Wages of Sin (7 page)

Rourke looked down now at his brother's bent head, noticing how the once thick brown hair was growing thin on the crown. Yet there was still that familiar crescent pock of a scar on his right temple from where he'd fallen off a pier at the lake one summer. Rourke ached for his brother suddenly, as if the humiliation and disappointment of that long-ago evening were still fresh.

Fio uncrossed his arms and straightened, filling even more of the room. “What family did Father Pat have supper with last night?”

Father Ghilotti's shoulders came up and he rocked forward on the balls of his feet, as if his first thought had been to meet Fio in the middle of the room and have it out with his fists. “The Albert Payne Laytons,” he said instead, but with an edge to his voice now. “Mr. Albert is Holy Rosary's financial advisor, and Floriane de Lassus Layton is chairwoman of the board of our Catholic Charities.”

Rourke knew of the Laytons. He'd come into contact with the family peripherally while investigating a case last spring, where a young Negro chimney sweep by the name of Titus Dupre had been accused of the rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old white girl and suspected in the disappearance of another. The Laytons' daughter, Della, had been a classmate of the two victims, and Rourke had interviewed her briefly at their school, the St. Francis of Assisi Academy for Girls.

“If he had an appointment after that,” the priest was saying, “it would probably be in his book and that's upstairs in his bedroom. I'll get it for you.”

“No,” Rourke said. “We'll get it.”

The bedroom smelled of cigarette smoke.

It was the only vice they were to find among Father Patrick Walsh's few personal things. The bedroom itself was sparsely furnished, with a narrow iron bedstead painted white and a pine chest of drawers with a small matching rolltop desk. An electric fan was the only concession to comfort.

A prie-dieu stood in one corner, with a picture of a bleeding Sacred Heart tacked unframed above it. Rourke saw where the cushion on the prie-dieu had been removed, which would have made kneeling on it uncomfortable, even painful after a time. An act of penance, then, as well as prayer.

On top of the chest of drawers was a faux tortoiseshell-backed brush and comb set, but no matching mirror. No mirror anywhere in the room, Rourke realized. Nothing on the walls at all except for the picture of the Sacred Heart and a wooden crucifix above the bed. Nor were there any framed photographs on the surfaces of the furniture, or remnants of a life before the priesthood.

Rourke peeled back the coverlet on the bed. The sheets were of a rough, fibrous cotton, and the mattress he looked under was little more than a thin pallet lying on top of a thick board.

“He lived like a monk,” Rourke said.

“What'd you expect?” Fio said. “A Hollywood boudoir?” He was skimming the titles of the books on the shelf above the desk. He plucked one off and read the spine. “St. Thomas Aquinas.” He shook it to see if anything fell out.

“He was a diocesan priest, though,” Rourke said. “They take vows of obedience and celibacy, but not poverty. And the Church not only provides room and board, but also a salary. So what did Father Walsh spend his paycheck on?”

Fio slid the book back on the shelf. “Maybe he played the ponies. Or maybe he's got a woman or a Nancy-boy tucked away somewhere. Wouldn't be the first time.”

On the stand by the bed was a Bible, a breviary, and a goose-necked lamp. Its single drawer held a couple of packs of cigarettes, matches, a pencil, and a cheap spiral steno pad in which the dead priest had jotted down fragments of thoughts and ideas for future homilies. Rourke slipped it in his pocket.

The drawers in the chest held nothing but clothes, except for the top one where Rourke found the promised appointment book. It was bound with embossed green leather, its pages edged with gilt—a surprisingly expensive item, given the spartan existence revealed by the rest of the room.

Rourke flipped through it. Father Walsh's days had been full, so full that he'd made sure to schedule in his book an hour at two o'clock every afternoon for prayer. Alphabetized pages in the back of the book were crammed with names and phone numbers and addresses.

Rourke went back to yesterday's date. The last entry, scrawled through the hours of seven to ten in the evening, was simply the name Flo. Not Floriane de Lassus Layton, nor Mrs. Layton, but Flo. Rourke noticed how the entries from that day had been neatly printed, but “Flo” had been written with a flourish, as if the hand that held the pen had been excited, happy. Or maybe, Rourke thought with an inward smile at his own fancifulness, the hand had simply been in a hurry.

