Pious Deception Page 4

  If anything in the house could illumine Vanderhooven’s personality, it would be here, in this anachronistic room.

  A hodgepodge of volumes filled a scarred bookcase, leatherbound volumes on the top shelf, paperbacks with broken bindings on the bottom. A good third of the titles were in Latin. She had blocked out her childhood Latin and could not draw it back. Medical terminology was no help. The best she could do was to categorize the volumes as religious, and that any fool could have done with no Latin background at all.

  When the sheriff arrived later this morning he would seal off the house and she wouldn’t be able to get back in, even with permission of the archdiocese. This was her last chance. She turned to a fresh page in her pad and began to list the contents of the room: “Mahogany table, 2½’ × 5’—scratched. On it—stack of books.” She noted the titles. Two biographies of monks, one book on Arizona history, one on state tax law. She paged through them, but no passages were underlined, no corners were dog-eared. On the blotter under the last volume were two stains, a small round outline and an octagonal one about three inches wide. She fingered the dark marks—a shot glass and a bottle? An unusually shaped bottle. She traced both marks, rolled the paper and banded it, and stood it next to her purse. Vanderhooven’s calendar she stuck in her purse. That she’d xerox and return.

  “Dresser top—comb, brush, wallet, handkerchief, change, key ring with six keys.” She pocketed the keys—just in case.

  She put a thin glove on her left hand and pulled open the bathroom medicine cabinet—“razor, shaving cream, Vaseline, aspirin, deodorant, talcum powder, toothpaste—no prescription medication.” Nothing out of the ordinary.

  The bedroom closet was huge, nearly half as large as the bedroom. She stepped inside and pulled the light cord. Priest’s clothes. Jogger’s clothes. Hiking boots. Jeans, slacks, shirts. But no ropes, chains, handcuffs, blindfolds, whips, no falsies, padded bras, garter belts, or panties, no pornography hidden in the back, no portable mirrors: none of the normal accoutrements of autoerotic asphyxia. And there had been no book on knots, a necessity for untutored devotees. She hefted a large leather suitcase—empty.

  The front door slammed.

  She glanced at her watch—3:30 A.M. —then lifted two smaller suitcases. They too felt empty.

  “No, I will not wait in there, thank you very much!” a woman’s voice insisted. The priest’s mother?

  “You’ll only upset yourself, Grace.” His father.

  “Upset myself! My son is dead; how do you think I’m going to upset myself?” There was a note of hysteria in the woman’s voice.

  Damn, Kiernan thought. Why couldn’t Dowd have had the sense to keep them out of here until morning? She stepped out of the closet just as the bedroom door banged open. The scent of jasmine perfume struck her.

  The woman, tanned, with monochromatic ash-blond hair, stared, not at Kiernan but into the room. For a moment she made no movement with either her eyes or her head. Then she turned stiffly and methodically moved her gaze around the room, favoring no item with a pause.

  Behind her, hand on her shoulder, stood Philip Vanderhooven. The resemblance to his son was striking—medium height, round face, blue eyes, thin faded hair, closer to the white it would become than to the blond it had once been. But there was no softness beneath the pale hair. Horizontal creases cut deep into the forehead and vertical ones between the eyebrows; the troughs beside the mouth were the lines of control. His palm lay on his wife’s shoulder, barely curled fingers held stiffly away from the linen of her blue-and-white dress.

  Strangely, it was Dowd, in his black suit behind the vacation-garbed couple, who looked out of place. All three appeared on edge, Grace Vanderhooven tottering, Philip holding himself in, and Bishop Dowd clearly exhausted and nervously eyeing the other two.

  Kiernan took a step toward the couple. “I’m Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  Vanderhooven nodded. “The bishop has told us about you. You’ve seen the body. So what’s your report?”

  Either Vanderhooven had no qualms about discussing the priest’s death in front of his distraught wife, or he was more upset than he appeared. Or, more likely, he was simply accustomed to being in charge. “Not a hands-off type,” Sam Chase had said of him. “Not a man used to hearing no.” Kiernan hesitated, then said softly, “There’s nothing I would take to court without an autopsy. The sheriff will probably need a couple of days to arrange that. What I think, from observation, is that your son was set up.”

