Murder at the National Cathedral (23 page)

There were myriad details to go over concerning the upcoming exhibition, and they worked steadily to resolve them over the next hour. It was now dark outside; the pinspots Annabel had softened with dimmers gave the gallery a warm, inviting glow. She was locking the front door and turning a small sign to indicate the gallery was closed when Armstrong came from the office and examined the valuable works of art on display. “So beautiful,” she said.

“Yes, I love coming here,” Annabel said. “I find a lovely sense of quiet and solace when I’m here … and when contractors aren’t.”

Armstrong, whose attention was focused upon a black basalt feathered serpent on a Lucite pedestal, said without turning, “I’ve been looking for quiet and solace ever since Paul’s death.” She faced Annabel. “I always found those things in my faith, in being able to use the quiet sanctuary of a church to ask for them from God.” A rueful smile came to her face. “It hasn’t been working lately.”

“Yes, I think I can understand,” Annabel said. “Something that senseless and tragic is a pretty powerful force to overcome. I have many moments during the day when I
think of Paul, of my wedding day. Of course, I didn’t know him nearly as well as you did.”

Armstrong looked back at the black serpent. Annabel came up behind her and stood silently, then asked, “Would you enjoy an early dinner together, or a drink?” The other woman had begun to cry. Annabel couldn’t see her face, nor was there any sound, but the telltale movement in her back and neck revealed her sobs. Annabel tentatively placed her hand on the priest’s shoulder. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go and have a bite. I just ate, but it was only a little salad. For some reason I’m hungry again.”

Armstrong turned and pressed her eyes shut, opened them, and managed a small smile. “Yes, I think I would like that. I’m not due back at St. Albans until eight. Are you sure you have the time?”

“Of course. I just have to call my husband.” It sounded good to say that.

Smith had just returned from visiting his mother at Sevier House. Annabel told him of her plan to have a quick dinner with Carolyn Armstrong.

“Fine,” he said.

“How was your mother?”

“Good, although she got a call from a British journalist in Buckland who’s doing a story about the Priestly murder.”

“Why would he call
her
?”

“About me. The English tabloid press will try to track anybody down, anywhere—at least by phone. He asked for an interview, and she told him she didn’t give interviews. Or read them.” Smith laughed.

“Did you finish reading all those briefs?”

“Yes. Some were pretty good, one was excellent, most of the rest were ho-hum, one or two positively illegal. Have you had a chance to talk to Carolyn Armstrong about Paul?”

“No, but I suspect that will come up. She has to be back at St. Albans by eight. I should be home around then.
There’s leftover chicken in the refrigerator, and some frozen dinners.”

“I’ll manage just fine,” Smith said. “Desolate, but fine. Enjoy your dinner. Love you, Mrs. Smith.”

“Me, too, Mr. Smith.”

Annabel Smith and Carolyn Armstrong left the Georgetown Bar & Grill at seven-thirty and said good night on the sidewalk. Annabel was happy to see that Carolyn’s spirits were elevated. She’d become animated, even verbose, during dinner, and seemed anxious—no, “desperate” was a more accurate description—to talk to Annabel about anything and everything, including Paul’s murder.

Annabel was eager to get home to share the conversation with Mac, but the minute she walked through the front door, she knew he wasn’t there. She went to the study and read the note he’d left on the desk:
Have gone to MPD—Reverend Merle has been taken in for questioning—George called and asked if I would go—hope dinner was pleasant and productive—back as soon as possible.

He called a half hour later and said he expected to finish up shortly and would head straight home.

“Have they arrested Merle?” Annabel asked.

“No, just brought him in for questioning. He came willingly, but it’s good I was here. I’ll fill you in.”

Annabel sat at the desk and made notes of what she remembered from dinner. She turned on CNN, but when there was nothing of local interest—aside from national and international politics, subjects which, in Washington, were considered local news by many—turned to a local newscast. There was a brief item about Jonathon Merle’s having been taken in for questioning, although the wording of the report made it sound as if he’d been arrested.

She kept looking at the clock; Mac was a lot later than he’d indicated he would be. Finally, at almost eleven, he
came through the door and received his customary exuberant, face-washing, stand-up greeting from Rufus.

“Where have you been?” Annabel asked.

