All the Dead Fathers

by David J. Walker

  “The security people called, but the police haven’t gotten here yet, so no one’s asked me anything. The thing is, Tony said the man’s supporting his girlfriend and their baby, who are both citizens here. But he’s a Moslem—from Syria, I think—and if they find him they’ll deport him, or maybe even send him to prison. That part really worries me. If Tony did go there, I sure wouldn’t want to get the man deported … just for helping him, and—” He stopped, then said, “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  “Michael, I’m a day’s drive away. I’ll call you after I get back. Meanwhile, if anyone questions you—especially the FBI—you have to tell the truth. If you don’t, you could have a big problem.”

  “I’m not in the habit of lying,” he said. “But then, what else is there but problems?”

  * * *

  It was just past noon, and it was a good seven hours to Chicago. It made no sense for Kirsten to race back to help look for Father Anthony Ernest, not until she finished what she’d come to Michigan to do. Although convinced that she’d found Debra Morelli’s hideaway, she had to try to make sure. There was no mailbox, of course, and nothing to indicate who, if anyone, lived here.

  She walked up the drive toward the house, her hand on the Colt .380 in her coat pocket. The whole time she’d been here not one car had passed by in either direction. If someone did come, they couldn’t get very close without being seen. As she walked up to the house, she became more convinced that someone lived here. There were no broken windows; no trash was lying around.

  It was a two-story frame house, white with faded green trim, and missing the covered front porch that Kirsten thought made so many farmhouses look so cozy. The basement windows were painted over on the inside. Unpleated curtains, possibly made of tan bedsheets, hung straight down at all the other windows. Four concrete steps with wrought-iron railings led up to a wide stoop and a windowless front door.

  She went up the steps and saw a circle on the doorjamb where there’d once been a bell, and marks indicating hinge sites for a screen door, also gone. Still clenching the gun in her pocket with her right hand, she pounded on the door with her left. No answer. She tried the knob and it turned, but the door was locked with a keyed, turnbolt lock. She went down the steps and around to the back. That door was locked, too. As was the set of sloping cellar doors. All the locks looked sturdy and new.

  The huge double doors on the front of the sagging barn were closed, but an entry door on the side was standing open. She went to the doorway and looked inside. Thin lines of sunlight streaming in through cracks in the walls, and a larger column through the hole in the roof, served more to accent the shadows than to dispel the darkness. The few windows along the side walls were coated with years of grime and illuminated nothing. She stepped farther in and ran face-first into a sticky spiderweb, and had to pick it, strand by strand, away from her skin and out of her hair. The barn was filthy and smelled strongly of rotting vegetables and the droppings of small animals. She stood and listened, but heard only the occasional flapping of the wings of birds—or bats, maybe—flitting around up near the roof.

  Suddenly she heard a car approaching on the gravel road. She ran back outside and saw an old red pickup roar by at about sixty miles an hour, tossing up a wake of stones and dust. It didn’t slow down as it passed the house and the parked Impala, and it quickly dipped out of view down by the river. She could still hear it, though, and could tell when it got beyond the river and came to the end of the road, slowed, and turned onto the crossroad. It accelerated again, and then the sound faded away into the distance.

  She didn’t go back into the barn, but checked the nearby sheds and found them equally dirty and deserted and empty. Except for one. That one had been cleaned out and had a fenced-in pen inside it, and in the pen were two pigs. Or hogs maybe, she thought, if there was a difference. They were huge, anyway, and ugly, and they didn’t bother to get up on their feet when she came in. They lifted their heads and made low snorting noises, and stared at her with mean eyes that made her shudder at what they were thinking about. Apparently no one had been in to clean up for a while, because the pigs and their shed smelled even worse than the barn.

  Finally she walked out to the three-sided building near the corner where the two rows of evergreens met. With its wide-open front it was easy to see that it was empty. It was an undivided space, a little wider and deeper than a two-car garage; the roof was about twelve feet high at the front and sloped down to maybe eight feet at the back. The floor was hard-packed dirt, and the tracks leading in and out showed that the shed was used for vehicles or some type of farm machinery. An unopened case of twenty-four quarts of motor oil sat up against one side wall.

