“So nice of you to let us come.” Kate smiled reassuringly. Senhora Rubiero relaxed a bit.
“Please, sit,” she said, waving to a mohair couch against one wall of the small living room. The room matched the outside of the house. Though freshly polished and well-cared-for, it smelled unused. It was probably what another generation would have referred to as the parlor and used strictly for important visitors. In this house, Mary Helen figured, most of the living probably goes on in a warm, cozy kitchen.
“What lovely handiwork.” Mary Helen fingered one of the delicate doilies covering the arms and back of the couch. “Did you crochet these?” she asked.
“Yes, Sister.” The old woman blushed.
“Lovely.”
“Thank you.” Senhora Rubiero perched her squat body on the edge of an overstuffed chair across from Kate and Mary Helen.
There was an awkward moment of silence during which Mary Helen studied the woman. One glance told her that Senhora Rubiero was a no-nonsense person. Her black, laced shoes were definitely sensible and had been bought, no doubt, for comfort rather than style. A black jersey dress, properly pulled together in the front with a cameo pin, stretched across her shelflike bosom. The hem of the dress more than adequately covered the knees of her two sturdy legs. Besides the pin, her only touch of frivolity was a pair of earrings, if you could consider the small, gold balls frivolous.
Not a single gray hair escaped from the neatly rolled knot at the nape of her neck. They wouldn’t dare, Mary Helen thought, observing the wide, strong hands that had rolled them there. A broad gold wedding band assured the old nun that Senhora Rubiero was indeed a senhora.
This lady might blush, demur to nuns, and even be momentarily frightened of the police, but, underneath it all, she was one tough customer. Mary Helen liked her immediately. Eileen would have called it an instant feeling of kinship!
“Can I get you something to drink, to eat?” Senhora Rubiero spoke English haltingly, but very well. There would be no danger of misunderstanding. Whatever the woman had to say would be clearly understood. Mary Helen guessed she had probably come to this country as a young married woman.
“No, thank you, Senhora.” Kate answered for both of them. “We are here on official business. We would like to ask you some questions about your two nephews.”
At the mention of the two young men, Senhora Rubiero’s black eyes flashed anger. “Carlos and Jose—two young fools. Ah, my poor sister—their mother . . . I promise her I take care. But, the young stupidos. . .”
Mary Helen watched, fascinated, as the woman’s thick hands began to move as quickly and nimbly as her tongue. The subject of her nephews had completely taken away any inhibitions she might have had. She warmed to her subject.
“They come. They stay. They go. They say nothing. No hello. No good-bye. No Gracia, Tia. How you call? Ingrates? And, ah my poor sister. What should I tell her?”
She paused to breathe and wring her hands. Mary Helen found it difficult to tell whether she was more upset about the ingratitude of her two nephews or about reporting their absence to her sister.
“If only my Alberto was here,” she said, tapping her wedding ring. “He would take a care. They come home, eat, sleep, say nothing. But what is a poor woman to do? If only Alberto was here.” She blessed herself. Apparently, Alberto had gone to his eternal reward, one he had, no doubt, earned.
“I am only a woman,” she repeated, shaking her head sadly. Butler’s couplet rang through Mary Helen’s mind. “Women, you know, do seldom fail, to make the stoutest man turn tail.” This had, no doubt, been the case with Alberto and the nephews.
“I cannot go to these hang-outs.” She spat out the last two words.
Kate perked up. “Could you tell me about these hang-outs?” she asked, pulling a small notebook from her brown leather purse. “Where are they located? Who do the boys go there with?”
Senhora Rubiero’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know where they go. They never tell me, the tia. They go with other young fools . . . other solteiros.” Realizing that her two visitors did not understand her last word, Senhora Rubiero translated. “Solteiros. How you call? Bachelors—bachelors who never want to marry.”
Kate nodded. “Who were these others?” she asked, her pencil poised.
Senhora Rubiero ignored Kate’s question. She didn’t even seem to notice he poised pencil. Jockeying her ample hips into a more comfortable position, she continued. “When we come from the old country, we work hard, pay back our benefactors. Help our relatives back home.” Mary Helen recognized the familiar ring. A generation gap in any nationality sounds the same.
