Inside, the church was cool and dark and smelled of burning candle wax and incense. He found the priest standing before a small altar in the north transept. With his black cassock, the father blended in with the long shadows cast by the presbyter arches, except for the white of his hands that were folded before him. His head was not bowed, though. He looked up instead at the marble pietà on the altar, and from the taut set of his shoulders and back and the tight grip his two hands had on each other, it seemed that whatever this priest was asking of the Virgin Mary, it was more a scream of desperation than a prayer.
“Does she answer when you speak to her?” Rourke said.
Father Paul Rourke whirled, blinking as if a flash lamp had gone off in his face. “Day? What are you doing here?”
His voice echoed, then fell in the thick, black silence of the church.
Rourke searched his brother's face. The round Irish chin and plump cheeks were unshaven and with his dark beard they looked dusted with soot. His eyes had always drooped at the corners, giving his face a melancholy cast even as a boy, but this morning the shadows under those eyes were dark as bruises.
“What's happened?” he said when Rourke went on staring at him, saying nothing.
A rack of votive candles burned at the pietà's marble feet. Rourke went up to it and held his palm out close over one of the flames. He felt the warmth at first, and then the pain. “Do you know what happens when you put fire to human flesh long enough?”
His brother, the priest, watched as if mesmerized. The candle flickered and danced and burned beneath Rourke's open palm, and the pain reached a pitch that was like the blare of a locomotive horn.
“Stop it!” Rourke's brother seized his wrist, pulling his hand away from the flame.
“It cooks,” Rourke said.
“My God, Day. What kind of trouble are you in?”
Rourke laughed. He took out his handkerchief and wrapped it around the throbbing burn on his palm. “Are you offering to hear my confession? From my lips to God's ears. Or maybe it's time I heard yours. After all, any priest who comes sneaking back to the rectory at dawn and wearing yesterday's cassock probably hasn't been keeping all the Lord's Ten Commandments.”
Even in the wavering candlelight, Rourke caught the fear in his brother's eyes, and suspicion passed through him like a shudder.
His brother shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his gaze drifting off Rourke's face to the distant recesses of the nave, the empty pews and pulpit and altar. “I have the eight o'clock Mass this morning,” he said, “and you know how my stomach gets into knots over the homilies. I always spend hours on them. I pray and sweat, and I am ashamed to say sometimes I even curse. I was up all night fretting over this one. There's a park bench beneath an old bent fig tree out in the square, and I go there often to meditate. You must've seen me coming—”
Rourke gripped his brother's face with his two hands. He dug his fingers into the soft flesh and gave him a rough shake, and then he lowered his head until their foreheads touched and the moment became an embrace.
“Paulie, Paulie, Paulie. You always were such a lousy liar.”
Chapter Six
Pink tea roses on trellises framed the rectory's kitchen door. Fio was waiting for them there on the stoop, holding the milk bottles by their necks, one in each hand.
“Somebody's already up inside and making breakfast,” he said. He'd picked one of the roses and stuck it in the brim of his hat. “Maybe whoever it is has made some coffee to go along with that lost bread I smell frying, and so maybe he could use some of this nice, fresh milk to put in his coffee. That's what's known as deductive reasoning. It's what detectives do, isn't that right, partner? We deduce stuff.” His broad grin shifted from Rourke to the priest hovering behind him. “Say, do you by any chance got a brother who's a cop?”
Paulie's gaze clicked back and forth between the two detectives. “Day, for God's sake. What's going on?”
“Let's go inside,” Rourke said, pulling open the screen door and then standing aside so his brother could go ahead of him. “I could use a cup of coffee.”
The kitchen in the Holy Rosary rectory was big and bright with yellow chintz-curtained windows that opened onto a garden. It smelled good, of freshly brewed chicory coffee and boiled milk, and of cinnamon from the bread dipped in batter that was frying on the stove.
A priest sat at a beautifully polished round oak table with his elbows bracketing a steaming cup of café au lait and his head buried in his hands. “I guess you didn't sleep well either,” he said without looking up as the door opened.
