by Declan Finn
CLERICAL ERROR
The death of
Fr. Timothy A. Lessner
By Declan Finn
&
Dr John Konecsni
Clerical Error by Declan Finn
Cover art by: Margot St. Aubin
Copyright 2020 John Konecsni
Printed in the United States of America Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights Worldwide English Language Print Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved 2019 Any attempt to reproduce this material without permission will end badly for you, do we understand each other?
Dedicated in loving memory to
Monsignor William J Rodgers, 1922-2018
Also by Declan Finn (In Order):
NONFICTION
For All Their Wars are Merry:
An Examination of Irish Rebel Songs
Pius History:
The Facts Behind the Pius Trilogy*
A Philosophy for Living (with Dr. John Konecsni)
FICTION
Clerical Error
Codename: Winterborn (with Allan Yoskowitz)
Codename: Unsub
It was only on Stun!
The Pius Trilogy*
A Pius Man: A Holy Thriller (Book 1)
A Pius Legacy: A Political Thriller (Book 2)
A Pius Stand: A Global Thriller (Book 3)
Pius Tales (Anthology)
Set to Kill
Sad Puppies Bite Back (A Parody)
Love At First Bite *
Honor at Stake
Demons are Forever
Live and Let Bite
Good to the Last Drop
Saint Tommy NYPD*
Hell Spawn (Book 1)
Death Cult (Book 2)
Infernal Affairs (Book 3)
City of Shadows (Book 4)
Crusader (Book 5)
Deus Vult (Book 6)
Miller and Williams
Too Secret Service (Book 1)
Dances With Werewolves (Book 2)
Night of the Assassins (Book 3)
ANTHOLOGIES
Pius Tales (Anthology)*
Places Beyond the Wild*
Paragons[*]
Planetary: Pluto[+]
Planetary: Luna (Editor)+
Planetary: Mars+
Planetary: Venus+
Storming Area 51 (Bayonet Books)
A note from the historical record
While the following is a fictional account, with murder being the most fictional of all, much of the backdrop of the time and place is accurate. This is as close as we can get to give you the spirit of the time and place, short of saying “You just had to be there.”
If at any point you say, “this couldn’t have happened” … Seriously, you just had to be there.
This is a manuscript started by the esteemed Doctor Konecsni mentioned on the cover and the title page. He wrote it within a few years of the time period mentioned. It was later cleaned up and modified a little by Declan Finn – mostly for readability changes.
CHAPTER ONE:
INTO DARKEST BROOKLYN
MONDAY NIGHT
FEBRUARY 12TH, 1976
ON THE THIRD DAY BEFORE TIM LESSNER DIED, James monitored the neighborhood with utmost care. He considered driving round the block a third time but decided that would look too much like cruising the streets, or casing the neighborhood.
The more he saw, the less he liked.
Quixotry has its limits, he thought as he securely locked his 1967 VW Bug, thankful once again that he had an older car. Lead the neighborhood not into temptation.
The block had all the smoldering charm of Berlin, 1945, or maybe vintage edginess of the South Bronx, circa 1970. He squared his shoulders and set out for the complex of buildings which dominated half of the block he had just circled. The other half of the block, contained one bar with grime on the windows so thick he wasn’t sure it was open, two odd storefronts which were labeled ‘social clubs’ in Spanish, a chits-and-grits, plus one fast food joint offering ‘salsa pizza’ in big red letters.
At the corner opposite from his target was the “Santa Barbara Botanica”—
Whatever that is, he thought.
The neighborhood was alive yet too quiet, as if waiting for something.
He glanced along the neighborhood trying not to focus on any one thing-- just enough to get him where he needed to go. Small but poignant details were burned in his all too efficient memory and added to his center-city paranoia…
A too young looking waitress at the restaurant is boredly staring out the window at him, with eyes out of focus and glassy…
A sugar skull painted with garish pink and black hearts, dotted with glitter and leering at him from the botanica …
Lots of empty businesses that existed without a clientele…
A shape moving behind too grimy bar windows that disappeared when he looked right at it…
Bored young men idling in front of alleyways seeming to scan the invisible horizon for trouble…
He was not the bravest man in the world, and this lack ached painfully as he passed, dangerously out of place and alone.
Brooklyn did not share Chicago’s bulls-eye style layout, but the center of the bulls-eye was deadly.
Across the street on the north side was a solid front of nineteenth century tenements—the kind usually seen blazing on television, while news commentators quoted the fire commissioner about suspicious origins. Spontaneous combustion in this territory is defined as a million dollar building insured for five million, as the one of the cuter talk show hosts put it.
The northeast corner diagonal to his destination contained God-knows-what, behind twenty foot high walls with the thickness of pre-Union labor. To east and west were rats and rubble, while the northwest diagonal corner housed a police station which blended into its shabby environment. Only the mid-February snow created an equal cover for buildings and rubble alike; where vehicular or canine traffic left filthy emissions, the underlying squalor reasserted itself.
