Children in the Morning

by Anne Emery

  “I hope you’re right.” She probably was. “And we can forget all about your Italian interlude.”

  Big mistake. Her silence would be short-lived, and I knew I was in for it.

  “Speaking of Italian interludes, Collins, it strikes me that you and Father Burke have been a little evasive on the subject of the road trip you boys took to Italy. Even the most benign questions are met by bland answers that convey very little by way of information, yet speak volumes to those of us who weren’t born yesterday. What did you do? Nothing, apparently. Who did you meet? Sister Kitty Curran and Father What’s-his-name at the Vatican, and Brother So-and-so at a monastery. Am I to believe you did nothing but consort with known nuns, priests, and monks when you were in the land of wine, women, and song, and thus maintained the decorum of nuns, priests, and monks yourselves? Would you care to answer that, Collins?”

  Anything I said would be, well, evasive, so I evaded her questions by claiming the sudden appearance of a penniless widow who was being evicted from her apartment and needed my kind assistance.

  “Get up and walk into the office next to yours, and you’ll find the guy evicting her.” A not entirely undeserved dig at Stratton Sommers, the corporate law firm that employed me. “I’ll speak to you later, Collins. Good day.”

  She did speak to me later. She called and informed me that there was no reference to a Matthew in her news clippings about Delaney. That did not mean he had never had dealings with a Matthew. If his client was seventeen years old or under, his name would not be made public. Similarly if, say, a child was a victim of a sexual crime, the name would not be revealed. And, of course, the news clippings represented only a small sample of Beau Delaney’s cases over the years. Most cases never made the news.

  As promised, I looked through all the material I had on Delaney. Chances were that, over a long career like Delaney’s, he would have had dealings with one or more Matthews but, if so, they were not noted in the papers I had.

  So if the name Matthew was a clue to Normie’s problems, it was a clue that led us nowhere.

  (Normie)

  I was allowed to invite Kim over after school on Monday, so we skipped Four-Four Time, which is okay to do, and went to my house instead. When we got home, Father Burke was there in the living room reading a book. Kim gawked at him and didn’t know what to say.

  “Afternoon, Kim. Normie.”

  “Hi, Father,” I said, and nudged Kim with my elbow.

  “Hi,” she said then.

  “Your mum had to go out and she didn’t want to take the baby, so she asked me to stay with him. He’s still got a bit of a fever. She’ll be getting him some new medicine before she comes home.”

  “You mean you’re babysitting, Father?” Kim said. “How do you know what to do?” Then she thought maybe she shouldn’t have said that, and her face turned pink.

  “I’m an old hand, Kim. I have five brothers and sisters, you know. Four are younger than I am.”

  “But not now,” she said. “They’re probably grown up by now, right?”

  “They are. But I remember. I just gave him a cool bath, and he’s feeling better.”

  Me and Kim went out to the kitchen, and I opened the fridge to see if we had any chocolate milk. There was juice. Beer. Cans of ginger ale! We hardly ever had that.

  “Father, do you want . . .” Whoops. You’re supposed to say “would you like” and you never say “another.” These are manners I’ve been taught. “Would you like a can of ginger ale?”

  “Sure, Normie. That would be grand.”

  “Do I have to . . . would you like me to pour it in a glass, or is the can okay?”

  “The can’s fine.” So I brought it to him. “Thanks, little one.”

  I went back to the fridge and moved some stuff around, and found the chocolate milk. I poured a glass for me and one for Kim.

  Kim still couldn’t believe it, about Father Burke. “He looks like someone normal, like somebody’s dad. How come he doesn’t have his priest uniform on?”

  “Because he’s not at work, Kim. He always dresses like this when he comes over here. Or a lot of the times anyway.”

  “He doesn’t seem as scary here as he does at school. He comes over here a lot?”

  “Sure. He’s a friend of the family.”

  She looked around to make sure he hadn’t crept up on us. “Do you think he changed the baby’s diaper?!”

