Death Goes on Retreat

by Carol Anne O'Marie

  Moreno buried his face in his towel. Water ran in rivulets from his deafening Hawaiian print trunks down his hairy legs. Despite the heat, he shivered. “Hi, Sister,” he said finally.

  Mary Helen watched him dig the towel into his ears, then run his fingers through his thinning hair.

  “What are you up to?” he asked with just a hint of suspicion in his voice.

  “Me?” She feigned surprise. “Just trying to keep cool.” She glanced up at the cloudless blue sky.

  “Is that so?” His lips twitched the way they did when he was about to make a joke.

  Well, the joke wouldn’t be at her expense! She put on her most businesslike face. “I was on my way to the trash.” She lifted both hands, still full, and hurried off, hoping he’d stay put.

  When she returned, she was relieved to see the towel spread out and Ed Moreno lying on it, facedown. His muscular shoulders and the balding spot on his crown were both beginning to redden. If she didn’t hurry, he’d be burned to a crisp before she was half through questioning him.

  The problem, of course, was how to settle down casually next to him. There were no movable chairs around, and squatting on the soft grass seemed impractical. Getting down would be fine. Getting up was the trick!

  Father Moreno must have sensed her presence. He lifted his head and squinted against the sun. “Can I do something for you?” he asked, rolling over and up into a sitting position. It wasn’t the perfect setting for a quiet conversation, but it beat talking to his back.

  “I was curious about your relationship with Greg Johnson,” Mary Helen blurted out, unable at the moment to think of a more tactful way to put it.

  Ed Moreno gave a surprised laugh, “Anyone ever accuse you of being coy?” he asked.

  Mary Helen’s face warmed. “Not too often,” she admitted.

  Moreno struggled to his feet. “Let’s sit,” he said, and pointed toward a bench half hidden under a towering sycamore. A shrine to St. Francis hung from the tree’s trunk. The gentle saint’s hand was raised in blessing. A good omen, Mary Helen thought, settling herself beside the damp priest.

  “You want to know about my relationship with the Johnson kid,” he said, his eyes not meeting hers. “Well, there wasn’t any. Next question?”

  After years of teaching eighth-graders Mary Helen was immune to flip answers. “Why not?” she shot back.

  Moreno’s head jerked up. “Why not what?” Obviously he was stalling.

  “If the boy worked with you, why didn’t you have some sort of relationship with him?”

  “When you say ‘work’ with Greg Johnson, you are using the term work lightly, Sister. Very lightly,” he replied, avoiding her question entirely.

  Mary Helen perked up. “He was lazy, then?”

  “That guy had lazy down to a science.” Father Moreno draped one leg over an arm of the bench and wriggled his bare toes in the sunshine. “When he first came to help out at Juvenile Hall, I thought he was just warming up. But then when he never really did start to perk, I got concerned. He talked a lot, but never really did anything. You know the kind of guy I mean?” He raised his hand like an old-fashioned cigar store Indian. “Heap big smoke. Very little fire.”

  Mary Helen nodded. Indeed she did. Over the years she’d run into quite a few people who fit the description.

  “Then, I thought he was just one of those guys that liked to hear himself talk, and it was harmless. You know—just a lot of gab. And most of the kids in Juvie have plenty of time. They aren’t going anywhere, so to sit and listen to a guy B.S. was, I thought, just a different way to pass the time.

  “He was a clean-cut, open-looking guy and as I say, he was just talking, right?”

  “What did he talk about?”

  “Anything, everything. What kinds of programs he was going to start. What he was going to do for the kids. He was everybody’s pal. Knew most of the kids by name. So far, so good. Right, Sister?”

  Mary Helen nodded, waiting for the but. It wasn’t long in coming.

  “But he didn’t deliver.” Ed Moreno’s face hardened like a fist. “That was the thing about him. It was almost diabolical. He’d promise the kids things, get them all revved up, give them a taste of hope and friendship. And then he wouldn’t come through. These kids are experts on adult betrayal. The last thing they need is another adult letting them down, especially one who represents the Church.”

  Moreno’s mouth took on a bitter twist. “And that ain’t all,” he said in an attempt to sound lighthearted. “When Greg started to make innuendos about what I did with those young boys in my office, I went nuts. It’s absolutely untrue, of course, but it would end up my word against his. You know what even any hint of impropriety would do to my work with the kids. And he had no right. That bastard . . .” He caught himself. “Excuse my language”—he gave a short, cold laugh—“but when I think of Johnson and the harm he did in just six short weeks, I could kill him.

