Wages of Sin (12 page)

The archbishop brought his gaze back to Rourke, and all the fear and anguish he felt was betrayed now by his face. “And so you see why this must never become known,” he said. “Never. For it may be a test of faith that is too difficult for some to bear. Surely it is possible that this woman was the devil in disguise, or one of his minions sent to betray the priesthood, to make a mockery of it? She has done grave harm to God's Holy Church, and the peril to more souls should be weighed against this truth you seek. We must have a care that in an effort to find her murderer, a further, greater harm is not done.”

Weldon Carrigan threw his cigar into the empty fire grate with such force it exploded into a shower of sparks. “Right now we've got a lid on this mess, and that lid is staying on.” He smiled, a good ol' boy smile that didn't even try to hide the brass knuckles. “You're going to play ball with us on this, Day, or I'll be on your ass like a rabid dog, and the good archbishop will have your brother sent to a parish so far out in the boondocks he'll be grubbing sweet potatoes with his toes.”

Rourke smiled as well, for they had done this dance before, he and his angel.

He set his coffee cup down on a pearl inlaid table and stood up. When he spoke it was to the archbishop. “I'm not going to sandbag this investigation, Your Grace, just because
he
has become a
she
and we're all too scared now of what that really means and of what more we might find when we start kicking over rocks. Whatever else Patrick Walsh was, he was a human being and he deserves for someone, even if it's only the three of us here in this room, to know who killed him and why.”

The archbishop stared at Rourke, searching his face. “You can be a cruel man, I think. But you also have courage and you have honor, and when the time comes you will know what is the right thing to do and you will do it. Come here, my son.” His mouth quirked with a slight smile, as he raised his ringed hand, beckoning. “Come and kneel to receive the blessing of God and your Church, and do at least try to appear a little humble while you are doing so.”

Rourke sat in his car, thinking.

The live oaks cast cool green pools on the velvet lawns and deep galleries, and he could hear the lilting piano strains of a Brahms waltz coming out an open window of the house next door. Two little girls about Katie's age were playing beneath the shade of the trees in the neutral ground. They'd dressed up a big tabby cat in a doll's nightie and were trying to put him in a buggy, but he wasn't having any of it. The cat squirmed, trying to get away, until one of the little girls brought it to her breast, cradling and rocking it like a baby.

Little girls. His Katie loved baseball and played a mean game of street hockey, yet just the other day he'd noticed her talking to the boy who did odd jobs for the speak on the corner and she'd been all giggly and flirty with him, seven going on seventeen, and scaring the living daylights out of her poor old daddy. Rourke wondered now what kind of little girl Patrick Walsh had been, growing up—if the
Times-Picayune
article had gotten it right—in that orphanage in Paris, Louisiana. Whether she had played with dolls and flirted with the boys. At what point in that life had she become he?

Nobody is wholly who they say they are; even in the confessional you can end up lying to yourself and to God. Yet what was that Paulie had said?
I was jealous of his being so in love with God and with His world, and for always being so darn
certain
. Certain of what it meant to be a priest, of getting it right
…What if Father Pat had taken up holy orders not to hide what he was, but rather to be more fully what he was in his heart? A spiritual being in love with God and His world.

A murder victim could be like a kaleidoscope, Rourke thought. You do a little twisting and you get a whole different picture. Ever since he'd looked down on the crucified corpse in the morgue that morning and seen a woman, Rourke had been thinking of the dead priest as someone who had perpetrated an enormous, elaborate, and desperate lie upon the world, but maybe Father Pat hadn't seen it that way. Maybe to Father Pat the terrible lie was the one that God or chance or biology had perpetrated on him, the lie he must have felt like a physical blow every time he looked at his naked body in the mirror and saw an image that didn't match the one he had of himself in his head. He. She.

So who had the killer nailed to the crossbeam last night, he or she? Priest or woman?

Rourke sat in the car, watching the little girls play with their cat, and he felt a sudden rush, like the pop you get from a snort of cocaine. Most murders were spur-of-the-moment, crimes of passion, or crimes born of stupidity, and easily solved. Every now and then, though, he would catch a case like this one, where the killer had nerve and brains and a plan.

