EQMM, March-April 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Copyright © 2010 Art Taylor

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  Fiction: THE SEVEN SORROWS by Terence Faherty

  This month Terence Faherty gives us a new case for his first series character, Owen Keane, a sleuth the Indianapolis News called “metaphysical, thinking, introverted, self-effacing, ineffectual,” and “unlike any investi-gator to hit the mystery scene.” We rejoin Owen in 1995, fifty years from the end of World War II—an anniversary around which the story's plot turns. Mr. Faherty's latest book-length work, In a Teapot, features Scott Elliott, a P.I. who also frequently appears in these pages.

  1.

  World War Two officially ended on September second, nineteen forty-five. So this September will be the fiftieth anniversary. Last summer we started to run newspaper ads asking residents of Middlesex County to donate or lend us World War Two memorabilia for an exhibit. The response was tremendous."

  That was putting it mildly. The Middlesex County Historical Society had been deluged with donations. Either there was a sincere desire in this corner of New Jersey to honor the generation that won the war or a lot of people wanted to remodel their attics. The society had been forced to rent warehouse space a few blocks from its New Brunswick offices. And to hire additional flunkies to sort through the largess. I was one of those, and my new supervisor, Rachel Terman, was giving me my orders and a pep talk.

  "It'll be fun, Owen. A lot more fun than sitting behind a desk. You're like an archeologist. Or a detective."

  That last inducement was ill-chosen, though Rachel couldn't have known it. I'd played at being a detective way too often during my forty-odd years, which was one of the reasons I found myself in this barely heated warehouse on a January morning, working for little better than minimum wage.

  Rachel was a small woman made a little less so by the bulky winter coat she hadn't even unbuttoned. Small but brimming with organization.

  "What we need for you to do is prepare the rough draft of a catalog. We want you to assign each box and bag a lot number and list the contents. Then we can get it all on the computer."

  She pointed to the nearest object, a wooden trunk in olive drab. “Let's do this one together. Got your pad ready? This'll be lot number one. The tag says it's a donation, not a loan. It was donated by Mrs. James Petrone. It must have been her husband's footlocker. See, his name is stenciled on it: Sergeant James G. Petrone. Okay, now we open it up, if it will open."

  It certainly wasn't locked. There was a heavy hasp on the lid, but no padlock to go with it. On either side of the hasp were rusty latches, like the ones I'd had on my grade-school lunchboxes only much larger. Despite their oxidation, these opened easily. I lifted the lid, and Rachel let out a little gasp. Coiled on top of some neatly folded uniforms was a belt of ammunition. Every sleeve of the long canvas strip contained what appeared to be an intact round.

  "Don't panic, Owen,” Rachel said, though I hadn't even joined in the gasping. “There's a protocol in place for this. We were afraid there might be some live ammunition or even a souvenir gun mixed in with the donations. Don't touch anything like that. The bullets could be unstable after all these years."

  She dug in her coat pocket and produced a cell phone. “We're supposed to call the police so they can come and take it away. They gave us a special number."

  By the time that special number produced results, I'd gone through three additional boxes without finding any mortar rounds or hand grenades. Rachel had kept watch with me, though she'd spent her time on the phone, talking with someone back at the society.

  The responders, patrolmen named Ryan and Wisehart, were big men dressed, as policemen often seemed to be, in uniforms a half-size too small for them. They immediately violated our protocol on not touching old ammunition. In fact, Wisehart, after hefting the belt and scratching at one of the rounds with his thumb, tossed the whole thing to his partner, squeezing another gasp out of Rachel.

  "False alarm, Ms. Terman, Mr. Keane,” Wisehart said to us. “That there is dummy ammunition. The shell casings are real, but the bullets are just painted wood."

  "Thirty-caliber wood,” his partner commented. “Machine-gun belt. Must have been used in training or something."

  "Or something,” Wisehart repeated. He looked around at the stacks of boxes and bags that filled the big room. “Maybe you shouldn't be calling us every time you make a find. Maybe you should collect the stuff into a corner or someplace."

  "An ammunition dump,” Ryan said. “Or a woodpile.” He dropped the belt back into the footlocker and shut the lid. Then he said, “Huh."

