A Novena for Murder (15 page)

“Can you remember any names she may have mentioned?”

“Yeah, one,” he said. “Mrs. Rubiero.”

Rubiero—that was the woman Anne had made the appointment with. Maybe they were getting someplace, after all. “Why do you remember that name?”

Kevin shrugged. “No reason,” he said, “except that I met Joanna that night for dinner in Millbrae. She had just come from Mrs. Rubiero’s. She mentioned it, and the name stuck with me because we had a Portuguese kid on my high school basketball team by the same name.”

He thought for a moment. “You know what, Sister? Now that I think about it, it was right after that that she started to get funny.”

“Funny?”

“Yeah. Broke dates. Wouldn’t talk much. Didn’t have time for me. I could never figure out why. She said it would all be different when something got straightened out.”

“Maybe she’d found another boyfriend.” Mary Helen said that as gently as she could, remembering the scene with Tony on the hillside.

“Naw,” the young man said, with a masculine ego that Mary Helen found amusing. “She really liked me.”

“Did she ever mention a young man named Tony?” she asked.

“That weirdo! Yeah, she mentioned him plenty. Hated him. She’d go the other way if she saw him coming. He even tried to bother her once or twice when I was with her.”

So she had been correct about the kiss. It had not been too affectionate. She stored that information on the back burner of her mind.

“You don’t think that guy had anything to do with Joanna’s . . .” Doherty seemed unable to say the word “murder.” “Why, if he touched her, I’ll break the little bastard in two with my bare hands.” He slammed his clenched fist against the arm of the chair.

Mary Helen jumped. All the color had left the boy’s face. Only the blotchy freckles stood out; those, and the blazing blue eyes. Talk about your wild Irish temper, Mary Helen thought, studying the young man. She cleared her throat. “Kevin, I know you are upset,” she said. “And you have every right to be,” she added quickly.

“Sister, do you think he did it?” He strained the question through his teeth.

“I don’t know what to think,” she answered honestly. The young gardener was on her list to call. She’d put him off till later. She’d have to get to him today or tomorrow.

“If he did it, I’ll kill him.” Doherty’s bellow interrupted her thought.

“For heaven’s sake, Kevin, haven’t we had enough killing?” she asked in her sternest, schoolmarm
voice. “Why don’t we try to make sure no one else has to feel as hurt and angry as you do today?” She stopped, surprised at her own impatience.

For a moment the young man stared at her. He reminded her of a valiant warrior who has suddenly lost his taste for the battle. Unexpectedly, he hunched forward, burying his face in his two broad hands. Mary Helen felt a hot, sick pain of empathy. Reaching over, she tousled his blond, curly head. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

Then, like the tall, lanky youngster he was, Kevin Doherty sobbed unashamedly.

When he looked up, his freckled face was streaked with tears. “I think I loved her, Sister,” he said, cracking his knuckles.

“I think you did,” Mary Helen answered.

On her way to lunch, Mary Helen met Eileen. “Feel like a stretch before we eat?” she asked.

“It sounds marvelous.” Eileen checked her watch. “More than likely, there’ll be a line in the dining room if we go now. Ten minutes of fresh air will do us a world of good.”

“Up this way and back?” Mary Helen asked, swerving onto the narrow path leading off the driveway. Eileen followed. The two walked in silence for several yards.

“Why so quiet?” Mary Helen said finally.

“At this pace, old dear, who can both talk and breathe?”

Mary Helen slowed down. “I saw Kevin Doherty this morning,” she said. “Poor kid. Really loved Joanna.”

Eileen clucked sympathetically. “Did he say anything you think might be helpful?”

“I don’t know. He talked about the thesis.”

“The missing thesis?”

“Yes, I’m sure there is some connection. He also asked me if I thought Tony might have done it.”

Eileen looked shocked. “Tony kill Joanna? Why, that seems impossible. Tony’s a gardener! He spends so much time making things grow and flourish, I just can’t imagine him killing anything, much less anybody. Besides, wasn’t he a bit sweet on Joanna?” Without waiting for an answer, Eileen continued. “No,” she said, shaking her head for emphasis. “I just can’t believe it. Love and a garden—that should add up to something good, not evil.” She stopped, a sudden look of realization in her wide, gray eyes. “Although I must admit it didn’t work out quite so well in the Garden of Eden, now did it?”

