The Man Who Murdered God (10 page)

“What?”

“Typing his resume and an outline of his computer program. Wants it all put into brown envelopes with a picture of him, like a press kit. A press kit! Then he's sending them out to the papers and the TV stations, for reference, he says. You make the little bastard an acting lieutenant and he thinks he's Robert Redford.”

She looked up to see McGuire grinning back at her.

“Pictures?” he asked. “Like eight-by-ten glossies?”

“Yeah, the full size—” She stopped, the frozen look of anger melting slowly into a smirk that matched McGuire's. “You devious son of a gun.”

“There's a spare eight-by-ten of the writing on the blackboard in my office,” McGuire said.

“No kidding.”

“I could leave it at your desk. Say, in about five minutes.” Still grinning.

She stood watching him. “And what would I do with it?”

“Oh, what everybody does, I suppose. Slide it into a brown envelope for safe keeping.”

“One with the name of the
Globe
's
city editor on it, no doubt.”

“Just before Brenda in the steno area sends it out.”

“Good old Brenda.”

“It could get him fired, you know.”

“It could also get us a killer.”

She shook her head. “Sorry, Joe. It sounds like a hell of an idea, but count me out. I know how Kavander feels about releasing evidence without approval.”

“Then I'll do it myself. The envelopes are on your desk?”

She nodded. “If Brenda hasn't picked them up yet. Hey, I didn't have a thing to do with this, right?”

“I'll swear to it,” McGuire said from the open doorway. Then, pausing, he asked, “By the way, what does your husband do for a living?”

Her smile widened. “Didn't you know? He owns a bar. He's trying to build up clientele with cops. Why do you think I keep inviting you for a drink?”

Anne Murison sighed, checked her watch and slid her magazine under the counter of the ticket kiosk. Switching off the outside lights of the aquarium, she unlocked the door of her booth and walked past the dispersing crowds of children being shepherded to the exits.

She skirted the cylindrical Giant Ocean Tank, forty feet wide and twenty-three feet deep with an outer spiral walkway descending to the floor, home for more than a thousand fish. They swam past the glass above her in their non-stop journey. Sharks, barracuda, sea turtles the size of compact cars, angry-looking moray eels, thick-lipped groupers and dozens of other species. Anne never grew tired of watching them. Or the penguins in their open pens, diving from rocks and waddling around with their wings outstretched, their eyes strange and wide as though they were in a narcotic trance.

What was so interesting about a couple of otters?

“Time to go,” she said to the blond-haired boy. He had been reclining on the floor, his back against the wall. The otters were sleeping, curled into a single mound of brown fur.

“I'm sorry,” he said, rising quickly and reaching for his large black athletic bag.

“It's okay. No rush.” She patted her hair again. Thirty-five dollars and Norman doesn't even notice.

They walked together around the water tank, heading for the exit. Except for George, who was washing down the penguins' rocks with a garden hose, they were the only people left in the building. The fish swam silently behind the glass above them.

“You know, I could sell you a season's pass,” she said as they approached the door. “It would save you a lot of money. You could just come and go as you please. During our regular hours, I mean.”

He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple moving up and down. His eyes remained fastened on the exit door. “I don't think that will be necessary, ma'am.”

She hated being called “ma'am.” Sometimes the young school children called her that when they were looking for a washroom. Old-maid teachers were called “ma'am.” Not a woman barely into her thirties who once left her husband behind to spend a week in Jamaica on her own. She remembered the trip and shuddered deliciously. If Norman only knew everything she had done down there.

“What do you mean, it won't be necessary?” They were almost at the double glass doors.

“I don't know how much longer I'll be able to come here,” the young man explained. He stepped aside as she unlocked the door for him. The sky had turned grey; fog was drifting in from the harbour, bringing with it a light misty rain.

“Why?” she asked. “You moving away? Going off to school?” Her voice became hard-edged with sarcasm. “You're not going to get married or something stupid like that, are you?”

Stepping through the door without replying, he walked slowly towards the subway stop across the open plaza. She shouted at him above the noise of the wind and of an aircraft making its tight turn over the city, “Hey, what's your name anyway?”

But he continued walking, and she stood in the doorway, watching him until he disappeared through the subway entrance.

Inside, the blond young man rode the escalator down to darkness in silence. He entered the platform on the Bowdoin side and waited for the inbound train that would carry him to Government Centre and connect to the Green Line.

The station, its dark and dirty walls relieved only by defaced posters of aquatic life, was deserted. With the aquarium closed for the day, outbound express trains would no longer stop at the aquarium. The schoolchildren who had left the aquarium before him had boarded an inbound train carrying them to the downtown hub.

