The Man Who Murdered God

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  He looked up at McGuire, who was staring through the window at the brick wall next door. “You want me to skip the technical stuff from Doitch?” he asked. McGuire closed his eyes and nodded his head.

  “Suspected weapon—twelve-gauge shotgun, unknown make, possibly with shortened barrel. Witnesses—none. Characteristics of victim—born, Framingham, Massachusetts. Educated, P.S. 12 Framingham, Our Lady of Lourdes High School, Boston College, St. John’s Seminary. Military service, 1943–1945, 36th Army Division, Italian campaign. Awarded Bronze Star, Purple Heart, several battlefield commendations. Served as Army Chaplain, Korea, 1952. Appointed to St. Eugene’s, 1956.

  “Nearest living relative—Mrs. Kathleen McGrath, 1389 Fifteenth Street, Moline, Illinois. No criminal record, no known enemies, no rational motive for attack.” He looked across the desks at his partner. “Hell, Joe. Maybe somebody shot him for wearing his halo crooked.”

  McGuire allowed himself a small smile, and Lipson turned back to the notes in front of him. “Witnesses—none. No neighbours who recall unusual occurrence during period crime was committed. Five residents of immediate area claim to have heard one single loud noise from direction of church at approximately 6:30 a.m. Three of them assumed sound was backfiring car. One exited house, looked towards church, saw nothing unusual. One refused to become involved, returned to bed until 7:00 a.m.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Lipson and McGuire both looked up to see Reverend Deeley in the doorway. He had exchanged his severe black suit for a stylish blue jacket and grey slacks, worn with the same black bib and white collar.

  “They told me I’d find you here,” Deeley continued, “but if you’re busy . . .”

  “Just reviewing the facts so far,” McGuire said, standing up and offering his hand to the priest. Lipson pulled a chair away from the wall and pushed it towards Deeley. “Sit down, please. Get you a coffee?”

  Over bad coffee from plastic cups the two detectives revealed what they had gathered about the death of Reverend Thomas Lynch. Which, McGuire admitted, wasn’t enough to issue a parking ticket.

  “Look, Father—” McGuire began.

  “We’re not usually called fathers anymore,” Deeley smiled. “Kevin’s fine, Lieutenant.”

  McGuire shrugged and studied the priest. Kevin Deeley, in McGuire’s eye, had been blessed with more than his share of attractive qualities. In his early thirties, he was tall with a slim, athletic build. His blond hair was already thinning, but McGuire could imagine women’s knees growing weak when those clear blue eyes swept their way. Along with his good looks the priest had an aristocratic carriage few men acquired except through selective breeding or intensive training. Deeley appeared to be a natural leader, someone to seek out or follow into battle in time of trouble.

  He’d break a hell of a lot of hearts in the bars on Newbury Street, McGuire thought. What makes a guy take an oath of celibacy when he could be fighting off the girls with a hockey stick?

  Yet McGuire resented something about the priest. It may have been Deeley’s patrician bearing—the natural animosity of one leader towards another—or perhaps simple jealousy. Whatever it was, McGuire was not pleased with the priest’s presence.

  McGuire pulled his chair closer and rested his elbows on his knees. “We’re missing something here about your Reverend Lynch,” he said in a low voice.

  Deeley blinked. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “What I mean is, people don’t walk into a church at dawn with a sawed-off shotgun and blow somebody apart without a reason. And then disappear like a ghost again. It’s not normal psychotic behaviour.”

  The priest sat erect and stared out the dusty cubicle window as he spoke. “I didn’t know psychotic behaviour was normal.”

  McGuire stood up and walked to his desk, where he sat on the corner facing the priest again. “Look, I’ve seen my share of killings by nuts over the years. Trust me. They get a big enough pain to blow somebody away, they want the world to know it. Remember last year? Guy took an axe to a grandmother sitting on her porch, over in Roxbury? He went around telling everybody he’d just killed a witch, wanted to be made mayor of Salem? That’s normal psychotic behaviour. Losing all sense of reality.”

  “What are you saying, Lieutenant McGuire?” The priest was watching the detective intently, with a faint expression of distaste.

