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Authors: Penelope Williamson

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BOOK: Wages of Sin
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“We'd see if he was dirty and then cover it up.”

“You saying you think Father Patrick Walsh was dirty?”

Rourke shrugged. “I'm only saying I want to get a handle on his life before the archbishop rings up the other good fathers at his rectory with the news that he's dead and everybody starts covering their asses.” Rourke cut a glance at his partner. Fio was giving him that wild-eyed look again.

“You want me to come along with you while you roust some priests,” Fio said.

“I'll roust them nicely.”

“Hunh.” Fio pushed back his cuff and tried to check his watch in the intermittent light of the street lamps. “It's ten minutes of six.”

“Priests get up with the dawn. It's only sinners like you and me who've got to sleep off what we did the night before.”

“You want me to come along with you while you go knocking on the door of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary rectory at six o'clock in the morning and tell 'em that one of their priests has been murdered and then ask them if they did it.”

Rourke smiled. “Well, my daddy always said if it looks like a fight is coming, be sure you get in the first lick.”

Fio showed his teeth in an answering smile. “You said you were going to be nice.”

“Maybe I lied.” Rourke was quiet for a while, then he added, “Did I ever tell you that I have a brother?”

More silence filled the car and two blocks rolled by before Fio said, “Eleven months we've been partners, I've told you stuff I've never even told my wife, and this is the first time you mention a brother.”

“Yeah, well, he's a priest at Holy Rosary.”

Our Lady of the Holy Rosary was on Coliseum Square in a neighborhood that was mixed like gumbo, with Negroes, Irish and German immigrants, and old American families who could trace their lineage back to before the Civil War.

The square was actually shaped like a triangle with the Gothic-style church on Race Street anchoring its base. Holy Rosary's school was on the church's lakeside and the rectory was on the riverside, and all had been built in the middle of the last century out of the same Louisiana brick that was glowing bloodred in the early morning sunlight. A milk wagon was pulled up to the curb.

Rourke and Fio sat in the car while the milkman ladled milk from a big tin can into a couple of glass bottles and carried the bottles through the gate in a black iron picket fence afroth with honeysuckle. He blessed himself as he passed through the shadows cast by the church's octagonal bell tower and then left the milk at the rectory's kitchen stoop.

Fio watched the milkman; Rourke watched the priest who was cutting through the green of the square, moving fast and looking back over his shoulder. Rourke watched as the priest, almost running now, crossed the street, climbed the portal steps, and entered the church through the iron-banded wooden doors.

“Wait for me,” Rourke said to his partner, and got out of the car.

Rourke hurried up the root-cracked walkway, with the wind skirling yellow leaves around his feet. The knifelike fronds of the banana trees rattled above his head, and the waving knotted branches of the old figs threw shifting shadows on the red-brick walls.

Rourke's father's mother had carried bricks in her apron to help build St. Alphonsus, the church he'd grown up with as a boy in the Irish Channel. The women who had lived in this neighborhood generations ago would have done the same thing for Holy Rosary. Today the young sons of their line would be serving at the Mass in the way that Rourke had done. The sons and brothers and uncles of these families would become their priests.

Inside, the church was cool and dark and smelled of burning candle wax and incense. He found the priest standing before a small altar in the north transept. With his black cassock, the father blended in with the long shadows cast by the presbyter arches, except for the white of his hands that were folded before him. His head was not bowed, though. He looked up instead at the marble pietà on the altar, and from the taut set of his shoulders and back and the tight grip his two hands had on each other, it seemed that whatever this priest was asking of the Virgin Mary, it was more a scream of desperation than a prayer.

“Does she answer when you speak to her?” Rourke said.

Father Paul Rourke whirled, blinking as if a flash lamp had gone off in his face. “Day? What are you doing here?”

His voice echoed, then fell in the thick, black silence of the church.

Rourke searched his brother's face. The round Irish chin and plump cheeks were unshaven and with his dark beard they looked dusted with soot. His eyes had always drooped at the corners, giving his face a melancholy cast even as a boy, but this morning the shadows under those eyes were dark as bruises.

“What's happened?” he said when Rourke went on staring at him, saying nothing.

