* * * *
His secretary (very few people had secretaries these days since computers were so much less trouble) knocked on the door. Top policemen needed protection.
"What is it, Nell?” Eleanor Boyce had worked for him for several years.
"A lady to see you."
"Keep her away."
"I think you would like to see her."
She was a tall, well-groomed woman of middle age. Around her neck and drooping onto her ample breast she wore a triple row of beautiful pearls. He found himself not sure if Miss Boyce was pointing him towards his visitor's breasts or her pearls. Nell Boyce was capable of making this sort of underhand joke.
He stood up politely as the visitor came into the room. She was, somehow, the sort of woman you did stand up for. He felt as though he knew her face, which was unlined, and her body was that of a younger woman.
"Have we met?"
"I am Madame du Croy."
With hesitation Coffin said, “Du Croy's wife? There's a Comtesse du Croy?"
"Just one of his lies. He was not a count. No high aristocratic birth at all. I have come to confess to his killing. A woman may murder her husband—it is almost allowable—but I want justice, so I came to confess to you."
Inside himself Coffin was muttering: Just another lying woman wanting to confess to a murder she did not do. It's my day for madwomen.
"I bought two knives, but when it came to it I found his throat was nearer. I squeezed it, and he thought I was loving him, but of course, I was killing him."
Coffin felt cold: He was strangled, he thought, so perhaps she isn't lying.
She threw the knife onto his desk.
"Enough is enough is enough. When I found his latest lover was this young actor, I felt he should suffer, too—as I had. So I stabbed him. After I killed my husband."
Husbands can beat, stab, violate their wives, but in the end they seldom finish it, Coffin thought. Wives do.
"I've heard good reports on you, sir, so I throw myself on your mercy."
Coffin rose to pick up the knife, wrapping it in a tissue. My mercy, he thought, we'll see about that.
"We will need a formal confession,” he said as he started the winding up of the two latest murders.
What a terrible thing sexual jealousy is, he thought. And then, with some gloom, And what a lot of trouble it gives the police. I suppose King Arthur had that worry—but thank goodness I don't. I may be King Arthur, but I have no real worries over my Guinevere. On stage or off.
(c)2007 by Gwendoline Butler
[Back to Table of Contents]
THE JUDAS CLUE Terence Faherty
* * * *
Art by Ron Bucalo
* * * *
Called a “metaphysical detective” by the New York Times, Terence Faherty's Owen Keane is a compulsive solver of mysteries. The following tale is from the “lost years” Keane spent in Boston after dropping out of the seminary. Readers can piece together more of Keane's career from the several novels Mr. Faherty has written about him, and from the story collection The Confessions of Owen Keane (Crippen & Landru).
* * * *
1.
Bocce is a game played with wooden balls, nine of them, eight the size of softballs and one a little bigger than a golf ball. The big ones give the game its name. The little one, the target, is called the pallino. Bocce is played on a flat lawn or court with side walls and backboards. The teams post representatives on both ends of this court. The winner of a coin flip tosses the pallino anywhere on the court beyond the center line, and the players from the same end try to roll their bocce balls as close to it as they can. Then the players on the other end of the court start the business all over again.
At the courts where I played in Boston in the ‘seventies, the players were usually retired Italian men built low to the ground, but there were exceptions. Like Owen Keane, a skinny Irish guy in his late twenties and only semiretired. That was me. Another exception was my boss, Tessa Tesauro, a sturdy brunette in her forties who was very unretired. Tessa had inherited her membership in the Holy Angels Bocce Society from her grandfather, though she'd been an honorary member in her own right ever since she'd started tagging along behind him around age five.
When Tessa's husband had been killed in a holdup at the liquor store they owned and she'd decided to run the business herself, the Bocce Society had become her principal source of advice and support. At least, that was her excuse for never missing a Wednesday afternoon at the courts when the weather was nice. My excuse for accompanying her when asked was that she was an indulgent employer and deserved to be indulged herself. Plus, bocce was a sport that could be played with a beer in one hand.
