Rabid (77 page)

People tortured on the rack must have cried out to God to end their suffering while a representative of the Church stood over them, a tragic bit of irony. The medieval sufferers on the rack and the current penitents in the Alps were all offered a chance to save their immortal souls, like Leila’s abuser would.

Even in the Church, psychology and sociology tainted judicial proceedings, just as Bev’s lawyer expounded. The laity had insisted that the Church to do something,
anything
, about the priests who abused children.

The business of the Church was saving souls, not policing.

The only organization within the Church dedicated to policing priests was historically draconian; but in order to save children from the priests, the Holy Office went about its work in the way that it always had.

Arrest.

Isolate.

Demand repentance.

Each part seemed logical.

The gestalt was heinous.

Yet the alternative, allowing the abusers to continue in some fashion, frocked or defrocked, sanctified or lay, was obscene.

Perhaps the priests, like the medieval victims of the Inquisition, cried out to God for relief from their pains, or their appetites, or their captors.

Dante hoped that they did.

~~~~~

Leila held onto her stiff-backed notepad of white paper and took notes because she compulsively took notes. She was not entirely sure why she wrote
first-degree murder charge includes premeditation
, but it seemed important. Maybe because the Inquisition’s conspiracies would be tried in the Hague or Nuremburg someday, if worldwide crimes were tried anymore.

She wrote,
malice aforethought, guilty conscience, conspiracy
.

Maybe pedophilia came in different degrees, if not legally, then morally.

Say, a sadistic pedophile who warped his victims’ minds might be a first-degree pedophile, or a creepy guy in a park might be committing second-degree child attack, but a man who happens to fall in love with a girl just a few years too young to legally give consent, like eight years too young, and if they maintained a relationship that wasn’t just about sex but were lovers, maybe that would be different, maybe that would be third-degree pedophilia, or maybe they should have a different word for it, like the difference between
murder
and
manslaughter
.

Leila wrote,
evidence of concealing the crime
.

~~~~~

Mary, Lydia, and Laura sat behind Bev and watched the prosecutor lay out her closing argument.

The prosecutor’s definition of first-degree murder differed from Heath Sheldon’s, and they wondered which one was correct.

Some people, busybodies mostly, had approached Lydia and Laura after Church last week. June Joseph’s plastic wrap skin had tinged crimson when she asked for their thoughts on who was going to take over the choir when Bev went to prison.

Laura had laughed at her.

“Well, she’s going to jail,” June said, “and we should be prepared for it. And it’ll be good riddance to bad rubbish. I don’t know why Father Dante let her continue to direct the choir these last few months, her not even taking communion and all.”

Lydia screamed at the old woman that she was a gossip and a hag and called a choir meeting to vote June Joseph off the choir. Lydia prevailed by three votes in choir of seventy-five people.

Most of the choir members who had voted with Lydia sat behind them now, supporting Bev. Their prayer circle before court had been composed of two concentric rings.

Mary cringed as the prosecutor glossed over Conroy’s many affairs, citing them all as immaterial and an attempt to smear the victim, and she tried not to show the cringing.

Lydia and Laura hadn’t been in court when that little snippet Leila had singled out Mary as another of Conroy’s conquests. Lydia and Laura still acted friendly and casual, like they didn’t know.

Bev must not have told them.

If Bev had told anyone, condemnation would have wafted through the church’s air and Mary would have had to change churches, perhaps to another county considering the familial and social ties that bind Catholic parishes. Mary was beholden to Bev for not ratting her out, and Mary would have bribed a jury member to hang the jury, or bribed them all to find Bev innocent, or threatened their families, if she had known how.

~~~~~

In her closing argument, Georgina replayed Conroy Sloan’s death. “Beverly Sloan was holding the steak knife when it stabbed Conroy Sloan. Her fingerprints were on the knife. The steak knife’s serrations scraped one of his ribs and then entered his pericardium, the membrane around his heart, and stabbed him in the left ventricle of his heart.”

Bev braced her palms on the table. When her lungs expanded, nothing filled them.

“Conroy Sloan bled to death inside his own chest until he finally suffocated from the pressure of cardiac tamponade and died of exsanguination,” Georgina said.

Bev’s fingernails bit the table. Those words,
cardiac tamponade
and
exsanguination
, those meant that blood had compressed his beating heart and he bled to death inside.

Again, medical vocabulary obscured horror.

Leaking blood had strangled his heart and lungs until his own blood had crushed him.

Georgina stared at the jury as she paced in front of them, reading the autopsy details. Several gazed back, nonplussed.

She finished her closing with, “Beverly Sloan was so enraged by her husband’s infidelity and his abandonment that she killed him that night. She waited to call nine-one-one for help until he was unconscious. She
murdered
him. She knew what she was doing when she drove a knife into his chest and into his heart and
she
murdered him
.”

Bev’s head dropped forward onto her folded arms. The fake wood table blurred an inch from her eyes.

Murder
.

The knife had slipped into Conroy’s chest, through his white shirt, just to the right of a pearly shirt button.

She timed it like she timed the impact of a golf club whipping through a ball.

She could have turned her hand aside,
but she hadn’t
.

Bev had
murdered
him.

Murder.

Murderer.