  “I’m saying there has to be a reason somebody killed Thomas Lynch. I’m saying he had to do something to be ambushed and assassinated in his own church.” McGuire spread his hands. “That’s all.”

  Before Deeley could reply, Bernie Lipson spoke in a low, soothing voice, a sharp contrast to McGuire’s harsh delivery. “We’re really just looking for a motive here, Reverend Deeley. See, what Joe is saying is, this doesn’t fit the pattern of a motiveless crime.”

  It was Deeley’s turn to stand up, and he stood by the window, looking out at the misty day as he spoke. “There was no reason at all for Reverend Thomas Lynch to die.” He bit off the words, one by one, and his fair complexion grew red. “I know of no other man anywhere, in or out of the Church, who was more widely loved and respected as a gentleman than Thomas Lynch.”

  McGuire began to speak, but Deeley raised his voice, effectively cutting him off.

  “I don’t know very much about detective work, but I do know a little about psychotic behaviour,” he said, looking from McGuire to Lipson and back again. “I understand completely what you’re saying. And I’m telling you that if any motive exists for this outrageous act, it’s in the mind of whoever pulled the trigger. Not in the past of Reverend Lynch.”

  “Hey, Father,” Lipson said smiling. “Easy now. We appreciate you being here. I mean, we can use all the help we can get on something like this, you know? But we have to keep an open mind here.”

  “Did it occur to you that perhaps all the time you spend around criminals and misfits could affect your view of humanity?” Deeley asked. “God knows there’s evil in the world. But I suggest you should look for it in more traditional places instead of in the past of a gentle, hard-working and well-loved priest.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a past you’re even aware of,” McGuire replied. He was becoming angry at Deeley’s self-righteous attitude. McGuire knew little about the Catholic church, and Deeley knew even less about detective work. “It might have been something that happened yesterday, last week, anytime.” He spread his arms, a gesture of conciliation. “Everybody does something to piss off somebody in their life. Me, I do it every day. Maybe Lynch gave somebody hell about walking on the grass or told the wrong guy to say too many Hail Marys, I don’t know.” He dropped his hands onto his thighs with a slap. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

  Deeley gestured at McGuire as he spoke. “Maybe you piss off people every day as you claim,” he said. “But Reverend Lynch did not. Reverend Lynch wasn’t in the habit of upsetting people. He did all he could to comfort them.”

  McGuire scooped a pencil from his desk, glared silently out the window and snapped the pencil in two.

  The priest walked to the door, where he paused and turned back to face McGuire and Lipson. “I’m telling you, there was nothing in this past that could cause anyone to do this as a personal attack. And if that’s the route you’re taking in solving his murder, I don’t put much faith in your chances of success.” He turned to leave.

  “Reverend Deeley.” Lipson called.

  Deeley looked back, avoiding McGuire’s eyes.

  “How about Mrs. Kelley?” Lipson asked. “You were with her. She’s back home isn’t she?”

  The priest nodded. “The doctor gave her a heavy sedative. Said she’ll probably sleep through the night. I think it would be better if you avoided talking to her in the morning.”

  “You do lots of detective work, do you?” McGuire spat out, tossing the pencil pieces back on his desk. The anger welled in his face,
and his chin tightened, driving the corners of his mouth down. He resented the priest’s suggestion that they wait before questioning the woman.

  “You save any souls?” Deeley fired back.

  “Fuck you,” McGuire replied, and Lipson stepped between them, his hands raised, saying, “Hey, come on you guys,” while Deeley pursed his lips and his face grew crimson with anger. Then the priest turned on his heel and left.

  “He might have been a big help to us, the priest,” Lipson said when McGuire had slumped back into his chair. “Guy like that—”

  “Get one thing straight, Lipson.” McGuire jabbed the air in front of him. “I’m the senior guy on this team. I’ll call the shots just like Ollie Schantz did with me for eight years. You got that?”

  Lipson watched him without expression. Then he asked, “You want another guy to work with, Joe? I can go back on the desk, no problem.”

