The Death of an Irish Sinner

by Bartholomew Gill

  Which could be why he had become a policeman, right and wrong being the one concept that he understood thoroughly. “No,” he replied. “I said I see no sign of a god at work anywhere in the universe.”

  “Well—where do you think the universe came from? And…matter? Us? You and me? And what does life mean? Are we just motes hurtling for an instant through time and space?”

  “Well, take you, for instance.” McGarr reached an arm around her shoulder. “I know where you came from. Heaven, surely. But the book’s still out on me.”

  “Ah, go ’way now. Don’t patronize me.” She slipped out of his grasp. “I’m really disturbed that you’re insisting on that class of tough-cop agnosticism that you dust off like a party piece whenever I try to speak seriously with you.”

  Agnosticism? Was she hoping? “Tell you true”—he managed to take her shoulder again—“this is the only heaven we’ll ever know, you and me here in this garden. And we should enjoy it.”

  “You must be joking. Some garden, where a woman who sweated, slaved, and lavished her precious time on this patch of ground could be murdered in it in her eightieth year.”

  McGarr let pass the thought that at least she’d had the eighty years, less the day of her death, as gardener in one of the most beautiful places in the country, if not the world.

  “Then do you think Mary-Jo has passed on to a final and eternal reward?” Noreen asked.

  “Yes.” Wherever she was, if anywhere, it was surely final and eternal.

  “And it’s some place like here in this garden.”

  “I would hope.”

  “See—you’re just parsing this argument. Will you ever get serious with me? Or do you also take us, our marriage, our child, our lives as lightly as you view metaphysics? If the possibility of God means nothing to you, how can anything else?”

  Rather simply, actually, everything else being serious in the extreme. “I hope you know I take you more seriously than any other person, place, or thing in the world,” he said in a low voice into the fine auburn hairs at the nape of her neck. “Because I love you.”

  “Well, I hope that’ll be enough. For you.”

  When his time came, he supposed she meant.

  But it was. He was sure.

  Around half past three McGarr’s mobile phone rang, and five minutes later Noreen and he arrived at the door of Father Juan Carlos Sclavi’s room. It opened at the first knock.

  “Come in, por favor.” The dark young man bowed slightly as they stepped into the large room. “I believe you know my spiritual director,” he said in halting English, turning his head to Duggan, who was seated at a desk near one of Barbastro’s tall windows. He was writing something on a piece of paper that he then folded and slipped into a pocket.

  “Director?” Noreen asked. “Does a priest need a spiritual director?”

  “Of course,” Duggan put in. “We all need guidance in matters spiritual.”

  To ensure orthodoxy? McGarr wondered. In the packet of information he’d been sent, one item said that every Opus Dei member was required to attend a weekly Confidence with a spiritual director. Set topics were discussed, such as personal conduct, and faults in attitude. The “fraternal correction” that could be imposed might take the form of acts of contrition or some other punishment meted out by the spiritual director.

  On other occasions, the spiritual director or other Opus Dei higher-ups might visit lesser members in their rooms and remove some personal belonging, like a wristwatch or a jacket, to which a member had become overly attached, “self-abnegation and sacrifice, discipline, and confidence in the strict sense (group secrecy) being the keys to membership control.”

  The report had continued: “This is a most secret, reactionary organization that views itself as the successor to the militant traditions of the Knights Templar. Opusians believe that in spreading their interpretation of Christianity, all means justify the ends of countering Communism, Liberation Theology, and radical Islam, and of defeating within the Church ‘liberalizing’ issues such as birth control and women priests. Insubordination is not tolerated.”

  Duggan now said, “As I mentioned to you earlier, Chief Superintendent McGarr—Father Sclavi has something he’d like to tell you. And would you mind terribly if I remained here while you interview him? His English is not perfect, and I believe I have evidence that will corroborate what he’ll say.”

  Control again. Not only had Duggan orchestrated what the young priest would say, during the Confidence, now he wished to make sure the lines were delivered according to plan.

