“Well,” Schwartz said, “it is taking you a long time to get down that hall. At any rate, let’s continue. Melvin leaves his wife at the piano and moves to the single chair in the living room. Almost immediately, Carl enters from the long hall and sits on the couch near Melvin. This would be Matthew’s only opportunity to sneak into the dining room. Ms. Hoskin, would you do that now?” I walked down the hall and passed through the French doors. “Miss Hanson, Peggy, would you please tell us exactly what transpired from the moment you entered the kitchen to the moment you left?”
Peggy sighed again and said, “I went to where Sam and Melissa were sitting, at the bar to get the coffee pot, but realized that there were no filters”
“How many minutes did that take?” Schwartz asked.
“Less than one,” Peggy said. “Then I went to the basement door and opened it. The pantry is just off the top landing to the basement stairs. As I opened the door, Sara stepped out and startled me. We startled each other. I asked her what she was doing there, and she told me that she was getting filters.”
“Are the filters difficult to retrieve?” Schwartz asked.
“No,” Peggy said. “Sometimes they’re behind things though.”
“Would it be common for somebody retrieving filters to be in the pantry long enough for somebody else to realize that the house was out of creamer, come into the pantry, retrieve the creamer, leave the pantry without offering to help retrieve the filters, place the creamer on the bar and then leave the kitchen which was then entered by somebody else who had time to discover the missing filters and come to the pantry looking for them?”
“If you’re suggesting that I was in the pantry for a long time,” Sara said, “I was rearranging things. That’s not so uncommon, you know.”
“Fine,” Schwartz said. “This is the first time that you are mentioning it, but it’s reasonable. Miss Hanson, after you spoke with Mrs. Hanson about the filters, what did you do?”
“Well, she was making coffee, so I went to the living room to wait for it.”
“Passing Matthew as you left.”
“Yes, but he’d been there talking with Sam while I was in the pantry. I heard them talking.”
“Mr. Hanson,” Schwartz said, “Sam, what were you and Matthew discussing?”
“Nothing,” Sam said, “He just asked me if Melissa was all right.”
“He was in the doorway, but he kept looking over his shoulder,” Melissa said. “He seemed distracted.”
“After Peggy left,” Schwartz said, “What did Matthew do?”
“He came into the kitchen and waited for Sara to brew the coffee,” Melissa said.
“Ms Hoskin,” Schwartz said, “Why are you still in the dining room?”
“I don’t know when I was supposed to come out to the kitchen,” I answered defensively.
“Then we should try to determine that,” Schwartz said. “Let’s see, Matthew would have been in the hall with Lewis when Peggy first went into the kitchen. He’d have had to stay there until Mr. Melhorne went to the living room. Lewis, about how long was that from the time Peggy entered the kitchen to the time Melvin went into the living room?”
“I don’t know,” Lewis said, “about two minutes, maybe a little less.”
“Well, let’s say a minute and a half then,” Schwartz conceded. “Though according to Miss Hanson, she was already speaking with Sara in the pantry by that time, and Matthew was asking Sam about Melissa, and then Matthew came into the kitchen to await the coffee. No, I don’t see where he had opportunity to go into the dining room and apply Chlordane to all of the anointed parts of his father’s body.”
“But you do see where I had the opportunity?” Carl Hanson demanded sarcastically.
“It doesn’t matter,” Schwartz said, “if you had opportunity, unless I can establish that you had access to the poison. I certainly haven’t done that yet.”
Trevor stepped away from the door jamb for the first time. “Are you going to?” he asked.
“Everybody come down and take a seat,” Schwartz said. “I’ve got a little story to tell.”
***
We had gathered in a semi-circle with Schwartz in the center facing toward us. He had insisted on a very specific seating arrangement. His back was to the entrance, and Trevor was still guarding that. The seats before him were arranged in two rows. The first row consisted of the Hansons. Carl had the seat furthest left, then his wife, then Sam and his wife, then Peggy and so on in order of birth. The second row began with Felix, the insurance company rep, then Penny Prince, then me, then Dachnewel, then Coneely and finally Fr. Donatelli in the seat nearest the stage.