The book was too big for his pocket, and so Rourke tucked it into the crook of his arm. “Anything?” he asked Fio, who had been going through the small rolltop desk.

“Just the usual,” Fio said. “Receipts, stuff like that. And a lot of letters from people who'd read his book. ‘Dear Father Pat, You've changed my life,’ and all that baloney.”

“Let's bring those, too. Maybe somebody's life didn't get changed for the better.”

Leaving Fio to finish up with the desk, Rourke started out the door, but he stopped on the way for a closer look at the crucifix over the bed. The tiny brass nails were driven through the Christ figure's palms, not his wrists.

At the end of the hall a small chapel had been built into a window alcove overlooking the garden. The window was set with beveled glass, and fragile ribbons of early morning sunlight shone through it onto the mahogany altar and bronze crucifix. Rourke looked at the nails.

Through the hands.

He heard a step behind him and he turned. An old man stood in the arched doorway of the chapel, wearing nothing but an old-fashioned pair of long johns. His hair, the color of dirty snow, grew in a circle of wild drifts around his head. His face was thick with sleep.

“You shouldn't be in the chapel,” he said. “You get out of here right now.”

Father Ghilotti appeared beside the old man to slip an arm around his shoulders. “It's all right, Father,” he said, leading the old man away. “Why don't you get dressed and we'll have some breakfast together. I'll fry us up some more lost bread.”

Rourke looked out the window, waiting while Father Ghilotti took the old priest back into his bedroom. The garden below was abloom with hibiscus and blue and pink hydrangeas. A plaster statue of the Virgin Mary sat in a niche in a stone wall surrounded by white blossoms of tea olive. A stone bench faced the statue and was shaded by a mimosa tree whose branches swayed in the wind. On the bench sat Rourke's brother, hunched over and with his hands gripping his thighs.

“Please forgive Father Delaney,” Holy Rosary's pastor said, appearing back in the arched doorway. “He has these bad turns lately. He's long retired, of course, but he was the pastor here for forty years before me. This is his home and I couldn't bear to send him to another.” He genuflected before the altar and then turned to face Rourke. “Don't you think I deserve to be told how my priest was murdered.”

“I haven't said he was murdered.”

“Don't be coy, Detective. He wouldn't have died a natural death in a macaroni factory in the Quarter at two in the morning.”

“The coroner wasn't sure about the exact cause of death. He's doing a postmortem.”

A strange smile—one that Rourke couldn't read—pulled at Father Ghilotti's small mouth. “It's your roll, Detective, so I guess all I can do at the moment is sit back and wait for you to crap out…I see you've found Father Pat's appointment book without any trouble. It was a Christmas gift from me to him, the book. He rarely spent any money on himself, but then he grew up poor and he never seemed to pine for the finer things.”

“And what do you pine for, Father?”

“Just what you would expect, of course,” he said, the irony deliberate and thick now in his voice. “Wine, women, and song.”

He put his hand in the pocket of his cassock and pulled out a rosary. He stared down at it, watching his own fingers rub the ebony beads. “I might as well tell you then, since you'll learn of it soon enough. Father Pat and I had quite a noisy disagreement yesterday afternoon.”

“How noisy?”

Again that strange smile. “Holy water doesn't flow in our veins, you know. There was some shouting. Some name calling. A rectory is like a family and all families have their spats.”

“In my family, when there was a spat, somebody usually got the crap beat out of him.”

The priest's hand closed hard around the rosary's crucifix and his head snapped up. “Was Father Pat beaten?”

“What was your disagreement about?”

A few seconds of silence ticked by before he answered. “As a preacher, Father Pat had a style that was…unorthodox. It's hard to describe if you haven't heard it. It was joyful, exuberant, and loud. Really loud. It wasn't exactly like a holy roller prayer meeting, but it was close.”

“So what if he had 'em shouting hallelujahs, as long as he was packing them in? And filling up the collection basket.”

