Boy Crucified

by Jerome Wilde

  “Maybe.”

  I regarded him for a long while in silence. “He engaged in inappropriate conduct?”

  “It depends on what you mean by inappropriate.”

  “Sexual, maybe?”

  He lowered his eyes, frowned. “You know, some of these boys come from far away—we’ve got students here from Florida, California, even got two brothers from Canada. They get lonely. Homesick. Sometimes they just want to be close to someone. Maybe sleep with someone. Inappropriate, perhaps, but not necessarily a crime. Brother Boniface was too nice to send them back to their own beds. But there was never any suggestion that he took advantage.”

  Very diplomatically put.

  “Why do I have Brother Boniface’s fingerprints at the scene of a murder?”

  “I wouldn’t know. He wasn’t clever enough to kill anyone, I can tell you that. He was a simple man. Some thought he was stupid, or slow, but I don’t think so. I think he was a genuinely good person. He was very loving, very trusting, very childlike, all those things a good religious brother is supposed to be. He wouldn’t have harmed any of those boys, not in a million years.”

  “Why did he take that van, then?”

  Brother Francis glanced, almost casually, at the porter’s office. “I’ve got to get back to my class. Maybe we could talk while we walk upstairs?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Yet we didn’t talk. We went upstairs to the third floor and walked down the large hall. Only then did Francis answer the question, speaking very quietly. “Brother Boniface was removed from his position a week ago, ten days ago. I don’t remember now, exactly. He was heartbroken. He loved these kids. All teachers love their students, of course, but he really loved his kids, the boarders. And they loved him back. And sure, there were complaints—he was too indulgent, too nice to them. But these are just kids we’re talking about, and they’re a long way from home, and as far as I was concerned, they couldn’t have anyone better to take care of them than Brother Boniface. This place can be a bit intense from time to time. It’s hard for the boarders to get used to it. Brother Boniface made it bearable for them.”

  “Yes, but what about the van?”

  “I was getting to that. When he was dismissed, the teachers were told—all the brothers were told, for that matter—that Brother Boniface was not to have any contact with the students whatsoever. He was really hurt by that.”

  Daniel had been silent up to this point. Now he asked, “Why was he dismissed?”

  “He was caught sexually abusing some of the students, or so I was told.”

  “Was he?” Daniel asked.

  “Not on your life.”

  “But he was dismissed anyway?”

  “Yes. Bishop James ordered it. There’s been a social worker poking around this place lately, and the bishop is trying to head off any potential problems—that’s what I was told. He apparently discovered that Brother Boniface was abusing some of the students and dismissed him from his post.”

  “But you don’t believe he was abusing any of the students?” Daniel asked.

  “No, I don’t. Anyway, Frankie was leaving on Friday, and Brother Boniface asked me if he could talk to Frankie, say good-bye, make sure he was all right, and I had to tell him no. Those were the bishop’s orders. Brother Boniface went outside and got into the van and drove off. I thought maybe he had just taken Frankie for a drive and would be back in a hour or two. But he didn’t come back.”

  This presented an interesting twist.

  “So where did Boniface take him, then?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “And when you heard that Frankie had been murdered, didn’t it occur to you that maybe Brother Boniface had done it?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Who did do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have any idea at all? Anyone you suspect?”

  He did not.

  “Brother Leo?”

  He shrugged.

  “Are you aware that Bishop James might have been having ‘inappropriate’ contact with some of the students?”

  He frowned.

  “Eli Smalley said the bishop raped him,” I said.

  He walked to the window that overlooked the front of the monastery and stared out of it.

  “Have you heard anything like that?”

  “No,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

  “Does it surprise you?”

  “Nothing surprises me anymore. Not about… him.”

  “The bishop?”

  He nodded.

  “Why is that?”

  “Things have been… irregular… lately. It’s my job to run this school, and that’s hard to do when most of the students are terrified out of their minds.”

  “What are they afraid of?”

  “The punishments. The crucifixions. The boot camp. The swats. The ‘soldiers for Christ’ business. It’s just too much for them. That’s why Frankie left. A lot of them want to leave. Most of them can’t stand it here, and I don’t blame them. Don’t blame them at all. But Bishop James is the only valid Catholic bishop left, and we have to do what he says.”

  “Are you sure about that? This ‘only valid Catholic bishop’ stuff?”

  “Of course,” he said, glancing at me. “The other bishops have embraced heresy. How can you be a bishop and be a heretic at the same time?”

  “How can you rape a young person and then hear his confession afterward?”

  “You can’t,” he said, looking horrified.

  “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

  “You’re saying that Bishop James….”

  He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  He returned his gaze to the window, troubled, visibly upset. “That’s not right,” he said.

  “To be honest,” I said, “we’ve got two dead boys, both of whom said they had been raped by Bishop James. Strikes me as a bit too much for a coincidence.”

  He still said nothing.

  “You don’t know anything about this?”

  He shook his head. I realized he was crying. Tears slipped silently down his cheeks.

  “If there’s anything you can tell me, anything at all, I would be very grateful,” I said.