  McGuire stared at the cluttered surface of his desk, then shook his head abruptly. “Forget it,” he said in a calm voice. “Let’s go check the files, see if we can find any shotgun artists in the area.”

  Lipson stood up, grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair and strode past his partner out the door.

  Working without Ollie just might be harder than I thought, McGuire speculated to himself.

  “It was the strangest thing,” Anne Murison told her husband when she arrived home from work at the New England Aquarium that evening. “This young guy, maybe twenty or so, came in and spent the whole day there. Didn’t even have lunch. Looked at all the fish for maybe an hour, then he found the river otter display over in the corner and stayed there the rest of the day watching them. I had to go over at five o’clock to tell him we were closing, and he looked at me and said ‘They really love each other, don’t they?’ Meaning the otters. Because they spend all day cleaning each other and swimming on their backs with their paws together. So I told him he should have seen them last week when George went in to clean their pond and got too close, and one of them bit him on the hand. Took six stitches to close it. And he smiled! He’d looked so sad all day until I told him the otters could be vicious, and that’s when he smiled! Weird.”

  Her husband said that was interesting, and he sure as hell didn’t feel like warming up the macaroni from last night, so leave your coat on and we’ll go out for burgers and a beer, okay? Which was fine with Anne, who didn’t feel like cooking anything, not even heating the macaroni.

  She said nothing about the heavy athletic bag the young man had been carrying. Not even the way it clanked metallically when he bumped it against the turnstile as he left. But who knew what people carried in those bags with names of running shoes on the side anyway?

  Chapter Four

  McGuire stood at his apartment window staring across Van Ness at the lights of Fenway Park burning white in the darkness. He was thinking of Ollie Schantz, retired homicide detective. And of Thomas Lynch, dead Catholic priest. He avoided thinking of Joseph Peter McGuire, middle-aged member of the Boston Police Department and the remaining half of the most effective homicide team in the department’s history.

  “Well, you’re no longer a cop,” somebody had said to Ollie Schantz at his retirement party.

  “Garbage,” Ollie had replied. “After thirty-five years you never stop being a cop. When I’m old and blind and senile, sitting on some Goddamn porch in the Berkshires, I’ll still be a cop. Listening to people talk. Thinking about motives. Suspecting everybody new. Memorizing voices. You think you can turn it off just because you retire? You can’t. I sure as hell won’t.”

  McGuire turned from the glare of the lights at Fenway and raised the volume on the FM radio tuned to a Cambridge jazz station. He loved the jazz of his youth, the improvised music that had flowered just when the world began to accept rock and roll. In high school he had played trumpet and considered a career in music, a life of one-night stands in smoky nightclubs, leaning against the piano and sipping Scotch, waiting for his turn to solo. But he had chosen security. Or at least as much security as a big-city cop could enjoy. Somewhere in the apartment, which he had furnished ten years earlier from a Sears catalogue, were hundreds of jazz records waiting to be played. He hadn’t heard most of them in years, but it never occurred to him to sell or trade them.

  Who was that playing now? Desmond? Yeah, Paul Desmond. He’s dead, McGuire told himself without emotion. He shook some instant coffee into a mug, ran hot water from the faucet until it was steaming, and filled the cup. One thing about being a musician, you make records, and years after you’re gone people can still hear you play. He turned the volume up another notch, and the sound of Desmond’s alto saxophone soared higher and stronger than before. “Not like a cop,” he said, collapsing in the chair. A cop dies, they have a round of beers for him downtown, and years later maybe somebody comes across his name in an old file. “Look at this son of a bitch,” they say. “What a lousy writer.” Or they think, “I must be getting old. I can remember them talking about this old bastard around here.” And that’s it.

  Musicians have it better, McGuire decided. He leaned back and sipped the coffee. For one thing, you don’t start your day off by looking at somebody’s guts spilled on a church floor.

  He was thinking of Ollie Schantz again.

  “Somebody said there are only seven basic plots in fiction,” Schantz had told McGuire soon after they became a team. “Actually, my wife told me that. Me, I never read books.” Ollie’s wife had taught English in high school for several years. “Seven basic plots,” Ollie had repeated. “That’s interesting, because I figure there are only seven basic reasons to commit murder, too. You’ve got jealousy, you’ve got revenge, you’ve got escaping arrest or custody.

