Maine Crime Writers

No deep thinking this month–here’s a little baseball story you might enjoy . .

The Nuns’ Day Hit

“Seems like the shit never ends,” Burton said, refolding the Globe.

“What’s that?” Elder polished the rocks glasses, the ones Burton knew he loved the best.

“The priests. With the kids.” He stripped cellophane off a package of orange peanut butter crackers.

Elder grimaced, either at the culinary choice or the topic. The Catholics had no monopoly on abusing children. At his prep school, you knew not to get caught in the sauna with the assistant athletic director or indulge the housemaster’s questions about your sexual practice. The difference Elder saw was that the priests were all about power, the world they ruled. The teachers had been more hangdog than cruel. The effects on children were the same, of course.

“More of it how?”

“One of the brothers at CM.”

“Is that where your sister taught?”

“Oh, hell no,” Burton said. “You don’t mix the sexes at an all-boys high school. Though that could be part of the problem.”

He sipped his milky coffee. Elder had only been back in the Esposito a month, but they’d reacquired their old habits fast. Marina was gone. After she finished culinary school and Carmen died, she left Boston to work as a sous chef on a Disney cruise, out of Fort Lauderdale.

“Huh.”

Burton’s phone buzzed.

“Shit.”

Elder draped the dish towel over the handle of the ice machine.

“I thought you were off today.”

Burton drank the rest of his coffee, checked the display.

“Appears I’m wanted at Fenway Park.”

* * *

“Today was Nun Day.” One of the ball cub’s PR guys hovered at the edge of the crime scene, exercising his spin. “You know, like we did way back in the Sixties. Give ‘em jerseys, roses, wrist bands, bus them in.”

“Familiar with the concept,” Burton said.

He did not love these Boston-come-lately types, who acted as if they invented every tradition. Look, Ma: brass ducks on the Common.

The victim was a hefty woman, lying on her stomach with her head below her feet on the ramp leading down under the stands. She wore a vintage Garciaparra jersey—the expensive wool one—and her simple black and white headpiece was knocked askew, enough to display thinning gray hair and an incongruously pink scalp. A blotch of blood around a slit in the fabric, right in the middle of the number five, hinted at the cause of death.

Dina Jackson, the ME on duty, looked stricken. Burton wondered if she too had a Catholic upbringing.

“Iffy way to kill someone, stabbing,” she said. “Dumb luck to go in through the back and hit something vital. She didn’t suffer.”

Burton straightened up off the concrete, knees popping.

“You’ll verify? I have to go interview a room full of nuns.”

Dina crossed herself, answering his question.

“Go with God, young man.”

He cracked a smile and headed down the ramp into the stadium.

* * *

The responding officers had done a good job of separating the witnesses. There’d been several hundred nuns in the stands, most of them dressed alike, but the uniforms isolated the small group that included Sister Mary Humilitas, the victim. They were from a smallish order in Rhode Island.

A dozen or so sat in the cheap plastic bucket chairs of the room where the ballpark vendors stored their coats and belongings. A wall of blue lockers covered the back wall, a sink and mirror in one corner, and a toilet behind a half-open door. Burton could hear it running.

The minute he stepped inside, a cleric in full purple cassock bustled up to him. Burton thought he must love his vestments awfully well to wear the full regalia to a ball game in the middle of July. He doubted the nuns’ seats were in the shaded overhang.

“You’d be the detective, then?”

Burton took in the priest: pink-faced, overfed, clean-shaven. And nervous. His upper lip shone.

“Daniel Burton, Father. Can we sit down?”

The priest puffed himself up in a way too familiar to Burton, the flesh of the man so certain of the support of institution behind him.

“We’re going to miss the bus back to Providence,” the priest protested. “We must get the Sisters home before Vespers.”

Burton grinned.

“Not vampires, are they?” He got serious. “Let’s all sit down for a moment. I’ll get you on your way as quickly as I can.”

There was no privacy in the room, but he pulled two chairs to the farthest corner and interviewed the sisters one by one. He got nothing but platitudes and God’s-will-be-done until about halfway through the interviews. Until she sat down, he hadn’t noticed she was not wearing a coif or veil or any other sign of habit.