“Father,” Paulie said, a bit too loudly. “The police are here.”
The other priest's head snapped up, and Rourke saw shock register deep in his eyes. Shock and a bludgeoning fear.
Father Frank Ghilotti wore thick eyeglasses and he had large, slightly protruding teeth that gave his mouth a perpetually pursed look. His near-black hair was curled into corkscrews and plastered down wet over his skull. His olive skin had that freshly scrubbed look, as if he'd just stepped out of a bath or shower.
Father Ghilotti was the pastor of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary and as such he had authority over all the priests in his church. Rourke had met him only once, and briefly, about a month ago, the one time he had come to hear Paulie celebrate the Mass in his new assignment as Holy Rosary's assistant pastor. In New Orleans, family and connections were everything, and Father Frank Ghilotti had family connections of his own. He was the only son of the city's laundry racket boss.
And as that son, he had grown up in a world where polished wealth and polished power hid a rough street toughness. He showed some of that toughness now as he calmed his face and stood up, holding out his hand. “Detective Rourke. This early in the morning it can only be bad news.”
His gaze shifted to Paulie, and something unspoken seemed to pass between the pastor and his brother, and Rourke thought, Oh, Christ.
“I don't know what it is,” Paulie said, his voice still hitting that high, strident note. His face was flushed and spotted, and sweat glistened on his temples. “They haven't said.”
“I'm afraid that our bad news is for the both of you, Father,” Rourke said. “Father Patrick Walsh was found dead around two o'clock this morning in an abandoned macaroni factory in the Quarter.”
Paulie let out a cry and stumbled backward, collapsing into a chair, jolting the table so hard that café au lait slopped out of the forgotten cup. Behind him, on the stove, the frying lost bread started to smoke.
Shock had whitened Father Ghilotti's face again, too, only this time Rourke thought the reaction came purely from surprise. There was still a wariness, though, in the wide-open eyes that stared out at them from behind the thick lenses. Wariness and a quick, calculating mind.
“But I don't understand,” he said. “What was he doing down there in such a place in the middle of the night?”
“We were hoping you can tell us,” Rourke said.
“Well, I can't. I can't even imagine.”
Rourke's gaze went back to his brother. Paulie was staring down at the table, his face wet from crying, his hands gripped together in a tight fist in front of him. How about you, Paulie? Can you even imagine?
“Have you all been here at the rectory the whole night, Father?” Fio said. He had set the milk bottles down on the drain board and turned around to lean against it with his arms folded across his chest. As big as the kitchen was, he seemed to fill it.
Father Ghilotti stared at Fio a moment, then made an odd, abrupt movement with his shoulders and turned toward the stove. “My breakfast is burning.” He started to reach for the handle of the fry pan with his bare hand, then pulled it back at the last second and used a folded-up dish towel instead. He wiped his hands carefully on the towel, before he turned to face them again.
“Last night, we'd all been invited for family suppers at the homes of our parishioners,” he finally said. “We even made a joke about it—about how our popular
ity was going to make us all fat and save the Church money for our board. I ended up playing a game of chess with my host and it was late when I got home. Everyone else had already retired.”
“Does that everyone include Father Pat?” Fio asked.
“I didn't check their beds, if that's what you're asking. I'm the pastor here, not a warden.”
Rourke waited for his brother to say something about his own supper invitation, but Paulie only stared down at his fisted hands, running away inside himself the way he always did when things got bad.
One Sunday when they were kids, before Paulie had left home for the seminary, he'd invited his favorite priest from St. Alphonsus over for a chicken supper and somehow Paulie had gotten their daddy to promise that he would stay sober through the evening. Rourke had thought his big brother was a fool for not recognizing a vain hope when he saw one, for Mike Rourke had been the kind of cop who could wade into a bar fight with nothing but his fists and an attitude, and yet at the same time he had lived every day of his life scared. Looking back now, Rourke believed that what their daddy hadn't been able to face was the loneliness he carried around in his gut every waking moment. The booze couldn't completely banish the loneliness, but it took the edge off.