  Vanderhooven’s entire body seemed to sag, as if he had been holding himself taut for this moment. But his wife gave no indication of having heard; she continued her appraisal of the room. Vanderhooven asked, “Do you have any leads?”

  “Not yet. I’m trying to get an impression of what your son was like. I’ll have to ask questions that may be painful.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I’d like to continue to look through the room while we talk. Time is important.”

  “Fine. Grace, why don’t—”

  “No! I told you I am not going to wait out there. Austin is my son.” Jerking free from his hand, she started slowly toward the dresser. “What an odd room this is.”

  “Not like his childhood room?” Kiernan asked as she pulled open the door of the bedside table with her gloved hand. A phone book lay inside.

  “This? This is an old man’s room. Austin never had a dungeon like this! Not in New York. And when we moved to San Diego he had a bright yellow room, with his posters and his surfboard. His brother and sister fought to get that room when he left.”

  “It was black then, not yellow, Grace.” Vanderhooven turned around the chair by the mahogany table and lowered himself into it in one controlled movement.

  Momentarily, Grace Vanderhooven smiled. “Austin painted it while we were on vacation. I thought I would faint when I saw it. It looked like a cave. It was terrible, but it was his room. His rebellion.”

  Fighting her reluctance to yank them back from the solace of the past, Kiernan said, “Tell me about his rebellion. I already know he had a juvenile record.”

  “That!” Vanderhooven said. “That has nothing to do with this.”

  “We can’t be sure.”

  “It was kid stuff, fifteen years ago.”

  Kiernan shut the drawer and turned to Vanderhooven. “One of the ways I proceed is to get a clear picture of the victim. Then if I discover something out of character I can spot it. Otherwise when witnesses lie—and they will—I’ll have no way of judging.” Purposely, she hadn’t caught his gaze, hadn’t made her statement a challenge.

  Vanderhooven nodded slowly. “It was nothing serious, a foolish adolescent mistake. Austin—”

  Hand on the dresser, Grace Vanderhooven spun to face her husband. “Nothing serious, Philip! You didn’t think it was nothing serious at the time. The boy was arrested for theft!”

  “We’ve been through this, Grace. It was a misjudgment. He was trying to help those people.”

  “Help them to property that wasn’t theirs!” Grace’s voice trembled and rose. Bishop Dowd shifted his weight onto the foot nearest the door.

  Catching Vanderhooven’s eye, Kiernan let a moment pass before saying, “Tell me what happened.”

  “The kid thought he was helping a poor family extricate their possessions. The landlord locked them out for lack of rent. Kid should have assessed the situation before he got involved, instead of letting his emotions bulldoze his sense. Learned the hard way. Didn’t know he was helping these people take the landlord’s possessions as well as their own. He worked the rest of the summer to pay off that fine.”

  Kiernan glanced at Grace, but she showed no reaction to her husband’s words. Neither did she elaborate.

  “What else?” Kiernan prodded.

  “Else?” Vanderhooven demanded.

  “Mr. Vanderhooven, your son wouldn’t have had a record for one offense. Any competent lawyer would have gotten him off
if that had been his first offense. But it wasn’t, was it?”

  Vanderhooven shook his head. “Bearer’s bonds. Kid got hold of some bearer’s bonds. My security at the firm was lax. My fault. Should have been on top of it. Not that that excuses the kid. But he was only sixteen then. Most kids that age don’t know a bearer’s bond from a tamale wrapper. But the kid saw the glitch in the security system, knew bearer’s bonds were largely untraceable in those days. Headed off for a big weekend in Mexico; with his girlfriend.” Vanderhooven’s face relaxed; the corners of his mouth eased upward. His unspoken admiration was unmistakable. “Didn’t think a sixteen-year-old with bearer’s bonds might arouse suspicion. He almost got away with it. Had the bank officers down in Mexico nearly convinced. Said he was a special courier; said his youth was protective camouflage. The plan was dumb, but the kid could think on his feet.”

  “Theft,” Grace Vanderhooven muttered.

