The 7th Canon

by Robert Dugoni

  “Was it a book?”

  Red shook his head. “A videotape. He said Bennet had it. He said he put it in a locker in the office.”

  “Did you get it?”

  “I couldn’t. The lockers were locked, and the priest was in there.”

  “What did you do when the police showed up?”

  “Just ran.”

  Jack Devine’s whiny voice resonated inside Donley’s head.

  The little fucker had a videotape.

  Bennet had told Devine he had a lot of videotapes, and that he was going to make a lot of people pay. He’d been blackmailing someone with a videotape, but he was also running for his life from Connor. His two accomplices were dead. Where could he go? Ross said kids like Bennet had no place to go, nowhere to turn, nowhere except perhaps to a priest who had started a shelter for kids just like him. His two friends were dead. He was afraid. So he stashed a videotape at the shelter and took off. That’s why Connor broke down doors and busted locks. He was looking for the videotape Bennet had stashed. In the process, Connor planted enough evidence to blame the murder on Father Martin. He’d kill two birds with one stone.

  But why was Connor so interested in a tape? What was on it? Ross said no way Connor was on the tape, but Donley was no longer so sure. It was like Joe from the video store said. You’d be surprised what skeletons people kept in their closets.

  Donley knew.

  He listened to the distant sound of a siren screaming toward an impending tragedy, echoing as they had ten years earlier when the police cars had sped up the hill, one after the other, lights flashing, and pulled to a stop in front of Donley’s home. He considered the two boys, backs against the wall, knees to their chests, frightened, distrustful.

  He knew what he had to do to have any hope of saving Father Martin’s life. He had to get that tape before Connor used it for whatever purpose he intended, and Donley’s instincts were telling him he didn’t have a lot of time. Things were coming to a head. Connor knew it, too.

  Whatever Donley was going to do, he had to do it now.

  Chapter 20

  December 30, 1987

  The windshield wipers slapped a steady beat. Donley slowed the car to a crawl, the headlights blunted by the thick fog. With the temperature warming after a two-day cold spell, gray mist and fog had rolled over the Sunset District, nearly obscuring the pink-and-green neon sign of the 19th Hole.

  Donley parked across the street, stepped out, and walked toward the doors. He’d driven by Connor’s house, but it had been dark, with no car in the driveway. Now he was playing a hunch.

  He stepped to the swinging wooden doors of the 19th Hole and peered through the porthole. He recognized the hulking figure slumped on the same bar stool. Dixon Connor.

  Turning, he noticed a brand-new Range Rover, the only vehicle parked in front of the building. He put a hand on the hood. It was warm. He pressed his face to the glass and shone a small penlight through the windows. He didn’t see a videotape or a Bible on the seats or the floor.

  He hurried back to his car and pulled from the curb, driving past Connor’s house. Then he turned, and parked three houses to the west on the opposite side of the street. He killed the engine and took a moment to consider the neighborhood. Christmas lights and televisions glowed muted colors in the gray mist, but Donley detected no activity. No late-night dog walkers patrolled the sidewalks. No busybody neighbors stuck their heads out from behind curtained windows. The fog blunted all noise but for the low howl of the wind off the Pacific.

  Donley pushed aside the words of caution repeatedly streaming through his head. He couldn’t wait for Ross, whose wife said he was not home. Connor would not stay out much later. The bars closed at 2:00 a.m. Besides, Ross would talk Donley out of what he knew he had to do. He’d tell Donley that he had a career and a family to think about. He’d tell Donley that Connor was not someone to mess with. He’d tell him to call the police, to get a search warrant. But that would be too late. Connor would ditch the book and the videotape. And Father Martin would fry. If Donley had any hope of finding either, he needed to act now, before Connor realized the extent to which Donley and Ross were on to him.

  Besides, Donley had heard the same admonitions before, and he’d learned the hard way that if you wanted something done, you had to take care of it yourself. No one was going to help you.

  Donley’s only chance, Father Tom’s only chance, was Connor’s arrogance. He wouldn’t think anyone knew about the videotape. He wouldn’t think anyone would dare to come looking for it. He wouldn’t think anyone would be so brazen as to break into a cop’s home.