As the young man sat slumped on the bench, the last outbound train to stop at the aquarium roared into the station and squealed to a halt. A voice scratched the air from a hidden loudspeaker, its message unintelligible. The blank faces of commuters outbound for Wood Island, Suffolk Downs and Beachmont looked out at the blond young man without seeing him.

They were showing the same interest in his presence and appearance as they had in the poster of the barracuda behind his bench. It was one of many posters in the station, promoting the New England Aquarium by illustrating some of its notorious residents.

The illustration behind the young man on the bench was defaced. Thick black ink had been used to sketch glasses over the barracuda's eyes, and a Groucho Marx mustache had been drawn above its severe mouth—absurdities that mocked the animal's evil gaze and menacing shape. Something else, phallic and just as absurd but more threatening, dangled from midway along the fish's belly.

The commuter riders on the outbound train glanced at the wall, the defaced poster and the tired young man slumped on the bench. A few of them, who knew of the activities that took place in the aquarium station after hours, smirked or frowned at the sight of his graceful body and sensitive features, alone on the bench. Waiting. Inviting.

A whistle sounded. The train left the station, and the young man, his eyes brimming with tears for tragedies both recent and distant in his mind, leaned his head back.

He was no longer alone.

Across the tracks a figure stood watching the young, lean body whose large black athletic bag lay at his feet. Alvin Chadwick grinned. He had stepped off the outbound train too late to try his luck with the school kids. But this might be better. This might be good.

Alvin wore black leather pants, which wrapped his lithe, sinuous figure in a second skin. His thick brown hair was cropped squarely across the back of his neck. Nervously, his hands, the fingers long and slender, found his mouth and stroked his lips. His tongue emerged and withdrew. He looked carefully left and right, then walked quickly away, tracing an imaginary perfectly straight line in the direction of the exit and across the tracks to the inbound side of the station.

The young man on the bench remained motionless, his head tossed back and his eyes closed. Once, then twice, his body shook with a repressed sob.

Alvin Chadwick descended the stairs and walked cautiously behind the figure in the light jacket, faded jeans and sneakers. Alvin's fingers rubbed nervously together. He felt his heart quicken and nervous excitement race through his body, a rush of adrenalin, the familiar thrill.

He approached the young man on the bench and stood for a moment looking around. The subway station was deserted. There was no sound of an inbound train. He admired the boy's face, the smooth ivory complexion, the nose narrow and perfectly sculpted, the forehead sensitive and high. Good-looking, Alvin thought, and his hand dropped momentarily to the crotch of his leather pants and stroked the rising presence there.

So beautiful. And so sad. So in need of tenderness and love.

He walked quickly and silently to the figure on the bench and stood behind it, his hands poised over the head of fine blond hair. He stroked it gently.

“Are we sad?” Alvin Chadwick said gently. “Do we need someone to cheer us up?”

The eyes opened abruptly, clear and blue, shiny with tears. They stared up at Alvin Chadwick's angular face in surprise. The young man began to move, but Alvin's hands dropped to his shoulders and chest, stroking as they went, and his mouth went to the side of the young man's head. “I can make you happy,” he said in a throaty whisper. “So happy.” And he inserted his tongue in the young man's ear.

In an explosion of motion the blond young man threw Alvin Chadwick's arms away from his body, leaped up and twisted to face Alvin, his back to the subway tracks.

Alvin spread his arms in an open gesture. “Did I surprise you?” he asked sweetly. “I'm sorry if I surprised you. You just looked so sad and alone sitting there. And so pretty.”

The blond young man stood, his legs apart, breathing heavily. He looked wildly around the deserted station, then drew his arm across his eyes.

Alvin began to move from behind the bench. “Tell me what's wrong,” he cooed. Again his hand dropped to the crotch of his leather pants, which strained more than ever to contain the flesh within. “Come to Mummy.” The smile widened, the voice dropped in tone, heavily seductive. “I'll catch if you'll pitch.”

He watched the expression on the face of the blond young man change from fear to understanding. The young man swallowed once. His hands flexed, opening and closing. His eyes dropped to the park bench between them. Alvin's hand reached to unbutton his shirt, and he glanced towards the other end of the subway platform. “There's a quiet place, an empty room, down there,” he said as he moved around the bench. “I'll show it to you. The decor is a little tacky, but it's
such
a convenient location. . . .”

In two steps the blond young man reached the bench again. Keeping his eyes on Alvin, he stretched out his arm to grasp the black athletic bag, lifted it from the floor and set it heavily on the other end of the bench, away from Alvin.

He began unzipping the bag, watching Alvin carefully.