A rack of votive candles burned at the pietà's marble feet. Rourke went up to it and held his palm out close over one of the flames. He felt the warmth at first, and then the pain. “Do you know what happens when you put fire to human flesh long enough?”

His brother, the priest, watched as if mesmerized. The candle flickered and danced and burned beneath Rourke's open palm, and the pain reached a pitch that was like the blare of a locomotive horn.

“Stop it!” Rourke's brother seized his wrist, pulling his hand away from the flame.

“It cooks,” Rourke said.

“My God, Day. What kind of trouble are you in?”

Rourke laughed. He took out his handkerchief and wrapped it around the throbbing burn on his palm. “Are you offering to hear my confession? From my lips to God's ears. Or maybe it's time I heard yours. After all, any priest who comes sneaking back to the rectory at dawn and wearing yesterday's cassock probably hasn't been keeping all the Lord's Ten Commandments.”

Even in the wavering candlelight, Rourke caught the fear in his brother's eyes, and suspicion passed through him like a shudder.

His brother shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his gaze drifting off Rourke's face to the distant recesses of the nave, the empty pews and pulpit and altar. “I have the eight o'clock Mass this morning,” he said, “and you know how my stomach gets into knots over the homilies. I always spend hours on them. I pray and sweat, and I am ashamed to say sometimes I even curse. I was up all night fretting over this one. There's a park bench beneath an old bent fig tree out in the square, and I go there often to meditate. You must've seen me coming—”

Rourke gripped his brother's face with his two hands. He dug his fingers into the soft flesh and gave him a rough shake, and then he lowered his head until their foreheads touched and the moment became an embrace.

“Paulie, Paulie, Paulie. You always were such a lousy liar.”

Chapter Six

P
ink tea roses on trellises framed the rectory's kitchen door. Fio was waiting for them there on the stoop, holding the milk bottles by their necks, one in each hand.

“Somebody's already up inside and making breakfast,” he said. He'd picked one of the roses and stuck it in the brim of his hat. “Maybe whoever it is has made some coffee to go along with that lost bread I smell frying, and so maybe he could use some of this nice, fresh milk to put in his coffee. That's what's known as deductive reasoning. It's what detectives do, isn't that right, partner? We deduce stuff.” His broad grin shifted from Rourke to the priest hovering behind him. “Say, do you by any chance got a brother who's a cop?”

Paulie's gaze clicked back and forth between the two detectives. “Day, for God's sake. What's going on?”

“Let's go inside,” Rourke said, pulling open the screen door and then standing aside so his brother could go ahead of him. “I could use a cup of coffee.”

The kitchen in the Holy Rosary rectory was big and bright with yellow chintz-curtained windows that opened onto a garden. It smelled good, of freshly brewed chicory coffee and boiled milk, and of cinnamon from the bread dipped in batter that was frying on the stove.

A priest sat at a beautifully polished round oak table with his elbows bracketing a steaming cup of café au lait and his head buried in his hands. “I guess you didn't sleep well either,” he said without looking up as the door opened.

“Father,” Paulie said, a bit too loudly. “The police are here.”

The other priest's head snapped up, and Rourke saw shock register deep in his eyes. Shock and a bludgeoning fear.

Father Frank Ghilotti wore thick eyeglasses and he had large, slightly protruding teeth that gave his mouth a perpetually pursed look. His near-black hair was curled into corkscrews and plastered down wet over his skull. His olive skin had that freshly scrubbed look, as if he'd just stepped out of a bath or shower.

Father Ghilotti was the pastor of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary and as such he had authority over all the priests in his church. Rourke had met him only once, and briefly, about a month ago, the one time he had come to hear Paulie celebrate the Mass in his new assignment as Holy Rosary's assistant pastor. In New Orleans, family and connections were everything, and Father Frank Ghilotti had family connections of his own. He was the only son of the city's laundry racket boss.

And as that son, he had grown up in a world where polished wealth and polished power hid a rough street toughness. He showed some of that toughness now as he calmed his face and stood up, holding out his hand. “Detective Rourke. This early in the morning it can only be bad news.”

