The Judgment (53 page)

I found my way back to the room where we’d held our conversations. It was just as we’d left it, of course. The 30-30 stood against the couch where I’d propped it when he’d marched me out to that vast backyard. I didn’t touch it. There was no need to replace it. I’d left no prints on it.

It was only because I was wearing those skintight gloves that I was able to type Father Chuck’s suicide note. I was careful. I took my time. I simply enumerated his crimes in the first person, then added, “May God have mercy on my soul,” and signed his name. All on the typewriter.

It was nearly dark when I left by the back door. I gave the body one last look as I headed for my car. There was snow in the air. Father Charles Albertus would be covered by it in the morning.

I
n the beginning, the Kerry County Police treated Father Chuck’s death as a homicide. There were smudges on the typewriter keys and on the rifle where there might have been fingerprints. That made them suspicious. Besides, the idea of a priest committing suicide, not to mention the hideous crimes to which he’d confessed in that questionable suicide note—well, it was just unthinkable.

But the evidence against him mounted.

First, the bullet that had killed Sam Evans was found, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to have been fired from the rifle I had handled and left propped against the sofa. And that rifle was known by Father Chuck’s former hunting companions to belong to him. It was his favorite.

There had been some doubt voiced that anyone would type a suicide note. It seemed impersonal, inappropriate somehow. But then his housekeeper and some parishioners said that Father Chuck’s handwriting was so illegible that he typed everything. I hadn’t known. The Force was with me on that one.

Finally, tucked away in an upper drawer of the desk, they found items belonging to the murdered children. The county police had withheld word from the press that from each of the young victims something had been taken by the murderer, evidently as a memento. Lee Higgins’s pocketknife was there, as were Catherine Quigley’s small
handkerchief, Billy Bartkowski’s favorite marble, and Dickey Fauret’s whistle.

The discovery of those grisly souvenirs clinched the case against him. Nobody knew quite how to handle it. The newspapers—even
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
—editorialized, and the anchorpersons philosophized. He was a sick man, that much was agreed, but in this age when all of us are so much in need of the consolations of religion, we should not allow the insane acts of one man to shake our beliefs. And so on.

Bishop Solar himself said Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows all through that winter in an effort to hold the congregation together. Even so, attendance fell off. In the spring, the bishop brought a young priest in as pastor. I understand he’s a man of pleasant disposition and boundless energy.

Sue Gillis and I never got back together. When my anger over the arbitrary Thanksgiving interrogation of Dominic Benda had cooled, we had one last dinner on neutral ground, and I made a little speech to her declaring our break permanent. She took it well enough and had no desire to hear my reasons. That suited me just fine and saved us from a nasty session of mutual recriminations. Not long afterward, I began hearing rumors linking her—how is it they put it?—“romantically” with Mark Evola. That made me sad for her because there is a Mrs. Evola and three little Evolas, and a man with political ambitions as strong as his was not likely to risk a divorce.

By the time Sue and I had our talk, she was just getting over the shock that she had received from the revelations regarding Father Chuck. She said she believed them, but somehow she couldn’t accept them.

The Mark Conroy matter ended, just as I hoped it would, without a hitch. Charges were dropped. Conroy resigned.
With a little urging from me—it didn’t take much—Anthony Mercante asked him out to corporate headquarters and interviewed him for a spot as his number-two man in the security division of that Big Three auto manufacturer. Mercante had believed in Conroy right from the start, after all. He convinced his boss that Conroy’s resignation was in no way an admission of guilt, just making the best of a bad situation. Besides, as he pointed out, putting an African American in a high position of trust wouldn’t hurt their image in the least. Conroy was hired. At last report, he loved his position in the world of manufacturing and business.

Those two days spent in Port Huron must have helped Mr. and Mrs. Conroy work things out between them because they’re still Mr. and Mrs. Conroy. They’ve moved out to Southfield so Mark can be nearer to corporate headquarters.

