Wages of Sin (42 page)

“Yesterday morning,” Rourke said, “you tried to cover your ass by returning what you'd taken from the Charities' accounts. Where did that money come from?”

Father Ghilotti's back jerked as if he'd been punched, but he said, “You know where. From my father, of course. It seems I am his son after all.” He reached for the doorknob, but he still didn't open it. “Your brother told me once, Detective, that you like to think of yourself as so cynical and tough, but what you really are is the most idealistic man he's ever known.”

Rourke shook his head, not wanting to believe it, because in a bit of irony that wasn't entirely lost on him, he thought it made him seem weak. “Paulie doesn't know me. He left home to enter the seminary when I was thirteen, and we've maybe seen each other only two or three times a year since then.”

“That's a pity,” Father Ghilotti said, “because y'all are more alike than you realize. Deep in your hearts you both wish that God still made burning bushes.”

Rourke went home and woke up Remy and they made soft, early morning love. Then he slept around the clock and when the telephone rang again it was just past seven on Wednesday morning and her side of the bed was empty.

He fumbled the telephone to his face and croaked, “Yeah?” His head this time feeling fuzzy because he'd gotten too much sleep.

The phone crackled in his ear. “O'Brien here, Loo. I'm calling from the Carrollton-City Park box. He's finally led us to the woman. Only there's been some trouble.”

Rourke shucked into his clothes, unshaven and unwashed, and tore out of the
garçonnière
at a half run, heading for the Rampart Street garage. He got as far as the corner before he remembered with a bite of melancholy what had happened to the 'Cat.

He went back home through the carriageway and got his old Indian Chief motorcycle from where he kept it in a shed at the back end of the courtyard. Ten minutes later, he was driving the Indian up onto the lawn of a double shotgun on Carrollton Avenue.

Two uniform cops stood with their hands on their hips, jawing with each other beneath a lone, straggly palm that grew in the middle of the scraggly yard. One was the man who'd been put on the surveillance of Rourke's brother, and the other was Jack Murphy, whom Rourke had first met four nights ago, standing next to the crucified body of a priest.

Paulie, dressed in his black cassock, sat on the running board of a shiny new Lincoln with his head in his hands.

It was the woman, though, that Rourke went to first. She sat on the stoop—a woman in a rose-printed housedress, and with wheat-colored hair and a heart-shaped face. Her left eye was swollen into a purple knot and a cut on her mouth trickled blood. Two little girls stood on either side of her, at her shoulders. One was a toddler and the other was around Katie's age.

Rourke took a deep breath of sour air. “Who hit you?” he said.

The woman's gaze flashed to the men under the palm tree. “He didn't mean to,” she said.

For some reason that made no sense now that he thought about it, Rourke had assumed that Jack Murphy was here at this house on this morning as part of the job. Now he realized, with a sudden hard twist in his gut, that the woman and the kids on the stoop were his.

“Do you want to press charges of assault?” Rourke said to the woman, but the question came out harsh because of the anger he was holding back.

The woman looked up at him, weary, defeated, having been through this too many times before. “He's a cop. Just like y'all.”

“Press charges and I promise I'll see it through.”

She looked back at her man where he stood under the palm tree. He and the other cop were laughing about something now. He was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet and the laughter shone on his face, and the woman's face softened as she watched him.

“I don't want him going to jail,” she said. “I love him.”

Rourke turned away, but then he made the mistake of looking back. The little girl who was about Katie's age was watching him leave with drowning eyes. Eyes that said,
Make it stop. Please, you got to make it stop.

Rourke didn't go near Jack Murphy under the palm tree because he was afraid for the moment of what he might do to the guy.

He went to his brother instead, not feeling particularly charitable toward him either. Paulie heard him coming and dropped his hands from his face, looking up.

“You've been having me followed like I'm some sort of criminal,” he said.

“Is this your car?” Rourke said.

“It's Father Frank's. I borrowed it.”

“Give me the key and get in,” Rourke said.

“But—”

“Get in the goddamn car.”

