Blood on a Saint

by Anne Emery

  The band got back to more traditional blues fare after that. They wound up with Jimmy Reed’s “Cold and Lonesome” and a long harp solo by Monty on James Cotton’s “Slow Blues.”

  The performance earned applause, the thumping of tables, and some drunken shouts of approval. The other band members had been joined by their wives and girlfriends, and the one female member by her husband. Monty felt a pang of regret that Maura was not with him as she would have been in happier times, but he tried to put it aside. Last thing he needed with so much alcohol on board was to get maudlin. One of the guys had left Burke’s table so Monty seated himself there, and they all engaged in small talk about sports, cars, cops, aggravation at the unemployment insurance office, the usual. Burke made the occasional comment and enjoyed his whiskey.

  At another table were two women Monty had seen before. They spent a lot of time in this bar, and he knew why. They didn’t call the place the Flying Shag for nothing. He nodded to them and they gave him a little wave.

  Monty’s back was to the bar, and he faced the front door. He took a glance in that direction, towards the table in the corner by the door and, at that moment, caught the lone stranger eyeing him before the guy could look away. It struck him then that the guy looked familiar; he had seen him somewhere. Monty was about to get up and have a word with him in case he really was recording the band. The members of Functus would not welcome that kind of private initiative. Pirate recordings of Functus? The music market in North America would go into a tailspin.

  But Burke said something then, and Monty turned to him. There was a burst of loud conversation nearby and the banging of a tray of glasses, and Monty missed whatever was said. When the priest got up and pointed to the back of the room past the bar, Monty realized he must have been asking the fellow next to him, Mel, where the washroom was. After all his visits to the Flying Stag, Burke would have been aware that the toilets were beyond the bar somewhere. But now that Monty thought of it, he had never known Burke to use the public facilities anywhere. Not even at the Midtown, where he spent several hours a night several times a month. Typical of the fastidious priest. Well, here at the Shag there were several doors, and it would not do to enter the wrong one.

  Burke was holding the bottom of his white T-shirt, and Monty could see there was brown liquid spilt on it. Who but Burke would feel compelled to go and wash off a stain in a place like the Flying Stag?

  “Brennan,” Monty said to him as he passed by, “you’ll see three doors. Make sure you go past — ”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know it’s back there somewhere. I’ll find it.” He continued on his way.

  Monty leaned across the table to Mel. “Did you fill him in?”

  Mel broke into a grin. “He’s a big boy. He’ll have to learn his way around.”

  “You didn’t warn him about . . . the Honeymoon Suite?”

  No response except a wider grin.

  Monty noticed that one of the two women regulars had got up from her table and headed down past the bar. Monty ordered another beer and waited for Burke’s return.

  Less than two minutes later Monty heard, “We could go somewhere else, if you don’t like the . . . room there.”

  The woman’s voice came from the area of the bar counter, behind Monty. He heard Burke clear his throat, and Monty turned around to watch. The woman was tripping along in Burke’s wake. His T-shirt was still stained. He had his left hand out in a gesture that said, “Leave it. Never mind.”

  “Honey, you were digging it. I know you were.”

  The hand made a slashing movement. It said, “Shut up.”

  The guys at the table exchanged glances and snickered. They buried their faces in their glasses as Burke sat down. He lifted his own glass and drained it.

  Mel leaned over and said to Monty, “That one over there’s got her eye on you. You got it made in the shade, Monto. Come on,” he said to his buddy at the table, “let’s let the lovebirds get together.” The two of them got up and made ready to leave. “You already got yours,” Mel said to Burke.

  “I did not!” Burke exclaimed.

  “Any requests?” Monty asked Burke when the others had gone. “How about ‘Third Rate Romance’?”

  “Fuck off.”

  Monty then heard Mel saying to the dark-eyed beauty, “He asked me to ask you to join him.” And the next thing Monty knew, she was sitting next to him, beaming.

  “Hi,” was all he said.