He was beginning to know Patrick Walsh now, know him from the inside out. It was like developing a photograph—get the image sharp enough, and then you can see, emerging out of the background, the murderer holding the knife, or the gun, or the nails, in his hands.

Nails. Nails through the wrists.

“I'll get you, you sadistic son of a bitch,” Rourke said aloud, and he smiled.

He wanted to shake up the priests of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary some more and see what fell out. He wanted to have a talk with Floriane de Lassus Layton, the “Flo” written with such an excited flourish in Father Pat's appointment book. And he wanted to take a good long look at the crime scene in daylight and talk with a few of his contacts on the street. A good cop knew all the bad weasels in town. Sometimes it was simply a matter of getting the right weasel to tell you who'd done it.

He punched up the engine and slipped the 'Cat into gear, singing “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

It was like the super had said: He loved being a cop. Fucking loved it.

Chapter Nine

F
ifteen minutes later Rourke was sitting in his car in front of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, watching in astonishment as Tony the Rat climbed the portal steps and went through the heavy, iron-banded front doors. Rourke waited just long enough for the doors to close behind the loan shark's back, then followed him.

Sunshine streamed through the stained glass of the rose window, casting red and blue blossoms of light onto the interior arches and columns and pilasters. A young woman in a bright pink hat and an older one in widow's black knelt in prayer in the pews closest to the chancel. In the choir above, a chorus of schoolgirls sang the
Kyrie Eleison,
practicing for tomorrow's High Mass. Their voices rose to the vaulted, frescoed ceiling, hauntingly clear and beautiful, like bells peeling over snow.

Rourke spotted Tony the Rat at the south end of the nave. The loan shark paused to pull a red silk handkerchief out of his sleeve, and pressed it to his perpetually leaking nose. Then he genuflected at the chancel rail and headed for the confessional in the west transept.

The door to the confessor's box was closed and the green light above the lintel was on. Both of the penitent's boxes were empty; Tony went into the right one and pulled the red velvet curtain closed.

Rourke sat in a pew and waited. Five minutes later Tony the Rat, apparently cleansed of all his many sins, pushed open the curtain of the penitent's box and came out. He genuflected at the chancel rail again, and left the church the way he'd come in, blessing himself from the holy water fount on his way.

Rourke thought about following him outside and bracing him, but then decided against it. A guy like Tony couldn't be cracked open without some kind of handle, and Rourke didn't have one yet.

Rourke waited around the confessional a half a minute for the priest to emerge, but instead of the priest coming out, the young woman in the pink hat went in, snapping the red velvet curtain closed behind her.

A stooped old man came out of the sacristy just then, carrying an armload of hymnals that he dumped on a table beneath the church bulletin board. Rourke figured he must be the sexton and he approached the man, showing him his detective's shield. He asked where he could find his brother.

The sexton adjusted the glasses at the end of his nose, sucked on his false teeth, and peered long and carefully at Rourke's credentials. “Father Paul's not here,” he finally said. “He got called up to Charity Hospital to give old Mrs. Furillo the last rites.”

“Yeah, okay,” Rourke said, surprised at the depth of the relief he felt to know the priest who had just had a little private meeting with Tony the Rat was not his brother. Because he figured there was as much likelihood of the loan shark coming to Holy Rosary for genuine absolution as there was of the Yankees trading Babe Ruth. “So how much longer, then, will Father Ghilotti be hearing confession?”

The sexton fiddled with his glasses, sucked some more on his teeth, then said, “Father Frank's out back in the boys' clubhouse right now. Confession's not till this evenin'. Five o'clock.”

Rourke went back to the confessional at a run, but the priest's box was empty.

Rourke found the sexton again and got access to the chancery office telephone. He called down to the precinct station house and arranged to have Tony the Rat picked up for jaywalking or spitting on the sidewalk, or whatever it took. Rourke was wishing now that he'd followed Tony out of the church and asked him a few pointed questions, but there was still time for that. Besides, a few sweaty, itchy, coke-hungry hours in a cage might help the loan shark see the value of cooperation.