“What is the penalty for impersonating a priest?” Paulie said.

For a moment Rourke thought with a jolt that he was talking about Father Pat, and then he understood that his brother was only talking about himself.

“Eternal damnation probably.”

Paulie had been looking at the ground between his feet, but now his head jerked up and the eyes he turned to Rourke were bloodshot and wide. “You aren't happy, are you, Day, without an excuse to be mean?”

“Jesus.”

They were sitting on the bottom row of the small grandstand that overlooked the baseball diamond in City Park, where they'd played some good pickup games with the other neighborhood teams when they were kids. The outfield grass looked smooth as green velvet beneath the low-lying clouds, but Rourke knew that if you walked out into it you'd find the gopher holes and dandelion weeds.

“When I was in the seminary,” Paulie said, “we had this priest who always answered our questions on Catholic morality with one of his own. He would say, ‘What would Jesus do?’ You saw her, Day. You saw what he's always doing to her. What do you think Jesus would do?”

“Lord, brother. That's one question I surely don't go around asking myself.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Hey.” Rourke pushed to his feet and walked off a couple of steps before he put his fist through something, then he swung back around. “I'm not the one here banging some other guy's wife.”

“I told you, I'm not…doing that with her.”

Rourke flung his arms out from his sides. “Sweet Jesus. What do you want from me?”

“How about some simple, brotherly advice?”

Rourke strode away again, came back. “Fine. My first piece of advice is to walk away from her now and stay away. She's married, she's Catholic, and you're a priest. My second piece of advice would be to go find a nice, clean bordello and visit the place once a month, except that you're too priggish and righteous and you're probably still a fuckin' virgin and, oh, did I mention that you're a priest?”

“God help me,” Paulie said. “I'm in love with her.”

There probably wasn't a man in the world who didn't know how much it goddamn broke your heart when the woman you wanted above all others belonged to somebody else, and Rourke thought of the look on the woman's face and her saying,
I love him,
only she'd been talking about her husband, about Jack Murphy, and not Paulie, and Rourke ached now for his brother. There was going to be no happily-ever-after ending to this scenario.

“Also, I think…” he began, and then decided maybe Paulie had been slapped in the face with enough truths on this morning.

Paulie stared at him out of bleak eyes. “What?”

“I think that some things are worth the sacrifices you've got to make to have them. And that's all the soul-searching you're going to be getting out of me today.”

Paulie's throat worked, trying to swallow, and Rourke thought that what kept getting stuck there was that same knot of hopelessness and desperation that he'd seen in the little girl's eyes.
You got to make it stop.
It doesn't ever go away, that feeling, not even after
it
has stopped and you've grown up and your daddy's dead.

“He shouldn't be allowed to beat the snot out of her like that,” Paulie said.

“No, he shouldn't.”

“But…”

“What?”

“You were about to give me a ‘but,’” Paulie said.

“Okay. Jack Murphy is a cop, and cops don't arrest other cops if they can help it, unless it's for capital murder and even then the guy's got to practically be caught with the smoking gun in his hand. And the DA's office tends to shy away from prosecuting wife beaters unless or until the woman ends up dead, mostly because the woman usually backs out before it gets to trial. The lawyers, the judge, the jury—they're all men, and hell, I don't know…maybe most of them figure that if he popped her one, she probably deserved it. You and I know that isn't right, the whole fucking world knows it isn't right, but that's how it is.”

“Fuck how it is,” Paulie said, but the vulgarity had sounded strained, as if he was trying it on for size and it wasn't fitting.

He looked away from Rourke, out over the baseball diamond. His lips were taut and gray, and he kept swallowing as if he had a fishbone in his throat. He was fighting his way back from the edge, Rourke thought, and so he left him alone.

“Field of dreams,” Paulie finally said. “It always broke my heart that I was never any good at that game.”

Rourke kept his mouth shut on all the things he could have said to that, like:
You never even tried to play the game, big brother. Yo u never really swung the bat like you were going for the fences.

