Say No to Murder Page 8

  The audience murmured in appreciation of that truth; there was even a tentative “Amen” to be heard in the crowd. She was no evangelist, but she was surprisingly effective.

  “It is essential,” she said, “that every individual part of the project contribute to the success of the whole. Surely there is no one among us who could not agree that the work of building the harbor must proceed at top speed . . .”

  “Oh yeah?” came a deep voice from the rear.

  Barbara must have thought it was only another “Amen,” She was three words into her next sentence before her head jerked up. “What?” said the mayor. “What?”

  We in the pews had already whirled our heads to the rear. We watched, with Barbara, as a young white man rose to his feet from the back row. His face, under a Greek fisherman’s cap and several days’ growth of beard, was gaunt and pale as a poet’s; his clothes looked as if they had come from the back of a closet of a 1960s hippie who had outgrown them. His voice was a raspy baritone that sounded as if it hadn’t been used in years. He was short and slight, more like a boy than a man.

  “You said,” he replied to Barbara, “that everybody agrees the renovation should proceed at top speed. And I said, ‘Oh yeah.’”

  The mayor, who’d handled her share of hecklers, smiled at us to indicate she recognized a lunatic when she saw one. She raised her voice.

  “And so . . .” was all she managed.

  “The reason I said, ‘Oh yeah,’” the young man persisted, topping her in volume, “is that Liberty Harbor is going to come to a complete halt as of right now.”

  An ominous rumble began deep in the throats of the congregation, uniting black members and white visitors alike.

  Hardy bounded to his feet. He shot a quick, commanding glance at the plainclothes cops who started walking, like deacons in a hurry, up the aisle toward the intruder. Beside me, Geof tensed but didn’t move.

  Barbara continued. “And who, sir, are you?”

  “You should have discovered that a long time ago,” the young man said with an unpleasant bark of laughter. “My name is Atheneum McGee.”

  I clutched Geof’s arm.

  “That’s McGee!” the stranger shouted angrily. “As in Lobster McGee, my great-uncle. As in the waterfront property my relatives sold out from under me to your goddamn cheating developers.” He thumped his thin chest, “Nobody asked me if I wanted to sell my property. And I don’t! So put that in your harbor and sail it!”

  “Atheneum McGee!” Barbara exclaimed, “Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to be dead?”

  “Well, this must be Easter,” the old man in front of us said querulously, “’cause that man done resurrected.”

  A nervous titter ran through the sanctuary.

  “You’re the great-nephew who died in Vietnam!” Barbara said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to get what’s mine, lady.” Atheneum McGee raised his cap, then crammed it back down on his curls. They were graying, revealing him to be older than he looked at first glance, old enough to have served in Southeast Asia in the sixties or seventies. He began to clamber over the other people in his aisle, as if making for the door. But he was halted in midstride by a full blast of volume from the Reverend Eberhardt.

  “Wait!” Hardy thundered. “If you are Atheneum McGee, we can only apologize, for we sincerely believed you to be dead. We have no wish to cheat a rightful heir to Lobster McGee’s property.

  “Surely, sir . . .” and Hardy’s voice turned mellifluous, soothing as a cool hand on a hot brow . . ."surely there is time for men and women of good faith to reason together. Like . . . five minutes from now in my study behind the nave.”

  Atheneum McGee peered back over his scrawny shoulder like a rat that has just smelled the cheese.

  “Bring your checkbook, preacher,” he drawled. “I was real fond of my great-uncle. That land’s got a whole lot of sentimental value to me, you know?”

  “I believe it,” said Hardy in the same stern tone of voice with which he might have faced the devil, “I do believe it, sir.”

  “Amen,” said the old man in front of us.

  chapter

  13

  Following the world’s fastest benediction. Hardy marched his choir down the center aisle at breakneck speed, the mayor at his side. Their differences over the Unmarked Grave temporarily forgotten, they looked united in their common desire to see that nothing interfered with the steady progress of Liberty Harbor.

  “The advisory committee meets in my study in five,” Hardy barked. Politically, he added, “If you please.”

