Wages of Sin (26 page)

“Bertie, don't. He was our priest.”

“I'm sorry. Was I being flippant? I didn't mean to be.”

Rourke smiled at him and said, “I'd like to know where you were, Mr. Layton, during the late hours of Friday night. Say, between midnight and three.”

It happened sometimes when you were interviewing a suspect or witness. You saw it deep in the back of their eyes—a little
click,
like the shutter on a camera. A revealing flash that told you that here was someone with something to hide.

And Albert Payne Layton appeared to be a man who relished his secrets, sucking on them and savoring them like they were hard rock candy. “Must we go into that here, Detective?” he was saying, lowering his voice and looking around the emptying nave. “We are, after all, in the presence of the Holy Eucharist.”

“We can go into it downtown in the squad room,” Rourke said, still smiling. “Where I keep a sockful of nickels in my desk drawer.”

Layton laughed and gave a little shudder. “Dear me. I've heard about the methods you cops use to beat the truth out of your suspects.” He paused and then made his eyes go wide, as if suddenly shocked. “Am I a suspect? Good heavens, I rather hope not, since I grow queasy at the merest sight of blood, especially my own…” Another pause, followed by a little sigh of surrender and a chagrined glance at Mrs. Layton. “If you must know, I spent the night, the whole night, with a woman other than my wife, but one who can and will support my alibi, and in public if necessary. Should that be necessary.”

“We can be discreet, but we will need to talk to her,” Rourke said, thinking: That, Mr. Albert Payne Layton, was smoothly, if a bit too obviously, done. And all the while there had been laughter in those pale eyes. Laughter and something else.

That little
click.

Rourke found his brother with the two altar boys back in Holy Rosary's oak-paneled vestry. One boy was helping the priest take off his chasuble, the vestment worn to celebrate the Mass. It was a heavy satin and brocade cloak, green for this time of the liturgical season, and thickly embroidered with silver and gold thread.

The other boy was putting the holy oils away in a mother-of-pearl cabinet and laughing about something. Laughter that cut off abruptly when he glanced up and saw Rourke in the doorway.

“Give me a few minutes alone with Father, would you please?” Rourke said.

The two boys looked to their priest, who nodded.

“Well, Day,” Paulie said, when they were alone. “I wish I could believe it was devotion that brought you to Mass this morning, but I am thankful nonetheless.”

Rourke said nothing. He looked at his brother and saw that since yesterday morning the fear had found its way into the cast of his eyes and the set of his mouth. Their mother's mouth, Rourke realized suddenly, and for the first time. Paulie had their mother's mouth, and the thought made him feel sick.

Paulie turned his back to him, going to the big walnut armoire that housed the priests' vestments. “What've you done with your Katie?”

Rourke waited another beat and then said, “I parked her in your Sunday school and told her to think about frogs. Maybe it'll do her some good, although I doubt it.”

“Never did you any good. In fact, the way I remember it, you used to terrorize the poor nuns who taught Sunday school at St. Alphonsus.” He took off his cincture and stole and hung them in the wardrobe. “So how come Katie has to think about frogs?”

Rourke recounted Katie's latest campaign to rid the Conti Street house of Mrs. O'Reilly, telling it in such a way that he soon had his brother laughing. In a street brawl, it always helped if you distracted your opponent before you nailed him with your sucker punch.

“You reap what you sow, little brother,” Paulie said, when he was done. “Remember how we used to go out and catch crawfish in the ditch after it rained and that one time when you found a baby alligator? You tried to make a pet out of him. You used to take him for a walk on a leash just for the pleasure of seeing all the neighbor ladies run off screaming into the night.”

“Yeah, yeah. I remember,” Rourke said. “But don't you ever go telling Katie that story. Not if you care at all about my peace of mind.”

Paulie laughed again, but he was still being careful most of the time to avoid Rourke's eyes. He untied the amice from around his neck, took it off and folded it, making a slow and careful production out of it.

“Who's the woman?” Rourke said.

Paulie's head snapped up. He blinked and his mouth actually fell open, just like a character's in a comic strip.

