EQMM, March-April 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I considered tracking down the Specter's all-knowing correspondent. Instead, I drove to the apartment of the correspondent's number-one suspect, Geneva Majo. I didn't go there hoping to break her alibi, though that would have been fine with me. I went there to ask her whether she'd ever seen a rosary on her late lover's person.

  The other woman lived in an older, well-kept building on Leyland Street. I was saved from having to negotiate with Majo via the front-door intercom by a deliveryman who happened to be leaving the building as I walked up. That only postponed the problem of explaining myself and my interest in the Petrone murder, but I was a man who'd take a postponement whenever I could get one.

  That day I got two. When I rang the bell of Majo's second-floor apartment, no one answered. Someone was home in the next apartment, though. I heard movement behind the door as I turned toward the elevator. On impulse, I knocked on that door, and it opened as far as the security chain would permit. A very short, very old woman peered out at me. Or rather, peered over my right shoulder.

  "There's no soliciting in this building,” she said.

  "I'm not selling anything,” I told her. “I came by to ask Ms. Majo about James Petrone.” Which got me back to the challenge of explaining myself, or would have, if the old woman had asked for an explanation.

  "I won't undo the chain,” she said instead. “You have a nice voice. I'm sure you have a nice face, too, but I won't undo the chain."

  "You can't see my face?"

  "Not very well. Macular degeneration, both eyes. I can't see anything I look at straight on. I only see things at the edges. But I don't complain about it."

  "You told the police that you'd seen James Petrone leave on the night he died. Did you really see him?"

  "A little. Mostly I heard him. He and my neighbor Geneva were having words that night. I'd been dozing a little, and they woke me. I heard them in her apartment and then out in the hall. I think she knocked on my door so he would leave. It worked, too. As soon as I opened up, he went away."

  "What were they arguing about?"

  "I'm not sure. I don't hear that well either. Geneva said later it was over money. It usually is, isn't it? She didn't want to talk about it. Geneva is a good person and a good neighbor, but she picks bad men. She doesn't like to be alone. I know all about that."

  "You're sure it was ten-thirty when Petrone left? Can you still read a clock?"

  "I'm not blind. I can see the buttons on your coat don't match. And I've got a clock that reads out the time if you push a button. But I didn't have to use it that night. I know what time it was because Geneva asked me over to watch Cheers. It had just started, and it comes on every evening at ten-thirty on Channel Eleven out of New York. We watch it a couple of times a week together, sometimes at her place, sometimes at mine. She has a bigger television set. If I sit real close and kind of look away, I can see a lot of what's happening. They're all reruns, of course. Even so, I almost called the station to complain about that night's episode."

  "Too racy?"

  "Cheers? No. It was just that they'd showed the same episode the week before. I'd watched it alone on my little set, and I'm sure it was the same one. Norm tries to save a restaurant he likes, the Hungry Heifer. They're supposed to rotate them better than that. That was pure laziness. I wouldn't have sat through it again, except that Geneva wanted the company. We were together for hours after the show, talking."

  "About Petrone?"

  "No, about New Brunswick and what it was like when I was a little girl. Geneva was full of questions. Not that she was really interested. She just didn't want to be alone. I know how that is, believe me."

  * * * *

  5.

  My lunch hour was over and then some, so I headed for the warehouse with every intention of putting in a good afternoon's work. Then, a few blocks from Majo's apartment, I saw a church with a familiar name: St. Monica's. It was the place robbed by Raymond Sleeth, according to Darryl and his press clippings. There was a parking space open at the curb in front of the church, a Romanesque building of once-white brick, and I pulled in.

  The church was open and occupied. Two men on a scaffold were working on one of the elaborate hanging light fixtures, which looked like diving bells designed by Bernini. From the safety of a checkerboard center aisle, a little man in black was watching them.

  I introduced myself to this supervisor and told him that I was concerned about a homeless man who'd been arrested for murder.

  "Raymond Sleeth, of course,” the little man replied before leading me to the nearest pew. “I'm Father Macy. I'm the pastor here, and I've been praying over that very thing. I'm concerned about St. Monica's role in all of this."

  "Your role?"

  Father Macy's skin was peeling like a sunbather's, though he wasn't the least bit tanned. He scratched at the back of one hand as he answered.

  "Oh yes. We're major players in this drama. Mr. Sleeth did break into the church and did steal some things we had in our basement, but we didn't have to prosecute him. I was persuaded to do it by the police, who told me it was the best way to get Mr. Sleeth some help. He's not quite right in the head, you know, poor man. Nowadays, it's hard to help a person like that unless he wants to be helped or he runs afoul of the law. But the law can't have done very much for Mr. Sleeth, since he ended up on the street again and committed a far worse crime."

  "Maybe,” I said.

  "Of course. But however his case turns out, we bear a burden of responsibility. I was in New York recently and saw that musical they made of Les Misérables. Have you seen it? Oh, you should really go. There's a scene that's been haunting me. An old bishop gives an ex-convict some valuable silver candlesticks, and they change the convict's life. I couldn't help thinking of poor Mr. Sleeth and the pittance he took from us. We should have let him keep it. We should have given him more."