“Not like now. Now they think money comes with the sun. Fool around. Don’t care for family. Live together, boy and girl, without marry.”
Mary Helen could feel Kate stiffen at the “live together without marry” line. Direct hit, Mary Helen thought, remembering her dinner last night. The old woman paused dramatically. Obviously, she had given this lecture many times before. Most recently, probably, to her nephews.
“The Sister, she understand.” Senhora Rubiero wagged her head.
“Have you any idea who these friends are, Senhora?” Kate asked.
“Other young fools.” Senhora Rubiero’s eyes darted toward the phone. “I hear them talking. Luis, Tony, my friend Erma’s cousin Manuel, Leonel, Jose. He now calls himself Joe. Fernando, Salvador, Fatima’s boy, Angelo, some more I don’t know. They speak of Sebastiao. He will come, a savior. Save them, save Portugal. Madre de Deus.” She blessed herself. “Save them! Stupidos! Only work. Work to be saved. Hard work will save them. No savior.”
Sebastiao. There it was again. “Who did they think this Sebastiao would be?” Mary Helen asked.
The old woman shrugged “Crazy, si?”
“Luis, Tony, Manuel, Leonel, Jose, who calls himself Joe, Fernando, Salvador, and Angelo,” Kate read back from her note pad. “Do you have last names or phone numbers for any of these fellows?”
Senhora Rubiero pushed herself out of the overstuffed chair and waddled toward a back room.
“What do you make of it?” Mary Helen asked Kate as soon as the old woman had gone.
“If the last names jibe, these are the same people the professor helped, and at least four of them are at the college.” She shot a quick glance at Mary Helen. “Maybe we’ve hit upon the link. Maybe it’s this Sebastiao business.”
“For the men, perhaps—but Marina and Joanna? And why would someone murder Joanna?”
“Maybe both men and women belong to this—what should I call it?—cult. Or maybe Joanna was on to something. Maybe something rotten. Maybe that’s why Senhora Rubiero’s nephews have vanished, pronto. Afraid Joanna would have blown the whistle. And maybe one of them decided to make sure she wouldn’t.”
Mary Helen suppressed a grin. It amused her to hear this trim, well-dressed, cultured young lady talk like a cop.
“What I can’t figure is, if they were into something, something they all wanted, why kill the professor? Why destroy the goose that lays the golden egg?”
Mary Helen resisted the temptation to tell her that only a professora could lay eggs. “Perhaps the professor wasn’t all he was cracked up to be,” she said, remembering Leonel’s outburst. Calling your savior a devil, a filthy animal, a flesh-eater, and a bloodsucker could hardly be construed as complimentary.
She was just about to relate the incident to Kate when Senhora Rubiero reappeared in the doorway. She was carrying a small, flowered address book, well-worn at the edges, which she handed to Kate.
“By the way, Senhora,” Kate asked, “did you ever hear your nephew talking to any women? Marina or Joanna, perhaps?”
“If they talked with girls, I would not be so worried. Maybe marry, settle down.” The older woman shook her head sadly. “Now, some tea? Coffee?”
“No, thank you.” Kate rose from the couch. “We’re on duty, and I’d like to question some of these young men you have mentioned.” Senhora Rub
iero looked disappointed to be losing her audience.
“May I keep this for a few days?” Kate held up the address book.
“Si, Officer.” The Senhora bowed graciously and escorted her guests to the front door. “What numbers I need, I know.” She smiled broadly, every one of her strong, white teeth as straight as a die. Mary Helen ran her tongue across her own slightly overlapping front teeth. And I bet every single tooth in her mouth is hers, she thought, smiling back.
“That’s some old lady!” Kate flipped on the ignition in the Plymouth. “I was beginning to wonder if those two nephews might have disappeared out of self-defense.”
“Could be.” Grinning, Sister Mary Helen fastened her seat belt. “But that would not account for what happened to the others. Or for the reason Leonel is so concerned about their leaving—how did he put it?—‘poof, without even a good-bye.’ ”
Kate faced her passenger. “Leonel worried about the others leaving? Poof? You never mentioned that before!”
