The green cards. That was a laugh on Fuqua. Fuqua who had not wanted him to go to San Quentin for Turd Turner’s execution.
Who had insisted that Turd Turner was a nobody.
The implication being that a nobody deserved to die alone.
He remembered the holding cell down the corridor from the gas chamber.
And the cheap rye in the paper cup.
And the way Turd Turner tried to make himself out a desperado instead of the fuckup he was.
That bank job in Inglewood, Turd Turner had said. That was me.
And the hit in North Hollywood.
And the green cards.
The forged green cards.
I bet you didn’t know that, Turd Turner had said.
No.
I was running them down to Mexico for Jack A.
Is that right?
Good stuff. The best. Jack was getting a hundred clams each for them from the Mexicans in Tijuana is what I hear. You got to hand it to Jack. He’s got a real nice thing going with those taco heads. First he sells them the phony papers and then he gives them a job shoveling shit to pay for them. A dollar a day and a lifetime to pay. That’s a Mexican’s idea of heaven.
Then the rye was gone and they had embraced and eight hours later in the presence of fourteen witnesses, Horace Turner had died in accordance with the laws of the state of California and he had not thought of the green cards again until Barry Backer refused to talk about lesbians on the family radio station that was going to broadcast the Cardinal’s midnight mass at Christmas.
He should have told Fuqua, but he didn’t. Fuqua was too busy telling everyone in the 50,000-watt listening area how smart he was, and Barry Backer was saying, Listen, gang, this is an exclusive, like he was Front Page Farrell. Fuck them both. One thing he was not going to do if he could help it, and that was make Fuqua chief. Sit on the green cards, check out Turd Turner’s story, Jack wasn’t going anywhere. There was the other side, too. With the history he and Jack had together, he had better be sure Jack was involved, a lot more sure than he was now. Brenda had said Jack was clean, and Brenda didn’t owe Jack any favors. Sure Jack knew the girl and sure he was probably hip deep in the green cards—that was the sort of operation that would appeal to him—but the two together didn’t necessarily add up to Murder One. Only that he liked to fuck and that he liked to make money and he wasn’t too choosy about how he made it. Killing the girl was stupid and Jack had never drawn a stupid breath in his life. Nor had he ever confused a fuck with grand passion. This whole business was too neat, too much like a story on the radio, and it had been from the start. There were no loose ends, everything seemed to be connected, and that was what bothered him. Usually you locked your desk and you went home and you worried about the termites in the ceiling or the dry rot in the avocado trees or whether your medical insurance covered the piles. The hemorrhoids growing like acorns in your ass had nothing to do with a cute little number who had a rose tattooed above her bush and who just happened to be cut in two. Not this time. Everything was mixed in together. You talked about Turd Turner, then you had to talk about Corinne. You talked about Jack, you were probably talking about Des, too. Knock on Brenda’s door and there was Mickey Gagnon, watch Fuqua take a leak and there was Dan Campion shaking Fuqua’s dick. Crotty’s Chinamen were probably in there, too, you looked hard enough.
No. That wasn’t how things worked. He knew there were those who would say he was trying to cover his own ass. Fuqua, for one. Maybe he was. It would be nice to roust Jack, to make him sweat, to watch the Cardinal drop him like he was a mortal sin, but let someone else stick his neck out. Not me, not yet. A hint here, a hint there and the green card story would come out. When that time comes, sit back and enjoy it. Until then, be cautious, move slow.
All things considered, the way it turned out, a wise choice.
“. . . he’s sucking his skim milk through a straw, Monsignor, is what they tell me,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said. Someone else at death’s door, Tom Spellacy mused. She was always the first to know when the bladder didn’t work or the bowels didn’t move. “The arteries are so hard the blood goes banging through like he’s a pinball machine. A ballroom dancer is what he wanted to be. With a roomful of gold cups from the Harvest Moon Ball. The waltz was always his favorite. But he had a hard time getting partners, with the cock eye. If it wasn’t for the cock eye, the arteries would be soft as spaghetti, I bet. Because dancing is good for the veins. Blood like marbles, and you can blame it all on the wall eye. Which comes from Scully side of the family . . .”