  "What?” Wisehart asked.

  "The name on this, James Petrone. Wasn't that the rosary guy?"

  "Sure was,” Wisehart said.

  Rachel asked, “The rosary-murder guy? Of course. I knew I'd heard that name before."

  I hadn't. “I'm new in town,” I said. “Somebody got killed with rosary beads?"

  "No,” Ryan said. “Shot. Shot and robbed. But the perp left a rosary on Petrone's body. He'd stolen the beads from a church. Left them right on the hole he'd drilled through the old guy's pump."

  Wisehart's equipment belt groaned as he bent to look at the tag on the trunk. “Donated by the widow. Not very sentimental of her. If we didn't already have a guy for the shooting, we'd have to give Mrs. Petrone another look."

  "She had an alibi,” Ryan said. “And no motive. I'd be looking at Petrone's mistress, if I was looking."

  I said, “He was cheating on his wife? Isn't that a motive for killing him?"

  "It would be for my wife,” Ryan said, “but not for Petrone's. She knew all about the chickie on the side. She knew about the previous five. Guess the old guy was a hound from way back. But the other woman now, she had a motive. Petrone ran through some money of hers. Told her he was investing it. Turned out, he made all his investments at an off-track betting parlor."

  "Bad ones, too,” Wisehart said. “But the mistress also had an alibi. And she's not suddenly donating her keepsakes."

  "As to that,” Rachel said, “the donation was set up last summer."

  Wisehart looked at the trunk's tag for a date. It didn't have one. Rachel held up her phone.

  "While we were waiting for you, I spoke to my office. I wanted someone to check the files in case we had to call Mrs. Petrone about the ammunition. Carol, who checked for me, said that a Marie Petrone first wrote in August offering us the footlocker. That was before the murder, wasn't it?"

  "Sure was,” Ryan said. “Which is good, ‘cause we don't need any more suspects. We got the guy."

  "Got a guy, anyway,” Wisehart said.

  "What do you mean?” I asked.

  The patrolmen's radios produced what sounded like static to me and a call to duty to them.

  "Whoops,” Ryan said. “Gotta go."

  "And why the rosary?” I asked.

  "Think stockpile,” Wisehart said to Rachel. “We'll catch you later."

  * * * *

  2.

  Rachel followed the policemen out, leaving me alone with my unanswered questions. And a definite feeling of dread. It was more than just the here-we-go-again sensation I experienced whenever I happened on a mystery, more than the certainty that I would poke it with a stick even though I should have learned by then to think twice. What bothered me was the timing of it. In the past few months, I'd investigated two mysteries, which was quite a caseload, considering that I didn't average two a year. And here was a third. I couldn't escape the feeling that events were building to something, something I wouldn't like. Whether this rosary murder was that ominous something or just another step toward it, I couldn't say.

  I could have escaped the whole question by forgetting I'd ever heard of James Petrone, by adopting a protocol for murder similar to Rachel's for live ammunition: Leave it to the police. Instead, I reopened the dead man's footlocker and turned it inside out.

  The carefully folded uniforms beneath the dummy ammunition were lying in a tray that lifted out
of the locker, revealing the main compartment. Its contents, which filled a full page of my notepad, included Petrone's mess kit, his corporal's stripes—still fringed in the threads cut from his uniform when he'd made sergeant—curled photographs of the camps where he'd trained, and postcards from Paris and other places in France. There were also citations for two medals—the medals themselves were missing—and a small bundle of letters loosely tied with black ribbon. The letters weren't in envelopes, so I could see a little of them without undoing the bundle. Each was written in pencil on a tiny piece of paper folded once. And each was signed by Petrone's wife, Marie.

  I thought, as Wisehart had, how odd it was that the widow had donated the locker, especially since it contained her wartime letters. But she might not have searched the locker first. It couldn't have been that hanging on to mementos of a murdered husband was too painful for her, since she'd arranged for the donation before he'd been murdered. It was more likely that she was just unsentimental about the baggage of a serial philanderer. And more likely still that I was making too much of it. After all, I was sitting in a room full of other donations made by other, equally unsentimental families.

