True Confessions (35 page)

I am being tested, Desmond Spellacy thought. My faith is being tested. My vocation. Such as they are. Every priest expected the test at some time or another during his priesthood. Usually in a way where the choice was heroic.

Do you still believe in your God? the commandant of the firing squad would say.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth . . .

Ready.

. . . And in Jesus Christ . . .

Aim.

. . . His only begotten Son . . .

Fire.

Like a lozenge, that kind of test. Easy to swallow. What the seminary did not prepare you for was your own brother in the confessional. The former bagman for Wilshire Vice.

Sanctimonious Des.

Soiled Tommy.

It would be so comforting to attribute the strain between them to that. So easy.

And such bullshit.

What happened in Wilshire Vice only crossed the Ts and dotted the
Is
. There had always been strain between them. And fear. And envy. They were brothers. It was as simple as that.

Cain and Abel.

Always exchanging roles.

“You don’t want me to hear, Tommy, what is it then?” Desmond Spellacy said. “I can pass up your thoughts on the eighth commandment.”

“As a matter of fact, Des, there is something, you got a minute. Your pal, Jack, he’s kind of in the shit, is the reason I’m here.”

Of course.

“He left here, we picked him up. Not on the front steps, we didn’t want to embarrass the Cardinal. A couple of blocks away. He ought to be arriving downtown in about ten minutes. I just thought you’d want to be prepared, you saw his picture in the paper ...”

The sacrament of absolution. That was a laugh. Copping a plea, Tommy called it. First Jack. Then Tommy. One made him feel irrelevant, the other useless.

“One thing you can tell the Cardinal, though. He was in a state of grace and you can guarantee that . . .”

The words washed over him. Green cards. The girl at 39th and Norton. He did not understand. Nor did he try. Nor did he care.

He knew only one thing.

It was over.

“I’m going to die, Tommy,” my brother Des said
.

But of course Des had begun to die that day twenty-eight years before. Jack’s picture was in the paper, hands cuffed behind his back, escorted by Crotty and three uniformed officers whose names weren’t mentioned, and Jack said that Des had met Lois Fazenda coming up from Del Mar and then Fuqua told the
Express
and the
Times
and the
Mirror
and the
News
and the
Examiner
that he would follow this investigation no matter where it led. They loved that, the newspapers, especially Howard Terkel. One thing you could say about Howard, he knew how to dig, and he dug up Brenda and he also dug up every construction contract Jack ever had with the archdiocese and by the time he plowed through the kickbacks and the money Jack had skimmed off the top, you got the impression that Des wasn’t very smart. The Cardinal said that Des had not been personally involved in any irregularities and if you read between the lines he also said that Des had not been boffing Lois Fazenda, which is not the sort of thing Cardinals like to say about future bishops.

In other words, Des was through.

And so was Jack. Bail was refused, and by the time his lawyers were able to get a writ of habeas corpus, he had started to hemorrhage in his cell and he was transferred to the prison ward at County General and he went in and out of a coma and three weeks later he died.

Which pleased the shit out of Fuqua. Who now did not have to prove that Jack had killed Lois Fazenda. He went on “Homicide Hotline” with Barry Backer and said that the case of the Virgin Tramp was officially closed and what it proved was that his department—he was already calling it his department, even though the Select Commission hadn’t picked him as chief yet—would not be intimidated by people in high places, no matter how sacred. The Cardinal got that message and wouldn’t attend the civic dinner honoring Fuqua when he made chief. Which was too bad, because if he had been there, he could have given Fuqua extreme unction. The thing that happened was that he swallowed a piece of steak the wrong way and it got caught in his windpipe, but no one noticed because they were too busy laughing at Dan T. Campion’s jokes about the Jewish rabbi and the Catholic priest and about the nun who wanted to join the Marines, and by the time they realized that Fuqua wasn’t laughing, it was too late.