His gaze shifted to Paulie, and something unspoken seemed to pass between the pastor and his brother, and Rourke thought,
Oh, Christ.

“I don't know what it is,” Paulie said, his voice still hitting that high, strident note. His face was flushed and spotted, and sweat glistened on his temples. “They haven't said.”

“I'm afraid that our bad news is for the both of you, Father,” Rourke said. “Father Patrick Walsh was found dead around two o'clock this morning in an abandoned macaroni factory in the Quarter.”

Paulie let out a cry and stumbled backward, collapsing into a chair, jolting the table so hard that café au lait slopped out of the forgotten cup. Behind him, on the stove, the frying lost bread started to smoke.

Shock had whitened Father Ghilotti's face again, too, only this time Rourke thought the reaction came purely from surprise. There was still a wariness, though, in the wide-open eyes that stared out at them from behind the thick lenses. Wariness and a quick, calculating mind.

“But I don't understand,” he said. “What was he doing down there in such a place in the middle of the night?”

“We were hoping you can tell us,” Rourke said.

“Well, I can't. I can't even imagine.”

Rourke's gaze went back to his brother. Paulie was staring down at the table, his face wet from crying, his hands gripped together in a tight fist in front of him.
How about you, Paulie? Can you even imagine?

“Have you all been here at the rectory the whole night, Father?” Fio said. He had set the milk bottles down on the drain board and turned around to lean against it with his arms folded across his chest. As big as the kitchen was, he seemed to fill it.

Father Ghilotti stared at Fio a moment, then made an odd, abrupt movement with his shoulders and turned toward the stove. “My breakfast is burning.” He started to reach for the handle of the fry pan with his bare hand, then pulled it back at the last second and used a folded-up dish towel instead. He wiped his hands carefully on the towel, before he turned to face them again.

“Last night, we'd all been invited for family suppers at the homes of our parishioners,” he finally said. “We even made a joke about it—about how our popularity was going to make us all fat and save the Church money for our board. I ended up playing a game of chess with my host and it was late when I got home. Everyone else had already retired.”

“Does that everyone include Father Pat?” Fio asked.

“I didn't check their beds, if that's what you're asking. I'm the pastor here, not a warden.”

Rourke waited for his brother to say something about his own supper invitation, but Paulie only stared down at his fisted hands, running away inside himself the way he always did when things got bad.

One Sunday when they were kids, before Paulie had left home for the seminary, he'd invited his favorite priest from St. Alphonsus over for a chicken supper and somehow Paulie had gotten their daddy to promise that he would stay sober through the evening. Rourke had thought his big brother was a fool for not recognizing a vain hope when he saw one, for Mike Rourke had been the kind of cop who could wade into a bar fight with nothing but his fists and an attitude, and yet at the same time he had lived every day of his life scared. Looking back now, Rourke believed that what their daddy hadn't been able to face was the loneliness he carried around in his gut every waking moment. The booze couldn't completely banish the loneliness, but it took the edge off.

It was always worse in the shank of the day, when the night stretched before him, hollow and empty. He would begin with his shaking hands wrapped around a full shot glass, a freshly opened bottle at his elbow, and he would end up with his head on the table, passed out and drooling spit in a puddle beneath his cheek. Yet to everyone's surprise, maybe even his own, Mike Rourke had come sober to the supper table that one evening. He'd even put on his one good civilian suit, the one he wore to all the neighborhood's weddings and baptisms and wakes. He'd gotten a lot of wear out of that suit over the years, the Irish Channel being a place where living came hard and dying came often.

It was an irony most appreciated by those who lived in the Channel that the priest Paulie had chosen to invite to supper at the Rourke house that evening was a secret boozer himself, was in fact as big an alky as their daddy ever was. Father Josey O'Connor, his name had been, and he'd brought along his own bottle and it wasn't long before the the two of them, priest and cop, were tying on a big one. Their drunk started out happy, took a turn into maudlin, and ended up mean. By one in the morning, they were out in the front yard swinging fists at each other's heads. The neighborhood had gotten a good laugh out of the sight, but Paulie had gone and lay down on his bed with his face to the wall and stayed that way for three days. Running away inside himself.

BOOK: Wages of Sin
11.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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