Murder Makes a Pilgrimage

by Carol Anne O'Marie

  “It’s this.” Mary Helen waved the shiny Polaroid.

  Sister Eileen, looking as satisfied as a cat in the cream, stood beside her.

  “Look, Comisario.” Mary Helen shoved the print across his desk. Ángel skimmed the picture. It was a poorly taken snapshot of the two nuns. Both could be mistaken for fugitives except that fugitives usually didn’t look so disheveled. And the photographer had caught Mary Helen with both eyes closed.

  “It is certainly not very flattering,” Ángel admitted.

  “That is not the point, Comisario.”

  He had never seen Sister Mary Helen like this. Her whole body trembled with energy. She eyed him expectantly as he brought the picture closer to study it. He examined the figures in the background. Whatever is exciting her, he thought, must be in the background because these two are not “it.”

  Four figures were caught behind the nuns. Two he quickly recognized as the DeAngelos. The third was a piece of Heidi Williams. The fourth person must be Lisa Springer. The amber hair and the crooked-toothed smile gave it away. The beautiful animated face in the photo bore little resemblance to the discolored, swollen lifeless mask that he had seen beside the tomb of St. James.

  “Well,” Sister Mary Helen asked impatiently, “do you see it?”

  Reluctant to admit he hadn’t, Ángel continued to study every detail of the snapshot.

  Mary Helen groaned aloud when she heard the knock on the comisario’s office door.

  “Pase!” he shouted without looking up from the Polaroid.

  The door opened, and stiff-backed Officer Zaldo escorted in a bewildered-looking Heidi Williams. Her red-rimmed eyes shifted between Ángel and the nuns. Obviously she had been crying, and from the nervous way she kept swallowing Mary Helen could tell that her mouth was dry with fear.

  “What do you want me for?”

  “A few questions, señorita.” Ángel was gentle.

  “I’ve told you everything I know.” Heidi’s eyes began to fill.

  “Only one or two more.”

  “You’d better be careful about your questions,” Heidi said. If she meant to sound menacing, she failed. Her words came out in a near whine. “I’ve just talked to my mom, and she’s really mad now.”

  “Why is that, señorita?”

  “My mom says she doesn’t want any more questions. She says I don’t need to answer questions. She says a cop came to our house and really upset my father. My mom is mad at me, but it is not my fault.” Heidi’s voice shook.

  “Of course not,” Ángel said soothingly. “This will be one of the last questions, I am sure.” He motioned Heidi to a chair facing him and nodded toward Zaldo.

  Mary Helen felt the wind of the officer’s quick exit on her back.

  “Señorita, have you remembered anything else Lisa said on Friday night when she saw the note that was left under your door?”

  Heidi stared at him.

  “When she read the note?” he prodded. Mary Helen figured that Ángel was searching for something, anything, that would produce a lead.

  The office air was electric while Heidi thought. “She just said, ‘What’s this?’ when she first saw the paper.”

  “What’s this?” The words triggered something in Mary Helen’s memory. “What’s this?” Bootsie had asked when she found the small tightly rolled slip of paper on her plane seat. “Belmont,” Bootsie had read aloud, and Mary Helen had thought only of the city on the Peninsula.

  “Belmont.” Her voice almost crackled. “Does Belmont ring a bell?”

  Heidi, the comisario, Eileen—all three pairs of eyes were on her.

  “That’s where Lisa went away to school,” Heidi said.

  “And where Professor DeAngelo taught before he transferred to his present assignment,” Ángel said.

  Abruptly he rose from his chair. “What is it, Sister?” Now his eyes were on Eileen.

  Her face was as white as the wall. “I should have remembered.” Eileen’s gray eyes were enormous.

  “Remembered what?” Mary Helen asked, rubbing her friend’s icy hand.

  “Don’t you?”

  “You’re the one with the phenomenal memory, Eileen. I’ve said that all along. What is it that you have remembered?”

  Eileen sucked in a deep breath.

  “Agua,” Ángel shouted from the doorway, and Zaldo appeared almost magically carrying a glass.

  “I don’t know what happened to me,” Eileen said after a couple of swallows. “I guess it was such a shock.”

  “What was a shock?” Ángel hovered over her.

