The Judgment (51 page)

And what about the van that had eluded the cops out on Copper Creek Road? It could have been the one I’d seen parked by the rectory on my two visits to Father Chuck, and the same one in which, according to Doris Dieberman, the priest would pick up the children from school for special activities at Our Lady of Sorrows.

And it was funny that Bud Billings hadn’t mentioned it, but he had had the strong feeling during the interrogation of Sam Evans that the kid had recognized the driver of the car out there on Clarion Road, the one who had placed the body of Catherine Quigley by the side of the road. Because of Bud’s own feelings about Sam’s father, he had suspected that it was Delbert Evans that young Sam had seen out there. Well, clearly it was not. Clearly, it was somebody else.

Just say that it had been Father Chuck who he had seen out there that night; why would Sam Evans have held back? First of all, because of the false accusation he had earlier leveled at Father Chuck. Who would believe him after that if he were to point the finger at him a second time? The boy cried wolf. What else? Could Sam have conceived of blackmail in that little pea brain of his? Perhaps. He’d certainly gotten the idea from his father that people would pay to keep certain matters secret. That would have given him a reason to keep it quiet, to hold it back from everyone, perhaps even from his father. This would be Sam’s enterprise and nobody else’s.

And who but Father Chuck fit Mark Conroy’s tip so well? Conroy had said it had to be someone that the kids could trust, that kids would naturally trust. Then he had told the story of the bent cop. That was what confused things. Sue—and maybe even me, too—had taken it too literally. But later on, the next day in fact, Conroy had reiterated the principle: It had to be someone the children
would be drawn to. And who were they going to trust more than good old Father Chuck in his Roman collar? Two of the children who had died were in some way connected to Our Lady of Sorrows.

Motive? I’d gotten that during my so-called debate from Father Chuck himself. He’d stuck by that nutty idea that the children were better off dead because they wouldn’t be exposed to all the sin and misery that would have been their lot if they had lived out their lives.

Putting myself back in that trophy room of his where we had our discussion, I saw the deer heads on the wall, the mounted rifles and shotguns. Did one of the rifles have a telescopic sight? If not, one could have been mounted. Surely one of those rifles was a 30-30. He could probably have dropped Sam Evans easily at five hundred yards. He may not even have needed a telescopic sight.

He had it all: the “motive” to kill the children, twisted and perverse though it was, the skill to kill Sam Evans, and a possible reason. But he would have to be deeply disturbed to do such things. But hadn’t he shown that to me? Wasn’t his drinking a sign of something? Maybe he downed all that whiskey to keep a lid on it. Or worse, maybe he drank to empower himself, to permit himself, to let himself go.

And it was at this point that I always stopped and sorted through things all over again. Who could believe this of a priest, a man of God, a celibate, a man who hated sin? How could such a man commit such sins? Who would believe it? Certainly not Sue. She had been inspired, uplifted, just talking to Father Chuck. It would do no good to pass any of this on to her. No, I told myself again and again, I’d better rethink this, and I did. But each time I came up with the same conclusion.

Finally, I turned away from my view of the river, got up from my desk, pulled on my trenchcoat and gloves, and walked out to Mrs. Fenton.

“You’ve certainly been deep in thought in there,” she said. “Or have you been taking a little nap?”

“It doesn’t matter much, one way or the other. Look, I’m going out for a while. I don’t really know how long. If I’m not back by the time you go, just put the messages on my desk with the others. I’ll come in later to check them.”

“One of your nocturnal visits?”

“Yeah, I seem to be making a lot of those lately, don’t I?”

All the way out Clarion Road to Hub City, I asked myself why I was going and what I hoped to accomplish. Did I intend to confront him? With what? My suspicions? Only in
Perry Mason
do murderers crumble before stern accusation. I should probably have gone to Bud Billings and voiced my thoughts about Father Chuck to him. He’d take me seriously. He’d understand how it all fit together. I could still do that. All I needed to do was find a nice wide spot on the road and make a U-turn.

But I drove on.