Mary Helen knew a rhetorical question when she heard one. “Who loves a garden, still his Eden keeps,” she quoted, hoping to ease Eileen’s mind a bit.

Her friend kicked a loose pebble in the pathway. “What do you think?”

“Tony’s on my list to call.”

“Not about Tony—about the whole business.”

“I don’t know what to think until I mull it over for a while,” Mary Helen answered. The two walked a
few more feet. “You know, I’ve done an awful lot of mulling about these murders,” she said.

“And just who hasn’t, old dear?”

“I really can’t figure out yet how the professor and Leonel and Marina and Joanna and now Tony, plus a missing thesis, figure into this puzzle, but I’m sure they do. One thought that has struck me is that whoever our murderer is, he or she always makes very sure poor Leonel is around so he can be implicated.”

“Unless poor Leonel is our murderer,” Eileen reminded her softly.

Mary Helen continued as though she hadn’t heard the remark. “Now it is our job to figure out just who could possibly know all of Leonel’s movements.” She stopped and faced Eileen.

“Why, several people could, I’m sure.”

“Who comes to your mind first?”

“Marina, of course, but . . .” Her gray eyes opened wide, then blinked. “But you couldn’t possibly think . . .”

“He was so defensive about her at the Hall of Justice. Remember?”

“Certainly I remember. But you can’t possibly believe for one moment that sweet, young Marina killed the professor and then her own sister.”

“Why can’t I possibly believe it?”

“Let’s turn back.” Eileen checked her watch. “If we don’t hurry, we’ll miss lunch completely,” she said, walking quickly toward the driveway. Obviously, Eileen didn’t want to discuss the subject any further.

“I said, why can’t I possibly believe it?” Mary Helen pushed the point.

“You can’t believe it because it’s . . . it’s so unnatural,” Eileen stammered. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”

“Really, it’s nothing so new,” Mary Helen said, following close behind her friend. “You just mentioned the Garden of Eden. And you know as well as I do, that if you keep on reading the Genesis story, the next thing you run right into is the story of Cain and Abel.

Turning quickly on her heel, Eileen shot her old friend what she later denied was a dirty look.

“Damn!” Kate Murphy slammed down the phone receiver. The creeping charlie in her desk planter quivered.

Across from her, Gallagher looked up. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked in a mild, controlled voice.

“For God’s sake, Denny, don’t use that tone of voice on me. It makes me feel like a—an hysterical woman.” Replacing her earring, she stared out the window of the Hall of Justice at the heavy freeway traffic.

“Well?” Gallagher returned to the large stack of papers piled on his desk.

“Just what did that ‘Well’ mean?”

“It could mean ‘Well, what the hell is wrong with you?’ or it could mean ‘Well, you are a—an’ ”—he
mimicked her fumble for the correct article—“ ‘an hysterical woman’!”

Kate knew that much.

“You wanted to be the detective, Murphy; you figure it out,” he said, going back to his paper work.

Kate felt the color rise in her face. She flopped into her swivel chair and began to twist a few strands of hair around her index finger. “Sorry, Denny,” she said. “I’m just frustrated, that’s all. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

“Let’s start again. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“It’s that damn nun!” Kate slammed her fist on her desk.

“Hey, Murphy, no police brutality,” one of the officers hollered from the coffee urn. Chauvinistic smart-asses, she thought, I’ll show them when I catch the Holy Hill killer!

“The problem?” Gallagher asked.

“The names of the people the professor helped—the ones I got from Marina. I couldn’t get hold of a single one of them. I called Marina at home and got the names of any of their relatives that she knew. I’ve been calling them. Most every call ends the same way. ‘The Seester, she ask already,’ they say. When I mention I’m from the police, they hang up. What I can’t figure out is where ‘Seester’ got the list, and why in the hell she’s calling these people.”

“Why do you want to make her stop?” Gallagher asked.

“Well, for starters, it is police business. And, for finishers, if she does happen to run into a serious lead, we could have another murder on our hands.”

“Then tell her.” Gallagher made it sound so simple.

“What do I do? Go up to the college, flash my badge, and tell the old lady, ‘Bug off, Sister’?”

“Back at St. Anne’s, one old gal, Sister Felicia, used to drive the pastor, Father Hennessey, bananas. He could control the police and the politicians in the City, but he couldn’t begin to be a match for Felicia. Well, one day they must have had an awful Donny-brook. Old Hennessey said to me, ‘Denny, nuns are like bees. Leave ’em alone and they make honey. Interfere, and you’ll always get stung.’ I was just a kid, but I never forgot it.”