  Donley’s hand drifted to the passenger seat, feeling the walnut-wood grip of Lou’s police service revolver. In the thirty years Lou had kept it in his desk, it had never been fired. It had probably never been cleaned, but it was always loaded. Donley had no idea if it would fire or explode in his hand. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out tonight.

  He took a deep breath, steeled himself, and stepped from the car. He shoved the barrel of the revolver into his pants at the small of his back and covered the handle with his leather jacket. He shut the car door with care. A neighborhood dog, as if sensing his presence, barked.

  The fog blew moist pellets in his face as he crossed the street and walked up the sidewalk. He passed the walkway leading to Connor’s front door, took a final look over his shoulder, and ducked down the driveway beneath the sill of a window. At the end of the driveway, he came to a wooden gate. He looked over the top into the backyard before pulling on the knotted string. The gate unlatched with a click and swung open. He crept into a bleak backyard of crabgrass and dandelions. Weeds stood four feet high in planter beds along a dilapidated redwood fence. In the corner of the yard, a rusted clothesline resembling an oversize television antenna rotated in the breeze, whining like the strings on a violin.

  Donley moved to a small wooden porch off the back of the house and started up three steps to a back door. The steps sagged beneath his weight, and the railing shook, likely rotted. The persistently moist salt air was hard on the homes.

  Closer, he noticed a large hole had been cut in the bottom of the door and covered with a plastic flap. Dog door.

  Damn.

  He hadn’t thought of a dog. Connor didn’t seem like the pet-loving type. Dogs unnerved Donley. He’d never had a pet growing up, and the dogs in his neighborhood had served one purpose: security. Even after Kim talked him into getting Bo for those nights Donley worked late, his innate fear of man’s best friend persisted.

  He surveyed the yard but did not see where an animal had trampled the tall grass, nor did he see a doghouse or a bowl or smell dog poop. He looked through the windowpane. The interior was dark. He knelt and cautiously lifted the flap of plastic covering the opening. No large animal lunged out and took a hunk of flesh from his face.

  With no dog, the dog door became a blessing. Donley stuck his head inside the opening and saw a washer and dryer—a laundry room off the back of a kitchen. He recognized the familiar floor plan. His shoulders were too wide to squeeze through the hole and his arm just inches too short to reach the latched deadbolt above the doorknob.

  He slid back out and retreated down the steps, rummaging in the tall grass until finding a dilapidated flower trellis along the fence. He snapped off one of the redwood sticks and considered its length. It might do.

  He slid into the dog door again and used the stick to reach the latch on the deadbolt. After several failed attempts, he managed to push the latch straight up. Standing, he threw the stick into the grass, braced the glass pane with the palm of his hand so it would not rattle, and turned the door handle. The door stuck in the jamb, and he momentarily feared it remained locked. Then it popped free.

  He was in.

  Dixon Connor sat watching the two men on the television dance around each other in a boxing ring, neither throwing many punches. He took a final pull on his Irish whiskey and spit an ice cube back into the glass. His othe
r hand rummaged in the wooden bowl of mixed nuts, and he dropped a fistful into his mouth, several tumbling off his chin and onto Father Thomas Martin’s black Bible, which he’d set on the bar. Hidden inside it, he’d found the sheet that included the names of those boys who had stayed at the shelter that night, along with a record of their belongings. It mentioned Red, who had done as Connor instructed and not given his real name, but there was no mention of the videotape next to Bennet’s name. Bennet must have hidden it from the priest and shoved it into the locker when he wasn’t looking.

  Didn’t matter. Connor now had the videotape and the sheet. Case closed. Now, the fun could really begin. In just a little more than twenty-four hours he would have exacted the type of justice his old man deserved.

  “Two Mexicans dancing around up there and getting paid to do it,” he said to the television. “Is it any wonder this country is going to hell?” He shook the ice in the glass and sucked at the remaining drops of whiskey. The bartender turned from a conversation at the other end of the bar and glanced with disinterest at the television.

