"You probably don't want to talk about it, do you?"
"The phone call?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know much more than that there's a dead priest in a motel room."
"God. A dead priest. Wow."
All the time we talked, I grabbed socks and underwear and shirt and slacks and tie.
She came over and touched my arm. "I'm sorry about my butt. For bugging you about it, I mean."
I kissed her quickly. "I'm not sorry about it. In fact, I'm very happy about it. You have a wonderful butt. A glorious butt."
"Honest?"
"Honest."
"You're nice." She kissed me back.
"So're you," I said.
Then she grabbed my left cheek.
"You've got a yummy butt, too, Robert."
I was showered and dressed in under five minutes. I'd recently had my hair cut very short. Didn't even need a drier these days.
"You look good," she said.
I kissed her again.
"I hope your friend is going to be all right. The priest."
"I hope so, too."
A priest in a motel with another priest, this one dead. All sorts of lurid possibilities came reluctantly to mind.
I gave her another kiss, this one as much for my sake as for hers, and left.
Fifteen minutes later, I turned into the parking area of the Palms Motel. It was the sort of place the tabloids love, the peeling paint and broken neon sign and cracked windows symbols of the peeling and broken and cracked souls who inhabited the rooms themselves. Whores got murdered here sometimes — usually forlorn black girls from the wrong end of the south-east side, or ample farm maidens from one of the small towns surrounding Cedar Rapids.
I found Room 154 and pulled into the closest available parking spot.
I lingered a moment in the cold morning rain, the hard relentless kind of spring downpour only the farmers love. I looked around to see if anybody was watching. Down at the far end of the sidewalk, a man in a white cowboy hat and a brown western suit came out of his room, carrying a thick briefcase. He rattled the door knob several times to make sure it was locked, then got into his big Chevrolet van.
When he was done backing up and turning around, headed in the opposite direction, I walked over to 154 and knocked. Father Steven Gray opened the door immediately.
Chapter Two
The room was dark and tomb-cold. The only light came from the bathroom in the back. There was a mixture of smells: mildew, dirty rugs, towels, linen, and death. The dead man had shit himself. He lay hunched fetus-style in the middle of the double bed. He was without shirt or socks. His pants were unbuckled. I wasn't sure what to make of any of these details. His mouth was open as if in a silent scream, the lips violent red with blood.
I stood in the room and let myself be suffused with its history; all the betrayals and loneliness. The furnishings, stained, chipped, and dusty, looked too dirty to sit on.
"What's his name, Steve?"
"Father Daly. Peter Daly."
"From St. Mallory's?"
"Yes."
I took a penlight from my sport jacket and knelt down next to the bed. I wanted a closer look at the wound in the chest. It was a large one. I suspected he'd been stabbed several times in the heart. But his open mouth was even more perplexing. This was not commonly seen in a murder victim. I shone my light inside and gagged. My entire body spasmed. I'd never seen anything like this.
"What is it?" Steve said.
"His tongue has been cut out."
"Oh, my Lord."
I went in the back and looked in the bathroom. Though I saw no blood I smelled some, probably in the dirt-and-mustard-colored carpeting. The police lab man would use a test called Luminol to see if there was indeed blood in the rug.
Steve Gray followed me around like a child trailing a parent. He wore a white button-down shirt, a blue windbreaker, chinos and Reeboks. I wondered if the Pope ever dressed like that.
"You looking for anything in particular, Robert?"
"Not really," I said.
When I came out of the bathroom, he said, "We need to talk"
I shook my head. "Talk is for later. What we need to do now is call the police. You can't afford to stall them any longer."
"I called two other people," he said. "And they're on their way over."
"Who are they?"
"Bob Wilson, who is the President of the Parish Board, and Father Ryan. He's the only priest left at St Mallory's now — besides me, I mean." He stared down at the dead priest. "We don't always agree, Father Ryan and I, but this time we do."
"Why invite them now?"