Dan T. Campion died in bed two years later after a Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick dinner. With a fourteen-year-old girl. He was still wearing a funny little green cone-shaped leprechaun hat with the elastic band under his chin.

Lorenzo Jones went to law school at night, got into politics and became mayor.

As for Crotty, he got his loan from Warner Brothers, and the two of us decided that the Fazenda case really should be closed, and so we burned everything in the files about Harold Pugh.

Mary Margaret went back to Camarillo and Saint Barnabas. Occasionally, if there was a big funeral, she would check herself out and she would sniff the flowers and touch the makeup on the face of the deceased and see who was driving the funeral cars and ask how much it cost. “They paid this crowd $1,600,” she would say in a stage whisper. “Sonny McDonough would have done the whole thing for twelve hundred. And made Mr. Feeney look like he was taking a snooze. Which he had a lot of practice doing, snoozing. He never was worth a plugged nickel, Clinton Fee-ney . . .”

I saw Corinne once. She had married again, an engineer in Water and Power, and I ran into her in the cafeteria in the basement of the Federal Building. I bought her lunch and over coffee she said she would fuck me if I wanted and I said no and while I was paying the check she just got up and left the table. I never saw her again. Crotty says that she’s living in Tucson now and that she’s got cataracts.

I guess that brings everything right up to date.

Right up to that grubby rectory in Twenty-nine Palms.

“I’m going to die, Tommy,” my brother Des said.

And for the first time in more years than I care to remember, I broke down and cried.

I suppose Des bringing me out to the desert was his way of giving me absolution. The arteries leading to his pump were shot and it was only a matter of time. I went out to see him every week and we sat and we talked and we looked out the window at Father Eduardo, who was still trying to fix the carburetor on that old two-tone Chrysler. We never mentioned what had happened. Too many years had passed for it to matter much anyway.

Two old men in the desert.

“That’s some car, Des.”

“Which one is that, Tommy?”

“Father Eduardo’s. He wants to plug the holes in the carburetor, he should pour some black pepper in it. It swells, the pepper.”

“I keep forgetting. You know something about cars, don’t you.”

“I used to work three days a week for Jack Walker.”

“The car dealer.”

“Ninth and Figueroa.”

“After you retired.”

“It was a way to stretch the pension.”

“I’ll tell Father Eduardo about the black pepper.”

“It’s a good gimmick. There’s a lot of gimmicks in the used-car business.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“A fellow comes in and trades in his old car. What you do is, you send him a dollar or so in loose change and say you found it under his upholstery.”

“Is that right?”

“It makes him a repeater.”

“He tells his friends you’re honest.”

“And he sends the friends in.”

“I never would have thought of that.”

“Another gimmick is, a fellow comes in to make his monthly payment, and you send him around the corner for a free car wash.”

“That’ll get him to send in his friends. Imagine, a free car wash.”

“You shouldn’t be smoking that cigar, Des.”

“What’ll it give me if I stop? Two more weeks?”

“I see your point.”

“How’s Frank Crotty?”

Crotty was fine. He lived in Palm Springs and still wore the white suits. And played a lot of golf now. Mainly with Jack Decker. You played with Jack and you took a swing and missed, Jack said it was a practice swing. Jack was good about things like that. Frank said that Jack would give you a putt if your ball was anywhere within Riverside County. Which is why Frank had a handicap of twelve, playing with partners like Jack. Jack used to say that giving a guy a putt was better than being in the slam. Jack used to be Jacob Dickstein and he ran most of the semis out of LA until ‘51 or ‘52. A little highjacking on the side, and when a guy wanted to hire some muscle, he would call Jake Dickstein and Jake would give him a telephone number. Then Jake got busted for Murder One when his wife Mitzi was found in a motel in Westchester with an ice pick stuck between her tits. Frank investigated the case and he told the DA there wasn’t enough to pin on Jake. Not that I think Frank tried that hard. There was a lot of talk that Frank had some of the highjack action, but I never believed it. Frank was too smart. He wasn’t too choosy about who invested in his motels, but he stayed away from anything illegal. Anyway, Jake beat the rap and then he retired from the trucking business. All the way to the Springs, where he changed his name to Jack Decker and joined Thunderbird. A nice life. Golf every day with old friends. Like Frank.