She was also half the age of the other sisters, her dark hair cropped very short and her face marred with acne scars, some old and some fresh. She was dressed modestly, not in baseball gear, but dark blue pants and a white blouse buttoned to the neck. A small wooden cross hung from a rawhide thong around her neck.

“Sister Mary Humilitas was a prick,” she said, looking around to see if anyone else could hear. “A prick and a bully.”

“Strong words. You’re not a nun, then?” He gestured at her head.

“Marjorie O’Toole.” She ducked her head, as if she remembered she was supposed to act humble. “Novitiate, it’s called. You’re not a Catholic?”

“I don’t think that’s germane.”

“Because you’d understand better if you were.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Sister Mary Not-Humble was the Mother Superior. You have a clue what that means?”

“The woman in charge.”

“The dictator,” Marjorie said. “Squeezed her power until it cried for mercy. Telling on people, giving out shit jobs.”

“You’re saying I have a room full of suspects here?”

She nodded.

“One time or another, she probably pissed off everyone in the room.”

“Really. Enough to kill her?”

She nodded and looked at the priest significantly.

“And I’d ask Father Conklin a question or two. I would.”

He wondered if she realized she was dropping herself into the same black kettle she’d dumped everyone else in. He could see Sister Mary Humilitas scrubbing out Marjorie’s mouth with soap and water.

* * *

A uniform from Chelsea Burton recognized from the diversity seminar stuck his head in the door.

“We grabbed this kid running away from the scene. Repeat offender.”

“You know him.”

The uniform, named Talbot, nodded.

“Pickpocket and mugger, as long as the muggee isn’t too young. Or strong.”

Burton picked at something in his teeth.

“Hold him for a minute while I finish up here. How did you eyeball him?”

He would have been a face in the crowd leaving the game. The uniform grinned.

“Carrying a purse. And not a man-bag, if you know what I mean.”

* * *

“Her purse is missing,” Sister Carmelita said, thin fingers tangling in her lap. She was tiny, her upper body swimming in the Betts jersey. Her black eyes glinted like wet stones. “She never let it out of her hands. I believe this was a purse-snatching gone bad.”

Burton read the trembling lips, her shaking hands.

“You and Sister Mary were close?”

“Sister Mary Humilitas, if you please.”

Burton had a minor flashback to grade school, the metal ruler across the knuckles form of education.

“Yes. But you were friends?”

“As much as we could be.” She brought her knuckles, knotted with arthritis, up to her mouth as if she’d said too much.

“How do you mean?”

“We don’t have a lot of time to ourselves,” she said. “I only mean we shared our love of Christ, our work together. Our worship.”

Burton raised a hand to release her. She’d meant something else, but he doubted there were secret lesbian affairs among the nuns. Every one of them was closed-up as a nighttime flower and tough as wire. If something was going on at the convent, he wasn’t going to find out by talking to them.

* * *

He left the priest until last, seeing how much it pricked the man’s impatience. Conklin sat, pulling the literal and figurative vestments of his position around him. He seemed calm for a priest who’d lost one of his flock to violence.

“How well did you know the sister, Father?”

Conklin crossed himself before answering.

“I’m new to this abbey,” he said.

Which pricked up Burton’s ears, knowing why priests sometimes moved from parish to parish.

“And where were you before?”

The priest cast his eyes down, which Burton read as guilt.

“I served in a church in Jamaica Plain.”

The latest of the local suburban parishes to be associated with the too-familiar scandals.

“Transferred out of there pretty quickly, were you?”

Conklin bristled at the implication.

“I was brought in to heal the community. That’s been my role in the diocese for some time.”

Burton didn’t quite believe him, though it was true that public knowledge into what happened forced the diocese to act. Or appear to.

“Blessed are the healers,” Burton said. “Something in the Order needs mending?”

Conklin got cooler and calmer the longer they spoke. Nothing that happened in Jamaica Plain would help solve the murder of Sister Mary Humilitas.

“What do you think happened here, Father?”

Conklin fingered his scapular.

