Masquerade Page 27

  “You know these so-called secrets?” Krieg challenged.

  “Uh-huh,”Tully said.

  “All four?”

  “Three. But we’ll know the fourth before long,” Tully said.

  “It seems to me, then,” Krieg said, “that you know as much or more than you claim I know. With all that alleged information, you should be able to solve this case. If someone is trying to kill me—a hypothesis I deny—then you have all you need to catch the person. That is your job, isn’t it?”

  If he had tried to anger two detectives he was succeeding.

  “You refuse to cooperate, then?” Koznicki asked.

  “Cooperate? In what? Your fantasy?”

  “Are you so avaricious—or so stupid—that you would risk your life?” Koznicki said incredulously.

  Krieg merely shrugged.

  At that moment, Sister Marie appeared in the corridor. She seemed appropriately startled at all the commotion. By now, the area inside and outside Reverend Krieg’s room was awash with police personnel taking pictures, measuring, taking notes. She moved directly to Krieg and the two detectives.

  “What’s going on here?” she demanded almost as if she were addressing an unruly second grader.

  “Maybe you could tell us,” said Tully. The response drew a sharp glance from Koznicki, whose parochial school background made it difficult to relate to nuns with anything but deference.

  Marie ignored the insinuation. “What is that?” She sniffed. “It smells like gasoline.”

  “It is,” Tully said. He fished a paper from an inside pocket and studied it for a moment. “What are you doing up here, sister? You’re scheduled for a class now.”

  “I . . . I forgot and left my notes in my room. I was just coming up to get them.”

  Or, thought Tully, you came up here to see if your plan worked and Krieg was out of your way. At the same time, he knew he was getting ahead of himself. As far as the record was concerned, they had not as yet found anything in Marie’s past, the revelation of which could motivate her toward homicide. However, a well-honed instinct told him at least all three remaining writers were solid suspects.

  “Well,” Tully said, “luckily you’ll find your papers intact. If we hadn’t stopped the Reverend from lighting his cigar, this gasoline could have become a lethal bomb.”

  Marie shuddered. “Again? This was another attempt on his life?”

  Tully nodded. “Uh-huh. By the way, Sister, did you know Krieg smoked?”

  “Did I?” She crinkled her nose as if catching a foul odor. “Of course. How could anyone live in these quarters and not smell the cigar smoke? It was not here yesterday morning—but then neither was the Reverend Krieg. He was staying at a hotel. But he stayed with us last night and this morning the odor permeated everything. Of course I knew he smoked. So did everyone else who stayed in this section of the building.” She paused in thought a moment. “Lieutenant, what sort of question was that? Are you accusing me of something? Of trying to murder Reverend Krieg?”

  Tully regarded her coolly. “Sister, you will know without a doubt if I accuse you of anything. This is a homicide investigation and we’re going to pursue it. Along the way, we’re gonna ask questions. Some of them may sound offensive. If you take offense, that’s your problem.” His voice softened only slightly. “If it helps any, you are definitely not the only one who is going to be questioned before this is over.”

  Tully and Koznicki moved to one side. They consulted with each other, checked on the progress of the investigation of Krieg’s room, and agreed on a statement that would be released to the press.

  Meanwhile, Sister Marie remained where she had been standing. She felt shaken. She also felt guilty. The guilt began tugging at her memory, calling her back to another era.

  Then she noticed that Father Koesler had been standing nearby all this time. She approached him. “I wonder,” she said, “if you would be kind enough to take the class I’m supposed to have now?”

  “Really,” he began to protest, “I’m not . . .”

  “I think you can handle it quite nicely, Father. It just has to do with the use of real police in researching a mystery novel. I know this is your forte. You’ve done a lot of that, or so I’ve heard. I mean, you’ve had lots of contact with the police. Even now . . .” She didn’t complete the thought.

  “You’re upset, Sister. That’s understandable. But I guess I can wing it with some hints about getting the cooperation of the police—even if it’s for a novel. They really are very helpful to writers by and large.”

  “Thank you very much. I appreciate it.” Marie pinched her forehead.

  The headache was pronounced. She slowly descended the stairs to the main floor, and worked her way through the crowded corridor. She entered the now empty chapel and knelt in the rear pew.

  The Gothic interior of the chapel was so traditional, even with the altar placed just inside the sanctuary instead of at the rear wall. Religious statues and paintings abounded. It put her in mind of her home parish in Detroit. She had spent a lot of time there, too.

  She was eighteen again, in church, and feeling guilty.

  21

  Thursday before First Friday. How often had she done this? Marie Monahan had plenty of time before it was her turn to go to confession. Let’s see, approximately eight times each scholastic year for, since she’d begun going to confession in the second grade, eleven years. So, eighty-eight times.

  As far as she could recollect, it was Saint Margaret Mary who had the vision during which Jesus promised grand spiritual rewards to those who “made” the first Fridays.

  The idea was to go to Communion on nine consecutive first Fridays and all the promises Jesus made to Saint Margaret Mary were yours. Somehow, someone must have dismissed the magical number nine, for she, Marie Monahan, and her classmates had completed nine consecutives long ago. Like so many Catholic devotions, the first Fridays had become a quasi superstition. If nine first Fridays were good, a limitless number of first Fridays was infinitely better.