“I must have,” Mary Helen said quickly. She wouldn’t want Kate to think for one moment that she was withholding evidence. Why, she was just beginning to feel that they had struck up a bit of a partnership, and she, for one, was enjoying every minute of it. Not the murder part, of course, but the detecting. She didn’t want to be dropped. The old nun could feel her face redden. For a moment she felt ridiculous. But hadn’t someone once said, “If we err in our liking of detective stories, we err with Plato”? Well, if they hadn’t, they surely should have!
“I’m sure I told you.” She added a little emphasis. “Just before you picked up Leonel, he told me he was worried about some in the group the professor had brought to this country.” She glanced over at Kate. The young woman’s jaw was firm.
“Go on,” Kate said.
“Well, that’s all he said. Four of them were missing. Poof! And he was worried about Joanna.”
“Which four?”
“A Carlos and Jose. Those must be Mrs. Rubiero’s nephews. And two Manuels.”
“Is that everything you know?”
“Everything I can think of,” Mary Helen answered meekly, trying to erase the slit in the coroner’s seal from her mind. There was really no use getting into that.
After a few moments of silence, Kate pointed to her notebook and to Senhora Rubiero’s worn address book on the seat between them. “There must be hundreds of Tonys and Luises and Manuels in the Portuguese community,” she said. “First thing we’d better do is find out if we are talking about the same people. Check the book against the list in my notebook, will you please, Sister?” Relieved, Mary Helen picked up the two books. They were still partners.
They had just merged onto 280 heading toward the city when Mary Helen finished her checking. “The last names and phone numbers are the same. We are talking about the same people.” She didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad. On the one hand, she was glad that everything seemed to be narrowing down to a few young people Professor Villanueva had sponsored. She imagined that would make discovering the killer easier. On the other hand, she was sad that all the evidence was beginning to point to the murderer as being one of them, someone the sisters all knew. It seemed now she had been right about that from the beginning. The murderer was not some poor, demented psychotic who had wandered onto the hill, but someone who had been, or still was, at the college.
The two rode for several miles in a comfortable silence, each lost in her own thoughts. There wasn’t much traffic on a Saturday morning. A soft autumn sun on the Peninsula hit against the low, rolling hills to their left. It made little sparks of light bounce across the deep, black-blue water of Crystal Springs Lake. A small, green boat cut gently through the water—probably a Water Department caretaker making sure the lake was safe to supply the City with drinking water. The scene was so peaceful, so pastoral, Mary Helen forgot for a moment the horrors of the past few days.
“Look ahead.” Kate’s voice jarred her back into reality. She was pointing toward the city. “Fog!”
Sure enough. Ahead of them, San Francisco was wrapped in a cocoon of gray fog.
“I guess we had better head straight into that mess and up to the college to question Tony and Luis again.” Kate changed to the fast lane on the freeway. “Do you think they’ll be at work today?”
“I don’t see why not,” Mary Helen answered, remembering that she, too, wanted to talk to Tony.
“This time I think I’ll ask them about their connection with Dom Sebastiao. Maybe that’s the angle.”
“Maybe.” Mary Helen was distracted. Something about that Sebastiao bothered her. What was it? Something she had wanted to tell Kate.
“I think I’d better question Leonel again, too.” Kate glanced over at Mary Helen.
Leonel! That was it! Poor, volatile Leonel and his outbursts against the professor. That is what she had wanted to tell Kate when Senhora Rubiero had reappeared in the living room. Maybe “wanted to” was a bit too strong. Perhaps “felt she should” would be a more honest evaluation.
Quickly, Mary Helen related the incidents, carefully omitting to tell where she had run into Leonel. “And so you see, Kate,” she concluded, trying her best not to use her schoolmarm voice, “although I’m not sure why, some one of those fellows could have been so disillusioned with the professor that he ended up hating him enough to bludgeon him to death with his own statue.” Mary Helen gave a triumphant smile. But as soon as her last word echoed in her ears, she realized what she’d said. She hoped Kate hadn’t. She had.