  I turned to a new lot and worked away quietly until the time came for my lunch break. Then I headed for the Central Library on Livingston Avenue. I hadn't been in New Brunswick long, but I was already on a first-name basis with one important contact, a reference librarian named Darryl Craddock. Darryl was another cog in the historical society's World War II exhibit wheel. He and his library were to provide poster-size blowups of important wartime front pages, culled from the files of the Examiner, a defunct local newspaper.

  I'd met Darryl during a meeting about the posters. And made a good impression on him, I hoped. If the rosary murder had happened sometime since last September, it was too recent to be in any newspaper's index, and I didn't feel like working my way through weeks of dailies. Darryl looked like a high-school junior, but in our meeting he had demonstrated a real knowledge of 1940s history. I was hoping he was at least as good at current events.

  The young archivist was on duty in the library's stacks, and he knew all about the Petrone murder. In fact, he saw it in a way the others hadn't, as a cause célébre.

  "It's a travesty of justice, Owen. He's being railroaded."

  "Who?” I asked.

  "Raymond Sleeth. He's a homeless guy. And he's gay. That's two reasons for them to want him locked away."

  Some of Darryl's extreme youthfulness came from his small size, some from the loop in his earlobe, and some from his fashionably shaved head. Three decades separated me from the sixties and my own extreme youthfulness, but it still made me cringe inwardly to see a young man wasting hair like that.

  "You're saying the police don't have any evidence?"

  "Sure they have evidence. When Sleeth was arrested, he was carrying the murder weapon and Petrone's wallet."

  "Not exactly circumstantial,” I said.

  "Sleeth explained it. He'd been Dumpster-diving behind a Shoprite a couple of blocks from where Petrone was shot and found the gun and the wallet."

  "The wallet was empty?"

  "No, it had twenty or thirty bucks in it. The police made a big deal about that. But all it means is, the real killer panicked. He didn't want any part of the money when he realized what he'd done. I think that's why whoever did it left the rosary beads. They were a sign of remorse."

  "Didn't the rosary come from a church Sleeth robbed?"

  "Another conclusion the cops jumped to. Sleeth slept in some churches last winter when he could get away with it. He may have helped himself to some stuff in one of them."

  I risked a little of Darryl's goodwill. “Helped himself?"

  "Okay, he took some things. But I don't think he really knew what he was doing. He's not quite balanced mentally. That's the third strike against him. He's as good as in Rahway Prison right now."

  I said, “Maybe Sleeth happened across Petrone after he'd been shot and took whatever he found. He could have left the rosary in exchange."

  "No, Owen. That's not how he tells it. He never saw Petrone. He didn't leave anything with him or take anything away. He's stuck to the same story through all of this, and I believe him."

  I tried another angle. “How did the police find Sleeth?"

  "They got a tip from another homeless guy who shared a packing case with Sleeth one night down near the river. Sleeth showed him the gun and the wallet. This guy figured he deserved a share and Sleeth wouldn't give him one, so he turned him in.

  "The cops swarmed all over Sleeth. They found the gun and the wallet in his knapsack. They checked his record and found out he'd tried to pawn some stuff from St. Monica's last year, which explained to them why he'd have a rosary. They figure they have an airtight case."

  It was looking that way to me, too. The other side of the balance contained only Wisehart's subtle dissent. And Darryl's unsubtle one.

  "You can read all about it for yourself, Owen. I've kept every story the Star Ledger and the Specter ran."

  * * * *

  3.

  When Darryl spoke of saving “every story,” it led me to expect a thick file that would swallow the rest of my lunch hour whole. What he actually delivered to the one cubicle I found with a working reading light was a very thin folder. The biggest nearby daily, Newark's Star Ledger, was represented by a total of three clippings. But from them I learned a few new facts. Petrone had been sixty-nine when he'd died. He'd been on his way from the New Brunswick apartment of Geneva Majo, fifty-seven, to his favorite watering hole, the Ten-Spot Tavern, when last seen alive. That had been by Majo herself, who had said goodnight to Petrone at about ten-thirty, a fact substantiated by one of her neighbors.

