I nodded. I could see Rosa as a competent treasurer. It flashed through my mind that she might have been less angry if she had channeled her energy into a career: She would have made a good corporate financial officer.
“I don’t really know what happened,” I said to Carroll. “Why don’t you tell me the story-where the safe is, how you came to find the fakes, how much money is involved, who could have gotten at them, who knew about them-and I’ll butt in when I don’t understand.”
He smiled again, a shy sweet smile, and got up to show me the safe. It was in a storeroom behind his office, one of those old cast-iron models with a combination lock. It was stuck in a corner amid stacks of paper, an ancient mimeo machine, and piles of extra prayer books.
I knelt to look at it. Of course, the priory had used the same combination for years, which meant anyone who’d been there a while could have found out what it was. Neither the FBI nor the Melrose Park police had discovered any signs that the lock had been forced.
“How many people do you have here at the priory?”
“There are twenty-one students at the House of Studies and eleven priests on the teaching faculty. But then there are people like your aunt who come in and work during the day. We have a kitchen crew, for example; the brothers do all the washing up and waiting at table, but we have three women who come in to do the cooking. We have two receptionists- the young man who probably directed you to my office and a woman who handles the afternoon shift. And of course there are a lot of neighborhood people who worship with us in the chapel.” He smiled again. “We Dominicans are preachers and scholars. We don’t usually run parish churches, but a lot of people do treat this as their parish.”
I shook my head. “You’ve got too many people around here to make sorting this out easy. Who actually had official access to the safe?”
“Well, Mrs. Vignelli, of course.” That was Rosa. “I do. The procurator-he handles the financial affairs. The student master. We have an audit once a year, and our accountants always examine the stocks, along with the other assets, but I don’t think they know the combination to the safe.”
“Why’d you keep the things here instead of in a bank vault?” He shrugged. “I wondered the same thing. I was just elected last May.” The smile crept back into his eyes. “Not a post I wanted-I’m like John Roncalli-the safe candidate who doesn’t belong to any of the factions here. Anyway, I’d never been at all involved in running this-or any other-priory. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know we kept five million dollars’ worth of stock certificates on the premises. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know we owned them.”
I shuddered. Five million dollars sitting around for any casual passerby to take. The wonder was that they hadn’t simply been stolen years before.
Father Carroll was explaining the history of the stocks in his gentle, efficient voice. They were all blue-chip shares-AT &T, IBM, and Standard of Indiana primarily. They had been left to the priory ten years ago by a wealthy man in Melrose Park.
The priory buildings were close to eighty years old and needed a lot of repairs. He pointed to some cracks in the plaster on the wall and I followed the line of damage to a wide brown stain on the ceiling.
“The most urgent problems are the roof and the furnace. It seemed reasonable to sell some shares and use the money to repair the plant, which is, after all, our main asset. Even though it’s ugly and uncomfortable we couldn’t begin to replace it today. So I brought up the matter at chapter meeting and got an agreement. The next Monday I went into the Loop and met with a broker. He agreed to sell eighty thousand dollars’ worth of shares. He took them from us then.”
That had been the last of the matter for a week. Then the broker had called back. The Fort Dearborn Trust, the company’s stock-transfer agent, had examined the shares and found they were counterfeits.
“Is there a possibility the broker or the banker made an exchange?”
He shook his head unhappily. “That’s the first thing we thought of. But we had all the remaining certificates looked at. They’re all fakes.”
We sat silently for a bit. What a dispiriting prospect.
“When was the last time the shares were authenticated?” I asked at last.
“I don’t know. I called the accountants, but all they do is verify that the shares are there. According to the FBI man, these certificates are extremely good forgeries. They were found out only because the serial numbers had not been used by the issuing companies. They’d fool any ordinary observer.”
I sighed. I probably should talk to the former prior, and to the student master and procurator. I asked Carroll about them. His predecessor was in Pakistan for a year, running a Dominican school there. But the student master and procurator were both in the building and would be at lunch.
“You’re welcome to join us if you like. Ordinarily the refectory in a convent is cloistered-that means only friars can use the room,” he explained in answer to my puzzled look. “And yes. We friars call this a convent. Or a friary. Anyway, we’ve lifted the cloister here at the school so that the young men can eat with their families when they come to visit.
The food isn’t very interesting, but it’s an easier way to meet Pelly and Jablonski than trying to track them down afterward.” He pulled back a yellowed sleeve to reveal a thin wrist with a heavy leather watchband on it. “It’s almost noon. People will be gathering outside the refectory now.”
I looked at my own watch. It was almost twenty of twelve, Duty had driven me to worse things than undistinguished cuisine. I accepted. The prior locked the storeroom carefully behind him. “Another example of locking the barn door,” he said. “There was no lock on that storeroom until we discovered the fake securities.”
We joined a throng of white-robed men walking down the corridor past Carroll’s office. Most of them said hello to him, eyeing me covertly. At the end of the hall were two swinging doors. Through their glass top halves I could see the refectory, looking like a high-school gym converted to a lunch room: long deal tables, metal folding chairs, no linens, hospital-green walls.
Carroll took me by the arm and led me through the huddle to a pudgy middle-aged man whose head emerged from a fringe of gray hair, like a soft-boiled egg from an egg cup. “Stephen, I’d like you to meet Miss Warshawski. She’s Rosa Vignelli’s niece, but she’s also a private investigator. She’s looking into our crime as an amica familiae.” He turned to me. “This is Father Jablonski, who’s been the student master for seven years… Stephen, why don’t you dig up Augustine and introduce him to Miss Warshawski. She needs to talk to him, too.”
I was about to murmur a social inanity when Carroll turned to the crowd and said something in Latin. They answered and he rattled off what I assumed was a blessing; everyone crossed himself.
Lunch was definitely uninteresting: bowls of Campbell ’s tomato soup, which I loathe, and toasted cheese sandwiches. I put pickles and onions inside my sandwich and accepted coffee from an eager young Dominican.
Jablonski introduced me to Augustine Pelly, the procurator, and to some half dozen other men at our table. These were all “brothers,” not “fathers.” Since they tended to look alike in their fresh white robes I promptly forgot their names.
“Miss Warshawski thinks she can succeed where the FBI and the SEC are baffled,” Jablonski said jovially, his nasal midwestern accent blaring above the dining room cacophony.
Pelly gave me a measuring look, then smiled. He was almost as thin as Father Carroll, and very tanned, which surprised me-where did a monk go sunbathing in mid-winter? His blue eyes were sharp and alert in his dark face. “I’m sorry, Miss Warshawski-I know Stephen well enough to tell he’s joking, but I’m afraid I don’t get the joke.”