Boy Crucified (16 page)

“I need to speak to Brother Leo,” I said. The social worker said Brother Leo was one of the ones having sex with the boys. When the porter did not answer, I added, “As soon as possible.”

“He’s no longer part of the community,” the porter said prissily.

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he leave?”

“He was kicked out by Bishop James, and that’s all I know.”

I considered this in silence. “Did he have blond hair, by any chance?” I was thinking of those blond hairs we had found at the scene of Frankie’s murder.

“Well, yes, he did,” the porter replied.

“Is there any way we can contact him?”

The porter shrugged.

“Phone number? Contact information?” I prompted.

“I can get that for you,” he said.

“Good. Please do. What about Brother Francis? Can I talk to him?”

“He has a class right now.”

“It’ll just take a couple of minutes.”

Scrunching up his nose, the porter hurried off to fetch Brother Francis, returning a few minutes later. He then went into his office and looked in his files, bringing back a piece of paper with the phone number and address for “Mr. and Mrs. Mattling,” Brother Leo’s parents.

He retreated, ignoring the thanks I offered.

We waited in the foyer. Another religious brother appeared from within the shadows of the porter’s office.

“Are you Brother Francis?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Were you scheduled to take Frankie Peters to Kansas City this past Friday?”

He nodded.

“And did you?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“I’ve already explained this. Brother Boniface told me he had been assigned instead, got into the van, and took off. That’s all I know.”

“Well, unfortunately Frankie Peters got himself murdered. Now we’ve found another one of your students, Eli Smalley, has also been murdered. Any idea why?”

He lowered his gaze to the floor. A troubled look crossed his features. He was about my age, thin as a rail, with thinning hair that was turning gray.

“I take it that means no,” I said.

“They were good students,” he said, very quietly.

“Somebody must not have liked them very much.”

“Or perhaps too much,” he said, glancing up at me.

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged.

“Do you know who killed them?”

“If I did, I would have told someone already.”

“Do you suspect anyone? Brother Boniface?”

“Not in a million years,” he replied.

“So you think someone else did it?”

“I know it wasn’t Brother Boniface.”

“How do you know that?”

“He loved those boys. He couldn’t even bring himself to give one of them a swat, much less kill them.”

“How much did he ‘love’ those boys?”

“Maybe too much.”

“Maybe he crossed a few lines here and there?”

“Maybe.”

I regarded him for a long while in silence. “He engaged in inappropriate conduct?”

“It depends on what you mean by inappropriate.”

“Sexual, maybe?”

He lowered his eyes, frowned. “You know, some of these boys come from far away—we’ve got students here from Florida, California, even got two brothers from Canada. They get lonely. Homesick. Sometimes they just want to be close to someone. Maybe sleep with someone. Inappropriate, perhaps, but not necessarily a crime. Brother Boniface was too nice to send them back to their own beds. But there was never any suggestion that he took advantage.”

Very diplomatically put.

“Why do I have Brother Boniface’s fingerprints at the scene of a murder?”

“I wouldn’t know. He wasn’t clever enough to kill anyone, I can tell you that. He was a simple man. Some thought he was stupid, or slow, but I don’t think so. I think he was a genuinely good person. He was very loving, very trusting, very childlike, all those things a good religious brother is supposed to be. He wouldn’t have harmed any of those boys, not in a million years.”

“Why did he take that van, then?”

Brother Francis glanced, almost casually, at the porter’s office. “I’ve got to get back to my class. Maybe we could talk while we walk upstairs?”

“Of course,” I said.

Yet we didn’t talk. We went upstairs to the third floor and walked down the large hall. Only then did Francis answer the question, speaking very quietly. “Brother Boniface was removed from his position a week ago, ten days ago. I don’t remember now, exactly. He was heartbroken. He loved these kids. All teachers love their students, of course, but he really loved his kids, the boarders. And they loved him back. And sure, there were complaints—he was too indulgent, too nice to them. But these are just kids we’re talking about, and they’re a long way from home, and as far as I was concerned, they couldn’t have anyone better to take care of them than Brother Boniface. This place can be a bit intense from time to time. It’s hard for the boarders to get used to it. Brother Boniface made it bearable for them.”