“Toys, have we?” Alvin lisped. “Oh, I love toys.” His voice became even more outrageous, almost a self-parody. “Say, you wouldn't have a spare jockstrap in there for
me
, would you? An extra-large, naturally.”

The first rumble of an inbound train echoed in the distance.

Alvin took another step. “What's your name, sweetie? Mine's Alvin. Can you believe it? My mother, bless her soul, must have had a thing for a singing chipmunk.”

He froze in his place, horrified and unbelieving. His frightened gaze flew from the ugly weapon the young man withdrew from the athletic bag to the same clear, blue eyes that had opened wide less than a minute ago.

“My God,” Alvin whispered. “You don't need that. Listen, if I offended you, I'm sorry, really.”

The blond young man raised the gun to waist level. His left hand moved spasmodically on the wooden grip, and a spent red shell flew out to clatter and roll across the concrete floor.

The sound of the inbound train grew louder within the tunnel, an animal loudness full of motion and fire.

“Look, please don't,
P L E A S E D O N ' T
!” Alvin screamed.

The first blast destroyed Alvin Chadwick's neck as he twisted his head away. With the action of a puppet whose strings had been cut, he collapsed across the bench on his back, his arms and legs outstretched.

With another quick pull, the spent shell flew out of the gun, and the young man stepped closer to the body. From barely an arm's reach away he lowered the stunted barrel of the shotgun to the front of the glove-soft, black leather pants—which had been Alvin Chadwick's pride—down to the place where the legs met in a hand-crafted codpiece, the flesh there no longer tumescent and threatening. As the roar of the incoming subway train grew louder, he closed his eyes and pulled the trigger again.

Only the barracuda on the poster watched it all through the horn-rimmed glasses sketched over its eyes.

“We know him, the victim,” Bernie Lipson was saying to Joe McGuire. “The guys over at vice know him. Soon as we put his name on the line, we got a playback. Real gearbox, he was.”

McGuire stood looking down at the body of Alvin Chadwick sprawled across the subway bench. The concrete floor was painted in congealing blood, a sight he found neither shocking nor particularly interesting. It was the effect of the shotgun blast to the front of Chadwick's pants that attracted his attention.

“Blew his balls off,” McGuire said, shaking his head. “Jesus, what a mess.”

“Doitch says he was already dead,” Lipson observed. The overweight medical examiner was a few feet away, packing his instruments back into his bag. Uniformed cops and ID men stood around in small groups, separated by the subway trains, which continued to roar by a hastily erected plastic barrier at the edge of the station platform.

“Thing is,” Lipson went on, “the guys at vice say he was harmless, this Chadwick. Not one of your violent screamers. Did a couple of terms for molesting minor boys, just a little ass petting or quick B.J.'s in an alleyway. Got him for indecent exposure in front of some little kids once. But he wouldn't get violent, especially with somebody his age and size.” The detective shrugged. “Doesn't sound like self-defense to me.”

“Sure as hell isn't, when you blast him in the crotch after you've practically blown his head off,” McGuire looked at Lipson. “Think our boy's switched from priests to faggots?”

One of the uniformed cops approached McGuire. He kept his eyes away from Alvin Chadwick's remains, lying within the perimeter of his own blood, and from the chalked outline on the concrete floor. An outbound subway train entered the station and roared through without stopping. The cop waited until the noise faded before speaking.

“You wanted to talk to me, Lieutenant?”

McGuire looked up at the cop, pink-cheeked and with a neatly trimmed black mustache above a firmly set mouth. You look good, kid, McGuire said silently to the cop. Look real tough. Christ, I'm calling a cop in his twenties “kid,” he thought. How old am I anyway?

“You the first one here?” McGuire asked.

“Yes sir,” the cop answered. He pulled out his notebook. “Received call at 5:31 p.m. from one James Hannaford, M.B.T.A. motorman, regarding alleged body on inbound side of Aquarium subway station. Arrived at approximately 5:40 p.m. to discover John Doe remains. Sealed off station, secured area. No apparent witnesses, no suspects. Called your squad immediately in accordance with directive number 15217 from Captain Kavander regarding all shotgun assaults upon civilians in the greater Boston area.” He flipped the book closed.

“You didn't check for a pulse?” McGuire asked, his eyebrows arched.

The young cop appeared flustered. “Well, no sir, it was apparent to me—”

“Forget it.” McGuire waved the cop's embarrassment away and turned to Lipson. “Three priests and a faggot,” he said. “What do you figure?”

“Sounds like a joke you'd hear down at the archdiocese.”

“Maybe Deeley has the punch line.”

“Think we should call him on this one?”