  “So when he was caught with the landlord’s possessions later, that was a second offense,” Kiernan said. “What happened then?”

  “He got thirty hours of community work, hard labor with a shovel,” Philip said. “I could have pulled strings, but I didn’t. He needed to feel the sting of the law.”

  Kiernan moved to the dresser. The jasmine scent of Grace Vanderhooven’s perfume filled the air, as if marking off territory. Kiernan stooped and opened the lowest drawer. Sweaters, what seemed like a lifetime supply for a Phoenician. “Did he do drugs?”

  “Never. Wasn’t that kind of kid,” Vanderhooven said.

  “Alcohol?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, eyeing the stained desk blotter.

  Grace whirled to face her. “Of course we’re sure. The only time Austin ever drank was on that … that lark to Mexico. He learned his lesson then.”

  If Austin Vanderhooven had had a drinking problem, keeping it hidden from parents who lived in another state would not have been difficult. Kiernan turned and glanced questioningly at Bishop Dowd, who stood by the doorway behind Vanderhooven. But Dowd seemed to have tuned out the whole scene.

  Kiernan turned back to Philip Vanderhooven. “Were you surprised when your son decided on the seminary?”

  For a few moments—long enough for her to turn back to the drawer, finger each sweater, and satisfy herself there was nothing hidden beneath or in them—there was silence. Then Grace said, “You were, weren’t you, Philip? You didn’t think Austin cared about the Church. You thought he’d be like you.” Her voice was sharp and the undertone of triumph clear.

  But Grace’s accusation must have been a slice of a well-worn battle between the couple; her words seem to fly past him unnoticed. Answering Kiernan, he said, “Kid could have been a first-rate economist. Had the makings, the temperament. But he had a mind of his own. The boy had his wild moments, boys do, but he pulled himself together. And I’ll tell you, Miss O’Shaughnessy, he approached the priesthood as he would a business. He told me he could make a difference there, with his background. He knew their resources were invested poorly. He wanted to be with an institution that stood for something; he knew he could contribute.”

  So Philip Vanderhooven still saw his son as what he had wanted him to become, an economist, but one working within the Catholic Church. Kiernan opened the middle drawer—underwear, plain white jockey shorts, plain tank shirts, plain white socks, and to one side, six pairs of black nylon socks. She looked over at Grace beside her as she too eyed the drawer. “Were you surprised?”

  “Yes.”

  “What had you thought he would do?” she asked, feeling carefully through the piles, then pushing the drawer shut.

  “Finish school, live in New York, marry, I suppose.”

  “You seem hesitant about his marrying.”

  Grace pulled open the top drawer and stared down.

  “Try not to disturb anything, Mrs. Vanderhooven,” Kiernan said softly. “About Austin’s marrying, did you think that was unlikely?”

  “Marry?” Grace laughed, bitterly. “Why should he have bothered?” Grace ran a hand through her stiff hair, leaving thick ash-blond clumps thrusting out from her head. “That girlfriend of his, that Beth Landau, she lived with him while he went to school, right in San Diego. Oh, I know it’s done all the time now, but this was fifteen years ago. This was in the town we lived in, where his younger brother and sister lived. If it hadn’t been for her there would have been no bearer’s bond business. And she was the one who made him move that stolen property.” Turning her back to the room, Grace began rooting frantically through the drawer.

  Abandoning the effort to restrain her, Kiernan watched Grace snatch up and toss aside an eyeglass case and a rosary, a scapular, a fountain pen, some white handkerchiefs. Her hands shook; the discarded handkerchiefs fluttered into a heap. The smell of perspiration cut through the cloud of jasmine.

  “I thought—” Grace stopped, mouth half-open. “I was sure he’d marry that whore.” She yanked the drawer forward. It hovered but didn’t fall. She grabbed a ball of lacy red nylon, shook it till it hung free—red lace bikini pants.

  7

  “WHAT COULD HAVE POSSESSED you to falsify Austin Vanderhooven’s death certificate? You, a doctor, Elias?” Sylvia Necri shouted. She stood, hands braced on thick hips, back to the picture window and the skyscraper across Central Avenue. Her coarse dark hair was brushed back in the same no-nonsense style she had worn it in when she had reached the construction site in the Superstition Mountains at six the previous morning. The furrows in her forehead and the grooves beside her mouth were the scars from many an architect-vs.-contractor battle.

