True Confessions (20 page)

He thought of Turd Turner. He supposed it was only natural. Without Turd Turner, there would be no mystery to understand.

He considered the ifs. If Turd Turner had not snatched Corinne, she wouldn’t have met me. She wouldn’t be pregnant. Turd Turner wouldn’t have gone to the gas chamber.

Poor Turd. If. If. If.

A 207 conviction hung on a three-time loser. It didn’t matter that Corinne had not been harmed except for a bad case of hysterics. (And meeting a cop who would knock her up, he thought.) The law was the law. A snatch under those circumstances meant the gas chamber.

He did not like to think of his part in it.

Not now.

With Corinne pregnant.

He never told Corinne that he had watched Turd die. The surprise was Turd asking to see him the night before he went to the gas chamber. He could have avoided it. There were any number of excuses. Fuqua didn’t want him to go. We’re short-handed, Fuqua had said. He’s a nobody, Fuqua had also said. Meaning that if Turd Turner had been a somebody, Fuqua would have gone himself. He went anyway. And not just to spite Fuqua. The fact was, he felt a little guilty about his part in sending Turd to the gas chamber. He lied to Corinne to cover his absence. A stakeout. You won’t see me for a couple of days. And he went to Q. It was creepy sitting in the holding cell on death row. He thought it wouldn’t get to him, but it did.

“I got no family, Tom,” Turd Turner had said. “All the times you collared me, I guess you come as close as anyone, being family.”

“There’s no hard feelings, then?”

“Jesus, Tom, you were just doing your job.”

“It’s nice you’d think that way,” Tom Spellacy said. “You seen the chaplain?”

“Shit,” Turd Turner said. “The regular chaplain’s sick and they wanted me to hold hands with this nigger minister. I seen him taking a leak in the crapper and he’s got this thing, it looks like a Louisville Slugger. ‘You got one of them in white, I’ll take it,’ I says to him. I mean, I’m going out tomorrow, I can use a few laughs. Right?”

“Right.”

“Laughs, shit, he starts giving me this shine voodoo.”

“They do that.”

“Fuck him,” Turd Turner said. He smiled conspiratorially. “You’re the law, Tom, but I bet you got a drink.”

Tom Spellacy nodded. A cop could get away with a lot of things on death row. Especially the arresting cop. He took out a flask and poured some rye into a paper cup.

“Jesus, that’s good,” Turd Turner said. He downed the drink and held the cup out for a refill. “You know they got two chairs in there. Chair A and Chair B. Like in a fucking Chink restaurant. So when the warden comes around to see me this morning, I says to him, I say, ‘Chair B, that’s for me, with the warden on my knee.’ Another fuckin’ stoneface. Like he never heard a pome before.”

Tom Spellacy poured some more rye into the outstretched cup. Anything to keep Turd Turner talking. The manic conversation was the last line of defense against death.

“You know, Tom, I nearly made the Ten once.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s a federal list is the reason you didn’t know, probably.”

“Probably.” Under any other circumstances the idea of Turd Turner being on any Ten Most Wanted list would have made him laugh out loud.

“A lot of my friends in law enforcement told me I was the eleventh most wanted man in the country and that Mr. Hoover was fixing to put my name on the Ten as soon as he had an opening. Mr. Hoover said my nickname was against me or I would have made the Ten a lot sooner. That’s what my friends in the FBI tell me. If I had a name like Two-Gun Turner or Machine-Gun Turner, I would have made it easy.”

“Tuffy Turner.”

“That’s a swell name, Tom.” He burped and Tom Spellacy filled the cup to the top. The cup was beginning to soften at the sides and the rye was leaking out. Turd Turner held it in both hands and downed it in a gulp. “But all my friends in the press, they all knew my nickname was Turd, and my real name was Horace, and that wasn’t good enough, Horace. I mean, there’s never been a Horace on the Ten. Ever. Horace Turner. That’s not a tough name.”

“It’s got a nice ring to it, though,” Tom Spellacy said carefully. “Horace.” It was the only thing he could think to do, calling him Horace. It was bad enough going to the gas chamber without the last person you talked to calling you Turd.

“It was really swell of you coming here, Tom. I mean, how many guys take the deep breath with a hangover, right?” He reached for the flask and put it to his mouth. “And hell, the things I’ve done, I was going to end up here sooner or later anyway.”