It was always worse in the shank of the day, when the night stretched before him, hollow and empty. He would begin with his shaking hands wrapped around a full shot glass, a freshly opened bottle at his elbow, and he would end up with his head on the table, passed out and drooling spit in a puddle beneath his cheek. Yet to everyone's surprise, maybe even his own, Mike Rourke had come sober to the supper table that one evening. He'd even put on his one good civilian suit, the one he wore to all the neighborhood's weddings and baptisms and wakes. He'd gotten a lot of wear out of that suit over the years, the Irish Channel being a place where living came hard and dying came often.
It was an irony most appreciated by those who lived in the Channel that the priest Paulie had chosen to invite to supper at the Rourke house that evening was a secret boozer himself, was in fact as big an alky as their daddy ever was. Father Josey O'Connor, his name had been, and he'd brought along his own bottle and it wasn't long before the the two of them, priest and cop, were tying on a big one. Their drunk started out happy, took a turn into maudlin, and ended up mean. By one in the morning, they were out in the front yard swinging fists at each other's heads. The neighborhood had gotten a good laugh out of the sight, but Paulie had gone and lay down on his bed with his face to the wall and stayed that way for three days. Running away inside himself.
Rourke looked down now at his brother's bent head, noticing how the once thick brown hair was growing thin on the crown. Yet there was still that familiar crescent pock of a scar on his right temple from where he'd fallen off a pier at the lake one summer. Rourke ached for his brother suddenly, as if the humiliation and disappointment of that long-ago evening were still fresh.
Fio uncrossed his arms and straightened, filling even more of the room. “What family did Father Pat have supper with last night?”
Father Ghilotti's shoulders came up and he rocked forward on the balls of his feet, as if his first thought had been to meet Fio in the middle of the room and have it out with his fists. “The Albert Payne Laytons,” he said instead, but with an edge to his voice now. “Mr. Albert is Holy Rosary's financial advisor, and Floriane de Lassus Layton is chairwoman of the board of our Catholic Charities.”
Rourke knew of the Laytons. He'd come into contact with the family peripherally while investigating a case last spring, where a young Negro chimney sweep by the name of Titus Dupre had been accused of the rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old white girl and suspected in the disappearance of another. The Laytons' daughter, Della, had been a classmate of the two victims, and Rourke had interviewed her briefly at their school, the St. Francis of Assisi Academy for Girls.
“If he had an appointment after that,” the priest was saying, “it would probably be in his book and that's upstairs in his bedroom. I'll get it for you.”
“No,” Rourke said. “We'll get it.”
The bedroom smelled of cigarette smoke.
It was the only vice they were to find among Father Patrick Walsh's few personal things. The bedroom itself was sparsely furnished, with a narrow iron bedstead painted white and a pine chest of drawers with a small matching rolltop desk. An electric fan was the only concession to comfort.
A prie-dieu stood in one corner, with a picture of a bleeding Sacred Heart tacked unframed above it. Rourke saw where the cushion on the prie-dieu had been removed, which would have made kneeling on it uncomfortable, even painful after a time. An act of penance, then, as well as prayer.
On top of the chest of drawers was a faux tortoiseshell-backed brush and comb set, but no matching mirror. No mirror anywhere in the room, Rourke realized. Nothing on the walls at all except for the picture of the Sacred Heart and a wooden crucifix above the bed. Nor were there any framed photographs on the surfaces of the furniture, or remnants of a life before the priesthood.
Rourke peeled back the coverlet on the bed. The sheets were of a rough, fibrous cotton, and the mattress he looked under was little more than a thin pallet lying on top of a thick board.
“He lived like a monk,” Rourke said.
“What'd you expect?” Fio said. “A Hollywood boudoir?” He was skimming the titles of the books on the shelf above the desk. He plucked one off and read the spine. “St. Thomas Aquinas.” He shook it to see if anything fell out.
“He was a diocesan priest, though,” Rourke said. “They take vows of obedience and celibacy, but not poverty. And the Church not only provides room and board, but also a salary. So what did Father Walsh spend his paycheck on?”
