Pious Deception (20 page)

“Then he doesn’t need an investigation anymore.”

“Right. When he hired you he wanted to know the whole truth. Now he’s satisfied with the part that suits him.” He gunned the engine as he pulled onto the Pima Freeway.

Kiernan nodded. “But he can’t tell me that. So he’s stuck with me. At least until Philip Vanderhooven starts pressuring him.”

“What about Vanderhooven? Could he be the forger?”

“He’s so worried about people finding out just how his son died that all he wants is the case closed and me fired. He’s probably been on the phone to Dowd already.”

“So, what now? You go back to San Diego and we file for breach of contract? It’ll make one helluva case,” Wiggins said.

“Oh no. Dowd, at least, ought to know about the stubbornness of the Irish. Even if Dowd and Vanderhooven’s own parents don’t want to know what really happened, I do. Whoever killed Vanderhooven is clever, ready to take chances, and real dangerous. And dammit, Stu, someone hit me on the head and tossed me into the bathroom. I’m not letting anyone get away with that.” She stared out the dusty window. The pale greens and tans of the misty landscape shimmered in the early morning light. The air that rushed in through the front vents felt fresh and clean against her skin, but it did nothing to cool her temper. At not quite seven
A.M.
it was already rush hour. Lots of office workers worked seven-thirty to three, Stu had told her. And now every single one of them was on the freeway! “Stu, the truth is right now I’m mad enough to … Look, I’ve got to think about something else for a few minutes. To calm down. Otherwise—”

“Okay, there. How ’bout you think about breakfast, huh?”

“Perfect. I’m ravenous.”

Wiggins veered onto the freeway exit. “You know, Kerry, if we were near my place, I could make my famous Wiggins Breakfast Tacos.”

“You cook?” she asked, amazed. She hadn’t seen Wiggins’s house, but she realized she had created her own picture of it, and now she focused on that picture: an adobe rectangle; a dusty living room with old leather-strung chairs, a scarred wooden table that doubled as a desk, and worn leather tomes of the law covering one wall. Off to the right would be a small whitewashed bedroom with a washstand and a hard single bed, a room like the one she’d just come out of. The Wiggins house of her imagination had no bathroom, no dining room, and certainly no kitchen (though she did picture a doorway through which Wiggins went for beer). It was, she admitted, an abbreviated replica of the Spanish ranchos of the last century. And Stu Wiggins was its caballero.

“Kerry, you’re looking at a damned fine cook here. Might be every bit as good as you.”

Kiernan laughed. “If you can open a can you’re that good. I don’t have a houseman for nothing.”

Wiggins slowed down at a sign announcing
OLD ADOBE SHOPPING CENTER
and turned into the parking lot. A covered walkway similar to the one outside the sheriff’s department fronted the row of stores—Micro Center, Half-Cost Baked Goods, Lamps and Shades, a Thai restaurant, and at the end, a place called Ben’s Burgers. He pulled up in front of the burger shop. “Kerry, with the amount you chow down—”

“I didn’t say I don’t like to eat. My housekeeper played offensive line. He used to spend his days with guys who weighed over three hundred pounds and ate twelve egg omelets filled with half a hog. I went out to dinner with them—if you ever want to see a restaurateur in heaven … I sat between a center and a left tackle and was still eating when both of them shoved back from the trough. I’m no pansy at the table, Stu.”

“And you don’t cook?”

She sighed. “You cooks are such snobs. You just can’t accept that there are those of us who don’t cook, and don’t care.”

“But Kerry, how do you—”

“See? You really can’t accept it.” She laughed halfheartedly. “You’re not going to let up on this, are you?”

“Probably should, but I’m a nosey old fellow, you know that. That’s what you like about me.”

“Okay, Stu. But I warn you, it deals with my sister’s death and my adolescent reaction.” Already she could hear the catch in her voice. “Ben’s Burgers doesn’t exactly sound like breakfast,” she said. She knew she was stalling.

“They’ve got a breakfast burger with guacamole, egg, and better sausage than you deserve, on a roll your football friends would consider a meal.” He opened the door and climbed down.

