Wages of Sin (19 page)

“So what do we do now?” Fio said. “We can't haul the archbishop and the priests of Holy Rosary down here and give them the third degree. We got nothin' to go at them with. A big fat goose egg is what we got.”

Rourke pushed himself off the wall and prowled the small room, his hands in his pockets, jiggling car keys and change. “I just can't see the Tony Benato we all knew and loved agreeing to front money for a crucifixion killing on anybody, let alone a priest. Not even for a half a brick of coke. Whoever was behind the contract must've had leverage on him.”

“The Ghilotti family's got plenty of leverage,” Malone said.

“The Ghilotti family could've done it themselves and for a lot less trouble.”

“So what are you saying?” Fio said. “That maybe we aren't totally fucked?”

Rourke stopped pacing to stare at a crack in the yellowed plaster wall. “We've jumped to some conclusions here. That Tony the Rat went into the confessional at Holy Rosary to get paid in cocaine for fronting some kind of hit on Father Pat, that the person doing the paying was another priest or connected with the Church in some way, and that Tony himself was killed in turn because of what he knew. Any one or even all of those conclusions could be wrong. We don't even know for sure if Father Pat was meant to end up dead. The word on the street was for a priest to be worked over, not killed.

“And besides…” He turned around and leaned back against the wall. “Besides, a guy like Tony the Rat goes soliciting murder, or even a beating, the somebody he's going to find to do the job would be more likely to use a brickbat in a dark alley somewhere, make it look like a mugging. This crucifixion thing—it's too…elaborate. And there was too much danger of the killer getting caught in the act—in fact, he almost did. It's like this guy had some kind of
relationship
with Father Pat.”

“This mornin',” Fio said, “you'd decided it wasn't a sex thing.”

“That was this morning and a man is entitled to change his mind.” Rourke tipped his head back, lightly banging it against the wall a couple of times. “It's just…I keep thinking there's something we're not seeing, but maybe we're getting all hung up on the method when it's the motive we should be looking into. Dirty Eddie said he'd gotten a feeling there was a jealous husband in the picture somewhere.”

“Hey, I can see that,” Fio said. “Guy comes home and finds his wife in the sack with another guy who turns out to be a priest who turns out to be a woman. That'd be enough to rile the Pope.”

“Yeah, well…” Malone pulled the bottom drawer of his desk out and propped his feet on it. He leaned back and laced his hands behind his head and cast a suspiciously benevolent eye at his two detectives. “Unless Tony the Rat ended up doing the killing himself—which I'm inclined at the moment to doubt—there's not only the somebody who wanted it done and put out the hit, or whatever it was supposed to be…there's the somebody who actually did do it. And what is going to happen here is that the two of you are going to find these somebodies, and then maybe I won't be firing your cabooses before the end of the week.”

The captain had even been grinning when he'd said it, but there was a
tone
there they'd never heard before. Fio caught Rourke's eyes and shrugged his shoulders. Rourke looked away so that he wouldn't smile.

“Day, stay one more minute,” Malone said as the two detectives were about to leave. He waited until the door had shut behind Fio's back and then he said, “Going through the file on this crucifixion case, I noticed that one of the priests at Holy Rosary—”

“Yeah. Father Paul Rourke is my brother.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“No.”

“'Cause if it's going to be a problem…”

“It won't be a problem.”

Fio was waiting at Rourke's desk, sitting in Rourke's chair with his feet up and his head back, studying the water marks on the ceiling.

“He wanted to know about Paulie,” Rourke said before his partner could ask. “He wanted to know if it could turn out to be a problem. I told him it wouldn't.”

Fio kept all expression off his face. Even his eyes were blank. “Okay,” he said.

He let his feet fall with a thud and stood up. He picked his hat off the blotter and stared at it for a moment, playing with the bullet hole in the crown. “Since of the two of us,” he said, “you're the one who's the hotshot dick with all the ideas and I'm just the dumb schmuck who goes along for the ride…it's your call. We could go roust Tony Benato's friends, except I don't think he had any. Or—”

“Why don't you call it a day?” Rourke interrupted. “You're looking about as beat as I feel, your arm must be hurting like the blue bejesus, and this case sure isn't getting solved tonight.”

