The Man Who Murdered God (17 page)

They were in the living room, Bobby seated primly on the edge of the chair in the corner, Mattie sprawled on the couch with one leg raised, one hand resting on the floor holding the empty champagne bottle by the neck.

“You gotta laugh more, Bobby,” Mattie slurred. “Listen, we're here and soon we're gone, and if you don't get your share of laughs while you can, what the hell's the use, right?”

Bobby offered a smile and stared down into the champagne glass he held as though it belonged to someone else. “Don't you ever worry about the future?” he asked quietly.

“You think the future's worrying about me?” Mattie demanded. “Bobby, you're what? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Whatever. And you're a nice, sweet, shy kid. But I bet you think you've got it all figured out, right? 'Cause I did when I was your age. I had it all figured out. I was a New York model, flying here and flying there, doing fashion spreads for Bonwit-Teller and perfume ads and swimsuit stuff. And it wasn't just the money. It was the
attention
. I'd show up at a photo session and all the guys, the account executives and the clients and the photographers, they'd all hug me and make kissy-face and invite me to parties on Long Island, you know?”

She paused and looked up at the ceiling. Bobby watched as her eyelids began to blink rapidly.

“And after a couple of years . . .” She swallowed and began again. “After a couple of years things got slow, and I went to France for six months with a friend. I figured, what the hell, I'd try some modelling over there. I mean, I was big in New York, I could be big in Paris, right? But I wasn't. After I sat around for a couple of months, I took a fling with a guy and moved in with him in his villa near Cannes. Away up in the mountains, it was. I'd get up in the morning, and there was the whole Mediterranean spread out before me. White yachts in the harbours. Palm trees all around. Sometimes we'd go to parties on those yachts.

“Then one day the guy, who was a Frenchman of course . . . dirty bastard . . . one day he said he had to go to Geneva for a week on business, and I said okay, I'd wait for him. And we had a maid, a cook and a chauffeur there, and when I came back from a shopping trip the maid and cook were gone. And the place was locked up.”

She turned from the ceiling to look at Bobby. “And all my luggage was stacked on the porch. There was an envelope taped to my bags, with a note and one-way ticket to Paris inside. The note said ‘It was fun. Merci.' Just like that. And the chauffeur stood there looking bored, waiting to drive me to the airport.”

She brought her finger to her mouth and bit down on it. “Talk about being dumped. The bastard. So I came back to New York, and I got my old address book, and I made the rounds. And it was like I had never been there. Nobody wanted to see me. They wouldn't return my telephone calls. When I took my comp book with me to show the photographers, all my best shots in it, they'd send their juniors out to look at it, just to get rid of me.”

Mattie removed her fingers from her mouth and covered her eyes with her hand.

“Six months, and I go from the top to zero like that. Because they don't want my look anymore. I'm not hot anymore.” She wiped her eyes and tried to smile. “I was so upset, I went out and married a Goddamn car salesman, if you can believe it.”

“I'm . . . I'm sorry.” Bobby said softly from the corner.

“Come here, will you please?” She dropped the empty champagne bottle on the floor and held her arms out to him. “Please, Bobby? Just give me a hug, all right?”

Bobby set his glass aside. He rose and walked uncertainly towards her, and she wrapped him in her arms. “Thank you for listening,” she whispered. “It's so hard to find someone who listens anymore.”

She shifted her weight, making room for him. “Stretch out and talk to me,” she said. Her eyes were dry, and her smile less bitter. “I want to know all about you.” Awkwardly he lay beside her. “You need a mother, Bobby. I can tell, you poor kid. God, we all need mothers, don't we? Fathers, they can all go to hell, but mothers are so precious.”

Bobby lay unmoving next to her, his eyes growing wider.

“Will you let me mother you, Bobby?” she asked, taking his head in her hands. “Will you be my good little boy and let me mother you?”

He nodded solemnly in reply.

Mattie reached up and kissed him, long and deep. Slowly, Bobby responded, but she could feel him holding back. Unwrapping her arms from around him, she stretched behind her and unfastened her brassiere. Step by step she unbuttoned her blouse and shrugged out of it, casting both blouse and bra aside while Bobby watched, wide-eyed. Her breasts were full and round, the nipples erect and tingling.