  “Remembering that Belmont was the college with the scandal seven or eight years ago. It was the talk of the educational community. A history professor. I can’t remember his name, but he was giving good grades to coeds for sexual favors. What made it even more despicable, if I remember correctly, was that he victimized scholarship students, who needed to maintain their grade points, and he picked on only those who were plain. That way, I guess, he figured the authorities would never believe their accusations. He could slough them off as the delusions of frustrated and love-starved young girls.

  “It would have worked, too, except that one plain-looking administrator believed the young women. Nothing, however, was ever proved. The professor’s wife gave him an ironclad alibi. No one ever went to jail. The college smoothed it over, and the professor simply went on sabbatical. I have no idea if it was Professor DeAngelo, of course.” Eileen took another swallow of water. “It just seems so coincidental.”

  “Would he murder to cover up an old scandal?” Ángel was thinking aloud. “It doesn’t seem necessary.”

  The giant bells of the cathedral began to peal. Bells chimed from the stately towers all over the city and filled the air with one enormous sound. Mary Helen raised the Polaroid from Ángel’s desk. She studied it more closely. All at once her scattered thoughts swung together, like steeple bells, into one long, loud harmonious whole, and she knew she was right.

  “I know who did it,” she said above the ringing. “I’m not sure why or when, but I’m absolutely sure how.”

  The smell of fear filled the comisario’s office almost before the DeAngelos took their seats.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Roger said indignantly, but his dark eyes held no anger, only panic. He plucked at his beard. It was beginning to need a trim. “We are American citizens! What right have you to summon us arbitrarily?” he demanded, trying to sound ominous. Nervousness had raised his voice an octave, and he only sounded silly.

  Bootsie’s face was mime white, and her long, shoe-polish-black hair was pulled back and sprayed as stiffly as a wig on a mannequin. Her eyes, hard as blue glass, shrieked hatred. She smiled with chilly courtesy at the group.

  And an odd group it is, Mary Helen thought. Comisario Ángel Serrano, whom one could easily mistake for an aging and harmless gnome unless you caught the intelligence in his dark eyes; Officer Zaldo, stiff and formal, the parody of a police zealot; red-eyed Heidi Williams, sniffling and chewing her perpetual stick of gum; and two aging nuns.

  No wonder Bootsie DeAngelo viewed them with contempt. She had figured them for a knot of fools. Mary Helen’s heart began to race. This was going to be fun!

  “What is it that you people want anyway?” Bootsie said with the condescending frown of Scarlett O’Hara talking to a Yankee. She touched her husband’s forearm as if to restrain his rage. “Perhaps this matter can be simply settled, Roger, and then the comisario can get back to his real work of looking for the mugger.”

  “Do you recognize this picture?” Mary Helen picked up the Polaroid snapshot from Ángel’s desk and handed it to Bootsie.

  “I have more to do with my time than look at pictures.” With a bored sigh, Bootsie glanced at it. “That idiot woman was snapping Polaroids in the Madrid airport if I remember correctly. It is a very bad shot of you nuns,” she said, her inflection making “nuns” sound like an insult.

  “Pacience is an heigh vertu, certeyn,
” Chaucer’s pilgrim claimed. At that moment Mary Helen found it amazingly true.

  “No, dear, behind us,” she said innocently. “Do you see who’s behind us?”

  Feigning annoyance, Bootsie studied the picture again. “Roger and I, part of her”—her eyes flicked to where Heidi was sitting—“and Lisa Springer’s face. Was that what I was intended to see?”

  “That—and something more,” Mary Helen said, feeling strangely like a mongoose toying with a poisonous snake.

  “I have more to do than to play your nonsensical games.” Bootsie’s eyes, sharp as drawn swords, met hers. “What exactly are you getting at?”

  “Look at what you are wearing on your head,” Mary Helen said calmly.

  Bootsie’s eyes fastened on the Polaroid, her thick eyelashes still. What little color she had left drained from her face, leaving deep wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Her hands shook almost imperceptibly.

  The silence in the room lengthened.

  “What is it?” Roger grabbed the picture from her stiff fingers. “What in the devil is it that you’re wearing?” He squinted at the picture. “It’s only that old horseshoe headband thing you wear to keep your hair off your face.” His eyes darted quizzically from Mary Helen to Ángel and back again.