One Wednesday in June we played a practice match with two brothers, Enzo and Emilio. Bocce is usually played by two teams of four, so it can get a little crowded at each end of the court. Teams of two give you more elbow room. And more privacy for the business chats Tessa liked to have. I usually watched those from the other end of the court, but on this particular day, Tessa chose Enzo as her teammate and pulled me behind her to the shadier end of the pitch.
I quickly reviewed my recent performance at McNab's, Tessa's store, where I stocked shelves, made deliveries, and sometimes clerked. I fulfilled those duties with a certain lack of interest, as I imagined most shelf-stocking, delivery-making liquor-store clerks did, but, as far as I could recall, my recent daydreaming had been no worse than usual.
That left another, more ominous possibility. Once, a year or so earlier, Tessa had tried to interest me in her daughter, Grizzella, an operator for New England Bell. That had been a nice compliment, since I was no obvious catch. True, I had graduated with honors from nearby Boston College. But then I'd dropped out of a Midwestern seminary where I'd gone to study for the priesthood. Dropped out or been pushed, depending on who was telling the story. Following that, I'd spent the middle years of a perfectly good decade underachieving at everything except drinking beer and reading detective stories.
Compliment or not, I'd passed on Grizzella's hand. Tessa had been hard to convince, and I was afraid, as Enzo and Emilio threw their last balls of the first frame, that I'd have to do the job all over again. Tessa's opening remark told me otherwise.
"You've heard me talk about my poor cousin Dolly."
That was it for the moment, but it was enough. Cousin Dolly, last name Vasti, was a murder victim, a recent one. She'd died of a blow to the head, probably delivered by her husband Frank. I'd seen a photo of the victim—dark and attractive—in the paper and overheard Tessa discussing the case with consoling friends who'd dropped by the store. Now Tessa wanted to discuss it with me. I found myself wishing that she'd come up with another daughter for me to date. Listening to gossip was one thing, getting involved another.
"They've arrested Frank,” Tessa said as she tossed the pallino down court, tucking it into one corner, as she liked to do. “But I don't know."
Frank Vasti had been the only suspect mentioned in the Boston Globe's brief account of the crime. Dolly, bleeding from a head wound, had been found wandering the hallway outside the couple's apartment by a neighbor. She'd been incoherent, and the neighbor had called for an ambulance. Its attendants had guessed that Dolly was also bleeding inside her skull, but there'd been nothing they could do for that except hurry her to the hospital. She'd died on the way without revealing the name of her attacker. She had said something, though. The newspaper accounts hadn't mentioned it, but no visitor to McNab's had failed to. According to these authorities, she'd muttered a phrase several times: “the sin of Judas."
Tessa repeated the words now, also muttering. “Frank was cheating on her, with a woman named Camaselli. Dolly proved that herself. Or that detective she hired to follow Frank proved it, that Maniman guy. So maybe Dolly solved her own murder. Only I don't know."
I took a cold can of Budweiser from the cooler I'd placed behind the backboard, popped the top, and dropped the pull tab into the can.
&nb
sp; "You're going to swallow one of those someday,” Tessa said, as she always did. “Not to mention it's unsanitary. Your turn."
I rolled a ball down the turf, finding bounces that shouldn't have been there and getting a glower from my partner, Emilio. I decided I'd have to use guile to hold up my end of the match, though I'd rather have dropped the Dolly Vasti subject entirely.
I waited until Tessa was lining up her shot and asked, “You don't think Frank did it?"
"No,” she said, the ball frozen on her fingertips. “I've known him since grammar school. He and Dolly and I went to the same one. Same high school, too. All us girls were after him then, I remember. What I can't remember is him ever hitting anyone. He was a hound, okay, but he never raised a hand to Dolly."
"Maybe he was saving it up,” I said as her roll smacked the backboard without hitting another ball first, scratching the attempt. “And there was a handkerchief, right? The Camaselli woman's."
The murder weapon, a heavy ceramic bookend shaped like a dog, had been partially wiped of blood with it. The piece of cloth held the mistress's initials, AC, and she had identified it herself. It would have made Camaselli the prime suspect if she hadn't had a great alibi. She'd been undergoing an IRS audit the morning Dolly Vasti was attacked.