  “Hi. You were really good up there. I’ve heard you here before, but I was too shy to say anything.”

  “Well, I’m glad you spoke up this time.” Monty could hear the slight slurring of his voice. He was well over his customary limit.

  She leaned towards him and gave him a view down the front of her shirt. “Maybe you could get the other guys to sing, and then me and you could dance together.”

  “That’s tempting,” he said, “but I don’t think they’d appreciate it if I slacked off for the last set.”

  She leaned farther in and put her arms around him, putting her lips to his and giving him a deep and prolonged kiss. He responded to her, and thought, Yes! This is going to happen. Lay off the booze, do the last set, then off to her place, and . . . in like Flynn. Just like old times playing the bars when he was single.

  But he wasn’t single. He had spent the last two years trying to resume his married life with Maura, his family life with the kids. Despite the overwhelming temptation to seize this opportunity, he could end up blowing his chances forever. Starting something with this person, this fan, would not be a good idea. Having a one-night stand and avoiding her ever after would be caddish behaviour on his part. He pulled away and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m half-cut here, and I shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “It’s okay. I want you to.”

  “I’m married.” He didn’t even want to think about the repercussions if, after all they had been through, Maura were to learn of him getting it on with someone she would call a groupie. She would banish him to hell for all eternity. What he wanted to do was finish the set and take a cab to Maura’s. And be with her and stay with her. But she would blast him for being so pie-eyed. He wouldn’t go tonight. He’d go when he was fresh and sober.

  “You don’t look married,” Dark Eyes said. “I thought you were single, or divorced.”

  “No.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “No need of that. Stay around and listen to the music. I’ll do a song for you. What would you like to hear?”

  “No! I’m leaving!” She got up and marched to the door and out into the night.

  He looked across at Burke, whose expression was unreadable behind a pall of smoke. Monty got up and signalled to the band that they should start getting ready for their last set. Before heading to the stage, he sat in the chair next to Burke’s.

  “Quite a night, Father.”

  “You lost a friend there, Collins.”

  “Yep. Not much of a night for me in the romance department. But you, now, that’s a different story. Spent some time in the Honeymoon Suite, I noticed. I can’t help but contrast that with the way I saw you earlier tonight, in the lecture hall. From the Reverend Doctor Burke, scaling the heights of metaphysical speculation, to a guy in a dirty shirt getting his rocks off with a twenty-dollar hooker in the toilet of the Flying Shag.”

  “I didn’t get anything, you bollocks! I was standing there at the sink and the next thing I know this one is on her knees in front me with her hands . . . I put a stop to it.”

  “You’ve never used the can here before?”

  “No. And I didn’t use it tonight either; I tried to wash a stain off my shirt.”

  “I guess I never told you about the services available to those who enter door number one. The girls see a guy go in there, and it’s assumed he’s looking for company. Paid company. It’s all part of the c
harming ambience here at the Shag.”

  “You’ve enjoyed those services yourself, have you?”

  Monty wasn’t about to answer that. If he had ever been in there — and he made no admission to that effect — it would have been as a callow youth, a drunken young arsehole who had not yet been granted the hand of Miss Maura MacNeil in marriage.

  “The place is filthy!” Burke griped. “The sink is dirty. The urinals are sewers. The floor is dirty and pissy, and your feet stick to it. I have to feel sorry for those poor girls working in conditions like that.”

  “If not for the dirt and the stench, though, if this opportunity had arisen, say, after the Shag’s semi-annual refit, toilet flush, and hosing down, would your priestly vows have been maintained?”

  “Yeah. They would. Now don’t you have a job to do before we fall into a taxi for home?”

  “I guess this means we’ll wrap things up after my last set, eh?”

  “I’d say so.”