  “Not like the old days with real fighters. Guys stood in the center of the ring and went toe-to-toe. Jake LaMotta. Rocky Marciano. Jack Dempsey. Those guys were fighters. The Rock beat the shit out of that nigger, Joe Louis. My dad sat right here, and I stood next to him listening to the radio.” Connor pointed. “Eddie Buchanan and Charlie Lawlor recreated every punch right in that corner over there. Then, boom, the Rock knocks that big black son of a bitch into the ropes, and the place erupts like fireworks on the Fourth of July.”

  Connor put the glass on the bar and motioned for the bartender to pour him another Jameson. The bartender took his time walking to Connor’s end of the bar. He retrieved the glass and leaned across the wood, inching into Connor’s personal space.

  Connor leaned back. “What are you, a fag?”

  The man straightened and stepped back. “Take it easy, Connor.”

  Connor looked around the bar. “What? Somebody got a problem with me?”

  No one said anything.

  “Nobody’s got a problem with you, Connor. It’s just a little loud,” the bartender said.

  “You mean I’m a little loud.”

  “Yeah, OK, you’re a little loud. Just take it down a notch. Let me pour you a cup of coffee, heat you up a couple of hot dogs.”

  “Shit, I wouldn’t eat that crap. You don’t know what they’re putting in those things. You never should have closed the kitchen if you wanted people to eat.” He swiveled his stool. “There used to be a kitchen on the other side of that wall, before the Chinaman bought this place and made it look like a boxcar.”

  “I know,” the bartender said, his voice weary. He dunked the glass in a sink of soapy water behind the bar. “And I’ve told you, I didn’t close the kitchen, and I didn’t construct the wall. I just pour the drinks.”

  “Then pour me another drink, and shut up. I’ve been drinking here for twenty-five years, sitting on this same damn stool . . . my father’s stool. I’ve been here long before the Chinaman, or you.”

  The bartender reached under the bar with a look of contempt, pulled out the bottle of Jameson, scooped ice into a glass, and poured the drink. He slid it to Connor on a fresh napkin. Connor sipped his whiskey and considered what the 19th Hole had once been. The Chinaman took more than square footage. He took the bar’s soul. He’d put a big partition right down the center of the room and squeezed in a grocery store on the other side, though all he sold were cigarettes and dirty magazines. He’d covered the walls with cheap wooden paneling that was now bowing in spots and made the bar long, narrow, and dark. Then he’d walled in the large, tinted window that looked out onto the sidewalk. He said the window was a hazard. He feared vandals, but vandals and gangs had steered clear of the 19th Hole because at any moment, there could be half a dozen off-duty police officers inside, Max Connor usually one of them.

  Not anymore. The bar was just like the police force. The regulars were gone, kicked out and replaced. The life had been squeezed from it. The Chinaman had killed it. Minorities were killing the city, just like they’d killed his old man.

  Connor took another drink. “My dad would have beat the shit out of those Mexicans. Look at them, dancing around up there. Looks like they got jumping beans in their shorts. Stand and fight!” he shouted at the television. “They should give them dresses and put on a record.” He finished his drink in one long pull and put the glass on the counter.

  “Give me another one.”

  The bartender ignored him, washing and stacking glasses.

  “Hey, you deaf?”

  “Go home and sleep it off.”

  “I said, give me another one.”

  The bartender picked up the telephone. “I’ll call you a cab.”

  Connor swore and slammed a hand on the counter, spraying the bowl of peanuts. “What is this world coming to? I got a bartender who won’t pour a drink in a bar?” He picked up his glass and hurled it at the rows of bottles, as if throwing a baseball at milk bottles stacked in a carnival booth. Glass exploded, cascading to the floor.

  “Goddamn it, Connor.” The bartender dropped the phone and pulled the ax handle from two clips under the bar. “That’s it. I’ve had—” He froze, looking like the rusted tin man cutting wood in The Wizard of Oz.

  “Go ahead.” Connor pulled back the hammer on the .44. “But this isn’t baseball. You only get one swing. So I suggest you make it a good one.”

  Donley stood in the laundry room, listening to the sounds of the house while allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. His mouth was dry, and he was fumbling with the rubber gloves Frank Ross had given him when they went inside the shelter.

