by Tracy Clark
“What are you doing?” Thea asked, a damp Kleenex wadded up in nervous hands. “The police said we’re not supposed to touch any of his things.”
I ignored her, squeezing my eyes shut when flashes of Pop’s dead body intruded, causing my hands to shake. I’d never get that image out of my head. For a moment, I thought of Voigt’s pills, now stuck in a drawer somewhere at home. I hadn’t taken a single one after the rooftop, after Voigt’s sessions. He’d been wrong. It was a battle of wills, me against them, and I’d won. I’d crawled my way back from misery without a single tablet. Right now, though, with Pop dead, I craved the momentary oblivion they offered. “I know what I’m doing. Go drink your tea.”
Thea drew closer, watching. “It can wait.”
The top of the desk offered up nothing interesting. I scanned the office. I knew it well. I’d been here many times before, for chess, for counsel. The mahogany table against the far wall held an often-replenished bowl of jelly beans, which neither Pop nor the school kids he welcomed in could get enough of. Behind the candy sat rows of framed photographs, a few with Pop shaking hands with local dignitaries, even the mayor. Those, however, were pushed well back behind the photos of smiling children: Pop’s kids. What would they do now? What would I do?
I slid open the top drawer, quickly picking through pens, paper clips, and assorted dreck, but my mind was on the cops across the way, on Farraday. This was his job, I knew, but that mattered little. I started on the other drawers, finding nothing in the way of personal papers—no treasured birthday cards kept as a memento, no bank statements, no letters from old friends. Pop didn’t hold onto stuff; he held onto people instead. The left bottom drawer held parish forms, phonebooks, carryout menus, stacks of thank-you notes from churches—St. Ambrose, St. Rita, St. Margaret.
“He went everywhere,” Thea said.
I looked up, having forgotten she was even there, then went back to searching.
“He liked to visit other parishes. That’s how we started our homeless outreach. He saw it somewhere else and brought it here. We served lunch and made sure whoever needed it got a new pair of shoes, a sweater, or a referral to social services.” She sniffled. “But you know all that already. I can’t seem to stop talking.”
Pop had been proud of the program, and he should have been. It did a lot of good. I kept looking. Finally, I pulled the handle on the last drawer, but it wouldn’t budge. I yanked harder, feeling just a little give in the latch. It was locked, not stuck. With a little more effort, I could probably just yank it free, but not without busting the lock. Thea and I exchanged a wary look.
“Oh, please tell me you’re not going to force that open.”
I let the handle go, just for a moment. If there were keys, I’d have found them by now. I remembered I’d seen a letter opener and fished around in the top drawer again until I found it.
“Wait.” Thea stepped forward. “This doesn’t feel right.”
I looked up at her, feeling her pain, knowing it matched mine, but Pop was dead, violently taken. And then there was the rage and the call of the pills and the incompetent Farraday. I popped the lock.
* * *
We stared at the gray lockbox, neither of us saying anything or making a move to lift it out of the drawer, cautious, as if it were a living, unpredictable thing capable of biting off a finger if you came at it wrong. When I finally lifted the box out and set it on the desk, Thea breathed a sigh of relief, and then moved in closer to see what else might be inside the drawer.
“Legal pads,” I said, drawing out a stack of yellow pages. “His sermons, handwritten, going back months.” I set them on the desk. There was nothing else in the drawer, so I shut it. The lockbox opened by sliding a tab to release the latch, but when I did that, nothing happened. Pop had locked that.
“The letter opener again?” Thea asked, pain creasing her face.
“You should go,” I said.
She shook her head. “No, ma’am. I want to know what you know.”
I thought for a moment, then carefully turned the box bottom side up, finding a tiny silver key taped to the underside by a short squib of masking tape.
Thea’s face lit up. “How’d you know?”
“Small key. Easy to lose. This is where I’d keep it.” I opened the box.
“His personal things,” Thea said.