“Tell you all about it as soon as I’ve taken the beast out. You didn’t, did you?”

“No, I did not.” She loved Rufus, but never enjoyed being dragged through the streets of Foggy Bottom by this powerful, albeit magnificent, four-legged animal.

Upon his return, Smith poured himself a brandy, a Nocello for Annabel, and joined her in the den. “Who goes first?” he asked.

“You,” she said. “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”

They both laughed. Smith then recounted for her what had occurred at MPD. Merle had been asked late in the afternoon to make himself available for questioning. Initially, he’d balked, but changed his mind after conferring with Bishop St. James and went with two detectives to MPD headquarters on Indiana Avenue. The questioning focused on two things: First, the inconsistency in his story about being in the cathedral the night of Singletary’s murder. He stuck to it, claimed he’d retired to his apartment across the street in the Satterlee Apartment Building, where he spent the evening preparing a sermon he was to give the following Sunday. He had no one to verify that, nor could he explain why Reverend Armstrong would claim to have seen him in the cathedral that night. She was mistaken, Merle said, although Smith commented that the way Merle put it left little doubt in anyone’s mind that he felt she was deliberately lying.

The other line of questioning had to do with rumors that Merle’s personal dislike of Paul Singletary was intense. Merle did not deny that, although he repeatedly said that his feelings about Singletary—about any other human being, for that matter—could never be strong enough to wish him bodily harm.

“How did the police accept his answers?” Annabel asked.

“In their usual delicate way, with lots of sighs, raised eyes, grunts, and moans. I don’t think they seriously consider him a suspect, but you never know. I’m just glad I was there as his counsel.”

“That was your official role?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re in all the way.”

“I now have a client named Reverend Jonathon Merle, if that’s what you mean.”

“Damn!” she said.

“We’ll see what develops next. Enough of this. Tell me about your dinner with Carolyn Armstrong.”

“Well, let’s see. We had dinner at the Georgetown Bar and Grill. I had a club sandwich, she had a salad with smoked chicken.”

“I wasn’t looking for the menu,” Smith said. “Did you have a chance to get into the conversation she’d had with George the day before Paul’s murder?”

“It came up. She said that she’d warned Paul early on about his involvement in Word of Peace. She said she asked him to get out, but he sort of laughed it off.”

“Was she specific about any of the people in Word of Peace who might have been a threat to his life?”

“No, although I had a feeling that there could be a person or two whom she knew more about than she was willing to share with me. Nothing more than that, Mac—a feeling. Anyway, I asked plainly whether she thought someone from Word of Peace had murdered Paul. She said she thought it was a possibility, but then she focused more on Merle.”

“I don’t wonder,” Smith said, “the way she was quick to tell the police that Merle was in the cathedral. What did she base her feelings on?”

“Mutual dislike. It wasn’t easy for her to be this critical of a fellow priest, but she was candid. She told me that Merle was a warped and evil man, paranoid, jealous of Paul,
and a man she felt was sufficiently unbalanced to have done such an act.”

“You might say that Merle has a real enemy there.”

“He sure does. What do you think?”

“About Merle, or about Word of Peace? I suppose they’re all players in the game, not to be summarily dismissed, but I don’t know. I wish I did.”

They changed and climbed into bed. Annabel browsed through a lovely book Smith had bought for her,
The Artist in His Studio
, while Mac picked up where he’d left off with material for his next class at GW. Just before they turned off the lights, Annabel said, “There’s one more thing I should mention about my dinner with Carolyn.”

“What’s that?”

“She was madly in love with Paul, and I think it even went beyond that. I think they were in the midst of an affair, a very serious one, when he was killed.”

“She said that?”

“She didn’t have to. Trust me. Good night, Mac. Sleep tight.”

The National Cathedral, 5:00 a.m. the Following Morning—Frost on Everything

His eyes were fixed upon the sword embedded in the heart of the Blessed Mother, rendered in tempera over gold leaf. The profound sorrow on the face of Mary Magdalene, who knelt at the feet of the Blessed Mother, radiated out into the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea.

He lowered his eyes and leaned farther forward, his long, angular frame hunched over the wooden communion rail. Lips moved in silent prayer. It was cold in the chapel, perhaps because of the symbolism of Christ’s death as well as the natural early-morning chill contained by the stone walls.