They were like that, guys going to the gas chamber, Tom Spellacy knew. When the jig was up, they confessed to a lot of crimes they had nothing to do with. It was the stand-up thing to do. Palship. Taking the heat off someone else in the bunch. Going out doing some other guy a good turn.

Turd Turner mentioned a hit in North Hollywood.

A bank job in Inglewood.

Running forged green cards down to Mexico for Jack Amsterdam.

The flask was empty. Turd Turner stood up unsteadily.

“Well, I guess that’s it, Tom.”

“I guess it is, Horace.”

Turd Turner embraced Tom Spellacy and then sat down heavily on the bunk.

“One thing, Tom . . .”

“Sure, Horace.” He knew what was coming, knew the reasons he had been summoned to this holding cell on death row.

“Was she really a les?”

“A real bull, Horace.”

He didn’t tell Corinne that. Nor did he tell her that Turd Turner had held his breath for forty-one seconds. Not good, not bad, the warden had said. The record was two minutes fourteen seconds. A professional life guard from Seal Beach who had taken out his boyfriend. It was like he wanted to get his name into “Believe It Or Not By Ripley.”

Tom Spellacy picked up a nicked ashtray. It said The Mo-cambo, New Year’s Eve, 1939.

If it hadn’t been for Turd Turner.

If. If. If.

He wondered what Corinne was doing at mass.

“Blessme, Father, I confess to Almighty God and to you
, Father, that I have sinned . . .”

Desmond Spellacy settled back in the confessional and made the sign of the cross. There was one nice thing about hearing confessions at Saint Vibiana’s: a kapok cushion covered the hard wooden bench in the priest’s cubicle. Leave it to Jamie Marinan to think of his bottom. The pastor at Saint Vibiana’s was convinced that priests had a higher incidence of hemorrhoids than other people and that the reason was sitting on a hard bench for hours at a time during confession. It’s the priests’ disease, Des, Jamie Marinan liked to say. Look at how many of the fellows in the sem with us are all bent over and walking like their legs were stilts. You sit in a confessional long enough and passing gas is like passing razor blades. Terminal piles is what most priests die of, you can look it up.

“I lied four times and I took the name of the Lord in vain seven times ...”

“What kind of lies?” Desmond Spellacy said. He leaned close to the mesh screen. He knew that the young boy on the other side of the screen did not expect the question.

“Uh . . .”

“You told your mother you did your homework and you didn’t do it, is that it?”

“Yes, Father.”

You said you practiced your violin and you didn’t do it.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Four times.”

“Yes, Father.”

“You said you took the Lord’s name in vain seven times. Not eight. Not six. Not fourteen. You must be a very good bookkeeper.”

“Yes, Father.”

“What did you say? Goddamn? Jesus Christ? Holy Moses?”

Desmond Spellacy could feel the hot, bad breath of the youth expelled into his face. He knew the boy would check his name card on the confessional door and avoid him like the plague in the future.

“The first two, Father.”

He was tempted to ask the boy if he had said anything scatalogical. Or sexual. Shit? Fuck? No. Better to save that. Wait for the proper time and place. Drop it on someone like Dan Campion. Swearing was the kind of sin Dan confessed. Except he called it cursing. Or Agnes McNulty. Always congratulating herself on being such a good Catholic. He savored the fantasy: Shit. Fuck. Are they the cursewords you said, Agnes?

The boy was waiting for his penance. Desmond Spellacy gave him five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys and told him to make a good Act of Contrition.

“
Ego te absolvo
. . .”