“Yes, but what about the van?”

“I was getting to that. When he was dismissed, the teachers were told—all the brothers were told, for that matter—that Brother Boniface was not to have any contact with the students whatsoever. He was really hurt by that.”

Daniel had been silent up to this point. Now he asked, “Why was he dismissed?”

“He was caught sexually abusing some of the students, or so I was told.”

“Was he?” Daniel asked.

“Not on your life.”

“But he was dismissed anyway?”

“Yes. Bishop James ordered it. There’s been a social worker poking around this place lately, and the bishop is trying to head off any potential problems—that’s what I was told. He apparently discovered that Brother Boniface was abusing some of the students and dismissed him from his post.”

“But you don’t believe he was abusing any of the students?” Daniel asked.

“No, I don’t. Anyway, Frankie was leaving on Friday, and Brother Boniface asked me if he could talk to Frankie, say good-bye, make sure he was all right, and I had to tell him no. Those were the bishop’s orders. Brother Boniface went outside and got into the van and drove off. I thought maybe he had just taken Frankie for a drive and would be back in a hour or two. But he didn’t come back.”

This presented an interesting twist.

“So where did Boniface take him, then?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“And when you heard that Frankie had been murdered, didn’t it occur to you that maybe Brother Boniface had done it?”

“Not at all.”

“Who did do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have any idea at all? Anyone you suspect?”

He did not.

“Brother Leo?”

He shrugged.

“Are you aware that Bishop James might have been having ‘inappropriate’ contact with some of the students?”

He frowned.

“Eli Smalley said the bishop raped him,” I said.

He walked to the window that overlooked the front of the monastery and stared out of it.

“Have you heard anything like that?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

“Does it surprise you?”

“Nothing surprises me anymore. Not about… him.”

“The bishop?”

He nodded.

“Why is that?”

“Things have been… irregular… lately. It’s my job to run this school, and that’s hard to do when most of the students are terrified out of their minds.”

“What are they afraid of?”

“The punishments. The crucifixions. The boot camp. The swats. The ‘soldiers for Christ’ business. It’s just too much for them. That’s why Frankie left. A lot of them want to leave. Most of them can’t stand it here, and I don’t blame them. Don’t blame them at all. But Bishop James is the only valid Catholic bishop left, and we have to do what he says.”

“Are you sure about that? This ‘only valid Catholic bishop’ stuff?”

“Of course,” he said, glancing at me. “The other bishops have embraced heresy. How can you be a bishop and be a heretic at the same time?”

“How can you rape a young person and then hear his confession afterward?”

“You can’t,” he said, looking horrified.

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

“You’re saying that Bishop James….”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

He returned his gaze to the window, troubled, visibly upset. “That’s not right,” he said.

“To be honest,” I said, “we’ve got two dead boys, both of whom said they had been raped by Bishop James. Strikes me as a bit too much for a coincidence.”

He still said nothing.

“You don’t know anything about this?”

He shook his head. I realized he was crying. Tears slipped silently down his cheeks.

“If there’s anything you can tell me, anything at all, I would be very grateful,” I said.

He wiped at his eyes and shook his head. “We live in the end times. The remnant who have remained faithful must suffer. And so we are suffering.”

Daniel glanced at me, disbelief in his eyes.

I gave Brother Francis my card.

VI

D
ANIEL
and I walked through the school, located on the second and third floors of the monastery’s west wing. We looked into classrooms, the dormitory, trying to get a feel for the place. Teachers, standing at blackboards dressed in black cassocks with short hair and serious faces, glanced at us but said nothing, not even when we stood inside their classes and listened.

