True Confessions (5 page)

Tom Spellacy opened his notebook. “We need a list of sex crimes with the same M.O.”

“A check of all known sex offenders.”

“And their cars for bloodstains.”

“Put the word out to the garages and the wrecking yards for anything that comes in with blood on the seats.”

“Or in the trunk.”

“We should probably check the joint, see if any sex offenders went over the wall recently.”

“The funny farms, too,” Tom Spellacy said.

Crotty sipped his tea. “Fuqua will love it. The systems approach. You know what we’ll come up with, don’t you?”

“Shit,” Tom Spellacy said. “Shit for the newspapers.”

“Weeny flashers,” Crotty said. “Guys who shit on the sidewalk. Panty sniffers. Guys who fall in love with their shoes. The guy who belts his hog on the Number 43 bus there. People like that. The kind you want to invite home at Christmastime there to meet the old lady and give them a missal for a present. Nice people to have in the house, you got a pair of gloves to wear when you shake hands with them. And what are we going to be pulling them in for? To find a guy, sliced up a girl who’s got a rose tattooed on her pussy. Like my old mother there. We never could keep Ma out of the tattoo parlor. The flower on her twat, the cock on her tits, those were Ma’s favorites. A big nigger cock, a foot long, Ma was crazy about that one. She was always flashing it at Doc Daugherty’s wife Sadie at the Stations of the Cross there.”

Tom Spellacy finished his beer.

“I got a motel to run is all I’m telling you,” Crotty said. “You think I’m going to lose any sleep over who took this dame out, you’re shitting strawberries and whipped cream, is what you’re shitting, you think that. Fuck her, is what I say. And you should say, too. You know how we’re going to break this one. Couple of years from now, they’ll bring in a guy ran a red light. ‘I did it,’ he’ll say. ‘Did what?’ we’ll say. ‘Killed the girl with the rose tattooed on her twat,’ he’ll say. ‘Which fucking one was that?’ we’ll say. That’s how we’re going to break this one.”

’’Don’t tell Fuqua that,” Tom Spellacy said. “It’d give him acid indigestion, I think.”

Crotty called for the check. Wo Fat said it would dishonor his house if Lieutenant Crotty paid. Crotty bowed.

When they reached the street, Crotty said, “Listen, Tom, I think I did a little talking out of turn about Jack A. up there. I mean, I know how tight the monsignor is with him.’

“Fuck him,” Tom Spellacy said.

“The monsignor?”

“Him, too.”

The Right Reverend Monsignor Desmond Spellacy counted the
mink.

Enid Fallon had a mink. Theresa Dowd and Mary Devlin had minks. Regina Gaffney’s mink had horizontal pelts and Helen Donahoe’s vertical pelts. Verna Boylan had a champagne mink, Edna Whalen a silver mink.

Mrs. Chester Hanrahan was weeping into her mink jacket.

Desmond Spellacy shifted his weight on the prie-dieu. It was quite a send-off for Chet. The vicar general saying the solemn high-requiem mass, thirty priests and monsignors on the altar, all the ladies from the League of Catholic Women in their mink. He searched for Monica Gargan. It wouldn’t be a funeral without Monica. There she was in the second pew, matching Mrs. Chester Hanrahan tear for tear. “Two hundred and eleven spiritual bouquets Chet’s got so far,” Monica had whispered to him at the rosary. “Do you think that’s a record, Monsignor? I know for a fact that Andrew Costigan only got 194.” Trust Monica to know that. And the make and year of all the cars in the funeral procession. Quentin Houlihan had the record for Cadillacs. She knew the number of wreaths, too, and whether they had come from Jim Daley’s or Harry McAuliffe’s. “You get your bargains from Jim,” Monica Gargan said. “Harry gives you a quality wreath. Colorado carnations and a grand piece of silk ribbon with the gold lettering. It’s the day-old salmon glads from Jim, and the cheap satin doesn’t hold the printing.” One last dismissal of Jim Daley. “The Polish all use Jim. And the Italians.”