Tom Spellacy wondered who the wall-eyed Scullys were but nodded at Mary Margaret anyway. There was a shrewdness beneath that chatter somewhere. I think we should have relations, Mary Margaret had said Thursday night. Relations. It had been two years since he heard that word and he had almost forgotten the dread it made him feel. When Corinne said “relations,” she was talking about an uncle or a cousin. Someone whose name he did not have to remember. What you did in bed was fuck. It had nothing to do with relating. Maybe Corinne was the reason Mary Margaret wanted to have relations. The house obviously had not been much occupied the two years she was in Camarillo. I had to be living somewhere. Somewhere I was probably having relations. Perhaps Mary Margaret just wanted to establish that she was home. And the best way to establish it was to have relations.
The idea wasn’t bad, he supposed. Just the execution.
For one thing, when he was on top of her, he thought of Corinne. Not that thinking of someone else was unusual. Often when he was on top of Corinne, he had thought of Brenda, or the girl in the Ponds ad. But when he thought of them he only thought how nice it would be to have them there, telling him how terrific he was, the best they ever had. Especially the girl in the Ponds ad, in her strapless formal. He never even wanted the girl in the Ponds ad to take off her gardenia corsage. When he thought of Corinne, in the three minutes he was on top of Mary Margaret, he remembered he had not picked up the clothes at her apartment. There was a pair of blue slacks and a brown suit and a couple of shirts and the Jockey shorts she had bought at the mid-month men’s furnishings sale at Bullock’s and he remembered that he had not tried to find out where she had moved or whether she had had the scrape or what she was doing or how she was getting along and he remembered how relieved he was when she said she always cut her losses and first it made him feel badly that he was relieved and then he felt guilty and then he came and then he said to himself, Fuck it, never again.
It was a performance he did not want to repeat. Better to work late than to repeat it.
And so he stayed late Friday night. Stayed until he was sure Mary Margaret was asleep, lost somewhere in the folds of her flannel nightgown. The bullpen cleared out, the telephones did not ring, the teletype machine was silent except for an occasional clatter. A code 8 on West 57th Place. A 415 on the 2700 block of Hoover. A 211 on Arlington. A 447 on Devonshire. He opened the file drawers and took the manila folders back to his cubicle. The fluorescent lights made the flimsy partitions an even more sickly green than they were in the daytime. He spread the first pile of folders on his desk and stacked the others on the floor, each pile sagging under its own weight: interrogation reports, psychiatric reports, telephone logs, field investigations, confessions, statements, watch reports, end-of-tour reports, yellow sheets, fingerprint records, incident reports, arrest records, photographs, tip files, lead files, M.O. jackets, nickname files, witnesses, suspects, informers, snitches, paper, paper and more paper. The systems approach. A search for a definite pattern. Although it was not exactly what Fuqua had in mind. The systems approach to pass the time until Mary Margaret was asleep and he would not have to raise the flannel nightgown over her thighs and think about Corinne.
Let Fuqua worry about the green cards. That was a story he already knew. Let Fuqua find the thread of connections and sew them all together like buttons on a suit. He would read and not fuck his wife. The language in the reports was restful, so anonymous th
at it removed personality. Suspect. Perpetrator. Vehicle. Apprehended. Weapon. Surveillance. Residence. Caucasian. Male. Female. The murderer was a well-built male who hated women, said the first police psychiatrist. The murderer was a well-built female who hated women, said the second police psychiatrist. The murderer was impotent. The murderer was potent. He read on. The murderer was a midget. The murderer was a twin. He ordered coffee. The murderer was a lesbian. The murderer was a child molester. He ordered a ham and cheese on rye, but when the sandwich came on whole wheat he did not eat it. The cheese curled and hardened and the bread went stale. A chief petty officer confessed, a Negro waitress accused, a deputy sheriff in Riverside County arrested. Charges dismissed.
