The Only Good Priest

by Mark Richard Zubro

  We chatted with him awhile. A nice enough guy, I guessed. He left.

  A wrinkled hand gripped the side of the booth. Moments later the head of another Faith board member, Bartholomew Northridge, peered around the side of the partition.

  “May I sit with you?” he asked.

  I invited him to join us. He glanced cautiously around the room and fearfully back toward the doorway. Then he tottered over and dropped into the booth alongside Scott with so much force I thought he might break some bones. He licked his lips, coughed, took out his hanky, and spit into it.

  “Monica said you’d be asking me questions about Father Sebastian’s death.” He clutched one quivering hand with the other. “I didn’t kill him.”

  I told him we weren’t going to accuse anybody, just find out what happened. I told him he’d been seen and heard downstairs.

  His hands began wandering over his body, nervously picking at nonexistent lint, scratching his head, rearranging the wisps of white hair that gathered randomly on top. He began rocking, back and forth in unconscious motion.

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  Gently, I tried to find out of what. He stared at me mutely for the longest time. Finally, his washed-out gray eyes rested on Scott.

  “You’re famous, aren’t you?” he whispered.

  Scott nodded.

  “When I was young, I was attractive enough to have all the sex I wanted. Now I can barely afford to pay for a little human closeness once a month.” A tear glittered in the old man’s eyes, rolled down his cheek. He looked at Scott. “May I touch you?” Scott immediately moved closer. Their eyes met and the old man stopped shaking. Gingerly Bartholomew reached a hand out. It landed first on Scott’s shoulder. Scott’s blue eyes bathed him in warmth. From tentative pats and caresses of his shoulder Bartholomew rubbed his hand over the flannel shirt-covered arm down to the wrist. The angle they sat at in the back of the booth let me catch only glimpses of the next movements of Bartholomew’s hands as they moved to Scott’s kneecap. Then, with eyes downcast, he moved his hand nervously up Scott’s thigh. He renewed the body rocking with his hands inches from the folds of Scott’s crotch. My lover didn’t flinch. His eyes waited for Bartholomew to look up. With a wrench of courage, the old man brought his eyes up to Scott’s. The rocking stopped again.

  Bartholomew took several deep breaths. Then the wrinkled hand moved to find the top of Scott’s head, patted the soft blond hair. With two fingers he traced Scott’s eyebrows, nose, cheeks, left ear, chin; finally the tip of one finger touched each lip. Bartholomew’s hand fell away and tears coursed down his cheeks. He cried silently. Scott moved even closer to the old man, put an arm around his shoulder, and hugged him tenderly. No two-year-old clung tighter to Scott’s neck than Bartholomew did at that moment. Scott soothed him, murmured kind words, rubbed his back with one hand, held him tight with the other.

  After several minutes I heard Bartholomew murmur, “Thank you.” They unclinched. Bartholomew pulled out his enormous hanky, yellowed from years of overuse and inadequate bleaching. Scott remained sitting close to him, and after Bartholomew cleaned himself up, Scott put his right arm around his shoulder, took Bartholomew’s frail, wrinkled hand, and wrapped it in his own. The old man laid his head back on Scott’s shoulder, using it for a head rest.

  I explained to Bartholomew about checking each person’s story and the need to find the person Sebastian met with each week. He gulped, squeezed Scott’s hand, and nodded. He told us he’d gone downstairs to use the john, then stepped over for a few words with Father Sebastian, the only person who took time for him, didn’t laugh at him behind his back. He knew he kept the job as Faith’s treasurer because Neil secretly checked his books and reports each week.

  “I don’t need his pity. I’m eighty-two years old, but I know my work.” There was a fierce professional pride in his tone.

  He told us Father Sebastian was the only one who ever visited him. His parents and sisters died years before and his nephews lived far away, and they’d never been close to begin with.