  With nothing more to look at, she turned and walked back to the house, and then down the drive toward the Impala. The sun was still out, so it startled her to hear distant thunder. She looked up to see storm clouds rolling in from the west.

  There were no toys or swing sets in sight, or anything else indicating children lived here. And it wasn’t some group of skinheads or militia types, because those would be men, and this place seemed neat and clean, as though a woman were in charge. She’d have loved to look around inside the house, but even if she’d had her tools with her it wouldn’t have been easy to pick any of those locks. And she sure wasn’t about to break in and leave notice to Debra—and that’s who lived here, she was sure—that someone had an interest in the house and its occupants.

  She could contact the Detroit detective, Frontera, and tell him she found Angela Morelli’s old place and was pretty certain Debra Morelli was living there now. But as she played that conversation out in her mind she knew it wasn’t a call she would make. First, she had no real proof that Debra lived here. Second, Debra wasn’t a high priority on anyone’s list for her part in the crimes that had sent Carlo to jail.

  Nor was there any point in calling Danny Wardell in Rockford. He took her way more seriously than those two FBI idiots, but she had nothing solid to tie Debra to the priest killings. She had told Wardell about the postcards and the target on her door and her punctured tire, but from his point of view she had only a belief that the murderer and her unseen stalker, assuming there was one, were the same person … and a woman. Beyond that, he would discount Kirsten’s belief that Debra Morelli matched her “profile” of who that woman must be, and say it was only a guess.

  Thus, about all she would accomplish by calling any cops at this point was to line herself up in the FBI’s crosshairs. No thank you. She got into the Impala and drove away. With the time difference, and a little luck, she could be back in Chicago by seven o’clock that evening.

  * * *

  A combination of factors made it almost midnight when Kirsten got home. Rain had started falling shortly after she left, and it got worse the farther west she went. The traffic was terrible, too, with a multicar accident on the interstate somewhere around Gary, and then construction making one lane out of the Skyway—the towering bridge that spanned the entire southeast side of Chicago from the Indiana-Illinois border to the Dan Ryan Expressway.

  What delayed her more than all of that, though, was her decision to stop at every home she could find within a two or three mile radius of “Anna Bergstrom”’s place and ask whether anyone knew who lived there now. No one did. In fact, no one had ever heard of Anna Bergstrom or Angela Morelli. Basically, no one knew one damn thing they wanted to share with some strange woman from Chicago who drove around in the rain asking weird questions. She decided it wasn’t a myth after all that such interviews go better on bright cheerful mornings.

  When she got home it was too late to call Michael. She listened to her phone messages. One was from Dugan, who said he was exhausted and not to wake him up. The other was from Harvey Wilson, the man in charge of security at the seminary. He left his cell phone number. “Call me,” he said, “no matter how late it is.”

  So she did, and he answered right away and sounded like a man with a lot to worry abo
ut.

  “These priests,” he said, “I mean, the cardinal told them they don’t have to stay here. So I can’t keep them here if they wanna leave. The problem is, I’m not set up to keep track of them unless they cooperate.”

  “I know.” She was asleep on her feet and wondered what the hell Wilson thought she could do about anything.

  “But I’m responsible here,” he went on, “so if one of them disappears, how do I know he’s not kidnapped, or … you know … dead or something?”

  “I understand. So how do you know whether Anthony Ernest just decided to live somewhere else, or was—”

  “Exactly,” he said. “But the reason I called is your uncle. Father Nolan. The FBI wanted to talk to him about Father Ernest. But now Father Nolan’s gone, too.”

  44.