James headed up the broad ochre steps and made for the huge double-sized wooden doors. The dirty panels of glass in the upper half of the door were indistinguishable from the wood, save by texture, from the heavy varnish which reduced the oak to blackness. He pressed the doorbell, set down the suitcase and waited. And waited.
After five tries on the bell in seven minutes, James sharply rapped on the glass with the point of his car key.
A tall, slender black man of indeterminate age with a very short haircut of tightly curled black hair and a potbelly opened the door. He was dressed in black and wore a Roman collar.
“James, so glad you could come,” the priest boomed with a voice that could be heard across the street. “Come in, come in! Come drop your bag in the common room. I’m waiting for Father Pedro to finish evening Mass.”
The vestibule opened into a spacious corridor. A propped-open door on his right permitted the sacristy to be seen. He could see some people seated in the sacristy and could hear, but not see, the priest reciting some of the prayers after communion. On his left were two huge rooms which could host public meetings or whose doors on rollers-- or “pocket doors”— could be slid out
of the wall to permit less public conversations.
He followed down the corridor alongside a huge flight of stairs on his right. James glanced up at the multiple stories on his way to the back room.
What the priest called the common room was a huge cube of space, sixteen feet on a side, with a desk at right angles to the doorway and a pair of sofas bordering on the far diagonal corner. Two doors on the far wall were bordered by a sofa on the left, three sofas on the right, and a vinyl lounge chair in between them.
James threw his suitcase into the area between the longer sofa and the heavy wooden coffee table that paralleled it, then turned to observe his friend’s restless pacing. He raised questioning eyebrows, and received only a gesture for silence in return. He shrugged, sat, and began the pipe smoker’s ornate ritual of stuffing, lighting, tamping, and relighting his pipe. When he got a good cloud of smoke going, he leaned back and wondered if he shouldn’t bail out of the entire project. After all, Father Gus was only a classmate for one year almost a decade ago.
All in all, what do I know about him? The Reverend Augustine Patrick Sadowski, pastor of Sts. Gabriel, Columcille, and Rocco. He’s been in this slum forever. He lists his masters and Doctorate in intellectual history, alias “the history of ideas,” under “hobbies.” He sat in on some of my graduate philosophy courses. My gal Abby helped me celebrate his MA in ’67 and his PhD in ’75. In sum, three classes, two parties, a dozen phone calls in half as many years, and all of a sudden I’m in the middle of his latest crisis.
I have to stop being helpful.
Gus gestured to James, then turned to greet the other priest at the door. It was all over in a matter of seconds but James had the impression of extreme height, severely rounded shoulders stooping, dark hair, eyes, and Latinate complexion.
“Thank you very much, Father Pedro! Much good luck and success at your next assignment! I’d like you to meet Dr. James, especially as he’ll be taking over as your successor. He’s moving into the house tonight.”
I’m what?
CHAPTER TWO:
YOU REALLY WANT THIS JOB?
James felt as though the rush out the door should have included something rude, like “don’t let the door hit you in the back on the way out.”
The pastor went to the window, was satisfied that Pedro had left, then turned to his friend and said, “Let’s get out of here. Maybe dinner will wash the bad taste out of my mouth.”
By the time James got his coat on, Father Gus was at the front door. James was beginning to fear that his friend’s life was done at full run. As he got to the rectory door, Gus was opening up the door of his own car.
As James settled into this anonymous car of appearance as disreputable as his own, Gus asked “Where’s your car?”
James shrugged casually. “Around the corner.”
Father Gus’ voice went dark and serious. “Put it in the schoolyard. Now.”
Gus drove him around the block, James parked as directed, and returned to Gus’s passenger seat. As they traveled through the streets James could never recognize in the dark, Gus kept up a non-stop tirade against Pedro.
“Wasn’t he marvelous? Oh, so polite!” Gus frowned and scoffed. “Goddamn Backstabber! Did I tell you how I found out about it?”
James raised an eyebrow. “The transfer?”
“Of course the transfer!” he barked. Gus paused a moment, took a breath, and calmed down. “Sorry James. Nothing personal… against you. But that ungrateful son of a bitch humiliated me and it burns my ass at how I’ve been manipulated. When he was a peasant priest from the backwoods of Spain, this house was ‘amazing’! It was his first domicile with indoor plumbing! As an externe, a rent-a-priest, who wasn’t incardinated in this diocese, I could have paid him anything. But no, he drew the same salary as any regular incardinated priest of this diocese.”
James frowned, his brow furrowed, confused at the word choice. “What has the cardinal got to do with his status?”
Gus sigh and patiently explained, “Incardination simply means that he was ordained by and for the diocese where he is practicing.”
The patience evaporated as Gus continued his story, and the driving matched his fury. “When he failed to qualify for the diocesan group medical, dental, and auto plans, I got the parish to cover him. For five years, I’m teaching him English, and then he decided to leave? And does he even tell me himself that he has ‘outgrown’ the parish or some similar euphemism? Hell, no.”
