Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(18)

Outside, the morning sun was coming up hot and I wished I could wear a little less fabric, but such is the standard of decency among grown men. I blinked against the light and Martin Eagan ignored it, stomping toward a jalopy parked by the door. He yanked it open, threw one box onto the seat, and then asked me for the other so he could cram that one inside, too.

“There’s no sense in driving, and the pair of us won’t fit anyway,” he said with regards to the little two-seater. Even without the crates, the pair of us might not have fit on the seat, but he was too polite or distracted to say so. “We may as well hoof it.”

“To Saint Paul’s?”

“It’s not so far from here, and I can give you the story, if you want it. But,” he said, and that rolling grumble of a voice was all vowels and dissatisfaction, “you aren’t going to like it much.”

He kicked the jalopy’s door shut and walked away, pulling a cigarette from his inside jacket pocket. I was already sweating, and couldn’t imagine adding a stick of fire to the mix—so when he offered me one, I declined.

“No, thank you. There’s plenty of heat out here already.”

“Heat? It’s rather cool today, Inspector. If this is what you call heat, you’d best stay away in July.”

“Duly noted.”

He struck a match, and his mustache twitched as he sucked the cigarette alight. “But you’re here about Father Coyle. How much do you know about what happened?”

“Almost nothing. I know he was murdered by a man named Edwin Stephenson, who expects to walk free due to temporary insanity. And you told me most of that. Word in Boston was only that he’d been killed, and details were thin.”

Eagan cleared his throat and nibbled thoughtfully on the cigarette as we walked side by side through a pretty part of town. It was a lovely city, with clean streets, tall lamps, and signs freshly painted—everything in good repair. Southern charm, I suppose you’d call it. But so far, most of that charm appeared superficial.

“Father Coyle was a good fellow, and I’m not just saying that because he was a priest,” the old chief finally said. “He was a man who cared about the people in his church, and everyone else, too. In the end, that was his downfall.”

“There are worse things to go on a man’s tombstone.”

He chuckled without smiling. “True, but no one wants it carved too soon. Father Coyle was only trying to help that girl, and should you ever encounter the despicable Mr. Stephenson, you’ll understand why.”

“What girl?”

“Stephenson’s daughter, Ruth. She’d been trying to escape that miserable old goat for half her life. As soon as she could walk, she did her best to run away from him; and recently, the girl’d reached an age where it was hard to keep her at home. I’m not saying she’s a bad sort, because she isn’t—she’s a sweet young woman, and a damn sight brighter than her old man.”

“So what did she do?”

“She eloped,” he said simply. “With a man plenty older. But that wasn’t the problem.”

“No?” I asked, but I was already making guesses in my head.

“There were two problems, really. Two problems at the root of it, anyhow: Her new husband’s a Catholic for one thing, and a Puerto Rican for another.”

Well, I’d guessed one of them right.

“The fellow’s a day laborer who’d worked for her family in the past. Hung wallpaper, built windows, that kind of thing. I don’t know him well, but I’ve seen him around and thought he wasn’t so bad. Quiet, competent. Not the sort to beat her. She could do worse, I suppose.”

“But her father didn’t think so. And oh . . .” I made another guess, one I would’ve bet the bank upon. “Father Coyle was the man who, shall we say, facilitated this elopement?”

“Correct. She’d befriended Coyle somehow, and her father had warned her away from him—with a belt, I expect, or something harder. But she kept coming around the church to spite him, or maybe she was thinking about trying on a different hat, when it came to how she worshipped Our Lord and Savior. Maybe the street preaching and the shouting wasn’t for her.”

“What was her father’s affiliation?”

“Methodist, of a kind.”

“There’s more than one kind?”

He sniffed, and blew a small stream of smoke through his nose. “I’d hate to sully the name of that church at large, and paint all the Methodists alike with a tar brush, you hear me—and to the upstanding local congregation’s credit, when they found out what he was up to, they gave him the boot.”

“What does it take to be ousted from one’s congregation in the Methodist faith?” I asked. I really knew almost nothing about it.

“He was hanging about the courthouse, telling folks he was a minister—and offering to perform marriages for a small fee. Made himself a little killing on it, over time.”

“There’s . . . there’s a market for that sort of thing? Sidewalk unions?”

“Well, say you’re in a hurry for some reason or another. Say you’re headed to the justice of the peace, and all you plan to do is sign a piece of paper to make it legal. Then say some nice fellow offers to perform you a service, on the spot—blessed by God as well as the county. Plenty of people have been romantically inclined enough to take him up on it. I think he was asking less than the courthouse fee, anyway—but I wouldn’t swear to it. The point is, he was out there pretending to represent the church, and pretending he had the authority to marry people off. And he didn’t, either way.”