It was odd how the mind wandered during confession. He wondered why people like Dan and Agnes even bothered to go to confession. They were such ignoramuses. They had no concept of sin. Nor did they comprehend that the calibration of sin was the essential element of his trade. Confessors sin, he thought. I sin. Mary Ginty. He remembered those nights after Ed Ginty first went to prison. Poor Ed. Embezzling that money to bail himself out of the market. He made a mental note to speak to the Cardinal about Ed Ginty’s situation. Ed would be out on parole soon and perhaps they could find an opening at the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. It needed a lay administrator, and Ed had always been a conscientious executive before the trouble. At Ginty & Klein’s, the accountants. Maybe the job would make up for his dreams about Mary when Ed went away. She always kept up appearances. There wasn’t a charity she didn’t volunteer for, a wake she didn’t attend. He was always running into her. It was her courage he admired. A stranger would ask about her husband and Mary would say, Ed’s in the penitentiary. And never flinch. He dreamed about her. That was all. He would awake in a state of arousal, his bedding wet from the nocturnal emission. “State of arousal,” he thought. “Nocturnal emission.” Wet dream, he had always called it in Boyle Heights. Boner. He always was fluent in the argot of the streets. He knew all the anatomical words. And how they applied to the girls in the Heights. Tommy was right about one thing. He had wondered about Mary Margaret when they were young. What she looked like. How it would feel. He had a good idea how it would feel. From Clementina Testa at Holy Rosary. What was it Tommy had said about her? “She could teach you a few things you might have missed along the way.” She had. Once at fourteen, once at sixteen. His only two ventures with the flesh. He suspected that Tommy knew. The impulses of the flesh were the darkest sins in Tommy’s canon. How wrong he was. Those impulses could be sublimated. Pride was a substitute. Power. The urge to manipulate. Vices that I possess in abundance, Desmond Spellacy thought. That at least was Seamus Fargo’s opinion, intoned from the darkened confessional at Saint Basil’s. The mental liaisons with Mary Ginty had not impressed Seamus Fargo. They were dreams and dreams would pass. Hubris was the constant . . .

Three Hail Marys to the boy who stole a baseball. A decade of the rosary for the woman who admitted pleasure in her neighbor’s rejection by the Junior League.

Calibration . . .

He did not have to hear regular confessions, but he liked to help out. It made him feel more like a priest. Perhaps it was his one good deed. He heard every morning before mass at Saint Vibiana’s, and on Saturdays and the nights before Holy Days of Obligations, he would volunteer at other places around the archdiocese. Sometimes at a convent, sometimes a hospital, sometimes a colored or a Mexican parish; never the same place twice in a row. This is Monsignor Spellacy, Father, I know Father Garcia is on vacation and I wonder if I might help you out hearing confessions Saturday. He knew what Seamus Fargo said to that: “As if any pastor would say no to the chancellor of the archdiocese. When all he wants is flush toilets in the rectory and the chancellor is saying they’re too expensive.” Leave it to Seamus to know everything he turned down. Flush toilets or pew cushions, his grapevine was infallible. He doubted he would ever be able to please Monsignor Fargo. Too bad. At least dealing with Seamus was character-building. The thought made him smile. He wondered what Monsignor Fargo would say to that.

“I was late for mass once, Father, the car broke down and I had to walk and I didn’t get here until the
Confiteor
. . .”

Good, solid, safe Saint Vibiana’s. Upper-middle-class sin. Nothing Latin or Slavic. Not like last Saturday at Santa Teresita. First the nun in the convent. An Irish sister from Cork sent to a Mexican parochial school in East Los Angeles, where almost no one spoke English. Perfect planning. Hands across the sea.

“Bless me, Father, I’m going to have a baby.”

The nun’s brogue was thick with tears.

“How old are you, Sister?”

“Fifty-one years of age, Father.”

“I don’t think you’re going to have a little one, Sister.”

In the convent for thirty-five years with no idea how babies were made, let alone where they came from. Something they did not bother to teach the postulants in Cork. Going through menopause and thinking she was pregnant. An immaculate conception at the convent of Santa Teresita.

Then there was the twelve-year-old Mexican boy.

“
Vάlgame Dios, mi padre, porque he pecado. Yo puse un
cherry bomb
en el
asshole
de mi hermano. El tiene seis anos. El es retardo
”

He did not understand much Spanish, but he got the gist.
Hermano
, What did it mean?
Hermano
, Brother. That was it. The brother was six, the brother was retarded . . . Oh, my God. “
Su hermano,’
he had said carefully, “
estά muerto?
”

“
Yo no sé,”
the boy had said. “
Yo tengo un problema pequeno, no?
”

Un problema pequeño
, he thought. A little problem. A cherry bomb stuck up his retarded six-year-old brother’s asshole. That was only
un problema pequeño?
He wondered what the parishioners at Santa Teresita would consider a big problem.

