Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  “You’re saying you think Edward Drew killed Blaine in the hopes that with Blaine out of the way he could get tenure?”

  “But no, you do not listen! I say he has no courage, that one! He is afraid because of his job, he would be afraid to kill. No, it is his wife, she is a lady tiger, that one. She has said it would be good if Blaine is hit by a truck. You have talked to her?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Ha! You will see!” Carlos laughed, flung up his left hand in mock terror, and crossed himself hastily with his right. “And pray God to deliver you from such a woman!”

  Holder thought it was time God delivered him from Carlos Barreda, but he managed to get rid of Carlos without succumbing to the temptation to say so. When he had gone, Holder put his elbows on the desk, propped his chin in his hands, and stared at his notes in unabated gloom. “Pursley,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “This is going to be a mess.”

  “Yes sir, it, uh, does seem to get worse as it goes along.”

  “Umph. God, I can’t believe it. You wanta start listing possibilities? Get a large sheet of paper. On the woman angle. Valerie Powers killed him because he jilted her. Ellen Caldwell killed him—oh, because he was about to jilt her. Or they had a lovers’ quarrel. Or Ellen was afraid her husband would find out. Lots of good motives for murdering your lover. Or Ellen Caldwell’s husband killed him, for obvious reasons. Or there might be a man behind Valerie Powers, the man she dumped to take up with Blaine. Or maybe Jamie Newman killed him because he was afraid Valerie would go back to him. Or Blaine seduced the redheaded girl and she was a virgin and she got her revenge by sticking a knife in him. I’m getting sarcastic, cancel that last one. No, don’t, with sex anything’s possible. Or he was about to seduce the redheaded girl and some other man killed him to keep him from making the conquest. That one’s not sarcastic at all, God help us.

  “Then there’s the professional angle, which I for one don’t believe in for a minute. I mean, my God, who would commit murder to keep a lousy job teaching school, or to get a better one? But just to make you happy we’ll take it seriously, and we’ll even list your theory first: John MacDonald killed Blaine because he wanted his job. Then Barreda’s theory, Mrs. Drew killed Blaine so her husband could keep the job he’s got. And if we’re going to take that seriously, we ought to consider the idea that Edward Drew is not the coward Barreda thinks he is, and he killed Blaine himself. It’s the biggest pile of—”

  “Sir?”

  “Yeah?”

  “About the other stuff, other than the professional angle. Do we have to take all that seriously? I mean, everything this guy said? I mean, he kinda looked like the sort of guy who hated everybody, or, well, no, not hated them, just liked to say bad things about everybody.”

  Holder stretched and leaned back in his chair. “Well, it’s a point, I grant you. I’m not saying I swallowed everything he was trying to feed me. But some of it made sense. Ellen Caldwell and the redheaded girl, for instance. Valerie Powers said the same thing. So at least that’s what people are saying and thinking, whether it’s true or not.”

  Pursley saw again in his mind the smile that had annihilated his wits, and said manfully, “But all that stuff about Miss Powers, sir, we have no proof that that’s not a bunch of, well, just being nasty, not true at all.”

  Holder grinned. “Sergeant, you shouldn’t pick favorites among the suspects. I grant you we haven’t got any proof, but I for one believe what Barreda said about Valerie Powers, because it explains the thing about her that I was most curious about.” The Sergeant opting to sit in offended silence, the Chief continued for his own satisfaction, deciding he could repeat Kathryn’s remark now that it appeared to be justified. “Barreda not only said Valerie was having an affair with Jamie Newman, but he made a point of saying how much it was hurting Newman’s wife. Well, Newman’s wife is a good friend of my friend Kathryn Koerney. And Kathryn Koerney is not only a priest but a pretty tolerant human being in general, even toward people she can’t stand, but she gets downright vicious on the subject of Valerie Powers. Even said she’d like to kill her, and asked me to pin this murder on her. Now if the Powers girl is really leading Jamie Newman around by the nose, and his wife is hurting over it, then that all fits together and makes sense. Don’t you agree?”