There was a passport inside, Pop’s, a checkbook, credit card receipts. There was also a neat stack of business cards tucked up against the side, held together by a heavy rubber band. “Plumber. Notary public. Dentist.”
Thea peered at them over my shoulder. “Dr. Mendel. I see him, too. Nice man.”
I read through the old credit card receipts. There were a lot of charges from about a year ago for clothing and shoes from men’s stores, which surprised me. Pop wore basic black almost every day. Where was this vast new wardrobe he’d gone into hock for?
There were also charges for airline tickets, dated last May. I couldn’t recall him taking a trip or being gone for even a day. “The Red Roof Inn in Los Angeles,” I said, reading the next charge down. “A two-day stay.” I held the statement up for Thea to see. “What was he doing there?”
I could tell from her confused expression that she hadn’t a clue.
I read on. “There’s a charge for a single one-way ticket out there. Two days later there’s a new charge for two tickets back to Chicago. Who’d he come back with? And why can’t I remember him being gone?” Thea asked.
I sat holding the statement. I had no answers. The front door of the rectory suddenly creaked open down the hall. Probably Ben, coming back to collect me. I slid the receipts into my pocket, the sermons, too. “I’m taking these.”
“But you know what the police said.”
I stood, faced the door. “I’m still taking them.”
Chapter 7
I was twelve and my mother was dead. The smiling priest stood over me, blocking out the sun. “Punch it,” he said. I stared up at him as if he were crazy. I’d come to sit quietly on the bench outside the church, away from the oppressive sadness inside, away from my mother’s body in the casket. I wanted to be alone. I wanted peace. I wanted to run until I ran out of road. I had had a good mother just over a week ago. She cared for me, knew everything about me; now she was gone. I felt untethered, set adrift in the world, lost.
He smiled, holding a pillow to his chest. I wondered briefly where he’d gotten it, then decided with a sigh that I didn’t care. Adults were strange. There was no figuring them out.
I turned my head, ignored him. I didn’t have time for childish things anymore. When I turned back he was still there.
He tossed the pillow to me. “You’ll feel a lot better if you sock something. Really whale on it.”
I threw the pillow back. “Go away.”
“You want me to get your daddy for you? He’s right inside.”
I smirked. My father wasn’t holding up. He didn’t know how. I shook my head, squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, the priest tossed the pillow back. It was a stupid game.
“The point here, kiddo, is that you need to whale on it to get the anger out. Make room for other stuff. Go on. Take a shot.”
I turned away from him again. He could eat the pillow for all I cared. I threw it down on the bench beside me. “Leave me alone.”
“Want to hit me instead?”
I faced him, glowered. It was a tantalizing offer. “Who are you, anyway?”
He held out a friendly hand, which I stared at, but didn’t take. “Father Raymond Heaton. I just transferred here.” He scanned the courtyard. “Pretty place. I think I’m gonna like it.” He beamed down at me, his face so open, so kind, I softened some in spite of myself.
“You talk funny.”
He shrugged, smiled. “Could say the same about you. I hail from New Orleans. They call it the Crescent City. Best city in the world.... You ready for that pillow now?”
“Then will you go away?”
&
nbsp; He chuckled, the corners of his eyes wrinkling in a comforting sort of way. He stood tall and straight, just beginning to gray at the temples. He was a good man. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I did. “Sorry. I kinda come with the church now. Package deal, you could say.”
“I can figure this out on my own.”
He watched me, smiling. “I believe you can. But isn’t it a wonderful thing that you don’t have to?”
He picked up the pillow and tossed it to me a third time. This time I caught it.
“You’re gonna feel a whole lot better. I guarantee it.”
“And if I don’t?”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll just have to think of something else, won’t I?”
I took the pillow and beat it until my knuckles ached, and a mound of goose feathers lay at my feet.
* * *
“Cass?” I jumped, startled at the sound of my name being called. I looked up into Thea’s worried face. She eased down beside me on the bench and plopped her handbag onto her lap, her stout frame bundled into a warm sweater, wisps of black hair fluttering out from under a sturdy knit cap. It looked as though she hadn’t slept in a hundred years. “You looked like you were a million miles away.”