Inside, Ben’s Burgers gave up any allegiance to the Western motif. With its Formica-topped tables, it could have been a café anywhere in the country. An elderly couple sat by the windows. The woman pointed to the air-conditioning vent and reached for a sweater that hung over the back of her chair. Two solitary men at the counter were working on platters of something that smelled of onion and garlic. Stu and Kiernan settled at a table overlooking the Mustang. When they had ordered, Stu said, “Now tell me how a nice Catholic girl like you avoided the kitchen.”

“Okay. You asked for it. You know about my sister, Moira,” she said slowly, pressing her fingers against the glass salsa container. “Moira was beautiful—tall, with long curly red hair and eyes darker blue than mine. When we went downtown, men would stop in the street to stare. Moira had loads of boyfriends. Her biggest problem was which one to choose. She was bright, funny; when she laughed, everybody laughed. I take chances; I love to play the edge; I learned that from her. I don’t know where she got it from, certainly not our parents. I used to fantasize that she and I were aliens hiding out in the most prosaic household in America. When she paid attention to me I adored her; when she didn’t I hated her, like any little sister. I was twelve when she died. She was seventeen.”

Kiernan pressed her fingers hard against the salsa jar. She took a breath and swallowed before she could continue. “It was the night of my father’s cousin’s wake. A wake is a time the Irish let go, or at least it was like that then. My parents knew they’d be drinking and they’d be out late. If it hadn’t been for me, they would have taken Moira with them; she was old enough.”

“Kerry, you can’t be sure.”

She shrugged and sat for a moment. “After they left …” She swallowed and began again, “After they left, Moira and I were in the kitchen. We were supposed to be making a Jell-O salad to take to the cousin’s house the next day. Catholic ladies are big on Jell-O salads, Stu: red Jell-O with canned fruit, green Jell-O with pineapple chunks, orange Jell-O —” The salsa container shot out of her grasp and banged against the sugar. She grabbed it, pulled it back. “Moira said … she said I should make the Jell-O because it was bad enough she was stuck home with me when she could have gone out with Tommy Noonan. I said no. She insisted. And so on. Standard generic argument between sisters,” she said, forcing a smile. “It ended up with me screaming, her screaming, and me throwing the open Jell-O package at her. The Jell-O was green, I remember that. I remember her standing there with the green crystals lying atop her red hair like something out of Disney, and on her face. And those green crystals floating down onto the brown-and-red linoleum. Moira was shaking her head and wiping her hand over her face to brush the Jell-O off, but that just streaked it. And she was yelling at me to clean the mess up. I yelled no. She started at me. She would have grabbed me by the shoulders and marched me to the mop closet. She wouldn’t have hurt me.” Kiernan swallowed hard, staring at the salsa container, trying to block the picture of Moira from her mind. “But I jumped back before she could get me. I screamed I was leaving and there was nothing she could do about it. It was eight at night. She said, ‘Fine. Go ahead.’ Of course that wasn’t what I wanted. I tried to think what I could do to up the ante—to win.” Her voice had become raspier. She coughed to open her throat. “Then I remembered the Sunset Hotel, where the hookers hung out. Moira had taken me past there the week before to show me real live hookers. It had been an adventure for me, our secret. Ma and Pop would have been scandalized. I yelled at her. I said I was going to the Sunset Hotel. I stomped out.” She closed her eyes and swallowed, trying to get control of her voice.

“I hid in the old playhouse in the McCarthys’ backyard. I wanted to follow her when she started searching for me, but I was afraid she’d get a bunch of her friends to help and they’d spot me. So I waited in the playhouse for almost two hours. Then I went home. By then, of course, she was out looking for me. She went to the Sunset Hotel looking for me. She died there.”

“And you never told anyone?” Wiggins asked softly.

It was a moment before Kiernan could block out the picture of that brown clapboard hotel, and the red pulser lights from the police cars spraying over Moira’s dead-white skin, the picture that had filled nightmares so long yet never lost its sting. “What?”

“You never told anyone that she went there to find you?”

“Stu, I told them all, my parents, Father Grogan, Mrs. McCarthy. They never believed me. They preferred to think that Moira was there meeting some man.” She shook her head. “I spent the next six years battering my stomach muscles on the uneven bars.”

“To forget?”

“And you can see how effective that tactic was.” She laughed mirthlessly. “But it did keep me away from Jell-O. That was what I fixated on. I guess you pick some small, irrelevant thing. I picked Jell-O to connect with Moira’s death. And I picked a sport that would keep me out of the kitchen when it was being made.”

