The Man Who Murdered God

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  McGuire ordered a Kronenbourg for himself and Deeley.

  “Kronenbourg?” Deeley asked. “Danish? Bavarian?”

  “French,” McGuire explained.

  Deeley grimaced. “The French, I’m afraid, are not my favourite people.” He tore a thick chunk of sourdough from his loaf. “The ones I met when I was over there seemed unusually arrogant. There’s a lesson there, I suppose, about the dangers of national hegemony.”

  “You gotta admit they’ve got the right religion,” McGuire sneered.

  Deeley popped the bread into his mouth and leaned back in his chair, his arms folded, watching McGuire and chewing. Smiling while he chewed. Handsome son of a bitch, McGuire thought to himself again as he looked back at Deeley. How’s he stand never getting laid?

  “Well, McGuire, it took you longer than I thought, but you finally got your shot in, didn’t you?” Deeley said.

  McGuire shrugged. The waitress placed a beer in front of each of them. Deeley thanked her, and McGuire began pouring his into a glass.

  Deeley leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “Look, McGuire. I’m not enjoying this any more than you are. I know bloody well you and I wouldn’t be here if Captain Kavander hadn’t ordered you to show me some hospitality. He wants to encourage me to take a good report back to the bishop. And I will. The people I met today, almost everybody in your department, I was really impressed with. I can go back and honestly tell everybody at St. John’s, ‘The Boston Police Department is doing everything possible to hunt down this killer. They’re marvellous people. Dedicated, well-equipped, using all the latest technology.’”

  “And they still haven’t got a fucking clue to go on.” McGuire bit off each word. “Don’t forget to tell them that, Father.”

  “You’ll do it.” Deeley poured his beer. “If it’s humanly possible to find this beast, I’m sure your people can do it.”

  McGuire snorted and took a long swallow. Good and cold. A bit of sweetness to it.

  Deeley was leaning towards McGuire again. “The only thing I can’t figure, McGuire, is you. The commissioner called us at St. John’s yesterday. He told us you were in charge of the investigation, and that you were probably the best homicide detective on the force. Said you and your partner achieved the highest arrest-and-conviction rate in the city over the past five years. I have to admit, McGuire, I haven’t seen any evidence of it. Not by a long shot. All I see is a bitter, hostile man who doesn’t seem to care about the fact that two very fine priests in this city have been brutally murdered over the past few days.”

  “They’re just two more bodies, Deeley. That’s all.”

  “Maybe to you they are—”

  McGuire slammed his glass onto the table, spilling beer over the edges. “Listen, Deeley. You know what I resent? I resent being told that we better break our asses for two guys who just happened to wear their collars backward. And that we’d better put more effort into it than we would for some schmuck who works fifteen hours a day driving a truck to feed his wife and kids over in Chelsea. This isn’t royalty, for Christ’s sake. This isn’t the Goddamned president or even the governor. It’s two guys who make their living telling fairy tales and goosing nuns when nobody’s looking.”

  “McGuire—”

  “Shut up and let me finish.” Deeley leaned back in his chair. McGuire looked around to see a family at the next table watching him, a middle-aged man in a worn sports jacket, giving hell to a young good-looking priest. He turned back to Deeley.

  “Another thing I resent. We’re getting all this pressure, all this crap about keeping St. John’s and the bishop happy, and you bastards don’t even pay any taxes. That strike you as unfair, Deeley? A truck driver over in Chelsea, he gets his brains blown out, he’s just another John Doe. Poor bastard pays half his income in taxes, and he gets the standard issue. You guys send all your money to Rome for another marble statue or whatever the Vatican figures it can’t live without this year, and when somebody decides to blow one of your guys away, suddenly it’s the FBI against Dillinger. That’s what I resent.”

  McGuire glanced back at the family. They were concentrating on their chowder, the mother whispering fiercely at the young boy, telling him not to stare and for goodness sake to finish his lunch.

  “You get it all out?” Deeley asked quietly.