I offered a weak smile. I hadn’t slept, of course. Instead, I’d poured over the things I’d taken from Pop’s office the night before, but none of it meant anything yet. “I met him sitting right here. God, he pestered the hell out of me.”
Thea smiled. She knew. “I like that pillow story. It’s a fact he wouldn’t let anything or anyone go. I’m living proof. I once begged him to leave me be. I was on the street, strung out, lowest I’d ever been, but he kept coming at me.” She rapped her knuckles on the bench. “Fifteen years clean, all because of him.”
I smiled. “You did the work.”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t disappoint him by not doing it.” She was only in her early fifties, but it seemed as though she’d aged that and more since I’d seen her just a few hours ago. That’s what grief does. It adds years and takes some away. She mournfully eyed the rectory door. “I don’t think I can step one foot inside there again.”
“You can. You will.”
We both looked out onto the empty street. The school was closed. No kids to pile noisily into the building, just the birds in the trees and the two of us on the bench not knowing what to do with ourselves.
“There’s still Father Pascoe to do for, of course, but Father Ray was the heart of the place.”
“Pop said Pascoe had personal business to attend to. That’s why he wasn’t here when I saw Pop home. Where is Pascoe now?” I didn’t mean for it to come out as a condemnation, but it did.
Thea noticed. “He’s not a bad man, just different. A little standoffish, sure, but his heart’s in the right place.”
“He never smiles. He acts like the parish is some alien planet he just crash-landed on. This is the South Side of Chicago, not Mars.”
Thea shook her head. “Like I said, he’s different. I don’t know where he was, but I called his cell after the police showed up. I didn’t want him to hear it from the news. He was so upset, he could hardly get a word out. I expect him anytime.” Thea heaved out a weary breath. “He’s in charge now, of course. And so you won’t have to ask, I’ll tell you. Before I found you in the courtyard I was at home, just me and my cat. He can’t speak for me, but if he could, he would.” Thea grew quiet. “I know it’s hard for you to turn the cop off.”
I stared at the yellow crime scene tape still strung across the side door of the church. The building would be off limits until all the evidence had been gathered. I burrowed into my jacket, trying hard not to think of the church as Pop’s tomb. “He never said a word about the trouble he was having.... No one did.”
Thea sighed. “You blame me.”
Of course, it wasn’t her fault. Not anyone’s. Maybe not even mine, though it felt like it. Pop was stubborn and fiercely protective. Neither of us could have easily swayed him to do anything he didn’t want to do. I put a reassuring hand on hers. “I don’t.”
Thea straightened. “You do, because I do. He kept saying it was nothing to worry about, that it would all pass. And I could be wrong, but it felt to me like he knew who was doing it, and he was trying to give them a chance to work it out for themselves.”
“Did Father Pascoe know?”
She nodded. “And he wanted to call the police right away, but Father Ray wouldn’t hear of it. He had to remind Father Pascoe that he was only the associate pastor.” A faint smile swept over her face. “He didn’t much like being reminded.”
“You made Pop come to me?”
“I told him if he didn’t, I would, and he knew I meant it.” She blew her nose into a tissue. “I was scared for him, for all of us, and I didn’t care how mad he got about it. You know how he was when he dug his heels in.”
I nodded. “Unmovable.”
“He could be a stubborn old cuss.”
I chuckled, remembering. “Yes, he could.”
“They wrote in the paper that he shot that boy, then himself. I know as sure as I’m sitting here that that’s not true, and you do, too.”
“Then who hated him enough to kill him?”
Thea turned, shock on her face. “You’re asking me?”
“I found him in the confessional. Maybe he got there on his own, maybe he didn’t. Maybe somebody thought he needed to atone for something. That feels personal. It feels close. You saw him every day. I need a name. Someone he got on the wrong side of.”