“Like Leonel?” Kate’s mouth formed a hard, straight line.
“Like any one of them,” Mary Helen shot back, feeling a little as she felt when she miscounted the trump. “Leonel was the only one I heard express it.” She tried to recover.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“It didn’t seem significant.”
“You were afraid it would implicate Leonel, weren’t you?”
No, the old nun thought, not implicate, vindicate.
Sister Mary Helen waited several minutes before she thought it might be safe to speak. Long enough, she calculated, for two Irish tempers to cool down. She hoped she reckoned the cooling-down period correctly, because she liked Kate Murphy. “What I can’t figure out is Joanna’s connection,” she offered mildly.
“That’s a tough one,” Kate answered, quietly. “I know there must be some connection between the two crimes. We’re looking for a direct connection, something that will link the murderer with both Joanna and the professor. Now also with the Sebastiao business. Maybe we’re missing the real connection. Some indirect link we haven’t even noticed yet.”
Carefully, Kate veered the Plymouth over into the slow lane. She turned off the freeway at the first Daly City exit. “I’ll stop and give Denny a call,” she said, pulling into a gas station on her right. “I’ll ask him to meet me at the college in twenty minutes.” Kate checked her watch. “He can help me question these fellows again.” She rummaged through her purse for some change.
Sitting in the car, Mary Helen watched Kate in the phone booth. She had removed one earring and was talking rapidly. Probably explaining the whole interview with Senhora Rubiero to Inspector Gallagher. Mary Helen could just see him sitting back, loosening his tie, saying nothing, rolling his stubby cigar around in his mouth. Poor fellow probably couldn’t have shoved a word in sideways, even if he wanted to.
Small wisps of fog escaping from San Francisco blew into Daly City and whipped around the phone booth and parked car. Mary Helen felt the chill. She pulled her jacket tightly around her.
She stared at the large oil stain by the gas pump. It was slick and black against the gray cement. Small, round bubbles of water from the wet fog stood out on the surface. Hostile properties, she mused, staring at the oil resisting the moisture. The substances just don’t mix. Like the two murders—Professor Villanueva’s and Joanna’s. Her instincts told her something was off kilter. But what? The connection wasn’t r
ight. What had Kate said? “Maybe the connection is indirect.” Could there be two separate connections, two separate motives, like these two separate substances on the damp cement of the gas station—two that do not mix?
Or perhaps . . . A thought shot through her mind like an electric shock. It left her dazed and clammy cold. She hated to allow it in a second time, but she had to. Any detective worthy of her salt had to look at all the possibilities. Could it be possible that there were two different murderers? She swallowed hard.
“What’s the matter with you?” Kate jumped into the car and slammed the door. “You’re as white as a ghost. Are you okay?”
“I just had a horrible thought.” Mary Helen could hear the desolate ring in her own voice. How she hoped Kate would say she was wrong.
“What is it?” Kate asked.
“You said that maybe we were missing the connection between the two murders because it was an indirect one . . . one we never thought of . . . like two motives for murder. Well, one thing we have never really thought of at all is the possibility of two murderers!”
Kate said nothing. She started the car and zigzagged her way through the traffic toward Mount St. Francis College for Women.
Mary Helen stared out the car window. Immediately, she began to reason with God. Dear Lord, think of poor Therese. She’s on the seventh day of her novena, the one she began to catch one murderer of one victim. Now look what You are letting happen! Two murders, and now maybe two murderers! How, in heaven’s name, can You do that to poor, high-strung Therese!
Mary Helen was glad God seldom talked back, because she was pretty sure she knew what He would say. “Hold on! People murdering one another is not exactly the way I plan things! But relax, old dear, and stick with Me. We’ll work it out!” And she knew He was oh, so right.
Inspector Gallagher was waiting for them when they arrived at the college. Mary Helen spotted him immediately. His bald head stood out like a shiny buoy in the sea of slender, jeans-clad Saturday students gushing from the main entrance.
A Novena for Murder Page 13