“What woman?” he finally said, having waited way too long to go into his innocent act. “I don't know what—”

Rourke had closed the distance between them in two strides. He grabbed his brother's shoulders and slammed him up against the wall, so hard he heard Paulie's teeth knock together.

He asked it again, punctuating each word with a slam, so that his brother's head was smacking a tattoo against the plaster. “Who is the woman?”

“God,” Paulie said, the word exploding out of him. “Will you look at yourself? You're just like—” He cut it off, stopped by the pure, unadulterated fury on Rourke's face.

Rourke held his brother hard up against the wall, his fists crushing the fine linen of his priestly alb, held him until he felt the flesh beneath his hands begin to tremble, and then he let him go.

He started to turn away, then spun back around and pointed his finger between Paulie's eyes. “I can help you. But you got to stop fuckin' lying to me.”

Paulie stayed flattened against the wall, as if he'd been hung there, and then all the air seemed to collapse out of him. He tried for a smile, failing badly. “I suppose it's useful to have a cop for a brother, but I haven't committed any crime, Day. Not even spitting on the sidewalk, as God is my witness.”

He groped his way along the wall until he found a chair and eased into it. His hands clutched his thighs and he looked at the floor.

“What,” Rourke said, “was the bargain that you made with Father Pat?”

Slowly, Paulie lifted his head. A tic had started up at one corner of his mouth. Their mother's mouth. In his eyes was the reckless desperation that you often saw in the eyes of the man sitting across the
bourré
table from you, when he suddenly realizes he might have to cover a pot he can't afford.

“My God,” Paulie said again. “How do you find out these things?”

Rourke didn't tell him it was a simple matter of reading the dead priest's notebook. He tried pushing the anger out of himself, coming down off the balls of his feet and putting his hands in his pockets. “Is there any wine in here that hasn't been made into a miracle?”

A set of cupboards bracketed the locked showcase that displayed Holy Rosary's treasure: gold-plated patens and a pearl-encrusted pyx, and a tabernacle fashioned of beaten silver. Rourke looked in the right cupboard first and found a bottle of bourbon and a glass in the bottom drawer.

He poured the bourbon in the glass up to the rim and put it in Paulie's shaking hands. Paulie drank it down fast, in two swallows, and with some apparent experience, and Rourke thought of how often they'd both heard their father say that all a man needed to get through the day was a little booze and God's good grace.

Rourke refilled the glass, and his brother drank some more, slower this time. “Let's start with her name,” Rourke said.

Paulie shook his head, and the rim of the whiskey glass clicked against his teeth. “If I tell you everything else, can we leave her name out of it? She's in a…difficult marriage, and they have children. They could all be hurt.”

“Go on then for now,” Rourke said. “Maybe we'll get back to her name later after I hear what you have to say.” He'd know the woman's identity before long anyway. Since yesterday evening, they'd had a tail on all the priests of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. Sooner or later, Paulie would lead them right to her.

“It happened last spring,” Paulie said to the floor, “when I was still over at Immaculate Conception. You can't imagine how lonely I've…” He stopped, laughing harshly. “No, of course you can't. Not my little brother, who just happens to be sleeping with the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“Sometimes,” Rourke said, “a bedroom can be the loneliest place on God's earth.”

Paulie was quiet for a moment, and then he sighed. “Forget I said that. I'm probably only jealous because, priest or not, I wouldn't have the confidence even to say hey to your kind of woman.” He waved an impatient hand. “It's not about sex, or celibacy and the Church, anyway—not only about that.”

He went silent again, but this time Rourke waited him out, knowing that his brother had come to that place where he had to unload at least part of the burden because carrying it had become unendurable.

“It's as if,” Paulie finally said, “I spend my life caught inside some kind of giant soap bubble. I can see things, but they're all blurry. I can hear, but the sounds are muted. Worst of all, I can't touch anybody and nobody can touch me. People come to me—they come to
me
, and they confess how lonely they are, and I tell them to look to God, that God will give them a friendship more glorious than any they can ever imagine, and all the while I'm thinking that I don't even know where God is anymore. Then one Sunday I mount the pulpit to give my homily and I look out over the congregation and I see her, and it was as if someone had come along and whitewashed the world.”