  I tried to reach my father, but the congregation was in pandemonium, and I couldn’t even see him. I wasn’t too worried now, however, because Atheneum McGee had wrested attention from my dad; the reporters and photographers were stampeding to get to the scarecrow in the back row. Every member of the church and visitor, as well, seemed to be shoving to reach Atheneum and to plead with him to be reasonable, and not to obstruct the renovation our town needed so badly. Men who’d been out of work for months tugged at his ratty sleeve; mothers with babies in their arms pushed those babies toward him as proof that Mommy needed work because Baby needed shoes. “Listen fella,” Goose Shattuck roared, “we’re six months into that job! You want your fair share, don’t bug us. Go after those relatives of yours who had you dead and buried!”

  Jack Fenton put a hand on Goose’s beefy shoulder and said, surprisingly, “Shut up, Goose.” The banker said coolly to Atheneum McGee, “If you didn’t die in Vietnam, where have you been all this time, Mr. McGee? I wonder if the army might not/be interested in that information.”

  An expression that unpleasantly combined cunning and fear crossed Atheneum McGee’s sharp features. “You can’t blackmail me into disappearing,” he said nastily. “It’s not my fault the army identified the wrong dead body! My buddy and me, we was blown up in a cave in Nam. Damn near knocked me into Cambodia, and when I woke up I didn’t know my ass from my army. Wandered around in the jungle living off the gooks, didn’t even know my name. It was my sergeant, man; he identified my buddy’s body, said it was me, said it was my buddy who was MIA. I got witnesses, man! I can prove it.”

  Again, that image of a rat came to my mind. Atheneum McGee looked like a diseased, crazed rat. Rabid. Vicious. Jack Fenton and the rest of the crowd around him seemed to sense it, too, and backed off, giving him breathing room.

  Unexpectedly, Webster Helms took advantage of the moment to rescue McGee by pulling him out of the importuning, hostile crowd and into a room with a lock on it. Just before Web slammed the door, Pete and Betty Tower ran up and Betty pounded on it. “Let us in, Web,” Betty said shrilly. “Can’t let him delay us, got to keep on schedule!” Web allowed them, in, muttering something that sounded like, “Dam fool.” I heard the lock fall into place.

  That left the rest of us with nothing to do but mill around and wring our hands. Some of the crowd gave up and left for their homes and lunches. I looked futilely for my father, only to give up and head for Hardy’s study. But first, I turned to Geof who was still beside me.

  “At least this isn’t the kind of trouble you feared.”

  But he was scanning the horizon, looking so bloodhoun-dish I expected him to sniff the air. “Urn,” he said, “Excuse me, Jenny.” I watched him convene the other cops in a corner of the sanctuary, and then they dispersed to different areas of the church. Geof, feigning that official pose that fools no one, slipped into the crowd on the front steps.

  “Come on, Jenny,” commanded Mary Eberhardt. “This way.”

  She had also rounded up Jack Fenton, Goose Shattuck and Ted Sullivan. Mary led us to her husband’s office to join the mayor. Ted and I took the only chairs. Jack and Goose paced, crossing paths in the center of the room. Barbara stared out the window.

  “Damnedest thing,” Jack muttered to the carpet. “If this isn’t the damnedest thing.”

  Betty Tower’s blond head appeared in the doorway. She loo
ked flushed, strained, unsteady on her feet as if the day’s shock had made her woozy. “Ted,” she said, her voice trembling a bit, “take my place in there. If I have to spend five more minutes with that smelly moron, I’ll be sick.”

  Ted left quickly, followed by Goose. Shortly after, Jack Fenton couldn’t seem to stand it any longer, and he disappeared, too, along with the mayor. For the next half hour, the minister’s office was a giant jack-in-the-box with many heads popping in and out.

  “You talk to him, Mary!”

  “All right, but don’t expect miracles.”

  “Why not, it’s a church, isn’t it?”

  “Where’s Hardy?”

  “Gone to phone a lawyer, get some legal advice about this. How come we don’t have a lawyer on the committee?”