  Gloves on, he walked across the linoleum hearing every squeak of the floor. The kitchen looked unused, the tiled counter clear, the Wedgewood stove’s metal polished, the liner of the garbage can pristine. Donley walked from the kitchen into a dining room with a table and chairs, sideboard, and a china cabinet filled with plates and ceramic figurines. Time looked to have stopped somewhere in the 1960s.

  The living room was off the dining room, its windows and the front door facing the street. Two floral couches covered in plastic were arranged perpendicular to each other, with a glass coffee table in the middle and end tables with lamps. A recliner faced a television. No plants or flowers to indicate anyone lived in the house on a daily basis. The air smelled like an old person’s clothes left in a closet with mothballs.

  Built-in bookshelves included a framed photograph of a man and woman, presumably Max Connor and his wife. Next to it was a photograph of Connor in his dress blues. He was the spitting image of his father, the same square head and death-cold stare. The shelves were packed with videotapes, movies like Roman Holiday, Run Silent Run Deep, Trapeze, On the Waterfront.

  As Donley stepped from the room, the television suddenly burst to life. He jumped and reached for the gun, feeling his heart skip a beat, then realized the television must be on a timer. He took a moment to regain his composure and catch his breath, wiped perspiration trickling from his temples, and walked through the dining room into a hallway. The bathroom was directly ahead. He turned left, toward the back of the house and a closed door. He turned the knob and pushed the door open. Light from a street lamp cast shadows on a queen-size bed that took up most of the space in the room. In the center of the bedspread was a large, dark-brown stain. Blood. A chill ran up Donley’s back as he remembered Frank Ross telling him that Dixon Connor had found his father’s body. He realized not only that this was the room in which Max Connor had taken his life but that Dixon Connor had kept it preserved. Not wanting to linger, Donley quickly opened a closet door. The closet was empty, not even a hanger on the bar.

  He shut the door to the room behind him and walked to the closed door at the other end of the hall. He put an ear to the door, hearing only the sound of his own breathing. Gathering himself, he opened the door. The room was dark, the window covered by a shade.
He removed the small pen flashlight from his pocket and began his search.

  Connor fumbled to insert the key in the Range Rover lock, pulled open the door, and slid in to the smell of new leather. He slammed the door closed with a thud that seemed to shake the whole neighborhood and sat for a moment watching fog billow up the street. As thick as it was, it couldn’t mask the 19th Hole’s now-tattered appearance. The Chinaman hadn’t put a nickel into the place since he’d bought it. Word was, he wanted to tear it down and build an apartment building. There had been a time when such talk would have caused punches to be thrown. The 19th Hole had reflected the neighborhood. The 19th Hole was the community. Tearing it down would be like tearing out the neighborhood’s soul.

  As a boy, Connor used to ride his bike down the street at sundown and push through the swinging doors feeling like Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke. Everyone greeted Max Connor’s kid. His father would have Connor make fists and punch in combinations while Mike O’Shea lowered his voice to sound like a ring announcer echoing over a microphone.

  Ladies and gentlemen, the next heavyweight cham-peen of the world, Dixon Connor.

  He hadn’t made it that far, but he had won a city Golden Gloves championship.

  Everything had revolved around the stool at the corner of the bar.

  Not anymore.

  They’d killed the bar, just like they’d killed his father.

  Connor had just had his final drink at the 19th Hole. Thursday morning, he’d pick up his money. Then he’d vanish, to hunt and fish the rest of his life. For the fun of it, he’d screw that prick Gil Ramsey and his father. He’d send a copy of the tape to the local media. What had gone around was coming back around. Payback was going to be a royal bitch.

  He turned the key and started the engine.

  The tiny penlight revealed an unmade bed. On it was a large canvas bag stuffed with clothes and toiletries. Donley’s instincts were correct. Dixon Connor was leaving town, in a hurry from the looks of it. Unopened mail and debris littered the floor and obscured a desk. Donley stepped closer to what, at first, appeared to be a strange wallpaper pattern. Instead, his penlight revealed dozens of articles pinned and taped to the wall—a seemingly unorganized collage.