The students, dressed in black and white, had closely-cropped hair and were extremely well-behaved. No spitballs, no note-passing, no doodling in the margins of a textbook. Catholic piety was evident everywhere, from the crucifixes in each room to the pictures of Mary hanging on the walls in the hallway to the life-size statue of an angel standing at the end of the hall, a large basin in its hands filled with holy water. I hadn’t seen one of those since I was ten.

Though the building was old, everything was scrubbed clean and well maintained. There was no slacking at St. Konrad’s.

On the second floor, outside the chapel, we stopped by the gift shop to have a look around.

“Hey,” Daniel said, nodding at a row of statues displayed on a shelf.

St. Francis of Assisi stared back at us. The statues were of the same type and size as the one we’d found. He was standing next to Our Lady of Fatima, St. Anthony, St. Joseph, and a row of crucifixes.

“Can I help you?” a voice asked.

We turned to see a brother approach from behind a bookshelf, looking decidedly bored.

“Just looking,” I said.

He gave us a suspicious, unfriendly look, as if he thought we might be trying to shoplift.

We moved on, heading through the large doors to the main chapel just to our left. I wanted to have a look, if only for old time’s sake. A huge crucifix presided over the altar up front. Statues of Mary and Joseph stood to either side on pedestals carved into the wall itself. Stained glass windows gave us glimpses of St. Michael the Archangel and other angels like St. Raphael and St. Gabriel, the one who brought the glad tidings to Mary. There were guardian angels, too, and the Good Shepherd—Jesus with a lamb over his shoulder. Situated on the walls, below the stained glass windows, were the Stations of the Cross: fourteen scenes representing the passion and death of Jesus Christ. During Lent, it was common to pray the Stations of the Cross every Friday.

I went to the very back pew and knelt down on the kneeler that folded out behind it. Daniel Qo followed me. He knelt himself, giving me a funny look, as if wondering what the hell we were doing.

“You still Catholic?” he asked in a whisper, as if the silence of the place was making him nervous, making him feel like he needed to fill it up with chatter and noise.

I shook my head.

“Then what are you doing?”

“Praying,” I said. “Do you mind?”

He made a face. His eyes darted about, taking in the chapel, the atmosphere, the strange faces staring back at us from stained glass windows and statues and pictures and carvings.

Was I still Catholic
? Not a chance in hell.

I glanced around the chapel, aware that the beauty of the place had the effect of making me
feel
pious, and that it wasn’t unpleasant to feel that way. Indeed, some people were addicted to it. Churches, temples, mosques, they all had a way of making life seem sacred and important, even if it was neither.

I put my face in my hands. There were still parts of me that wanted so much to believe in God, to lay the burden of life down, to pretend that all one had to do was believe in the name of the Lord Jesus and it would all be all right. That simply wasn’t true. Seductive, yes. Alluring, enticing, fascinating, tempting. Oh, indeed. But it was a crock of shit and I knew it. At the end of the day we are, each of us, alone, and no amount of pious pretending can change that.

Daniel Qo got to his feet. “I’ll wait for you outside, man.”

VII

T
HE
drive back to the city with Daniel was relaxing, until I received a call from Harlock on my cell phone.

“Tommy?”

“Yes?”

“I need you to get your ass over to a scene.”

“Another one?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“Not another crucifixion?” I said.

Surely our killer wasn’t that prolific.

“Crucifixion? Shit, no. A dumped body.”

“Well, don’t you think I have enough to do at the moment? Can’t you get someone else to look at it?”

“Of course I could,” he said agreeably. “Except this body belongs to Earl Whitehead, your main suspect. And from the looks of him, he wasn’t anywhere near Chillicothe killing that Smalley boy last night, since he was much too busy decomposing. I think you’d better have a look for yourself. Of course, if you’re too busy, I’ll tell them to bring the body in and we’ll just forget about it.”

“What is it?” Daniel asked.

I explained.

“We’re on our way back to the city now,” I said. “Where’s the body?”