“
Credo in unum Deum
. .
’.”
Augustine O’Dea sang. The vicar general’s rich bass rolled through the cathedral. Desmond Spellacy was originally supposed to sing the funeral mass, but Mrs. Chester Hanrahan had vetoed that. “All he’s done for Holy Mother the Church,” she had sobbed after the coronary, “Chet deserves a bishop at least.” It was the Cardinal she wanted, but His Eminence was indisposed. A touch of the flu. Although Desmond Spellacy suspected that the real reason His Eminence was absent was because he had never been able to stand Chester Hanrahan.

“
Patrem omnipotentem
. . .” The men’s choir took up the refrain.

Doris Doyle’s mink had a full collar and Sadie Cormier’s cuffs big enough to be muffs. Dolores Kearney wore a red mink and Vitaline Dowdy a black mink. Dan T. Campion had a mink collar on his Chesterfield.

Desmond Spellacy noticed that Dan T. Campion was sitting with the delegation from the police department. Good. Dan was keeping on top of that situation. He made a mental note to suggest to His Eminence that he attend the Policemen’s Ball. If only to give his blessing. In and out in five minutes, that was all it would take. One picture in the newspapers would do it. The Cardinal in purple and ermine showing his solidarity with the department. At a time when the department desperately needed a vote of confidence. The vice scandal had almost wrecked it. The mayor recalled, the chief indicted, seven senior officers resigned. One suicide, God rest his soul.

“
Oremus
. . .”

He thanked God Tommy had never been indicted. He knew it wasn’t a coincidence, Tommy being transferred out of Wilshire Vice when he was. But that was all he knew and all he wanted to know. He blotted Tommy from his mind. The immediate problem was getting the Cardinal to the ball. His Eminence deplored the appearance of opportunism, although not opportunism itself. It would not do to argue that the new police chief, soon to be selected, would appreciate the favor and that it never hurt to have a friend in the department. Something more high-minded was in order. A scholarship, perhaps. He ran over the possibilities. A college education sponsored by the archdiocese. Four years at Loyola. He knew he could get the Jesuits to agree. The jebbies wanted the Cardinal’s approval on that new dormitory. A Loyola education, but for whom?

The son of a policeman killed in the line of duty.

That would do it. His Eminence could announce the scholarship at the Policemen’s Ball. Not that the Cardinal would be fooled, but appearances would be satisfied.

“
Lavabo inter innocentes
. . .” Bishop O’Dea intoned.

Appearances. They were very much on Desmond Spellacy’s mind today. Augustine O’Dea, for example. Tall, in his late fifties, with massive shoulders and the mane of snow-white hair. The very picture of a bishop. He had only one drawback: he was a boob. A view, Desmond Spellacy knew, that was shared by the Cardinal. That big, booming voice always ready to discourse on Saint Patrick and the snakes or the day Babe Ruth said hello to him at Comiskey Park. Two favorite topics. (Desmond Spellacy had once pressed him on the Babe and what the Babe had actually said was, “Hiya, keed.”) But. . . . Always the
but
. There was something about Augustine O’Dea that seemed to amuse the Cardinal. With rapt attention, Hugh Danaher listened to the endless monologues about the day little Bernadette met Our Lady at Lourdes or the absence of snakes on the Emerald Isle. Is that right, Augustine? I didn’t know that, Augustine. It was as if the vicar general provided the Cardinal with his only relief from the byzantine tedium of running the archdiocese.