  The confessions, of course, were necessitated by the Communions. No one in the world could have foretold then, in 1960, what would be accomplished by the Second Vatican Council, to begin the following year. One of Vatican II’s achievements would be the divorcing of confession from Communion. Catholics would be advised that they could go to Communion without first going to confession practically forever as long as they did not commit a mortal sin. Just when they got used to going to confession only infrequently, if ever, a later Pope would emphasize the necessity of individual frequent confession, and put confession and Communion back together again. After Vatican II, the casual Catholic was frequently confused.

  The eighty-eight confessions Marie had just carefully computed by no means approached the total number of times she’d been to confession to date. Sometimes she would confess every week or every other week. And always, always, the same thing: disobedience, angry thoughts, inattentiveness in school, gossip. Venial sins, imperfections.

  There were times when she suspected she might find some other sins if she examined her conscience differently. But she had been taught by the nuns how to examine her conscience when she was in the second grade. Never having been given an update, she retained a child’s approach to confession. In this she was not unlike many, if not most, adult Catholics.

  The inside joke to all this was that by her peers she was considered to be “wild.”

  “Wildness” meant something considerably different in a parochial school of 1960 and prior than it would some thirty years later. Marie was a starter on the girls’ basketball and softball teams. She was a cheerleader. She was a tomboy. Her tight-knit circle of girlfriends tended to be boisterous. Worse, they were forever testing the dress code limits of “Marylike” modesty. As often as they could get away with it, they’d be mischievous and roll their waistbands until their school uniform skirts hung well above the knee. Or they’d “forget” to fasten the top buttons on their blouses
, leaving a fraction of a bra exposed. Around them at all times the vigilance of the nuns was ever required.

  Marie Monahan was never in the running as the sodalist selected to crown the Blessed Mother’s statue on May Day.

  And yet, with all of that, to her knowledge, she had never in her life committed a mortal sin.

  Probably the simplest mortal sin possible to a Catholic would be the deliberate missing of Sunday Mass. The next most commonplace would be a grand dinner of meat on a Friday. After that, things got complicated. Stealing an article of significant value or lots of money would do it. Or killing someone, of course.

  Possibly the classic mortal sin—and this was far more the venue of males—was almost any sexual sin anyone could imagine.

  The gravity of sin, in those days, was measured by three criteria: the matter, the intention, and the circumstances. Matter: the difference, say, between ten cents and ten dollars. Intention: inadvertence, force, or fear could limit responsibility. Circumstances: participation in a “just war” justified killing. Sexual sins did not admit parvity of matter. Thus whatever the intention or circumstance, one embarked on a sin of sexual nature with serious, grave, mortal matter.

  But Marie Monahan had never committed a sexual sin.

  That fact was not a commentary on her natural attractiveness. She had neither a good nor an accurate self-image. She considered herself quite plain. Actually, she had a natural beauty that came close to perfection. The boys in her school were well aware that Marie Monahan was amply endowed and that, under that bulky school uniform, there were sensuous adult curves just begging to be fondled. All such male thoughts and vulgar references were confessed with religious regularity.

  It was her turn. She’d been waiting to go to confession for more than half an hour, inching forward as each student ahead of her was shriven. All this time wasted, when she should have been examining her conscience. All she’d done was to entertain distractions.

  She knelt on the unpadded bench, rested her folded hands on the little shelf. Directly in front of her was a dark and seldom-if-ever-cleaned cloth behind which was a wooden door that made a terrible racket when the priest slid it open or shut. It was dark in there. Neither priest nor penitent could see each other even when the little door was open. The cloth and darkness saw to that.

  Slide . . . Bang!

  “Oh,” she whispered, “bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was about two weeks ago.”

  Snort, cough, growl. The priest cleared his respiratory passages.

  “Since then,” she whispered, “I disobeyed my mother four times and my father twice. I gossiped a bit, nothing very serious. And,” rememberinga few minutes ago, “I had distractions in church. And that’s about it.

  “I’m sorry for these and all the sins of my past life, especially for disobedience.”

  She thought that a representative confession. It had been serving her, with slight variations, for the past eleven years.

  “For your penance,” the priest’s voice sounded tired and bored, “say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. And now, make a good Act of Contrition.” She could not have guessed how bored—almost terminally—he was. He’d been hearing practically the same humdrum story for the past six hours, beginning with the third graders and marching upward through the classes. The sole salvation of his sanity was that the present—final—penitents were high schools seniors. Purgatory was about to end.

  Marie mumbled the Act of Contrition while the priest mumbled an absolution in Latin. That they were speaking in different languages simultaneously, neither paying any attention whatsoever to the other, did not bother them.

  It did not take Marie long to forget that confession and, indeed, school in general. Christmas vacation was about to begin and that was on everybody’s front burner.

  Marie had been invited to the seasonal teen club dance by none other than the captain of the football team. It was such a natural: a three-year letter man in football, basketball, and baseball—and team captain in football—dating the school’s outstanding female athlete and captain of the cheerleaders. The wonder was that it had taken them so long to get together.