“A mugging, I suspect. Purse snatching? Isn’t that the most likely?”

He nodded to the father.

“Get them on the bus, Father. I’ll be in touch.”

* * *

The kid the uniform was holding looked about fourteen, skinny as a refugee and pale, red-headed with freckles. Burton opened the purse the officer handed him.

“This your pot?” he said.

“No way. Look, I found it on the ramp going out. I was taking it to lost and found.”

Burton delved deeper, found a roll of fifties and hundreds the size of a baseball.

“I guess you didn’t see this, either?”

The kid’s eyes went wide.

“Shit. No. I would’ve . .”

“I know what you would have done,” he said. “Cut him loose.”

The uniform looked irked. Burton wouldn’t have explained himself, but the officer deserved a pat on the head for quick thinking.

“Can’t hold him. Unless someone saw him grab it?”

The uniform shook his head.

“You didn’t find a knife on him? Cut him loose. Any luck at all? You’ll see him again.”

* * *

It was one of those impossible cases. Burton would have liked to believe in the purse-snatch gone bad theory, but abuse scandals or not, there was enough respect left in the city for Catholic clergy, especially nuns, that he didn’t believe anyone would target Sister Mary Humilitas. Anyone with half a brain knew the orders took a vow of poverty and inside a sold-out Fenway Park, 37000 or so souls? A mugger could have found a hundred richer targets.

“I can’t tell if I’m reading too much into it,” he said to Elder.

A brassy big band played in the background. Burton sipped a whiskey sour.

“Every group has its weirdnesses,” Elder said. “Tensions. Relationships. Why should a convent be exempt?”

“If nuns are killing nuns, I’ll never solve it. The father—Conklin—he’s legit, though. They drop him in like a troubleshooter when a parish has a problem. Apparently not one of the priests causing the problems.”

“So. Just means there is a problem. Not the usual one.”

Burton nodded, hating the idea they could talk about abuse as the “usual.”

“Yep. No altar boys in the convent.”

“Financial?”

“No money in being a nun. And the convent finances would be managed by the diocese.”

“You have an itch,” Elder said.

“Random makes no sense. The good sister had a wad of cash and a couple ounces of primo pot. And Conklin refuses to talk to me. It’s the Church thing: we got this taken care of, kindly fuck off.”

The street door of the Esposito creaked open. It was early enough the bar had no customers and without a new cook, Elder wasn’t serving lunch.

“You open?”

The voice was familiar, but he didn’t peg it until the young woman who’d been training as a nun walked down the stairs.

“They told me I could find you here,” she said.

Burton wondered who at the precinct gave him up. He thought the Esposito was his secret.

She was dressed in elegant casual wear: lemon-colored linen shorts to her knee and a gray silk sleeveless blouse. Her hair had grown in enough that she no longer looked like a prisoner. She carried a small red leather clutch purse.

“Sorry,” Burton said. “I’m blanking on your name.”

She reached into the purse, withdrew cigarettes and a lighter.

“You can’t do that in here,” Elder said.

Burton glared, dismissed him with his hand. Elder threw up his hands and retreated down the bar.

“Marjorie,” she said.

“O’Toole.”

She lit up and looked around.

“Nice place.”

“I don’t have a lot of time to screw around,” he said. “You leave the order?”

She glanced at the whiskey sour and exhaled smoke. She’d been with the nuns long enough to perfect that disapproving look.

“I thought it was something that would help. I was wrong.”

He would have asked ‘help what?’ but that wasn’t pertinent.

“You didn’t come all the way up to Boston to tell me that.”

“My Ma lives in Chelsea.” She looked like she was trying to decide whether to trust him. “There’s something wrong down there.”

“Thanks. That’s very helpful.”

She looked flustered.

“It wasn’t a purse-snatch, like Carmelita was saying. Sister Mary Not-So-Humble wasn’t living up to her name.”

“What’s that mean, something wrong?”

“You visit the place?”

He had two other open homicides on his desk right now. A visit to Providence was low on the priority list.

“Not yet.”

“Well, maybe you ought to.” She held up the hand with the cigarette in it. “I wasn’t there long enough to know any details. It’s a feeling I had.”