  Rogers Park is the last neighborhood on the north edge of the city, along the border with Evanston. Kirsten took Lake Shore Drive north to Sheridan Road, then Devon to Western Avenue. The sari shops and restaurants and other storefront businesses this far west on Devon seemed primarily Indian, but she knew there were immigrants from over a dozen different countries and three or four continents living within a half-mile radius of where she was. It was eight o’clock in the morning.

  A bit farther west and two blocks south she found St. Jeremiah’s. It was in a congested neighborhood, but directly across the street from the church the property lay flat and vacant. Whatever used to be there had succumbed to the wrecker’s ball, and a sign on the security fence announced townhomes on the way, offering “the latest in urban luxury and convenience.”

  She pulled to the curb as two black-haired women in bright saris came along the sidewalk with their babies. The strollers they pushed looked about half the size of Kirsten’s Impala, and she wondered how hard it would be to maneuver one of those things up and down her stairway at home. She got out of the car and approached the women. The sun was out, but there was a chill in the air, and nothing of the babies was visible beyond what must have been their noses, deep down in the folds of their blankets.

  She leaned over the strollers and cooed at the noses and told the women how beautiful their children were. That must have been true, too, because both mothers were radiantly beautiful themselves. Both were just girls, really, ten to fifteen years younger than Kirsten. They smiled and thanked her, in halting English, and she was surprised to feel suddenly envious. Of their youth, to be sure. But more than that, in an ache of resentment growing deep in her abdomen, she envied them their strollers. Signs they had babies to push.

  “Oh, wait!” she called, because they’d gone on by before she remembered to ask them. “Excuse me!” When they stopped and turned back, she asked, “Last year, wasn’t there a big apartment building across the street here?”

  They looked at each other, and she was afraid they didn’t understand. But then one of them said, “Oh no, miss. That was houses there. Old houses. Not apartment building.”

  “A big apartment building,” the other one said, pointing, “is past the church. On the other street.”

  “Thank you,” Kirsten said, and the two of them turned away and pushed their babies on down the sidewalk.

  She looked toward where the woman had pointed, but her view was blocked, so she walked that way until she could see past the church to the apartment building. It was a massive three-story structure on the corner, made of ugly yellow brick, with entrances on both streets. Probably thirty or forty apartments in there.

  She wondered how Anthony Ernest thought he was going to live across the street from the side of the church, and across from the front of the rectory, without being seen coming and going by someone who knew him from when he worked here as a priest. If that happened—and regardless of what his actual crimes were, or how long ago they’d occurred—there would be a huge outcry that the child abuser was back, skulking around the church and school again, a predator seeking more victims.

  Or maybe he planned not to come or go at all, but to stay holed up for God knows how long in some small, dingy, sunless room in the basement, probably next to the boiler. Sharing it with a man who himself lived in daily fear of exposure to the authorities.

  It was a foolish plan, and dangerous. Both for himself, and for the janitor if he let him stay. But she sure hoped Anthony Ernest was here. Because otherwise he might right now be sitting somewhere else, dead. Or worse yet, still alive, with sections of his skin being peeled off in strips. Besides, whether he was here or not, this had to be where Michael had come.

  If Michael had stuck around Villa St. George long enough for the police or the FBI to get there, he would have had to choose between lying to them or exposing the janitor to arrest and deportation, possibly never to see his baby or its mother again. Michael wouldn’t have liked either alternative. Nor did Kirsten, which was why she hadn’t told Harvey Wilson where she thought Michael might have gone to look for the missing priest.

  Michael knew that Anthony Ernest’s hiding out here was a dangerous idea. And since he clearly felt a responsibility to his fellow “exiles,” he would have come here to try to talk him out of it. That was assuming, of course, that Michael’s disappearance from Villa St. George was voluntary. Which is what she did assume. First, because Harvey Wilson said Michael’s old white Ford Fairlane was missing from the parking lot there; and second, because any other assumption was simply unacceptable. She tried each of the five street-level entrances, but found no mailbox or doorbell marked MAINTENANCE, or MANAGER, or anything like it. She went around to the alley and to the rear of the building. The space within the L formed by the two wings was paved, and there were several cars parked there. Two were taxis; none was Michael’s Fairlane.