  “Unless I’m wrong, that old horseshoe headband thing is the exact size and shape of the mysterious weapon used to strangle Lisa Springer,” Mary Helen said. “What I don’t know, Bootsie, is why.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” The professor’s voice echoed in the silent room. “Bootsie would never kill anyone.” He turned toward his wife. She was rigid, her ashen face as emotionless as a mask. “Tell them, Bootsie. Tell them you didn’t.”

  Bootsie was silent.

  Roger grabbed her shoulders and shook her until her head bobbed like a puppet’s. “Tell them, Bootsie. Do you hear me? Tell them.”

  “But I did,” Bootsie said in a small, satisfied voice. “I did it, Roger. Before that girl brought up Belmont again. We couldn’t have that, could we?”

  Roger looked baffled. His hands dropped from his wife’s shoulders. “What girl? Lisa?”

  “She was one of the fat, homely girls you had trouble with at Belmont, you know,” Bootsie said in the same flat way she might have said, “One of the girls you taught in Western civ.”

  Mary Helen’s blood ran cold.

  “I recognized the hair and the crooked eyetooth,” Bootsie said with satisfaction. “She was going to make trouble for us again, Roger. I couldn’t allow that.”

  By now Roger DeAngelo’s whole body shook. His already lean body shrank inside his natty tweed jacket. Tears ran unheededly down his cheeks. He stared at his wife as if he were seeing her for the first time.

  “Bootsie, why?” he asked, bewildered.

  “I told you, Roger. You know as well as I that once she found you, that little bitch was never going to leave you alone. Her note on the plane with that one word.” Bootsie’s eyes narrowed. “You’d never hear the end of her. I saw you on Friday night, coming down the cathedral steps. I knew whom you had met, silly.” Now she sounded like an indulgent parent chiding an errant child. “So when you fell asleep, I slipped a note under her door. From you, of course.” She smiled at her own cleverness. “I told her we’d meet in the crypt as soon as the cathedral opened in the morning. Six o’clock is when it opens. What could seem safer? Six in the morning in a church.” Her carefree giggle clashed with the stunned silence in the room.

  “Once again I saved you, my darling. Once again, Roger, Bootsie has saved her pussycat.” She smiled a cloying smile and put a protective hand on his sleeve.

  Roger recoiled as if her fingers were on fire.

  Bootsie looked puzzled. “What is it, darling?”

  For a long moment Roger DeAngelo stared at his wife. “You’re crazy!” he said with sudden contempt. “I’ve always known you were possessive and suspicious, Bootsie”—his words were rapier sharp—“but I had no idea that you were crazy, too.”

  Color rushed back into Bootsie’s face. It made red splotches on her white cheekbones. “Don’t say that to me, darling.” For a moment her eyes blazed; then they faded. “I simply could not go through it all over again, Roger. The newspapers, the accusations, the veiled innuendos from the other faculty wives. And worst of all, the pity I saw in their faces. I’d do anything—anything, Roger—to wipe away that superior pity.”

  Bootsie snatched the Polaroid from Roger’s hand and tore it into small pieces. The whole room watched as intently as if they were playing charades.

  “Now that’s gone!” Bootsie said, and grabbed Mary Helen’s pocketbook. With an impersonal glance toward Mary Helen, Bootsie unearthed Anne’s travel diary from the purse. “She has been writing things in here all week,” Bootsie said, holding the book triumphantly above her head. “I’ve seen her.”

  With a smug grin, she ripped out a fistful of pages and shredded them.

  “It was you who put those Gypsy women up to snatching my purse,” Mary Helen said, feeling a sudden lightness.

  Bootsie DeAngelo turned her frosty blue eyes on the old nun. “Who would have imagined that you were so strong?” she said and gave Mary Helen a look of pure hatred.

  Then she touched Roger’s arm. “All the evidence is gone, my darling. I’ve destroyed it.” Bootsie was as matter-of-fact as if she’d said, “I just took out that pesky trash.”

  “Once again I am your alibi. Now you can be mine. We are free to go, aren’t we, Comisario?” she asked.

  “I am afraid not, señora.” Ángel Serrano’s voice was gentle.