Fio slid the book back on the shelf. “Maybe he played the ponies. Or maybe he's got a woman or a Nancy-boy tucked away somewhere. Wouldn't be the first time.”
On the stand by the bed was a Bible, a breviary, and a goose-necked lamp. Its single drawer held a couple of packs of cigarettes, matches, a pencil, and a cheap spiral steno pad in which the dead priest had jotted down fragments of thoughts and ideas for future homilies. Rourke slipped it in his pocket.
The drawers in the chest held nothing but clothes, except for the top one where Rourke found the promised appointment book. It was bound with embossed green leather, its pages edged with gilt—a surprisingly expensive item, given the spartan existence revealed by the rest of the room.
Rourke flipped through it. Father Walsh's days had been full, so full that he'd made sure to schedule in his book an hour at two o'clock every afternoon for prayer. Alphabetized pages in the back of the book were crammed with names and phone numbers and addresses.
Rourke went back to yesterday's date. The last entry, scrawled through the hours of seven to ten in the evening, was simply the name Flo. Not Floriane de Lassus Layton, nor Mrs. Layton, but Flo. Rourke noticed how the entries from that day had been neatly printed, but “Flo” had been written with a flourish, as if the hand that held the pen had been excited, happy. Or maybe, Rourke thought with an inward smile at his own fancifulness, the hand had simply been in a hurry.
The book was too big for his pocket, and so Rourke tucked it into the crook of his arm. “Anything?” he asked Fio, who had been going through the small rolltop desk.
“Just the usual,” Fio said. “Receipts, stuff like that. And a lot of letters from people who'd read his book. ‘Dear Father Pat, You've changed my life,’ and all that baloney.”
“Let's bring those, too. Maybe somebody's life didn't get changed for the better.”
Leaving Fio to finish up with the desk, Rourke started out the door, but he stopped on the way for a closer look at the crucifix over the bed. The tiny brass nails were driven through the Christ figure's palms, not his wrists.
At the end of the hall a small chapel had been built into a window alcove overlooking the garden. The window was set with beveled glass, and fragile ribbons of early morning sunlight shone through i
t onto the mahogany altar and bronze crucifix. Rourke looked at the nails.
Through the hands.
He heard a step behind him and he turned. An old man stood in the arched doorway of the chapel, wearing nothing but an old-fashioned pair of long johns. His hair, the color of dirty snow, grew in a circle of wild drifts around his head. His face was thick with sleep.
“You shouldn't be in the chapel,” he said. “You get out of here right now.”
Father Ghilotti appeared beside the old man to slip an arm around his shoulders. “It's all right, Father,” he said, leading the old man away. “Why don't you get dressed and we'll have some breakfast together. I'll fry us up some more lost bread.”
Rourke looked out the window, waiting while Father Ghilotti took the old priest back into his bedroom. The garden below was abloom with hibiscus and blue and pink hydrangeas. A plaster statue of the Virgin Mary sat in a niche in a stone wall surrounded by white blossoms of tea olive. A stone bench faced the statue and was shaded by a mimosa tree whose branches swayed in the wind. On the bench sat Rourke's brother, hunched over and with his hands gripping his thighs.
“Please forgive Father Delaney,” Holy Rosary's pastor said, appearing back in the arched doorway. “He has these bad turns lately. He's long retired, of course, but he was the pastor here for forty years before me. This is his home and I couldn't bear to send him to another.” He genuflected before the altar and then turned to face Rourke. “Don't you think I deserve to be told how my priest was murdered.”
“I haven't said he was murdered.”
“Don't be coy, Detective. He wouldn't have died a natural death in a macaroni factory in the Quarter at two in the morning.”
“The coroner wasn't sure about the exact cause of death. He's doing a postmortem.”
A strange smile—one that Rourke couldn't read—pulled at Father Ghilotti's small mouth. “It's your roll, Detective, so I guess all I can do at the moment is sit back and wait for you to crap out…I see you've found Father Pat's appointment book without any trouble. It was a Christmas gift from me to him, the book. He rarely spent any money on himself, but then he grew up poor and he never seemed to pine for the finer things.”
Wages of Sin Page 5