The Carbon Murder(22)
Berger’s speaker voice was hard to understand, but it was better than my standing over Matt’s shoulder trying to read his notes.
“The good news is we got the shooter,” Berger said, his voice sounding muffled. “A pharmacy over in Chelsea called in response to our bulletin. Told us a guy phoned and said he sliced himself with a piece of broken glass, and he wants hydrogen peroxide, antiseptic cream, tape, bandages, extra-strength painkiller.” Matt and I gave each other a thumbs-up. “And here’s the clincher—the guy asks for forceps. Says there’s a piece of glass in his hand, he has to catch a plane, doesn’t have time to go to the ER, et cetera, et cetera, and he wants the package to be delivered to the Beach Lodge.”
“Where Gallen stayed.”
“Yeah. ’Course there’s not exactly a hundred places to hole up around here. Anyway, by the time we got there the guy was out cold, bleeding like crazy.”
Good girl, Nina, I thought.
“The other good news is that we found two weapons in the room. One is most likely the gun used on the PI woman, the other probably her gun, which he must have kept after dumping the body. We have to wait for ballistics, but it looks like the right ballpark all around.”
PI woman? Would Berger have said PI man? Never mind, I told myself, that battle’s for another day.
“Could have been shot by a third party who killed the PI, planted the gun, and so on.” Matt made twirls in the air as he spoke, as if he were reciting a formula he was very familiar with, but which needed reviewing. “Or, he shot the PI, and someone else shot him using her gun. Handy that her gun was right there, don’t you think?” Matt’s tone was more telling than asking, as he continued his elaborate hand gestures. “Won’t know till we talk to him. Where is he now?”
“Oh, that’s the bad news.”
“He’s DOA,” Matt said, with a click of his tongue.
“Right.”
Bad news for sure. I’d been hoping for a wellspring of information from a killer in custody, some connections that might also solve MC’s problem, though I seemed to be the only one who thought there was anything to worry about in that regard.
“Any ID?” Matt asked.
“Yep. An ex-con, Rusty Forman, from—three guesses, the first two don’t count.”
Leave it to George Berger to pull up a corny expression from the fifties.
“Houston,” Matt and I said together.
CHAPTER NINE
Sunday morning. Still raining, and still twenty-four hours before there was a chance we’d hear from Matt’s doctor. It had been a while since I’d been to church for anything other than a wedding or a funeral, and I gave it some thought. I pictured myself kneeling to pray, opening my missal—where was it? Had I seen it when I was packing for the move to Matt’s house?—singing a hymn, standing for the Gospel. Then came the hard part. I heard the priest’s homily as clearly as I had when I was in Confirmation prep classes. As they were then, the words were meaningless to me, and I mentally left the church again.
Rose was still practicing the faith. On the most recent Holy Day of Obligation, August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, I’d called their house, and Frank told me she was at mass.
“She goes for all of us,” he’d said lightly.
Later, I’d chatted with Rose about how likely it was that the body of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, had been assumed into heaven, not subject to the deterioration process every other human body underwent.
“And why not just pray wherever you are?” I’d asked her, continuing our Why I Am (or Am Not) Still A Roman Catholic debate.
“Because God lives at St. Anthony’s,” she’d said with a grin. End of discussion. At times I envied her faith.
The mortuary was just down the street from St. Anthony’s Church, so I’d had a daily reminder when I lived there of the choices I made regarding religion. I always came to the same conclusion—I couldn’t pretend. Some days I felt I knew what it meant to pray, and others I didn’t. Some days I believed there was an all-loving God in heaven who knew each hair of our head, and other days I imagined random gaseous events set in motion and left to the laws of science. There was no use trying to package that into religious observance. Blame it on Sister Pauline, I thought, who never could answer my logic questions when I was ten.
“Maybe they counted the loaves of bread and the fishes wrong to begin with, and that’s why there seemed to be more at the end,” I’d said, earning no holy card that week.
Surely there was no hope for me now.
Matt, another fallen-away Catholic, as we were officially called by Holy Mother Church, was spending Sunday morning at his office to make up for his hours on the tubular pillow in our living room. He was being productive, while I was home, too distracted to do anything useful.