Pious Deception (19 page)

Quickly she moved down the hallway, walking soundlessly as she neared Beth Landau’s door. She looked through the archway into the living room; beneath the windows four lopsided patches of moonlight glowed on the floor. The window glass rattled against the moldings. Was it working up to a storm outside, or was she just turning chicken?

She crossed in front of the kitchen, moving carefully in the dark end of the room till she came to the office door.

The lock looked like no problem, but you could never tell. At least there was no dead bolt. It would have been a pushover if she could have used her Lock Aid Gun: Insert needle, pull trigger, and bam! Every pin in the lock goes snapping up and down. It could set those pins in a straight line on the first try.

And in a place like this, where everyone was on edge, it would wake up half the house.

Patsy pulled out her old tool case—“Pretty Nails,” it said on the outside. It should have said “Pick and Rake.” She grinned and slid the pick into the lock. Patsy was good at locks; she’d told Stu Wiggins that often enough. But it took all her concentration. She slipped the rake into the hole, feeling the pins as she pulled it back across them. Her eyes closed. Behind the office door, windows rattled.

The pins lined up. She pulled the knob toward her and turned it. Lifting up against the knob she opened the door slowly, eased herself in, and closed the door with care.

It could have been dusk inside the room, the moonlight was so bright. The walls were a light color, maybe green. A sofa with flowered cushions like the ones in the living room stood next to the door. Opposite it, under the window, was a big wooden desk. Its right side touched a tall file cabinet, and beyond that was a closet—hardly a great hideout, but better than nothing. The door slid open, revealing a raincoat and a pair of boots. It was, after all, monsoon season. Tomorrow it could be pouring. There could be flash floods out here, and the dry arroyos could be running full.

Patsy took out her penlight, pulled open the top file drawer, extricated the first seven files—A to G—took them into the closet, and closed the door partway. “Client files,” she muttered. Pressing her teeth together she paged through the folders, skimming to keep the names from becoming real people, checking the men’s names, writing them down. The files—all three drawers—referred to fifty-three males, none of them named Vanderhooven, Necri, Dowd, or McKinley.

An hour had passed by the time she pulled open the bottom drawer and found the first interesting thing, a liqueur bottle. Without a second thought she unscrewed the top and drank. Her eyes snapped open, and she had to smack her hand across her mouth to keep from coughing. What was this stuff? She held the offending bottle up to the light. It was eight-sided, about three inches wide; on the gold label was an adobe hacienda with a palm tree in front, and the name Culiacán. Culiacán? Patsy’d never heard of that. She could see why. No one in their right mind would drink the stuff. It tasted like powdered sugar and hot peppers.

She was tempted to jam it back into the drawer. Instead, she stuffed it into her pack. That was the problem with this type of case, working for someone else, there was no way to know what could be important.

Behind the divider in the bottom drawer was a manila envelope. In it was a deed, dated September 8, 1937. One John McKinley deeded thirty-six acres to the pastor of Mission San Leo. She made a note of the particulars and moved on to the desk. The bottom two drawers were filled with office supplies.
They
weren’t important. The top drawer had pencils, paper clips, and in the back a packet of letters held with a rubber band. The return address varied, but the name was Vanderhooven. Now
that
was important. With a smile, she moved back into the closet.

She read the bundle of letters—love letters, letters that described the longings of the writer, of the priest-to-be, his speculations, his memories of licking Culiacán, that revolting stuff in the bottle, off the “furry little peaches” at the insides of Beth’s thighs, his plans to bring an artist’s brush, to stroke “the dark silky veil that hides my secret chamber.” Patsy kept shaking her head. The letters read like something out of one of those
True Confessions
magazines her sister slavered over. So this was what they thought about in the priest houses! Stu would get a kick out of this.

She pushed herself up and jolted forward on numb legs. It was nearly four in the morning. Bracing her arm against the desk, she opened her tool case, extricated a small file, and trained her light on the phone lock.

Behind her the door opened! The light went on. Patsy jammed the file in her pocket and spun around.

Beth Landau stood in the doorway, holding a .38. It didn’t take a detective to read the outrage on her face.

Patsy swallowed.

“You! My little friend in the car. So anxious to help me out checking the windows! So concerned about the prowler!”