As for the spiritual crisis I seemed to be enduring through all this, I guess I’m past that now. I’m not a churchgoer, nor do I offer nightly prayers, but Father Phil LeClerc and I have had a couple of talks since that first one, all pretty casual. But helpful. With Sue no longer in my life and no one else in sight, I have a lot more time for reading these days. I finally took him up on his offer of books and borrowed a couple by his man, Miguel de Unamuno. Good stuff—an emotional intelligence at work and a vigorous style, would have made a good trial lawyer.

I have lots of difficulties still, but I no longer doubt that there’s Somebody in charge. I can’t pretend to understand what He’s up to most of the time, nor how He can permit monsters like Father Charles Albertus to do the things they do, but when you’ve had a prayer answered as mine was out behind the rectory, it’s pretty hard to suppose you’re out there flying without a net all the time.

In a way, Ismail Carter did a lot to convince me that there is some sort of moral order at work in the world.
He did that partly by just being Ismail, who he is and what he is. They can tell all the stories they want about him and imply he was just another crooked politician, but I don’t buy it. In my book, he is and always will be a just man.

I’d always suspected that, but I became firmly convinced once I’d heard the story he told me when I went to visit him that day in December. The note of thanks I wrote right after charges were dropped against Mark Conroy ended with a promise to come and visit sometime soon. That turned out to be nearly three weeks later. Since Christmas was just around the corner, and because he deserved far more than I or Mark Conroy could repay, I brought him a gift. I went shopping in the pricey little boutiques in Grosse Pointe and bought him the classiest pair of silk pajamas I could find. Naturally I had them gift-wrapped—bows, tulle, the works. When I appeared with it tucked under my arm, I found him in bed but awake and alert. In fact, his eyes lit up when he spied the package.

“Is that for me, Charley?”

“Who else?” I thrust it toward him. “Merry Christmas.”

“Uh-oh. It’s a Christmas present, huh? Does that mean do-not-open-until?”

“Nah, that’s just for kids. You’re no kid.”

He laughed. “I sure ain’t!”

Then, very carefully, he removed the ribbon, the bow, the tulle decoration, and unwrapped it.

“That’s the prettiest package I ever got,” he said, “and I got some good ones in my time. And you bought whatever it is in Grosse Pointe. You know how to shop with taste, you sure do.”

“Well, open it up.”

And when he did, I saw that I’d chosen well. He fingered the material, taking pleasure in the pure feel of it.

“You noticed my weakness for silk,” he said. “Thank you, Charley, it’ll go real well with my robe.”

“My pleasure.”

“Is this a bribe?”

I laughed in surprise.

He gave me a knowing wink. “The way I figure it, at this moment there is probably nothing in the world you want to know quite so bad as what the mayor and me talked about at that sit-down we had a few weeks back. Am I right?”

“Well, yes you are, but…”

“And probably that boy, Conroy, has been after you to tell him what got him off the hook. You ain’t told him anything, have you? Never mentioned my name.”

“Not a word, I swear.”

“I believe you.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re not wired for sound, are you?—no, don’t answer that, I know you ain’t. But all right, now, I tell you what. If you promise to go right on sayin’ nothing to Conroy or anybody else who asks, and if you’ll walk over and shut that door to the hall, I’ll just accept your bribe and spill the beans.”

I did as he ordered, and on the way back, I said, “You’ve got my promise, Ismail.”

“Good, ‘cause this is for your ears only. Pull up a chair. This is gonna take a while to tell.”

He sat up a little higher in bed, adjusted his pillows, and got comfortable.

“Maybe you remember and maybe you don’t, but back in the Seventies, when I got that discrimination suit thrown at me, you wanted to know, had I ever had any white women workin’ for me. I said there’d been two. One was the Communist who moved out to California. Remember?”

“Yeah, I spent time and some of your money on a private detective out there, but she just dropped out of sight completely.”

“That’s right. And the other one, I said, don’t bother to look for her, ‘cause she’s dead. I knew she was, ‘cause we’d kept in touch. I knew she’d got sick, and I went up and visited her in the hospital there at the end. All this
happened just about a year before the Federal case.