  “Most of it.” McGuire drained his glass.

  “We’re not asking for any special help, McGuire. Obviously you don’t share the community’s concern about such a violent attack not just on men, but on the entire Catholic church.” McGuire rolled his eyes. “I’m here to assist you in every way I can,” Deeley continued. “That’s all. I don’t want to get in your way. I don’t even want you to waste your time taking me to lunch, trying to do a public relations job on me.” He lifted his glass and smiled. “Which, by the way, you’re not very good at, are you?”

  McGuire picked up his spoon and began working on the remains of his chowder.

  “Well, you’re good at recommending beer anyway,” Deeley said when he realized McGuire wasn’t going to respond. “I like this stuff.” He drained the glass. “Now. Tell me what I can do to help you people. I’ve got the bishop’s assurance that I can put the whole diocese at your disposal if necessary.” He softened his voice. “What can we do?”

  McGuire looked up. “Guess you can pray a lot.”

  “We’ve been doing that. Special masses. The bishop has asked for prayers from each diocese.”

  “Well hell, Deeley. In that case we’ll just sit around, wait for some old bastard in a robe and a beard to walk down on a sunbeam, point a bony finger at somebody, and say ‘Him!’ Right? What the hell are we breaking our asses about?”

  The priest looked puzzled. “I don’t mind you being an atheist, McGuire. Heaven knows I’ve met enough of them in my life. I’m just curious why you’ve got such hate in you about religion.”

  McGuire finished his chowder and pushed it aside. “Let me tell you something,” he said, his voice flat. “You want to know where I grew up? In Worcester. Down along the tracks. Breathed nothing but industrial smoke for the first ten years of my life. Never knew what a blue sky was until I took a bus out to the Berkshires once.”

  Deeley frowned slightly, as though trying to emphasize how hard he was listening.

  “My old man worked at a foundry,” McGuire went on. “For thirty-three years he cleaned up iron castings, working on a grindstone big as a wagon wheel. A lousy, dirty job. He’d come home at night, he couldn’t wash the filings and shit off his skin. Made enough money to nearly pay for a frame house, two bedrooms, one john, a porch big enough for a rocking chair, and a backyard that stretched out to the railway tracks. Never bought a new car in his life.

  “Two years before he could’ve retired, he got a bad wheel. It blew up in his face. You have any idea what a half-ton grinding wheel does to a body when it explodes at five hundred RPM?”

  He paused, watching the priest shake his head in sorrow.

  “The company gave my mother about five hundred bucks a month and a cash settlement. Enough to bury the poor bugger, and that’s all. A year later she lay down on the sofa and died. Just gave up. What the hell. That’s what the doctors said. She just gave up. And every morning of every Goddamn day I see some hustler on TV waving his arm in a tailored suit, gold Rolex flashing on his wrist, saying all we have to do is send him some money, and he’ll guarantee everlasting happiness. No grinding wheel will blow up in your face. No one you love will ever die and leave you broke and alone.” He nodded at the priest. “You guys are all in the same business, Deeley. Selling promises you can’t fulfil.”

  Deeley shook his head sadly. “Just because some TV evangelists go to excess, I don’t see why you should hate all organized religion.”

  “What’s the difference?” McGuire demanded. “It’s the same God, isn’t it?”

 
Deeley sighed. “You want to go back to headquarters now?” he asked. “I can get a cab to St. John’s from here.”

  Outside, as Deeley walked to the curb to hail a cab, he looked back and asked, “If you don’t believe in God, McGuire, just what do you believe in?”

  “Myself,” McGuire replied without hesitating. “I believe in myself. What the hell else is there?”

  Two pins on a wall map. One between Jamaica Plain and Forest Hills. The other at Xavier Seminary. Two pins, three ounces of buckshot and one spent cartridge, McGuire thought, sitting there staring at the map. That’s all we’ve got.