“No, I don't,” McGuire snapped. Then, in a softer tone, “What do you figure he was doing down here? Not this guy,” he said, indicating Chadwick's body. “The kid. With the gun.”

His partner shrugged. “Catching a train, I guess. I don't know.”

“But it's not a line end. The others, they were the end of a line, like the kid just got on and rode it until he had to get off. There's nothing around here except the pier, couple of hotels, the aquarium. Let's get some teams down here. We'll work out sectors, get everything covered. Somebody had to see him come down. Maybe they saw him here on the platform. He might even live nearby. Talk to the trainmen who came through between five and five-thirty.”

Lipson nodded. “Where you going to be?” he asked.

“Back at the squad room,” McGuire answered, lost in thought. He was staring down at the remains of Alvin Chadwick. Walked right up to him, lowered the gun, and blew his balls off, McGuire said to himself. Jesus, what makes him so Goddamn angry?

No one at Government Centre noticed the blond young man with the oversized athletic bag as he boarded an outbound Green Line train. He walked silently to a corner of the car and wedged himself between a window and an insurance actuary, who sat reading
The Wall Street Journal
and who didn't look up from his paper, not even to stand as the train pulled into Kenmore station, where he exited.

Most of the passengers, including a large number of laughing Boston University students, left the train at Kenmore, a station where the line split into three directions. Boston College and Cleveland Circle were the two nearest terminals. The train on which the blond young man still rode continued further west to Riverside.

He had been as unaware of the insurance actuary and the sloppily dressed students as they were of him. He leaned against the glass, hoping he wasn't going to be sick to his stomach again. In an alleyway off State Street he had been ill behind a stack of cardboard boxes and had emerged, trembling and perspiring, to see the police vehicles roar by, their sirens howling and their drivers shouting unheard threats to the rush-hour Boston traffic.

At Riverside he left the train and walked into fresh, cool, moist spring air delicately spiced with the salt of the ocean. He turned the collar of his jacket up, swung the heavy bag to his other arm and set out along the shoulder of the suburban road.

I will go where my feet and fortune carry me, he told himself. He was beyond so much now. Beyond fear and guilt, beyond questioning and remorse. He saw himself as an arrow launched from a bow, moving swiftly towards an unknown and unseen end, buffeted and staggered by crosswinds but continuing on, rising, arcing, falling.

Ahead, at the corner near a gas station and convenience store, the lights of a telephone booth glowed softly in the mist. The young man entered it and, after resting a moment or two against the side of the booth with his head on his arm, searched in his pocket for a coin.

“Nothing.”

Janet Parsons dropped the file on the table in front of McGuire. Bernie Lipson and Ralph Innes were standing at the wall map, sectoring the area to be swept by search teams through the night. Eddie Vance was seated against the wall, transferring data into a book on his lap.

“Nobody saw a thing?”

Janet shook her head. “We've talked to everybody in a two-block area of the place. The hotel staff, the souvenir sellers, the parking-lot attendants, the staff at the aquarium. One guy, a caretaker at the aquarium, said there was a blond kid there most of the day, but he's something of a regular. Gave us the name of some ticket seller he said left with the kid. We called her and she said she'd seen him hail a cab, so it couldn't be him.” Janet shrugged. “What the hell do we do now?”

“We know he didn't leave on the subway,” McGuire said. “The last inbound stopped at five-fourteen. The next train to pass was at five-eighteen, an outbound. Nobody remembers seeing a thing. The five twenty-five inbound, that's who found Chadwick.”

“Nobody ever notices anything on the subway,” Janet commented, sitting on the edge of McGuire's desk. “They're all either zombies, or their heads are buried in a newspaper.”

The fabric of her skirt stretched tightly across her thighs, and he could see the line of her panties under the cloth.

“You want to take a picture, Joe?”

He glanced up to see her watching him, a smirk creasing her face. “What?” he said.

“I said, do you want to take a picture.” The smirk widened into a smile. “You were staring, Joe.”

“Oh.” He busied himself with Mel Doitch's medical report. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

She slid off the desk and smoothed her skirt. “Sure as hell were.”

“Look, Janet, I'm tired.” He smiled at her. “Okay? Don't take offence.”

“Who said I was offended?” She leaned over to look directly into his eyes. “You sleeping here again tonight?”

He tilted his head at a cot in the corner of the room. “After I visit the hospital.”

“Take it easy then, okay?” She glanced in Vance's direction, and asked, “Any response yet about Mr. Public Relations?”

McGuire shook his head, and she straightened. “See you in the morning, Joe,” she said and left the room, her jacket thrown over her shoulder. Ralph Innes stopped speaking to Bernie Lipson long enough to watch her leave, his eyes at the level of her hips.