  “Father Sebastian wanted me to get out more. He told me I should volunteer to help people with AIDS. I was scared. I know that’s stupid. He told me I was silly. I got mad at him the last time he visited. So I had to go see him Sunday, downstairs. I had to know if he was angry with me. He wasn’t. He smiled so nicely. But he told me I had my health, and I should help others, and he’d be taking me to Howard Brown Memorial Clinic this week.” He hung his head and squeezed Scott’s hand. “I said I couldn’t. His kindness made me feel so guilty. I said horrible things, then left as quick as I could.” He gulped, but held back the tears. He sat straighter in the chair. “I’m going this week. I’ll do whatever I can for them. I’ve got to make it up to him, and I’ll help you boys too.”

  He grinned for the first time. I saw the gleam of his denture clips. He glanced around the room and leaned forward confidentially.

  “Priscilla,” he whispered. “I’ve heard her. She talks violence, destruction, and murder. She threatened Father Sebastian last Sunday before Mass. Threatened to kill him, I don’t know why. She scares me. Usually she ignores me, like I’m deaf and slime, but I hear.” He tapped his right ear. “I hear perfectly.”

  He leaned back, perhaps exhausted by this confidence. I thanked him. Whether from lack of knowledge, trust, or energy, he told us no more. We chatted briefly, then walked together to the door. We offered to get the car and drop him someplace, but he refused, insisting he could make it on his own. He and Scott hugged briefly; then the old man disappeared down the street.

  We walked back to Scott’s. After the bitter cold earlier in the winter, the forty-degree weather in January caused us to linger as if it were seventy in June. I had Monday off in honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday, but the next day’s schedules dictated two cars so we made the return trip to River’s Edge.

  We decided to stop by the rectory to see if the good Father Clarence was all snug in his suburban bed. Perhaps we might follow him to the trysting place Frank Murphy had posited. We arrived at the church just after midnight. In the parking lot a red Corvette nestled between two black Chevies. A gray Toyota pickup truck sat three parking spaces away from them. The only light in the rectory shone from the front windows on the first floor.

  “Late-night visitors?” Scott said.

  “I guess priests can stay up late and party,” I said.

  We parked halfway down Altadena Terrace, close enough to see who came and went. After fifteen minutes Scott said, “What if the neighbors see us out here and call the police?”

  I pointed to the ramshackle, run-down houses around us. “On this side of town they won’t notice, of they’ll think we’re cops.”

  “In a Porsche?”

  “Okay. They’ll think were drug dealers, which is even better. They’ll know better than to fuck with us.”

  After half an hour he said, “This is stupid.”

  I said, “Haven’t you ever seen them do surveillance on TV? Before the commercial comes on they always get a lucky break.”

  He sighed. “We couldn’t see anybody’s face from back here anyway.”

  I started the car and moved us a quarter of a block closer.

  After forty-five minutes his fidget index hit its limit. “Tell me why this is a sane thing to be doing! It may not be zero outside, but I’m starting to get cold. This isn’t summer here.” The annoyed thrum at the back of his voice told me I’d better come up with some solid logic quick. He fixed his blue eyes on mine.

  “A few more minutes?”

  “Fifteen. Solid limit. We leave no matter what.”

  I shrugged grudging agreement.

  Fourteen minutes later the rectory door opened.

  “Look.” Scott pointed.

  Still buttoning his coat, and in nonclerical pants, Clarence hurried across the parking lot to his car.

  He tore off down the road. I made the Porsche purr after him. Down 161st Street to Wolf Road, thr
ough Mokena, right on Front Street to School House Road, a jog through New Lenox to Laraway Road, over to Route 52, then down to Manhattan. Just inside the little town he turned to the right toward a cluster of two-story apartments houses a block from the highway.

  I’d closed the distance significantly on entering town. He parked in the driveway at the first apartment house on the north end of the complex. The door opened before he knocked.

  “A sick parishioner?” Scott said.

  “Not his parish. I saw a woman in a very short and sexy nightie. I don’t think this visit was to bring her communion.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “Not unheard of.”

  “For a priest?”

  “There’s got to be some heteroxsexual priests. Then again, I’m not sure.” I told him my brother Glen’s story about the old priest who performed the wedding ceremony for him and Jeannette. The priest spent most of his time insisting that all the women in the parish loved him.

  “Setting up his heterosexual credentials?” Scott asked.