  Bernie Lipson stuck his head in the squad room. “I’m heading home, Joe,” he said. “He’s still here, Fat Eddie. Running computer checks on shotgun killings on the whole east coast for the past five years.” He grinned. “Keeps the fat little bastard off the streets. You need me for anything?”

  “No, Bernie,” McGuire replied. “I don’t need you for anything.”

  “You want to tell me what’s bothering you? About me, I mean?”

  “What’s bothering me is that some loony is blasting priests with a shotgun and we don’t have a clue, a woman I used to sleep with is full of cancer, Kavander’s on my ass—”

  “And I’m not Ollie Schantz,” Lipson added quietly.

  “You sure as hell aren’t.”

  Lipson nodded and left the room.

  McGuire was still staring at the map a few minutes later, when Janet Parsons walked past the open doorway, shrugging her way into a light raincoat. She stopped, entered the squad room and sat down next to McGuire.

  “You think the guy’s picture is going to appear on the map?” she asked.

  McGuire glanced at her and shook his head. “It’s about all we’ve got,” he said. “I’m just trying to make the most of it.”

  She looked up at the map briefly, then back at McGuire. “Listen, Joe,” she said. “I’ve got to say something to you.”

  “Say it.”

  “You’re quickly becoming an asshole.”

  McGuire turned to see her studying him, waiting for him to react. “It’s better than becoming an Eddie Vance, I guess.”

  She grinned, relieved he hadn’t exploded. “Yeah, okay, maybe you’ve got a point. But you’re treating Bernie like a piece of dirt.”

  “Bernie’s a grown man. He’ll get over it.”

  “You really miss Ollie that much?”

  He looked at her again. Grey eyes. Nice eyes. “What the hell makes you think I miss him at all?” he asked.

  “Couldn’t you use him right now? Aren’t you asking yourself how Ollie would handle it?”

  “I’m not asking anybody anything. I’m telling myself how I’m going to handle it.”

  “You know, you used to be a nice guy.”

  “I still am. This is as nice as it gets.” McGuire let himself smile a little. “You heading home?” he asked.

  She nodded and stood up. “I could be persuaded to stop off for a drink on the way if you promise to let the old Joe McGuire come out and play for a while.”

  “Some other time,” McGuire said. “See you in the morning.”

  He listened to her footsteps echo down the hall before reaching for the telephone. He started to dial, stopped and stared at the ceiling, then hung up and dialled again. After two rings a woman’s voice answered, and McGuire introduced himself, said yes, he was fine, yes, he was assigned to the priest murders, and then she told him Ollie wasn’t home—went out last weekend and bought himself an aluminum boat and a trailer and drove it up to New Brunswick for some salmon fishing. Hired a guide and all, and she didn’t expect to hear from him for another week.

  McGuire promised to drop in and visit sometime after Ollie returned. He hung up and stared at the map and the two pins again.

  Chapter Nine

  If Harvey Jaycock could finish buffing the ground floor hallway by seven, he would be out of St. Matthew’s Catholic School for Boys with lots of time to get to the Braintree Bowling Palace and the United Custodian’s league tournament.

  Harvey lived for bowling. He had a wife and two adolescent kids and a decent dog in Quincy, all of them housed in the bottom half of a frame duplex. He had over fifteen years of work as janitor at St. Matthew’s behind him. And he had a custom-made Strikemaster bowling ball in a shaped fiberglass case, locked in the trunk of his eight-year-old Chevrolet out in the parking lot, and visions of perfect strikes and cross-alley take-outs in his mind.

  Harvey’s family would sometimes visit the bowling palace to watch him at work on the alleys. “If you come, you gotta sit in the back,” he would tell them sternly. “You don’t talk to me before the game starts, and you give me ten minutes to wind down after it’s over. You hear? I’m pumped full of adrenalin, that’s what I’m tellin’ you. Take me that long to come down. See, even the other guys on my team, they give me the room I need.”

