by Jerome Wilde
CHAPTER FOUR
Soldiers for Christ
I
JOSHUA SMALLEY was a farmer. His rough, callused hands said as much, and so too did the overalls he wore, the Farm Bureau hat on his head, the simple, unpretentious way he had about himself. Despite his name, he was not small: he was well built, thick around the middle but in a way that suggested muscle and strength, not a man gone to seed. He looked like he’d brought in more than a few harvests over the years.
We were standing in the woods at the murder scene, not far from his farm. Like Frankie Peters, his boy had been nailed to a cross and left to die.
His boy’s name was Eli—they’d chosen it from the Bible, Mr. Smalley said, he and his wife. They’d named all their kids that way. Eli Smalley was fourteen, a student at St. Konrad’s. The family was part of “the community,” had been for years.
“When was the last time you saw Eli?” I asked.
He shrugged. Sighed. Rubbed at his face. “Last night, I reckon.”
He was not given to providing long answers, so I prodded him. “About when was that, sir?”
“Just after 9:00 p.m. or so. I was on my way to bed. Eli said he was going to check on Nellie Number Nine. That’s what we call her. One of the cows. Caught her leg in the fence last week, tore open the skin, it got infected. He’s been cleaning that leg every day, and she’s doing better. Nellie Number Nine. She’s out in the barn. We’re keeping her separate from the others, till she heals up.”
“And then what?”
“I went to bed. My wife was already sleeping. We’s early to bed, early to rise folks. My other kids were in bed too. Eli said he was going to check on her one more time and he’d be back in, he’d lock up, I wasn’t to worry.”
He fell silent.
“So you went to bed?”
He nodded. It was a sad, self-recriminating nod, as if he should have known better.
“Anything strange happen during the night?” Daniel asked.
He shrugged. “Sir, no. Lefebvre barked, just after I went to bed. I thought that was a little strange.”
“Lefebvre?” I asked.
“Yup. She’s the dog. That St. Bernard. Eli loved her, I’ll tell you that.”
I did not want him to ask if “Lefebvre” had been named after Archbishop Lefebvre—obviously she had been. Perhaps it was a joke, a little dig at their fellow religionists.
“So she was barking?”
“Just a little bit. I heard Eli tell her to hush, and she did. She’s like that. She’ll bark at a butterfly. She’s an awful guard dog, I tell you. Most of it false alarms. But if she smells someone she don’t know, she’ll go to town, you can count on it.”
“So, did Eli come back into the house?”
He shrugged. “I went to sleep. I guess I don’t rightly know. I didn’t think about it. He’s my oldest, Eli is. I can trust him to lock up, go to bed when he likes. He’s always real good about that.”
“Then what happened?”
He sighed and wiped at his eyes with a large, callused hand. “This morning I got up. I don’t know, something wasn’t right. Lefebvre was in the woods, barking at something. I called Eli, told him to see what his dog was up to, but he didn’t answer me, so I checked on him, and he wasn’t in his room. Bed hadn’t been slept in.”
“So you went out looking for him?”
“I thought he might have had an accident in the barn, fell over, busted his head open or something. It happens. Couldn’t find him nowhere, and Lefebvre kept barking, so I went into the woods and found him, well, like you see him.”
“Do you have any idea who might have done this, who might have wanted to do such a thing?” Daniel asked.
He shook his head back and forth. “Eli was a good kid. ’Course, all parents say that, but for Eli it was true. Never had no trouble with him. Wasn’t very bright with his schoolwork, but he wanted to farm and didn’t care about ’rithmatic and all that. He loved animals. He loved his dog. He went everywhere with that dog. They went swimming together, hunting together, camping together, and he even let that dog sleep in his bed. He loved the cows, too, was always real good with them, real gentle. Everybody liked Eli.”
Apparently not everybody.
“Just don’t know what I’m going to tell his mother,” Mr. Smalley said.
He turned his face away from us.
II
WHILE we talked, a police photographer from the Chillicothe station photographed the scene and the evidence collection began.