  “Sort of. Except Glen said he ruined the whole effect when he spent the entire reception solicitously checking out how much the handsomest young men had drunk.”

  “Another fag priest,” Scott said.

  “Probably. Glen said it was embarrassing when the priest tried to be chummy. It was as if the guy thought a sex spy from the chancery might be checking up on him.”

  The lights in the downstairs apartment flicked off one by one. I doubted if Father Clarence had to worry about his hetero credentials. Barely hidden at the edge of a denuded cornfield, I didn’t want to wait for departure. If the Manhattan police stopped to ask questions, we’d be hard pressed to explain our presence.

  Back the way we came and home again home. “So he’s got a girlfriend,” Scott said as we sat at the light at Gouger Road and Route 30.

  I felt sorry for the guy stuck in his vows, no one to hold him in those special times, good or bad. Yet he’d gone into it open-eyed. No one forced him to be a priest, as they had in the Middle Ages.

  In the car on the way home Scott turned frisky and rather bawdy, even for a Porsche on darkened back roads. I managed to get us home with most of our clothes on. I made my mistake when I pulled the car onto the darkened side of the house. Love in a Porsche doesn’t have a lot to say for it. Even with our athletic acrobatics, discomfort reigned.

  We did a serious workout for two hours Monday morning. After showers we had stale Cheerios and milk almost ready to turn sour for breakfast.

  “Great meal,” Scott commented.

  “You didn’t have to cook it. I didn’t burn it. That equals gourmet around here. Shut up and eat.”

  He had an eleven o’clock photo session at a cable TV station in Forest Park. He left and I drove to the River’s Edge police station. Smack in front of the place sat a police car with four flat tires and a cop sitting behind the wheel staring ahead. He never blinked as I walked past him, up the steps, and into the police station. Inside I asked Frank what that was all about.

  He said, “A mistake,” and offered no further explanation.

  I told him about Father Clarence’s nocturnal wanderings. Frank raised an eyebrow and chuckled but said he didn’t imagine it had anything to do with Father Sebastian. He didn’t want to doubt my nephew, but he hadn’t been able to establish any connection between Clarence and Sebastian’s death.

  “I did find out some strange stuff.” We walked to the gray conference room. Today the radiator gave off sporadic clangs. He tipped his chair back, leaned his shoulders and head against the wall, and steepled his fingers. Then he rubbed them along the sides of his nose.

  “Good news, bad news, what?” I asked.

  “Odd news. Information missing. I had to be very discreet. I tried a courtesy call to the cops in charge of the case. Not the least interested in what I had to say.” The cops had sounded bored and put upon but had also evaded every question. Usually the city and suburban cops cooperated fairly closely. Many of them had trained at the Chicago Police Academy together and knew one another from way back. Most little suburbs didn’t have the cash or manpower to create an enormously expensive training program for one or two cops. Instead they sent them to Chicago, where they got some of the best training in the country.

  “Got nowhere with them,” Frank said. “Wouldn’t even let me check the files. I backed off quickly. They wanted to know my interest. I stalled them with a bullshit story about suburban cop paperwork. I don’t think they bought it.”

  Then he’d tried the Medical Examiner’s office. An old friend worked there. Even this guy hesitated to talk, but finally he said one thing. In putting the files in order at the end of the week, he’d noticed the Father Sebastian report out of place. A quick inspection told him some documents were missing. He checked with a number of co-workers. No one had seen anything.

  Frank did his two-handed nose rub again. A few reports remained, mostly lab work that must have arrived after the other materials in the file had been taken. In fact, his friend had gotten the blood report back from the lab just half an hour before Frank called.

  “Father Sebastian tested positive for the AIDS antibodies,” Frank said. “I guess I never really thought about there being gay priests. Of course I never really think about priests much at all.”

  “He was sure about the test?”

  “Yep.”

  “That couldn’t have been what killed him?”

  “Nope, but what did is no longer in the files, if it ever was.”

  “Your friend make a stink?”

  “He reported it to his superior. The woman took the file and said she’d investigate. My friend’s worked in Chicago long enough to smell a cover-up. He says this one stinks from Evanston to Gary. ‘Some heavy shit is going down’ is the way he put it.”