  She had missed dinner because she’d had to haggle with the cement contractor. The next hour and a half she had spent on the phone tracking down the general contractor, finally unearthing him in a roadhouse ten miles north of the site. She’d reasoned, cajoled, and threatened till one in the morning before she got him back to following the plan. It was nearly two when she had headed home to Phoenix, squinting into the blanketing blackness of the mountain road, shoulders hunched from anger. The shot of Chivas at the roadhouse hadn’t put a dent in it. She had opened the door of her condominium at 4:13 Friday morning, looked into her living room and found her nephew, looking exhausted and frightened.

  “What are you doing here?” she’d demanded. “You told me you’d be in Acapulco, windsurfing. You’d planned it for months.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Changed—”

  “Forget that, Aunt Sylvia. That’s not the problem.” Then he had told her about Vanderhooven’s body, Dowd’s detective, and the death certificate he had signed twenty-four hours earlier.

  It was now 4:54 A.M.

  “How could you be so stupid?” she yelled at him, for once unmoved by his handsome face.

  “What else could I do? Austin was my friend, I couldn’t tell the world that he’d been found, er”—Elias dropped his gaze—“unzipped, in the church. People would never forget that.”

  He wasn’t lying about his concern for his friend Austin. He was loyal, her nephew, sometimes too loyal, and he had come to like the priest. But that was beside the point. “This could mean your medical career, Elias, the career I’ve sacrificed my life to pay for. With the money I spent on your education, I could have bought—no, not bought, designed and built—a house by Encanto Park, instead of living here in an apartment someone else slapped together.”

  With a small grin playing under his dark mustache, Dr. Elias Necri looked around the condominium living room, his gaze resting on the handcrafted coffee table, the twelve-by-eighteen Navaho rug she had commissioned, the framed photo of her group of young architects with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen West. He stared at the window that overlooked Central Avenue, center of Phoenix’s banking and government. “You’re not living in poverty, Aunt Sylvia.”

  “Stop it!” she snapped. “Don’t you tell me that because we were raised poor we should be satisfied with crumbs now. You of all peo
ple!” She stared at her nephew, fighting even now the allure of his deep, dark eyes, that earnest, hurt, little-boy look. “What else, Elias? You don’t endanger your entire career to protect someone’s memory.”

  “Aunt Sylvia, Austin was my friend. We jogged together three days a week.”

  “Don’t fool yourself. You were his friend because I asked you to be his friend. How many weeks did you go panting around the streets at dawn so you could run fast enough to keep up with him, so you could happen to run into him and suggest you jog together? You’ve always been a liar, Elias—”

  “Aunt Sylvia!”

  “Don’t look so shocked. Even as a toddler you lied.” Her voice softened. “It was cute then; you were so transparent. Your mother threatened to beat it out of you; it was I who protected you. You fooled her; you fooled them all, but not me.” She tried to read his face, so handsome despite the reddened eyes, the nascent lines of tension, but she couldn’t quite get her bearings. She had always been able to read him; the sharpness of his mind had been no hindrance to her. It was only recently that she had been less aware of his dissembling, and more recently that the startling thought occurred that perhaps Elias had learned to deceive her, too. There had been other things like this supposed trip to Acapulco. Pushing that from her mind, she reiterated, “No one knows you like I do. What is it that could make you falsify a death certificate? What did you say on it?”

  “Heart failure,” he muttered.

  “Heart failure,” she shouted. “Heart failure! Austin has rope marks on his neck and you say he died of heart failure! An altar boy wouldn’t believe that!”

  “Aunt Sylvia, what could I say? If I’d said asphyxia, the sheriff would have demanded an autopsy. The sheriff checks all the death certificates.” He took a final swallow of his drink. Bourbon, bourbon she kept for his visits. Then raising an eyebrow in question—the boy never forgot his manners; it was part of his charm—he walked to the liquor cabinet.

  “You could have said no, Elias.”

  “No, I couldn’t.”