Eli Smalley had been crucified in the woods not far from his home. What appeared to be the numbers “11-10” had been carved into his chest for reasons I could not fathom.
I looked around carefully in the grass and dead leaves, hoping the killer had dropped something, hoping for solid evidence. At this point, it was safe to assume Brother Boniface had done this, but without evidence, we would never know for certain.
The body was not moved right away, though the coroner from Chillicothe arrived before the sun did. Eli Smalley was dead and nothing was going to change that, and given the chilliness of the morning, there was no worry about his body decomposing anytime soon.
Mr. Smalley had gone back to the house to tell his wife and children what had happened, and soon returned with them in tow. They wanted to see the body. The family always did, no matter how gruesome it was. They would not believe it unless they saw it with their own eyes.
Mrs. Smalley did a lot of crying, as did her two daughters. Her other son stood off by himself, looking somewhat shell-shocked and apparently not wanting any comfort from anyone.
We processed the scene as carefully as we could, and I was not shy about telling the Chillicothe police officers precisely what I wanted done and how. They had little experience with murder scenes, and they seemed grateful for my assistance.
The coroner eventually removed Eli’s body, sealing him in a black body bag before he and a police officer carried him away. By the time we were finished with the scene, it was about 10:00 a.m. We had not found any of the sort of evidence I was looking for. The only connection we could hope for now would be with the materials used—the barbed wire, the nails.
“I’d like to talk to the family,” I said.
Grubbs and Daniel both nodded and followed me along the now-visible trail that led to the Smalley farm. They were in the living room. Mrs. Smalley was sitting on the couch, holding her two daughters. Mr. Smalley was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the boy.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said to Mrs. Smalley.
She did not appear to notice me, did not seem to care one way or the other as to whether I was sorry or not.
“Mrs. Smalley, I need to talk to you now. I know it isn’t a good time, but it’s important.”
The daughters quieted, rubbing at their eyes.
“What do you need, officer?” Mrs. Smalley asked, getting hold of herself, but still not looking at me.
“I need to know if you have any idea who did this to your son,” I said, as gently as I could.
“Frankie and Eli were good friends,” she said, as if this explained everything.
I waited for her to continue.
“When he heard about Frankie, he was real broken up about it. But Eli was a good boy. Who’d want to do something like that to him? I just don’t understand.”
“There had to have been some reason,” I said. “Can you think of any reason? Did Eli fight with anyone recently? Did he have any enemies?”
She made a face. “Eli never had no enemies. That’s ridiculous. It was those folks at St. Konrad’s.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t really know.”
“But can you try to explain it to me?”
“Those folks at St. Konrad’s… what they did to Alan Dobsen… I don’t know. What did Eli ever do?”
“Alan Dobsen was the one who submitted to being crucified,” I said, just to be sure we were talking about the same person.
&n
bsp; She made a face. “We’ve been part of the community for ten years now, and we don’t want to leave, but that business is just too strange. I wish to God they’d never got it started. Who cares what they do in the damned Philippines? It scares everybody.”
Undergoing a mock “crucifixion” was popular in the Philippines, I knew from my seminary days when I’d seen pictures of it.
“So you think someone at St. Konrad’s did this?” Daniel asked, speaking quietly, still unsure of himself.
“Who else?” she asked angrily.
Who else, indeed.
“Did you know Brother Boniface?” I asked.
“He came around from time to time.”
“What did he want?”
“Well, he’d bring the boarders and they’d collect Eli and go swimming. There’s a swimming hole through the woods, not too far. In the summer they did that a lot, and Saturdays and Sundays too. All them kids would ride their bikes over from St. Konrad’s and leave them in the drive, and off they’d go. Why do you ask?”
“How well did you know Brother Boniface?”
“I said, why do you ask?”
I frowned. She spoke like a woman used to being obeyed. “Brother Boniface is my primary suspect in Frankie’s death at the moment.”
She shook her head back and forth several times.
“So, how well did you know Brother Boniface? Did he come around often?”