What was it that made me continue? In some sense, I think, it was that I saw something of myself in Father Chuck. There was what I perceived as his alcoholism. We shared that, certainly, though I acknowledged it in myself, and he was still in denial. Perhaps subtler and more complex but even more important was the fact that he was a priest, the Catholic Church personified. He represented, if anyone did, the values, the attitudes toward sex and women, the qualified system of rewards and punishments, with which I’d grown up. I’d put all that behind me because I soon learned out in the great world that it was many times more complicated than that. In my profession, that all became very clear. But growing to maturity as I did in the old Church had certainly left its mark on me, probably an indelible one. And each time I was face-to-face with Father Charles Albertus, I saw not so much myself in him, but the representative of all that had held such powerful sway over me when I was young, all that I had eventually rejected.

I was aware, too, that perhaps I had rejected too much.
I needed something. I knew that. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, I seemed to be moving through a sort of low-grade spiritual crisis. It first made itself known to me that night nearly a month ago when I’d driven Sue out this very road to the place where Catherine Quigley’s body had been placed by her murderer. Looking at that little body in the snow had had a traumatic effect upon me. It had made me physically sick, but that was the least of it. The conversation with Bob Williams that same night at Benny’s, which I remembered so vividly, had done nothing to help. All it did was bring to the surface the questions that had been deep in my mind for who-knows-how-long. Was there a Higher Power? Was He all-powerful? If so, how could He allow such monstrous things as the murder of a little child to happen? There was the horror of that experience at the autopsy and the lost weekend that followed, an eruption from deep in the soul, a cry for an answer to these paralyzing questions. My talk with Father LeClerc hadn’t helped that much. I felt a reluctance to seek the old remedies for problems that were new to me. Yet Phil LeClerc was a good priest. I recognized that.

One way or another, with all this on my mind, I made it into Hub City. By now I knew the way to Our Lady of Sorrows and the rectory around the corner from it. I made all the correct turns, through what was left of the downtown area of this decaying little metropolis, and then I took Kellogg Street out to the edge of town. There it was, the most imposing building for blocks, Gothic in style and a light stone gray in color. I then turned the corner, drove the length of the church, and parked in front of the rectory.

I went to the door and gave a good long rap with a heavy knocker, which was cased in the shape of a human hand. I hadn’t noticed that before.

After what seemed to me a considerable amount of time, Father Chuck appeared, dressed informally. He wore his dickey, shirt, and collar but beneath them was a pair of old, faded jeans.

“Why, Charley! Come on in!” He threw open the door. “Did you just decide to drop by? Were you in the neighborhood? Maybe you want to continue our great debate.”

I stepped inside. He gave me his usual clap on the back and led the way down the long hall.

“Let’s say I was in the neighborhood,” I called out to him.

“Great!” he said over his shoulder. “I get few enough visitors here. I’m always glad for some company. Come on in,” he said, gesturing me through the open door of his office. “Just sit down and tell me what’s on your mind.”

The room was the way I remembered it, deer heads and an angry fish mounted on the wall, along with a rack of seriously lethal hardware. I took a seat on the sofa again. But he sat behind his desk. That’s where his drink was. I must have been agitated, for I made no move to take off my coat or gloves.

“Not going to stay?” he asked. “You seem a bit upset. Anything wrong?”

He took a good, healthy slug of his Scotch.

I hesitated uncertainly. “I don’t know quite where to begin.”

And that was the truth. I had been wrestling with the facts, with my speculations, and with myself so energetically during the last couple of hours that I really hadn’t given much, if any, thought to what I might say to Father Chuck once we were alone. This wasn’t like me at all.

“In that case,” he said cheerfully, “I suppose that the thing to do is to begin at the beginning.”

That’s just what I did.

“You may or may not know that I was along with Sue Gillis the night that Catherine Quigley’s body was discovered out on Clarion Road.”

“No, Charley, I didn’t know that.”

“Seeing that child dead in the snow affected me deeply. It threw me into a moral turmoil. I asked myself how, if there is a just God, He can permit such things to take place. Then I—”

“If you’ll forgive me for interrupting, I really think I can help you here. We priests see—”

“And if you’ll pardon me for interrupting, Father, but please, now that I’m started, I’d like to tell this in my own way.”