  As though reading McGarr’s mind, Duggan added, “Yes—we’ve discussed what he will say. But because of the details, which are particular, I think it would be wise to allow me to assist you.”

  McGarr shrugged. Why not learn what they had to tell them? He could always interview Sclavi in private later, and at least he’d have the Opus Dei position—forged during the Confidence—on record.

  Or was he being entirely too cynical? Perhaps the young man with the dark hair and prominent widow’s peak, the oval face and deep-set eyes, was sincere in what he was about to divulge.

  Perhaps McGarr had been prejudiced against faith, religion, and priests because of his early brutal experience with the agents of religion. And more recently by what Dery Parmalee had told him about Opus Dei and what the quick inquiry into the order had partially confirmed.

  “Work away,” McGarr said to Duggan.

  Sclavi half-bowed again and moved toward Duggan at the window. “I shall now speak?” he asked, turning his head from McGarr to his spiritual director.

  Both men nodded.

  “So, I was here at this window, looking out sometime after Pater Fred informed me that I should remain in my room. But I look out into the garden and see Miss Stanton, down on the ground where she was digging.

  “Then I see a man pick something up from the ground and go into the wood.”

  “Do you know who that person was, Juan Carlos?” Duggan asked didactically, his arms folded across his chest, his head cocked to the side.

  “I do, Pater. It was the gardener.”

  “Francis Mudd.”

  Or Manahan. Brother of Delia Manahan. Informer and ex-convict.

  McGarr moved to the window and looked out. Certainly he could see into the formal garden where the corpse had been discovered, but it was full daylight. At night, he imagined, the scene would be more difficult to see from the distance of—what?—easily a hundred yards. But then his own eyes were not what they once were.

  On the blotter of the desk lay a pair of eyeglasses.

  “More to the point, it seems that Father Sclavi’s testimony can be documented,” Duggan said.

  McGarr waited.

  “It’s on the transcript—the security tapes. After the bit with the jacket being placed over the lens of the camera at the moment that Mary-Jo was being killed.”

  “How do you know that?” McGarr had ordered Ward and McKeon to seize the tapes as evidence.

  “Oh”—Duggan closed his eyes and shivered his cheeks histrionically—“I neglected to tell you. I consulted my superiors, who inquired of a solicitor, who advised me to make copies of the tapes before handing them over. Yesterday, the day of the…crime.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, as a simple precaution.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against the possibility that they might be edited.”

  “By the police?” Noreen asked.

  Duggan hunched his broad shoulders. “I was ordered to do it. I did it.”

  As a good soldier in Christ, thought McGarr. A modern-day Templar.

  “But isn’t that a curious attitude for a religious organization—not to trust the police?”

  “Of course we trust the police. Implicitly.”

  But Noreen would not be put off. Two patches of red had appeared in her cheeks. “Then why make a copy?”

  Duggan shook his head. “Perhaps to ease the mind o
f one of my superiors.”

  “And who might he be when he’s at home?”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t say.”

  “Yet that unknown—could he be unknowable?—person is orchestrating your actions here?”

  Duggan only stared at her, rather balefully, McGarr judged.

  “Take us to this tape,” he said.

  It showed what Sclavi said had happened, only minutes after Duggan and McGarr had left the murder scene. Mudd—or some figure that looked remarkably like Mudd—stole out of the garden haggard and, approaching the corpse, stooped and picked something up.

  “It’s the water bottle. The one that Mary-Jo always kept by her side when she gardened,” Duggan narrated. “To ‘hydrate,’ don’t you know. It’s very important.”

  To hydrate? McGarr wondered. Or the bottle, as it related to the cause of her death—her sudden heart attack, when she had no history of heart trouble.

  “And there’s more,” Duggan went on, backing the tape up to the events directly before the elderly woman’s murder. “Remember how the jacket was placed over the camera?” Which was what now appeared on the screen.

  “I took the liberty of having a friend enhance the tape at that point—you know, enlarge and clear up the image.”