  "Was one of the things he took a rosary?"

  The old priest sighed. “The police and I have gone round and around about that. In the end, they had to accept that I just don't know. You see, what Mr. Sleeth broke into was a storage room where we keep odds and ends. One of the boxes he found contained the personal effects of a retired priest who'd passed away at our rectory. Father Gregory Carron was his name. He didn't have any family, so we'd just stored his things away until we could make an inventory, which we never got around to doing."

  At that mention of a shirked inventory, it was all I could do to keep from looking at my watch. Father Macy missed the struggle.

  "Mr. Sleeth was caught because some of the things he pawned had Father Carron's name or initials on them. There was an engraved gold watch that his last parish had given him and some beautiful cufflinks that had been his father's, I believe. Mr. Sleeth hadn't tried to pawn a rosary—I doubt if you could these days—and that bothered me, too. Not that he'd kept it but where he'd kept it. I asked the police where a homeless man would have hidden away a rosary all the time he was in custody. I mean, they didn't hold one for him and he doesn't have a sock drawer to lose things in. They suggested he might have had a secret cache somewhere around town. It didn't seem too likely to me."

  Or to me. I started to thank the priest for his time, but he cut me off by tapping his peeling forehead with a peeling hand.

  "Listen to me,” he said, “calling those beads a rosary when I tried for an hour to get the police to stop doing it. I got mad every time I read ‘rosary murder’ in the paper, and here I'm near to saying it myself. Too catchy to resist, I guess."

  "The beads weren't a rosary?"

  "Not the ones the police brought to me to identify. They were a chaplet, of course, a circle of beads used for a religious devotion, but not a true rosary. The church has many devotions that feature repetitive prayers counted off on prayer beads. Over fifty devotions, I think. The Holy Rosary is only one of them."

  I suddenly remembered a long-lost lecture from my seminary days. “There's one connected with the Sacred Heart, isn't there? And another with St.
Anthony."

  "Very good,” Father Macy said. “If you know that, I'm sure you've heard the Virgin Mary referred to as ‘Our Lady of Sorrows.’ “

  "It was the name of my high school."

  "A Trenton boy, eh? Well, the chaplet the police brought me was for a devotion connected to Our Lady called ‘The Seven Sorrows.’ It's very like the rosary Catholic children used to grow up with, except instead of five groupings of ten beads there are seven groups of seven. You meditate on seven sorrows of the Blessed Virgin as you say the Hail Marys.

  "The Seven Sorrows dates from the late Middle Ages. I believe it's much better known in Europe than over here. I don't recall Father Carron ever mentioning it, but he might have practiced the devotion. Or someone could have made him a gift of the chaplet at some time or other. You wouldn't believe the number of Miraculous Medals I've been given, especially during flu season. People fall into the bad habit of thinking of those things as lucky charms."

  He walked me to the door. There he said, “I'm afraid it's Mr. Sleeth who needs the lucky charm now. I trust our prayers will do instead."

  * * * *

  6.

  Rachel Terman wasn't waiting for me back at the warehouse with a pink slip in her hand. By the time she showed up an hour later, I'd made enough progress to cover my wanderings. Not that Rachel seemed interested in my productivity. She'd come back to get in the last word in a conversation that had ended hours before. She wanted to address those words to a certain pair of policemen, but in their absence, she had to make do with me.

  "I found Marie Petrone's original letter to us, Owen. It supports what Carol told me over the phone. Mrs. Petrone offered us the footlocker before her husband was murdered."

  Rachel was almost indignant over something, the suspicion cast on Mrs. Petrone, I guessed. It was as though a slur against a benefactor of the historical society reflected on the society itself.

  "Did you find anything else we need to show the police?” she asked.

  "Not yet."

  "Too bad. I brought the letter with me. I wanted them to read it."

  She handed it to me instead. It had been typed very neatly on a manual machine. The first paragraph contained the offer of the footlocker and explained why its owner had been willing to give it up: “My husband isn't as sentimental about the war as some veterans and most wartime brides, like myself."

  This particular war bride was extremely sentimental. Her closing paragraph was a prose hymn to the generation that had won World War II.

  "The strengths and sacrifices of that pure time shaped the rest of our lives. And more than that. The courage and fidelity of those few short years justified and sanctified all the long decades since."

  "She writes beautifully, doesn't she?” asked Rachel, who'd been reading along over my shoulder.

  "Yes,” I said, agreeing to both possible interpretations of Rachel's compliment. Mrs. Petrone's writing was impressive and her penmanship, as displayed in her signature at the bottom of the page, was in perfect copybook style. Perfect and wrong. She'd signed herself “Marie Petrone” rather than “Mrs. James Petrone,” but that wasn't what brought me up short. The first name of that signature was nothing like the “Marie” I'd seen on the letters in the footlocker. An adult's handwriting changed over time, but it had never been my experience that it improved. Compared to this copperplate, the signature on the old letters was a scrawl.

  I waited until my busy supervisor had bustled off before I opened the locker and retrieved the loosely bound packet. Loose or not, I'd respected the seal represented by its black ribbon when I'd first happened on the letters, but now I slipped the flimsy pages out and started reading.

