The Man Who Murdered God Read online

  The phone rang, and Lipson reached for it, saying “Here comes another one, I’ll bet.”

  Kavander turned to McGuire. “Which motive do you like? Revenge or a psychotic?”

  “Neither.”

  “What the hell?” Kavander exploded. “You give me two motives, and then you tell me neither one fits?”

  “I’m saying they’re the only two we’ve got.”

  Lipson, his hand over the telephone receiver, said “Joe, it’s for you.”

  McGuire dismissed him with a wave of his hand, and Lipson spoke softly to the caller.

  “I don’t like revenge,” McGuire said, “because this guy Lynch sounds like he was a damned saint. And I don’t like the psychotic angle, because everything was too well planned. Ambush the priest in the morning, leave without anybody seeing a thing. He even took the empty shell with him so we couldn’t trace it. That sound like a nut case to you?”

  “Joe?” It was Lipson again, the receiver still in his hand.

  “You better get that, McGuire,” Kavander said. “Could be a tip. Sounds like you could use all the help you can get.” He turned on his heel and left.

  “Who the hell is it?” McGuire snapped as he swung around to look at Lipson. The other detective was cradling the receiver against his chest.

  “Personal,” Lipson replied, looking uncomfortable. He waited until McGuire had seized his telephone before gently lowering the receiver and busying himself with a sheaf of reports on his desk.

  “Lieutenant McGuire.”

  For a few seconds McGuire heard only laboured breathing. Then a female voice, scratchy and strained, said, “Joe? It’s me. Gloria.”

  McGuire frowned. “Gloria who?” he demanded impatiently.

  This time the voice was stronger. “How many Glorias were you married to?”

  McGuire slumped visibly in his chair and swung to face the wall away from his partner. “What the hell are you doing calling me? You’re supposed to be living in Houston with some Goddamn real estate developer. Where you calling from?”

  She answered with a long sigh followed by a voice that climbed steadily in pitch until it became a weak, pain-ridden cry. “I’m at Mass General. I’ve been here a week and I’m not leaving, because I’ve got the cancer, Joe.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” McGuire whispered. “Jesus, Gloria, I’m sorry.”

  “Will you come and see me, Joe? Please? I’d love to see you.” She was sobbing now, her voice tight and fearful.

  “Sure I will,” McGuire answered. “Maybe tonight. How’s tonight sound?”

  “Oh, Joe, that would be great!” Her voice was stronger. “That would be just great. You can come anytime. They let visitors come any time on this ward. It’s ward twelve.”

  “How about your husband?” McGuire’s voice was softer, deeper. “Is he with you?”

  Another sigh. “He’s back in Houston. I guess. I don’t know. His lawyer handled everything. Said . . .” She began sobbing again. “Said I could have anything I wanted, money wasn’t an object. So I said . . . I said I wanted to go back to Boston to die, and they flew me up and here I am.” Her voice resumed its tragic pleading. “Joe, I’m so damned lonely and scared. You’ll come and see me, won’t you?”

  It was McGuire’s turn to sigh. “Sure,” he said. “Sure I will. Tonight for sure.”

  He placed the receiver gently back on its cradle. Looking up, he saw Lipson watching him intently.

  “Trouble?” his partner enquired.

  McGuire nodded. “I guess so. What else do you call it when an ex-wife wants you to come and help her die?”

  Dead ends. Tips from little old ladies, which revealed nothing except rampant paranoia and senility among the elderly. Anonymous telephone callers, whose first few words signal a cop’s experienced ear to hang up and go back to bending paper clips and staring out the window. Brief flurries of excitement, when a connection seemed to appear, then vanished. All part of every murder investigation in a big city. And the more sensational the killing, the greater the number of tips that led only to frustration.

  In the midst of making telephone calls, reviewing forensic reports and talking to acquaintances of Thomas Lynch, the memory of his ex-wife’s telephone call withdrew neatly, obediently, to the back of McGuire’s mind. Once, while listening to Lipson reciting details of a vacation trip the priest had taken the previous summer, McGuire recalled Gloria’s words, hearing them again in her shattered voice for the first time since she had called.