  “Probably.”

  “No! Father Burke is always so clean!”

  “Well, clean people have to change diapers, too, you know. And he gave Dominic a bath, so he would have washed his hands at the same time.”

  The doorbell rang then, and I went to answer it. It was Mr. Delaney with a briefcase.

  “Hi, Normie. Is your mum home?” I shook my head. “Oh, okay. Could you ask her to call me when she gets in? Are you here alone?”

  “No.”

  “Someone’s looking after you?”

  “Father Burke’s here.”

  By that time, Father Burke had come to the door too. “Afternoon, Beau.”

  “Brennan! They’ve got you on babysitting detail, have they?”

  “Just one of the many services I provide.” He lowered his voice then, and said: “She wants an adult here with the baby while all this is going on, in case Giacomo turns up. And the little fellow is still sick, so . . .”

  “Right. Is he doing any better?”

  “He is. Why don’t you step in? Herself won’t be long, I’m thinking.”

  “Great. I will.”

  “There’s beer in the fridge.”

  “It’s kind of early in the day for me to be thinking of beer. Are you having one? Oh, you’re a ginger ale man, I see.”

  “Well, not always, Beau. I tend to take a drop of whiskey or a pint of Guinness now and again. But these days, yes, I’m on the ginger ale.”

  “Problem?”

  “Not at all, though I have been wrongfully accused of being a bit of a heavy drinker. So, here’s the proof I’m not.”

  I was back in the kitchen by then, and I found some cookies. They came from a bakery so they were good and not all burnt on the bottom.

  “Mr. Delaney comes here too, Normie?” Kim asked.

  “Not usually.”

  “Oh.”

  Dominic started to cry then. I didn’t want to leave the cookies, not that Kim would hog them all, but I wanted to just stay and eat cookies instead of maybe catching germs from a sick baby. Father Burke called out to say he’d get him. Must have read my mind.

  I could hear the baby giggling when Father Burke carried him out to the living room.

  “Well, you’ve got a cheerful little guy there, Brennan,” Mr. Delaney said. “He’s obviously glad to see you!”

  “Mmm.”

  “Handsome little devil. Dark hair, dark eyes. Bit like you, Father!”

  Father Burke didn’t say anything.

  Mr. Delaney asked: “He’s how old now?”

  “He’ll be eight months old next week.”

  “And where were you, Brennan Burke, on the night in question seventeen months ago?”

  Father Burke didn’t answer.

  “Let the record show that the witness is unresponsive. Father Burke, earlier in these proceedings you admitted that you have been accused — by someone — of heavy drinking, is that correct?”

  “Have you no other way to amuse yourself, Mr. Delaney?”

  “I’ll ask the questions here, Father. Have you ever, on any occasion, consumed so much Irish whiskey that you ‘blanked out,’ to use a layman’s term, and were unable to remember what you did whilst under the influence of said alcohol? Perhaps my question was too general. I’ll rephrase it. On a night seventeen months ago, is it possible that you . . .”

  Then Mr. Delaney changed from his la
wyer voice to a surprised voice. “You have thought about this, haven’t you, Brennan? You see this little dark-eyed, black-haired baby and you wonder if you got really blitzed one night, and you and Maura . . . I can see it in your face!”

  “Will you get off of that?”

  “You’re the solution to the problem! Tell it to the judge!”

  “I think not.”

  Kim said something and interrupted my listening. But I didn’t get what they meant anyway. Was Father Burke drinking whiskey seventeen months ago? He probably was, but so what? He’s never drunk; he just drinks, and not all the time. Never at the church or school. Obviously.

  Then I heard Father Burke say: “Behave yourself, Delaney. Here she comes now.”

  “Who?”

  “The MacNeil.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “It’s her car.”

  “You know the sound of her car?”

  “I hear everything, Beau. I’m a musician. Every sound registers. It can be heaven; it can be hell.”

