by Declan Finn
“The drunk striving with all her might to break that habit might fall off the wagon in an unguarded moment. If it were early in the reform process, a sane adviser would be more concerned about her despair than the drink itself. The habit is ruling the person to such a point that freedom and therefore responsibility may be out of the question.
“I know bishops who’ve missed Mass on Sunday, teachers who’ve neglected classes, and even lawyers who’ve not shown up in court for all the same reasons: unavoidable ignorance. The bishop lost track of the days crossing the International Date Line. The teacher lost track of the time while doing research in the library. The lawyer copied down the wrong time and date in his court schedule book.
“Emotion has been known to carry us away before we were able to think. If you don’t realize how close you are to a temper tantrum, the explosion might carry you away. I’ve known some people to describe anger episodes as ‘watching myself flip out.’
“There you have it: people act from fear, because of force, out of unavoidable ignorance, controlled by habit. All these adjectives are important: the burglar who can’t overcome his fear isn’t guiltless, he’s a coward. The hypocritically ignorant, the habit as phony excuses are not things which diminish or excuse responsibility.
“Before I turn the class over to you for questions and clarifications let me lay before you in baldest for this Great Paradox: Mao, Stalin, Hitler, three of the greatest butchers of all time. If you can write them off as totally crazy or if you consider them totally sincere, then you must consider them personally innocent while still considering their acts as the brutal, bloody, murderous acts that they were. The principle applies just as clearly to the woman who destroys a baby inside her just because the doctor told her not to worry about that little malignant growing protoplasm.”
For the next thirty minutes his class of statistically normal, self-centered adolescent females gave him the extended, emotional responses he had expected. The conservative criticized the anarchy ‘his’ notion could be expected to cause. The liberals who had fought his every statement of objective natural law felt that their objections had been preempted and carried further than they had ever intended. The resulting dislocation made it, as always, one of his better performances.
James drove home feeling content at a teaching success and wondering whether or not Lagkvist’s Law might not contain the solution to his own puzzlement surrounding the death in the rectory.
He felt sure he knew who and why and part of how Father Tim Lessner had died.
But it was going to take a crowbar to get Gus Sadowski to give him the rest of how.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:
THE LAST CONSUMMATUM EST
HIS WEDDING DAY DAWNED GRAY, OVERCAST, AND THREATENED A RECURRENCE OF NOAH’S ORIGINAL DELUGE.
“Happy the bride the sun shines on, but rain betokens good luck.” The two contradictory proverbs ran through James’s head as he parked his car near Gus’s church. The ceremony was scheduled for three o’clock and he was there an hour early. He knew Sadowski would be there and he hoped that his best man wouldn’t.
James had asked Pytor Sullivan, an Irish-Russian who must be counted his longest friend, dating back to the days when dinosaurs walked the earth and they were undergraduates together with Abby.
The only reason he sought to avoid Pytor was pure nerves. James routinely kept a nice gulf between his head and his emotions; this awareness of his edginess made him even more nervous. Pytor would only make it worse, being the new possessor of an honorable discharge from the United States Navy after only sixty days’ service. (They caught Pytor sleepwalking aboard ship, couldn’t break him of the habit, and had to let him go back to civilian life.)
Trying in desperation to think of anything but the Main Event of the day, he returned to thoughts of Tim’s death. The events had stretched over three-quarters of a year and his awareness over fifteen months but his revised memories convinced him of two things: the fact that the killer would walk away from the entire fracas, and that someone besides himself also knew all there was to know all about the death on the stairs.
James entered and looked around. Gus was sitting in the sacristy, fully dressed for the ceremony, which was still far away. He found him deep in his prayer book.
“Abby tells me that they use this room for the new-style confessions by just locking the door. Lock the door, Father.”
Gus stared at him. “I thought we had an understanding. I don’t hear confessions of the people who work with or around me.”
“I’m sorry to strain the friendship, but Church Law says I have an absolute right to have my confession heard and by the priest of my choice. Please lock the door.”
Gus got up and locked the door.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two days since my last good confession. I come to you for spiritual direction.” James halted and the silence went on.
“Yes?” encouraged Gus.
At the moment, James was glad that the new style for this Sacrament of Reconciliation involved sitting face-to-face instead of the old kneeling behind a grill. He sat back.
“I recall a GK Chesterton story where Father Brown ran out of the confessional to avoid hearing something he had already figured out for himself. Was he correct: a priest must even remain silent about individual, independently-known things once a penitent has put the matter plainly to him in confession?”
Gus spoke slowly, thoughtfully, “It may not be obligatory. The other material you speak of may be in the public forum, but what is public knowledge on one block may be unknown on another. It seems to be a prudent course of action for the priest to avoid even appearing to use the material given him in confession. I know it raised hell for me in the old days when the diocese set the topic for the Sunday sermon on some vice and there were people in the congregation who had confessed that vice to me and who, I was sure would be convinced—no matter what I said—that I was blaring their secrets from the pulpit.”
“I once had the unusual experience of having as priest share with me one of his sins by way of giving me hope and encouragement, and in the full knowledge that we were both bound by the seal of confession.”