  The band played on through one last, abbreviated, set. Just as Monty was about to announce the final number, he looked down the room and saw the guy with the recorder putting his jacket on. It was the dark rain jacket Monty had noticed outside the lecture hall at St. Mary’s. He remembered then where he had seen the guy before. The television studio. He and Podgis had been having a word when Monty arrived to watch the replay of the show. This amateur spy was a reporter, working with Podgis, and he had seen and recorded all the night’s sordid events. Starring the defence lawyer and the Crown witness, out boozing and womanizing together.

  “Hold on for a second,” he instructed the band, and leapt down from the platform. Burke was giving him a questioning look, and Monty gestured towards the reporter. When he got to Burke, he said, “That’s a reporter. He’s working with Podgis. We’ll put him out of service.”

  Monty saw the implications cut instantly through Burke’s inebriated state. No doubt the priest pictured himself, and his brief sojourn in the Honeymoon Suite, as a news item the following day, just as Monty pictured Maura hearing the news about his own short-lived encounter. Burke got up so fast his chair tipped over with a clatter. He and Monty reached the reporter just before he could make his escape. Burke stepped in front of him and blocked his exit. The fellow was short and skinny with pointy facial features. He glared up at Burke and demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “The answer is none of your business.”

  “It’s my business if you are in here recording the band,” Monty said.

  “I didn’t come to record the band.”

  “Oh, yeah? What did you come for?”

  “I got what I came for, and now I’m leaving. So get out of my way.”

  “You’re not going anywhere with that.” Monty pointed to the tape recorder. He made a grab for it and wrenched it out of the reporter’s hands.

  “Give me that! This is theft! I’m calling the police!”

  “Go ahead, you little weasel. That tape is not going to exist by the time they get here.”

  Monty opened the recorder and removed the cassette, then began pulling the tape out with his fingers. Burke reached towards the guy and grabbed something. A notebook.

  “You can’t do that! That’s my own private property.”

  “To be used to violate the privacy of how many people? And for whose benefit?”

  Burke read from the pages of the notebook: “Collins blues at Stag tonight. Burke lecture at SMU. Burke flirting with teen bimbos. Collins at SMU.” He looked at the reporter. “Flirting with bimbos? How did you come up with that one?”

  “Those two outside the lecture hall.”

  “You mean the two he was mocking outside the lecture hall?” Monty asked. “You don’t have a very good grasp of human behaviour if you couldn’t even get that right. I wouldn’t trust you to report the facts of any event accurately, pal. We’ll take these off your hands,” he said, referring to the notebook and tape. “Save you from embarrassing yourself.”

  “It won’t be me who’s embarrassed when this night makes the news,” the guy insisted.

  Who was Podgis out to get? His own lawyer? Did that make any sense? Or Burke, the Crown witness who had testified against him at the prelim, and who would testify again at the trial? The witness whose testimony made Podgis look boorish and pathetic, and positively swinish in relation to women.

  “Beat it,” Burke ordered him. “And don’t be slandering people when you know they haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “What’s the matter, Father? Are you a little sensitive about your adventure with a hooker in the bathroom?”

  “Nothing happened. Nothing could have happened in that short a time. Maybe your sexual encounters are finished in less than ninety seconds but not mine.”

  “You’re not supposed to have any of those encounters.”

  “And tonight I didn’t. I speak from memory. Have you any of those memories yourself?”

  “Fuck you. Do you expect me to believe nothing went on in there?”

  “Ask her yourself. She’ll tell you.”

  “She’ll say or do whatever you pay her to say or do. That’s what a prostitute does.”

  “Speak for yourself. And if you think she’ll say whatever she’s paid to say, pay her more. Then see what she says.”

  Monty had to shut this down before things got any worse. Burke looked ready to pound the guy to a pulp. So Monty did something he could not remember ever doing before, something he despised when he saw it done by others: he used a version of “Do you know who I am?” This situation called for desperate measures.

  “Your boss, Brett Bekkers, is a very good friend of my boss, Rowan Stratton. And Rowan is a very good friend of mine and of Father Burke’s. When Rowan hears about this, you can be sure he’ll put in a call to Bekkers. And Bekkers will not be impressed with your dirty work on behalf of Pike Podgis. If you don’t want your career to be over by high noon, you’d better be on your way. Here’s your recorder minus the bootleg tape.”