  It took so long because, on the one hand, with her poor self-image it never occurred to Marie that the school’s prime catch knew she was alive. While, on the other hand, she was regarded as the unapproachable—the virgin queen, above and beyond accepting casual dates, and probably frigid to boot.

  She shared her excitement, as she shared everything, with Alice, her best friend in all the world. Together, they began planning and preparing for the magic evening. Alice, too, had a date. And not a loser by any means, but not the captain of the football team and an all-state pick in three sports.

  At long last, December 21 arrived, and it was perfect. The evening was brisk and clear. A dusting of snow made it seem as if clusters of tiny diamonds had fallen on earth.

  When Marie walked into the decorated gym on the arm of Bucko Cassidy there was almost a collective gasp from the assembled crowd. They were perfect together. Young, brimming with good health, tight skin perfectly formed, a blooming couple who easily could have stepped out of the advertisement pages of any popular magazine.

  Bucko and Marie felt everyone’s gaze on them. It was exhilarating.

  The evening went as well as could be expected. Marie and Alice were able to steal a little time together to compare notes. By and large, Alice was having the better time of the two. Her date had interests that transcended sports. Bucko Cassidy, on the other hand, was limited conversationally not only to the sports world but more parochially to his own considerable athletic accomplishments and his bright professional future.

  Bucko’s only departure from his totally egocentric monologue was when he turned to Marie and said, “But what about you, Marie: Which sport do you think I should pick for a pro career?”

  It was all she could do to keep from laughing out loud. “I don’t know, Bucko,” she said in restrained self-control. “You’re so good in all of them. But don’t you think you’d last longer in baseball?”

  “Last longer?”

  “Yes. What’s the average football career? Less than ten years—twelve if you’re lucky. Basketball? All that constant running takes it out of your legs. But baseball, now there’s a career that could bring you a big paycheck for lots of years . . . don’t you think?”

  “Geez, Marie, I think you’re right.”

  “But all that has to wait until the scouts make their offers and you see the whites of their contracts.”

  “Neat, Marie, neat!”

  Marie could scarcely wait to closet with Alice and bring her up to date on Bucko’s greatest problem in all the world.

  It was toward the end of a pleasant evening with no surprises that Bucko popped his surprise: the postparty party.

  Marie begged off. She had a curfew. Bucko protested she could phone her parents and tell them she’d be a little late. Besides, they wouldn’t stay long.

  They argued. They discussed. Marie weakened. She talked it over with Alice, who advised against it. Marie talked it over with herself. She thought of all those deadly dull confessions. She’d never even had necking or petting to confess. If her confidantes were truthful, she must be the only senior who never did anything even vaguely naughty.

  She agreed to go.

  Bucko was happier about her decision than he had any right to be. She remembered that later.

  At first, all went well. Her parents agreed, reluctantly, but they agreed. Her mother would wait up for her. There was an abundant crowd of seniors at the party—another reassuring sign.

  But there were no adults. The owners of the house had gone on a skiing holiday in Northern Michigan and their son had opened their bountiful liquor supply.

  About half an hour after they arrived, Bucko suggested they go upstairs. The downstairs was already too crowded and getting more so by the minute. Marie knew what he had in mind. Finally she was going to find out what it was
like to engage in some serious necking.

  They found an empty bedroom. There were several layers of coats on the bed. A sweep of Bucko’s athletic arm solved that problem. The coats were on the floor and he and she were on the bed.

  Things began happening too fast. Bucko was all over her. She pushed him away and sat up. “Bucko! I’m not a baseball. You don’t have to rub the cover off me!”

  Bucko considered the situation. “You’re right,” he admitted. “We’re too keyed up from the dance and all. Let’s go back with the gang.”

  It was Bucko’s finest thespian moment. He had no intention of calling off this carnal intimacy.

  Back to the dull confessions. After a moment’s thought, “We don’t need to do that, Bucko. Just go slower, can’t you?”

  “Sure. Wait a minute.” He located his coat on the floor and drew a flask from a pocket. “Let’s have a shot of this. It’ll relax us.”

  “I don’t know . . . what’s in it?”

  “It’s just a little booze. It’ll help. Come on . . . here.”

  She looked doubtful. But, she had to admit, she could use something to relax. She was tighter than a drum. Well, one doesn’t commit one’s first deliberate mortal sin lightly. “You first,” she said.

  “Okay.” He took a sip and handed the flask to her.

  She sampled one mouthful, then another. Then, straightway, she collapsed on the bed. Bucko stepped into the bathroom and emptied his mouth. Even so, he was somewhat affected by the knockout drops he’d put in the liquor.

  When Marie regained consciousness, she was in Bucko’s car. She did not feel at all well. She looked at Bucko behind the wheel, but saw him in a confused haze. “What time is it?”

  He checked his watch as they passed a street light. “One-thirty.”

  Half an hour past her extended curfew. Not good, but not tragic. What was definitely not good was how she felt. “Stop the car, Bucko!”