  “But I didn’t,” he added quickly. “Not that I didn’t want to. And the feeling was mutual.”

  Mary Helen raised her eyebrows.

  “That’s right, Sister. I think the kid wanted to kill me as much as I wanted to ace him. Maybe more so.”

  “Why’s that, Ed?”

  Moreno turned toward her and with one big hand gripped the back of the bench. “I called his bluff, that’s why. I was counting on the kids at Juvie and the arch to back me up. They did, too. So, I’m the one who finally had the guts to tell him that I didn’t think he had a vocation to the priesthood. Maybe to politics, but not priesthood. The dedication, the responsibility, the call. It’s hard to put your finger on, Sister, but something was missing. Something necessary. So, I figured I’d do us all a favor—the Church, his fellow priests, God knows, his future parishioners.”

  He pushed back a strand of wet hair from his forehead. “It’s not as if he had a sterling seminary career. Stories get around. When I said something to him, he looked as if he’d just bitten down on something sweet with an exposed nerve. You know what I mean?”

  Mary Helen winced.

  “At first, I thought he was going to cry,” Ed continued. “Then I caught a flicker of what looked like relief in his eyes. But, by the end of the week when he left to return to the seminary, those same innocent blue eyes had hardened. He gave me a look when he said good-bye that burned with such hatred, such absolute loathing, it gave me gooseflesh.”

  And it still does, Mary Helen thought, noticing that, right now, despite the heat, Ed Moreno’s bare legs were covered with bumps!

  “So, Sister.” Ed stood and pulled down the legs of his trunks. “If anybody was to kill anybody in this relationship, as you call it, I think Greg Johnson would kill me. Not the other way around. Does that answer the question to your satisfaction?”

  “I guess it does,” Mary Helen said. “Thank you.”

  The short, wiry man strode toward St. Philomena’s Hall, and the sun moving through the leaves cast delicate shadows across the damp spot where he had sat.

  Near Mary Helen, a metallic hummingbird whirred and darted in and out of an enormous snowball hydrangea blossom. Such a peaceful place, she thought, watching Ed Moreno disappear into the building. The perfect spot for contemplation. It seemed so out of place to be contemplating only betrayal and murder!

  “So there you are, old dear.”

  Mary Helen’s heart jolted. She hadn’t heard anyone approaching. She made a conscious effort to calm herself. After all, it was only Eileen, but it could have been anyone.

  “I’m so sorry.” Eileen studied her. “I must have startled you. Your face is the color of cold Cream of Wheat. Look.” She pointed to Mary Helen’s hands. “Even your knuckles are white. You didn’t hear me coming, did you?”

  Mary Helen knew where this conversation was leading.

  “My mind was a hundred miles away, thank you,” she said. “I would have heard you if I had been paying attention.”

  “I swear, old dear, you should get
those ears of yours checked.”

  “My hearing is just fine, if you please, Eileen. If some people only spoke distinctly instead of mumbling through a mouthful of mush.”

  Eileen said something that Mary Helen didn’t have the humility to admit she missed. “How did you do with the monsignor?” she asked brightly.

  Eileen sat down, avoiding the print of Ed Moreno’s wet trunks. “He really is a lovely gentleman,” she began, “and everything about him shouts ‘innocent,’ I’m sure, but we’ve an old saying back home.” She rolled her eyes knowingly. “ ‘A saint in the face may be a fiend in the heart.’ ”

  Mary Helen’s mouth went dry. Had Eileen stumbled onto the murderer? “Are you suggesting—”

  “Of course not.” Eileen cut her off. “Not for a minute. I was just reminding us that appearances can be deceiving.”

  “Did you suppose we didn’t know that?” Mary Helen grouched.

  After a short but dangerous silence, Eileen gave a long-suffering smile. Mary Helen felt ashamed. This murder on what should be her retreat was affecting her nerves and she was taking it out on Eileen.

  Waving aside Mary Helen’s attempt at apology, Eileen hurried on with the account of her meeting with Monsignor McHugh. His connection to Greg Johnson hinged chiefly on his long-standing friendship with Greg’s mother.