Once he was satisfied with the arrangement, Schwartz began to lay out his theory. “Chlordane,” he said, “has been banned in this country for over twenty years. For a few years prior to its banishment, it was allowed to be used only as a means of controlling termites. According to your interviews with the police, only a few of you could have been considered as potentially having any access, and those possibilities seemed remote. Lewis works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But the police looked into that, and found nothing suspicious. The same applies to Mr. Melhorne who works with various chemicals in his profession, though not insecticides. Peggy works for an exterminator. Certainly the police examined that route, and again came up empty. Am I correct, Detective?”
“You are,” Trevor said. “They haven’t used Chlordane since before the ban, and she didn’t come to work for them until about ten years later.”
“However,” Schwartz said, “Sam here flew a crop duster before the ban.”
“But I never sprayed Chlordane,” Sam insisted. “It was already illegal for anything but termites.”
“Correct. In addition to which you were a freelancer, and you had no license to purchase your own toxins,” Schwartz aided. “So none of the obvious routes suggested anything suspicious to the police. So it seemed a dead end.”
“Isn’t it a dead end?” Trevor asked.
“Well,” Schwartz said, “unless you consider that both Peggy and Sam came under suspicion because they knew a person, specifically Jerry Clarke of Clarke’s Exterminating, who had access to Chlordane during the time that it was still legal for use in exterminating termites. Sam was flying freelance for him, and Peggy knew him and would years later call on that familiarity to acquire her job. And if you further consider that the person who brokered those jobs for Sam and Peggy was Carl, that brings him back into the picture.”
“So what are you saying?” Carl asked. “That I asked my friend Jerry for Chlordane twenty years ago and kept it in the pantry all this time so that I could euthanize my father before his insurance ran out? How very intuitive of me.”
“No good,” Trevor said. “We asked Clarke if any of the Hansons had ever bought Chlordane from him. He had good records. They were clean.”
“Let’s come back to this,” Schwartz said. “For now, we’ll skip ahead to the night that Coneely let slip that he knew a way to poison a person receiving last rites. Carl was in the room when that conversation occurred. We’ve already established that he knew that his father’s life insurance policy was due to expire. If he also knew where he could get a supply of Chlordane, he could have come up with the plan right there on the spot.”
“But we don’t know that he did know where there was any Chlordane,” Trevor insisted.
“Very well,” Schwartz said. “Let’s speculate for a while. Suppose that somebody had come to Carl while he was working for the airport and had told him that he was having a problem with termites. Suppose that Carl had recommended his friend Jerry Clarke as a source of good insecticides. Now suppose that years later, Carl was to hear that the person who had bought the Chlordane had had to replace the very lumber he’d bought the Chlordane to protect because of a termite infestation.”
“We looked into that possibility when you found the St. Christopher’s medal,” Trevor said. “Clarke says he never sold the church a
ny Chlordane to use on this building.”
“Let’s say the poison was for a playground,” Schwartz said, “and the fact that it had been eaten away by termites was common knowledge because it was accidentally uncovered as a result of a television news report. Now let’s suppose that while Carl thought it odd, he filed it away in the back of his mind and forgot all about it until that day when Coneely suggested that he knew of a way to poison a person during last rites. Suppose that at that moment, several things clicked. Suppose Carl then went to the person who had bought that Chlordane some twenty-plus years earlier, we’ll call him X, and told X that he knew that X still had the Chlordane, that X had been using it to euthanize people, and that X had confessed the fact to Michael Coneely who had let it slip as a hypothetical. Suppose Carl had then carried out the plan, and mercy-killed his father, only Matthew saw him sneaking either out of or into the room. Suppose Matthew had realized what Carl had done, but didn’t understand what Coneely’s part in it had been. Suppose Matthew contacted X for advice when he thought that the police were going to arrest Coneely, but not arrest Carl. Suppose that X had asked Matthew to arrange his thoughts which Matthew did on his laptop. Suppose that X then poisoned Matthew, erased everything from the lap top that didn’t sound like an admission using only the back and delete keys which he wiped clean before washing his own glass, placing the poison vial in Matthew’s hand and leaving the scene.” Schwartz stopped speaking. All attention had been riveted to him. Gradually, we noticed that he had stopped talking. Slowly we turned our heads to see Fr. Donatelli’s reaction. The only one who didn’t turn his head was Fr. Coneely, who had covered his face in his hands to weep.
