True Confessions (24 page)

“I give you that, Sonny,” Dan T. Campion said. “You got to think of the population trends these days. Isn’t that right, Des? You got to think of the population trends.”

“There’s something else we’ve got to think of,” Desmond Spellacy said. His voice was so soft the other two men had to strain to hear. “We’ve got to think of a way to cut Jack Amsterdam loose.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Dan T. Campion said.

“Holy Mother of God,” Sonny McDonough said.

There did not seem much point in continuing the game. They left their clubs with the caddies and walked back to the clubhouse. By the time they reached the pro shop, Desmond Spellacy had filled them in on the Protectors of the Poor. In the bar they ordered beer and sandwiches.

“We could let it go is my advice,” Dan T. Campion said.

“It’s not as if he done anything illegal,” Sonny McDonough said.

“Only profitable,” Desmond Spellacy said. His sarcasm seemed to escape them.

“He’s done a lot of good works, Jack,” Dan T. Campion said.

“That sheeny halfback, it was Jack got him to transfer to Notre Dame,” Sonny McDonough said.

“He was going to go to SC is what I hear,” Dan T. Campion said.

“Then Jack bought him a car,” Sonny McDonough said.

“A convertible Studebaker,” Dan T. Campion said.

“I thought a Jew would want a Cadillac at least,” Sonny McDonough said. “A Jew canoe, that’s what they call a Cadillac, you know.”

“Oh, that’s grand, Sonny,” Dan T. Campion said. “A Jew canoe.”

“It’ll be a coon quarterback next,” Sonny McDonough said. “You mark my words. There’s eleven Protestants on the team already. I did a check.”

“What’s Frank Leahy thinking of,” Dan T. Campion said.

Desmond Spellacy took the toothpick from his club sandwich and placed it carefully on the side of the plate. He knew that Dan and Sonny would do anything to avoid the issue.

“He still goes.”

“You’ve thought about it then, Des,” Dan T. Campion said.

“I’ve thought about the headlines, MORON PASTOR. AMBULANCE CHASER CARDINAL’S PAL.”

“I think you’re a little overwrought about this, Des,” Sonny McDonough said.

“It was sound business practice is what it was,” Dan T. Campion said.

“Like Ferdie Coppola’s cranes,” Desmond Spellacy said. “And the ton of asphalt.”

“Was it your brother the policeman told you this?” Sonny McDonough said.

“No.”

“I hear there was a run-in between Jack and your brother the policeman not long ago,” Dan T. Campion said.

“You were calling him Sherlock Holmes on the eighth hole,” Desmond Spellacy said. It was time to get rough. “When we were talking to Sonny there about Corky Cronin.”

The point was made. Sonny and Dan each picked at their sandwiches in silence.

“What’s he got outstanding?” Sonny McDonough said finally.

“He’s supposed to finish San Pedro Klaber in July,” Desmond Spellacy said. “He’d better. His Eminence dedicates the seventeenth and holds confirmations the eighteenth. And he’s the only bid on Saint John Bosco.”

“Can you extend the bids?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Sonny McDonough said. “I can get Neddy Flynn to put one in. You work on Emmett Flaherty, Dan.”

“He likes living too much, Emmett,” Dan T. Campion said. “He hates getting his bones broke, I hear.”

Sonny McDonough ignored him. “You know a lot of people in the police department, Dan. Maybe you can put in a word, tell them not to mention the Protectors. His Eminence wouldn’t want to be embarrassed, you tell them.”

“I know what to tell them,” Dan T. Campion said. He was suddenly furious. “I was telling them when you were still planting poor people.”

A look of hurt crossed Sonny McDonough’s face. “There’s no reason to get personal.”

“There’s no chief is the problem,” Dan T. Campion said. His voice was so loud that people were looking at him. “There’s no one to talk to.”

Sonny McDonough leaned across the table. “This fellow Fuqua’s a comer, I hear. I’m on the Select Commission picking the new chief and he’s impressed me.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “That’s confidential, of course.”

“Meaning I should mention it,” Dan T. Campion said. Sour resignation seemed to have replaced his fury. “Meaning I should tell him Sonny McDonough, the famous harp undertaker, says you’re a hot prospect, you learn how to keep your lip buttoned.”

Sonny McDonough pretended not to hear. He turned to Desmond Spellacy. “Maybe we don’t have a problem. He was in to see me the other day, Jack. He wanted a plot for himself.”

“He must expect some shooting,” Dan T. Campion said.

“Not for him and the Mrs.,” Sonny McDonough said. “Just for himself. In the Celebrity Circle, that’s where he wanted it. Under a palm tree. Can you beat that? Like he was Al Capone.”