Paulie raised his head. He had been crying again. “I thought all I wanted was the closeness, you know? To be able to put my arms around her and feel her head on my shoulder. To sit across from her at the kitchen table and wait for her to look up at me and smile. But then after a while the holding and smiling weren't enough and I realized that I was lusting after her in my heart, and now you're laughing at me.”

“I'm not laughing at you,” Rourke said, lying a little. “It just sounded so quaint and old-fashioned, to be lusting in your heart.”

“Yeah, well I'm a priest, remember? And that's pretty much all the lusting that God wants me to do.”

Most people, thought Rourke, subscribed to a hierarchy of wrong: there was dead wrong, there was wrong but not bad, and there was wrong but everybody does it. Not the Rourke brothers, though. Uh-uh. For them there was always only wrong and right. Even their daddy had had that uncompromising and unaccommodating view of the world; it was, in fact, what had destroyed him. Becoming a cop and a priest was probably the last thing the two sons of Mike Rourke should ever have done.

“It would have been bad enough,” Paulie was saying, “if I was her next-door neighbor wanting to…to lie with her, a married woman. But I'm her priest and so for me to touch her in that way, that would be like God doing it. Like Jesus doing it. I was putting both our immortal souls in danger, and so I confessed my sin to the archbishop. He sent me here to Holy Rosary, and as part of my penance I had to swear a solemn vow never to go near her again.”

He let go of his knees and rubbed his face, pushed his face hard into his hands, as if he wanted to rip off his flesh. Then he let his hands fall back into his lap.

“I managed to stay away from her for a while,” he said, “but it was too…I just couldn't bear not seeing her. So I did see her.”

“And Father Pat found out about it,” Rourke said.

Paulie squeezed his eyes shut and nodded, swallowing hard. “He felt it was his duty to inform the archbishop of my disobedience and he was right. Only I pleaded with him—God, I'm telling you, Day, I literally got down on my knees and begged him not to tell. He shouldn't have given in to me, but he did. And I swore again on the altar that I would stay away from her.”

“Only you couldn't.”

“God help me, but I did try.”

His brother was also, Rourke thought, one of those who needed to be caught telling a lie while he was telling it. Father Paul, the priest, might have started out to bare his soul with the truth, but Rourke was almost certain that he was lying about something now.

“So you went over to her house Friday night for supper,” Rourke said. “The night Father Pat was killed.”

Paulie nodded, then said on a gasp, “Yes.”

“Did you stay there with her the whole night?”

He nodded again, swallowed. “Her husband works a night shift. And when he comes home to her in the morning, he smells like a parlor chippy and he's already half in the bag. He's still drinking when he…claims his conjugal rights of her, and when he's done he passes out drooling a river of spit, and as she's telling me this, she's sitting across from me with a split lip and her eye all puffed up, and I'm thinking that what this man is, Day, what her husband is, is our own daddy come back to life.”

A fury, seeming to come out of nowhere, surged through Rourke, balling his hands into fists. He took a step toward his brother, with some thought of slamming him up against the wall some more, of hitting him, maybe, only the other man's tormented face stopped him.

That didn't stop him from unloading the words, though. “You don't know a fucking thing about it, since you made sure you got your ass out of there before it got bad. So the old man liked his booze and he had a temper—he wasn't either the first or the only one. And you're forgetting how he took us fishing up at the lake every summer, and showed us how to strip a car's engine and pitch a sinker ball. He could tell a fine story and laugh at himself, and he was a good cop—”

Paulie came off the chair so hard and fast that for a moment Rourke thought his brother was going to take a swing at him. “My God, how can you stand there and defend him?” Paulie cried. “He was our enemy. He waged
war
on us.”

“Then you should've stayed and fought back, damn you. When I think of all the times that I—”

“That you what? Got in his face for my sake? I never asked you to be my whipping boy.”

He had, as a matter of fact, but Rourke didn't want to go down that road. Suddenly he and his brother were face-to-face and seeing in each other's eyes the kind of secret and shared knowledge that makes you ashamed of your own thoughts. Ashamed of the memories of what went on in that house in the Irish Channel.