At 11:30 he called home. Mary Margaret answered on the second ring. She said she was going to say her prayers and go to bed. Shortly after midnight he went to the all-night cafeteria on Temple. He had pot roast, mashed potatoes, gravy, apple cobbler and three cups of coffee. A drunk was asleep at a corner table. The drunk was only wearing one shoe. Tom Spellacy stared at him for a long time before he finally realized what was missing. He wondered how long he had overlooked the missing shoe. He blamed the reports for the oversight. They boiled all life’s aberrations down into simple declarative sentences. The complexities were removed, the questions sandpapered away. “Subject is female Caucasian, thirty-seven years old, known only as Dildo Dot.” Why was the subject only known as Dildo Dot? In the report she was no different than Mabel Leigh Horton. Female, Caucasian, age unknown. Tommy Diamond, Raymond F. Rafferty, Leland K. Standard, they were all the same. Harold Pugh, Shopping Cart Johnson, Gloria Deane, Ida Parnell, Sammy Barron, Timothy Mallory. Maybe Fuqua was right. The only way you could find a definite pattern was to plane away the knots of identity, the quirks that muddled the perception with likes and dislikes and knowing. Back in his cubicle he picked up the incident reports from the night of the murder. Armed robbery. Misdemeanor assault. Grand theft auto. Rape. Assault with a deadly weapon. Lewd conduct. Indecent exposure. The unusual occurrences of a usual night. Drunk and disorderly. Disturbing the peace. Animal bite. Arson. Burglary. Petty theft. Abandoned vehicle. Prowler. Missing child. Brush fire. Drunk driving. Dead body.
One o’clock. He wondered if Mary Margaret were asleep. The thought of her flannel nightgown made him wide awake. He picked up another end-of-tour report. Turned in by Bingo Mc-Inerney and Lorenzo Jones the night of the murder. He turned the pages of the report, wondering what it would be like working with Lorenzo. Lorenzo, whose brass was always polished and whose leather always shined. Who changed the sweatband in his cap every month. Who always used a Scripto pencil because wooden pencils broke and who always carried an extra package of lead. Whose neat square printing was perfectly matched to the unadorned language of the report. Who was going to law school at night and who Bingo thought was a pain in the ass ...
And then Tom Spellacy had seen it.
The one thing no one had considered.
“Marshmallows is nice in molded salad,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said. “Not the big kind you roast, but the little kind. Like buttons, but soft. Because they’re marshmallows. Some people like the lime mold now, but I still like the strawberry. Monsignor doesn’t like the lime, Tom, I’m sure of that. That’s why we’re having the strawberry, Monsignor. Your pa never liked strawberries, though. That’s one thing I remember about him. It was the palsy he had. He couldn’t keep them on the spoon, the strawberries. You don’t have good balance when you’ve got the palsy, and that’s a well-known fact. Palsy people have got bad balance. He was such a grand man, your pa. Never missed a wake. He’d be sitting there in his folding chair, spilling strawberries if they gave him any . . .”
It suddenly came to Desmond Spellacy. Mary Margaret wasn’t crazy after all. She knew his father never had palsy. The reason Phil Spellacy never missed a wake was because the booze was free and there was plenty of it. Mary Margaret knew perfectly well that Phil Spellacy was only a drunk with the shakes, knew it, but still she called it palsy. Not out of any sense of delicacy either, Desmond Spellacy bet. She’s just opted out. That torrent of conversation about bowel movements and Sunday collections and cock-eyed ballroom dancers was just a wall she could hide behind so that no one could ever touch her again.
He wondered if she even believed in Saint Barnabas.
How wonderful if Saint Barnabas were only an elaborate joke that freed her from the responsibility of making contact.
Take Moira. Moira wasn’t fat. Saint Barnabas said Moira was a stylish stout, and all the better saints were stylish stouts. Caloric theology, Desmond Spellacy thought. He watched Mary Margaret remove her glasses. The nosepiece had worn deep grooves into either side of her nose. Desmond Spellacy wanted to knead the nose as if it were a sausage, removing the indentations. She was still a pretty woman. For a moment he felt the same sense of wonder about her he had felt twenty years before. He was sure he could get behind the wall, but then what? He knew that for Mary Margaret it was the world outside that was imprisoned, not herself. He tried to remember when she had first concocted Saint Barnabas. Probably when she discovered that Tommy was fooling around. And I bet she knows he was a bagman, too, he mused.
A philandering husband and a two-hundred-pound daughter.
Better to invent Saint Barnabas than to deal with them.
Not to mention Kev, the oldest. Kev who tended to break wind when he got nervous. Now a chaplain’s assistant awaiting discharge. Desmond Spellacy hoped the general never came to call on the chaplain. It might make Kev nervous.
“Undertaking would be nice for Kev when he gets out of the service,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said. “It’s a grand business and you always wear a tie. Not like some businesses. Arithmetic teachers don’t wear ties, I’m told. It’s a new thing, not wearing a tie if you’re an arithmetic teacher. My second cousin, Raymond Dennehy, was in the undertaking business and he always wore a tie. The trick kind that you clipped onto your collar. He was a driver, Raymond. ‘Hearse’ Dennehy, they called him. He wore a boutonniere, too, along with his trick tie. You know what a bou-tonniere is, don’t you, Monsignor?”
