“Too racy?”
“Cheers? No. It was just that they’d showed the same episode the week before. I’d watched it alone on my little set, and I’m sure it was the same one. Norm tries to save a restaurant he likes, the Hungry Heifer. They’re supposed to rotate them better than that. That was pure laziness. I wouldn’t have sat through it again, except that Geneva wanted the company. We were together for hours after the show, talking.”
“About Petrone?”
“No, about New Brunswick and what it was like when I was a little girl. Geneva was full of questions. Not that she was really interested. She just didn’t want to be alone. I know how that is, believe me.”
5
My lunch hour was over and then some, so I headed for the warehouse with every intention of putting in a good afternoon’s work. Then, a few blocks from Majo’s apartment, I saw a church with a familiar name: St. Monica’s. It was the place robbed by Raymond Sleeth, according to Darryl and his press clippings. There was a parking space open at the curb in front of the church, a Romanesque building of once-white brick, and I pulled in.
The church was open and occupied. Two men on a scaffold were working on one of the elaborate hanging light fixtures, which looked like diving bells designed by Bernini. From the safety of a checkerboard center aisle, a little man in black was watching them.
I introduced myself to this supervisor and told him that I was concerned about a homeless man who’d been arrested for murder.
“Raymond Sleeth, of course,” the little man replied before leading me to the nearest pew. “I’m Father Macy. I’m the pastor here, and I’ve been praying over that very thing. I’m concerned about St. Monica’s role in all of this.”
“Your role?”
Father Macy’s skin was peeling like a sunbather’s, though he wasn’t the least bit tanned. He scratched at the back of one hand as he answered.
“Oh yes. We’re major players in this drama. Mr. Sleeth did break into the church and did steal some things we had in our basement, but we didn’t have to prosecute him. I was persuaded to do it by the police, who told me it was the best way to get Mr. Sleeth some help. He’s not quite right in the head, you know, poor man. Nowadays, it’s hard to help a person like that unless he wants to be helped or he runs afoul of the law. But the law can’t have done very much for Mr. Sleeth, since he ended up on the street again and committed a far worse crime.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Of course. But however his case turns out, we bear a burden of responsibility. I was in New York recently and saw that musical they made of Les Misérables. Have you seen it? Oh, you should really go. There’s a scene that’s been haunting me. An old bishop gives an ex-convict some valuable silver candlesticks, and they change the convict’s life. I couldn’t help thinking of poor Mr. Sleeth and the pittance he took from us. We should have let him keep it. We should have given him more.”
“Was one of the things he took a rosary?”
The old priest sighed. “The police and I have gone round and around about that. In the end, they had to accept that I just don’t know. You see, what Mr. Sleeth broke into was a storage room where we keep odds and ends. One of the boxes he found contained the personal effects of a retired priest who’d passed away at our rectory. Father Gregory Carron was his name. He didn’t have any family, so we’d just stored his things away until we could make an inventory, which we never got around to doing.”
At that mention of a shirked inventory, it was all I could do to keep from looking at my watch. Father Macy missed the struggle.
“Mr. Sleeth was caught because some of the things he pawned had Father Carron’s name or initials on them. There was an engraved gold watch that his last parish had given him and some beautiful cufflinks that had been his father’s, I believe. Mr. Sleeth hadn’t tried to pawn a rosary — I doubt if you could these days — and that bothered me, too. Not that he’d kept it but where he’d kept it. I asked the police where a homeless man would have hidden away a rosary all the time he was in custody. I mean, they didn’t hold one for him and he doesn’t have a sock drawer to lose things in. They suggested he might have had a secret cache somewhere around town. It didn’t seem too likely to me.”
Or to me. I started to thank the priest for his time, but he cut me off by tapping his peeling forehead with a peeling hand.
“Listen to me,” he said, “calling those beads a rosary when I tried for an hour to get the police to stop doing it. I got mad every time I read ‘rosary murder’ in the paper, and here I’m near to saying it myself. Too catchy to resist, I guess.”
“The beads weren’t a rosary?”
“Not the ones the police brought to me to identify. They were a chaplet, of course, a circle of beads used for a religious devotion, but not a true rosary. The church has many devotions that feature repetitive prayers counted off on prayer beads. Over fifty devotions, I think. The Holy Rosary is only one of them.”
I suddenly remembered a long-lost lecture from my seminary days. “There’s one connected with the Sacred Heart, isn’t there? And another with St. Anthony.”
“Very good,” Father Macy said. “If you know that, I’m sure you’ve heard the Virgin Mary referred to as ‘Our Lady of Sorrows.’ ”
“It was the name of my high school.”
“A Trenton boy, eh? Well, the chaplet the police brought me was for a devotion connected to Our Lady called ‘The Seven Sorrows.’ It’s very like the rosary Catholic children used to grow up with, except instead of five groupings of ten beads there are seven groups of seven. You meditate on seven sorrows of the Blessed Virgin as you say the Hail Marys.
“The Seven Sorrows dates from the late Middle Ages. I believe it’s much better known in Europe than over here. I don’t recall Father Carron ever mentioning it, but he might have practiced the devotion. Or someone could have made him a gift of the chaplet at some time or other. You wouldn’t believe the number of Miraculous Medals I’ve been given, especially during flu season. People fall into the bad habit of thinking of those things as lucky charms.”
He walked me to the door. There he said, “I’m afraid it’s Mr. Sleeth who needs the lucky charm now. I trust our prayers will do instead.”
6
Rachel Terman wasn’t waiting for me back at the warehouse with a pink slip in her hand. By the time she showed up an hour later, I’d made enough progress to cover my wanderings. Not that Rachel seemed interested in my productivity. She’d come back to get in the last word in a conversation that had ended hours before. She wanted to address those words to a certain pair of policemen, but in their absence, she had to make do with me.
“I found Marie Petrone’s original letter to us, Owen. It supports what Carol told me over the phone. Mrs. Petrone offered us the footlocker before her husband was murdered.”
Rachel was almost indignant over something, the suspicion cast on Mrs. Petrone, I guessed. It was as though a slur against a benefactor of the historical society reflected on the society itself.