“Yeah, well, there was that. He probably got twice as many worshippers at his Masses as the rest of us did put together. But lately some of the stuff he was saying in his homilies was flat-out contrary to the teachings of the Catholic faith, and so I forbade him to preach. I told him he could celebrate the Mass for the sisters in the convent, but no longer for the laity. And no more preaching. I told him a priest calls people to holiness and challenges them to a better life, but he does not make the Church about himself. Father Pat took offense and we ended up hollering at each other like a couple of guys at a boxing match.”

“Do you think someone hated this style of his enough to kill him for it?”

The pastor blew out a hard breath, as if he'd just been punched. “Oh, God. I would have said until this moment that everybody loved Father Pat. And he was especially beloved in the eyes of our Lord, I do truly believe. Beloved and chosen.” He turned his head and his gaze lifted to the bronze crucifix above the altar, and Rourke thought he saw a painful light like a burning match in his eyes. Or it could have simply been sunlight from the window glancing off his thick glasses.

“When I was a kid,” Father Ghilotti said, “I had a favorite uncle who was also my
parrain.
He stood up for me at my baptism. He gave me expensive toys on my birthday and took me places, just the two of us together, like to West Park and the zoo. On the day of my confirmation, when I was twelve, my family had a big celebration and as my godfather he was there, of course. After the party was over, he left in a car with a couple of my old man's goons and he was never seen or heard from again.”

He stopped, closing his eyes, and he might have been praying, or he might only have been remembering. “I saw them looking at each other,” he went on, and his voice had taken on a street flatness. “My
parrain
and my daddy, before he got in the car. He knew what they were going to do to him and he knew why. They were brothers, but it was business.”

He looked down and saw that he still had the rosary in his fist and he thrust it back into his pocket. “Nobody's safe,” he said. “Not even a beloved priest.”

“Did you kill him?”

The face he showed Rourke was both tough and open. “No, I didn't kill him. When I took my vows, I stopped being my daddy's son.”

Rourke looked back out the window, where his brother still sat on the stone bench, curled in upon himself as if waiting for a reckoning that was sure to come, and sure to hurt.

It isn't true, Rourke thought. We are always and forever our father's sons.

The old priest, Father Delaney, was sitting at the kitchen table cradling a cup of coffee, a cigarette burning between yellowed, palsied fingers. He looked up as Rourke passed through on his way to the garden.

“You are the new assistant pastor,” the old man said. “Father Paul, is it?”

Rourke paused, his hand on the doorknob and turned back. Father Delaney tugged at that place in Rourke that wanted to save the world from all pain and folly. He couldn't imagine a worse horror than to grow old and go on living while your mind broke off of you in pieces and melted away.

“No, Father,” Rourke said. “Paul is my brother.”

The old man's watery blue eyes, vague and trembling, creased with his smile. “Two priests in one family. Your mother must be proud.”

“No, I'm not…Yes,” Rourke said, smiling back at him. “She's proud.” He'd never thought of himself as being like Paulie, not in looks nor in any other way that mattered. He wondered what connection this old priest, in his dementia, was seeing.

The old priest pointed his cigarette at the appointment book in Rourke's hand. “So now you've come for it, then. Because Father Pat is dead.”

“Yes. I'm sorry.”

“He was a good man, and he was particularly blessed, but he was…” His voice trailed off and he looked down at the coffee and the cigarette as if he suddenly couldn't remember how he'd acquired them.

“What was Father Pat?” Rourke prompted. He wasn't really expecting a coherent answer, but the gaze the old priest turned back up at him had cleared some.

“Lonely,” he said, in a voice that was stronger as well. “Oh, we're all lonely in a way, because our hearts are restless until they rest in peace with God. But this priest, he had a loneliness of the soul.”

Rourke followed a flagstone path and the smell of the tea olive to the stone bench where his brother sat. The morning sun was almost full up now and so bright it struck his eyes like shards of a broken mirror, making them shudder.

Paulie looked up at him with eyes that were swollen and red, then looked away. Rourke sat next to him, saying nothing. The plaster Virgin was wearing a blue robe and she had her hands pressed together palm to palm and tucked beneath her chin. She had a sweet look on her face. Rourke could imagine praying to her and the thought disturbed him. It had been a long time since he'd been on speaking terms with the icons of his faith.

He studied his brother's averted face a moment, then leaned over, bracing his forearms on his spread knees. “Paulie—”

“So how was the party of the century?”