“Or,” Fio went on, “we could both go home, spend some time with our families, get some shut-eye, and start all over again tomorrow, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, even though tomorrow's Sunday and Sundays are supposed to be our day off, but, what the hay, we're the city's finest and the city's finest never rests, and you're just like my wife, you never listen to a word I say.”

Rourke was checking his watch for the time—it was coming on six in the evening; Father Pat had been dead for sixteen hours. Rourke hadn't been to bed since he couldn't remember when and he was dead tired, but he also had that nerveless, focused feeling that could keep him going through a marathon game of cutthroat
bourré.
“You go on then,” he said to Fio, “and I'll catch you in the mornin'. I just want to spend a little time writing up reports for the case file, going over what we've got so far, and digesting all the pithy observations that I've been hearing you make throughout the day when you thought I wasn't listening.”

“Pithy observations,” Fio said as he wedged his hat back on his head and sauntered from the room. “Man, you'd think we could leave off discussing your dick for more than an hour or two at a time, but, no, it's always gotta be about you, you, you…”

The squad's desk sergeant was in charge of collecting the paper on the case. Rourke got the file from him and went back to his own desk. He poured himself a glass of rye from the bottle he kept stashed in his bottom drawer and settled down to read.

“Hey, Sarge,” Rourke called out after a minute. “I don't see Father Walsh's appointment book in here. Big, fancy green leather thing…”

“Nate Carroll's got it,” the desk sergeant said. “There were some phone numbers in there without names attached to 'em and he's running them down for y'all.”

So far, Rourke saw, five people had confessed to the murder. The captain would have put one of the other detectives on chasing those down as well, but it would be a waste of time. Gory, sexy murders like this one always got their share of loony birds coming forward to claim that some voice in their heads had told them to do it.

Nate Carroll and his partner, George Lappin, had canvassed the neighborhood around the macaroni factory and gotten zilch. They'd also talked to the housekeeper at Holy Rosary's rectory and she'd confirmed that the victim and Father Ghilotti had had “words” yesterday. She wasn't sure what the argument between the two priests had been about, but she thought it might have been money.

The Ghoul hadn't submitted his autopsy report yet, but Fio's photographs had been developed and they were ugly. The killing looked worse in black and white, Rourke thought. More obscene. There was something almost symbolically sexual in the close-ups of the nails piercing the wrists, the priest's hand and arm ethereally white against the black beam. Soft, white flesh being penetrated by the phallic-shaped spike. The black blood.

In one of the close-ups it looked like the flash lamp had caught some markings on the beam, next to the hand. Rourke dug a magnifying glass out of his desk and looked closer, confirming to himself what he had suspected. He'd seen enough suicides by hanging to recognize ligature marks left by a rope wrapped around wood.

Rourke tapped the magnifying glass on the photograph, thinking…Father Pat had probably been unconscious then, when he'd been brought to the macaroni factory. The killer had tied him up to the beam with ropes first, but then he would probably have waited for the priest to wake up. He would have wanted his victim aware when he drove the nails in, wanted him to feel it. Wanted him to hurt.

For a criminal law course that Rourke had taken at Loyola, he'd had to read a thesis paper by a Notre Dame psychologist,
Man's Death at the Hand of Man: The Psychology of Murder.
The paper had been mostly academic hoodoo, but there had been an interesting premise at the heart of it: that murder usually resulted from urge colliding with resistance. It could have been like that this time, Rourke thought. The priest could have had something the killer wanted and he had resisted giving it over. Or he hadn't had it in his power to give it over.

Or hadn't had it in
her
power…It could have been about sex after all, if the killer or whoever was behind the killer had wanted a kind of love that Father Pat the woman hadn't had in her power to give. A woman wanting a man, say, or a man wanting a man.

And urge would have collided with resistance.