  He wiped at his eyes and shook his head. “We live in the end times. The remnant who have remained faithful must suffer. And so we are suffering.”

  Daniel glanced at me, disbelief in his eyes.

  I gave Brother Francis my card.

  VI

  DANIEL and I walked through the school, located on the second and third floors of the monastery’s west wing. We looked into classrooms, the dormitory, trying to get a feel for the place. Teachers, standing at blackboards dressed in black cassocks with short hair and serious faces, glanced at us but said nothing, not even when we stood inside their classes and listened.

  The students, dressed in black and white, had closely-cropped hair and were extremely well-behaved. No spitballs, no note-passing, no doodling in the margins of a textbook. Catholic piety was evident everywhere, from the crucifixes in each room to the pictures of Mary hanging on the walls in the hallway to the life-size statue of an angel standing at the end of the hall, a large basin in its hands filled with holy water. I hadn’t seen one of those since I was ten.

  Though the building was old, everything was scrubbed clean and well maintained. There was no slacking at St. Konrad’s.

  On the second floor, outside the chapel, we stopped by the gift shop to have a look around.

  “Hey,” Daniel said, nodding at a row of statues displayed on a shelf.

  St. Francis of Assisi stared back at us. The statues were of the same type and size as the one we’d found. He was standing next to Our Lady of Fatima, St. Anthony, St. Joseph, and a row of crucifixes.

  “Can I help you?” a voice asked.

  We turned to see a brother approach from behind a
bookshelf, looking decidedly bored.

  “Just looking,” I said.

  He gave us a suspicious, unfriendly look, as if he thought we might be trying to shoplift.

  We moved on, heading through the large doors to the main chapel just to our left. I wanted to have a look, if only for old time’s sake. A huge crucifix presided over the altar up front. Statues of Mary and Joseph stood to either side on pedestals carved into the wall itself. Stained glass windows gave us glimpses of St. Michael the Archangel and other angels like St. Raphael and St. Gabriel, the one who brought the glad tidings to Mary. There were guardian angels, too, and the Good Shepherd—Jesus with a lamb over his shoulder. Situated on the walls, below the stained glass windows, were the Stations of the Cross: fourteen scenes representing the passion and death of Jesus Christ. During Lent, it was common to pray the Stations of the Cross every Friday.

  I went to the very back pew and knelt down on the kneeler that folded out behind it. Daniel Qo followed me. He knelt himself, giving me a funny look, as if wondering what the hell we were doing.

  “You still Catholic?” he asked in a whisper, as if the silence of the place was making him nervous, making him feel like he needed to fill it up with chatter and noise.

  I shook my head.

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Praying,” I said. “Do you mind?”

  He made a face. His eyes darted about, taking in the chapel, the atmosphere, the strange faces staring back at us from stained glass windows and statues and pictures and carvings.

  Was I still Catholic? Not a chance in hell.

  I glanced around the chapel, aware that the beauty of the place had the effect of making me feel pious, and that it wasn’t unpleasant to feel that way. Indeed, some people were addicted to it. Churches, temples, mosques, they all had a way of making life seem sacred and important, even if it was neither.

  I put my face in my hands. There were still parts of me that wanted so much to believe in God, to lay the burden of life down, to pretend that all one had to do was believe in the name of the Lord Jesus and it would all be all right. That simply wasn’t true. Seductive, yes. Alluring, enticing, fascinating, tempting. Oh, indeed. But it was a crock of shit and I knew it. At the end of the day we are, each of us, alone, and no amount of pious pretending can change that.

  Daniel Qo got to his feet. “I’ll wait for you outside, man.”

  VII

  THE drive back to the city with Daniel was relaxing, until I received a call from Harlock on my cell phone.

  “Tommy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I need you to get your ass over to a scene.”

  “Another one?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Not another crucifixion?” I said.

  Surely our killer wasn’t that prolific.

  “Crucifixion? Shit, no. A dumped body.”

  “Well, don’t you think I have enough to do at the moment? Can’t you get someone else to look at it?”

  “Of course I could,” he said agreeably. “Except this body belongs to Earl Whitehead, your main suspect. And from the looks of him, he wasn’t anywhere near Chillicothe killing that Smalley boy last night, since he was much too busy decomposing. I think you’d better have a look for yourself. Of course, if you’re too busy, I’ll tell them to bring the body in and we’ll just forget about it.”

  “What is it?” Daniel asked.

  I explained.

  “We’re on our way back to the city now,” I said. “Where’s the body?”

  “About five hundred feet away from where you found Frankie Peters. Looks like he was rolled down the hill there, or so I’m told.”

  I tried to recall the surroundings. Frankie had been found on a bluff overlooking the river. If you kept walking about thirty feet beyond Frankie’s body, there was a steep incline going down to the bank. Whitehead must have been dumped over the bluff and down into the brush along the river, which would have made it impossible for us to see him.

  “How do we know it’s Whitehead?” I asked.

  “Wallet in his back pocket,” Harlock said.

  I hung up and offered Daniel a helpless shrug.

