The hour when Monsignor Lavigny became involved in the crime (he lived directly to the east of the Hoffmanns) was eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning in April — during a tranquil moment in which the Monsignor was annoying several aphids on his Bella Romana camellias with a nicotine spray. Sunshine slanted gently onto his silver-crested head and distinguished appearance, which bore a nostalgic resemblance to Walter Hampden in the actor’s turn-of-the-century portrayal of Cardinal Richelieu.
The people involved in the tragedy he knew very well. They were Candice Hoffmann, the murdered man’s teenage niece-and-ward, and a black-browed athletic young ox with the romantic name of Raul Eusebio Fuentes, who was the Hoffmanns’ neighbor to the west.
The youngsters were, of course, in love. It was the first and therefore the fiercest sort of blind emotion on Candice’s part, but hardly the first on Raul’s whose reservoir of sentiment had begun operations in his birthplace in the Oriente province of Cuba at the tender age of twelve. This in no way diluted the young man’s intensity, nor the passionate resentment he felt toward Hoffmann (now a corpse) over Hoffmann’s refusal to consent to his ward’s marriage while she remained a minor and legally under his skeletal thumb.
Perhaps skeletal was a tough extreme, as Monsignor Lavigny believed that Hoffmann’s air of fleshlessness, both physically and in the amenities, was basically due to the man’s several ailments, among which was a rickety heart, and all of which combined to make him a decidedly acid character.
It was a character to be deplored, even for its lesser sins of pride, conceit, and a miserly grip on possessions both human and material. So convinced was Hoffmann of his control over his body and mind that he even refused to acknowledge the existence of physical pain. As for the parading of any bodily deficiency, that was out of the question. And yet, in spite of it all, Monsignor Lavigny had always looked upon Hoffmann as a soul to be enticed into the fold. Difficult, and now (thanks to a bashed skull) beyond further attempt.
The fourth member of the blood-tinged masque was Hoffmann’s wife, Elise. She seemed a brave and handsome asset, much younger than her husband, and a woman whom Monsignor Lavigny considered to have been a bride of circumstance. Just what the circumstances were that had induced her into a marriage with Hoffmann he did not know, but he imagined they had lain within the periphery of economics, perhaps of loneliness, perhaps of some fortuitous avenue of escape. Gratitude too was a possible explanation — but never love.
The curtain rose at eight in the morning on the tooting of an automobile horn.
Monsignor Lavigny left the outraged aphids in a state of suspended peace, and responded with a wave to the gloved hand of Elise Hoffmann as she drove past in her foreign convertible, heading for home. The glimpse of her cotton-crisp freshness and gaily insolent excuse-for-a-hat blended pleasingly with the tone of the morning.
As he later told his young friend Chuck Day of the sheriff’s CBI division, not many minutes seemed to have passed before the Monsignor heard the scream. Even across the distance that separated the two houses, the scream came clearly through the masking flora as one of shock mingled with horror.
The prelate cast dignity to the winds and broke into a lope that halted at the open jalousies of the Hoffmann Florida room, where the scene was appallingly similar to the final curtain of a Greek tragedy.
Elise Hoffmann, still hatted and gloved, stood stage-center and had been turned, apparently, into a pillar of stone. At her feet, with his acid face flecked with blood, lay Hoffmann, flat as only the dead can lie flat. Then to complete the ghastly tableau, under an archway leading into a central hall, young Candice was stretched out on terrazzo tiling in a state of collapse.
The pillar of stone swayed as shock began to recede from Elise. Her clouded eyes seemed to clear as she focused them upon Monsignor Lavigny.
“He ran out,” she said. “He struck Candice brutally — senselessly—”
“Who did, Elise?”
There was a flicker of irritation in her voice, as though the answer should be obvious.
“Why, Raul, of course.”
“The thought is beyond belief,” Monsignor Lavigny said to Chuck Day as they sat in the Lavigny patio eating cashew nuts and drinking a cooled chablis.
“The evidence proves otherwise, Father.” (The prelate preferred the usage of that title by his friends rather than that of Monsignor, with the latter’s stiltedness and variety of mispronunciations.) “I am sorry about it, too, because I know you like the bum.”
“Bum? No, never that. Patriot, if you wish. Raul is a youngster who is deeply, devotedly in love and hence unpredictable; but he is neither a killer nor a bum.”
Chuck, whose mind and experience inclined him to the dogma that a fact was ruler-straight, could never accustom himself to Monsignor Lavigny’s proved ability to throw a few curves across the plate. There had been that child-kidnaping case last year, the beach robbery of the Terressi diamonds the year before...
“What has patriotism got to do with it?” he asked skeptically, nevertheless filing the thought for further consideration. “Raul Fuentes has been naturalized and living here for years.”
“Perhaps it has everything to do with it. Or nothing. There is a parable—”
Chuck interrupted with a certain firmness, but still within the limits of respect. Monsignor Lavigny’s parables were notoriously of interminable length. “Father, let me give you the picture as we are turning it over to the county prosecutor, I think you’ll agree that the job was one of passion? Balked love, then murderous hate?”
“Yes — with some reservations.”
“But what’s left? Money? Profit? Neither motive figures. Whatever else he is, Fuentes is a rich kid, and Candice is a wealthy girl. Just happens she’s under age. They could elope and get hitched by some J.P. up in Georgia but they’re both sincerely religious, and surely such a marriage would not be acceptable in the eyes of the church. Especially with her guardian forbidding it.”
Monsignor Lavigny absently inclined his head.
“Actually,” Chuck went on, “they had no alternative but to persuade Hoffmann to change his decision. Do you know his reasons for objecting to the match?”
“I did talk with him, and it is possible to understand his point of view.”
“It makes good sense to me too. Elise Hoffmann discussed it while you were staying over at the Sacred Heart with Candice.” (This was the hospital where the. young girl had been taken.) “Consider Raul’s actions. He’s, in his early twenties and rich, but where does the dough come from?”
“Why, from his paternal estate down in Cuba, as I understand it.”
“So he says. Then why within the past year did he set up a phony ranch in the boondocks west of Davie? Why does he keep a plane there which he pilots himself, and a camouflage stable of mixed-up plugs strictly out of old milk routes?”
Monsignor Lavigny smiled blandly. “Hope springs eternal, especially on the race track.”
“Now, that’s nonsense, Father, and you know it. If one of those antique platers even caught sight of a starting gate he’d collapse from fright. And what about Raul’s habit of disappearing for a day, or a week, and then side-stepping questions as to where he was or why? According to Mrs. Hoffmann, even Candice can’t dig it out of him.”
“There are certain things that cannot be discussed except,” Monsignor murmured, “in the confessional. If I may refer to certain of the martyrs—”
“Fuentes? A martyr? In my book the guy’s up to his neck in some sort of racket.”
“My reference was oblique.”
“Well, there was nothing oblique about the three-cornered row Elise Hoffmann overheard yesterday morning before she drove over to Pompano. She got a load of it while she was packing a bag in her bedroom. Hoffmann, Candice, and Fuentes were in the patio just outside her windows. Fuentes gave them both the works, the gist being that either Hoffmann changed his mind, or Candice agreed to forego the church and elope — and then he tacked on the threadbare old cliché of ‘or else.’ ”