James tightened his grip on the car door, bracing himself against the increasingly angry driving of Father Gus as the story drew on.
“The end of January, I’m in the vicar’s office and Marty himself springs it on me. ‘Oh, by the way, Gus’ – and you know from the opening that he has saved something nasty as a final jack out of the box. ‘Oh, by the way, Gus, you did know that Father Armatierez has applied for incardination?’
“I took a long pull on my cigar and replied ‘Of course, Monsignor.’ But I was fuming. I’d be damned if I’d let The Very Reverend Martin J. Heaney—Vicar or not—with his expensive suits and cheap Master’s in Social Work—discover that he knew something about my parish which I didn’t know first.
“Our dear Bishop’s policy is to immediately assert his control over any externe who applies to become a regular priest of the diocese. Since an externe is under the sponsorship of the pastor who brought him into the country in the first place, the bishop wants to break that bond of gratitude as fast as possible. The new applicant is transferred immediately in order to be reminded that he has no boss but the Bishop.”
James had been listening to this story in various forms since the first of February when the official notice came from the Chancery Office. The original information stated that Pedro would be leaving on the 15th of February and the central office would be sending a replacement “around” March first.
James had no idea why Gus called him in efforts to find a rent-a-priest for the fortnight; but the final solution was… that there was no solution. That in this year of Our Lord 1976 there were no freelance Dominicans, Franciscans, or in desperation, even Jesuits to be had, told him more about the church he had been ignoring than any other fact since 1968. That was the year he gave up reading, hearing, or putting up with the institutional silliness of the “Spirit of Vatican Two,” which seemed to owe more to Woodstock than to Rome.
Once upon a time there existed a lady in James’s life whose favorite quote impressed him inordinately: It has taken two thousand years of Christianity to get people to change their first question in the face of a problem from “Why should I help?” to “Why shouldn’t I help?” And since the lady had changed his life in many ways, most of then to the good, James succumbed to the temptation to volunteer. The “Gee, would you?” at the priest’s end of the phone was so pathetically touching that James was initially glad that he had offered.
Now, in listening to the thirteenth rehash in fourteen days, he wondered just how bright his volunteering had been. Being single, available, and having a three-day a week teaching schedule… having as one’s friend a black priest who is afraid to sleep in a rectory with no one else in the house…
All of these concerns faded into insignificance in the face of imminent death.
Gus’ pastoral tirade was accompanied by the squeal of burning tires, the blare of horns and other such noises as usually accompany a car which ran stop signs, skimmed through red lights, and gave new meaning to the term “reckless endangerment.”
As he sat on the passenger side of the front of the car, James tired very hard to forget the term ‘suicide seat’ in connection with his own participation in the present events. Even concentrating the mind as fully as fear permitted on this thirteenth rehash did nothing to inhibit his reaction to the immeasurably large number of near-misses happening all around him.
Finally, a sharp left took them out of a warehouse district and into a short block of neat, well-preserved houses. The little white car was aimed into and empty
lot and parked.
“Don’t bother locking it,” Gus told him.
James looked puzzled.
Gus gave him a sly little smile, and waved him over with a finger, like a big kid with a secret to share. “Come here.”
They stood at curbside as Father Gus pointed to each house in turn, keeping his hand and finger low and relatively covert. “The house with the dark green siding belongs to Angelo ‘Angel of Death’ D’Angelo. The house on the other corner is the property of another warlord.
“The church at the other end of the block belongs to the Italian Franciscans – the Catholic group, not another mafia clan. The church was robbed … once. When the local numbskulls found out that there is a death penalty for disturbing the godfather’s parish, it was never touched again. If you’ve got those Franciscan brown robes on, you can walk these streets at any hour of the night with impunity.
“Now, don’t be conspicuous, but you might notice the little old man across the street, staring out his living room window, listening to the opera? He’s the block watcher. So, my car is safe because of him and your car is guarding the rectory in a double bluff. The car lets the neighbors think that someone’s in the house and therefore that someone in the house is watching the car.”
James furrowed his brow slightly, and his lips bunched up as he thought over the arrangement. “Unless someone rings the front doorbell,” he noted, trying to pierce the logic of the strange world he had entered.
Gus shook his head. “Never after dark. They only come on Bingo night.” He started forward. “Come on, Papa Luigi’s is down the block.”
Behind the unimpressive facade of the restaurant was a less impressive bar. James followed him through the bar to occasional greetings from some of the inhabitants to his host, all of which were politely returned. Through the bar, through the kitchen (Does the Board of Health allow such a walk through? wondered James to himself as he glimpsed the men at work), they finally emerged into a dining room which could be described as muted opulence. The maple paneling which covered the lower half of the four walls was surmounted by a nineteenth century mural of Venice as seen from the Plaza San Marco—except that the colors were vivid and fresh.