  Trying to visualize Gloria, McGuire would picture two different people. The first was a young woman wearing shirt-waist dresses, her hair in a long dark ponytail that swung like a pendulum as she walked. He saw her dancing at a house party, laughing at his jokes on the Common, riding with him to a picnic near Lexington, looking up at him wide-eyed from a bed in a Cape Cod motel, smiling through a flurry of confetti.

  The other face was an older woman’s, her hair straight and unbrushed, tears streaking her face, speaking to him in a dull voice from behind a cigarette, which remained poised near her mouth. A mouth that sagged from the pull of gravity and disillusionment.

  They were two different people to McGuire. Both named Gloria. Both of them his first wife. They had both died years ago in a dingy apartment in the Back Bay before the area became fashionable again. Now the Gloria who had replaced them was in a hospital ward for terminal cases, dying her own death.

  I’m responsible for the first death, McGuire admitted to himself. With all my lies and my screwing around, I killed the first Gloria, the one who smiled so easily. But not this one. This one they can hang on somebody else.

  In the evening he nodded good night to Lipson, gnawed savagely at a sandwich, bought flowers from a street vendor, walked to Mass General.

  The ward nurse directed him to Gloria’s room—two beds with a window facing the river. One bed was empty, neatly made and standing silent. In the other an old woman dozed, propped up on pillows, a plastic tube leading from her nose to a mechanical device that hummed with a droning indifference. Under his breath McGuire swore at the nurse for sending him to the wrong room.

  A second look at the woman before he left. A closer study of the cheeks, under awkward smears of make-up. And the hair, thin and greying, tied back from a face with etched lines not even sleep could conceal.

  McGuire leaned over to examine the chart at the foot of the woman’s bed. Mrs. Gloria Arnott. He shook his head and continued reading. His name was written next to hers. Address: Boston Police Department, Berkeley Street. A list of medications followed, and under Special Instructions he read, written in a neat feminine hand with a bold felt-tip pen, NDP, NH. He recognized the code. No Doctor Purple. Forget about hitting the emergency button when she begins to go. No Heroics. Let her die.

  “Hi Joe.”

  McGuire looked up from her chart to see Gloria watching him. She was smiling, and the clumsy make-up appeared less grotesque. He said hello and held up the flowers for her to see. “Brought you something,” he said. “They got a vase around here?”

  She raised her arms to him. “Bring them here, Joe. Please?”

  He walked to the side of the bed and handed her the flowers, but she reached for him, and he bent stiffly to let her hug him.

  “Thank you for coming,” she whispered, clinging to him. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”

  “You look great,” he muttered as he stepped back.

  She dabbed at her eyes with a corner of the sheet. “Come on,” she said shaking her head. “I look terrible, and you know it. The least you can give me is honesty.”

  He pulled a steel, straight-backed chair next to the bed and sat. Crossed his legs. Folded his hands in his lap. Looked around the room.

  “You look terrific, Joe. And that’s honest.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  She shrugge
d. “I found a lump in my neck about a year ago. They operated, said they thought they got it all. Then, two months ago, I went back for a check-up. I’d put it off because I didn’t want them to find anything. But they did. All through my lungs. Spots on the X-ray everywhere. Didn’t even open me up. They said they’d try chemotherapy, but all it did was make my hair fall out, and I was throwing up twenty-four hours a day.”

  Without thinking he reached across to grip her hand in sympathy, and she squeezed it in return. “What about the guy you married,” he asked. “What happened to him?”

  She looked out the window to the river and bit her lip. “He couldn’t take it. He never touched me after they found the lump. Said he couldn’t stand the idea. Said he’d always had this problem with sick people. When . . . when they did the X-rays, he started disappearing for days on end, leaving me alone in Houston. About a month ago his lawyer came to see me at the house. Said he was representing Richard, and that Richard had moved into another location.”

  She looked angrily at McGuire.

