by Mark Zubro
Fenwick asked, “Did someone go up to 65A about a half hour ago?”
“Sure, Bishop Tresca.”
“He lived there?” Fenwick asked.
“Him and Bishop Kappel. When the paramedics arrived, I called up. He told me to tell them to leave. A few minutes ago, he ran out the front door. I hailed him a cab. Is something wrong?”
Fenwick said, “Bishop Kappel is dead.”
“Up there? Mr. Waldin didn’t say anything.”
“It happened off site. How was he the last time you saw him?”
“He looked perfectly healthy yesterday about seven.”
“Was he coming in or going out?”
“Out. Some big, hefty guy opened the back door of a limousine for him.”
There was nothing special about the man or the limo that Koet remembered.
“Kappel and Tresca cause any problems?”
“No.”
“You knew they were clerics?”
“Sure. I’m Catholic, go to mass on Sundays. I’ve seen pictures of them in the church bulletin and in the papers.”
“Did they ever wear cleric’s clothes?” Fenwick asked.
“Not usually. Priests don’t as often as they used to. Lots of them just walk around in regular clothes and only put on official stuff when they have official things to do.”
“Do you remember what Bishop Kappel was wearing the last time you saw him?”
“Cleric stuff, I guess. I didn’t notice anything odd.”
“Were they here every night?”
“They travelled a lot, but usually.”
“How often were they gone traveling?”
“It varied. Sometimes a few weeks at a time. Mostly just a day or two.”
“Anything recently?”
“No, as far as I know they’ve been around pretty much. I don’t see them every day, but we weren’t saving their mail recently.”
“Ever notice anything unusual about the mail?” Turner asked.
“No, but I’m not sure this was either one’s primary residence. They were very quiet. There were no complaints from them or about them.”
“Any particular visitors you remember?”
The man shifted from foot to foot. “Takeout food deliveries sometimes. Late at night, they had kind of a parade of visitors.”
“Anything special about them?”
“Well, I’ve been a doorman for a long time, and we kind of notice things. Sometimes there’s not much to do in a place like this. Mostly we’re just supposed to keep the tenants happy.”
“What did you notice about Bishops Kappel and Tresca?”
He cleared his throat. “Like I said, I’m Catholic and these guys are bishops, but I think they were doing something wrong. I’d never say something about religious people. They do lots of good, but these guys. Maybe they did good, but something was, well, odd.”
“What was odd?” Turner asked.
He cleared his throat again and continued. “There were frequent visitors, young men, who came by themselves and stayed for an hour or two and then left.”
“When they were both home?”
“I only met them when Bishop Kappel was here alone.”
“How often did these young men show up?”
“Usually once a month and then on holidays as well.”
“Same ones?”
“I don’t remember any repeats.”
“Any of the visitors look underage to you?” In this day with Catholic priests, if you didn’t ask such a question, you were negligent.
“No, pretty much twenties, sometimes thirties.”
They went through six more members of the staff from cleaning people to doormen to garage attendants. No one noticed anything unusual about the bishops in 65A. They tipped okay. No burly strangers had tried to get in to see them or had been noticed coming in with them. Turner and Fenwick would have to come back later and interview others on the day staff who Waldin hadn’t managed to get in.
The detectives were finishing their notes when Waldin brought in a young man with taut muscles who wore tight, faded jeans, a torso-clinging black shirt, sleek, black running shoes, and thin wrap-around sunglasses.
He was introduced as Jose Gravis. Once the door was shut behind Waldin, Gravis took off his sunglasses and said in a deep voice, “Man, I got places to be. You can’t make me come in on a Saturday night. This ain’t right. I didn’t steal nothin’.”
Turner could see now that he had dark brown eyes that had a vulnerable, sad droop to them.
“Please sit down, Mr. Gravis.”
He slouched into a chair with his legs spread wide emphasizing his slenderness, the tightness of his clothes, and the bulge in the front of his jeans.
“I gotta go quick.”
“Mr. Gravis,” Turner said, “Bishop Kappel is dead.”
“Huh?” He sat up, glanced at each of them, leaned forward his elbows on his knees. His eyes got a wary look.
“What shift do you work?” Turner asked.
“I’m on midnights. What happened to him?”
“He was murdered.”
The detectives watched his look of incredulity. Neither of them was of the school that believed you could intuit what a person had for breakfast three weeks ago from a twitch in their left eye. That kind of body language intuition they left to writers of bad television shows. On the other hand, they noticed Gravis did not shift his eyes or twist his body. A neon sign did not appear on his chest, flashing guilty or innocent.
“The Bishop? Got murdered?”
“Yes. What can you tell us about him?”
“Not much.”
“Whatever you know might help us catch his killer.”
Gravis squirmed in his chair. “Are you supposed to tell stuff about bishops?”
“Did they go to you for confession?” Fenwick asked.
Gravis shook his head. “Not like that.”
Turner asked, “How much did they pay you to have sex with them?”
Gravis turned his now worry-filled dark brown eyes on Turner. He hesitated, wrung his hands together, cleared his throat. He stood up, paced the room for a few seconds, glanced at them, looked away. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“We’re not looking to bring trouble to you,” Turner said. “We just want to solve a murder.”