“The point, Denny—what is the point?”

Gallagher leaned back in his swivel chair. He studied her with what Kate was sure could be classified as a supercilious grin. “Well,” he said, “as the old saying goes, Katie girl, if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.”

It took no longer than twenty minutes for Kate Murphy to arrive at the Sisters’ Residence. And it didn’t take her more than another ten minutes to outline, politely but very definitely, that criminal investigation was her domain; hers, and the SFPD’s. She also enumerated the many dangers inherent in amateurs meddling in murder cases, not the least of which was being murdered themselves.

She’s not a redhead for nothing, Mary Helen
thought, watching Kate sitting on the edge of the parlor chair. She waited, silently, until she felt sure Kate had finished her well-prepared speech. The old nun tried to look concerned and contrite.

“Aren’t you curious about where we got the list?” she asked meekly.

“At the moment, I’m more curious about why you feel you should get involved in a police investigation,” Kate said.

Sister Mary Helen outlined as succinctly as she could the deep anger and resentment she felt about a murderer being allowed to terrorize the college. She thought about using “damn mad” for emphasis, but then decided she’d save that until she knew Kate a little better. The young woman remained silent. Mary Helen hurried on to her positive intuition about Leonel’s being not only innocent, but victimized. Kate opened her mouth, but, thankfully, closed it again. Mary Helen was sure that line from Shakespeare, “I have no other but a woman’s reason: I think him so, because I think him so,” would not fit into Kate’s idea of a well-orchestrated homicide investigation. She felt she knew the young woman that well.

“Now, are you curious about the list?” Mary Helen asked when she finally finished what she later described to Eileen as her
Apologia pro culpa Helenae
.

Exhausted, Kate lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and sank back into the chair. “Frankly, yes,” she said.

“I discovered Joanna had written a thesis on the Portuguese immigrants,” she said, “which disappeared
from Sister Eileen’s library at just about the same time that Joanna did. Now, I call that too much of a coincidence. Don’t you?”

“I guess I might have, if I had known it!” Mary Helen thought Kate still sounded a little annoyed. She hurried on.

“I just thought to myself—Portuguese-thesis-professor-Joanna. There has to be some connection. But the thesis was missing, and the professor’s office was sealed.” She hurried over that. “So we couldn’t get in for a duplicate copy. Anyway, we . . .”

“Who’s we?” Kate asked, too quietly.

“Sister Eileen, Sister Anne, and I,” the old nun answered.

Kate groaned. “That’s how you got to all those people so quickly. “ ‘Seester called.’ There were three ‘seesters’ calling.”

Mary Helen ignored the interruption. “Anyway, we got the list from Marina of the people Joanna had interviewed for her thesis. It was a very long one, but Eileen found dots by some of the names.”

“Dots?” Kate took a final drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out.

“Right. We figured those dots must have some significance, so we divided it into three. Plus, Joanna had a boyfriend, Kevin Doherty, whom I talked to this morning.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, among other things, that she got funny after she talked to Mrs. Rubiero.”

“Who?”

“Rubiero. She has relatives Professor Villanueva helped. She’s on the list. In fact, I’ve an appointment with her tomorrow, if you’d like to go along.”

“If I’m not intruding.” Kate sounded a bit sarcastic to Sister Mary Helen, who wasn’t sure if being sarcastic was better or worse than being annoyed.

“What did the boyfriend mean by ‘funny’?” Kate lit another cigarette, took a long drag, and exhaled.

The old nun opened the long, narrow, parlor window, hoping the smell of smoke wouldn’t cling to her clothes.

“He said she became obsessed with her research. Something she needed to solve. Lost interest in him.”

“Maybe it was another boy. That Tony you mentioned?”

“I suggested that, but Kevin said she hated him. He got very upset about Tony. You don’t suppose Tony might have something to do with the murders?”

“Not a chance. I checked his alibi for the night Villanueva was murdered. He was in a bar in Santa Clara. Dozens of witnesses. Even the bartender remembers him.”

Mary Helen felt slightly disappointed. If Tony had had no alibi, then he might be guilty, and this whole awful mess would be solved. Suddenly, she felt her face flush. Poor Tony. Why, that wasn’t even cricket. The poor devil was probably every bit as innocent as Leonel—or almost.