  “I knew what it meant. It meant he was shacked up with the receptionist from his office. His lawyer said Richard had authorized him to make any settlement, to provide anything I needed as long . . . as long as I was in this condition. I hated Houston, Joe. Always did. Hot and dirty place. I never made any friends there, any real friends. The women I met through Richard’s business all stopped coming around when they heard what I had. Just stopped. I’d try to call them, and they were always going out to a club meeting or just packing for a weekend in Phoenix. So I told Richard’s lawyer, I said ‘Tell him to send me back to Boston where I can die around real people.’” She held her head up, a gesture of pride. “It took them two weeks to find me a bed here.”

  McGuire remained for half an hour while they talked of his life and hers during the years after their divorce. She asked about Ollie Schantz—“I used to resent how he treated you like a son, but now I realize how nice it was of him”—and of McGuire’s second wife, a younger woman he had met and married within a few weeks of their divorce.

  “She was too young, and I was too set in my ways.” McGuire shrugged. “We both started fooling around on the side, and one night we just faced it and said ‘Let’s end this Goddamn mess,’ and that was it. I hear she went to Florida, worked in a bar for a while.”

  A nurse entered with a tray of capsules. Gloria thanked her and swallowed two with water while the nurse took her pulse and made a note on the chart.

  “I’ll be pie-eyed in a couple of minutes with these,” she said when the nurse left. She held her arms out again. “Thanks, Joe. I know you’re probably busy and all. This really meant a lot to me.”

  McGuire said he would be back to see her sometime.

  “When?” Desperation in her voice, her hand pulling nervously at the gold chain around her neck.

  McGuire shrugged. “When I can.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  He said he would do what he could.

  “Say tomorrow, Joe. Promise me tomorrow, okay? Please?”

  McGuire nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t know what time. I’ve got—” He began to explain that he had a funeral to attend tomorrow, but he caught himself. “We’re in the middle of that priest murder, and, you know, Kavander’s pushing hard.”

  “Kavander’s a jerk,” she said. “Always was.”

  McGuire smiled. “I’ll come back tomorrow. Sometime.”

  Walking home, the air cold and damp off the river, McGuire remembered the look in Gloria’s eyes when she berated Kavander. For a moment they had been the eyes of the first Gloria, the one who had died somewhere during their twelve years of marriage and who had been replaced by the grey-haired woman in the cancer ward who was to receive no heroics.

  Chapter Five

  Black was everywhere against the fresh, green April grass. The only colours were in the splash of flowers heaped around the open grave and in the white and gold raiments of a balding man mumbling against the wind and sprinkling water down onto a coffin.

  “The father, he had a lot of friends for a small-time priest.” Bernie Lipson stood sucking at a back tooth and scanning the mourners. “’Course, half of them are from the diocese. Right?”

  McGuire nodded, watching the knot near the grave unravel as the mourners trailed their way back to the fleet of limousines parked on the roadway. Someone from the ID squad was recording licence-plate numbers. A waste of time, McGuire knew. They would trace every second car all the way back to the Vatican.

  “Well, now you’ve seen pretty well the whole Boston Catholic establishment in one place,” a man’s voice said from behind them.

  McGuire and Lipson turned as Kevin Deeley approached. He rested a hand on Lipson’s shoulder and nodded to both men in turn.

  “How’s the investigation coming?” he asked. “Any progress? Any idea why this happened?”

  Lipson glanced at McGuire, who continued watching the funeral party scatter towards their cars. “I’m afraid not, Father Deeley,” Lipson replied. “A lot of tips we’ve got, but nothing substantial.” He spread his hands. “We might just have to wait.”

  “Wait?” Deeley demanded. “Wait for what?”

  “You know, somebody remembers something they haven’t told us, or we spot a guy walking around with a sawed-off. A break like that, you never know where it’ll come from.”

  The priest frowned and shook his head. “That’s it? That’s all you’re counting on?” He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s just luck. You’re waiting for dumb luck.”