Placing a hand behind Bobby's head, she brought him to her, felt the nipple enter his mouth, thrilled at the touch of his tongue and shivered at the sight of his body stretched out beside hers.

“Oh yes, Bobby,” she murmured. “Oh yes, my sweet boy. My sweet, precious little boy!”

After Lipson parked the car, he, McGuire and Kevin Deeley approached the monastery entrance. The building stood four stories high, its sharply peaked gables trimmed with carved, red sandstone. The heavily-leaded windows were dirty, and the gardens and shrubbery around the building grew thick and undisciplined. Behind them the driveway wound down the shallow ravine and through the twilight to the residential street.

“How long have these guys been here?” McGuire asked Deeley as they walked along a brick pathway.

“About fifty years or more,” Deeley replied. “Originally it was a manor house built for some industrialist in the eighteen-eighties. The family willed it to the Cesenas when one of the errant grandsons spent some time with the brothers and got himself straightened out.”

“Can you imagine how much it's worth now, this property?” Lipson asked, looking around them. “Gotta be in the millions. Easy.”

Two heavy oak doors stood at the Gothic entrance. Deeley opened them, stepping ahead of the others into a small foyer floored with quarry tile. A plaster statue of the Virgin Mary was mounted against the wall to their left. Small candles flickered around it, the cast-iron holders layered in multi-coloured wax. Deeley brought his hands together, touched his fingertips to his lips, and lowered his head to speak a few words quietly. He made the sign of the cross and turned towards the inner doors.

McGuire looked down to see if the statute's toes were painted red with nail polish.

Deeley turned a small brass crank on the door in front of him, and a bell echoed within. After a number of bolts and locks had been slid aside with the grating sound of rusty iron, the heavy inner doors opened wide enough for a wizened face to look out at them, its two red-rimmed eyes leaping from the priest to the detectives and back again.

The eyes finally fixed on Deeley, and a high-pitched voice said “Yes?”

“We would like to see the abbot,” Deeley said with authority. He retrieved a calling-card from his jacket pocket and handed it through the opening. “Reverend Kevin Deeley, here on official business of the archdiocese.”

The hand that retrieved the card was red and scaly with eczema; the eyes flickered from the engraved lettering back to Deeley and the two detectives. “Come in, come in,” the voice muttered, and the door opened wider.

A long hall, floored with the same rough grey quarry tile as the foyer, stretched ahead of them. Dark wainscotting reached up the walls, ending at a roughened plaster surface. The ceiling was high above them. At intervals, unlit iron chandeliers hung on heavy black chains, each chandelier marking the location of two dark oak doors beneath it. There were no pictures on the walls, no relief from the expanse of stucco except for heavy cobwebs, which, even in the dim light reflected from the open door, could be seen hanging like dusty trimmings here and there.

The three men turned to look at the small figure who had admitted them. He appeared to be no more than five feet tall, his slight figure wrapped in a long grey tunic fixed at his waist with a leather thong. On his feet he wore slippers of grey felt. His eyes still studied Deeley's card, clutched in the same rough raw hand. Then, looking up and seeing the three men watching him, he tucked the card hastily in an outer pocket of his tunic and nodded to a bench placed against the wall.

The three men sat as the monk padded off in quick, short steps, his felt slippers making a snick-snick sound across the tile floor.

“Good place for a horror movie,” McGuire said, crossing his legs and folding his arms.

“Do you know anything about monks?” Deeley asked.

“As much as I need to know,” McGuire told him. “They're like hermits, except they get other people to pay their way. Or they pay it by making honey, bread or wine, right? Let's face it, Deeley, monks are just hippies with a crucifix.”

Deeley smiled at him. A tight smile, one he might give to a rebellious child.

Bernie Lipson sat studying the gloomy interior. “The kid spent two years here?” he asked.

McGuire grunted.

“He's a bright sixteen-year-old kid, and he comes in here for two years?” Lipson shook his head, not believing it. “I mean, he should be out riding his motorcycle or hanging out at drive-ins. Two years in here would screw up any kid.”

“Except one looking for God,” Deeley added quietly.

“Shit,” McGuire sneered.