  He got a reluctant “yessir.”

  Holder pondered a minute, then made a disgusted sound. “Maybe we ought to make a list of the people who don’t have a motive for murdering Blaine, it’d be a shorter list. Seriously, who is there? José with the impossible long name, and our nice friend Carlos here, and maybe Stephen Stanworth, wherever he is, only if it’s true what Barreda said, even that might be some kind of motive.”

  “Uh, sir?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe Barreda does have a motive, and we just don’t know about it. I mean, look at what he said at the end there: He’s glad Blaine is dead, and he doesn’t want to help us find out who did it. Then he goes right on and tells us all that about Drew and his wife! Seems to me he was trying just a little too hard to make us suspicious of everybody but him. I mean, think about it—we’ve talked to most of those people, and they’re nice folks. It doesn’t make any sense for Barreda to hate them. But why would he say those things about them when he’s got no reason to hate them? Easy: He just wants us to be suspicious of them.”

  Holder gathered up his notes and rose laboriously to his feet. “Nice try, Pursley, but you’re wrong. Your problem is that you’re ‘nice folks’ yourself. So you can’t imagine anybody hating nice folks. Especially hating them because they’re nice folks.”

  “Because they’re nice—?” Pursley stared in bewilderment at his superior.

  “Carlos is jealous, my boy. I think Carlos is just so jealous, he can hardly stand it.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Kathryn stepped out of the small stone building where her afternoon seminar had just concluded. She hadn’t been happy with it. She acknowledged the farewells of her students, all of whom were setting off down Merton Street back toward the main campus of the Seminary, but she did so rather absently. She was distracted.

  She herself turned toward town. The golden weather was holding; they’d had a week of it now, a singular blessing. But Mason Blaine’s murder was drawing a cloud across it. No, it wasn’t that, she realized. She didn’t give a fig for Mason Blaine or his murder. It was that argument between Tom and Father Mark. That was what was troubling her, rattling her, keeping her mind from where it should have been in her seminar.

  Well, she was going to see Mark now, and although the topic of their meeting was something else entirely, she would take a few minutes at the beginning of the conversation to speak to him about this morning’s scene with Tom.

  Kathryn went to the little side gate of St. Margaret’s, and told the officer guarding it, “I have an appointment with the Rector.”

  As she was dressed like a priest, she expected to be admitted without argument, and she was. She walked up to the side door of the church and entered. Given the events of the previous night, she thought it possible that there might be a few more people than usual at the church, drawn there by morbid curiosity. She was wrong. There weren’t a few more. There was a mob.

  They were milling around the corridor she had just entered, talking nineteen to the dozen, with the unmistakable intensity of people who have just gotten out of a meeting. Kathryn recognized immediately that she was looking not at the idle housewives of the parish who had dropped in to gossip, but at the parish leaders.

  A handsome middle-aged woman caught sight of Kathryn in the crowd and hailed her. “Hey! You should have been here. Father Mark called an emergency vestry meeting.”

  Kathryn kissed the tall fortyish redhead on the cheek and said, “Hey, Tildy. What on earth for?”

  Tildy twinkled. “To defend our sacred ground against the onslaught of sacrilegious violation.”

  Kathryn was not amused. “Tildy, se
riously, what’s he on about?”

  “Well, he seems to think that it’s bad for the church, all this murder stuff, and that we have to actively fight it, not just sit here.”

  “Actively fight it how?”

  “Well, for one thing, constant prayer vigil in the church, nonstop, till the police tapes go down and the cops clear off.”

  “Not constant prayer vigil in the church until the murderer is found?”

  “Now that, my dear Kathryn, is very interesting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come over here.”