  I noted right away that more had changed than Marie's signature. Her prose style had also improved greatly since 1944. In fact, the style of the letters was so awkward and simple it was as though their author had been writing in a second language.

  That insight confirmed what the difference in signatures had led me to suspect. The coincidence of a common name popping up twice had caused me to make a hasty and incorrect assumption, perhaps the thousandth of my career. The wartime letters had not been written by the bride Petrone had left behind.

  I read through the packet, finding references to “my village” and “our chance meeting” and “our night together” that seemed to back my latest hunch. There were many wishes for Petrone's safety, one of which made the warehouse seem even colder: “You think it foolish, but keep my little gift close to your heart."

  * * * *

  7.

  When my shift ended, I returned to my apartment, which was stylishly decorated with the boxes from my recent move. There I placed a phone call to a television station in New York. The station's staff transferred my call three times, keeping me on hold between each handoff. Even so, I was back on the road again by six.

  I drove to a yellow-brick cottage on a winding street near Mayburg Park. The small front yard, a steep brown slope on either side of crumbling steps, was decorated with a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary. There were traces of blue paint in the deepest folds of her veil.

  Marie Petrone answered the front door. She was a tall woman, nearly my height, with bright red hair. That it was her natural color or at least an accurate reproduction of it was suggested by her very pale complexion and by her eyes, which were a blue bordering on aquamarine.

  I introduced myself and used the opening I'd thought of earlier, telling her I'd come to return the letters she'd mistakenly left in the footlocker. She didn't look down at my empty hands or ask to see the letters, which I'd also left in the locker, though not mistakenly.

  She just said, “I don't want them back."

  She started to shut the door, so I quickly jumped to my real business. “Then maybe you can help me save a man named Sleeth. He's been falsely accused of murdering your husband."

  If I hadn't read Mrs. Petrone's letter to the society, I would have considered a slammed door a likely reply. It was still an even-money bet, but something, the mismatched buttons on my coat or the January cold I was standing in, swung things my way.

  "Come in,” she said.

  By the time she'd settled me in her under-lit living room, which Rachel Terman would have taken intact if she'd been doing an exhibit on the 1960s, the widow had thought of things she should have said on the front porch.

  "Raymond Sleeth hasn't been convicted of anything, Mr. Keane. If he is, I would consider asking the judge for mercy, given the man's mental problems."

  "You can do better than that,” I said. “You can get Sleeth out of jail tomorrow. All you have to do is admit that you shot your husband."

  Somewhere in the back of the house, a stereo was playing Glenn Miller. “String of Pearls” gave way to “American Patrol” without commercial interruption.

  Mrs. Petrone was dressed in a velour sweat suit, and its material was tight at her knees. But she smoothed it absently now with her big hands as though it were a misbehaving skirt.

  "Why would I do that, Mr. Keane?"

  The question was ambiguous, and I took the easier path. “So an innocent man doesn't suffer."

  "I meant, why would I have shot my husband? And how could I have done it? I was at work when it happened."

  "The how wasn't hard to figure out. Geneva Majo lied to the police when she said your husband left her about ten-thirty. It was probably no later than ten past ten. The neighbor who seconded her story has vision problems. She based her testimony on an episode of Cheers that started as your husband left. It was a repeat of an episode the station had run the week before, which is unusual. So unusual, in fact, that it never actually happened. When Majo pretended to turn the program on, she actually started a tape she'd recorded earlier. Then she kept the neighbor talking for hours, so she wouldn't notice a problem with the time when she got home. Your contribution—besides the murder—was to make sure the body wasn't found right away.

  "The police might have looked into the time business more clos
ely if Majo's alibi had depended on it. But hers didn't. It was enough that she was never alone after Petrone left her. Your alibi was the one that rested on the timing of everything. I guess the cops couldn't imagine you and Majo working together. And, of course, Sleeth distracted them by diving into the wrong Dumpster."

  Sometime during my long speech, Mrs. Petrone had turned her gaze from me to a spinet piano. And to the wedding portrait that sat atop it. The pictured groom was a young soldier with remarkably curly hair. The girl bride was beautiful, with a button nose and a chin held very high. Taking her cue from that artifact, Mrs. Petrone raised her chin now.

  "Why would that Majo woman do anything for me? And why would I hurt Jimmy?"

  "Jimmy wiped out Majo's savings. She'd probably have shot him herself if you'd set it up that way. You pulled the trigger because your husband cheated on you."

  "He'd cheated on me many times. I told the police about five affairs I knew of before Miss Majo. I gave them the name of every one of Jimmy's women."

  "Not every one. You didn't tell the police about the only woman who mattered. Her name was the same as yours: Marie. Your husband met her in France in nineteen forty-four when you two were still newlyweds. All these years you've thought of your early days with Petrone as a pure time. All the things your husband did to you since you forgave for the sake of those newlyweds, for the sacrifices they'd made and for what they'd meant to one another.

  "You didn't find out about Marie until last fall, when you went through your husband's old footlocker. You came across the letters she wrote him. Tied up with them was a lucky charm she'd given him, a religious chaplet. She'd told him to keep it by his heart, which is where you left it."