HYDE
Chapter 9




McKenna's Catholic school education and at least a dozen Hollywood movies had given him a preconceived notion of what a priest's office should look like. He wasn't disappointed in that regard; the place where Father Hays worked was exactly what McKenna had expected, straight from The Bells of St. Mary's. There was the mahogany decor, the crucifixes, the pictures of Christ, and the statue of Mary, complete with a row of candles in front.
     On the other hand, nothing in his experience prepared him for Father Hays. The first surprise was the priest's choice of clothes. It wasn't the black traditional garb nor the Hipster jeans and flannel shirt activist priests seemed to favor; Father Hays was wearing khaki slacks and a white shirt, both with sharp, military creases. Tall, well-built, in his late thirties and sporting a full head of light brown curly locks, he looked like a cross between Harrison Ford and Robert Redford, the kind of man some women swoon over.
     It didn't add up to McKenna that a man who looked like Father Hays had chosen a celibate life-style, so he looked for an angle, but didn't find one. Father Hays turned out to be his kind of guy.
     It started when Hays just about bounded from his desk to give Maureen a kiss and a hug as soon as they entered. He then took her in, head to toe, before he told her how wonderful she looked. Him Maureen believed, because right before McKenna's eyes she blushed like a schoolgirl.
     Then it was McKenna's turn. Hays took his hand in a strong grip and said, "So good to finally meet you, Detective McKenna. I've been following your remarkable career for years."
     "Thank you very much, Father," McKenna said, wondering if he was blushing himself. "Why don't you just call me Brian?"
     "Okay, Brian. Let's relax while we chat," Hays said. He took two chairs from along the wall and placed them in front of his desk, then took his own seat behind his desk. Maureen and McKenna sat down and got comfortable.
     "Maureen tells me you think my low-life pal Benny was poisoned," Hays said, and waited for McKenna to begin.
     For a moment, McKenna didn't know what to say. He had expected to meet a man of God who would tell him that Benny Foster had been a poor, misguided, and misunderstood individual who had been sent to his untimely final reward after a life of unjustifiable suffering. "You find any redeeming qualities at all in Benny?" McKenna asked.
     "No, and believe me, I looked," Hays said.
     "Was he bad enough for someone to want to murder him?"
     "Tough question." Hays had to think about that for a moment before arriving at a conclusion. "No, he wasn't that bad, although most everyone who knew him wouldn't mind smacking him around a bit. Felt like doing it myself most of the time."
     "What you know about him?"
     "A lot. At one time, he was one of the people I had some hope for, and there aren't too many of the homeless we can say that about."
     "You mean hope in a spiritual sense?" McKenna asked.
     "No, I never had any spiritual hope for Benny. If there's a Hell, then that's where he is. What I meant was he didn't have the physical, mental, or dependency problems many of them have that make them hard-core unemployable."
     "You mean he didn't have to be homeless?"
     "That's what I'm saying. I think he was smart enough to have made some kind of life for himself."
     Maureen disagreed. "I'd say he was crafty, not smart," she said. "Crafty enough to get everything he could without doing a lick of work."
     "Maybe I was being too kind," Hays said. "Crafty might be a better word, but he was still no dope."
     "So what was he?" McKenna asked. "Just lazy?"
     "No, not lazy. Benny was the best panhandler in the city and he worked at it. He had more scams than anybody out there. Did the wounded-Vietnam-vet thing, the working-guy-who-ran-out-of-gas-and-just-needed-a-dollar-to-get-going thing, the I've-got-AIDS-and-I'm-not-on-welfare thing, the my-house-burned-down thing, you name it." Hays shook his head and smiled. "Whichever one he used, he made more than anybody else at it."
     Having walked around the streets of New York for the past year, McKenna had already seen all the ploys Hays had mentioned, and quite a few more. "Looks like you admire his creativity," he commented.
     "Yeah, not that it means that much. In panhandling, the difference between the best and mediocre can't be more than a hundred a week. Not enough to have a life or get a place to live."
     "Not even with the help he was getting from the city?" McKenna asked.
     "Three hundred and eighty-two dollars a month? Maybe in Nebraska, but not here."
     "But there were two of them. Kerri gets a check, too. Between the food stamps and the panhandling, that should have been enough to set them up."
     "Unfortunately, that's not the way the system works. Once they share an apartment, the Department of Social Services treats them as a family unit. Just one check, maybe four and a quarter. And you're not figuring in furniture, utilities, or security deposits, even if you could find a landlord willing to rent to them. Besides-"
     "I know," McKenna interrupted. "Benny liked living on the streets."
     "I don't know if I'd say liked . Preferred, maybe. He knew how to cope and, on the street, Benny was respected by his peers."
     "But not liked?"
     "Not at all. He treated them all as inferiors and was always conning even them out of money, one way or another."
     "Can you think of any enemies in particular? You know, bad-asses?"