Certainly not the confessions of conspicuous consumption at Saint Vibiana’s. Sons who wrestled with themselves beneath the sheets. And thought they were going to become midgets if they didn’t stop. Mothers who cheated at bridge. Fathers who had lewd thoughts about their neighbors’ wives. Five Our Father, five Hail Mary confessions. He hardly had to listen, only raise his hand periodically in absolution. It gave him time to figure out how to negotiate with the Community Chest over the start of its fund-raising drive, which was scheduled to start the same day as the Catholic Charities drive. Both wanted May. April was out. It was only a month after taxes. Give the Chest May, Desmond Spellacy decided suddenly, we’ll take June. Protestants worry about summer camp for their children, but the drive to a tennis camp in Monterey was not generally a Catholic concern. Or a Catholic summer expense. Desmond Spellacy smiled bleakly to himself. Of the ability to make such distinctions were bishops made.

The litany of venial sins slackened. Desmond Spellacy turned on the light in the confessional and began to read his office. The words were automatic; his attention began to wander. He took a pencil and made a note to ask Devlin Perkins and Phil Leahy about the Protectors of the Poor. The banker and the insurance man were both connected downtown, but he still wished he could get Tommy to do the checking. He was a tomb of secrets, Tommy. He wondered if Tommy kept a ledger on favors done the archdiocese. It was like a mortgage long past due. Although he suspected that Tommy’s payment was in discovering yet another example of human frailty. No. Tommy was out of the question. They hadn’t spoken since lunch that day at the Biltmore. The memory pained Desmond Spellacy. Goddamn Jack. No more stalling. He had to take care of that situation. But first the Protectors of the Poor. The newspapers said that girl was a volunteer of the Protectors. The girl with the ugly nickname. Whose murder Tommy was investigating. Lois Fazenda. There was something hauntingly familiar about her. Desmond Spellacy wished he could put his finger on it. Perhaps she just reminded him of those wayward girls whose confessions he heard at the House of the Good Shepherd.

That must be it.

Get Dev and Phil on the case. Find out what the hell the Protectors were up to. All I need is a headline that says, THE VIRGIN
TRAMP AND HIS EMINENCE’S FAVORITE CHARITY, Desmond Spellacy thought. He tried to imagine explaining that one to the Cardinal.

No, thank you.

Enough of that. Desmond Spellacy closed his breviary and switched off the light in the confessional. In the aisle he saw that Jamie Marinan was still hearing. He wondered if Jamie logged his thoughts. Probably not. Jamie thought too much thinking was bad for the character.

He knelt at the altar rail for a moment. A short prayer to erase the debris from his mind. It was not a particularly holy use of prayer, but it was an orderly one.

“Monsignor.”

The woman was handsome. Mid-thirties. Hair wrapped in a scarf. A fine network of lines around the eyes. No perfume. No lipstick. Level gaze. He wondered if it were proper taking all this in.

“Yes.”

“Would you hear my confession?”

“Monsignor Marinan is still hearing.”

“I’d prefer to go to you, Monsignor.”

He nodded and pointed her toward the confessional. There was something about the woman that was distinctly not Saint Vibiana’s. In the cubicle, he kissed his stole and opened the screen.

There was no preamble. “I have committed adultery.”

Not impure actions. He liked that. Simple and to the point. “And that’s all.”

“All that’s important.”

“I see. Are you married?”

“No.”

“Then you . . .” He had trouble saying “committed adultery.” Here was a time when it would have been useful to say “fucked,” but the word stuck.

“With a married man, yes.”

He realized he had not asked how often the adultery was committed, but then thought, It’s not like stealing a Mars Bar. The number did not increase or diminish the importance of the act.

“Will you stop?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sorry?”

“No.”

The woman was a refreshing experience. She seemed to know the unequivocal weight of every word.

“Do you think it’s a sin?” He knew that already he was falling into her diction. Not the absolute, Are you sorry for your sin? Instead the less certain, Do you think it’s a sin?

“No.”

The answer was not unexpected. Desmond Spellacy knew she was not to be trifled with. The sham brimstone would not work nor the coded pieties. The torpor of the morning evaporated. He felt suddenly stimulated, as he always did when absolutes were challenged. It occurred to him that he had no real interest in right or wrong, only in the ambiguities and ambivalences of any moral question. A strange attitude for a priest.

“Then why are you here?”

“To talk.”

“Ah,” Desmond Spellacy said. He waited for her to speak and when she did not, he asked, “Do you believe in God?”

“No.”

“And you think He cares?”

“Doesn’t He?”

“I would think He had more pressing concerns.”

The woman said, “I bet you’re proud of that answer.”

“You think it’s cheap.”

“Debating club.”

Desmond Spellacy smiled. “The point is taken.”

“You’re different.”

“How?”

“I thought you were like ...”