  Then you got your greed, your self-defence and your sexual reasons. Last of all you’ve got your psychotics. You figure out which slot to put your murder into, the one you’re working on today, and you follow the pattern. Just get the slot, and you’ve got the pattern.

  “Because all murders follow patterns, Joe. Nobody’s less imaginative than a murderer. Bam, they kill. Slam, they go. That’s it. Understand that, and our work gets easy.”

  McGuire believed it. He was convinced they would discover something in Thomas Lynch’s past, something the priest had said or done, which led to his death. “We are agents of our own misfortune” was a creed McGuire clung to. He placed no belief in faith or fate. He believed only in what people did to themselves and others, acting on their own needs and their own emotions. Love. Hate. Fear.

  The Desmond record finished, and a Duke Ellington tune began. McGuire drained his cup. A cheer erupted from the direction of Fenway. The Sox got a hit. Or an out. McGuire thought about the early season baseball crowd gnawing on hot dogs and huddled together in the evening chill. He thought about inviting Ralph Innes to join him at a game some evening. Or better still, one of the women at work.

  He thought about the last time he had enjoyed a woman’s company for more than three evenings.

  Then he clicked off the radio and went to bed.

  “You got nothing, right?”

  It was mid-afternoon, and Jack Kavander was leaning on the door frame of McGuire and Lipson’s cubicle. A toothpick was being worked frantically around his mouth, in and out, from side to side. After twenty years Kavander had finally stopped smoking by replacing cigarettes with various surrogates. Pencils, paper clips, peanuts, usually a toothpick.

  “Old Jack’s just trading one disease for another,” Ollie Schantz had observed a few months earlier. “He gave up cigarettes because he was afraid of emphysema. Now he’s chewing so many toothpicks, he’s liable to get Dutch elm disease.”

  “Am I right?” Kavander growled from the doorway.

  McGuire tossed a pencil on his desk and leaned back, his hands behind his head. “We’ve got a partial print and an approximate time,” he said, staring back at Kavander. “We’ve got a reasonable g
uess at the weapon, and we’re pretty sure he was using Remington shells.”

  “What else?”

  “The woman who found him, Mrs. Kelley,” Lipson added before McGuire could reply. “We talked to her.” He shook his head. “No help at all. Said everything was normal. Didn’t see or hear anything unusual.”

  “Like I said, you’ve got fuck all.” Kavander pulled the toothpick from his mouth and gestured with it as he talked. “I’m getting flak from a lot of corners. The bishop’s upset, the mayor’s concerned. People don’t like the idea of priests getting their guts blasted in Boston.” He studied the mangled end of the toothpick before returning it to his mouth. “Give me something to feed them. Anything.”

  “We’re working on two theories,” McGuire said. “One, it was a revenge killing. Something Lynch said or did, maybe in the last few days. Two, it’s a psychotic, somebody who just felt like blowing a guy away, and the priest was handy.”

  “You getting any leads? Anybody calling in?”

  “So far, three,” Lipson answered. He glanced at a sheet of paper on the corner of his desk. “This one guy over at City Hospital, tried to take out his own appendix with a pocketknife. Phoned up to confess, but the hospital says no way he’s been out of bed in three days. Got another guy said he killed the priest just like he killed Kennedy and shot the pope in eighty-one. He’s a regular. Give the mayor a parking ticket and this yo-yo says he’s responsible. Then we got a woman in Quincy, calls up, tells us she’s sure her neighbour did it because he’s never liked Catholics and says nasty things about them.”

  “You check that one out?”

  “Yeah. Turns out the guy is suing her because her mutt dug up his rhododendron last month or something. His wife and kids claim he was home in bed at the time. Went to work at eight o’clock, everything checks out normal. He’s never owned a shotgun, and now he’s going to sue the broad next door for slander as well as having an unleashed animal trashing his garden.” Lipson shrugged. “Nothing there, but we’ll keep checking it.”