He raised his gaze from the corpse on the bed.
"They're better at press relations than I am. I'll need their help."
I surveyed chairs, end-tables, bed and bathroom counters for anything that had been left behind. There was a golden earring on one of the end-tables. It had been cast in the shape of a heart. I left it where it was. The lab folks would be very angry if I didn't. An open condom wrapper on the bed proclaimed itself to be of the ribbed variety, with a "special" tip.
"Is that what they call a French tickler?" Steve said.
"Uh-huh."
He made a face. "He was quite a guy."
I didn't want to touch the phone so I walked out of the room and went up to the office. Steve walked alongside me.
"The night man here goes to St Mallory's," he said. "He'd had complaints about some kind of fight going on in the room. When he let himself in and found Father Daly dead, he called me right away."
"What's the night man's name?"
"Paul Gaspard."
"Let's go see him. I'm not sure he did you any favors. The cops're really going to be mad."
"This will hurt the parish," he said, not heeding me. "The scandal. I can hear all the jokes already."
We passed a series of junk cars lined up along the walk. They all had out-of-state plates — Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota . . . drifters drifting, desperately trying to find justice or at least shelter from injustice. They'd work minimum wage for a time, maybe enroll their two or three scruffy youngsters in a local school, and then some night they'd do something crazy, or something crazy would be done to them, and they'd start drifting again. You see the kids sometimes, peering out the back windows of rusty old cars. They can break your heart.
Just before we reached the office, I said, "What was Father Daly doing here?"
"I don't know."
I stopped and looked at him. With his pugged nose and curly dark hair, his face would always look younger than his years.
"You wouldn't lie to me, would you, Steve? I'm trying to help you, remember?"
He looked away from me. Big semis pushed into the sheets of rain marching down the nearby interstate. All the cars had their lights on, fragile prayers in a world of thunder and lightning and darkness.
He turned back to me. "I think he was having an affair."
"Who with?"
His smile was sour, his tone defensive. "Despite what the tabloids have to say about us, most priests have affairs with women, not other men or little children."
Steve hadn't given a name. I decided to ignore that for a while.
"Couldn't he get in trouble for having an affair?"
Steve nodded. "Yes, and especially in this diocese. Bishop Curry doesn't put up with anybody breaking the vow of chastity. He has also been known to turn pedophile priests over to the police. He's a tough guy."
"Was Father Daly a nice guy?"
He shrugged, glanced up at the line of raindrops dripping from the edge of the overhang that kept us dry. Everything smelled cold. Everything looked drab and sad.
"I'm not sure anybody would have called him nice."
"He have any enemies?"
"A couple, as a matter of fact."
"Any idea who they might be?"
"Well," he said, "for starters I'd say the husbands of the two women he had affairs with while he was sup
posed to be counseling them on their marriages. The husbands weren't at all happy about that. In fact, one of them was going to sue Father Daly for alienation of affection." He smiled bleakly. "I guess there are some things we can forgive as priests that we can't as men. Father Daly caused a lot of trouble in his time, I'm afraid."
"I take it you'll tell the police this?"
"I won't have any choice, will I?"
We went inside. When Steve saw the woman behind the counter, he said, "Oh, where's Paul?"
"Paul left," she said. "His shift ended twenty minutes ago." She nodded to an ancient dusty wall clock. She was maybe sixty with dentures that clicked and an angry snarl of hair that a beautician had tinted an impossible orange. "Help you gentlemen?"
"May I use the phone here?"
She pushed a black phone toward me. "Long as it's local."
"He's calling the police," Steve said. "There's a dead man in Room 154."
"Oh Lord, not another one," she said calmly.
"Another one?" I asked as I dialed.
"Couple years ago they found some hooker with her throat cut. There must've been cops here for two weeks, traipsing in and out. Scared the heck out of our customers. I mean, a lot of them don't want anybody to know they're here."