She finally looked at me, and there was tremendous pain and unhappiness in her eyes. “A social worker came round last week, wanting to talk to Eli. We done been through all of this already.”
“Been through what?”
She seemed reluctant to say it. “After what they did to that boy, Alan, after he hanged himself, someone or other called the authorities and they started an investigation. They’ve been doing interviews, poking their noses around, wanting to know what’s going on over at St. Konrad’s. For some reason, a social worker came here, wanting to talk to Eli. He talked to her, but wouldn’t tell us what he said. Father Alexius—he’s a priest over there—came over, wanting to know what Eli had said. Eli wouldn’t tell him. Wouldn’t tell anyone. But anyway, I know my boy, and I know they did something to him, something he’s too embarrassed to tell us. Father Alexius told us not to speak of this to anyone at all lest we be kicked out of the community. He said troublemakers were just trying to stir something up, and we was not to worry about it. And then Brother Boniface came over, and he went outside with Eli and they had a long talk about something or other. When Eli came back in, I could see he was real upset, but he wouldn’t say anything about it.”
“So maybe Brother Boniface threatened him or something?” I asked.
“I just don’t know, officer. I don’t know what it was about. I just know that whatever Eli said, it must have made some people mad.”
“Why do you say that?”
She sighed, as if tired of the questions, and no doubt she was. “Father Alexius pulled me out of Mass on Sunday morning, told me Eli would no longer be able to go to school at St. Konrad’s. All my kids go to school there. Where else am I supposed to send him? But he said Eli couldn’t go until he told the bishop whatever it was he’d told that social worker. Eli wouldn’t do it. He was that way sometimes. If he got his back up, he wouldn’t do what you wanted, and you could threaten him all you liked, he just wasn’t going to change his mind. If he thought he was right, he would stick to his guns.”
“So Eli knew something, you think?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head very firmly. “It ain’t like that. They did something to him. It wasn’t something he knew or overheard. He either did something, or they did something, but either way, he wasn’t about to tell any of us what it was. I asked him why—he was being kicked out of school—but he just wouldn’t tell me. And he wouldn’t tell me because he was scared, so I didn’t push it.”
I frowned. “Did you have any idea what it was?”
She shrugged.
“Do you think it might have been sexual in nature? Kids are usually too embarrassed to talk about that sort of stuff, no matter what.”
She looked at me, then looked away. “Well, that’s what I thought, that maybe they did something to him, and when that social worker came along, maybe he told her what it was, not thinking anyone would find out. You see, Eli could never lie. He just couldn’t. When Father Alexius came round wanting to know what they’d discussed, he wouldn’t tell him, and I guess he gave himself away. He should have just said that he told the woman nothing and let it go at that, but he couldn’t lie. Yet he couldn’t tell the truth, either. So Father Alexius knew—we all knew—that he’d told the woman something.”
I had a good idea what Eli Smalley had told the social worker, which meant we now had two young men who had been silenced. But by who? If it was Earl Whitehead, where was he?
III
AT noon, the social worker arrived at the police station in Chillicothe.
“I’m Carla Smith,” she said, introducing herself to us. “Nice of you to return my phone call.”
“Pardon me?” I said.
“I left a message with your receptionist. If you can call her that.”
“I get a lot of messages,” I said.
“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “If you had taken my call, I could have given you some information. Do ya’ll mind if I smoke?” Without waiting, she went over to the row of large windows against the far wall and pulled one up slightly, letting in a cold draft. She lit a cigarette with a match and tossed the match outside. We followed her to the window, and since she was smoking, Daniel decided he would do the same. Then Grubbs decided he could do with a cigarette too. I almost felt like having one myself but did not.
“Those folks at St. Konrad’s are a bunch of goddamn loonies, if you ask me,” Carla Smith said. “I grew up Catholic. I can ‘Hail Mary’ with the best of them. But what’s going on over there is about as Catholic as a whorehouse. You’ll have to pardon me. I guess I’m just a little bit upset.”
“Are you familiar with the facts of this case?” I asked.