“Give me your contact information. I’ll want to talk to you again.”

She made a face and dipped into the clutch, handed him a business card.

“We will talk,” he said.

* * *

The three-story brick building of the convent for St. Agatha of the Trees took up half a block in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Providence. The neighborhood was what an optimistic realtor would have called transitional and Burton called a slum. The streets were more or less deserted at mid-morning, the sketchier residents home sleeping on their stained mattresses or nodding off in abandoned buildings. The gleaming black Audi parked in front was an insult to the neighborhood. Father Conklin’s, he assumed.

The birdy Sister Carmelita was the new Mother Superior. A novitiate conducted him from the guarded front door to the main office. Sister C seemed to have taken on a certain physical heft, as sometimes happens when a person gains power.

“Officer Burton,” she said.

“Detective.”

She made a vague motion with her hand, not so much a blessing, as an acknowledgement of his presence. A pair of dark blue nitrile gloves rested on her desk. She whisked them into a drawer. Cool air trickled in from an open window.

“Have you solved the murder of our dear sister in Christ?”

He shook his head.

“Sadly, no. I did think I ought to drive down and visit. Perhaps reinterview some of the sisters who were at the ballpark.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” she said.

As if she understood what a shot in the dark it was for him to be here. She might have convinced him, except that background checking proved that Sister Mary Humilitas owned a six-figure savings account at the Royal Bank of Newfoundland.

But before he could insist, a door behind Sister C opened and a plumpish sister in a long white coat, wearing similar nitrile gloves, burst into the room.

“Oh, I am sorry!” She looked befuddled, then sly. “Reverend Mother, we’re having a slight problem in the, uh, kitchen.”

The furtive look would have told him something shady was going on, even if the sister hadn’t drafted the musk of marijuana into the room.

“Go then,” Sister Carmelita said. “We will deal with it.”

Chastened by the sharp tone, the nun slammed the door behind her, a touch harder than she had to.

He folded his hands in his lap and regarded the Mother Superior. She stared back.

“Well,” he said.

She looked at him for several long moments that recalled grade school for him.

“I suppose.” She stood up. ‘You’re not likely to leave without an explanation.”

He tipped his head to one side, a half-nod.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with Sister Mary’s death, you know.”

He noticed the Humilitas honorific was missing now and that Sister C spoke of the murder as if her colleague had been hit by a bus.

“Shall we?” He moved toward the door.

* * *

“We don’t charge a cent for it,” Sister Carmelita said. “We give it away to the needy.”

As drug dens went, the room was pretty benign, a small storeroom with a single stained-glass window of a shepherd and his flock. Four nuns weighed and packaged plastic bags from a kilo-sized bale in the middle of the table.

“Cancer patients, mainly. A few with glaucoma.”

“But not only in this parish.” Not in the amounts they were processing.

“Correct. Father Conklin . . .”

“He’s your distributor.”

“Oh, no. We found Sister Mary was stealing. No money was ever supposed to change hands. Then one of the novitiates, cleaning, found her stash.”

The word sounded foreign in Sister Carmelita’s mouth. She went on, defiant.

“And she was planning to  leave us. And tell what we were doing.”

He doubted that, if only because she’d incriminate herself.

“So there was a good reason for her death.”

Sister Carmelita looked horrified, but not convincingly.

“We’re not gangsters, Detective.”

Same as, as far as he was concerned. Same as the church covering up for priests acting badly, how the church considered itself above the laws of the land. Exactly like gangsters.

“Then who would have done such a thing?”

He doubted any of the sister had the nous to slip a shiv into Sister Mary. But he could think of someone who did.

Sister Carmelita straightened up, her lips tight.

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “Maybe you should speak to Father Conklin.”

“Of course. The troubleshooter,” Burton said. “Has he been reassigned yet? Off to shoot troubles in other parishes?”

“I believe,” Sister C said, folding her hands. “I believe the Bishop mentioned Brazil.”

And through the open window, Burton heard the Audi start up with a roar, the tires chirp as Father Conklin took off to his next assignment.