  Mum came in then, and chased me and Kim outdoors to play. After Kim’s dad came to get her I peeked inside, and Mr. Delaney was gone. Mum and Father Burke were talking in the kitchen. I went into the back porch and stood there for a few minutes.

  “I don’t like this, Maura. You know that.”

  “I just don’t want the complication of Monty in this, Brennan.”

  “How would Monty be a complication?”

  “His feelings would be complicated, for one thing.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’d want what’s best for me and the children, on the one hand —”

  “First and foremost, not just on the one hand.”

  “But on the other hand, and quite understandably, he might —”

  “If you’re going to suggest that Monty would want to see you lose your child to a man who lives on other side of the Atlantic Ocean, I don’t want to hear another word out of you.”

  “I’m not saying he would consciously wish it, or even admit it to himself . . .”

  “Go on out of that. You said his feelings were one thing. What’s the next thing?”

  “I don’t want him getting involved in it, legally or personally. I don’t want him in a pissing match with Giacomo.”

  “All of that seems preferable to deliberately keeping him in the dark about something so fundamental in your life, and in the lives of Normie and Tom.”

  “Stop worrying about it, Brennan. Monty wouldn’t want to know. If I thought otherwise, I’d be the first to tell him. This wouldn’t contribute to his peace of mind.”

  “Why should you make that decision on his behalf? I feel like a double agent helping you mislead him!”

  “Look, Brennan. It’s not as if we’re deceiving him about the facts. He knows there’s a baby. He doesn’t think it was the Holy Spirit; ergo, there must have been a man. He knows there’s a guy called Giacomo.”

  “I hear you, but that doesn’t change things. I don’t like it.”

  I went into the kitchen then, and Father Burke left, and Mum asked me what I wanted for supper. I said spaghetti with pink sauce, so she made that for us. She didn’t look very happy. She may have been keeping secrets from Daddy, but she wasn’t thinking Nyah, nyah, nyah, I have a good secret from him! She really thought he would be upset if he heard all the bad news about Dominic and Giacomo so, really, she was being nice by keeping Daddy in the dark about it.

  (Monty)

  Beau Delaney laid much of the blame for the murder charge on Sergeant Chuck Morash of the Halifax Police Department. I called and spoke to Morash, and learned that he was a witness in a trial taking place in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court on Tuesday. I arranged to meet him for coffee at Perk’s on Lower Water Street in the morning before court got underway. He wasn’t there when I arrived, so I stood outside and watched the outline of a navy frigate making its way out of port in a dense, grey Halifax fog. The ship was barely visible, but then, it was almost impossible to see the city of Dartmouth across the harbour.

  “Monty?”

  I turned, and saw a short, powerfully built dark-haired man approaching me with his hand extended. I realized I had seen him around but we had never met.

  “Sergeant Morash?”

  “Chuck.”

  We shook hands and went inside, where we ordered coffee and pastries, and sat down at a table.

  “I guess I can figure out what you want to talk to me about,” Morash said. “They didn’t make me a sergeant for nothing!”

  “You’re on to me, no question. Chuck, when you arrived at the Delaney house on the night of Peggy’s death, what made you think this was a murder and not an accident?”

  “She was lying at the foot of the stairs exactly as she landed, in my estimation. Nobody had moved her.”

  “And this told you what?”

  “If I came home and found my wife lying at the bottom of the stairs and she wasn’t yet stiff with rigor mortis and I thought it was an accident, I’m pretty sure my first reaction would be to touch her, hold her, shake her, look underneath her . . . something! I’m not speaking as an investigator now, but as a husband. I wouldn’t just back off and leave her there, as if I had come upon — or created! — a crime scene. That’s what did it for me.”

  Yes, I could see that. But I had no intention of saying so.

  “You knew who Delaney was, of course.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Had you had any dealings with him before this?”

  “Just the usual, giving evidence against his clients in court.”