I talked to a homicide detective and gave her all the information I had. She said that a black and white would be there within a matter of minutes, and that she herself would follow shortly afterwards.
Steve was over by the door. "Father Ryan and Bob Wilson just pulled in. I'd better go back to the room."
"I'll come with you," I said. I pushed the phone back. "Thanks."
"You know the guy personally?" the woman asked me. "Yes," Steve said, and I could see the pain it caused him to say this. "He was a priest."
"You're kidding me," the woman said. "A priest!" Her dentures clicked and she made a grim face. "Boy, you just don't know who to trust these days, do you?"
We walked back to Room 154.
Father Ryan was a tall, slender man with thinning blond hair and thick eyeglasses. He was dressed in priestly black, and a white Roman collar. He had a steel handshake.
Bob Wilson was big, beefy, whiskey-faced, and blustery. He had the air of a good bar-room brawler that his gray business suit, white shirt and blue tie couldn't quite offset. While he was still shaking my hand, he said to Steve Gray, "This is great. We're supposed to start our fund-raising drive next week, Monsignor."
"We'll be all right, Bob, just stay calm," Steve said. I remembered him saying that Wilson and the priest would know how to handle the press. Given his air of frenzy, I wouldn't let Wilson anywhere near the press.
I went over to the door, pushed it open and marched inside. They followed me. We were like teenagers at a carnival, about to gaze upon one of the world's most frightening sights: a murdered man.
"Boy, what did he do?" Bob Wilson said as soon as he was inside. "Crap his pants or what?"
Father Ryan was more solemn. He went over and stood next to the bed and stared down at Father Daly's body.
He reached out a long arm and touched the dead priest's shoulder. Then he closed his eyes and began praying silently.
We all stood in silence until he was finished. I checked out the room with a couple of glances. Everything was as it had been — bathroom light on, door ajar, ashtrays clean, rusty metal wastebasket empty and tipped over on its side, golden earring on end-table, black oxfords and socks near the head of the bed, man's white shirt tossed over the back of a chair.
When he opened his eyes, Father Ryan said, "I got to know his sister pretty well, Monsignor. She's over in Omaha. I can call her if you'd like."
"I'd appreciate that, Father."
Wilson, all angry energy, was stalking around the room. "What was he doing here, anyway? Cheap motel like this. God Almighty."
Yeah, he'd make a beautiful press spokesman all right. He started to pick up the ashtray.
"Don't touch anything," I said.
Wilson looked first at Steve and then at me. "Exactly who are you, anyway, Mr. Payne?"
"Robert was an FBI agent for a little over ten years," Steve said. "Now he's a consultant on murder cases to police departments."
Wilson said, "Oh. Sorry I snapped at you then. I guess you know what you're talking about after all."
He walked back to the bathroom. "All right if I pee? I've had three cups of coffee and no breakfast."
"I wish you'd go down to the office, if you wouldn't mind," I said. "The police may find something useful in the toilet bowl."
"What a job," he said, "pawing through toilet bowls."
He left and Steve said, "He's actually a very decent family man."
Before I could say anything, Father Ryan said, "He works very hard for our parish, Mr. Payne. We wouldn't have been able to make any of the church improvements if it hadn't been for Bob Wilson."
Steve was nodding agreement, when the two uniforms came through the door.
They introduced themselves and started the process of securing the crime scene.
"I'm afraid we'll have to ask you to wait outside," the young uniform said. "I understand that they have coffee and rolls down in the office."
I was just turning to go when I glanced over at the end-table where the golden earring had been.
I walked across to the table and looked around at the floor, in case the earring had been knocked off.
But the earring was gone, even though I'd seen it just a few minutes ago.
I looked at Steve, Father Ryan, and Bob Wilson.
Only Bob Wilson had been anywhere near it. Only Bob Wilson could have taken it.
But why was an earring found at the crime scene so important to a good family man like him?
Chapter Three
"He's a friend of yours — Monsignor Gray?" Detective Judy Holloway asked me. Then: "Excuse me."