     "No. There are some retired bad-asses among our clients, but Benny was smart enough to leave them alone."
     "How about the rest?"
     "For a suspect? On paper, maybe. If you checked their criminal records you'd find that many of them had been to jail for one thing or another when they were younger. But being homeless has a way of sapping your self-respect, even criminal self-respect if you ever had any. They might have done bigger things once, but now a little shop-lifting would be the extent of it, and most of them wouldn't even do that."
     "So there's nothing violent about them?"
     "Generally, no. Sometimes a psychotic or neurotic forgets to take his medication and acts up, but that has nothing to do with this case. Regarding Benny, a few might cut him in a fit of rage, but you suspect that this is a poisoning case, right?"
     "Yeah, something requiring planning."
     "Then I'd say you have to look somewhere else for a suspect. I don't think any of my clients pulled it off."
     "Any suggestions?"
     Hays shrugged. "Maybe someone from his past."
     I'm not getting much help here, McKenna thought. "Mind if I ask a personal question?"
     "No, go ahead."
     "You've been described to me as the only friend he had," McKenna said. "Do you think that's accurate?"
     "As far as I know."
     "But you didn't like him, right?"
     "No, I didn't like him. He burned me a few times,"
     Hays admitted.
     "Burned you? How?" McKenna asked.
     Hays started running them off on his fingers. "He used the church's name to collect funds for himself. He set himself up as a supervisor in our soup kitchen and collected food stamps from our slower clients for their meals here. He sold to bodegas right on the church block the cheese the government gives us to distribute. He..."
     "He stole cheese from you?" McKenna asked.
     "No, he bartered for it from our other clients after we gave it to them."
     "What did he use to barter with?" McKenna asked. "Food stamps?"
     "Worse than that," Hays answered, looking to Maureen.
     "He used Kerri," she said. "He used that poor simple-minded girl in the vilest ways just to get cheese. He rented her out."
     "So he rented his girlfriend for cheese," McKenna said, looking to Hays. "Why didn't you cut him off, throw him out, and keep him out. Maybe even have him arrested for some of his stunts?"
     "I'd like to say that it's because I believe that each of us is created in God's image and therefore, we all have the capacity to be good. Even the worst of us," Hays sighed, leaning back in his chair.
     "But that's not it?"
     "No, that's not it. Unfortunately, I'm not that fine a person. The truth is, Benny found a loophole, a way to keep scamming me over and over. I knew it, but there was nothing I could do about it."
     Hays smiled, but McKenna saw sadness in it. Now how could Benny keep scamming this guy, a sharp guy who's been around enough to recognize Benny for what he was? McKenna asked himself. Figuring it must have something to do with religion, he ventured a guess. "Confession?"
     "You got it," Hays said. "Confession. Benny became a Catholic and had me feeling good about it until I finally realized it was a scam. Every time I caught him doing some shenanigans, he pulled the confession angle on me."
     McKenna understood, but was gratified to see that for once Maureen didn't.
     Hays caught it, too. "As a priest, I'm required to hear confessions from any Catholic whenever he or she feels the urge," he explained to her. "So Benny would confess his sins to me and ask God's forgiveness. Acting in God's name, I'm required to give it. So who am I not to forgive him if God does? he always had me asking myself. I knew better, but he still managed to pull all my strings."
     "I see how he put you on the spot with that one," Maureen said. "He was despicable."
     Hays nodded, then turned his attention back to McKenna. "Now, mind if I ask you a question, Brian?"
     "Shoot."
     "You don't have to answer this, but aren't you investigating more than just Benny's murder?"
     McKenna was stunned by the question and cast a sidelong glance at Maureen. She gave him an unconcerned, innocent smile, although he figured she had broken one of the cardinal rules of protocol and had divulged details of his investigation without his permission. Even though Hays was a police chaplain, it still wasn't done.
     When and how? he wondered. He reached the conclusion that she had been listening while he reported to Ward during their trip to headquarters and that she had then called Hays while he was waiting for the photos. He felt anger rising within him, but Hays's question still had to be answered. "Yes, it's possible that more than one person has been murdered," he admitted.
     "More than one homeless person?"
     "Yes. Maybe a lot more."
     "I thought so," Hays said to McKenna, but he was smiling at Maureen. It appeared to McKenna that they were both sharing a little joke on him. Then Hays turned back to McKenna. "If it's possible there's a good number murdered, then why are we going so deeply into Benny's background? Wouldn't it seem to be random killings of homeless people?"
     McKenna thought it was a good question, one he had even asked himself after he had talked to Andino. He gave Hays his conclusion. "Maybe, if there is more than one. I can't even say for certain yet that Benny was poisoned, but all the bases still have to be covered and investigative procedures still have to be followed. Now I need a favor from you."
     "You mean keep all this to myself?"
     "Exactly," McKenna said, trying to smile pleasantly while struggling to keep his anger under control. If Father Hays knows that, why doesn't Maureen? he wondered.

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