  Tildy pulled Kathryn gently down the hall and around a corner until they were well out of earshot of the rest of the crowd. Then she resumed. “You weren’t even at the meeting and you put your finger right on it. Our Rector, fine man that he is, and I love Mark, I really do, has gone bananas. His territory has been invaded and he’s lost his balance. He can’t see straight. All the way through that meeting you’d have thought that the bad guys were the police, and not whoever it was that dumped the body in our driveway in the first place.”

  “And the police,” Kathryn pointed out, “happen to be incarnate in the person of Tom Holder, who just happens to be a member of this congregation. What was the Rector doing with that?”

  “He wasn’t. He was just saying, ‘the police.’”

  “Damn.”

  “I thought you ought to know.”

  “Thanks, Tildy. You’re a peach. You’re enough to change my opinion of lawyers.”

  “I’m a shark with a heart of gold. You’d have been able to steer things a bit, you know,” Tildy remarked, as they walked back in the direction of the main corridor and the rest of the vestry, who were now exchanging parting remarks with the Rector and with each other, “if you came to vestry meetings.”

  “I’d have come to this one. If I could have. But I wasn’t asked.” Kathryn was just wondering if this had been intentional on Father Mark’s part (had he wanted to keep a pro-Holder person away?) or if she was being paranoid, when she caught sight of a short, gray-haired man in a five-thousand-dollar suit who was talking to the Associate Rector. “Holy cow!” Kathryn exclaimed. “How did Mark get Link Massey to leave Manhattan before six P.M.?” Link Massey was the C.E.O. of a Fortune 500 company that occupied three floors of the south tower of the World Trade Center.

  Tildy replied, “Can’t have a vestry meeting without the Senior Warden.”

  Kathryn shook her head in wonder. Despite Tildy’s blithe response, both of them knew that Mark Randall’s power as Rector of the church was exceedingly strong and he had just demonstrated it.

  Suddenly Tildy grabbed Kathryn’s elbow. “Look!” she whispered. “A little comic relief! Trish O’Malley and Suzy Norton. The uncreated Eve under the arm of God, yes?”

  Kathryn looked. Suddenly, despite all her concerns about the church’s troubles and the feud between the Rector and Tom Holder, she was hard put not to burst out laughing. Suzy, an anemic-looking blonde, was at that moment encircled by the left arm of her friend Trish, and something vaguely unformed about Suzy’s expression did indeed make the arrangement reminiscent of the scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  But Kathryn didn’t feel like laughing for long.

  “Kathryn! Why weren’t you at this meeting? I know you don’t normally come to vestry meetings, but I would have thought you would have made an exception for this one.”

  Kathryn didn’t appreciate the scolding tone, but she wasn’t about to get herself off the hook by saying she hadn’t been notified; that might possibly have reflected badly on the Rector, and whatever quarrel she might have with Mark, she sure as hell wasn’t going to share it with Crystal Montoya. Crystal was another Manhattanite Mark had managed to fetch early out of the city; she owned a gallery in the Village specializing in overpriced Mexican folk art.

  “Hello, Crystal, how nice to see you. I teach a seminar this afternoon; it just adjourned. Since the Seminary pays me and my job at the church is voluntary, I’m sure you understand that I couldn’t possibly cancel the seminar.” As Kathryn was coming to the end of this honeyed speech, an idea struck her. Crystal was Castilian Spanish, tall, blond, beautiful, and divorced. “Crystal, did you know Mason Blaine?”

  “Very slightly. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, just wondering,” Kathryn replied airily, turning away and rapidly putting several people between herself and any comeback Crystal might care to make, winking at Tildy Harmon as she did so.

  The other members of the vestry had been summoned from local jobs, or at least jobs not so far afield, or from their homes. Father Mark had beckoned, and the vestry had come. They had all come. Or at least, as best Kathryn could judge, scanning the departing faces, the vast majority of them had come. That was amazing. It was incredible. It was a whale of a tribute to Father Mark.

  Or perhaps it was a tribute to the guy who had put the body in the driveway.

  The Rector spotted her. “Kathryn! We just finished an emergency vestry meeting. Somebody’s probably already told you. I thought we’d better address this problem right away.”