Desmond Spellacy wiped the beer foam from his lips. “I don’t think we should count on Jack using the Celebrity Circle right away.” Although he knew that nothing would make Dan and Sonny happier. Divine intervention. The sure hand of God. There would be no volunteering from those two to tell Jack the archdiocese didn’t want his business anymore. “I’ll talk to him.”

“That’s grand, Des,” Sonny McDonough said. His relief was almost visible. “There’s a lot of grand ways to handle it. So his feelings won’t be hurt is what I mean. We can give him a dinner.”

“Catholic Layman of the Year,” Desmond Spellacy said drily.

“A grand idea, Des,” Sonny McDonough said. “His Eminence can give him a sash. Something green. Or purple. Or we can name a wing at Saint John Bosco after him. The Amsterdam Orthopedic Wing.”

“For all them bones he broke in the old days,” Dan T. Campion said.

A lot of grand ways to handle it, Desmond Spellacy thought. Sonny had the chairman’s mentality already.

Dan T. Campion pushed away his sandwich. “I’d like to know who named that girl that.”

There’s where the trouble began all right, Desmond Spellacy thought.

“I’d like to know who got her into the Protectors is what I’d like to know,” Sonny McDonough said.

The roller coaster hung for a moment at the top of its climb
, hung as if it were going to slide back, and then with a sudden lurch, plummeted over and down the gorge. Nuns screamed. Black veils snapped straight back, the wind tore at white cowls.

“They got ears,” Crotty said. He was eating a hot dog and leaning against the vendor’s stand, watching the roller coaster. “I was a kid, over to Saint Patricia’s there, I always used to wonder, you know, if they got ears. Like other people. And hair. I always heard they had to shave it off, when they become sisters. They’re all bald-headed, nuns, I hear. And another thing I hear—”

“I know what you hear,” Tom Spellacy said. The roller coaster had momentarily disappeared down a gulley. The normal noises of the arcade level at Ocean Park replaced the roar of the tr^in. Hawkers, drummers, vendors, tattooed men, mustachioed ladies, hot-dog stands and shooting galleries filled for the silence until the roller coaster drowned them all out once again. “You hear, they got to wrap something around themselves, the sisters, when they take a bath.”

“You ever want to check that out with the monsignor, Tom, don’t let me stop you. I’d take the mortal sin, I could find that out, and go right to confession afterwards.”

“As a matter of fact, it did come up,” Tom Spellacy said.

Crotty was incredulous. “You asked your brother, Tom?”

“He said most convents don’t let the priests watch the nuns take a bath,” Tom Spellacy said. “Most of them got rules about that. He said if he ever found one that didn’t, though, he’d let me know.”

“Shit.” Crotty’s huge hand speared a drop of mustard before it lighted on his white suit. He licked the mustard from his finger and then swallowed the last half of the frankfurter. “I heard him speak last night, your brother. At the Catholic War Veterans Din-ner. I roared. Every time he jumped out of the airplane, he said, he landed in the water. And this Protestant says to him, he says, ‘From the frequency of your immersions, Father, you must be a Baptist.’” Crotty started to laugh and nearly lost part of the hot dog. Tom Spellacy pounded him on the back. “Isn’t that a grand story, Tom?” Crotty said when he caught his breath. “He tells a grand story, your brother.”

“He tells it often enough.”

“You must roar every time.”

Tom Spellacy nodded. He wasn’t up to discussing Des with Crotty. Or Corinne, either. Especially Corinne. Not after last night. She was such a goddamn fool. He wondered if he would ever understand women. He checked his watch. The puppet maker was late. The puppet maker was someone Crotty had dug up. Name of Shopping Cart Johnson. He carved and sold puppets to the shooting galleries at Ocean Park. Tom Spellacy suspected that Crotty just wanted to spend half a day at the beach. It was all right with him. He watched a pyramid of cotton candy melt in the sun.

“What were you doing at Catholic War Veterans?”

“It was honoring Cosmo Gentile.”

“The labor statesman,” Tom Spellacy said sarcastically. Cosmo Gentile ran the building trades. “Kickback Cosmo.”

Crotty ignored him. “His union built all them barracks during the war.”

“And that makes him a Catholic war veteran.”

“He did a grand job.”

“He got indicted.”

“He might’ve got indicted,” Crotty said. “But he never did anything wrong.”

Tom Spellacy lit a cigarette. You want to build a motel, he thought, you go watch Cosmo Gentile named Catholic war hero of the year. He wondered what excuse Des had.

“He gave himself a dinner, Cosmo, is all he did,” Crotty said.

“The Builders Association gave it to him, you want to be accurate about it,” Tom Spellacy said. “A hundred a plate, 340 guests. Extortion I think the DA called it.”

“It was a Welcome Home Dinner, Tom.”

“He’d only been to Yellowstone Park.”

“There’s a lot of bears in Yellowstone Park,” Crotty said. “Man-eaters is what they tell me.”

“Five days. That’s all he was gone.”

