of Moira’s death would not have destroyed them.

Kiernan gave her head a shake. It felt as if her brain had broken loose and was clanging against her skull. Aspirin, she needed more aspirin. She climbed into the Jeep, wincing as the heat of the seat cut through her jeans. She started the engine and let it idle, then, gratefully turned the air-conditioning on high and headed back to Howard Johnson’s.