  VIII

  “I’VE been down there, and he ain’t pretty,” Georgina Durmount said, picking burrs and dead leaves off her pants. “But we decided to wait anyway, just in case you wanted to have a look.”

  We stood on the bluff, looking down at the scene. The tech guys combed the area for clues. The body itself could not be seen from this height. Dressed in slacks and a tie and nice shoes, I did not much feel like clambering down the bluff to look at a dead body, especially since my shoulder was aching from the syringe wound.

  “I’ll go, boss,” Daniel said.

  “I’m sure I can manage,” I replied.

  “Got a bash on the back of the head,” Durmount said. “Half his skull is caved in. But the body is so bloated and discolored that you may have to wait for an autopsy if you want to learn more.”

  We weren’t likely to find anything the tech guys hadn’t already found, or would, but even so, I wanted to have a look for myself, so I rolled up my pant legs. Durmount led us down the path that had been made by the other investigators, and it was steep. I found myself grasping shrubs and saplings and hoping I didn’t tumble down the hill like a middle-aged fool. Since it was October, I was not worried about snakes or other wildlife, although the deep grass was not much to my liking. In fact, the farther Mother Nature stayed away from me, the better. On the other hand, I didn’t mind Daniel Qo keeping close, always ready to grab for me should I go plummeting down the hill. Nice to know someone was looking out for me.

  Durmount was right. There was not much to see. And what we did see was not worth the effort. As a body decomposes, gases are released, which causes swelling and discoloration. The eyes sink in, losing their fluid. Skin begins to slough off. Insects make a mess of things. Flies lay eggs in orifices like eye sockets or nostrils, giving rise to maggot infestation. We were seeing all this now, making it all but impossible to see anything else.

  I glanced at Daniel. His face seemed rather pale. He was new to this. No doubt he’d attended an autopsy or two, but decomposing bodies in the field were another thing altogether. He looked like he might be sick. I put out a hand to touch his arm, to reassure him. He offered a tight smile.

  I stared down at Whitehead. I was reminded of why Westerners are so fond of embalming. Anything to stop this natural, but gruesome, process.

  I looked around.

  The tech guys had found nothing but a piece of two-by-four that looked like the murder weapon. One end was bloody. The other end, we hoped, might have fingerprints.

  Their initial assessment was that Earl Whitehead had been hit over the head, then pushed down the bluff. The board had been tossed after him. They had arrived at this conclusion after finding a spot on the bluff above, where a significant amount of blood had dripped on the ground and seeped beneath the dead leaves. I wanted to ask why they had not found this spot the first time around, but did not.

  Whitehead was still wearing his religious garb. The material of his habit was twisted around his legs, revealing old, scuffed black shoes and dirty white socks. He lay face down, the bashing on the back of his head clearly visible. In life, he had not been a very large man.

  “Well, if you have any ideas, I’m all ears,” I said to Durmount.

  She offered a sympathetic smile. “From the condition of the body, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been killed the same night as Frankie Peters. I’ll be able to date it more exactly when I can take a better look at the insect activity.”

  “Don’t even start with that,” I said.

  “Maybe your new partner might find it interesting,” she replied, nodding at Daniel.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Insects arrive at the scene of a death with almost clock-like precision,” she said to Daniel. “Flies usually come first, sometimes within minutes, laying th
eir eggs. From the eggs come maggots, about twenty-four hours later. From the size of the maggots, we can determine how old they are, how many days they’ve been alive.”

  “And thus, how many days the body has been lying here,” Daniel added. “I read about that.”

  “Reading is one thing,” she said. “Other insects play a part. Worms, beetles—lots of beetles. They usually show up about twenty-fours after death. I’ll spare you all the gory details, and just say that having a look at the insect activity is a very useful tool in determining exactly when someone has died.”

  “I’ve read about that too,” Daniel said again, looking even paler.

  “Well,” Durmount said, smiling, “ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.”

  “And what will you do now?” he asked.

  “We’ll bag the body, take along as much of the scene as possible to preserve the insect activity and any trace evidence. I’ll examine the body, although I suspect the cause of death is pretty obvious. I’ll want to rule out any other cause, such as asphyxiation or drug overdose. Sometimes postmortem wounds are inflicted in an attempt to confuse us, making it seem like the victim died one way, when in fact he died some other way.”

  “Since we found his wallet,” I said, “that suggests the motive for his murder wasn’t necessarily robbery, not that a monk is going to have anything worth stealing anyway. How did we find his body?”

  “Guy came down here fishing,” Durmount said.

  “This late in the year?”

  She shrugged.

  I remembered the autopsy report for Eli Smalley that was in my briefcase, and told her I wanted her to have a look, to compare the findings to those for Frankie.

  “Leave it on my desk,” she said, a bit wearily. “It’s going to be a long evening.”

  As we turned and headed back up the hill, Daniel bent close to me and whispered, “That was charming.”

  “That is what you signed up for,” I replied.

  “Is it too late to change my mind?”

  “Yes. On that and other things.”

  This produced the hint of a genuine smile.