  McGuire turned to Deeley, his face livid. “You got it, Father,” he snapped. “It was Lynch’s bad luck to be around when a nutcase called. It’ll be our good luck to find the son of a bitch.”

  Deeley thrust his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t know we solved violent crimes in Boston on the basis of luck,” he said in a cold fury.

  “What, we got World War Three ready to start again?” Lipson interrupted. “Come on, you guys—”

  “It’s hard for me to believe you people are taking this, this obscenity seriously,” Deeley said. “I should think you would be talking to the FBI, maybe Interpol. Perhaps there’s an international connection of some kind.”

  “Interpol?” McGuire snorted. “What the hell, let’s get NATO involved.”

  Lipson stepped between the two men, touching each lightly on the chest. “You want a beer, Joe?” he asked his partner. “Maybe we just go somewhere for a beer. Father, you can have a beer with a couple of cops, can’t you?”

  McGuire brushed his partner’s hand aside. “Hey, Father,” he snarled, advancing towards the priest. “You want to help us? Maybe you should just try praying your ass off a little more. Maybe you can talk somebody into reaching down from heaven to hand us a Goddamn suspect list carved on a stone.”

  “Joe,” Lipson began, and McGuire told him to shut up, damn it.

  Deeley grew calm, an expression of distaste on his face. “You have your job to do, and I have mine,” he said.

  “Yeah,” McGuire spat out. “Ours is dispensing justice. Yours is dispensing wafers.” Then, dismissing the scene with a wave of his hand, he turned and walked across the grass in the direction of the cars.

  “That was stupid, what I just did back there.” McGuire was wheeling the Plymouth through almost impenetrable city traffic back to Berkeley Street. “Really stupid.”

  “You got a right to blow off steam,” Lipson said, steadying himself against McGuire’s driving, one hand extended to the dashboard. “So’s Deeley. He tells me, after you left, he says there wasn’t a more popular guy in the whole diocese than Lynch. So the creep who shot him, everybody wants to see us pull him in. Sooner the better. Asks me what would happen if one of our guys got it, a hard-working guy everybody liked. So I tell him, we’d have every cop from here to New York beating the bushes. ‘Well, we feel the
same way,’ he says.”

  McGuire grunted and turned into the parking ramp.

  “Listen, Janice wants to know when you can come out for dinner,” Lipson said, changing the subject. “You know, she’d like to meet you. All the guys I work with, she wants to meet them. Says she wants to know who’s covering my ass for me. Helps her sleep better. So what do you like? Gefilte fish? Matzo soup? She makes her own corned beef, too. It’ll melt in your mouth, Janice’s corned beef . . .”

  McGuire jerked the car into the first open parking space. “She make me a ham sandwich, Bernie?” He pulled the key violently out of the ignition.

  Lipson watched his partner open the door and step out. “Joe, you don’t have to say that,” he said sadly. “Janice, she’s a good woman. Me, I’m just a dumb cop trying to help.”

  “Help?” McGuire asked, his hand on the door handle. “What the hell’s to help?”

  “You, Joe. If you need it. Everybody needs help sometime.”

  “When I need it, Bernie, I’ll ask.” McGuire wrenched the door handle and leaned his weight against it. “Until then, don’t bother offering.”

  “Aw, what the hell,” Lipson replied as McGuire stalked up the stairs and out onto Berkeley Street.

  Gloria had prepared herself more elaborately for McGuire’s second visit. Her make-up was applied with delicacy and discretion, and she wore a colourful kerchief, which concealed her limp, thinning hair. On the table beside her, McGuire’s flowers stood proudly in a green glass vase.

  They spoke in short flurries of conversation, recounting tales of former friends and relatives, until McGuire noticed the steadily growing tension behind her eyes. Finally, after he had been with her for several minutes, her arm reached out and she slapped a panel on the headboard of the bed. She lay back, breathing in short painful gasps, watching him. In seconds a nurse appeared with a shiny tray of instruments, and as McGuire remained silent, Gloria was injected with morphine to push back the wall of pain that had been about to engulf her.