It could have been a situation with Augustine O’Dea. Desmond Spellacy was certain of that, but the Cardinal had handled it perfectly. It was a matter of turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse. Hugh Danaher was, after all, only an obscure coadjutor archbishop in Boston when he succeeded Daniel Shortell, who had died quietly in his ninety-first year, leaving the archdiocese, in a word, broke. It was easy to get rid of most of the deadwood that had accumulated around Archbishop Shortell, but Augustine O’Dea was vicar general, second in command in the archdiocese, and he had expected to be Daniel Shortell’s successor. The simplicity of Hugh Danaher’s solution was exquisite: he just took advantage of the vicar general’s imposing good looks. If there was a ribbon to be cut or a communion breakfast to attend, there was Augustine O’Dea posing for the photographers, telling of his plan to send a Christmas card to every Catholic in the American League. Because of his long friendship with the Babe, of course. Title after title was piled onto his broad shoulders, each more meaningless than the last. Director of the Apostleship of Prayer. Chairman of the Sodalities of Our Lady. Director of the Priests’ Eucharistic Congress. Spiritual Director of the League of the Hard of Hearing.

Vintage Hugh Danaher, Desmond Spellacy thought. He had a gift for turning a liability into an advantage. A complex man. Desmond Spellacy doubted that he would ever really understand the Cardinal. Except for one thing. He would never try to pull a fast one on him. Even now, nearing eighty, in the twelfth year of what had appeared, when he was named archbishop, only a caretaker appointment, the Cardinal could still be ruthless. Desmond Spellacy shivered. He had seen the Cardinal in action too often. That cold stare. Where the seconds seemed like hours. He had seen priests crumble under that stare. John Tracy, sixty-eight years old, who had asked His Eminence why he had never been named a pastor. The stare. Until poor John Tracy wept. The Cardinal never had to give the answer John Tracy had dreaded: because you’re a homosexual.

It was that kind of ruthlessness which had helped him pay off the debt of five million dollars left by Daniel Shortell. And create twenty new parishes, eighteen new high schools, sixty-four new parochial schools. Desmond Spellacy knew how the rich laity quaked when Hugh Danaher put on the squeeze. “When Mary O’Brien, a chambermaid, can give seventy-five cents to the Building Fund, I expect Randle J. Toomey, who would like to be a Grand Knight of Malta, to give seventy-five hundred dollars.” Not
in camera
. At the annual luncheon of The Holy Name Society. It got the job done. The Pope rewarded Hugh Danaher with a red hat. Spiritual leader of a flock numbering 1,250,000 people. A bookkeeper in ermine was more like it, the Cardinal said. Interest rates and construction costs and real-estate values. These were the problems that filled his days. The application of marriage laws and the businesslike operation of hospitals, orphanages and cemeteries.

Appearances, Desmond Spellacy thought. A sow’s ear. A spiritual leader. He wondered if Augustine O’Dea knew about the polyp on the Cardinal’s prostate. He thought not. Augustine O’Dea’s latest enthusiasm was trying to perfect his Al Smith imitation. Best not to trouble him. Get Chet Hanrahan into the ground. A new chairman of the Building Fund, that was the immediate concern. Not whether Desmond Spellacy was going to succeed Hugh Danaher.

“
Orate fratres
. . .”

In the front pew, Mrs. Chester Hanrahan leaned toward her husband’s casket and keened loudly. The organist from Immaculate Conception High School began to play “Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue.” It was Chet’s favorite “number,” according to Mrs. Chester Hanrahan. As Immaculate Conception was his favorite high, because it was there that he had his first fund-raising success, putting the drive for the new gymnasium over the top with six “Put-A-Pool-In-A-Catholic-School” Sunday collections.

The volume of Mrs. Chester Hanrahan’s sobbing seemed to embarrass her two children, Brother Bede Hanrahan of the Athanasians and Sister Mary Peter Hanrahan of the Salesian Sisters of Saint John Bosco. What a windfall for the Salesians and the Athanasians, Desmond Spellacy thought. One thing Chet Hanrahan had never figured on was both his children going into the religious. And now the Athanasians and the Salesians would someday be carving up the Hanrahan Development Corporation.

“It’s a goddamn shame, Des,” Chester Hanrahan had said after his son had entered the Athanasians, “that boy not having more respect for his mother.”

If there was one subject Desmond Spellacy had not wished to discuss with Chester Hanrahan, it was his son’s vocation. The Athanasians were a mendicant order who devoted their lives to menial service. “He heard the call, Chet,” he answered deliberately.