  A set of concrete steps led down to a basement entrance, right at the angle where the two wings met. The door was wooden and covered with what looked like fifty coats of black paint. It was locked, so she pressed the button and heard a loud buzz from inside. No one answered. She tried again and still got no response, so she just pressed her finger to the button and let the buzzer go on and on. Finally a door opened on a wooden porch a little to her right, and about five feet above ground level. She took her finger off the buzzer.

  The door was the back door of a first-floor apartment. A dark man in an undershirt and gray pants came out, yelling in an angry voice. The language must have been Arabic, but the message was clear: that damn basement buzzer was driving him crazy.

  “Where’s the janitor?” she yelled back.

  “What?” He stared in her direction, blinking as though she’d woken him up. Then he ducked out of sight and returned almost at once, wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses. “What you want?” he asked, leaning forward with his hands on the porch railing.

  “The janitor,” she said. “He’s not answering.”

  “So then … go away.”

  “Do you think he’s down there?” she asked. “Because—”

  “I don’t know nothing. Go away.” The man went back inside and slammed the door.

  She turned to go and almost tripped over a boy, maybe six years old. “He went to the Elks Club,” the boy said. He looked Middle Eastern, too, but his English was perfect. He had wide, serious eyes that gazed up at her under lots of curly black hair, and his backpack said he was on his way to school. “He took the American man to the Elks Club,” he said, then added, “What is an Elks Club?”

  “Who took who?” she asked. “What man?”

  “The janitor, Habi.” The name sounded like hobby. “He took the sick American man in the sick man’s car. That was not so long ago.” He frowned. “I’m American, too. Did you know that?”

  “No,” she said. “But how do you know the man was sick?”

  “I heard him. He said he felt terrible and gave Habi his car keys. Habi said the Elks Club is on … I think … Foster Street?”

  “Foster Avenue?” she suggested.

  “Oh yes, Foster Avenue. I’m American because I was born here, and anyone who is born in Americ
a is—”

  “Just one American man? What kind of car? How did—” She stopped, not wanting to scare the boy off.

  “Just one. And Habi, the janitor. It was an old white car and they—” A late-model SUV pulled into the alley, and the boy swung around. “Oh, I must not be late,” he cried, and ran to the SUV and was gone.

  45.

  It took just two phone calls for Kirsten to get the address of an Elks Club on Foster Avenue near Kedzie, a couple of miles away. The old white car the boy spoke of had to be Michael’s Fairlane, but was Michael ill? And even if a fraternal organization was open this early on a Wednesday morning, why would anyone take a sick man there?

  When she got there she had to park a block away and walk back. It was a storefront building, with a Thai restaurant on one side and a printing shop on the other. Horizontal venetian blinds were closed behind the large window along the sidewalk, and ELKS CLUB was painted on the window. A piece of paper taped to the inside of the glass door said simply: MEETING WED. 8:00 A.M. She knew at once what that meant.

  She pulled on the door and it wasn’t locked. She stepped inside into a small room with a desk and a couple of chairs, but no people. In the opposite wall was an open doorway. She couldn’t see into the room beyond, but the lights were on in there and she could smell overheated coffee and cigarette smoke. She started that way and just then heard a brief burst of applause, then the scraping of metal chairs on a tile floor, then people talking and laughing. The meeting was obviously just breaking up.

  She went through the doorway and into a room about the size of a large classroom. Set up at the end near her were four or five round tables with chairs, and more tables and chairs that were folded up and leaning against the wall. Across the far end was a small bar, and in front of the bar was a rectangular conference table with more folding chairs. Twelve or fifteen people of various ages, three of them women, were up near that table. The meeting was over, and some were slipping into their coats, while others—including Michael, in wrinkled tan pants and a dark blue windbreaker—stood around in groups of two or three, drinking coffee from polystyrene cups. Most of them were smoking, but not Michael.