  With a scrape of his boots, Officer Zaldo slipped up beside Bootsie and clicked the handcuffs on her wrists. The manager’s small office reverberated with the sound of her shrieking.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15

  Feast of

  St. Teresa of Ávila,

  Doctor of the Church

  “Denny is on the phone, hon.” Jack Bassetti’s voice was soft, and his words barely penetrated Kate’s heavy blanket of sleep. “He says it’s important.” Jack gently shook her shoulder. “Phone, hon,” he said again.

  Kate smelled his after-shave. She blinked her eyes open. Her husband was dressed. How had she slept through the ringing of the phone? How had she slept through Jack’s alarm, his showering and getting dressed for work? What time was it anyway? The clock was fuzzy, but she thought it said seven-thirty. Where was the baby? She propped herself up on one elbow, but her head began to swim. Lowering herself, she closed her eyes. “Why did you let me sleep? I’ve got to get up,” she insisted.

  “Just stay put, hon.” Jack’s voice was soothing. “I’ve fed and watered the baby, and my mother’s on her way. Talk to Denny, now, and we’ll talk when you hang up.” He placed the cool receiver against her burning ear.

  “Hello,” she grunted.

  “Those damn two nuns have done it again,” Gallagher shouted without so much as a “hello.” “Even in a foreign country where they can’t even speak the language, they can’t keep their noses clean. The commissioner from Santiago calls me in the middle of the night. Not that I blame him. He sounds like a nice enough guy and has some sense, considering how anxious he is to get the hell rid of those two.”

  “What happened, Denny?” Kate’s head was throbbing. Even her scalp was on fire.

  “I’m not sure of all the details yet, Katie-girl, but from what this commissioner guy tells me, he was afraid that before he found the killer, he was going to end up with a second murder.”

  “Whose?”

  “Sister Mary Helen’s, naturally, because you have never been able to tell her to stay out of police business.”

  “This is not my fault, Denny.” Kate felt her temper warm, but she was too tired to argue. “Who is the murderer?” she asked instead.

  “Barbara, aka Bootsie, DeAngelo, the professor’s wife, Serrano says. He also says that she’s probably a certified nutcake as well. Since both she and the murder victim are American, our
State Department and the Spanish government did some fancy footwork and decided to let us have her. She’ll arrive on the same plane as the rest of the tourist group, accompanied by an officer from our embassy. We need to meet the plane at the airport and take the lady off his hands. Are you still there, Katie-girl? You’re awful quiet.”

  “I’m here.” Kate was barely listening. She itched all over. Her neck, her arms, her eyelids, across her midriff, everything itched. What was it? Did she have some sort of rash? An allergy? What had she eaten? Kate opened her pajama top to examine her stomach. What she saw looked oddly familiar.

  “I thought if you’d decided to come back to work on Monday anyway, you might want to take a ride to the airport with me this afternoon. See the nuns, pick up the prisoner. You know, get your feet wet again.”

  “Denny, I’m afraid I won’t be back to work on Monday.” Kate was strangely relieved that a decision of sorts had been made for her.

  There was an unnaturally long pause before Gallagher spoke. “Then you’ve decided to quit?” He seemed to be battling his emotions. “Not that I blame you.”

  “I’ve decided nothing, Denny.” Kate started to giggle. “It’s been decided for me.”

  She reexamined the patch of small red bumps on her stomach. She’d seen those same bumps on two-year-old Stephanie’s stomach last week at the pediatrician’s. She didn’t have to be much of a detective to figure it out.

  “I have the measles,” she said.

  Gallagher guffawed.

  “And don’t you dare say one word about it to any of the guys!”

  “Fat chance, Katie-girl,” he roared in her hot ear. “Fat chance!” he said, and hung up.

  The plane ride home was long and, by comparison with the week’s events, uneventful. Hours dropped away, and a quiet settled over the passengers as the giant jet flew on.

  Mary Helen was exhausted. As exhausted, surely, as those medieval peregrinos who had walked to Santiago from France or Italy in their thick-soled shoes and floppy hats. Everything ached. She closed her eyes in the hope that the steady hum of the plane’s engines would lull her to sleep. No matter how hard she tried, she could not switch off her mind. Lisa’s purple, swollen face appeared without warning. Bootsie’s manic screams echoed and reechoed in her ears.