The Judgment

by William J. Coughlin

  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”

  “Frankly, for a couple of reasons,” I said, still quiet and persuasive, “three, actually. First of all, without any prompting from me, when you spoke of Sam Evans as ‘bad news’ and ‘sinister,’ you used the past tense, as if to say he’s no longer with us.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s nitpicking. I was probably thinking
of him in the past tense as a worry that was now out of my life.” Then he added, “Thanks to you.”

  “All right then, what about this? When I told you Sam Evans had been murdered, you said he’d been shot. In fact, he was, but I didn’t say so.”

  “Aren’t firearms responsible for most homicides today?”

  “And finally,” I said, “there’s the matter of the shot that killed Sam Evans. Bud Billings told me that it had probably been fired from a grove of trees some five hundred yards away—all that distance and it was a clean hit right through the heart. He said that only a master marksman could have hit on a shot like that.” I gestured to the trophy heads on the wall. “If anybody in Kerry County fits that description, you certainly do.”

  He had nothing to say to that, so I got up and walked over to the gun rack on the wall. I lifted one down.

  “It was probably something like this that took Sam Evans out. Maybe this is the very weapon that did it. Bud Billings said they thought it would probably have been a 30-30 that did the job. Is that what this is?”

  “That’s what it is.” He said it in a slightly removed, thoughtful sort of voice.

  “You know when they find the slug that killed him, they can match it perfectly with the gun that fired it. It’s just like fingerprints.”

  I examined the rifle, hefted it. It wasn’t nearly as heavy as it looked, well balanced, a beautiful piece of lethal machinery. I noticed flanges along the rear of the barrel. Holding it up to him, I pointed them out.

  “What are these?” I asked. “They couldn’t be mounts for a telescopic sight, could they?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what they are.”

  “Do you have a telescopic sight for this rifle, Father Chuck?”

  “I have one around here somewhere.”

  “Bud Billings said it would have taken one of those to place the shot that killed Sam Evans. Has this gun been fired recently?”

  I turned the rifle around and smelled the barrel.

  “Careful, Charley,” he cautioned. “Even unloaded guns are dangerous.”

  “No, it smells like it’s just been cleaned.”

  “All my weapons have just been cleaned.”

  “Look, Father, wouldn’t it be better if you came in with me and talked to Bud? He’s a parishioner. He’ll understand. Tell him about Sam Evans: how he tried to blackmail you, threatened to bear false witness against you the way he did in that miserable business of the civil suit that they threatened against you. Let me assure you, he’ll understand.”

  “I understand far more than you think I do,” he said. He seemed to have collected himself, readied himself for some sort of counterattack. “I understand that you’re conning me. You know that if I go in and let them question me about Sam Evans’s death, it won’t stop there. They’ll go on and question me about all kinds of things, things I don’t want to talk about, things that should remain hidden. Very few would understand them, and most of them are saints, dead and gone.”

  “Father Chuck, you’re not making good sense.”

  “Oh, I’m making sense, all right, better sense that you do with all your modern rationalism, your defense of the real criminals who prey upon us. You and your ‘suicide doctor’! I’m surprised you haven’t found an abortionist to defend. You know, Charley, you make me sick. You really do. I honestly don’t know how you live with yourself, the way you seem to seek out the dregs of society and add them to your list. What do you say? ‘I got this drug dealer off, this murderer, this rapist.’ Do you keep count?

  “I tried to talk to you,” he ranted on, his voice louder, rising to his feet. “You called it a debate, but then you began cross-examining me! I didn’t break, you did! I’d like to have seen that in court, the witness breaking down the lawyer in cross-examination. Let me tell you, Charley, God is with me. He spoke to me and told me to protect the innocents, and He told me that the only way to protect them from this world of drugs and violence was to take action. What could I do? What could anyone do but protect the innocents from such a world? And how do you do that? You send them to God in their pure state, without sin but just at the age of reason. Couldn’t you understand that yourself? Why couldn’t you? I wanted you to. I wanted you to with all my heart! Oh, but clearly, you have turned your back on me, just as you’ve turned your back on God. Why, Charley? Why can’t you understand?”

  “I’m trying, Father Chuck,” I said. “I really am. But I’ll tell you, though, that in all honesty, I think you need some help, not help in the parish, or with the outlying churches. No, I think you need help for yourself. Do you remember who sent me here in the first place to help you out with the Sam Evans problem? It was Bishop Solar. I think that from what I’ve heard from you, and from what I’ve observed from your drinking, I really owe it to him and to you to tell him about your difficulties here. I think he’ll recommend psychiatric help for you. I think you need it.”

