True Confessions (31 page)

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 . . .”

Desmond Spellacy smiled wanly. Me and Bing. A perfect parlay, Monsignor Fargo would say. He shivered involuntarily. Even thinking about Seamus Fargo made him feel ashamed. He looked across the table. Tom Spellacy was staring at him. He probably thinks it’s Mary Margaret who’s making me jumpy, Desmond Spellacy thought. He probably thinks I can fire eighty-year-old monsignors without losing any sleep over it. The funny thing was, Tommy was almost right. Six months ago he wouldn’t have lost any sleep over it. Six weeks ago even. It was all in a day’s work. No Seconal needed to make him sleep like a baby.

Six weeks ago, he thought. That eternity ago before I made my armistice with life . . .

“. . . It was a meal fit for the Queen of Spain,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said. It seemed to Desmond Spellacy that he had missed a transition between the Holy Year and the Spanish royal family. “That she can be such a grand cook with all the sadness she’s had to offer up. You remember her son John, Monsignor? Him that used to be His Eminence’s favorite altar boy. He married a Polish girl. With all the advantages he had . . .”

Thank God for Mary Margaret, Desmond Spellacy thought. Her only concern was how to keep away from the Poles and the Italians. He tried to concentrate on the malefactions of the Cardinal’s favorite altar boy, but the face of Seamus Fargo kept distracting his attention. It was not so much firing Seamus last night that bothered him, only the way it was done. At the Saint Thomas Aquinas Guild dinner. That had been the Cardinal’s idea. The perfect time, the perfect place, the Cardinal had said, to announce a well-deserved retirement. After all the Guild was honoring Seamus for sixty years of exemplary service to the Church. An occasion for which the honorary chairman of the evening was His Eminence Hugh Cardinal Danaher and the principal speaker the Parachuting Padre himself, the Right Reverend Monsignor Desmond Spellacy, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, U.S. Army Commendation Medal, European Theater of Operations ribbon with four battle stars.

Not the kind of hit men ordinarily found on a dais.

Nevertheless.

Desmond Spellacy would wager that Seamus did not have much of a say in those selections. That was Dan T. Campion’s work. Dan T. Campion was the program chairman and master of ceremonies. Which gave the evening a particularly detestable off-color shade. Sacking Seamus after trying to save Dan T. Campion—to Desmond Spellacy it was an obscene trade-off. And he had kept his mouth shut.

That was the worst obscenity of all.

Now it was Dan Campion intruding on his thoughts. Winking. Wearing his master-of-ceremonies tuxedo. Shooting his cuffs and telling Irish stories. Dan T. Campion had winked at Desmond Spellacy at the no-host bar. “Thanks, Des, you did a grand job with your brother the policeman and I appreciate it.” Another wink and Dan Campion was sliding down the bar, shaking hands, moving in on Sonny McDonough and Harry Pottle. Not coinci-dentally both members of the Select Commission picking the new police chief. “You ask Des’s brother, the policeman, he’ll tell you what a grand officer Fred Fuqua is.” So Tommy was right. Dan Campion was campaigning for Fuqua. “He reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt when he was police commissioner in New York.” Dan Campion linked his arms to Sonny McDonough and Harry Pottle so that they could not move. “And we all know how far TR went, with his being such a grand commissioner. Fred Fuqua is the one, I’m telling you, and that’s a fact. FF is what they’ll be calling him before he’s through, you mark my words. Like they called Teddy TR. You can fault Dan Campion on a lot of things, but you can’t fault Dan Campion on one thing. Dan Campion has always been able to spot a comer. And I spotted Fred Fuqua just the way I spotted Des Spellacy, before he even knew where the front was on his Roman collar . . .”