Donatelli stood in abject hostility. “This is outrageous!” he shouted. “It’s nothing but conjecture plain and simple. You can’t prove any of it!”
“Suppose,” Schwartz said, “I could. If my theory is correct, you have been poisoning parishioners for more than twenty years. Ms. Hoskin was good enough to find one for me who remembers you performing last rites just minutes before her father died. Let’s suppose that I’ve spoken with her, and she is willing to consent to an exhumation and autopsy. You know, Chlordane leaves traces that last for years.”
Donatelli had walked toward the kitchen entrance. “This is crazy,” he said. “I’m a Roman Catholic priest. I can’t believe you are talking to me this way. I’m going for a drink of water, and when I return I want this man off of church property.”
“I’m afraid I can’t let you leave my sight just now,” Trevor said leaving the door jamb and moving to approach the elderly priest. An officer in uniform, who had been waiting for Trevor’s signal entered behind him. Then, for the second time that day, Trevor found himself in hot pursuit. Donatelli bolted for the exit behind the stage. Trevor was slowed by the collection of folding chairs and Hanson family members who had jumped up when Donatelli had fled. By the time he got out the door, Donatelli had gotten to his car and was lurching out of his parking space.
Something else happened for the second time that day. Donatelli’s car dragged on the pavement, and his rims set off a shower of sparks as he drove on four flattened tires. Vic Jenkins jumped from his own car and began firing a quick succession of photographs of the priest’s thwarted escape attempt. Once the police had made the stop, Jenkins reached into his pocket and produced a small white card. He flipped it through the window onto Donatelli’s lap and smiled across the parking lot to Schwartz. He was waving the valve-core remover Schwartz had lent him.
“What was that card?” I asked Schwartz.
Schwartz smiled a cocky grin and said, “It was one of mine. I asked Vic to deliver it. It says:
The crime of disdain is a crime of arrogance. The police have been called. There’s nowhere for you to hide. Perhaps you’ll learn something from this.”
Chapter 35
Schwartz returned to the hall to discuss terms with Thornton Felix, so I crossed the lot to hob-nob with Jenkins. He'd staked out an area near the split-rail fence at the playground where he could shoot pictures of the police as they read Donatelli's rights. The windows of the school were filled with students and teachers watching Fr. Donatelli being arrested. By the expressions on their faces, it was as though they were witnessing the very persecution of Christ.
I reclined on the fence and said, "So much for objectivity, huh?"
"What do you mean by that?" Jenkins asked as he fired off a shot of Trevor shielding Donatelli's head as he was placed in the squad car.
"Well," I said, "we're not supposed to become a part of the stories we cover. We practically helped script this one."
"The way I see it," he said, "we're people too. Life happens all around us."
"So you're not concerned about the ethics?" I asked.
"That's not my department," he said. "The paper's editors decide what's ethical. Not me. I just do what I'm told."
"What do you think they'll tell you about this one?"
"I think they'll tell me to give an interview to one of the other more experienced reporters to write up."
"Yeah," I said, "I think my editors might just do the same thing. What are you going to do about it?"
"What can I do?" he said shrugging as Trevor started up his engine.
"Well," I said, "you can do what I always do. Tell them you'll write it yourself, or you'll take your pictures and your eyewitness account to the competitor's down the street."
***
I was crossing back across the lot when Trevor came up behind me and squawked his siren. I took in enough air to float a dirigible as my heart enjoyed an adrenaline rush. "Are you trying to scare me to death?" I asked.
"I just want to ask you," he said through his open window, "how much of Schwartz's plan did you know when you asked me to come to his house this morning?"