  Majo's testimony had helped to establish a time of death, an always imprecise process. Without her help, it would have been especially imprecise, since Petrone's body hadn't been found right away. He'd either been lured or forced into the alley next to the tavern or else he'd stumbled in there after he'd been shot. Either way, he'd gone unnoticed until early the next morning. But based on the time it took to drive from Majo's to the Ten-Spot, the police had placed the attack at approximately ten-forty. No one inside the tavern had heard the single shot that killed Petrone, but a late basketball game had been showing on the bar's televisions, which were kept loud to accommodate a graying clientele.

  The Star Ledger's second story announced the arrest of Raymond Sleeth, thirty-one, following a tip to the police. The piece mentioned the wallet and the unregistered gun found in Sleeth's possession and elaborated on something that had been touched on in the first story: the rosary left on Petrone's body. The beads hadn't belonged to the victim, according to his wife, and had probably been placed on his chest just after the wound in its center had stopped pumping blood.

  The third Star Ledger clipping was Petrone's somewhat brief obituary. It listed his wartime service in France, his decorations, his thirty years as a tool- and-die maker in a Ford plant in Edison, and his sole survivor, his wife of fifty-two years, Marie.

  The remaining clipping in the file was from the second paper Darryl had named, the Specter. I'd seen its racks outside the place where I bought my morning coffee and in a bookstore near my apartment. It was a counter-culture weekly, a more likely source of concert reviews and exotic personal ads than crime reporting. But it had run a lengthy story on what it had called “the Sleeth Scandal,” a report that echoed Darryl's outrage and may have inspired it. The feature was certainly the source of much of the librarian's inside information. It told of Sleeth's past arrest for church robbing, the jealous “street person” who'd turned him in, and Sleeth's story about finding the gun and wallet in a Dumpster.

  The Specter article may also have been where Ryan and Wisehart had gotten the inside information they'd tossed around. It named the same two alternate suspects they'd mentioned, Marie Petrone and Geneva Majo, and discussed their alibis. Mrs. Petrone had reported for duty at ten-thirty at the hospital
where she worked as a volunteer. Majo had invited a neighbor over to watch television as soon as Petrone left her. That had to be the same neighbor who'd backed her up on Petrone's time of departure.

  Like Patrolman Ryan, the Specter liked Majo for the crime. The article described the money Petrone had talked her out of as her “life savings.” It passed along the rumor about the off-track betting parlor and added a second one concerning a trip Petrone may have made to Las Vegas.

  Petrone's past affairs were mentioned, five of them, going back to 1955. According to the writer, they were known to the police because the long-suffering Marie Petrone had listed them by way of proving that this latest example was no big deal. She'd told the police that she worked the late shift at the hospital because she'd gotten tired of waiting for her husband to come home.

  The reporter didn't explain why Marie hadn't gotten a divorce, except to say that she and Petrone were Catholics. That satisfied his inquiring mind, but not mine. A lapsed Catholic myself—I'd lapsed my way right out of a seminary—I'd known a number of divorced ones, one or two from Marie's generation. I was also bothered by the rosary left on the chest of a Catholic man. That had to be a coincidence, if it had been done by Sleeth or some other stranger, and I had the amateur sleuth's natural distrust of coincidence. It was true that in this corner of New Jersey you couldn't swing a rosary without hitting a Catholic, but it still made me wonder.

  It bothered me while I was returning the clippings and thanking Darryl and through the process of looking up the addresses of Marie Petrone and Geneva Majo in a city directory. It was still rankling when I returned to my Saturn, so much so that it knocked my earlier visions of burgers and fries clean out of my head.

  * * * *

  4.

  I kicked myself for not bringing along the packet of letters I'd found in Petrone's footlocker. They would have given me the perfect excuse for showing up at Marie Petrone's house. I could have returned them on behalf of the historical society and, as long as I was there, asked her why on earth she'd stayed with a cheating husband. Also about possible accomplices. She'd have needed one, if she was behind the murder, since she couldn't have reported for work at ten-thirty and killed her husband blocks away at ten-forty.