“You go to Catalina for the day, boyo, and I’ll toss you a Welcome Home Dinner, too,” Crotty said. “They’ll be glad to see you home safe and sound, your many friends in the community, and not a victim of the Pacific winds and those terrible ocean tides they have over there. Sweet Mother of God, Tom, it’s like the China Sea and the Mindanao Deep and awful places like that, is what I hear about the boat trip to Catalina there.”

The roller coaster suddenly careened around a bend not thirty feet from where they were standing. Over the din, Crotty yelled into his ear, “It keeps the labor costs from going up.”

Tom Spellacy nodded and smiled, all the while watching the nuns clutch the safety bars of the roller coaster. They seemed terror-stricken. It gave him a small sense of satisfaction. They had never been that way giving him the rubber hose at Saint Anatole’s.

When the roller coaster had passed, he said, “Where’s this puppet maker?”

“Don’t worry, he’ll show up,” Crotty said. He was watching a girl in a two-piece bathing suit on the beach. “You ever see a nun didn’t have a mole on her nose?”

“My daughter.”

“Jesus, Tom, I forgot about Moira and her being a nun. Sister Angelo, isn’t it.”

“Sister Angelina.”

“She’s a perfect nun type, Moira. She must be very happy.”

He knew Crotty meant that Moira was fat. A light heavyweight.

“Listen, I got this letter yesterday.” Crotty was trying to change the subject. “Green ink. Pink stationery with little red curlicues all over it. ‘Dear Frank,’ it says. Personal. Like I know someone uses pink paper. *I killed the V-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash Tramp.’ Can you beat that? Can’t even bear to spell the word. Even the nuns don’t say The Blessed V-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash. They say it right out. The Blessed Virgin.”

“Priests, too,” Tom Spellacy said. He liked to give Crotty the needle.

“His Eminence.”

“What else did he say?”

“The Cardinal?”

“The letter-writer.”

“Oh,” Crotty said. “ ‘Stop me before I kill again.’ It was a fairy, I figure. So I bring it down to handwriting. I get the analysis this morning.”

Crotty patted his pockets until he found a piece of paper. “ The fluctuating baseline of the writing reveals the writer to be affected by extreme fluctuations of mood, dropping to melancholy,’ “ he read. “Blah, blah, blah, blah. Here it is. ‘Because the last letters of many words are larger, it reveals extreme frankness. There is a fine sense of rhythm present, showing the penman to be either a musician or possibly a dancer.’”

Crotty put the handwriting analysis back into his pocket. “Not just a fairy,” he said. “A fairy who plays the clarinet and dances a nice waltz.”

“You should let them analyze your handwriting, Frank.”

“Not a chance,” Crotty said. “They got it down to such a science, they’ll look at the shape of my Os and tell me I’m building a motel with a bunch of Chinamen who got me paying off Cosmo Gentile.”

Tom Spellacy thought, She’s a gold mine, this Lois Fazenda. A magnet for every two-bit swami and shrink and expert, handwriting and otherwise. Not to mention the newspapers. The life story of Lois Fazenda with photographs of Lois Fazenda in a bathing suit. Somebody was turning a nice piece of change on Lois Fazenda in a bathing suit, he was sure of that. It was hard to pick up a newspaper without finding resurrected an old unsolved murder of some girl, along with a picture of Lois Fazenda in a bathing suit and the headline: WHERE IS THE MISSING LINK? Tits and ass were the missing link, that was simple. He wondered how many little boys were beating their meat into the
Express
. At least they were getting something out of it. There didn’t seem to be anything but dead ends. He supposed that was a good thing. Dead ends meant more work, and the more work there was, the less time to worry about Corinne. And Mary Margaret. Mustn’t forget Mary Margaret. There was no point in rousting Jack Amsterdam. He could account for every minute the day of the murder. Save that one for a rainy day. When I don’t give a shit and it might be nice watching Jack sweat. He had checked the M. O. file after seeing Brenda. For a barber who liked to shave pussy hair. One name. Harold Pugh. Questioned 1944, not charged. Harold Pugh was listed in the northwestern directory. Harold Pugh was also dead. Automobile accident. He had spent the better part of a morning listening to Harold Pugh’s widow keening on the telephone. On Harold, the father. And Harold, the husband. And Harold, the provider. There were no complaints about Harold. Good Harold.

The morning hadn’t been wasted. He did not think about Corinne once.

The roller coaster pulled to a stop. The nuns got out and surrounded an elderly priest in a black homburg.

“It’s His Eminence,” Crotty said. He was so surprised that he did not notice the ice cream dripping from his cone onto his suit. “What’s an old number like that doing on a roller coaster?”