  Duggan removed the tape from the video player and replaced it with another. It showed a blowup of the label on the jacket, which said “Stafford.”

  “Your man Mudd has such a jacket.”

  McGarr turned to him.

  “When it was new, I once remarked on it to Mary-Jo—where a man such as he had come by a garment of such quality and why he insisted on wearing it while performing manual labor.”

  McGarr held Duggan’s gaze.

  “So—I believe we have our murderer,” Duggan concluded. “And a more ungrateful and heinous person there could not be on the face of this earth.”

  “What about the water bottle—did it belong to Mary-Jo?”

  “I never saw it before in my life,” said Duggan. “Usually Mary-Jo hydrated with commercial mineral water—Evian or Perrier—in the disposable containers.”

  “Would she drink from something that was just handed to her?”

  “Why not?—if handed her by a trusted employee.”

  McGarr remained unconvinced. It all seemed so wondrously pat.

  More so at Mudd’s cottage in the copse of beeches where McGarr took Sclavi and, of course, Sclavi’s spiritual director to confront Mudd/Manahan with the charge. And to secure the water bottle, if possible.

  In the back of his mind, McGarr kept replaying Dery Parmalee’s tales about the sudden myocardial infarction that had beset John Paul after only thirty-three days as Pope and had earlier killed an emissary of the Russian Orthodox Church, serendipitously for Opus Dei, if Parmalee—who seemed to have an ax to grind in regard to the order—could be believed.

  “You three wait here until I ask you to join me.” Removing his Walther from the sling under the seat of the car, McGarr fit the handgun into the right-hand pocket of his jacket.

  It was dark now, and every room of the cottage appeared to be lighted. At the door, McGarr knocked and called out, “Mr. Mudd. Frank Mudd. It’s Peter McGarr. Could you come out here for a moment?”

  When he received no answer, he tried the handle and found the door open. Inside, a radio was playing, and all seemed rather neat, if not particularly clean. On the kitchen table lay an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts and a bottle of whiskey with only an inch remaining. A glass had spilled onto the worn lino.

  There was a light in Mudd’s stable office, which McGarr approached with equal caution. That door was ajar, but again he called out, his early interview with Mudd having been cordial enough, at least toward the end.

  Another whiskey bottle, this one nearly full, was also in evidence on the desk, as was the odor of…human excrement, McGarr could only suppose.

  The source of which he discovered in the adjoining room. There Mudd was hanging from a rafter. A noose of rope was wrapped around his neck, which canted off at an odd angle, and the other end was knotted to the hook of a come-along—a hand-operated winch that was used to hoist or move small loads.

  Mudd was wearing the jacket from the videotape.

  In death the man’s bowels and bladder had evacuated, the effluent pooling around the toes of his work boots, which were only a few inches off the floor.

  His weathered face had assumed a purple cast, and his light eyes were splayed and protruding from the pressure of the cinch, McGarr supposed. Could he have actually reached up and quickly winched himself off the ground and thereby suffocated himself?

  How much easier it would have been to have taken a chair from the office, rigged the noose, fixed the other end to a short lead on the rafter, and then jumped. It was the way most every other hanging suicide had been accomplished in McGarr’s experience.

  But how many suicide victims are thinking clearly before their demise. And there was the evidence of the surfeit of whiskey. But no note—not in the stable or the house.

  After using his cell phone to report the death and request a team from the Technical Squad, McGarr asked Duggan and Sclavi to return to the mansion, while Noreen and he went through Mudd or Manahan’s effects, looking for anything that might explain the cause of his—was it?—suicide.

  Or the water bottle, which McGarr found at length, stuffed into a plastic garbage bag in a van that was loaded with other refuse, evidently to be taken to the local dump on the morrow, which was a Monday.

  “I’m surprised by what I didn’t find,” said Noreen.

  “The woman’s clothes and underwear that I’d seen earlier?”

  McGarr nodded.