Patsy swallowed again. How could she have let herself be caught! Caught with the names of all those husbands and boyfriends in her pack. There was no way she could ever remember more than a couple of them. The way things were going she could leave here real empty.

“You’re the third person today who’s been at me, Patsy. The others at least had legitimate reasons, but you …”

Patsy could feel her face flush. Not only was she going to leave here empty, but she was going to be responsible for exposing her connection to O’Shaughnessy. That was a lot worse than empty.

“I check and doublecheck everything so you can be safe here in the refuge. I drive around in town long enough to make sure no one’s following, I keep the phone locked. Dammit, I give up most of my life for this place, and this is how you respond, by going through …” She stared over Patsy’s shoulder. “By going through my files! Damn you! What were you looking for?”

Patsy’s eyes filled. She squeezed her eyes shut. It was bad enough Stu was going to think she couldn’t do a simple search; it was bad enough to blow the connection to the California detective. But dammit, Patsy Luca was not going to be seen crying! She squeezed her eyes harder. A tear rolled down her burning cheek. Oh, shit, shit, shit! Goddamn fuck!

Beth sighed.

Patsy opened her eyes to find Beth’s eyes widened in sympathy. Patsy swallowed hard. “I feel so awful,” she muttered. “You’re right. You’ve been real good to me. And I’ve used you. But”—she swallowed again—“I had no choice. Oh, I know it’s hard for you to believe that. But I’ve got all these bills to deal with. I had a job for a while, but my car got repossessed and I couldn’t get there any more. My ex, they’re his bills, but try telling that to a bill collector. They know he won’t pay. So they bully me. I won’t live off the state. So when he offered me this job—”

“He? Your husband?”

Patsy shook her head. “Not Jack. Jack’s too bone lazy to break into anything. There’s nothing he could want to see enough to bother peeking in someone’s window.” She sighed. “But, Beth, you were right about this place being broken into.” She watched Beth’s eyes widen as she made the connection to her prowler. Maybe, Patsy thought, just maybe she wouldn’t come up empty after all. If only Beth had told her the guy’s name, this wouldn’t be so hard. “But something happened, he didn’t tell me what”—she shrugged—“I think he was too embarrassed. But he never found what he was looking for—”

“And he hired you?”

Head bowed, Patsy nodded.

“Goddamn him! That’s just like him the slimy bastard. Is he outside waiting for you, or were you going to walk to his place?”

Walk? Up here? To where? The prowler, the nameless prowler, must live around here. “Walk.”

“Did he tell you it was thirty miles?”

Patsy shook her head. “He just said if I walked to the main road, and turned … But he made it sound like the main road was a mile away, not as far as it is.”

“Well, if you’d known Joe Zekk as long as I have, you wouldn’t be so surprised. Slimy bas—” She looked down at Patsy’s pack. “So what is it Zekk told you to steal from here?”

Damn! Now she had his name, but she was still going to lose the list of husbands and boyfriends, all fifty-three of them. Unless … Patsy said, “He wanted me to steal your letters.”

“I might have known. Slimy … slime.” She reached toward the pack.

Patsy stooped, effectively blocking Beth’s access to the pack. She needed to do something, or say something to knock Beth off balance. She felt in the pack, next to the bottle, and drew out the bundle of letters. Mimicking the look she had seen on her sister’s face when she sat poring over her romance magazines, Patsy said, “I have to tell you, Beth, that I read these letters. Joe did tell me to. But, gee, this guy Austin, he can really describe it, huh? I mean the parts about his artist’s brush, and the secret room, and how he felt the sand on the sheets when he ground his knees down on the sides of your … Gees. And—”

Beth grabbed the letters.

Patsy peered through her eyelashes to check Beth’s reaction. Beth looked embarrassed all right.

“This is what Joe Zekk told you to get?”

“Yeah.”

Beth looked down at the letters, then at the backpack. “Slide that pack over here. Let me see what you really got for him.”

Patsy stared. Slowly she moved the pack. Dammit, what could this guy Zekk have wanted more than those letters?

Keeping the gun aimed, Beth reached inside. She felt around and came up with the bottle of Culiacán. “This! Did he send you for this?”

Patsy hesitated, trying to read Beth’s face. Then she shook her head. “He sent me for the letters.”

