A Bitch Called Hope

by Lily Gardner

  “Are you confirming Jillian Oster’s story or denying it?” she said.

  “Sure,” he said. “I ripped her off. You happy?”

  “Last question. Did you know about your parents’ will?”

  He reached over and turned the tape recorder off. “I’m not answering any more of your questions. Fuck you. I’m getting my own lawyer.”

  Chapter 37

  Lennox drove from Pike Development back through the forest down to the Willamette River. The sky dimmed as she merged onto the Marquam Bridge. The river below was dark and wide. Lennox signaled and turned onto I-84, heading home. She was only doing her job. He could look past this time and forgive her. If he was the kind of a man who could forgive maybe they could get past today.

  That was the thing about hope: it blocked you from seeing the truth. The truth was Dan was still a suspect. A suspect with a helluva motive, whose truck most likely was the one that killed Gabe Makem. She was mooning over this guy? She needed her head examined.

  It started drizzling by the time she reached her exit. She would stop on the way home and pick up some wine, a carton of eggs. Get her dry cleaning. Try not to think.

  Alice was sitting on the sofa watching the shopping channel on television when Lennox got home. She was dressed in sweats. Her hair was unbrushed, her face patchy and flushed. There was no point asking her how her day was. Her day was like Lennox’s. Lennox said hello. Asked her if she’d eaten. No. If she wanted a glass of wine. No.

  Lennox turned on the lights as she walked to her office in the back corner of the house.

  If Dan’s alibi held up he was more than likely off the hook for his father’s murder. That meant Father Mac was off the hook as well. Of the four men, Dan and Mac had the strongest motives. Was it a coincidence that Gabe happened to use Mac’s likeness in his comic book? She called Mac’s number. It went immediately to voice mail.

  She called his office again the next morning after breakfast. A blue sky was doing its best to tear through the cloud cover. With luck, she’d see the sun today. In three rings, the now-familiar voice of Mrs. Abendroth, Father Mac’s secretary, answered. Mrs. Abendroth didn’t have a first name. Mrs. Abendroth was big on attitude. And she wouldn’t connect Lennox to Father Mac no matter how hard Lennox tried.

  Lennox paged through her notebook and called the number for Father Mac’s former parish, St. Stephen’s. She made the call and the priest himself answered it.

  “I don’t know what I can tell you,” Father Melito said. “It’s been twenty years since I worked with Mac.”

  Lennox explained that she was running a background check on certain key witnesses in a murder trial.

  “Mac is a key witness?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this on the phone,” Father Melito said.

  He gave her the go-ahead. Lennox jumped into her car and drove to a working-class neighborhood not far from the Ross Island Bridge.

  Mildew grew along the cracks in the white stuccoed walls of St. Stephen’s. Three scrawny rhododendrons struggled for purchase in the strip of garden between the parking lot and the church wall. It was about as different from Father Mac’s present deal as you could get and still have a Catholic church.

  Although his digs were spare, Father Paul Melito most assuredly was not. Six feet and egg-shaped, his face and hands were pink and well-scrubbed. Lennox followed his wide backside down an unadorned hallway to his office. With chubby fingers he motioned her to a tweed chair.

  “Now what is this all about?” he said.

  Lennox slid her license across the scarred desktop.

  Father Melito made a ceremony of fitting the wire stems of his glasses around his pink shell ears. He examined the license and compared her face to the face in her picture.

  “You’re not a Catholic,” he said.

  Was there a look? A distance between the eyes, a set of the mouth that separated Catholic from Jew from Protestant? “How can you tell?” she said.

  He leaned back in his chair. “There is no Saint Lennox.”

  “I was named after my mother’s china,” she said. Then she found herself swallowing. “It was supposed to be a joke or something. I usually tell people it’s an old family name.”

  She was telling a priest she lied?

  He nodded his head. He was a man used to confessions. “How can I help you?” he said.