  “He’s known her for years,” Eileen said, swatting at an insect buzzing close to her face. “Since both children were little. And to tell the truth, I don’t think the monsignor had much contact with either Greg or his sister. Certainly, he has no motive for killing Greg, or at least no motive that I uncovered.”

  Mary Helen’s heart dropped. Not that she actually suspected the monsignor of murder. It was just that they were nearly through the list of unlikely suspects, and so far they were stumped. Soon Sergeant Little would have to let them go home.

  She sighed, knowing she’d have to let go. After all, solving murders was not her job. It was the job of the police. In this case, the Sheriff’s Department. It’s important to know—how had that popular song put it?—when to hold, know when to fold. She’d just have to fold. Although unfinished business rubbed at her like sand in a bathing suit.

  “The monsignor did admit that over the years Mrs. Johnson has become a bit obsessive about religion.” Eileen was still talking.

  “So, you think the monsignor is innocent?” Mary Helen asked, wondering what she’d missed. The look on Eileen’s face told her.

  “Does he think that Marva Johnson may have killed her own son?”

  Eileen frowned. “I really am getting concerned about your hearing,” she muttered, and Mary Helen chose not to hear that remark.

  “A mother killing her son seems so unnatural, although we both know such things do happen.”

  “I told you.” By now, Eileen’s voice had an edge on it that Mary Helen did not much like, although, she reminded herself, Eileen’s nerves were frayed too. Turn-about is fair play. If the whole business wasn’t solved soon, they’d both have the screaming meemies!

  “I told you,” Eileen repeated, “that the monsignor said he tried to counsel Marva several times, especially about her disproportionate disappointment when Greg left the seminary. But he’s a busy man and she was a difficult woman, especially as she became older.

  “None of us gets any easier, I guess.” Eileen gave Mary Helen a knowing glance.

  Mrs. Johnson was probably no piece of cake when she was young, Mary Helen thought, knowing full well that old age doesn’t bring on eccentricities, it simply accentuates them.

  “And to tell you the truth,” Eileen said, narrowing her eyes, “the monsignor’s fuse isn’t getting any longer in his old age either.”

  “Did you get the rough edge of his tongue?” Mary Helen asked, concerned. She needn’t have bothered. One look at Eileen and she knew better.

  “Even a monsignor is smart enough not to cross an Irishwoman!” Eileen winked. “To be perfectly honest, I was as sweet as sugar. As we say at home, ‘soft words butter no parsnips, but they won’t harden the heart of the cabbage either.’ ”

  “Are you calling the monsignor a cabbage?” Mary Helen couldn’t resist.

  “Whatever he is, he is convinced, and he convinced me,” Eileen said, “that both he and Mrs. Johnson are innocent of any part in Greg’s death. In fact, the monsignor ended our conversation by stating, quite emphatically, that Marva Johnson is—how did he put it?— ‘nothing less than the salt of the earth!’ ”

  Mary Helen leaned her head back against the wooden bench. The sun, inching its way west, left one end of the swimming pool dark with shadows.

  The salt of the earth, is she? Mary Helen thought, listening to the soft pee-ur of a tiny phoebe. And we all know what happens when the salt loses its flavor. It is good for nothing, but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot!

  Next to her, Eileen was checking off names on her fingers. “Do you figure Ed Moreno is innocent?” she asked, two remaining fingers still sticking up in the air like a victory sign.

  Mary Helen nodded. Eileen folded down her middle finger. “Then, there’s only one priest left.” Her face wrinkled. “I can hardly imagine that handsome, charming Tom Harrington is our murderer, Mary Helen. We must be missing something.”

  “Murderers come in all shapes and sizes,” Mary Helen said, bolstering her own resolve, as well as Eileen’s. “Nobody ever said they must be ugly and boorish, now, did they? And who said it was one of the priests? We haven’t even considered Beverly yet.”

  From the expression on Eileen’s face, Mary Helen knew she was not looking forward to a confrontation with the cook.

  The two nuns spotted Father Tom Harrington by the ice machine on St. Philomena’s porch. The frozen-eyed statue of the saint, standing amid rocks and cactus, blandly watched the priest fill a plastic bucket.

  “How-do, Father Tom?” Mary Helen called.

  The priest made a slow, almost sleepy, turn toward them.