“That’s by no means standard procedure,” Gus responded, “but I’ve done it myself if the occasion warranted.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
Gus had been showing another side of his pastor character up until then. He had been quiet and encouraging, soft-spoken and not looking to closely at James. At the last words, the priest’s head snapped up, his face hardened.
“No deals,” he snapped.
“Well, then, Father, I really do have a problem which needs your help. My eligibility for sainthood is a joke: I know I’m vain and self-centered and lazy. I’m also rash, generally imprudent, and suffer from an easily bruised ego. But when I had to reorganize my life ten years ago, I chose to become a student of philosophy, knowledge, scholarship, wisdom, and all that other good stuff about which I make bad jokes because I am too respectably Irish of ancestry to wear my affections on my sleeve. But I am good at what I do, which is think and generate new ideas.
“I do not know if my continuing interest in Father Timothy’s death stems from it being the most horrendous thing I have ever seen in my life, or because I’m as little kid hooked on murder mysteries who has a puzzle to play with, or because I’m a grown-up who enjoys a reputation for neat solutions and fine distinctions, so that letting this one ‘get away’ offends my pride.
“You and I can settle the matter here and now. I do not want to take my suspicions to the police, and if I am correct, neither one of us want the killer to once again involve her or us in another public circus.”
James named the killer.
Gus gave an involuntary twitch, caught himself, and responded in a voice of ice. “Ask your questions.”
“The night before Tim died, I was letting the members of the Hijas out the door when I was interrupted by that lady with
the Masses she wanted said. You had just come back to the rectory, taking a break from bingo. When I went to let her out, the chain lock was already on the door.
“I don’t think you put the chain lock on the door.”
Gus’s face was impassive. “How do you expect me to remember that after all these months?”
“You know. I know you know. Let me assume for the sake of argument that you heard her confession on the Sunday after the murder. That was the turning point in our conversations about it: anytime after when I broached the subject, you answered a question with a question, changed the subject, told me to shut up. You always used a different technique of evasion. Remember, I know you responded to the bell for confession on that day. I do not even expect you to give me a straight-out yes or no about my hypothesis. But if I went to the police, there is no way in hell that you could claim clergyman’s privilege about whether or not you locked a door.”
“You quoted at me the notion of not even doing something which might even have the vaguest appearance of impropriety,” replied Gus. He paused. “If I put my answers under the seal of confession, would you accept that—even though it will not be material I know from the internal forum, from hearing the killer’s confession?”
“I will maintain absolute secrecy, just like the pseudonymous John-and-Mary stories in the textbook you lent me, which teaches the art and science of hearing confessions. Is that good enough for you?”
Gus let the silence hang and James did not dare push. Finally, Gus nodded. “I did not chain the door that night. I did not see anything that might be relevant.”
James nodded in turn. “Let me grant that you might not have been sitting in that ‘daddy chair’ in the common room, which commands such a nice view of the corridor, or, if you were, you might not have been looking up at that precise moment.” James hesitated. “You did not hear anything, but that door from the sacristy squeaks terribly. You heard that and the sound of high heels on the hardwood steps going up, but you thought it was Sister Mary Jane and you didn’t want another fight with Timmy over his nocturnal visitors. You knew or suspected those goings on for some time even if they did try to keep it their own sneaky little secret, didn’t you?”
“Did you ever hear of John XXIII’s management philosophy?” responded Gus, obliquely. “See everything, correct a little, overlook much.”
“I will tell you the rest of the story, laying out means, motive, and opportunity,” James continued, “and then you and I come to some agreement on how this whole matter should be handled.
“Once upon a time there was a mommy’s boy who became a priest. How much freedom tiny Tim had in this choice of vocation is up for grabs: I’d be willing to bet that Paul VI would have laicized him the same way they grant annulments to married folk nowadays. ‘Lack of due discretion,’ Father Hubert called it. After all, just how free are you when you’ve been brainwashed from birth because your mother has a fixation on ‘my son the doctor’ or ‘my son the priest’?
“But if my mythical Timmy was bright enough to think of such an out, he was too secure in the womb of Holy Mother Church to brave the cold, cruel world on the outside.
“Tim was in the seminary when everybody else was leaving, including a bishop and a mother superior, if I recall correctly. Remember the bullshit? ‘The Church is losing the best and the brightest, the schools are going to close.’ Blah blah. Well, all those ‘brightest’ who left haven’t been heard of since, and the schools are still going strong where the people want them enough to sacrifice for them as teachers or tuition-payers. But all that frantic atmosphere of the late ’60’s must have panicked the seminary to ordain any mobile male who presented himself for Holy Orders. That’s the most charitable explanation I can give for him ever getting past the screening process.
“Timmy gets ordained. Somewhere along the line maybe he hears Paul Claudel’s line that ’youth was not made for pleasure but for heroism’… No, scrap that, more likely it was the anonymous urban Christianity of Harvey Cox’s The Secular City that drove him to the inner city… where the action was.
“The only trouble is Timmy is still an emotionally retarded adolescent who now expects Daddy Sadowski to give him everything.