  She sat up straighter in her chair. “I’m investigating a murder that happened back in December. Father Mac was not only a witness, he was also the murder victim’s first cousin and business partner.”

  Father Melito steepled his hands, his fingertips pressed into his lips. He moved his fingers below his lips and said, “What are you implying?”

  “I can’t get a read on Father McMahon. He’s all charm and can I donate to his outreach,” she said. “But there are people I’ve interviewed with a completely different take on him, people who’ve told me about his history here.”

  “Good heavens!” Father Melito said. “Why?”

  ”The Altar Boys?”

  Father Melito had one of those faces you could read from across the room. For his own sake, Lennox hoped he never got close to a poker table.

  “Stop, Father. It’s not what you think.” What she wanted to do was squeeze his hand, reassure him, but touching him would probably alarm him more. “I’m not talking about kids here. These guys are grown men known as the capital “A” capital “B” Altar Boys. These two boys were juvenile delinquents back in the days Father Mac served at St. Stephen’s. Father Mac bailed them out of jail, hired attorneys for them. Does any of this ring a bell?”

  You really had to see Father Melito’s face. He knew exactly who Lennox was talking about. She watched the Father weigh his options and then decide to confide in her. He said, “This church is served by Franciscans, but His Excellency, Archbishop Harris, went to the same schools as Father Mac, knew of his reputation in outreach. That’s what we do here. Our dining hall serves three hundred people a day, six days a week. Father Mac played a big role in the fund-raising for this facility.”

  Turned out Mac’s outreach extended to local hoodlums, two boys in particular, the Altar Boys. And to the acquisition of certain commercial properties in the parish. Father Mac had his own money to invest and invest he did.

  “He became known as a bit of a slum lord,” Father Melito said.

  “Father Mac didn’t take a vow of poverty?”

  “Franciscans take a vow of poverty, but Mac is a diocesan priest and as such can own property. That said, diocesan priests are bound to live a simple life.” Father Melito shook his head. “Simple is one of those abstractions subject to interpretation.”

  “I don’t know how to ask this,” Lennox said.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Did you ever wonder if Father Mac was using the Altar Boys for anything illegal?”

  He looked weary as if thinking about those times wore him out. “Mrs. Guzman can probably help you. She’s been my housekeeper all these years.” He pushed himself away from the desk. “I’ll get her for you.”

  As he left the office he turned back to Lennox. What she first took for weariness now looked more like pain. “Mac was never a good fit for this parish,” he said and closed the door behind him.

  A tiny woman with a bird-beak nose and thin gray hair pulled into a tight knot at the back of her head entered the room and took the tweed chair next to Lennox’s. She fastened bright black eyes on Lennox.

  “You remember Father Mac, Mrs. Guzman?” Lennox said.

  She sat on the very edge of the chair, her legs planted apart but covered by her skirt. “Of course,” she said.

  She waited for the next question, watching Lennox the whole time. Lennox asked if Father Mac had used the Altar Boys for anything illegal.

  “My family lived in one of Father’s apartments,” she said. “The landlord before the Father never did what he said he would do. Clean the g
utters, exterminate. But he was a nice man and never once raised the rent. We lived there six years before the Father bought the building. We thought how wonderful, our parish priest, he’ll fix the leaky roof, the broken washing machines in the basement. Then we got the eviction notice. I was his housekeeper.” She sat even straighter in her chair. “I went to him. Told him we couldn’t afford to move. He was so very nice. He said he understood, not to worry.”

  “Then the trouble began. Those boys are criminals. First they broke the windows in my Hector’s truck, then they cornered my Isabella. Pushed her down on the sidewalk, lifted her skirt. We moved all right.”

  She wagged a brown finger at Lennox. “We all moved, every last one of us. When it was vacant, Father McMahon fixed everything. Painted. Put on a new roof. Called the apartments “condos” and sold them to white people with money. Then he bought another apartment and the same thing all over.”

  “Imagine,” Mrs. Guzman said. “Working for such a man. Making his bed. Cleaning his toilet. I was glad to see him go.”