“Of course. Go ahead.”

He seemed upset by that, even slightly intimidated, enough so that he finished off the neat Scotch he’d been drinking. As I resumed talking, he went to the cupboard and replenished his drink from one of the bottles there.

“Also, as you may or may not know, Sam Evans was out on Clarion Road that night. The pickup truck he was driving broke down, and he was on foot. He saw a car make a U-turn and pull over to the side of the road. The driver got out, took a large bundle from the back, and placed it near the side of the road. Then the car went back in the direction of Hub City. Sam was naturally curious what the driver had left, so he went for a look and discovered what was in the bundle. Another car came along then and caught him in its lights. Sam panicked and ran. Because he had left a footprint at the scene, and because he had been seen and identified earlier by another motorist on the road at that time, he was taken in for questioning by the county police, specifically by Sue Gillis and Bud Billings.

“I served as Sam Evans’s attorney during his interrogation by the police, at least during the latter stages. I gave him counsel and was present during the final time he was made to tell his story. The cops treated him as a suspect and kept him overnight on a trumped-up holding charge, but then they had to release him because the very evening he was in their custody, Billy Bartkowski was murdered and laid out by the side of the road, just as the others had been.”

I paused then just a little too long, for Father Chuck jumped in with a bit of quick-shot detection.

“But you know, Charley, Sam Evans could have killed the Quigley girl, and Lee Higgins, too,” he said. “Somebody
else could have killed Billy Bartkowski. You know how it’s done—to make it look like the others?”

“A copy-cat murder?”

“That’s what they call them. Exactly! No, I think they were wrong to let Evans go. That kid was bad news. And I don’t mean just because of that stupid lie he told about me. It was worse than that. There was something sinister about him.”

“Sinister?” I shrugged. “At any rate, Bud Billings, one of the detectives who questioned him, felt strongly that Sam Evans was holding something back.”

“See? I told you.”

“No, Bud believed the kid’s story, by and large, but he thought Sam Evans had recognized the driver of the car, the one who had deposited the child’s body at the side of the road. Evans claimed he was too far away, and that the snow was coming down too hard for him to tell who it was. Bud thought he knew, and for whatever reason, didn’t want to tell.”

“This is all very interesting, Charley, sort of the inside story, isn’t it? Fascinating, really, but why are you telling me all this?”

“Because Sam Evans was murdered this morning.”

“Really? I didn’t know.”

“Now, why would anyone want to kill a lamebrain kid like him?” I asked rhetorically. “What motive could they have? That’s a big puzzle.”

“I take it they don’t know who shot him, then?”

“No, they don’t. But let’s just theorize. Let’s say that Bud Billings was right, that Sam Evans had recognized the driver of that car but on Clarion Road. Suppose he had let the driver know he had been recognized and asked for something—money, whatever—to keep quiet about it. This is, of course, commonly known as blackmail, and it is a crime punishable by a prison term. Now, while I don’t condone the murder of Sam Evans, I think it might be entirely understandable. Look at it this way. Sam Evans had committed the crime of blackmail. Perhaps he had
been incorrect in his identification of the driver of the car that night and the party he went to was altogether innocent. Or perhaps he had willfully gone to a certain party, someone he bore a grudge against in revenge, threatened to bear false witness against him unless he was paid. So you see, Father, there are all sorts of possible extenuating circumstances here. There is, in other words, murder, and murder of a different sort.”

I let him chew on this a bit. But he didn’t chew, he drank. He was putting down great gulps of the stuff as he sat behind his desk and listened, nodding his interest and understanding but with his face averted. His focus seemed to be on the fire that blazed in the fireplace behind his desk.

“Are we talking about justifiable homicide?” he asked at last.

“I’m sure the man who disposed of that greedy—and yes, perhaps slightly sinister—young moron would have regarded his action as justified.”

He nodded. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Father Chuck,” I asked quietly, “were you that man?”

There was a lapse of a couple of seconds, then he suddenly came to life, turned and faced me. “What a question, Charley! How could you possibly think that of me? I’m a
priest”