  Kathryn couldn’t think of anything to say, a fairly rare circumstance for her, so she just made a listening noise and nodded. She and the Rector moved against the flow of departing vestry members down the hall and into Father Mark’s office.

  As she sat down, Kathryn was rapidly reconsidering her intention to talk to Mark about his argument with Tom. It seemed to her that in the few hours that had passed since their row, it had escalated—at least on Father Mark’s part—into a war, and she wasn’t prepared to talk somebody out of a war. Literally, she wasn’t prepared. Because it was obviously going to be a very delicate conversation. She needed time to consider, to pray. Then she would talk to Mark about it. For now, she would stick to the subject she came to discuss.

  “Now, then,” the Rector said, settling down at his desk with a smile, not having the slightest idea she was thoroughly disenchanted with him, “what’s this surprise you want to talk about?”

  “You’re going to need to take notes. Lots of notes. Biiiig sheet of paper.”

  Father Mark’s eyebrows rose. Obediently, he opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a large lined notepad, closed the drawer, and picked up a pen. “Ready when you are, C.B.” he remarked.

  Kathryn couldn’t resist. “Do you know where that comes from?”

  “No.”

  “Story goes that Cecil B. DeMille had built a movie set, a Western town, and he was going to burn it down for the great climactic scene. He had three cameras set up to film it. They set the town on fire and it burned to the ground. DeMille gets his megaphone and calls out to the first cameraman. ‘Did you get it?’ First cameraman calls back, ‘Sorry, C.B., the film broke.’ De Mille calls to the second cameraman, ‘Did you get it?’ Second cameraman calls back, ‘Sorry, C.B., the camera malfunctioned.’ DeMille, desperate, calls, ‘Cameraman number three!’ and the response comes, ‘Ready when you are, C.B.!’”

  The Rector laughed uproariously and Kathryn found her irritation toward him melting. She had always liked Mark; it was difficult to remain angry with him. So, restored to good humor, she launched into the business at hand.

  “I want to create, or fund, anonymously, a college scholarship for a member of St. Margaret’s Church. We will define ‘member of St. Margaret’s church’”—here she wiggled a finger at Father Mark to indicate that he was to write this down—“as a person who has worshiped here regularly for at least two years. This scholarship is to go to someone whose education was interrupted due to lack of funds and who now has to work rather than go to college.” She paused a moment while Father Mark scribbled. “The scholarship will pay tuition, room, board, books, all other expenses including generous spending money, plus the salary of the job that the person has to leave in order to go back to school.”

  Father Mark looked up at her, eyes very wide and eyebrows in his hair.

  “But don’t you see?” she expla
ined, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. “If you’re working on your P.H.T., that is, if you’re slaving away at some grim, underpaid job Putting Hubby Through to his Ph.D., then it wouldn’t be enough to get the money to put yourself through graduate school, would it? You’d still need to have the income from the job so that you could go on Putting Hubby Through while you went through yourself.”

  “As my friends in England used to say, I am a bear of very little brain, Kathryn. Who is Putting Hubby Through?”

  “Tracy Newman.”

  “Ah! Let me get this straight. You are creating an elaborate plot to give your friend Tracy enough money to quit her job as a secretary and enroll as a graduate student, presumably here at Harton, and you want me to help you by disguising the money as a scholarship offered by St. Margaret’s.”

  “I’ll say this for you, Mark, you’re not stupid.”

  The Rector again exploded with laughter. When he recovered, he and Kathryn worked out details. The trick was, of course, to define the parameters of the applicant so narrowly that the only person in the congregation who fit them was Tracy.

  “Let’s see,” said Kathryn. “Absent from formal education for at least two years. College Board scores of 1550. Nobody’s gonna have that but Tracy, I happen to know her Board scores. The scholarship must be used at an Ivy League University. That ought to do it.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a bit overly narrow?”

  “O.K. Ivy League University or institution of similar quality.”