He looked up again, and his lips stopped moving. St. Joseph of Arimathea, he thought, the Jew who took Christ’s brutalized body into his sepulcher because there was room there, and because there was room in his heart, too, for the crucified martyr.

Opaque, sunken eyes moved to other depictions on the mural behind the altar. Dominating the center was the Christ of Good Friday who had given His life so that others—so that we could enjoy an everlasting life through His grace.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said, embracing the richly polished wood of the rail as though to squeeze understanding and compassion from it. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

A cough. He looked over his right shoulder at one of two sets of carpeted stairs. No one. The maintenance man who’d cleared his throat as he started to enter the chapel had seen the figure at the communion rail and quickly backed out. You learned certain rules when working in the National Cathedral, among them that prayer was more important than polishing and was not to be interrupted. Maintenance chores could always wait.

Reverend Jonathon Merle made the sign of the cross and slowly stood, using the rail for leverage. Although he was no longer in a submissive prayer position, his concentration was as total as it had been when he was on his knees. He searched the faces on the mural. For what? Did they understand? he asked himself. Were they more than inanimate figures of garish paint and gold leaf? Could they hear his pleas for help? Did those beautiful figures function as conduits to
Him
, or was there a more direct communication?

Merle jerked his head left and right, looked up at the arched masonry ceiling thirty-nine feet above, supported by the substantial stone pillars more than twenty-seven feet in diameter. This was a chapel he avoided when possible, so depressing was its theme. The other chapels rang out with the joy of salvation: the Bethlehem Chapel dedicated to the birth of Christ; the Resurrection Chapel a triumphant proclamation of Christ’s having risen in victory. But this chapel was different, with its Norman altar, its green-and-brown
stone floor like that of a Roman amphitheater, the attempts by the muralist, Jan Henrik DeRosen, to mitigate the horrible theme of crucifixion through the use of colors so vivid that they only masked what any true believer felt.

Merle went to the center of the chapel and stood on the stone floor. Now he was shaking with anger; it was as if he were there in the scene depicted in the mural, had been there on that infamous day. How dare they, he thought, and his shaking intensified. His fists were clenched at his sides, and his head slowly moved back and forth. There was no cough this time, but Merle sensed that someone was looking down upon him from the top of the stairs. He looked in that direction and saw the maintenance man quickly walk out of view.

“Don’t let this happen to me,” Merle said to Him. Merle cried inwardly, but his eyes remained dry.

Then he stood ramrod straight, and his mouth pressed into a tight line. He walked up the stairs at the opposite side of the chapel, left the cathedral through the south transept, and sat on a bench in the Hortulus, the “Little Garden,” centered on a ninth-century French baptismal font. He sat there until the sun had risen and Bishop St. James would be in his study.

“Yes, Jonathon?” St. James said after Merle had knocked and had been invited to enter.

Merle sat in a chair across the desk from the bishop and stared at him.

“Jonathon, is something wrong?” St. James asked. “You look deeply troubled.”

“I …” Merle started to say, then fell silent.

St. James got up and came around to the priest. He knew it had been an ordeal for his canon to be interrogated by the police. He leaned back against the edge of his desk, folded his arms across his chest, and tried a little humor. “Are you upset because I never followed through on my offer of a
Chinese dinner?” He instantly realized it was inappropriate, and certainly not effective. Merle looked ready to cry at any minute, but there was such an aridness to him that it seemed inconceivable that there could be moisture within.

“Does this have something to do with Paul’s death?” St. James asked.

Merle sat perfectly still for what seemed an eternity. Then, with an almost indiscernible movement of his head, he nodded that it did.

St. James drew a deep breath and allowed his body to slump. Was he about to hear that Merle had murdered Paul? He silently said a quick prayer: Dear God, please do not let it be that. But he also had to honestly admit to himself that he had wondered from the start whether Jonathon Merle had killed Singletary. The animosity between them was overt. Devout as St. James knew Merle to be, and yes, good and decent, the bishop also recognized an enigmatic force within the priest, the sort of force that seemed endemic to social misfits, to those seemingly decent and good people who do dreadful things, who gun down fellow workers at a plant, or who follow their inner demons to cleanse the world by murdering prostitutes.