"It was Frank's apartment, too,” Tessa said. “So he had one of the tramp's handkerchiefs stashed away and the murderer found it. That's not impossible."
Just unlikely in the extreme. “What about the Judas clue?"
"That could have meant nothing. Her skull was fractured, and she was babbling. Or she could have meant someone else."
I waited, expecting her to share a name. The women who'd visited the store had always ended their discussions in whispers that had defeated my best eavesdropping.
Tessa stayed silent through two more frames, until I started to think she didn't have a name to share. Then she blurted out, “How about somebody from your old tribe? A priest. I'm not telling you this just to spread tales, Owen, but there's a priest at Dolly's parish, St. James. A Father Mullins. He's been accused of doing something horrible to a little girl, something the parish wanted to sweep under the rug. The little girl's mother might have let them—she's a mouse, that one—but not Dolly. She was ready to raise holy hell right up to the Vatican."
"You think ‘the sin of Judas’ might have meant Father Mullins?"
"Why not? Can you think of a betrayal greater than a priest harming a child? And a priest is an apostle, like Judas, right?"
Something about the whole Judas business bothered me, but I couldn't say why. “I guess,” I admitted.
"So listen, Owen. Here's the thing. I want you to look into this. As a favor. Dolly was more than a cousin to me. Not a sister, maybe, but close. I want to know what happened to her. I want justice done. You're the perfect man for the job. You've done some investigating, right?"
So I'd intimated more than once, when I'd been drinking or when someone had kidded me too hard about being a delivery boy with a four-year degree. I'd hinted at a more accomplished past as an amateur sleuth, for which I now felt like kicking myself.
"And you were in the seminary. You're practically in the club. You'll know who to talk to about Father Mullins and how to talk to them. The police are afraid to ruffle those peacock feathers."
I could have pointed out that being a seminary dropout had barred me from that club forever. I could have offered more details on my past investigations, several of which had blown up in my face. But I didn't win many arguments with Tessa. And before I could say anything, she added a deal clincher, timing it to coincide with her best roll of the match, one that came to rest kissing the pallino.
"I'll pay you. You'll be on the clock, like you were working in the store. And what's that they say on private eye shows? Oh, yeah. Plus expenses."
* * * *
2.
I started late the next morning with Seamus Maniman, the private detective who had been working for Dolly Vasti. I was actually looking forward to the interview, not because I expected him to extend me any courtesies, professional or otherwise, but because I couldn't pass up the chance to meet a real P.I., having spent so much of my recent life with fictional ones. And Maniman could sort the facts of the case from the whispers.
So I called Maniman Investigations and offered to buy the proprietor a drink, saying that I was a friend of a friend of Dolly's and interested in writing about the case. The detective, who'd answered his phone himself, changed the invitation to coffee and a donut and named a cafe off Kenmore Square.
Boston was taking the ‘seventies on the chin, it seemed to me. Its latest attempt to update its skyline, the John Hancock Tower, was still popping out blue glass panes when pedestrians least expected it. The panels were temporarily replaced with wooden sheets, giving the tower its local nickname: the world's tallest plywood building. And Boston's college-student population, which was enormous, was still spray-painting the town with peace symbols—despite the war being over—and papering it with handbills for concerts and plays and lectures on the cause of the moment. Kenmore Square was especially hard hit by these and looked to me that day like a bulletin board with sidewalks.
I arrived at the cafe early, having had luck with the Green Line for once, but Maniman was there waiting for me, overfilling his side of a window booth. He wasn't fat exactly, but he was big. His square face was red and moist, as though the tabletop pressing his midsection was cutting off his circulation. But his expression was friendly, especially around the ice-blue eyes, small for the face and crinkled with what I thought was amusement.
He might have been reacting to my outfit. To my usual well-worn oxford shirt and jeans, I'd added a linen jacket that went with my cover story, I hoped. Maniman's olive wash-and-wear suit was exactly the thing I imagined Lew Archer, my favorite paperback P.I., might wear. Archer's would be neatly pressed, too, like Maniman's. As the waitress brought my coffee and refilled my guest's, I made a mental note to pick a suit like that myself, if I ever got a Christmas bonus.