He nodded, cleared his throat. “It was only Bishop Kappel. Wait. Who told you?”
“You just did.”
“Oh. I thought maybe it was that neighbor, Mrs. Eisenberg. She’s a racist bitch. She doesn’t like immigrants, people with my skin color. I was born right here in Chicago.”
Turner said, “We’re not trying to arrest you because somebody paid you for sex. We don’t care about that. We just need to know about Bishop Kappel.”
“I’m not gay.”
“We don’t care about that either. We just need to know about him. When did he first approach you?”
“About a year and a half ago.”
“How long have you worked here?” Turner asked.
“About that long. It started a few weeks after I got hired.”
“How did it come about?”
“Well, he was always real friendly, Kappel was. I was hired just before Thanksgiving. He’d talk to me. I told him about my wife and kids.”
“You’re married?” Fenwick asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“What happened?” Turner asked.
“He’d tip me ten bucks every time I got him a cab. One time I told him I really appreciated it because things were tight. He said he wished he could help more, and a week before Christmas, he’d had a few people over. He came down after they were all gone. We talked. Somehow I mentioned not being able to afford much for the kids’ Christmas presents. He told me he could tip me a bit more, if I was willing to do a bit more. I’m not stupid. I knew what he wanted. He said he was just offering. The more I was willing to do, the more he would pay.”
“Anything unusual about what
he wanted you to do?”
Gravis shrugged. “I don’t know what’s usual. I’d never done that before. It wasn’t so bad, really.” He blushed. “Pretty much he’d touch me, blow me, and that was that. He offered me a lot of money to kiss him.” Another shrug. “So I did. It was his money.”
“Did he ever talk about his life?”
“No. He’d ask about mine. He was nice like that. A lot of the time he’d want me to talk about when I had straight sex, or even descriptions of when I beat off.”
“One of the other employees told us they had young male visitors.”
“I only work midnights to eight A.M. five days a week. I never noticed any others.”
“How’d you get into his place without his nosy neighbor noticing you?”
“I always went to the floor above and took the emergency stairs. That way she wouldn’t hear the elevator stop on her floor.”
“He ever ask you to find other willing guys?”
“No. I think that first time, I was sort of his Christmas present to himself.”
“Why do you think that?” Turner asked.
“He told me at that time of the year, he liked to treat himself, but it became a regular thing when Tresca was gone.”
“You never went with Tresca?”
“He never asked. Tresca, he was kinda nasty and snarky.”
“Because of what you were doing with Kappel?”
“I don’t know what he knew.” He shrugged. “I think he was just that way. I suppose if he offered enough money.” Another shrug. “As it was, an extra thousand a month really helped with my bills at home.”
“Sounds like a lot of money,” Turner said.
“For me it was. After the first couple times, I didn’t mind what he wanted me to do. The cash was great.”
“When was the last time you were with him?”
“Last Saturday night. I came in on my night off.”
“Anything unusual?”
“He wanted to kiss and make out and hug a lot. I didn’t even have to take my clothes off. He clung to me for a long time. It was a little different, but he paid me, so I didn’t care.”
He knew no more.
As they sat in the office for a few minutes finishing up notes on the conversations, Fenwick asked, “How did you know Kappel was paying him?”
“We had the one doorman talking about visitors. We’ve got a very good looking younger man. It would be unusual if he wasn’t asked.”
“So, it was a lucky guess.”
“An educated insight.”
“Same thing.”
Turner said, “For all that, it shows us Kappel was human, had needs, and could afford to fill them outside of his primary relationship. Maybe he just got lonely and needed a friend.”
“Yeah, well, I’d like to talk to Tresca about the nature of their primary relationship.”
Turner asked, “Is it significant, him wanting only to hug, hold, and kiss Gravis the last time?”
Fenwick shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me.”
Turner said, “Maybe he ran into a hustler who beat the hell out of him. Or a group of hustlers. Hunting on the Internet would be logical, but we don’t have his computer to check.”
“Want to try the address of the abbey?”
“It’s not that late, and we’ve got a corpse.”
“The Cardinal has been to their place. He must have known them.”
“Presumably.”
“We’re never going to be able to interview the cardinal archbishop of the diocese of Chicago.”
“Not in this lifetime.”
EIGHT
Saturday 8:10 P.M.
They headed west on North Avenue. As they drove, Turner used his phone to look up information on the Order. He read the opening of the article out loud to Fenwick, “The members of Sacred Heart of Bleeding Jesus Order are known as the Pope’s Commandos.”
“I thought the Pope didn’t have divisions.”
Turner shrugged. He read several moments then summarized. “They were started at the time of the Avignon papacy. The Italian pope needed loyal defenders. Charles of Avignon got some followers, had a vision, and poof, he was a religious order.”
“Good for him.”
Just past Milwaukee Avenue, a seven-foot stone wall on their right ran for half a block. It ended at an open wrought-iron gate. Two snarling gargoyles sat on pillars at either end of the opening. A brass sign with raised letters said they were at St. Pachomius Abbey of the Sacred Heart of Bleeding Jesus Order.