  I told Frank what I’d learned from the Faith group on Sunday.

  “If he took his commitment to celibacy seriously, as they claim, how come he was HIV positive?” Frank asked.

  “Could have had a blood transfusion. Or maybe they didn’t know him as well as they thought,” I said. “I’d like to find the guy Prentice said he met every Sunday.”

  “Good luck,” Frank said. “So far you haven’t found anything to indicate Sebastian’s death wasn’t due to natural causes. I don’t think you or I can do anything about the missing file stuff. I can tell you one thing. The initial cop on the case and his partner got called off it within days. That rarely happens. You might try them.” He gave me their names.

  I left wondering how Sebastian had become HIV positive. Somebody had to be close enough to him to know. Maybe one or more of the six Faith board members had held back information. I wondered if we had enough to pressure Clarence further. And I wanted to talk to the rest of the Faith board about their trysts in the sacristy Sunday.

  4

  Late that morning I drove to Scott’s. I parked my black pickup truck among the BMWs, Cadillacs, and limousines. I greeted Alfred, the doorman, and rode the penthouse elevator up. I spent an hour waiting for Scott in the music room listening to the Minneapolis Concert CD by Ed Tricket, Anne Mayo Muir, and Gordon Bok.

  For lunch we grabbed a corned beef sandwich at the corner deli and hurried to an appointment at the Gay Tribune. Their office existed in the hot new area of town along the Halsted Street strip between North Avenue and Fullerton.

  Inside, chaos reigned. Broken glass from the shattered picture window scrunched underfoot. Plastic and metal computer fragments lay strewn over the landscape. Heaps and drifts of paper continued to cascade as people sifted through them. All the desks sat upright, but the drawers were dumped out onto the floor.

  Monica sat on top of a stepladder, cigarette holder clamped in her lips. Youthful male and female underlings scurried about. Occasionally she’d be asked a question. She rarely did more than point. A phone rang and Monica picked a cordless model off the top of an eight-foot bookcase. We heard no part of her conversation. She wore dar
k blue bib overalls with a pink silk blouse underneath, along with Air Jordan tennis shoes. No matching purse in sight.

  A kid who couldn’t have been more than fourteen demanded to know what we wanted. She wore orange plastic glasses, baggy pants, a Mohawk haircut, and a paint-spattered T-shirt that said EAT THE WHALES. I asked to talk to Monica. She said, “Mom’s too busy. Can’t you see we had a break-in? Unless you’re cops.” She peered at us. “Not ugly enough. Fuck off.”

  Only twelve feet wide, the room ran the length of the building, maybe fifty feet deep. Monica caught sight of us from her perch halfway down the room. With languid grace but surprising rapidity, she descended the ladder and closed the distance between us. The child stalked off without a word or look passing between them.

  “The third-floor office is undamaged,” Monica said. “We can talk there.” She led the way up narrow stairs. Large holes gaped in the walls as we climbed. She pointed to them. “From the last break-in, not this one.”

  The glimpse I got of the second floor made the first look pristine. They hadn’t started cleaning here. The attackers’d covered the walls and mounds of debris with splotches of white and green paint. If you could cut it, they had. If it was breakable, it was in pieces. She led us into an elegant third-floor office.

  “Quadruple-locked and burglar-proof up here,” she said. “Because of Priscilla living in back, we put in extra protection. It’s on order for downstairs.”

  Photographs by JEB lined one of the walls. The fourth had a picture window that looked out on Halsted Street. Monica pointed to several indentations in the picture window. “Almost shot up the place a couple of months ago. Fortunately I had them install bulletproof glass when I moved in. You can’t be too careful when you’re a gay businesswoman. At least I know some stupid kid with his dad’s assault rifle can’t blow me away.”

  We stepped around a cantilevered desk crafted of rosewood burl with inlaid zinc zigzags. She seated us in comfortable chairs around a glass-topped coffee table. On the corner of the table nearest to where I sat was the Cunt Coloring Book by Tee Corinne, with an open box of Crayolas carefully placed to let the looker observe the cover completely.