“Not paying for it, I bet,” Tom Spellacy said. He had never seen the Cardinal in person before, and he was surprised at how old he looked. There must be nothing like a roller coaster full of nuns to make him doubt his vocation, he thought. What was he now? Eighty? He looked every minute of it. He’s going to conk out soon. Des better get bishop nailed down quick.

“I bet he stiffs that guy for all the nuns, too,” Crotty said. He began trailing after the Cardinal’s caravan. “I’ll go look for the puppet guy.”

“His Eminence isn’t investing in motels this year, Frank.”

“The credit rating he’s got, maybe he can pass me a couple of secrets,” Crotty said.

Tom Spellacy took off his hat and sat in the sun. I notice Des isn’t here, he thought. Him and Dan T. Campion are probably trying to make Cosmo Gentile the next Pope. He watched the nuns lead the Cardinal down the boardwalk, buying sandwiches and soft drinks at the vending stands. No money ever seemed to change hands. He wondered who was going to get stuck with the tab. Probably somebody wants to become a papal knight. The soda pop was just the down payment. There’d be a new kitchen range for the convent and a furnace and insulation for the attic and probably a paint job, too. All in all an expensive afternoon, but then getting to be a papal knight was an expensive proposition. He thought of Moira. He could never think of her as Sister Angelina. He wondered if Des had sprung her for Mary Margaret’s homecoming. Moira ought to be here. All that ice cream and cake was like sanctifying grace to Moira. If you got a plenary indulgence for food, Moira would be Mother Cabrini by now.

One of the sisters scooped up a small dog and handed it to the Cardinal. Tom Spellacy saw a look of displeasure flash over his face. Then the Cardinal smiled. Sourly. A nun fastened a leash to the dog’s collar and gave it to the Cardinal. He held the leash as if it were a stick with something bad on the end of it.

Tom Spellacy turned away. He was irritated at himself for paying so much attention to the Cardinal. I’ve got problems enough of my own without worrying if a dog’s going to piss on his shoe. He watched the ocean wash against the beach. Six years in the navy and a lifetime in the city and he bet he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had been swimming. It was just a waste of time sitting on the sand. A place to get sunburned. His shoulders always blistered. And then the skin peeled off in sheets and the freckles plastered his back. He had tried to fuck Mary Margaret one night on the beach. Early in their marriage. It was the last time she ever asked about romance. The moon. The stars. And the sand that got in everyplace. Everyplace. It was like doing it with sandpaper. She had cried. But then Mary Margaret cried in the bedroom. Not so Corinne. Corinne got tan. Corinne said she liked to fuck at the beach. There were a lot of things that Corinne liked to do that he guessed he would never get to try.

Not after last night.

It was his idea to have dinner. “The Windsor,” he had said over the telephone.

“For old times’ sake,” Corinne said.

He did not like the sound of that, but he let it pass. “A lot of things have happened.”

“Like what?”

“Like Chuckie Quinn’s name turned up as a suspect.”

“Who’s Chuckie Quinn?”

“Isn’t that your first husband’s name?”

“Charlie Quinlan.”

“Oh.”

“Close, though.” She added, not unkindly, “I can see someone making that mistake.”

“He was clean anyway, Chuckie.” A stupid mistake. And unnecessary. There was no Chuckie Quinn picked up. It was just that he always needed an opening to talk to her. And so he grabbed a name. The wrong name. Stupid. Her second husband, the one who was killed, what was his name? “At least I didn’t say we picked up Homer Morris.”

“No.”

“You were married to him, too, right?”

“Yes.”

“The one who was killed.”

“Yes.”

“At Pearl.”

“Tom, you don’t get any points for remembering the names of my ex-husbands.”

She was like Des that way. Very free with the lessons. “I’ll pick you up.”

“I’ll meet you. In my own car.”

And that was that. She showed up at the Windsor five minutes late. In her own car. He was already working on his second drink.

“I know you got a car,” Tom Spellacy had said. “As a matter of fact, I like your car better than I like my car. If the fanbelt works, I got to like any car better than I like my car, you want to know the honest truth. But the way it works, they tell me, if you go out with me, I pick you up in my car. I park the car in front of your house, and if there’s a lot of niggers in the neighborhood, I lock it, because cars have a way of disappearing in that kind of neighborhood, is what they tell me. And I ring the doorbell and you say, ‘In a minute,’ and then you open the door and say, ‘Hi, my name is Corinne, would you like a drink,’ and I say, ‘Thanks, no, I’ve got a table at the Windsor at eight, we’re running a little late,’ and you say, ‘Swell, I’ll get my coat,’ and we go downstairs to my car. If I’m lucky, I still got all my hubcaps, and if I catch any little bastard stealing them, I’ll break his toe. That’s how it works. Til meet you there,’ that’s a new one on me. ‘I’ll take my own car,’ that’s another one I never hear. I figure dinner’s thirty bucks and before I even get here, I’m hit with a couple of surprises, and that doesn’t include the check.”