“Some people believe you don't necessarily find God in brightly lit cathedrals or in sunny meadows,” Deeley added, ignoring McGuire's outburst. “To them, God is found in profound meditation, study and simple living. We have to understand that and tolerate it.”

The sound of footsteps, heavy and staccato compared with the soft treading of the felt slippers, echoed down the hall. The three looked up to see a medium-sized man round the corner and approach them. He appeared to be in his early forties, with hair, thick and silvery, reaching over his collar. He was wearing a short grey tunic tucked into oversized denim pants and secured at the waist by a leather thong. Instead of felt slippers, he wore heavy brown sandals.

“Father Deeley?” the voice boomed as Deeley and the two detectives stood up.

“Yes, Abbot,” Deeley replied. “Kevin Deeley, from the archdiocese. And these men are with the Boston Police Department. Lieutenant McGuire and Lieutenant Lipson.”

The abbot's pace slowed noticeably at the names of the detectives, and although he stretched his hand towards Deeley, his eyes remained on McGuire and Lipson. “I'm Brother Farrell,” he said, shaking Deeley's hand first, then the hands of McGuire and Lipson in turn. He looked back at Deeley. “We are honoured to have a representative from the diocese here, of course. But this appears to be more than a social occasion.” He attempted a smile as he nodded to each of the detectives.

Brother Farrell had a soft spongy face, a face with no hard angles. His full cheeks rounded down to a cleft chin. His nose was bulbous and round, his lips full and red.

“I'm afraid it's not social at all,” McGuire said. “It has something to do with the recent murders of the three priests. We think we can find some answers here.”

Brother Farrell's hand flew to his mouth. “I don't understand,” he replied. He began to smile unconvincingly. “Why . . . how could our small body of brothers be associated with those diabolical events?”

“Could we sit somewhere and discuss this, Brother?” Deeley asked. “Your office perhaps? Somewhere private?”

The monk nodded and said “Of course,” and led them down the darkened corridor, under the chandeliers and further into the building's interior.

Mattie was above him, supporting her upper body on her arms and looking down at Bobby, who was stroking her breasts, moving his cheek back and forth against them. His eyes were closed, and he shook visibly beneath her.

She leaned down to kiss him gently on the forehead. Lowering herself, she felt Bobby's mouth search for her nipple again. When he found it, she raised her head and moaned softly.

Another gentle kiss and she pulled herself away and rested her head on his chest. She raised his T-shirt, seeing the muscles of his stomach tighten and his own small nipples erect and excited. Then, kissing his navel gently, her hands began searching for the button of his jeans.

He moaned, forming the word “No,” but she had found the button and disengaged it, and now she was pulling the small brass zipper down.

Mattie frowned and withdrew her hand. It was warm and sticky, with a familiar sour aroma.

“Jesus, Bobby,” she said. “You've already come, haven't you? Just playing with my boobs was enough?”

She looked up to see Bobby's eyes squeezed tightly shut. Mattie crawled back to him and took his head in her hands. “You're a virgin, aren't you?” she asked.

Bobby nodded his head, his eyes still closed. “Please don't,” he whispered urgently.

“How could a nice good-looking kid like you still be a virgin at your age?” Mattie asked.

“Please let me go.” Bobby whispered the words painfully. “Please.” He made no motion to rise, but his expression had begun to alter—the innocence faded, replaced by a look of fear and anger, the look of a frightened, cornered animal.

“Let me show you something,” Mattie said, not noticing the change. “Let me show you a special talent I've got.” She slid herself slowly down him again, her tongue flicking out to tease his navel as she passed it, her hand returning to find him and pull him free, feeling him jerk spasmodically beneath her, sensing him on the brink of explosion.

Brother Farrell led his guests down the central hallway of the building and into a large sitting room furnished with worn and mismatched upholstered chairs. A blackened stone fireplace dominated one wall; heavy draperies covered the high windows facing the door. Along the third wall, opposite the fireplace, ran a continuous length of rough-hewn desks, slanted for writing. Several mismatched stools of varying heights stood in front of the desks. On one of the stools was perched the small wizened figure who had greeted Deeley and the two detectives minutes earlier. The little man turned to watch as the others entered.