She reached back into Patsy’s pack and pulled out the list. “The husbands! Of course. He was going to use this to threaten me, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. He just said to get it.”

Beth tapped her teeth together. Then she sighed. “Okay. Get a piece of paper out of the desk. There’s a pen … but you know where the pens are, don’t you? I want a full confession, where you met with Joe, when, what he was paying you, exactly what he said to you, word for word.”

Patsy thought. There was no way she could pull that off. She considered trying for another tear. But dammit, there was a limit. She straightened her shoulders. “Or what? You’re not going to kill me.”

“Oh no, but I would be willing to maim you. Think about that. We’ll see if you’re willing to tell me the truth tomorrow. In the meantime”—she looked down at the nearly full bottle of Culiacán—”you liked this so much, you can drink it. All of it!”

T
HE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT LOOKED
even seedier at dawn when a new deputy allowed Kiernan to make her phone call. Forty-five minutes later Stu Wiggins arrived. The deputy told them Sheriff Grimm had left an hour ago.

“I thought I was going to have to drag you out of there kicking and screaming,” Stu said as they climbed into his old red Mustang.

“I thought you’d at least make mention of false arrest. You could have been picking me up after school for all the legal threatening you did in there.”

Wiggins started the car. “Well, Kerry, now I know how it looked. But I also know Hobart Grimm. Hobart Grimm thinks just like he looks.”

“He looks like a mummy.”

Wiggins uttered a gurgle that might have passed for a laugh. “See, Kerry, I was trying to figure what was going on there. Here’s what I came up with. You told Grimm about my call. Now if he checked his tapes and didn’t find my call, you don’t think he’d have let you snooze away the night in your cell, do you? He’d have had you back in his office within an hour, right?”

“But we know your call would have been on the tape. It’s not like they’d have a tape they could erase. That would destroy the whole purpose of it.”

“Okay, second option. Grimm found my call. He got ahold of the guy who took it, and he’s checking into that. Then he’d have had you back in his office and been squeezing you for every bit of information you have.”

“I threatened him with the newspapers. And there is the question of false arrest.”

“Or he couldn’t find the tape itself, and he knows he’s likely to be up to his ears in shit. Now from our point of view it doesn’t matter whether he found the tape or not. Either way, as soon as he can come across a reason to hold you, he’ll drag you back in there and pump you till you’re drier than the desert. We could take legal action, of course, but—”

“I don’t have the time if I’m going to find Vanderhooven’s murderer by Monday, right?”

“Right you are. So I figured we’d git while the gittin’ was good. But Kerry, Grimm is still dangerous. It’d be a real smart move on your part to stay out of his way.”

Stiffly, Kiernan nodded.

Wiggins rolled down his window and stuck his elbow through the opening. “So, how’re you holding up after your night in stir?”

“Actually, not so bad as you might think. Furious as I was, I did sleep for five or six hours. It’s one of the best things I learned in medical school—I can sleep anywhere, anytime. Even in India, when I had what the Indians call European stomach and the Europeans call Delhi belly, I could sleep. But, Stu, don’t think I’m not pissed. If I had Bishop Raymond Dowd here right now, I’d liked to kick him so hard …”

Wiggins laughed. “Big-footed little lady! You figure it’s Dowd behind the forged forms?”

“Dowd, and accomplices.”

“How come?”

“If he has a signed death certificate and an interment permit, he can bury Vanderhooven.”

“And avoid scandal!”

Kiernan rolled down her window and leaned back against the seat, letting the warm air ruffle her hair. “But I’m not quite comfortable with that conclusion, Stu. The problem is that Dowd could bury Vanderhooven, but it wouldn’t solve his moral dilemma about burying a suicide in hallowed ground.”

Wiggins shook his head. “Let me give you my educated guess on that one. From what I’ve been hearing about Dowd, he’s not good under pressure. My guess is that he’s not after the truth anymore, he’s just looking for an excuse to salve his conscience so he can get Vanderhooven under the ground and out of his hair. So, suppose he takes to heart your theory that Vanderhooven couldn’t have gotten his hands behind him like they were when he was tied up. Then there was no suicide! All Dowd needs to do is bury him and figure that’ll end the questions about him.”