“She was a remarkable woman in just about every way. She came to work for me early in the Fifties. She’d got herself kicked out of St. Mary’s in South Bend just before graduation for some kind of wild insult to Notre Dame, right next door. I never got the straight of it. Anyway, she comes back to Detroit and directly to my office and asks for a job. Well, white women just didn’t do that in the Fifties, unless they were Communists, and she wasn’t. What I guess you’d say was that she was a Progressive. Hell, Charley, she was a firebrand was what she was! First thing she did, she tried to get me to introduce a resolution in the Council condemning the Korean War, and when I wouldn’t do it, she organized a bring-our-boys-home demonstration in Cadillac Square that about ten people showed up at. But she was learning, and there were other causes, petitions, demonstrations—something about County Hospital, some admissions scandal at Wayne State. In those days there was a lot to protest but not much will to do it. She had the will. On top of it all, she was just a demon worker for me in the office, wasn’t long before she was running it for me—very smoothly, I might add.

“Now, the thing she was hottest on, and her reason for coming to me in the first place, was what she called racial justice. She moved into a place at the edge of Black Bottom and one way or another began to attract people to her and stir them up. She’d get out the vote like nobody could. She’d organize child care so mothers could work, all kinds of things. But she was always discreet about it, so that what she organized, black people led.

“It was almost certain that in the course of all this, she would meet a certain young black civil rights lawyer, ‘cause hell, he was the only one in town in those days, the only one who would take on the system, go against the establishment. He just didn’t give a damn. He was a good-lookin’ dude, intelligent, kind of haughty, and a real rooster with the ladies. And she, well, I don’t think I said
how she looked, but she was one of those black-haired, blue-eyed Irish. White? Man, she was like porcelain—not beautiful the way these broads are who spend hours in front of the mirror, makin’ up, doin’ this and that. She didn’t care that much how she looked. But she was a natural beauty, like you see in those old-time paintings.

“Well, anyway, I think the occasion was some appeal for a new trial for some poor nigger who got pretty clearly railroaded first time around. Our young lawyer wanted to turn it into a political thing, so he came to me, and I handed him over to her. So whatever happened, I’m partly responsible for. Well, not for all of it, I guess, because the practical outcome was a big march downtown she organized that politicized it pretty good. The lawyer got his retrial, and his client walked. But what happened between them, the lawyer and my staffer, I do take some responsibility for that.

“Now, there wasn’t ever anything between me and her. Not that I wasn’t attracted, God knows. She had a kind of a way that drew people to her. The one or two times I came close to letting her know how I felt with a touch, or a word, I held back. I just didn’t want to disappoint her. See, she had a very high opinion of me, and I wanted her to keep it.

“She had a high opinion of her lawyer, too, but that didn’t stop him from putting a move on her, and it didn’t stop her from falling just crazy in love with him. God, Charley, it was something while it lasted. They were very open about it, didn’t try to sneak around at all. He was proud of her—-maybe it was just as some kind of trophy, but I don’t think so—and she, well, she practically worshipped him. People talked. Blacks gossiped. Whites gossiped. Pretty soon the word got to her folks. They gave her a good talking to, and she talked right back to them.

“The inevitable happened. She got pregnant. I was the first one she told, and I mean, man, she was just delighted, overjoyed is what she was. I asked her if she’d told him, and she said she was just looking for the right moment.
Well, she finally did tell him. He goes off and makes a phone call, comes back and gives her the name of an abortionist in Toronto. She was just crushed completely. Without a word, she got up and walked out, and as far as I know that was the last time they ever saw each other.

“What hurt me, though, was that it was damned near the last time I saw her myself. She moved up to Port Huron and had her baby, a boy, and stayed up there. She wanted to cut away from her past, parents and all, so she had her name changed legally from Connery to Conroy. You must have guessed that by now, right, Charley? And she made me swear never to let the boy’s father know what had happened to her. We kept in touch. I visited a few times, tried to force money on her, but she never took a nickel. She made her own way up there, did about as well as a woman could in a town like that. The last time I saw her she was in the hospital, and her son, Mark, was in his last year at Michigan State.