Alberto sat silently staring out at the rainfall outside. Only when we began travelling down the road that would take us to the Morehouse property did he speak again.
“She’s a good woman Bennington, the congresswoman. She’s helped a lot of people. I trust her with my own life.”
I respected Alberto’s loyalty to the woman who had given his life purpose. Even more, I understood it. That didn’t change the fact she was failing to fully comprehend what was happening to Dedra though, and that meant I had to move more quickly on my own. If that cracked a few eggs back at the congresswoman’s office, so be it. I’d deal with that later.
“Look, Alberto you don’t need to be a part of this. I don’t want you to feel like you’re compromising anything with the congresswoman, understand? I’m certain the man whose home we’re going to now, has something to do with Dedra’s condition, and whatever happened to Father Barnes. He’s connected with the FDA, so that also makes him part of the opposition to the congresswoman’s fast track cancer research legislation. So with you, or without you, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m going there now and get some answers.”
I leaned forward to tap the glass partition separating the backseat area of the taxi from the front. We were a hundred yards from the Morehouse estate’s gated entrance.
“Stop here.”
I turned to Alberto as the taxi pulled slowly to the side of the road.
“You can take the cab back to the Capital Building if you want. Let the congresswoman know I’m acting alone on this.”
The former Army Ranger shook his head.
“Then who’s gonna keep your tired old ass out of the fire?”
While grateful for Alberto’s help, I still wanted to give him an out.
“I’ll be fine Alberto. You just do what you feel is right.”
Alberto’s powerful right hand clamped around the upper portion of my left arm.
“You think this guy gave Dedra the cancer?”
I tried not to wince at the increasing pressure of Alberto’s grip.
“I don’t know about that, but I’m certain he’s using that cancer to shut her up.”
Alberto’s eyes narrowed as they stared into my own, seeking any sign of deception on my part. Finding none, he nodded once and turned to open the passenger door.
“Then what are you waiting for? Let’s go get the son-of-a-bitch.”
I watched as the cab drove away, leaving Alberto and me crouching under the overhanging limbs of the trees that ran along the side of the road in front of the Morehouse property as we tried to avoid the worst of the by then torrential downpour.
“This way.”
Alberto wheeled himself alongside me as I walked slowly toward the paved driveway leading to the gated entrance. When we arrived at that entrance, I was surprised to find the gate already open, like a large, black ironed arm beckoning us to enter.
“Looks like he was expecting you, Bennington.”
Alberto had to nearly shout in order to be heard over the sound of massive rain drops pounding upon the pavement.
“Yeah, maybe so.”
Or it’s a trap, and I’m more than dumb enough to walk right into it.
The sound of Alberto’s wheelchair made an odd, wet hissing noise as its narrow tires propelled him down the long driveway toward the Morehouse mansion.
I paused as we neared the steps leading to the front door, realizing the door, like the security gate, hung open as well.
What the hell is this about?
Men like Bruce Morehouse didn’t spend a small fortune to secure their property only to leave gates and doors open for anyone to walk on in. Alberto’s own instincts had quickly led him to a similar opinion as I looked down to see him already holding his handgun.
I walked slowly toward the half open front door, my eyes straining to see anything from inside. A strong gust of wind pushed at me from behind, opening the door inward several more inches.
Alberto had deftly maneuvered his wheelchair up the entrance steps and sat to my right, also trying to see inside the home.
“What now?”
I took a moment to look around the property. No vehicles were parked in front of the home to indicate anyone besides Morehouse was inside the house. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t be found in there either.
“I guess we won’t know until we go inside.”
I pushed the door more fully open with my right hand, positioning myself just behind the door so it could provide some measure of cover should there be someone waiting to do me harm on the other side. The home’s interior was a play of shadows, the blinds having been drawn closed and no lights turned on.
“Hello, anyone home?”
The mansion remained silent, while outside, the intensity of the wind and rain took on a decidedly angry tone.
“Morehouse, are you in here?”
I glanced down at Alberto and shrugged before stepping fully inside the home, my feet echoing on the same marble tile I recalled from my earlier visit.
His study was down the hall to the left. Check there first.
“You smell that? Is Morehouse a smoker?”