“You still play golf, Des?”

“I haven’t played golf in twenty-five years. I’ll tell you something, though. I watch Arnold Palmer on the television, and you know what, Tommy? I think I could have taken him. Playing at Knollwood and him giving me three strokes.”

“It’s a shame you gave it up, Des.”

“Monsignor Fargo wasn’t much for golf.”

“I always wondered about that. Two monsignors in the same parish.”

“It was my choice. His Eminence was going to give me a parish of my own. In Merced. And I asked him if I could be Seamus’s curate instead. He wasn’t going to live long, Seamus, and I said I could take over Saint Mary’s after he died. If His Eminence still wanted me to have a parish, that is. Of course, Seamus fooled us all, he always did. Ninety-one, when he died. He outlived His Eminence by eleven years. So I guess he had the last laugh.”

“It must’ve been hard, Des.”

He shook his head and smiled.

“He taught me how to be a priest, Tommy. I have no gift for loving God. I still don’t. Seamus said that wasn’t a drawback, as long as I could be useful, and out here in this Godforsaken place, I am useful. Maybe I only deal with Pinky Heffernan’s bowels or Mr. McHugh’s niece, the nun who wants to be a bowler, but I am useful to these people. There’s a kind of peace in that, Tommy. I can’t help it if you don’t believe it, but it’s true.”

I looked out the window of the cinderblock rectory, past Father Eduardo and the two-tone Chrysler, and in the distance, way out in the desert, I could see a sandstorm beginning to build up.

“I’m sorry, Des.”

He looked at me through a cloud of cigar smoke, not saying anything.

“It was my fault,” I said.

Des held up his hand. “You were my salvation, Tommy.”

I did not know what he meant. Still don’t, for that matter. But we sat there and he puffed again on his cigar and after a while, with the smoke still hanging in the air, he said, “You made me remember something I forgot. Or tried to forget is more like it. You and me, we were always just a couple of harps.”

Crotty went first. On the fourteenth fairway at Thunderbird. He was so far out on the fairway, he stepped aside and let Bob Hope and Arnold Palmer play through. It was a real thrill for Frank, seeing Bob and Arnie that way. Bob came over and shook hands and said, “How you hitting them, Fred?” and Frank said, “Frank,” and Bob said, “I want you to meet my friend, Arnie, this is Frank Carter,” and Frank said, “Crotty, it’s a great honor, Arnie.” When Bob and Arnie were off the green, Frank picked his club, did a couple of practice swings and then just keeled over.

Coronary occlusion.

Des went later that summer. In his sleep. He didn’t get up for breakfast one morning, and the Mexican housekeeper called Father Eduardo, she had never been in a man’s room alone, she said, and the first time wasn’t going to be in a monsignor’s bedroom, and so Father Eduardo went in and Des was gone, peaceful, his beads between his fingers. He left a letter that said he wanted to be buried out in the desert next to Seamus. I didn’t understand that, but what the hell, if that was what he wanted, it was okay with me. Being Des, of course, he had to give me one last goose. He had bought another plot and in the letter he said that he wanted me to lie out there with him when the time came.

In the middle of all that goddamn sand.

The Spellacy brothers.

A couple of harps.

The solemn high requiem mass was sung at Saint Mary’s by Seamus Fargo’s nephew, Richard, who was auxiliary bishop of Fresno. I tried to get the new Cardinal, but he couldn’t come, or wouldn’t, Holy Name Society business, his secretary, some snot-nosed monsignor, said, and the other bishops in the archdiocese were all out dedicating hospitals or shopping malls or something, which is why I had to go all the way to Fresno to get Richard Fargo.

As for me, I’m in the pink. I’ll be seventy-two next week.