  “How did that go for you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did Delaney tend to give you a grilling on the stand?”

  “Sometimes, sure. Part of the job. His job to give it, my job to suck it up.”

  “How did you do at sucking it up?”

  “If you’re thinking I had it in for your client, Monty, you’re wrong. No cop, no witness, likes to have his competence and his credibility attacked in court but, as I say, it comes with the territory. I wouldn’t hold a grudge over something like that, and I certainly wouldn’t charge a man with murder because he had caused me some embarrassing moments on the witness stand! We can’t function like that as police officers.”

  I took a bite of my cinnamon bun and a sip of coffee, and asked Morash: “What do you think of Delaney?”

  His answer surprised me: “Needy.”

  I had been expecting “good lawyer, too bad he’s on the wrong side” or “soft on crime” or “aggressive” or “relentless.” Anything but “needy.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He does a spectacular job for his clients. Nobody would dispute that. And I don’t question his dedication. But hasn’t it ever struck you that he needs the fame, the pats on the back, the adulation? That movie, well, that would go to anybody’s head. Especially with a title like Righteous Defender. I know I’d be cock of the walk if the Jack of Hearts had played me in a film. But I think he thrives on that sort of thing to, well, an inordinate degree.”

  “Could it be that he attracts all that attention and fame because he is so good at what he does, and that you’re looking back and making an assumption that he needs it?”

  “What drives him, though, Monty? What motivates him to take on this larger-than-life persona?”

  “What’s your background, Chuck?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  He laughed, and said: “I did my B.A. in psychology before joining the department, and I’m plugging away at my Masters at night.”

  “Yet you didn’t use the term ‘self-esteem’ once in your little personality profile of my client!”

  “Don’t even go there, on the subject of self-esteem and Beau Delaney!”

  “You think he’s got it in spades?”
/>   “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t.”

  “Really!”

  “I think he needs, and gets, a refill on a regular basis. I can’t quite imagine what he’d be like if he didn’t. This is a little thing, and you may laugh it off, but I’ll tell you anyway. When I went back to the Delaney house with a warrant, after we had laid the murder charge, I was in his bedroom and saw all these shoes in his closet, lined up on a rack. Not so many pairs of shoes that you looked askance at them, but you noticed them for sure. I looked at them, and do you know what I found?”

  I shook my head.

  “Shoe lifts.”

  “Shoe lifts! The man is six and a half feet tall! They couldn’t have been Delaney’s shoes.”

  “They were. They are. These lifts add maybe an inch, inch and a half, of height.”

  Odd.

  “What’s the significance of that?” I asked.

  “You tell me,” he replied, and I felt as if I was on the analyst’s couch.

  “I’d rather not speculate,” I said to him.

  “Fair enough. I would speculate that he very much enjoys being the big man in town, physically and otherwise. I think it’s possible that someone like Delaney may feel the need to be the top gun, the expert, in any situation. It’s an impression I’ve formed over the years, seeing him in court or at official functions. I think maybe he’s the type who would need to lord it over others, including perhaps his wife, and he might have lashed out if she confronted him or disagreed with him.

  “But no, Monty, none of this went into my decision to lay the charge. I based it on what I saw at the scene. A woman who apparently sustained a fatal skull fracture by falling down a set of stairs. Possible, sure, but how likely? And she fell backwards. If she had tripped, she would have fallen forward. She may have been able to use her arms to break her fall. And then there was Delaney’s demeanour at the house. All he told us was that he wasn’t there when it happened. He had come home from the Annapolis Valley just after twelve thirty. I found it curious that, well, he wasn’t more curious about what happened to Peggy, how she could have fallen like that, how such a fall could have been fatal. He didn’t wonder aloud whether somebody else had been with her. To me, Monty, it just didn’t add up. And the fact that he lied about what time he came home — Harold Gorman saw him outside the house before eleven o’clock — tipped the scales against him.”