“The Great Society disappeared with LBJ, Harvey Cox went on to setting another trend, and the church was no longer the same Womb with a View. The Pastor was too educated to fit into Tim’s white liberal stereotypes; somehow you were never officially black enough, and somehow that was intolerable. But mommy was still there to assure the crown prince that his holy calling was God’s will. But then, mommy’s will was always God’s will.
“Then, all of a sudden, no mommy. As you said when I first got here, his mother died, and he went off the rails. I don’t know how a guy gets through all those years in the seminary with only one friend, but that lonely round of activities from here to his sister’s to Mike Barry’s seems to have facilitated his slide into the bottle. I know that our Church has a more benevolent appreciation of social drinking than our Southern Protestant brethren, but somebody in the Personnel Office should be shot for not intervening to save him from himself.
“Then there was Mary Jane, fellow do-gooder, drinking buddy, mother subsititute. Oedipal Freudians would have a ball analyzing that relationship… and so to bed.”
James stood up and took a glass of water from the sacristy sink. “Besides the entry-exit problem for the killer, was the problem of Sister MJ’s herpes. The court was relatively uninterested in it, but then they process the wretched of the earth on a daily basis. Since there had to be a triangle for these two to catch ‘the gift that keeps on giving’, was the third side of the triangle male or female?
“It’s only because you mentioned Tim teaching a sex course when we found all those porno materials, and Tim being in charge of the Hijas that I bet Tim was making it with a second female. If it were one of the Hijas, then that cross-immunization might account for her giving it to him and still giving birth to a healthy baby herself—but that came later.
“Timmy is hellbent on drinking and wenching himself into oblivion while you and I were distracted by other concerns, like running the parish. Actually, you set me on the right track once we decoded the Bishop’s story. You were so focused on how the crack applied to you that you missed how it applied to Tim. I was so intent on Mary Jane Bughouse that I completely ignored a lovely little girl with a regular, if randy, boyfriend. A girl so overawed by Tim’s status that even a social misfit like our little prince could succeed in charming the pants off her.
“I can’t prove that she was the source of the nine pink candles at the Mary altar which followed Tim’s death, but I remember clearly that there was one of the Hijas I did not say goodnight to, or see leaving. She was also in Church the next morning. If it was easy to sneak upstairs from a darkened sacristy that night, it must have been terribly hard to sit in some dark corner of one of the front parlors, waiting for me to unbolt the entrance to the sacristy so that she could slip into a back seat in the congregation.
“She had the means, a simple kick or punch in the back. She had opportunity: in fact she was the only one who did. You can exclude me for sheer indifference, you because of Deke and Dominique, and Luraleen as protected by age and weight from Tim’s amorous attentions.”
Gus jumped. “I could drive a truck through the hole in your reasoning: Sister Mary Jane Neuhaus also had a key.”
“You, my friend, eliminated her, if my hypothesis about that Sunday Confession was correct—there was no way in hell that she would ever go to confession”
“But, as you say, that is just your hypothesis.”
James shrugged. “Yes, but the motive settled the issue for me, as it would for the police. I was thinking of young love thwarted. But there was that custom of the natives about which you told me several stories and which I was too thick to apply to the present case. In fact, when I held the record of the motive in my fat little fist, you did your level best to distract me. It was the b
aptismal record of Alfonso Gomez, ‘son’ of Maria and Pedro Gomez, ‘brother’ of Margarita Gomez and six other siblings.
“Only Maria is the grandmother and Margarita is the mother—I state that as a fact because if I asked you the direct question I would not expect to get a straight answer, correct?”
“Correct.”
James nodded. “But you can tell me if there is a public document somewhere which would confirm that the ‘A’ in the name of Reverend Timothy A. Lessner is something like Alphonsus, can’t you?
“The story ends with Margarita dropping out of the Hijas, and I would wager, out of the neighborhood, visiting relatives in Latin America until Thanksgiving, by which time their little one was born. Being responsible for a pregnancy was something Timmy wouldn’t be able to handle. I can’t see him rising to the occasion and taking the responsibility… but even if he did have one grand moment of mature adulthood, she wouldn’t have him.
“With either outcome, Tim’s next gambit would be to offer to pay for the abortion. Middle-class males have been making such offers since Theodore Dreiser described such a cad in the early 1900’s, and probably long before. Sex and love may be one thing, but motherhood is a whole other ballgame: given a choice between papa and baby, it is a rare female New Yorker, especially a New Yorkerican, who won’t tell papa to get lost. Hell, the welfare office is happier if baby is there and daddy isn’t,” concluded James cynically.
“Most Respectful Father Confessor—no sarcasm, I mean every word—what do I do with this solution? The police can find a true birth certificate somewhere, one of the Gomez women will blow it under police questioning, and the baptismal records can be subpoenaed…” His voice trailed off.
“You get married,” Gus told him.
“I mean about Tim’s death.”
”You get married.”
“I mean—”
“Stop being a blockhead. If your analysis is correct, what does justice demand? Even the civil law might treat it no worse than involuntary manslaughter with a suspended sentence for a first offender. Tim’s reputation is also best mended in silence. Your hypothetical killer is entitled to her good reputation, even if you think she doesn’t deserve it.”