“I heard,” Paulie said, “that there was another terrible tragedy last night. That Mrs. Layton shot her husband dead.”

Now that, on the other hand, was worthy of a comment or two. “Yeah, and now it's come to light,” Rourke said, putting some cop into his voice, “that you weren't the only priest at Holy Rosary making devil's bargains with Father Pat.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Paulie said. “I told you there was never any bargain. I begged him for a second chance and he gave it to me.”

“You're lying through your teeth again,” Rourke said mildly. “You remember the Sunday the
Times-Picayune
reporter came to do a story on Holy Rosary's famous and popular priest? He photographed Father Pat celebrating a Mass, and because it was such a big deal, y'all didn't use the regular altar boys. No, a special Mass like that, it wouldn't at all have been unusual for one priest to serve another. You served Father Pat at his Mass the day the reporter came, didn't you, Paulie? I know because you were in the photograph. So tell me what happened at the end of it.”

Paulie's face had gone gray all over and there was a tick in his cheek. “Nothing happened,” he said.

“Father Pat was sweating blood that day, wasn't he? From his head and his hands.”

The breath exploded out of his brother as if he'd been punched. “God. How do you find out these things?”

“It was just simple detective work, not hoodoo. The photographer caught it, but he didn't know what he had; he probably thought the film was defective. I put it together when I learned that Father Pat had sweated blood at least once before.”

Paulie leaned over and braced his elbows on his thighs so that he could rub his face with his hands, then he gripped his head as if he were literally trying to pull himself back together.

“It must have happened right at the end,” he said, “because no one noticed it until we were back in the vestry.” He straightened again and tried to laugh, but it broke coming out. “I mean, you tell yourself you believe in God's miracles, but when you're actually face-to-face with one…His palms were
bleeding,
Day. Just like Christ's wounds.”

“If it had been just like Christ's wounds, he'd have been bleeding at the wrists.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“There isn't much more to it. He tried to convince me it wasn't really happening, but I could see it with my own eyes. So then he begged me not to tell anyone. I told you that I got down on my knees before him, but it was the other way around. Only I thought I
had
to tell, you know? For the Church's sake. And that was when he said he knew that I'd been seeing Colleen again while her husband was on the night trick, and that he'd tell on me if I told on him. God, you should've heard us. We sounded like a couple of kids, bargaining away our souls to try to get out of a spanking. Only what was at stake seemed like everything at the time, and I suppose you think that I got the better end of it.”

Rourke didn't suppose any such thing, but then when it came to secrets, he had a few up on his brother.

“But you would be wrong,” Paulie went on. “Because the archbishop would've cared plenty to know that Father Pat had finished up a Mass with bleeding hands, and as his obedient priest I should have told him. I don't know what Father Pat would have done, though, if I hadn't agreed to just pretend like it had never happened. If you could have seen him, Day…He was pure terrified of anyone who mattered in the Church knowing about this bleeding thing…this stigmata, I guess you could call it that, I don't know. I don't think I want to know…”

Rourke could well imagine the horror Father Pat must have felt when he looked down at his hands at the end of the Mass and saw them sweating blood. A politically sensitive and expedient archbishop like Peter Hannity would have reacted with both greed and wariness at the discovery that he had a possible moneymaking miracle going on in his archdiocese. He would've insisted that Father Pat be looked at by a whole bevy of doctors, to expose any fakery going on, and the medical examination would have ended up exposing Patrice LaPage instead.

“It all doesn't matter anymore, anyway,” Paulie said. “Now that Father Pat's dead.”

“No. It doesn't matter anymore.”

Yet the images in the photograph stayed in Rourke's mind. Father Pat with his hand raised in a blessing, just starting to bleed. Paulie standing behind him and off to the side, swinging a censer. And another man, wearing a server's alb, too, but almost cut out of the photographer's frame so that all you can see of him is his arm and a bit of his shoulder.

“Who served Father Pat along with you at the Mass that day?”

Paulie, who'd been holding his head in his hands again, looked up. “What?”

“There's usually at least two altar boys.”