~~~~~

Dante left court early, had a few drinks at the Dublin, and walked into his church. His black shirt sucked the July sun and fattened with heat.

In one arm of the cruciform church, Bev’s hourglass silhouette, kneeling at the Marian niche, shifted.

Dante closed the doors behind him. The air conditioner sprayed chilly cross-streams into the church, fighting the sunlight rolling on the roof and lancing through the stained glass windows. Floating ochre, green, and purple puddled the warm air he walked through toward Bev.

Jury deliberations began tomorrow. For the next few days, his phone hung in his pocket, anticipating the call from Laura who had heard from Bev who had been called by her lawyer who had been notified by the court that the jury had reached a verdict.

Dante sat on the floor beside her, resting his tired back against the wall. Arthritic soreness had infested his skeleton for months. Finding a comfortable position on the wood floor was wasted time, so he adjusted for the least torturous. “I could hear your confession, if you want.”

“I can’t.” Her Rosary hung in her fingers like a beaded noose,
sans
corpse. Purple and gold squares of light draped her white blouse like handkerchief ghosts.

Dante’s own heart clenched in pity or jealousy. “God decides what is to be forgiven.”

“God can’t hear me.” Her caramel hair was sleek with the slightest curls from the twist she had worn at court.

If he touched her hair, the spidersilk strands would cling to his fingers’ calluses. If he touched her, his hand might reach for her neck, cradle her head, tilt her face, and he looked away into the rows of sun-stained church pews below them. He was still
un cazzone
. Dante combed his hair with his fingers to drag it off his damp face. “God hears us all when we pray.”

“Not me. I can’t hear Them anymore.”

“Who is
them
?”

“Mary, mostly. Well, I’ve only really
heard
Mary.”

“You
hear
voices?” He wanted to take back the derisive tone.

“Only the once,” she said. “Other than that, I felt God’s presence.”

Dante scoffed but caught himself before he rolled his eyes. “God is always present.” If one believes that sort of thing.

“I can’t feel Them anymore. It’s like an absence, darkness,” Bev said. “Like when a light bulb blows, or the silence when an air conditioner shuts off. A lack.”

“So you’re not hearing voices.” The back of Dante’s head ground against the plaster wall as he tried to stretch a kink out of his neck.

“Not anymore.”

Visitations, voices, interventions were all metaphors for the great Mystery that was mysterious because it was intangible, not sensory. He wished his neck would not hurt so. “Not hearing voices
anymore
?”

“I saw the Virgin Mary once.” Bev gestured aimlessly with floating fingers toward the towering porcelain figurine in the niche. “In Chicago.”

“The Holy Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, was in Chicago.” Maybe the Blessed Virgin Mother of God was hungry for a Chicago hot dog.

No, she would have kept kosher.

He adjusted his tailbone on the wood floor. “In a tortilla? Or an oil smear on a window?”

Bev said, “No, in the Church of St. Sophia. In Her niche.”

A good priest could shake Bev out of such silly posturing. Dante rubbed his face in exasperation. “A corporeal visitation.”

“Well,” Bev’s smooth forehead and lineless eyes suggested she was discussing lunch, “the statue didn’t come to life. It was more like an image moving over the surface of the statue, like ripples on water.”

No one sane could believe such magical happenings. An atypical anti-psychotic was the first drug an American doctor would prescribe. “Have you had other hallucinations?”

“It wasn’t a hallucination. I really saw it.”

That was the very definition of a hallucination, that they
really saw
it. “And what did the Blessed Virgin say?”

“She said that it was all right if I converted to Judaism for Malachi, that She and God wouldn’t leave me.”

“Malachi, the Israeli boyfriend.” Another man she didn’t love.

She nodded. “He has a little business in Tel Aviv, now. Wife. Four kids.”

Dante looked askance.

“Internet,” she said.