She could feel her face flushing. The picture of the kitchen—the green crystals floating down onto the brown-and-red linoleum—faded, and she was left feeling drained. And foolish. She unwrapped her fingers from the salsa container. “Sorry, Stu. It’s been twenty-five years. A well-balanced person would be … better balanced. But then, very few people think forensic pathologists are normal.”

Wiggins smiled. “Or detectives.”

The waitress slid a platter in front of each of them. “Will that be all?” she asked.

Wiggins nodded.

They ate in silence for a while.

A fourth of the way through the huge burger, Kiernan said, “Stu, this really is good.”

“I told you,” he replied without enthusiasm.

Kiernan squeezed her eyelids together. She put down the burger. “Okay, I think we’ve had enough distraction. Now let’s see where we’re going with this case.”

“If you can stay out of trouble long enough. From that blow on your head and the death certificate forgery we know someone really wants you out of here. If it’s Dowd or Vanderhooven, they couldn’t just pay you off. That’d reveal their hand. It’d be telling the world you know too much. And if it is Vanderhooven, Kerry, you be careful. He’s got mean connections.”

“I thought the Mafia went in for kneecapping, not forging interment permits and locking ladies in the john.”

“Listen, don’t be so smug. If the guy who hit you is one of Vanderhooven’s associates, Vanderhooven could be reining him in, for the moment. At any time he could give him his head. And you could lose yours!”

“A mite melodramatic, but I take your point.” She bit into the burger and chewed slowly. “What about you, Stu? What did you come up with?”

“I put out a lot of feelers that won’t produce till tomorrow at the earliest. But I did have an interesting talk with my buddy the archdiocese lawyer about Austin Vanderhooven.”

“You know, Stu, the picture of Vanderhooven I got from Beth Landau was not of the kind of man you’d want to confess your sins to.”

“It seems the book on Vanderhooven was that he was real sharp, could talk theology with anyone, not that he agreed with anyone.”

“How so?”

Wiggins put down his cup, leaned back in the chair, and rested the side of a boot on his knee. “Well, see, there are factions here like anywhere else. The conservatives call Vatican Two, Vatican Too Far. The progressives think a few old men are calling the shots in a show they don’t know much about, what with bachelors, some of them virgins, telling married couples how to think about sex and love.”

“And Vanderhooven?”

Stu laughed. “He ticked them off in both groups. Now a young guy like that with a California and New York education, you’d think he’d be a shoo-in for the liberal camp, right? At least on matters of sexual behavior. But there you’d be wrong. See, the liberals, they figure that unless a doctrine’s based on one of the pope’s infallible decisions, it’s open for interpretation. Fallible decisions they figure were put together by a guy who was influenced by his times. They say you have to take those times into account and adjust the basic idea to suit life now. They figure there’s a lot of unnecessary stuff that’s keeping the people at a distance from the Church, a lot of it left over from hundreds of years ago. They don’t want the people to pop in, pay their money, swallow their wafers and leave. They want the people to be involved. Of course, now, I’m not a Catholic, so what I’m saying is probably not how the red hats among the liberals would put it.”

Kiernan smiled. “Probably not. What was it we said as kids? You’d get credit for mass if you’d had holy water on your forehead, marks on your knees from the kneeler, and the wafer stuck to the roof of your mouth. It rhymed then.”

Wiggins finished his coffee. “Now the conservatives believe doctrine is doctrine is doctrine. And they say if a priest questions the Church’s teachings there is always the danger of Scandal, with a capital
S
.”

Kiernan squinted in puzzlement.

“Forgotten a mite of your R.C. lore, eh, Ms. O’Shaughnessy?”

“Most of it.”

“Well, according to my source, the issue of Scandal is front of the herd. The conservative view is that Scandal is caused when theologians question sensitive issues
in public.
Okay for the priests to ponder and dither as long as they don’t mention it. But discuss those questions, admit your indecision, and you get Scandal. And Scandal could mislead the lay folk, encourage them to make their own decisions, uninformed decisions, because a lot of this stuff turns on pretty obscure points. It could set the lay folk on the road to sin.”

“But if
theologians
can’t even discuss the issues in public, what’s the point of having theologians? They might as well just have xeroxes.”