  It was true. During the game Harvey’s teammates rarely spoke to him except to offer an “Attaboy!” or “You was robbed, Harv!” depending on the effect of Harvey’s Strikemaster rolling down the alley like drifting thunder.

  But it wasn’t Harvey’s adrenalin level that prevented his teammates from drawing closer. It was Harvey’s personality. “Basically, the guy’s a prick,” is the way other members described him. “Only reason we keep him around is because he’s as reliable as clockwork and he’s got a two fifty-five average.”

  Harvey was thinking about his Strikemaster while buffing the lower hallway floor of St. Matthew’s and worrying about the wisdom of using a brand-new bowling glove on this, the first night of the league tournament. Maybe he should have kept his old glove. It was well broken-in. New gloves are stiff, it takes eight, nine games until they give you the feel of the ball. . . .

  “Evening, Harvey.”

  Oh shit, Harvey thought. It’s Sellinger. What the hell’s he doing in here so late? “Evening, Father,” Harvey answered pleasantly. He smiled and nodded his head, half agreeable gesture, half genuflect.

  “Just cleaning up some test papers for tomorrow, Harvey,” Sellinger said in answer to Harvey’s thoughts. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour. Had a diocese dinner over at the Howard Johnson’s tonight. Couldn’t finish all the work.”

  Father David Sellinger, a Jesuit, taught grade six at St. Matthew’s Catholic School. His round Irish face shone pink beneath a sharply receding hairline. In college David Sellinger had been a first-string offensive guard on the Loyola varsity football team. Now he wore his weight like a heavy cloak, his rounded shoulders and barrel chest gliding smoothly into a corpulent stomach barely restrained beneath his dark vestments. Only his fiery disposition remained from those athletic days. Father Sellinger’s classes were the best-disciplined of any at St. Matthew’s. “You don’t mess around under Sellinger’s nose,” he would tell his students on the first day of each semester. “Understand that from the beginning, and we’ll all get along fine. If you don’t get the message, I’m going to get some exercise in my right arm, and you’re going to feel it on all four cheeks. Front and back.”

  Harvey Jaycock knew he could trust Father Sellinger to lock up. But that wasn’t right. Harvey was the custodian, damn it. If any of the teaching staff with keys wanted to enter the school at night after he had locked up, well, that was up to them. But Harvey knew he wouldn’t sleep well unless he returned to St. Matthew’s after bowling and checked all the locks for himself. And if he had to do that, then Harvey would be thinking about it all through bowling. It would occupy part of his mind. It would take the edge off his concentration.

  Damn it. Why tonight of all nights?

  But Harvey said “Sure thing, Father Sellinger,” and looked down again at the electric buffer swinging back and forth across the polished surface of the marble floor.

  Damn it all to hell.

  Twenty minutes later Harvey had fini
shed his work. He wheeled the machine into the storage closet and checked his watch. Quarter to seven. He’d hang around until seven, then go up and kind of prod Sellinger, explain how important tonight was to him, how he was responsible for locking up. Maybe Sellinger would understand. He was a tough bastard, but he was human after all. He’d know how important a thing like a bowling tournament could be to a man.

  Harvey had fifteen minutes to kill. He smiled a little. His tongue emerged and wetted his lips. He’d look at the magazine he bought in the Combat Zone last week. That magazine and others like it may have been the salvation of Harvey’s marriage. He would look at the pictures alone in the basement of St. Matthew’s, all those beautiful young girls and the things they did with those lucky young guys, some of them black. Harvey didn’t like seeing the black guys doing it to those pretty white girls.

  He would look at the magazines during the day, and at night he would remember the pictures when he was in bed with his overweight wife, whose breasts were like deflated balloons. It helped, Harvey believed. Without the fantasies of the pictures he and his wife would probably have no sex life at all. Take away all those dirty magazines, and you’d have a hell of a lot more screwing around, frustrated husbands and wives, divorces, all that stuff. Of course, people like Sellinger and the others would never understand it. That’s why he kept the magazine hidden in the furnace room, behind the repair manuals.