They pulled into the well-lit, tree-shrouded driveway, which led to the front steps of a medieval fortress. A five-story tower rose above the center portion. The drive continued on to the right around the building. They could see the back end of a car peeking out from around the edge of the building. Turner walked a few steps over. He said, “It’s a stretch limo.”
“Anybody big, burly, and dangerous in it?”
“Not that I can see.” He took down the license plate number.
From what they could see in the darkness beyond the well-lit drive, there were at least two substantial buildings on the grounds. The vast, medieval fortress they stood in front of, and then an immense five-story dormitory building that had an 1890’s look, dark red brick, white window treatments, the top floor sloped to flat peaks. The dormitory stretched back toward Milwaukee Avenue.
They rang the bell. The only thing missing when the door opened was the creak from a 1930’s horror movie. Somebody must have oiled the hinges. A row of motorcycles across the front, and it would have fit in with the entrance to Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s castle in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
An elderly man in a full cassock looked out at them from the doorway. They held out their IDs. With a halting gait, he led them into a vestibule.
“You’re here about Bishop Kappel.” The man must have been at least in his eighties. He had a crepey neck with wrinkled, saggy, loose, blotched skin, and with only wisps of feathery white hair on his head.
“Why would you guess that?” Fenwick asked.
The man gave him a thin-lipped smile. “I’m Brother Graffius. I don’t get out any more. One of my few hobbies as I monitor the entrance is listening to the police scanner.” He held up the currently silent instrument in his hand. “Plus it’s on CLTV News already.” CLTV was the local all-news television station. “They only let me answer the door at night when they think no one will knock. If they were the least bit Christian, they’d put me out in the first snowstorm next winter and let me die. If I last that long. Although God said fire not flood next time. A dream come true.”
Turner found the despair in the old man’s voice disturbing. “Is there something I can do to help?” he asked.
The old man reached out a hand and patted the detective’s arm. “Thank you, no.”
Fenwick cleared his throat. “Is there someone we can talk to about Bishop Kappel?”
The old man flashed his thin-lipped smile again. “It won’t do you any good. They won’t give you any real information.”
“How do you know that?” Fenwick asked.
The old man gave a brief hint of a smile. “I’ve been around this religious organization a long time.”
Hurrying footsteps interrupted their repartee.
Fenwick said, “Maybe we’ll see you on our way out.”
“Maybe so.”
A portly gentleman in his late sixties or early seventies approached them down the wainscoted hall. His voice boomed, “I’m Abbot Bruchard. May I help you gentlemen?”
Turner and Fenwick introduced themselves and showed ID. Turner said, “We’re here about Bishop Kappel.”
“Of course. Please follow me.” Bruchard wore black shoes, black pants, and a black shirt with a Roman collar. He led them through the vestibule, opened a set of ten-foot-wide dark-oak double doors, and into what looked most like a half-size nave of a medieval cathedral. Three tiered rows of chairs faced each other across the center aisle they now traversed. Oa
k beams in the ceiling, oak wood halfway up the walls, white plaster above.
Paintings filled the walls. They showed clerics in various period garb. They ran all the way back in time to what looked to be a woman radiating beams of light as she flew through the sky. Below her was a crucified Jesus who had phenomenal pecs and incredible abs and who was bleeding profusely. In this last, at the left-hand side at the bottom of the painting was a man in a suit of armor looking up in worshipful adoration at the woman and the bleeding Jesus.
Bruchard waved at the man in armor. “That’s the founder of the Sacred Heart of Bleeding Jesus Order, Saint Charles of Avignon.”
Fenwick held back a moment, leaned toward his partner, and whispered, “That can’t be a boner in the front of his crotch?”
Turner looked at the protruding bulge. “Or he’s hiding a ten-inch dick.”
“Or the artist had a sense of humor.”
Turner said, “Or in the international gay conspiracy of the day it was a signal to others that he was one of them.”
“The painter or the subject?”
“Both?”
“There was an international gay conspiracy?”
“No.”
Bruchard turned back to them, “Gentlemen?”
The detectives hustled forward.
When they caught up, Fenwick said, “Hell of a place you got here.”
Bruchard said, “Meyer Danforth, the great meat-packing baron, built what we call the home complex in the 1880s. It consists of the castle, the cathedral, and the old monastery. They were renovated several times. The last in the 1950s when the dormitory was built.”
The three of them arrived in a room that seemed to be a mix of armory and office. Suits of armor stood every three feet against two of the walls. One wall was hung with battle axes: starting at the top, a Valkyrie’s battle axe, then a double edged axe, a black dragon axe, a knight’s battle axe, and nearest the ground a warlock’s double axe. The rug, woven with a replica of the St. Charles of Avignon painting, covered much of the hardwood floor. A vast teak desk took up about a quarter of the room. A six-foot in diameter stained-glass rose window loomed behind the desk.
The detectives took the indicated high-back leather chairs in front of the desk. The bishop sat in a maroon swivel chair behind the desk. On it was a computer monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
