Other Men's Sins

by Lawrence Falcetano

Sandy and I were sitting at my kitchen table enjoying a Saturday breakfast. She had whipped up a batter and made a dozen golden brown silver dollar pancakes. We divided them with a number she considered fair; eight for me, four for her. She sprinkled some strawberry syrup on hers, while I drowned mine with my favorite, Maple flavor. Sandy poured some coffee in her cup and filled mine from a carafe on the table.

  It had been a week since the Conlon trial had ended and I was feeling myself again, although my heart ached at the loss of Andy Conlon. It would be some time before I got over that, if ever.

  “What was Eileen Conlon’s motive for killing her brother?” Sandy said.

  “She’d become a victim of her twisted mind,” I said. “She could not accept her brother’s way of life. She struggled with it herself for many years, keeping her brother’s secret and hating every second of it. Eventually, it distorted her way of thinking to the point that she believed the only way to free her brother from his burden was to send him to ‘a better place’. In essence, she believed she was helping him, liberating him from sin.”

  “Why did she kill Troy?”

  “Anger, outrage, indignation. In the name of God, she killed both of her brothers.”

  “And Father Faynor?”

  “She discovered he was her brother’s enabler and believed he was the catalyst that perpetuated her brothers sinning. He needed to go to ‘a better place’ too.”

  “Why’d she implicate Crockett?”

  “At one time she’d been very fond of Crockett, probably thought she loved him. But after he broke up with her, she held a deep animus toward him. When she planned her brother’s murder, she intended to make it look like Crockett did the deed. Thus taking her revenge on him, for what she believed, was his unwarranted mistreatment of her. He was a set-up, a patsy. She even paid Regan to hire some thugs to work me over and put the blame on Crockett.”

  “Which Regan accomplished very convincingly.”

  “I believed Regan at the time; had no reason not to.”

  “Or, maybe you wanted to believe him,” Sandy said.

  “I guess I did,” I said.

  “If Eileen Conlon hated Crockett, why did she get back together with him?”

  “She wanted to keep him close, make it easy for her to manipulate him into making himself unwittingly, look guilty.”

  “For someone with a deranged mind, she designed a fairly elaborately plan,” Sandy said.

  “Even to the degree of obtaining a screwdriver and a pair of old work overalls,” I said, “and saturating the overalls with her victim’s blood. Thus, further incriminating Crockett, the custodian who wore work overalls and used hand tools.”

  “And she typed that phony letter about Crockett to solidify his looking guilty,” Sandy said. “And went so far as to hide the overalls and screwdriver in a nearby trash bin where she knew they would be easily found.”

  “Clever,” I said, “but a banal attempt to deceive the police.”

  Sandy waited while I took a mouthful of pancake and washed it down with coffee.

  “As careful as she was in her planning, she made one mistake,” I said. “She forgot to wipe her fingerprints from the crucifix.”

  “A slip of the lip…” Sandy said.

  “As close as we can figure, she went to her brother’s office and when his back was turned, struck him with a heavy brass crucifix, causing him to lose consciousness and fall to the floor, and then—here comes the sick part—she jumped on him and strangled him in a rage until he was dead. Then, in a sustained rage, she used the screwdriver and proceeded to stab him multiple times, thus, releasing him from sin… in her mind.”

  I had one pancake left on my dish. Sandy had been sticking her fork in the two she had left without eating them.

  “Are you gonna eat those?” I said.

  She slid her dish over to me and said, “Why did Crockett run if he knew he was innocent?”

  “Fear, ignorance, mistrust of the system,” I said.

  I soaked the pancakes with syrup and went to work on them. I washed them down with more coffee before I said, “In any event, he’s been exonerated of any wrongdoing, even got his job back at the rectory. Monsignor Belducci said he had nothing to forgive Crockett for.”

  Sandy looked suddenly, pensive. “I feel sorry for the Regan kid,” she said.

  “Arnie Regan wants to be with his son. That’s what almost got him in trouble with the law, fighting for his son the wrong way. I think he’s learned that the way to go, is respecting his ex-wife and child. It might generate a mutual desire to rekindle their love for each other again. I’m doing what I can to help them become a family again.”

  Sandy reached out with a soft smile and gently stroked my cheek.

  “What happens to Eileen Conlon now?” she said.

  “Eileen Conlon will spend the rest of her life behind bars, whether in prison or a state mental institution. A judge will make that determination based on testimony from psychiatric professionals. Either way, it’s not likely she’ll ever be released.”

  “I’m sure, in her own way, she’ll find solace with the Lord,” Sandy said.

  I finished my coffee, got up and walked to the front window and looked down at the activity on Bigelow Street. The morning was fresh and clean; tree limbs, wet from an overnight rain glistened in the morning sun. The street was busy for an early morning. People were driving and people were walking on their way to wherever they needed to go, to get on with their lives. There were people from every walk of life, every faith, and every color, sharing the same ideas, hopes, dreams, and despairs. Men and women existing together in an assemblage known as humankind.

  Sandy came up beside me. She slid her arm around my waist. “What is it?” she said.

  I continued to look down at the street. “I can’t help feeling empathy for Eileen Conlon,” I said. “She had once been a loyal servant of the Lord, but through her own misguided belief, became a victim of self-destruction.”

  I looked at Sandy. “Eileen Conlon was right,” I said. “There is sin everywhere, in the good as well as the bad.”

  The end