And in the meantime Rourke was going to have a little heart-to-heart with Father Frank Ghilotti.

Rourke opened the door of the clubhouse to the smack of a fist hitting leather and the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on the old puncheon floor. The priest steadied a punching bag that was almost as big as the scrawny boy facing it. The boy's arms were skinny as broom handles and the big padded leather gloves made his hands look too heavy to hold up.

“You're pulling back on your punches soon as they land,” Father Ghilotti was saying. “Push your fist all the way through the bag and do it like you mean it.”

The boy cocked back his gloved hand and was about to let fly when he heard Rourke's footstep and whirled.

“Cheese it, it's the cops,” Father Ghilotti said.

The boy's eyes widened and he backed up until he knocked into the punching bag. “I didn't do nothin',” he cried. “Honest, I didn't.”

Both men laughed, and the boy jumped in the air as if he'd been goosed with a hot poker.

“Now there speaks a guilty conscience if ever there was one,” the priest said. He touched the boy lightly on the shoulder. “The policeman is here to see me, Bobby Lee, so why don't we call it quits for today.”

The boy nodded, swallowing hard. He gave Rourke a wide berth and then took off for the door, running.

“He was nabbed not too long ago trying to lift a ham at the Poydras Market,” the priest said. “The butcher let him off with a warning, but with a threat to bring in the law next time he caught the boy stealing. They've five kids in that family and their daddy's gone.” He held out his hand to Rourke and then realized there was a boxing glove at the end of it. “Sorry,” he said, smiling a little, shrugging. “I have this theory that it helps boys like Bobby Lee, boys who are angry at the world and hurting inside, to hit on something that won't hit back and can't be hurt in turn.”

He looked Rourke over, as if reassessing his first impression. Or confirming it. “You look like you might do a bit of boxing yourself,” he said.

“I do some sparring at the Athletic Club as many times a week as the job'll let me.”

Father Frank Ghilotti made an incongruous picture himself, with the sleeves of his cassock rolled up to reveal the fat, padded gloves, and yet once again Rourke was struck by a sense of the man's inner toughness. Having a couple of homicide detectives appear at his rectory so early this morning with the news of Father Pat's death might have put the pastor off his stride, but he seemed to have regained his balance.

“Father Pat was hurt,” Rourke said, trying to throw him off again. “He was crucified.”

Genuine anguish, or so it seemed, filled the priest's face. “Yes, I know. Archbishop Hannity telephoned a little after you all left this morning and gave us the details, but to be honest I had a hard time believing what I was hearing. How could such a thing have been done to him? And why?”

“Most killings are done out of greed or fear or passion,” Rourke said. “Likely the why will end up being one of those.”

He looked around the clubhouse, a temple to emerging manhood with its canvas sparring ring and barbells. The place smelled like a gymnasium—sweat and damp towels. “Did Father Pat help you teach the boys how not to pull their punches?”

In the silence that followed his question, Rourke could hear water dripping somewhere, and the bounce of a basketball on the pavement outside.

“Was he a chicken hawk?” Father Ghilotti finally said. “Is that what this is all about?”

Rourke's gaze came back to him, but he saw on the priest's face only pain and a kind of wary distaste. It would be a clever, disingenuous question to pose, though, if you were the killer and you'd known all along that Father Pat was a woman.

“Do you have reason to think he was?” Rourke said.

The pastor took his time answering, as if he were picking his words out of a minefield. “Father Pat was a well-loved priest, very popular, and because he was human that popularity gave him a certain pride and made him ambitious. I would have sworn, though, that he was chaste.”

“And yet now you're wondering.”

He lifted his shoulders in a small shrug. “It's just that when your archbishop does the kind of soft-shoe shuffle that I got from His Grace this morning, it's usually because one of your own has been caught diddling little boys. Or girls.”

“What kind of soft-shoe shuffle?”

“The don't-tell-anybody-anything-and-don't-ask-any-questions kind.”

“Yet here you are, telling me stuff and asking questions.”

Behind the thick lenses, the priest's eyes blinked once, twice. “Baseball ruled spitballs illegal back in '08. That doesn't mean they still don't pitch them.”