  Chapter 38

  That afternoon Lennox canvassed the neighborhood that ran adjacent to Father Mac’s subdivision. She rang a lot of doorbells and came up empty, the folks most likely at work. And the people who were home? Geezers too scared to slip the security chain off their doors and answer any questions. Finally, her twenty-first doorbell yielded Sarah Feeley, a mother in her late twenties and active in the neighborhood association. The Feeley house was a block from the subdivision.

  About two years ago, she said, two men came to their door. It was night and her husband, Ben, answered it. They told Ben it would be best if he and Sarah stayed home zoning meeting nights. Ben told the men to get off his step; he was calling the police. The men showed up the next day after Ben left for work. She never answered the door. They called her by name, demanded she open up. One of the men went to the back of the house and knocked on the window. Both she and her little boy were terrified. They hid in the hallway.

  Three nights later, Ben and Sarah found their dog by the front door. Her skull was caved in. Sarah showed Lennox a framed photo. She was an Australian shepherd. Her name was Emily.

  The men threatening Sarah’s family wore black caps pulled low on their foreheads and dark sunglasses, but Sarah was pretty sure they were the same men as the mug shots of the Altar Boys.

  Lennox rang a lot more doorbells that afternoon hoping to find additional witnesses. By the time she finished, the sun was setting behind Portland’s cloud cover. She’d made it home and had just finished listening to her voice mail when she heard her doorbell.

  Either a werewolf was standing on her porch or it was Fish. Either way, color her surprised. She slipped the chain, unbolted the deadlock and welcomed him in.

  She offered him a beer. She could feel his distrust of her. And something else she couldn’t put her finger on.

  “This ain’t a social call, Cooper,” he said.

  She flushed with excitement. “You’ve got the cell phone logs.”

  “A waste of time,” he said, kebabbing another lead. “Any other bright ideas before I go back to traffic land?”

  Forget her disappointment, she had less than a minute to get a read on Fish. Any bright ideas? More than his dislike for her was the hope that maybe she could come up with the brilliant idea that would help him crack this case.

  Brilliant idea? And presto! She had one.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  Reluctantly he lowered himself into the only uncomfortable chair in the living room. A wood rocking chair Aurora had given her from some long, lost, moldy relative with Puritan sensibilities.

  “Father McMahon has a crew of two felons does his bidding,” she said.

  “The priest.” Fish rocked the chair forward and stood up.

  “Listen. The priest was Bill’s cousin, his business partner. He stood to inherit thirteen million if Bill died. Okay?”

  Fish lowered himself back in the chair. “Yeah?”

  “These two felons were Father Mac’s altar boys back in the day. Now they’re our age and they’ve done time. I’ve interviewed people who claim these same guys, these Altar Boys, have threatened and harassed tenants Father Mac wanted to get rid of or people active in zoning issues that impacted Father’s subdivision.”

  “So?”

  “So. Maybe Father Mac put these Altar Boys up to the hit-and-run.”

  Fish rocked back and forth. She watched him get his thoughts together. “What did they do time for?”

  “Assault, armed robbery. I’ve got their sheets and their cell numbers. I’m telling you, Fish, I know these two murders are connected. Think about it. This rich dude gets killed. One of the witnesses comes into a great big bunch of cash all of the sudden. Then he’s murdered. This is no coincidence.”

  Watch Fish weighing the pros against her cons. “That would mean the priest put them up to it.”

  Fish, Catholic to the roots of his hair. She caught his eyes. “You got a problem with that, Fish?”

  He returned her look steady on. “Nope.”

  Chapter 39

  Beneath that leprechaun charm, Father McMahon was one ruthless sonuvabitch. But was he capable of murdering his cousin?

  Easy for the priest to slip upstairs—a quick duck in the master bathroom and he replaces the inhalers. He sets the trap and waits for the heart attack. What he doesn’t count on is an autopsy. It was a good working hypothesis.