  Monty handed the machine back to the reporter, who looked up into the implacable gaze of Brennan Burke and obviously decided to cut his losses. He left without another word. And without his notebook.

  How low was his client willing to stoop, Monty wondered, to get back at those who crossed him? He returned to the stage to close things down with the band’s slow and sloppy version of “Shame, Shame, Shame.”

  Brennan

  Morning dawned painfully for Brennan. There was a reason he had set his alarm clock for eight o’clock; what was it? Mass. Of course. He was doing the old Latin Mass with the boys’ and men’s choir. Right. His eyelids felt like sandbags. He let them close and he rolled over in bed and fell unconscious. But the alarm rang again, jolting him from sleep. How much had he had to drink last night? Where? O God, he remembered, he had been in the jacks at the Flying Shag. He could smell it all over again. And wasn’t there . . . yes, yes, he was with a hooker. But he hadn’t brought her along; she had appeared unbidden and . . . nothing happened in the end. O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee. . . . He threw the covers off and bolted for the shower.

  After he was scrubbed clean and shining, with his mouth tasting of mint and his smoke-infused clothing from the night before in his laundry basket, he dressed in his clerical black and went down to the kitchen. He found a croissant and a bottle of orange juice, and sat down at the table for his breakfast. The Chronicle Herald was there and, once again, there was a story about Pike Podgis. Another memory assailed him from the night before. Some little minion of Podgis had been in the bar, watching and recording the goings-on. Brennan thought that, between the two of them, he and Monty had put the fear of God into him. Monty had destroyed the tape, and Brennan, the notebook. But the horrid Podgis was an inescapable part of Brennan’s life now, he
realized, because he would have to testify against the man at the trial whenever that would be. Was the episode last night Podgis’s revenge for the evidence Brennan had given, or was Podgis trying to intimidate him out of testifying again? Well, it was not going to work. Brennan was not in the least intimidated by the likes of Podgis; in fact, he only wished he had more evidence to use against him to make sure he got convicted and sent away for good. Brennan picked up the paper, which offered more of the same.

  “SAINT” A POSSIBLE SUSPECT IN GIRL'S DEATH: PODGIS

  He’s been called a saint and a mystery to the medical profession. Now he’s being talked about as a possible suspect in the murder of 19-year-old Jordyn Snider, who died of stab wounds in the early hours of September 24 on the grounds of St. Bernadette’s church. Her body was found near the site where some people claim the Virgin Mary has appeared. Pike Podgis, the controversial TV personality who has been committed to stand trial for Jordyn’s murder, issued a statement last evening referring to a man who was found unconscious not far from the murder scene. Podgis said the man had blood on him when he was found, a fact that came out at the preliminary hearing. Although Podgis did not name the man, it was clear that the reference was to Ignatius Boyle. Boyle, a 56-year-old homeless man, is the person whose sudden ability to speak French has drawn comparisons with a revered Polish mystic. Supporters of Boyle claim he is a saint whose ability to speak a new language is not the only miracle he has performed. Two women have come forward with claims that they were cured of illness by Ignatius Boyle.

  In his statement, Pike Podgis accused the Halifax Police Department of ignoring the fact that Boyle was found near the murder scene with blood on him because the police have focused their investigation solely on the talk show host, who has criticized various police departments of “sloppy” investigative work in recent years in his broadcasts. Podgis levelled his charges during an interview with ATV News, the affiliate of CTV, which airs the Pike Podgis Show. Podgis’s lawyer, Monty Collins, was unavailable for comment but his law partner, Rowan Stratton, distanced himself from any allegations against Boyle: “There have been no charges against any other person in connection with this offence. If there are other possible suspects, we will of course look into them. In any event, Mr. Podgis will fight the charge against him, he will have a fair trial, and we are confident that he will prevail.”