“To clean up the shithouse in some old people’s home?” Chester Hanrahan said.

“If he’s happy, Chet.”

“Up to his elbows in piss, he calls that being happy?” Chester Hanrahan said. “What about his mother? If he had to go in, why didn’t he become a priest then, instead of some goddamn brother. At least his mother could watch him say mass then, he was a priest, or give a retreat. She could buy him a car. What is she supposed to do now? Give him a can of Ajax and watch him swab bedpans?”

You work your ass off, Chester Hanrahan had said bitterly. And he had. A pioneer in subdivisions. Del Cerro Heights. Fairway Estates. Rancho Rio. Wishing Well Meadows. Each new tract announced with billboards off every major artery. “Will There Be Underground Utilities in Del Cerro Heights?” “ ‘YES!’ Says Chester Hanrahan.” “Will There Be City Water in Fairway Estates?” “’YES!’ Says Chester Hanrahan.” “Will There Be Neighborhood Schools in Rancho Rio?” “’YES!’ Says Chester Hanrahan.”

It was over the question of neighborhood schools in Rancho Rio, in fact, that Chester Hanrahan had first come officially to the attention of Desmond Spellacy. That day seven years before when he was in the steam room of Knollwood Country Club with Dan T. Campion, the lawyer for the archdiocese.

“I was talking to Chet Hanrahan the other day,” Dan T. Campion said. The sweat poured off his bantam-rooster frame. “He’s got this grand new development. Rancho Rio, I think it’s called. He’d like to give a little piece to His Eminence for a school. Isn’t that a grand thing for him to do, Des?”

Desmond Spellacy nodded noncommittally. The little lawyer could sleep behind a corkscrew. He could imagine Dan T. Campion’s conversation with Chester Hanrahan. “Let me bounce it off Des Spellacy, Chet. He’s just a lad with the dew behind his ears. Hardly thirty, if he’s a day. Learned his numbers at the seminary. Where they teach them to count in one-dollar bills.” There was a fee in it for Dan T. Campion, along with his retainer from the archdiocese, if he was passing along an offer from Chester Hanrahan. Of that Desmond Spellacy was certain.

“He’s having trouble getting rid of his lots then, Dan?”

“My God, you’re a suspicious one, Des,” Dan T. Campion said.

“It’s not selling, Dan,” Desmond Spellacy said. “He needs something to make it go. And the city won’t put in a school or the county a golf course. On that very same land he offered both of them before his generous offer to us.” He’ll wonder how I knew that, Desmond Spellacy thought. And he’ll figure out its Sonny McDonough. The only Catholic on the board of supervisors. “I hear he’s overextended, Chester Hanrahan. The banks want to call in his paper.”

“You’re a smooth number, Des, that’s exactly what I told Chet. No fast ones on Des Spellacy, I said. His Eminence knew his buttons when he made you chancellor. Though there was some that thought the poor man was in his dotage when he made a boy like yourself such a high monkey-monk. Not me, though. ‘Never underestimate Des Spellacy,’ is what I said. ‘A very cool article,’ is what I said. ‘Looks like a leprechaun, thinks like an Arab.’ My very words.” The thick frosting of blarney with the brain clicking away under it. “It was Sonny told you, then?”

“A little bird.”

“It’s still a grand offer, Des,” Dan T. Campion said. “What if Chet were to throw in ten thousand dollars for the Building Fund.”

“I’d have to catch it on the bounce, is what I hear.”

“You have a grand wit, Des,” Dan T. Campion said. “Not like most priests, I hate to say. You say hello to some of them fellows and all they got to talk about is how Genial Jimmy Dahill was dancing the jig at his hundredth birthday party in the parish hall. And wasn’t it grand the way that Tommy Lawler, the famous bail bondsman, passed away saying the rosary.” He wrapped himself tightly in the Turkish towel. “I think I could persuade Chet to let his construction company build the school at cost.”