She sneezed then jammed the nipple of a small white plastic inhaler into her left nostril. "You think I'm bad off," she said, talking as if she had a cold. "You should hear my three kids."
Her sinuses quelled at least for the moment, she repeated, "So is Monsignor Gray a friend of yours?"
"Uh-huh. Old friend."
"You should sit him down and explain the law to him, then," she said. She was a slender woman about five-eight. She wore a red blazer, starched white button-down shirt, black skirt, black hose and black one-inch pumps. She wasn't exactly pretty but there was an earnest quality to the blue eyes I liked. Her haircut was earnest, too — short and dean and sincere. She looked almost like a kid, no more than mid-thirties.
She'd spent twenty minutes in Room 154, then another ten minutes interviewing Steve Gray down in the office. I was outside the room, drinking coffee from a paper cup. A rusty garbage truck was consuming the contents of two dumpsters, the hydraulic arms making a lot of noise. A drizzle had started fifteen minutes ago and was still soaking everything down. A cop walked over in the rain and jumped up on the garbage truck and told the guy to stop hauling the garbage away. The crime scene was being secured. The police team would want to look through the contents of the dumpster.
"I told him he should have called the police first," I replied.
She said, "You think he had anything to do with it?"
"With what?"
She sounded as if I were awfully naive. "With what? Boy, Payne, you're supposed to be a pro. You find a man in a motel room with a dead man, who's your first suspect going to be?"
"You don't know Steve Gray."
"No, I don't — but you do, and that's why I asked. I mean, they could have been gay."
"Not Steve. And from what Steve said, not Father Daly, either."
She nodded. "Yeah, he told me that Daly had had a number of affairs. I don't know why these guys don't just become ministers. You see that French tickler wrapper in there?"
"Uh-huh."
"He was one wild priest."
"I'll be sure and mention that to the Pope next time I talk to him."
"Smart-ass. Tim Brady says you're a good guy. I'll take his word for it."
Brady is a Cedar Rapids detective I once worked with on a case in downtown Illinois. A kidnapping. Brady had been a young cop there.
"I think I irritated Father Gray's friend," Detective Holloway said.
"Father Ryan?"
"No, the ball-player. I think he thought I wasn't reverent enough to the Monsignor."
"Ball-player?"
"Yeah. Bob Wilson."
"You got me. I'm not much of a sports fan."
"All-American fullback when he was at Iowa. Played a couple of seasons in the pros then came back here and made a lot of money selling real estate. Owns his own company now and is doing very well."
And one of his hobbies is collecting earrings, I thought.
I was just about to bring it up, how I suspected that Wilson had taken the earring, when a uniformed female cop approached Holloway and told her that the medical examiner wanted to see her in the room.
Holloway put out a hand. As we were shaking she said, "Don't forget to tell your friend the Monsignor how the law works around here."
"I won't."
I was watching her walk away when somebody behind me said, "He got a phone call late last night."
I turned around to see Father Ryan there. He had a pink-frosted cake donut in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other.
"This probably doesn't look too good, does it?" he said.
"What doesn't?"
"You know, eating a donut at a time like this. Especially a pink one. I mean, with Father Daly in there dead."
"You didn't like him much, huh?"
"You can tell?"
"Yeah. Sort of, anyway."
"He was a bully, if you want to know the truth."
"Steve Gray doesn't seem crazy about him, either."
"He gave Steve — the Monsignor, I mean - a lot of trouble over the past couple of years. He pretty much flaunted his women."
"How many women are we talking about?"
He sipped at his coffee. "Excuse me. I want to get some of it down before it gets cold."
"Sure."
He finished sipping and said, "Maybe six, seven. All of them women Father Daly was seeing as a counselor. Not to be cynical, but this is exactly the sort of thing the Catholic Church gets sued over these days. It creates a lot of bad publicity. And we don't need any more."
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