  “Jenny, aren’t you going in?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “Too many cooks.”

  They came and went, sometimes reporting progress, more often looking discouraged. Atheneum McGee was playing us like a poker hand, knowing all the time that he held the winning ace. “But Ted,” I said at one point when the realtor and I were the only people in Hardy’s study, “what if he is not really Atheneum McGee?”

  “But he is,” Ted said. “I’d bet on it.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, so would I.”

  Hardy came back from another trip to the telephone, “Okay,” he said, “where’s Jack? We need to get some cool heads together to talk to the man again.”

  “Getting a cup of coffee, I think,” I reported. “Who’s in there with McGee now?”

  “I don’t know!” The blue-robed arms flew up in frustration. “If I could get him alone, I could persuade him to see the error of his ways.”

  “Go team,” I said, to which he, to his credit, grinned.

  “Hardy.” I stopped him before he flew out the door again. “I hate to be the local pessimist, but I don’t think all this arm-twisting is worth it. People are so litigious these days; and Atheneum McGee strikes me as a person who will sue everybody who ever had anything to do with the project, whether or not they’re responsible for his problems. He’d probably sue the phone company because nobody called him to tell him he’s an heir. He’ll probably sue the funeral home that buried the wrong body; He’d sue his great-uncle Lobster if he were still alive.”

  “You,” said Mary Eberhardt, who had stuck her head in the door, “are what is known as a wet blanket. Besides, we’re making progress, I can feel it.”

  I shook my head. “That man is after every penny he can get,” I said. “If we were turnip he’d squeeze blood from us. I’ve a feeling this project is going on hold for a good long time, just about as long as it takes him to get an injunction to stop construction, and for us to appeal it, and for him to . . .”

  “You’re wrong!” Ted Sullivan crowed. Jack Fenton, the Towers and Goose pushed in behind him. “We’ve got him convinced to leave us alone and to get his money from the other heirs.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “Drip.” Mary smiled. “Drip, drip.”

  “Oh, ye, of little faith,” her husband said to me.

  “So who’s with him now?” Mary looked from face to eager face. They all stared back blankly at her. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said she, the master organizer, “we can’t just leave him alone in there to change his mind.” She wheeled around to retrieve the heir apparent. I sat in my chair and watched the others congratulate each other for managing to persuade McGee to sue his relatives instead of us.

  When she left the room it was eleven minutes past twelve, by the clock on the wall in Hardy’s study. At thirteen minutes past twelve a piercing scream shattered the bonhomie.

  “Mary!” Hardy said, turning as pale as it was possible for him to turn. “Oh Lord, my Mary!”

  We rushed after him, running toward the sound of that horrible scream which continued to echo through the halls of the church. The screaming was, indeed, coming from Mary Eberhardt’s throat. But we weren’t the first to reach her. Geof was.

  We found them both kneeling on the floor of the room in which Webster had sequestered Atheneum McGee. It was the practice and changing room for the choir. In respect for the negotiations that had been going on inside their quarters, the choir had neatly folded their blue, robes and piled them on the floor outside the door. But even if they’d been able to hang their pretty robes in the closet, they would not have wished to do so.

  Two legs sprawled out of that closet, their feet shod in sandals. The rest of the body lay half in, half out of the closet. It was Atheneum McGee, of course. He lay facedown, his arms flung out above his head. Deep into his back, in the region of his heart, somebody had thrust with violent and hateful force the whittled end of the cross for the Unmarked Grave.

  chapter

  14

  We viewed the corpse from the doorway because Geof had already blocked access with an overturned chair. “Stay there,” he directed. “Jenny, take your friends back to Eberhardt’s study. Nobody leaves the church. If you see anybody try to leave, stop them. If you can’t stop them, call for one of us to do it.”

  “Let me see my wife,” Hardy said urgently. He placed his hands on the chair barrier as if to hurl it out of his way. His eyes were-locked on his petite wife who still knelt, softly crying, on the floor near McGee’s feet. One of Geof’s arms was wrapped around her shoulders; with the other he waved us away.