I paused just before entering the hallway and inhaled deeply. Alberto was right, there was a very faint hint of tobacco smoke in the air, a smell that had been absent during my first visit to the property just days earlier.
“His study is down here. I’m gonna check it out.”
The massive double doors of the study were fully open, though the darkness of the large room made it impossible to see inside. The smell of cigarettes had grown even stronger.
A familiar voice croaked a greeting from the inky blackness of the unlit study.
“About time you showed up. Now get me a damn drink.”
30.
I turned on the overhead lights in the study and found Father Barnes bound to a large, brown leather chair. A sheet of clear plastic had been placed underneath the chair to catch the fluids oozing out from a black shirt soaked in his own blood.
As I stood in shock at the priest’s near death appearance, Alberto rolled to Father Barnes’s side to more closely inspect where the blood was coming from.
“Chest wound, and it’s bad, lost a lot of blood.”
The priest nodded his head slowly and grunted.
“We have a winner ladies and gentlemen! Chest wound it is, and it hurts like hell! Bennington, move your ass and get me that drink!”
While Alberto untied the priest, I moved to the study’s built-in bar and poured a heavy glass tumbler a third full of the same rare Scotch Morehouse had poured me when I first visited his home. As I moved closer to Father Barnes, I could see both sides of his face had been beaten badly, including a particular nasty gash just under his left eye. His skin was very pale, and his head drooped down toward his chest as if he lacked the strength to keep it raised.
I placed the drink in his large right hand, noting the deep abrasions on each of the knuckles. He had indeed fought very hard against his captors.
The priest raised the glass slowly to his cracked lips and with his eyes closed, took a long, slow, measured sip from the glass. The slight smile that crept across Father Barnes’s face indicated he was as impressed with the incredibly refined flavors of the whiskey as I had been.
“Oh yeah, this will do just fine.”
Alberto removed his phone from his jacket.
“I’ll call 911, get you to a hospital.”
The priest snarled at the former Army Ranger, his hand shaking slightly from the exertion of maintaining its grip on the drinking glass.
“The hell you will! I’m not walking out of here, and I don’t need anyone moving me until I’m gone, which won’t be too long now, so you sit tight, and just let me finish my drink in peace.”
I watched Father Barnes take another sip from his glass and then peer over at the wheelchair bound Alberto.
“By the way, who the hell are you?”
Before Alberto could respond I interjected, bring
ing the priest up to speed on Alberto’s connection to the T3 Group, and our most recent attempts to save Dedra. I finished the introduction with a question of my own.
“What happened here? Where’s Morehouse?”
The priest’s reply was first interrupted by a series of gurgling coughs that left a considerable amount of frothy blood running down his chin, which he then wiped away with the back side of his left hand.
“Pulmonary laceration. Lung is filling with blood. Little shits jumped me and then shot me in the back twice. One bullet passed through, but the other is buried inside me somewhere, and it ain’t coming out. At least not with me around to see it.”
Another bout of coughing shook the priest as his mouth was momentarily frozen open as he gasped for breath. After nearly a half minute, his body again relaxed enough to allow him another drink from the whiskey glass.
“Why’d they beat you? What did they want?”
The priest’s eyes closed as he focused on keeping himself from exploding into another coughing fit. When those eyes re-opened, he offered me a faint smile.
“They wanted the formulation. Tied me to this chair and beat the shit out of me. The same two shit thugs who chased us at the Black Cat. The Morehouse guy was here the whole time. He’d ask me where the formulation was, and then have one of his goons smack me around when I’d tell him to go to hell. Those guys hit like pussies anyways.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alberto’s face scrunch up in confusion at the language being used by a man I had told him was a Jesuit priest.
“So where’s Morehouse? What happened to him and the other two men?”
The priest finished the last of the whiskey and then winced as he adjusted himself in the leather chair.
“Bring me another. Actually, bring me the rest of the bottle.”
By the time I returned to where Father Barnes was seated, he was coughing violently into his right hand. When the hand was removed from his mouth, its palm was covered in the same, frothy blood as before – blood that he then wiped away on his pants before taking the Scotch from me and drinking deeply, nearly emptying what remained of the bottle.
“God bless whoever made this stuff. I’m not too happy about checking out, but at least I get to do it with a bit if class.”
I repeated my earlier question.