He felt better. He always felt better afterwards. Opening the door of the booth, he stepped back into the night mist, moving carefully along the shoulder of the road, facing the oncoming traffic.

The bag was growing heavier in his hand, and he considered tossing it and its contents into the small stretches of woods that appeared out of the mist, leaving it in the undergrowth and walking alone in the direction of the sun. But he knew he couldn't. It would make him a fugitive; it would be like St. Paul abandoning the believers on the road. Or a child might find it and cause injury.

No, it is a part of me, he told himself. As much as my hands, my eyes, my soul. It is demanding and it weighs heavily upon me like the burden of belief in a land of unbelievers.

But oh, he wished he could pray. He wanted so much to pray.

McGuire told himself the pillow was larger or softer or positioned differently. That is why she looks shrunken, he thought. She couldn't have changed so much in so short a time.

“How does it feel to be the highlight of someone's day?” she asked behind a forced smile.

“Always nice to know you're needed,” McGuire answered. He removed the withered flowers from her vase and dropped them into a wastebasket, replacing them with the fresh bouquet of roses he had brought. Gloria looked down at the discarded flowers with a sad, wistful expression.

“I didn't think you would come today,” she said when he had settled in the chair beside her bed.

“Why not?”

“Because you're so busy. I can tell you're busy. Your voice changes, and you talk more like . . . like a cop I guess.”

“It's a round-the-clock thing. I'm sleeping on a cot in the squad room. Kavander's putting the pressure on.”

“You got . . .” she stammered. “You got the biggest story to hit Boston since the Kennedys. How . . . how long can you stay and talk to me?”

“As long as you want.”

She smiled sadly. “No, Joe. No, you can't stay that long.”

“Well, I'll stay until the nurse comes with your injection, anyway.”

“I've already had it.” She cocked her head to look directly at him. “I'm on demand now. Like a junkie. I just say ‘Shoot me up' and they pour on the morphine.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “That bad, huh?”

“That bad.” Her eyes lost their focus and drifted from his. “I was thinking, Joe. It was unfair of me to ask you to do that. I mean, look after the funeral service and all that. . . .”

“No,” he blurted. “No, it's not. I'm going to do it. In all the craziness of this priest thing, it makes sense. I'll do it, Gloria. Organ music, champagne for the nurses, the whole works. Whatever you want.”

“Really?” She looked back at him again, and this time the smile made her face glow from within. “That's wonderful. Thank you, Joe. Come . . . come here, please.”

He bent down and she reached a thin arm behind his head, pulling him closer to kiss him lightly on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered in his ear.

When he pulled away, his face was flushed with embarrassment.

“Let's talk,” she said, now animated. “Let's talk about old friends. And that funny apartment we had in Cambridge, the one with the sun room. And how the air felt in Hawaii, walking barefoot on the sand.”

Anne Murison lay in the darkened room, listening to her husband snore gently beside her and her own heart beating madly within her.

God, had she done the right thing? There was no way that nice young boy could have anything to do with the murders of the priests. He was frightened and lonely. She had heard about police interrogations. They would pick him up and throw him in a cell with perverts, then they would shout at him and abuse him. It would be horrible, it could take days before they realized they had the wrong person. So she just had to say the boy couldn't have been involved in that shooting in the subway.

She couldn't let them abuse someone who was so obviously innocent and who loved the otters that much. She just couldn't. Besides, he was so . . . pretty. She smiled and closed her eyes.

And almost immediately opened them again. What if the police checked all the cabs? They did things like that. On the news tonight the announcer had said this was the largest manhunt in Boston history. Hundreds of police officers were working around the clock, looking for the priest killer. What if they came back and asked her again? Or made her take truth serum? Or a lie detector test? She might say something she didn't mean to say. Or she could be arrested for . . . what? Obstructing justice? Mischief?

She suppressed a sob and rolled towards her husband, grasping him in her arms. His snoring ceased, but he didn't awake.

If they came back to talk to her, she would tell them the truth.

But the young man who liked to watch the otters, she knew was innocent.

She only hoped the police would agree.

“McGuire?”

“Yeah, Vance.” McGuire didn't look up at the overweight detective standing next to his desk.

“I'm calling it a night. Going home, catch a few hours. Should be back on the job by eight.”

“That's truly wonderful, Vance.” McGuire glanced at his wristwatch. It was just after midnight.

“I've completed an analysis of all Remington 870 shotgun sales within the greater Boston area during the past six-month period according to sales records from one hundred and thirty-eight reporting retailers. You know we're tracking ownership with teams?”