"I beg your pardon," I said as a second squad car passed with Carl Hanson in the rear.
"Do you think he planned this embarrassment for me, or was that all you?" Trevor asked pointedly.
"What embarrassment?" I asked. "You got the killers."
"Oh, yes," Trevor said, "and it's so clean, isn't it? Now all we have to do is convince a judge to give us a warrant to exhume a body to get the evidence to convict the priest who invented the phrase 'fourth leaf on the clover.'"
I looked at Donatelli in his handcuffs in the back-seat and said, "That was yours? I got the impression that that was a Church-wide thing."
"So you didn't realize who Fr. Donatelli is?" Trevor asked.
"Who is he?"
Donatelli was looking out the window. He also looked at his hands, at the floor, at anything but my eyes.
"He was the right hand man of the previous bishop. He hand-picked his own successor for St. Bart's so he could keep this parish in his pocket. He'd be a Monsignor today if he hadn't picked the wrong pony as a successor to the last bishop," Trevor explained. "This is going to be a political nightmare. Now I understand why Schwartz wanted Jimmy to take this collar. Monsignor Peter Yitzosky at the diocese offices is Jimmy's uncle. Jimmy was an altar boy. I'm some divorced, horn-playing, career-cop who incorrectly declared the case closed at one point."
"Maybe I can help to make sure you're treated fairly in the press," I said.
"Oh, sure," Trevor said. "Like you did with Mother Foyer?"
"You said that didn't matter to you," I said.
Then as he started to pull away, Trevor said one more thing to me. "I lied."
***
In the hall, I found the remaining Hansons gathered in a circle with John Dachnewel in the center. Schwartz was conferring with Felix over in a corner, and Penny Prince was seated casually listening nearby. I walked over and sat with her. Schwartz was saying, "I don't think you read the contract correctly. It says that I receive one-third of every portion of the death benefit that my investigation saves your company."
"But you didn't save us anything," Felix insisted. "When you came to us, the police had named Matthew Hanson as the killer, so we
were already saved his portion. You proved that he was innocent but that another of his siblings was guilty, so it simply shifts the blame. It doesn't save us anything."
"It doesn't matter," Schwartz insisted. "The contract stipulates that I receive my share of any portion I can save your company besides the share that Matthew would have gotten." Felix began to speak, but Schwartz stopped him. "Besides Matthew's share. Not including it. In addition to that, a roomful of witnesses heard you okay a waiver that the Hanson's all signed. They each agreed to forgo their individual one-sixth share of the death benefit should they be proven guilty, but not Matthew's share. His portion was excluded from the bargain that you ratified." Again Felix began to speak, and again Schwartz interrupted, "In addition to that, had they not signed the waiver, you know as well as I do that a court might still have ordered for you to pay out the entire death benefit even if I'd shown that all but one of them was involved in Mr. Hanson's death. So long as one sibling remained uninvolved, he or she might have had a perfectly legal claim to the entire death benefit. The only thing that is keeping Mr. Dachnewel from informing them of that probity at this very minute is that document that Carl Hanson and his brothers and sisters all signed. A document that Mr. Dachnewel knows to be airtight since he helped me to draft it himself."
"Well," Felix said, "it is still contingent on a jury finding Carl Hanson guilty of a crime. He may get off. Juries can be very sympathetic in euthanasia cases."
"Carl Hanson's case will never see a jury," Schwartz said. "I know Mr. Dachnewel very well. He is telling the Hanson's that if Carl confesses to his part and offers to testify against the priest, the district attorney will probably not recommend any jail time at all. Carl Hanson will be a free man by Saturday, and his siblings will give him and his wife Matthew's share of the death benefit."
Felix looked as though he wanted to speak, but he had no thoughts to express. Finally he said, "You planned it this way," and he walked out of the church hall. Penny Prince stood and sighed. She started out the door behind her employer. Schwartz called after her and she turned.
"Yes, Mr. Schwartz?"
"You and I both know that I coerced him into signing that contract to hire me by using the information you supplied me. Do you have a problem with that?”