  “Hi, Sisters.” He treated them to his famous crooked grin. His curly hair was so tousled that Mary Helen wondered if he’d just rolled out from a nap.

  “I’m about to fix myself a drink.” The liquid brown eyes focused on them. “Won’t you join me for a little happy hour? It’s four o’clock somewhere, you know.”

  Mary Helen glanced at her wristwatch. They still had an hour to go in Santa Cruz. From the odor of his breath and the swimming look in his eye, Mary Helen suspected that Father Harrington was clocking his happy hour on New York time.

  “Won’t you join me,” he invited with a deep, theatrical bow.

  If that’s what it takes to get this job done, Mary Helen thought.

  “We’d be delighted.” Eileen must be thinking the same thing. She accepted for them both.

  Tom’s leather traveling bar was set up on the bureau top. He had moved a small picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help to make room for the case, which seemed terribly out of place in the bare, almost monastic room.

  “What will it be, Sisters?” he asked with largesse.

  One look at the bureau top betrayed their limited choice. A bottle of bourbon, a bottle of Scotch, and a bottle of vodka stood in front of the mirror like three musketeers awaiting battle. Spying tonic water, Mary Helen chose the vodka. Eileen followed suit. Besides, Mary Helen thought, taking the first sip, vodka is supposedly odorless.

  Perfectly at ease, Tom sank into the room’s one easy chair. Mary Helen took the straight-backed desk chair and, good sport that she was, Eileen perched on the edge of the bed.

  “Sláinte!” Tom cried out in Gaelic, raising his glass. The two returned his toast.

  “Nasty business this.” Tom examined the shiny toes of his Gucci loafers. “What do you two make of it?”

  “That’s what we wanted to ask you.” Mary Helen smiled her kindest smile. “Who do you think had reason to kill Greg Johnson?”

  Father Tom’s eyes came into sharp focus. He was not nearly as “iffy” as she’d first thought. �
��Do you mean who among those of us who were at St. Colette’s the night he died?”

  “Well, yes.” Mary Helen nodded.

  The priest’s face flushed and his lips pressed into an angry cut. “Are you suggesting that one of us did it?”

  “Not really. What I’m actually trying to do is to prove that one of us did not.”

  “Isn’t that a little bassackwards?” he asked with a disdain that made Mary Helen bristle.

  “Perhaps,” she said, struggling to keep her tone even, “but I thought that if I proved to Sergeant Little’s satisfaction that none of us was guilty, we’d be able to go home.”

  “So, Sister, you aren’t perfectly content to be sequestered in this idyllic spot where you can contemplate God in nature and in your fellowman?” He drained his glass.

  “Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Father,” she said stiffly, and watched him struggle before the arrogance slowly faded from the handsome face.

  “You’re right,” he said softly. “Some would say it’s the booze talking, but anyone who really knows will tell you it’s me talking, uninhibited by this.” He rattled the ice cubes in his glass, then rose and refilled it.

  “What was your question? Who had a reason to kill Greg Johnson?” He gave Mary Helen that crooked smile, then blew back a curly lock that had fallen across his forehead. “And, of course, you don’t mean ‘who,’ you mean ‘did you’ kill him? Right?”

  “Not entirely.” Mary Helen wanted her options kept open.

  With a grunt Tom positioned himself back in the easy chair and stared pensively out the small bedroom window. Just beyond it a clump of periwinkle shimmered in the sun. The heat in the room was stifling.

  “I can’t speak for the others, naturally,” Tom said, taking a long swallow from his glass, “but as for me, I had no reason to kill the kid. Not that I knew him all that well. He only worked for me for a couple of weeks. The archbishop thought communications might be his bag. He communicated all right! With everything in a skirt. It got so that none of the secretaries felt comfortable around him.

  “I took him out for a drink a couple of times after work and tried to tell him, man to man, to knock it off.” Harrington’s face flushed. “You know what that little twit—who, by the way, could match me drink for drink—had the nerve to tell me?” He stared, enraged by the very remembrance. “That I was nothing but an aging souse. He threatened to write a letter to the San Francisco Catholic denouncing me as nothing but a glibtongued alcoholic. Wouldn’t Absolute Norm love that? And I think he would have done it, too, except that one of the secretaries threatened a sexual harassment suit.