Her eyes skittered away. “I don’t know anyone who’d want to kill that man.”
“Someone with a grudge.”
Thea paused, her expression grim. “Folks can argue without being killers.”
“Then whoever it is won’t have anything to worry about.”
She shot up from the bench. “I’d be naming somebody who probably didn’t have a thing to do with this.”
I stood. “Or you might be giving me the name of the person who killed him.”
She stood there fretting over what to say, what to do. “It feels like you’re asking me to go behind his back.” She shook her head. “I can’t do that. He trusted me. You know what I owe him.”
Thea turned on her heels and headed for the rectory. I followed. “I know you’re loyal. I know you wouldn’t dream of gossiping if he were here, but he’s not here. He’s dead.” The words landed like daggers. “I need your help.”
She turned to face me. “And what if I tell you, and it turns out they’re innocent? Then what?”
“Who’s they?” She moved to tear away from me, but I grabbed her arm lightly. “Thea, please.”
“I need to think this over.” She pulled her arm free and walked away. Again, I followed. She unlocked the door and plowed inside. I rushed in after her. The empty feeling of the place nearly knocked the wind out of me. Thea headed full speed toward the kitchen out back, her domain. I matched her step for step. She slammed her bag on the kitchen table, shimmied out of her sweater. “Everyone has disagreements.”
“Who did he have disagreements with?”
She threw up her arms in frustration. “Half the city, from the mayor on down.”
“Thea, the mayor didn’t sneak over here in a rainstorm and kill him.”
“You’re making a joke, but this isn’t funny.”
“Tell me about it.”
We each took a step back, composed ourselves. We’d suffered a loss and hadn’t yet found a way to deal with it. I gave her some space; she did the same for me. Finally, I saw her square her shoulders. “People expect their privacy to be protected. He took that seriously. He made me take it seriously, too.”
“I understand, but he needs your help now. I need it. I’m asking for it.”
She stood quietly, twisting the rings on her fingers, biting her lower lip. “I’m not some gossipy woman listening at key holes.”
I nodded, but didn’t speak, waiting for her to make up her mind.
“Sometimes you hear things.” She hesitated. “Anton Bolek. That’s a name. School’s janitor. Something about him worried Father Ray, but before you ask, I don’t know what that was. I know he discussed it with Father Pascoe, so you’ll have to ask him.”
“I will. Who else?”
Thea looked as though she were on the horns of a great dilemma. I felt like a heel for putting her there, but pressed on.
“George Cummings. He’s a new parishioner, nice enough. He came in like gangbusters, though, volunteering right and left, a real old-fashioned kind of guy. He didn’t much care for the modern Masses Father Ray went for, and told him so. I’m of the opinion that if you’re the last one in, you should have less to say about how things are done, but it’s clear he thinks differently.” Thea made a face.
“And?”
“Nothing,” Thea said. “He’s a good family man.”
“There’s a but, Thea, I can see it on your face.”
She sighed. “He’s a little bossy, for my taste. I had a man like that once. Had to know everything all the time or he wasn’t happy, and if he wasn’t, I sure wasn’t going to be. Men like that have to tell you how, when, and why to do a thing. They always have to be in the driver’s seat.” She shrugged. “That looks like love to some women. Janice Cummings seems to be one of them, but it’s up to her what she settles for.”
“And he and Pop had a problem?”
Thea nodded. “Something happened a couple months ago that Cummings got real upset about. He and Father Ray really went at it in his office. I could hear the yelling all the way in the kitchen. Afterward, he and his family stopped coming to church. Father Ray reached out after a few Sundays and things seemed to go back to the way they were with them working together, just like always.” Thea turned her back to me, pulled the teakettle from the cabinet, and set it on the stove. “Maisie Ross. You know her.” She had owned a store that sold alcohol and drug paraphernalia to kids, until Pop organized the community and closed her down.
“Pop got rid of her.”
“And she held that against him, but it didn’t stop her from opening up a store someplace else. He told you about the break-in a couple weeks ago?”