“I heard the news,” she replied. “Frankie Peters. Now Eli Smalley. As a matter of fact, I called you yesterday since Frankie Peters was one the children I’ve already interviewed. I’ve been conducting an investigation at St. Konrad’s about their excessive punishments. I’m sure you’ve already heard about the crucifixion ‘penance’ thing. I’ve got some things to tell you.”
She was carrying a large briefcase, and now she settled it on the table and opened it up, producing a small piece of paper with three names on it. She handed it to me. I handed it to Daniel, who handed it to Grubbs.
She certainly had our attention.
“Now, as you might have noticed, two of those three kids are now dead. You want to ask me why those names are on that piece of paper?”
We did indeed.
She made a bitter, angry face. “When I started my investigation, one of the brothers—Brother Boniface, the one in charge of the student boarders—told me to write those three names down and talk to them. He wouldn’t tell me why. He said I’d figure it out. Well, I guess I didn’t work fast enough because two of these boys are now dead.”
I looked at the piece of paper again:
Frankie Peters/Eli Smalley/Charlie Hopewell.
“Brother Boniface is our suspect,” Daniel pointed out.
“I talked to Frankie,” she said, ignoring Daniel and taking a deep drag on her cigarette. She blew the smoke out the window. “I’ve got four kids of my own, and I know when they’re lying and when they aren’t. I know when they’re scared. I know when they’re scamming. Frankie Peters, now, that boy was scared, but he wouldn’t tell me a thing. I asked him about his parents. He said he had run away, wanted to go to school at St. Konrad’s. I said he needed his parents’ permission to do that, and he was either going to have to get me their permission, or he was going to have to leave. He said he wanted to leave, wanted to go home and try to
work things out with his mom and dad. I said I thought that was a good idea. But even though he was planning to leave, he wouldn’t tell me why he was scared, or what was going on. Seemed like he was afraid they would retaliate, punish him or something.”
“Then you talked to Eli?” I asked.
She nodded, crushing out one cigarette, then lighting up another. She seemed nervous, agitated, angry. “I had a bit more luck with that one. A real nice boy. Just like Frankie. They were both the kind of boys that girls think of as ‘cute’. You know what I mean. Good-looking kids. Polite. When I talked to Frankie, I had to do it at St. Konrad’s because he’s a boarder there, and I think maybe that frightened him. He didn’t want to say anything, not with these goons hanging around like they do. None of the kids wanted to speak to me. You could see they were all afraid of something or other. So I went to see Eli at his home, and we went out to the barn and he showed me this injured cow he was tending to, and he told me some things that made my hair stand on end.”
“And what were those things?” I asked, thinking about Nellie Number Nine.
She didn’t answer. Instead she returned to her briefcase, looking around for the notes she’d written on Eli Smalley. Once she found them, she began speaking. “Last year, Eli said, he was taken out of recreation and led up to the bishop’s private rooms. It was late afternoon. He said he had never been up to the bishop’s rooms, had never even talked to the bishop. As it turns out, it wasn’t talking the bishop wanted. He wanted a massage. He was in bed, Eli said. He was naked. He told Eli to take his clothes off too and give him a massage. Said he was in pain. Made Eli sit on top on him to give him a massage, and one thing led to another, and Eli Smalley got raped by His Excellency Bishop James. Eli said he tried to make the man stop, but the bishop told him he should endure the suffering in silence, just like Jesus did on the cross. Eli started crying. The bishop finished his business, called in one of the brothers, and Eli was given three swats. Then he was made to kneel in the corner for about thirty minutes. They wouldn’t let him put his clothes on, just made him kneel there. The bishop took a shower and eventually came back. Made Eli sit in a chair, gave him a talking to. Told him he had to be a ‘soldier for Christ’ and had to endure suffering and hardship for the sake of Christ. Then told him he was sorry if it hurt and he would make it up to him. Then knelt down and gave Eli a blow job. Once that was accomplished, the bishop told him that if anyone ever found out what they’d done, Eli would have to be punished for ‘betraying’ the ‘Mystical Body of Christ’.”