  The next morning Lennox crossed the Willamette River to the rectory at Saint Mary’s Cathedral. It had stopped raining for the moment, but everything from the trees to the porch eaves still dripped. She crossed the wet pavement to Father Mac’s office.

  Mrs. Abendroth looked nothing like what Lennox had imagined. Instead of a skinny, needle-nose woman, Mrs. Abendroth was round as a dumpling. She was too young and plump to have worn frown lines along the sides of her nose and mouth, but they would come as surely as autumn follows summer.

  Mrs. Abendroth pointed her finger in the direction of the office door. “He’s expecting you,” she said.

  Lennox opened the door to an office still clogged with sports gear. Father Mac sat behind his desk dressed in gray sweats, a coach’s whistle hanging around his neck.

  “Hello, Father,” she said and stepped around the bags of bats, helmets and baseball gloves that slumped against the furniture. A large box of jerseys butted up against the sofa.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” she said.

  He folded his hands on the desk. “What do you have for me this time?” His voice flat without accent. So much for the leprechaun charm.

  She sat across the desk from him. “Do you mind if I record this meeting?”

  “Of course I mind. I’m only seeing you as a courtesy to Delia.”

  She tucked the recorder back in the bag and pulled out her notebook. “I wanted to ask you about the partnership agreement you had with Bill for Hunter’s Ridge.”

  “What about it?”

  “How did you and Bill decide on a cross-purchase partnership?”

  His expression was unreadable. “I don’t remember.”

  “But, Father, this partnership has made you a millionaire.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “What are you implying, Miss Cooper?” Maybe he was on the defensive, but he was smug, too. She could see it in his eyes. He liked being called a millionaire.

  “Father, I’m just asking questions,” she said making that sound as innocent as possible.

  “The trial is in less than two weeks. Shouldn’t you be done with the questions by now?”

  He was right. She should be done with interviewing. Lennox had August Kline to thank for that. She sat impassively, her pen poised over her notebook. “Are you going to answer my question or not?” she said.

  “I did. I said I don’t remember.”

  “When you partnered with Bill on the Irving Street complex, you had a general partnership agreement?”

  “I think so.”

&nbs
p; “That partnership goes back to the late seventies. How can you remember that arrangement and not the agreement you made with Bill three years ago?”

  “Because back then, we either had a general partnership or we incorporated.” Father Mac turned his wrist slightly so he could read his watch.

  “Who inherits your estate?” she said.

  “Saint Mary’s parish,” he said.

  “Perhaps Bill initiated the cross-purchase plan so that he wouldn’t end up being partners with the parish.”

  McMahon shook his great bald head. “Perhaps. As I keep saying over and over, I don’t remember.”

  Enough already. Even she was getting tired of this line of questioning. She said, “Up until a year ago, Bill supported Scott financially. Then he stopped cold. You, Father, took over supporting Scott.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “It is true I loaned Scott money. I’m fond of the boy; he’s my godchild.”

  And thank God he was answering the question. “So were you prepared to take over Scott and his live-in girlfriend’s upkeep indefinitely?”

  “I was generous. If you want to cast that in a negative light, go right ahead.”

  “You certainly were generous. At the time you were leveraged to your eyeballs to raise enough capital for Hunter’s Ridge. I’m surprised you didn’t tell Scott to go get a real job.”

  He lowered his eyelids halfway, a classic fuck-you-very-much expression if she ever saw one. “What’s your question?” he said.

  “Why did you bankroll him for over a year?”

  “I’ve told you.” Father Mac glanced at his brass desk clock. “I’d like some coffee.” He hit a button on the bottom of the phone to summon Mrs. Abendroth. “Would you like some?”

  The smile he gave her didn’t reach his eyes. Which was odd. Why all of the sudden was he being gracious with her?

  “Thanks, anyway. I’m almost done,” Lennox said. “Could you check your diary and tell me what you were doing the day and evening of December 16?”