  “Oh no, Charley, I don’t think I do, and I don’t think I can permit another one of those doctors looking inside my head to tell me that I had a serious problem with repression, and that what I was doing was living an abnormal life. I like my abnormal life. I believe in celibacy. I believe in the Church, the way it’s been for two thousand years, give or take a decade or two.”

  He regarded me in exasperation and then shook his head in angry disapproval.

  “I really don’t like you waving that rifle around the way you’re doing. It shows ignorance, for one thing. I told you that even unloaded guns are dangerous. Even though I emptied that one you’ve got in your hand this morning—yes, and I took the telescopic sight off it, too—I know that it’s still dangerous to wave it around like that. It’s also useless, if you’re trying to threaten me. This, on the other hand, is a loaded gun, and if I threaten you with this, you should indeed feel afraid.”

  He had brought up a pump shotgun from behind the desk, one of his trap guns, and he leveled it at me.

  “Are you threatening me with it?” I asked.

  “Yes, I guess I am,” he said. “Now, I think the best thing for us to do would be to walk out to the back to settle this.”

  Stupidly, ignorantly, I had not counted on a development such as this. Defense lawyers deal with violence all the time, but we deal with it at a remove, safely distanced from any threat to ourselves. What did he have in mind?

  “Do you want me to raise my hands in the air or something?” I tried to make it sound like a joke, but it seemed flat even to me. What he said then made it seem that much flatter.

  “I don’t care what you do, just so long as you remember that there’s a shotgun pointed at your back. Go down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the door.”

  I walked on ahead of him, opening the back door as I came to it, going on ahead into that wide expanse behind the rectory and the parking lot that ended in the woods a few hundred yards away. It must have been about four o’clock, not yet dark but getting close to it. It was almost winter, after all, and the cold in the air confirmed it. It was damp, too; there would be a snowfall soon.

  “What’re you going to do?” Another attempt at humor. “Wrap me up in plastic and set me by the side of the road?”

  “Not at all. There’s going to be a terrible accident,” he said. “I was giving you a lesson in trap shooting, and you handled the gun so awkwardly that you shot yourself, fatally. I’ll call the police, the local police, of course. I know all five of them by their first names. There shouldn’t be any need to involve your friend Bud Billings in this at all. Why should he be interested in a shooting accident?”

  “He might be. I’ve told him all about you, Father Chuck.”

  “Charley, you’re bluffing. Remember, I’m an old poker player. I’m calling your hand, and I’m not impressed with what you’ve got to show.”

  For once I didn’t have a ready reply. Yet he had a lot to say, it seemed, and I had no choice but to listen to him ramble on.

  “You know, you’re very clever, questioning m
e the way you did about the death of that little moron, Sam Evans. You called him a moron yourself. You were so sympathetic, offering me a way out, suggesting that he might have threatened to bear false witness against me just as he had before. No, not that kid. He saw me out on Clarion Road that night, all right, and he recognized me. And you know what he wanted for his silence? À new pickup truck. That’s right, he wanted just enough for a down payment in the beginning and then enough for payments every month. Isn’t that disgusting? The greed for things. It’s a universal disease these days. But you almost got me with your talk, you really did. I actually wanted to say yes, I killed that worthless little excuse for a human being. He tried to make me sound like a queer, and he deserved it. I did it with one shot, and you were right, it was a damned good shot. I may not hunt anymore, but I keep my shooting eye sharp working on targets. Probably not another man in the county could have placed that shot at such a distance.

  “But of course if I had admitted to that, I would have admitted to all the rest. Those four children. And there’ll be more, believe me. But you don’t understand about that, do you? They die painlessly, and I honor them for their purity. That’s why I put them out in the snow. What could be purer than new-fallen snow? Their little bodies washed, their clothes cleaned, lying out there in the snow, the white, white snow. But their souls, their sinless souls, are with God.

  “Why do I do it? I even told you, but you weren’t listening, you wouldn’t listen to me, I suppose because I’m a priest. It was my nephew, Tom. I said he was the closest thing to a son I’d had, would ever have. I told you that he died, but I didn’t tell you how. He was still a child, seventeen, just into college at U of D. Yes, Detroit, Charley, that cesspool that vomited you up here to Kerry County. He was a bright boy, a good kid, and I thought the Jesuits could keep him on the straight and narrow. But I’m afraid I underestimated the malice and the snares of the Devil. Poor Tom, while he was still in grade school, he fell in with a bad crowd out around Palmer Park. He died of a heroin overdose at seventeen. I said the funeral Mass for him, and I drove back here to Hub City in the snow. So deep in sadness, I can’t express it. And on my way to the rectory, I saw little Lee Higgins and offered him a ride. And I remember thinking how much better it would have been for Tom if he’d died at Lee’s age. Think of the pain he would have missed, the sin he would have been saved from.