“What happened to Morehouse and the two men?”
The priest grinned once again as he lifted his nose upward.
“You know what happened. You can smell him. He was here less than an hour before you arrived.”
Gabriel.
Father Barnes watched my face as I recognized the unique smell of Gabriel’s unfiltered cigarettes. The priest’s grin turned into a wide smile as he brought the whiskey bottle to his mouth for another drink.
“Yeah, Gabriel, don’t know how he got in here, but there he was. They were going at me again, one punch, and then another, while the Morehouse guy, the one in charge, kept repeating the question of where the formulation was. I looked up and there was Gabriel standing behind both men, carrying the most wicked looking knife I’d ever seen. Dark steel, almost black, with a blade at least twelve inches long.
“I sat in this very chair and watched Gabriel jam that blade into the backs of their necks, first one, and then the other. He was so damn fast. Didn’t make a sound, and those two guys, they hit the floor dead. Right in front of me, their eyes empty, staring up at nothing.
“After they drop, Gabriel looks at me, smiles, and tells me hello as if we didn’t have a care in the world. At that point I really didn’t know if I was gonna be next, but Gabriel’s attention was on Morehouse, who had backed away toward that far corner of the room over there looking like he was gonna shit himself at any moment.
“Gabriel turns to Morehouse and introduces himself, says he’s a former associate of mine, and that Morehouse is in luck because I’m a priest, and today is the day he’s to make a confession.”
The priest paused to take another sip from the bottle.
“Yeah, that’s what he said – a confession. Something along the lines of how Morehouse had a great deal of sin around him, how he’d been responsible for the suffering and death of a lot of people and that on this day, it was time for him to confess those sins. Gabriel told Morehouse to get some paper and a pen and take him to his bedroom.”
Alberto, who was listening with wide eyed wonderment, held up his hand to interrupt the priest’s story.
“Why didn’t he untie you, this Gabriel guy?”
Father Barnes cleared his throat and then inhaled sharply, a short cry of pain escaping him before he continued.
“Well, like I told our mutual acquaintance here, I think it’s quite possible Gabriel is insane. He’s certainly unbalanced. Psychiatry isn’t my field of study, but he seems to be showing all the signs of some kind of manic delusional schizophrenia. So when he walked out of here with Morehouse, and left me tied up and bleeding in this chair, it wasn’t such a surprise. That kind of shit is Gabriel. He don’t think like the rest of us. He did tell me though, that he’d be right back. He even winked at me when he said it.”
The priest chuckled and then finished the last of the whiskey.
“So did he come back?”
Father Barnes nodded to me and chuckled again.
“Sure, he came back. Took about ten, maybe fifteen minutes, whatever he said to Morehouse upstairs in his bedroom. Then I heard the gunshot, and the next thing I saw was Gabriel walking back here. He took one of the bodies upstairs, and then came back for the second one. After that, he stood in front of me right here, and told me I had a choice to make.”
Alberto and I glanced at each other while waiting for Father Barnes to continue. When the priest remained silent, the gurgling sound from inside of his lungs growing worse, I pressed him to go on.
“What was the choice?”
Father Barnes opened his eyes and lifted his head to stare up at the ceiling above us.
“The choice was to live or to die – my salvation, or Dedra’s.”
I found myself shaking my head, believing the priest was losing his grip on reality due to blood loss, or the pain of his wounds.
“Why would Gabriel think he could offer you that kind of choice? And so you told him to save Dedra and leave you here to die? Why would you do that Father? Dedra is almost dead herself. There’s no saving her. It’s too late.”
Father Barnes wiped more blood from his mouth, his words now slurred from the effects of the alcohol.
“I couldn’t take that chance, Bennington. If there was hope to save Dedra, I couldn’t put my life ahead of hers, even if I was counting on the words of a crazy man who believes he’s some corrupted angel of God.”
I felt a chill run through me as Alberto again made the sign of the cross over his chest.
“Father, Gabriel is just like you said, a man who’s suffering from some kind of mental imbalance. He can’t save Dedra, but he could have possibly saved you. Maybe we still can. I’m calling for help. We’re getting you to a hospital.”
Private Detective: BENNINGTON P.I.: A thrilling four-novel political murder mystery private detective series... Page 50