  “They’re gone. And all other traces of a woman’s presence in Mudd’s life—the cosmetics and so forth.”

  Back at the mansion, Duggan yet again greeted them at the door. “Is there any way I can help you, anything I can do? Just name it.”

  “Your security tapes. Both those you copied and the tapes from today. All of them.”

  Duggan’s brow wrinkled. “The copies, surely. I can give you those if you demand them, our solicitor says. But not any from today.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there are none.”

  McGarr searched the priest’s dark eyes, the hale contours of his handsome face.

  “Well, with Mary-Jo gone and you, your men, and your wife here wandering all over the property, I figured, what’s the point? Why not conserve the expense? So I switched the system off, phoned the security company, and asked them to cancel the service.”

  “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When did you call them?”

  Duggan’s eyes shied. “Yesterday sometime. Or perhaps it was early this morning. I…I’ve been…it’s that I’ve been so devastated and distraught because of all this.”

  Yet he appeared to be sleeping well enough; that much was plain. Although roughly the same age as McGarr, the priest looked decidedly younger, the skin of his handsome face smooth and unmarred by pouches.

  In the closetlike security room under the stairs, McGarr checked to see if the monitoring system had, in fact, been disabled. After receiving the copied tapes from Duggan, he used his mobile phone to contact Avco Security Systems in Ballsbridge.

  The manager there revealed that the priest had phoned him about removing the system around one that afternoon, about the time McGarr had finished interviewing Delia Manahan and Duggan had requested the Confidence with Sclavi.

  Could the two priests have used the time when McGarr and Noreen were walking in the garden to steal down to Mudd’s with two bottles of whiskey and…? McGarr did not think so.

  After all, Duggan might be controlling and devious in order to protect what he perceived as the interest of Opus Dei. But his acolyte and he were still priests. Could they, would they murder and murder so…baldly as to get Mudd drunk and then string him up?

  Said Noreen, “They certainly had the
time, when, ironically, I was distracting you with all that carry-on about faith and religion. Sorry.”

  “Why be sorry,” he assured her, since they both knew there was no stopping a murderer intent on murder.

  At the car, McGarr drew her to him, and they embraced for a long moment. “The problem is—we don’t really get the chance to see each other as much as we should,” he said into her ear.

  She nodded.

  “We should go on holiday, someplace warm and away from all the bother—yours and mine.”

  “Santorini.”

  It was the Greek island where they had honeymooned. And where their daughter had been conceived.

  “Maddie’s never seen it. We can stay in that hotel that’s been chipped into the top of the cliff.”

  With the breathtaking views of the deep blue Aegean and lesser islands in the distance. There was a wine on Santorini that McGarr savored more than any he had tasted since. Days there—filled with strong sunlight and cooling sea breezes—just seemed to flow into each other. And the fishing, which was another activity that McGarr practiced too seldom these days, was excellent.

  “We’ll set it up when I get a handle on all of this.”

  If I get a handle, he amended to himself. Could more than one agent be at play in the murder of Mary-Jo Stanton and the possible cover-up “suicide” of Frank Mudd?

  “Your cell phone,” Noreen prompted. It was vibrating in his pocket. McGarr released her and opened it up.

  “Peter? Dery Parmalee here. Next time, send a true unknown to infiltrate my hateful rag. But not to worry. The only scars your Rut’ie took away are psychological and her own. With a correction of lifestyle and a dollop of contrition, she and her curious ménage à trois might escape righteous communal wrath. But no promises. Not one. You there?”

  McGarr grunted. From the clamor in the background, it sounded as though Parmalee was calling him from a pub.

  “On another, more sobering note—what about Mudd? Did he do himself there off the barnyard? Or do you suspect…foul play? Don’t hang up.

  “I called just to give you a heads-up, so to speak. I’m terribly excited by this recent development, and the staff and I are railroading the Opus Dei piece for a special edition we’ll put out on the streets the moment you’ve solved the entire hugger-mugger of Mary-Jo and Mudd and grant us the exclusive, as promised.