Desmond Spellacy nodded.
“It’s one of those flowers the spiffs used to wear in their buttonholes,” Mary Margaret Spellacy explained. “Carnations, usually. Although my cousin, Hearse, always wore an anemone. They were cheaper than carnations is why the Hearse always wore anemones. He liked molded salads, too, Hearse. Strawberry, like the mon-signor does, Tom. You remember how he died. At a funeral. One minute he was there and the next minute he was gone. They took off his trick tie but it was too late . . .”
For a moment Desmond Spellacy wondered who had replaced Hearse Dennehy behind the wheel. In a certain way he could see the point of Mary Margaret’s world. It was so restful. There was no Dan T. Campion to contend with, no Seamus Fargo. That was the real world. Desmond Spellacy put a napkin to his mouth and sneaked a look at his brother across the table. Tommy’s a million miles away. I wonder if he’s thinking about Mrs. Morris at the Jury Commission. No, probably not. I do enough of that for the both of us. He supposed the reason she touched him so much was that she was the first of Tommy’s girls he knew anything about. Other than Mary Margaret. It was just hard to think of Mary Margaret as one of Tommy’s girls. Desmond Spellacy balanced a pickled peach on his fork and smiled and nodded at Mary Margaret. She had left Morty Donnelly holding Hearse Dennehy’s trick tie and seemed to have segued into the Pope. It was best not to try to make a connection. Just a periodic nod until you picked up a thread. There it was. The Holy Year in the Holy City. The Pontiff. Mary Margaret seemed to have taken up calling the Pope the Pontiff. She used to call him Pacelli. And sometimes the Italian. He wondered what good deed Pacelli had performed to escalate himself into the Pontiff in Mary Margaret’s affections. It seemed to have something to do with Hearse Dennehy. The Holy Year. That was it. Morty Donnelly was going to Rome for the Holy Year. Wearing Hearse Dennehy’s trick tie. He had it now. Two brisk
nods and a furrowed brow to satisfy Mary Margaret. Then a mental summons to Mrs. Morris at the Jury Commission. Mrs. Morris had a face. While the other girls Tommy brought into the confessional were only blank receptacles for his adulteries. He tried to remember the face. She had worn a scarf in her hair. And there were large brown eyes. He remembered them as sad but perhaps he was reading that into them. And Mrs. Morris had a voice. Goddamn you, she had said, you talk less about sin than any priest I have ever met. A thought pierced his reverie: My God, I think a lot about the uterine mysteries for a priest. The Sorrowful Mysteries, the Glorious Mysteries and now the Uterine Mysteries added to the ecclesiastical canon. He didn’t suppose Pacelli would think much of that. So that was it. The envy of Tommy was a sexual envy. And all these years Tommy must have sensed it. Why else would he bring his adulteries into my confessional. Tommy. Tommy. Tommy. How difficult it is for us to love one another. If only there were a spiritual laxative to purge our guilts. Seamus Fargo would have laughed at that. Seamus didn’t believe in guilt. One man, one soul, that’s more than enough to worry about, Seamus was fond of saying. Still, there was no getting around it: sexual envy was a subject he would have liked taking up with Seamus in confession. Nothing ever seemed to surprise Seamus in the box. He listened. Listening was the secret of forgiveness, he had once heard Seamus say. This from a man who detested Freud. He would like to tell Seamus that Freud was the ultimate listener. Well, there wasn’t much chance of that now.
“. . . What I always wonder,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said, “is if the Pontiff has a favorite radio program. Like, ‘The Rosary Hour,’ Tom. If the Pontiff lived here, he could tune in KFIM and listen to the Monsignor on The Rosary Hour.’ And ‘Fibber Mc-Gee and Molly,’ too. McGee, that’s a Catholic name. ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’ are colored. They don’t have many colored in Italy. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ It’s like listening to a good tune when you say the rosary, Monsignor. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Bing Crosby couldn’t do it any better. ‘And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ If the Pontiff lived here, this would be the Holy City. And we could have the Holy Year right here. The Coliseum would be a grand place. Morty Donnelly would like that. He’s got season tickets to all the games. You could do The Rosary Hour’ at the Coliseum, Monsignor. With Bing Crosby. Bing would help out, it being the Holy Year and all . . .”
True Confessions Page 30