The desk sergeant had gotten the newspapers to send over any clippings they had of Father Patrick Walsh, and Rourke flipped through them. Attached to the article on the priest that the
Times-Picayune
had run a few weeks ago was a glossy photograph of him taken at the end of a Mass. In the picture he had just turned from the altar, one hand raised to bless his congregation, and there was some kind of a black mark on the priest's palm. Rourke picked up the magnifying glass for a closer look, but he still couldn't tell what it was. It was too dark to be dirt; an ink stain maybe, or a small cut. Or maybe there had been a flaw in the negative, a problem with the film or the developing process, and that was why the photograph had not been printed with the article.

Rourke moved the magnifying glass onto the priest's face. Father Pat had been wearing such a look of utter joy that day. He literally
shone
with it, like a beacon in a lighthouse in a black night, on black water. Rourke thought that such an ecstasy of spiritual joy would be considered by some to be a form of holiness, and holiness, surely, was a form of power.

His power. Her power.

Who were you really, Patrick Walsh?

Rourke had been carrying the priest's spiral notebook around with him all day in his coat pocket, and he took it out now. He saw that a telephone number had been scrawled on the back flyleaf. It wasn't a New Orleans exchange, and Rourke started to write a note to Nate with the number so that the other cop could follow it up, but then he decided that he would check it out later himself. He also wanted to take the time to read through every word in the notebook, but for the moment he turned to the last few pages. Father Pat had been drafting a sermon on free will, and his own thoughts and quotations from the Bible and other sources had been recorded in a jumble as they had come to him.

We wonder,
he had written,
why God gave the human heart the power to feel pain. Surely an all-powerful God, a loving God, would have spared us that? Yet not only did God give our hearts the ability to suffer the unbearable, He gave our hearts a memory so that we might relive the suffering again and again. Why would God do such a thing to those He created in his image?

But no sooner do I put forth the question and allow my heart to open up to the will of God, then there is my answer: I must give everything over to the Lord Jesus Christ, including my pain, especially my pain. Only then will I know peace.

Other words, quotations it looked like. Rourke recognized one from Socrates: “A life unexamined is a life not worth living.” From the Psalms, from Job. From the apostle John: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

Everyone,
the priest had written underneath this quotation,
has one unalterable truth at their core, a truth that lives in the heart of their existence. Only the heart has a will and it guards itself well, and so it remains forever mysterious.

Two of the night shift cops came in just then carrying buckets of fried shrimp and cartons of dirty rice, and the squad room began to smell like a greasy diner. The cops were indulging in a running argument about the new cushioned cork-centered baseball introduced last year.

“That's why the Babe was able to hit sixty home runs this season,” the one cop said. “Fuckin' juiced balls are taking the sport out of the game.”

“See, there's where you're wrong, my friend,” the other cop said. “Babe Ruth might've slugged sixty homers, but he still struck out most times he went to the plate. Baseball isn't a sport, it's a metaphor for life. The diamond is eternity and the ball is the journey.”

“Yeah? And what's the fuckin' bat then, huh? Can you believe his shit?” the first cop asked of the squad room in general, but he got no answer.

Rourke ignored the cops' banter. He flipped back through the pages of the notebook, skimming, and then his brother's name caught his eye.

It was a note, scribbled in the margin next to a draft of a homily the priest had titled “Seeing God for the Trees.” The penmanship was ragged, the letters deep, desperate slashes across the page.

A wicked, wicked bargain. The woman can't be sacrificed on the altars of pride and faith. Must make Paul see.

Rourke braced his elbow on the desk and lowered his head into his hand, pressing his eyes closed with his thumb and two fingers. “Christ,” he said aloud.

He opened his eyes and stared at the words etched deeply into the cheap paper, not really seeing them but seeing instead his brother's face from a long time ago when they were kids. Faded pictures in a scrapbook that was probably better left tucked away and forgotten on a closet shelf somewhere.

They'd had some good times, though, surely? Like that day on the Gulf Coast when a crab had gotten tangled in his hair, and Paulie had laughed so hard he'd started choking and nearly passed out. Or that time when he'd accused Gladys O'Toole of having cooties in her drawers and she'd pulled them down to prove she didn't and, God, the expression on Paulie's face as he got his first glimpse of naked pussy…Like he hadn't known whether to shit or go blind.