  “Stop right there.” Geof’s voice was commanding. Hardy hesitated long enough for another policeman to pull him back from that awful room. I began to tug at other sleeves, but to little avail. My fellow committee members were looking at death for the second time in eight days, and they would not be so easily moved.

  “I’m all right, darling,” Mary Eberhardt said then, as to a frightened child. “You stay there. I’ll come to you when they let me. They can’t allow you in here, you know that, darling. Fingerprints and all that, I suppose.” But then she broke down, again. “Oh Hardy, our cross, our beautiful cross.”

  His fists clenched at his blue-robed sides, the minister whirled toward the mayor. “You can stop worrying about the Unmarked Grave now, Barbara, can’t you? We’ll never use that cross . . . it’s marked with the blood of murder.”

  “Hardy,” the mayor protested weakly, “you don’t think ,.. this has nothing to do with . . . I can’t believe . . .” She lapsed into a hurt and uncharacteristic silence.

  “Sabotage,” pronounced Webster Helms. “Murder, fire, vandalism, now another murder.”

  “All that’s lacking,” I said wearily, “are plague and pestilence.”

  He threw me an indignant look. “Well, how else do you explain this, Jennifer? We finally get him to agree to leave us alone and then somebody kills him! It’s obviously sabotage.”

  I didn’t follow his reasoning, and said so.

  As to a slow child, he said, “This murder investigation will impede our work, Jennifer . . .”

  “Not my work, it won’t,” Goose boomed.

  Webster ignored the contractor. “And now we may have other heirs to worry about . . . maybe there’s a Vietnamese wife someplace, and little slanty-eyed brats.”

  “Webster,” said Jack Fenton sharply, “kindly indulge your bigotry outside of this church.”

  “But bigotry is the issue,” Hardy Eberhardt said, his hot rap having melted down to icy fury. He turned back to Geof. “I received some nasty racist phone calls this week, Bushfield. First time in years. Prompted by those photographs of the groundbreaking that were in the paper.” Tactfully, he didn’t look at me, but Geof, who knew of my caller, did. The minister said, “You’d better consider the implications of that, in light of this murder weapon.”

  “Sabotage,” said Webster stubbornly.

  “Yes,” Hardy agreed, “sabotage of the hopes and dreams of the black community in this city.”

  “We’ll consider everything, Mr. Eberhardt,” Geof said impatiently. “Officer Blakemore will now escort all of you back t
o the study. I said all of you. Now.”

  “Pete?” Betty Tower suddenly came to life. “Where’s Pete?”

  Pete, it turned out, was in the men’s room throwing up.

  It was over an hour later when Geof and his young partner, Ailey Mason, finally joined us in Hardy’s study. By then the room was unbearably hot. We’d turned off the ineffectual air conditioner and opened the windows, but that only served to circulate the smoke from Betty’s and Ted’s cigarettes. “It’s like an elevator in here,” Goose Shattuck complained more than once. “Put those damn things out.”

  None of us knew precisely what the police were doing in the choir’s chamber while we waited in the pastor’s study, but it was easy to guess. We’d all watched television. But whenever any of us tried to discuss it, Pete Tower raised a white handkerchief to his green face, causing Betty to hush us with a sharp rebuke. Mary Eberhardt, who’d been released from that chamber of horror, huddled within her husband’s arms. Jack Fenton was erect in a straight-backed chair; he looked as worried as a banker with too many loans outstanding. I stood with the mayor at one of the two windows, trying to find a breeze to breathe. “How could he say that?” Barbara kept whispering to herself. “How could he even think it?”

  Now Geof looked at Webster Helms.

  “You had him in that room with the door locked,” Geof commented. “It’s clear that nobody but you people entered that room while Atheneum McGee was still alive.”

  He paused to let that sink in.

  “What about the other door?” Hardy inquired.

  Geof looked blank. “What other door?”

  “The one behind the curtain that leads from the choir room directly into the sanctuary. I don’t think we ever locked it while we were talking to McGee because nobody was likely to try to come in that way.”