Maniman hadn't ordered a donut, evidently preferring a cigarette, unfiltered. I dug out one of my extra-filtered ones, being between attempts to quit. The detective offered me his lighter, an old Zippo like the one I'd once carried, and watched with amusement as I used it one-handed.
"So you're a writer?” he asked for openers.
"A would-be writer,” I said, waving my pen above the notepad that completed my clever disguise. “I'm a liquor-store clerk, but I don't want to be one forever.” So Tessa kept telling me.
"How'd you pick up on the Vasti murder? Friend of a friend, you said on the phone."
I told him that I'd overheard the case being discussed at McNab's, and he nodded like he knew the place. Everyone in the area knew McNab's.
"What makes it worth writing about? Guy cracks his wife on the head, that's ‘dog bites man.’”
He looked down as he said it, the amusement gone from his eyes. Though he was no older than Tessa, his brown hair was thinning, the regular lines left by his comb looking like furrows in a dying field.
"There's the priest angle,” I said. “A killer priest would be ‘man bites the leg off a dog.’”
"I don't know much about that,” Maniman said with a shrug. “Mrs. Vasti never mentioned it. The cop who grilled me did. Hardcase name of Craney."
I almost dropped my cigarette. Maniman didn't seem to notice.
"I think Craney just brought it up so he could say he had,” the detective added. “Woman's husband's stepping out on her, she has the proof, she intends to divorce him, she ends up dead. It hangs together all by itself. You don't need to drag in the clergy."
"So he really was cheating on her?"
"Not doubt one. Twice a week every week with a woman over in Newton name of Camaselli. Angela Camaselli. I trailed him to her house and the two of them to the kind of restaurants where the lighting's not so good. Got pictures, the works. Gave it all to Mrs. Vasti."
And now seemed sorry
he had. That was understandable, given how things had worked out. “Is that a lot of your business?” I asked.
"It's a lot of any private investigator's business."
Not in the books I read. My current paperback was The Barbarous Coast, by Ross Macdonald. In it, Macdonald had used a phrase that was haunting me: “an onion taste of grief.” I was still trying to wash that taste out of my mouth, years after I'd failed in the seminary. Maniman seemed to have his own onion taste to deal with, and the coffee he was sipping wasn't doing the job. He looked toward the cafe's door, and I hurried us back to the subject.
"Why would Frank Vasti care about being divorced? Isn't that what he wanted?"
"Another old story. Mrs. Vasti had the big money—legacy from her old man—and he had none. He wasn't going to walk away with any in a divorce, either. The divorce news must have hit him like a sock full of wet sand. He'd been sweet-talking Dolly—Mrs. Vasti—since high school. But this time, she'd had enough. I'm not saying he planned it out. He couldn't have, not leaving the handkerchief that way. But he did it."
"Did she confront him with the handkerchief?"
"Maybe. He claims he never saw it before. Mrs. Vasti didn't get it from me; I never got that close to the Camaselli dame. She could have found it among her husband's things. Or he could have had it in his pocket and taken it out when he tried to clean that bookend. People do stupid things when the hot blood takes over. But killing in a fit of rage is still murder. The cops have the right guy for once. Dolly fingered him before she died. The betrayer."
Maniman started to slide his bulk out of the booth. I said, “What's the rest of Vasti's story?"
"Ask him,” Maniman said, and left me.
* * * *
3.
Getting in to see Frank Vasti would have been complicated and maybe impossible. Luckily, Maniman had given me another lead. I knew the cop he'd mentioned, the hardcase named Craney. I'd met him when I'd been an undergraduate, when he'd been investigating the death of a nurse and I'd been a suspect, along with most of the men in my dorm. Craney had somehow found out that I liked to play detective. He'd tried to turn me into his campus spy, which hadn't worked out for him. All that was years in the past, but my heart rate still spiked when I thought about the time I'd spent in his interrogation room. I told myself that I'd be doing the questioning this time and boarded the inbound trolley.
EQMM, November 2007 Page 14
