“Huh?” Fio looked to where Rourke was pointing. He prodded the blood-soaked hole in the sleeve of his coat. “Ow, Jeez Marie and all the saints. I think the bullet's still in there.”
“I told you he was shooting at you.”
“Yeah, well, who is he and what did I ever do to him?” Fio said, looking around the rooftop as if he expected the shooter to leap out from behind the chimney and explain everything.
Weldon Carrigan, superintendent of the New Orleans police force, lived in a gracious antebellum mansion on Rosa Park in the uptown silk stocking district. It was a house he had acquired through marriage, along with a modest fortune that he'd long ago turned into a very large fortune. From the lowest beat rookie to precinct captain, most of the cops in New Orleans were on the pad, and as superintendent, Carrigan's pad was the biggest of them all. All the rackets in the city—bootlegging, prostitution, loan sharking, protection and extortion—they all had Weldon Carrigan, along with much of City Hall, on their payroll.
Weldon Carrigan was other things to Rourke, besides his superintendent. He was father to Rourke's dead wife, Jo, which made him Katie's grandfather, her beloved paw-paw. He was also Rourke's angel, under whose sheltering and uplifting wings Rourke had been given the plum of homicide detective and early promotion up the ranks. Theirs was an elastic relationship, though. Weldon Carrigan had once offered Rourke fifty thousand dollars not to marry his daughter, and Rourke had once let his father-in-law get away with the murder of a crooked cop in exchange for being allowed to keep his own job, and a relatively free hand at running his cases however he saw fit.
Parked in front of the Carrigan mansion was the archbishop's black Jackson Touring Car, and a uniformed chauffeur was rubbing a rag over brass trim that was already bright as a mirror. What with the shooting and then taking Fio to the hospital to get the bullet dug out of his arm, Rourke had been keeping two of the most powerful men in the city waiting for the better part of an hour.
He climbed white marble stairs to the wide, pillared gallery and rang the bell of a door that glittered with beveled glass. A butler showed him down a long hall of black and white marble tiles and into a cozy rear sitting room whose tall windows had a view of the swimming pool and his mother-in-law's splendid garden.
Weldon Carrigan struck a presence equal to his position, with his thick shoulders, his large graying head, and his contrasting black eyebrows that grew like a hedge over gunmetal-gray eyes. He stood at one of the windows with his hands gripped into a fist behind his back.
He waited until Rourke was all the way in the room before he turned. “About goddamn time,” he said.
“And here I was thinking you'd be grateful that I bothered to show up at all,” Rourke said, smiling as he shook his father-in-law's hand. Weldon Carrigan's grip was hard enough to fuse flesh to bone. Rourke took it like a man.
Archbishop Peter Hannity sat by the fireplace in a tapestry chair that had a back like a throne. He was a diminutive man with a nose hooked like a crow's beak, and hooded, piercing blue eyes. He might have been small in stature, but he held a power even greater than Carrigan's, and Rourke knew he would marshal the full extent of that power to preserve the sanctity of the Catholic priesthood, the long black line. Even if that meant protecting a killer.
Rourke bent over and kissed the ring on the fine-boned hand. “Good morning, Your Grace,” he said. He got a stern-lipped, monsignorial nod in return.
A maid in a stiffly starched cap and apron wheeled in a Sèvres coffee service on a silver-plated cart. Rourke sat down in a chair opposite the archbishop, the tufted leather sighing beneath his weight. He studied the man openly as they sipped coffee sweetened with sugar and cream. The sun shone through the tulle-curtained windows, throwing shuddering light onto the priest's face, and Rourke could see the shock there now. He looked fragile as heirloom china, older than his seventy years.
As the archbishop spoke, though, his voice betrayed nothing, and Rourke could almost see the scales tilting back and forth behind the penetrating eyes: what to give away, what to trade. And what to bury deep.
“Do you appreciate what is at stake here, Detective?” the archbishop said.
“I got an idea.”
The mouth softened a little, almost smiling. “Yes, I rather suspect you do. The question, of course, is whether you are right in your idea.” His gaze searched Rourke's face and the scales tipped some more, judging, weighing. “Tell me, then: Do you love God above all else?”
Love? Laughter welled up in Rourke's throat, but he didn't let it loose because he was afraid it was something else. Most days it seemed to him a test of faith just to go on believing in the existence of goodness.
“It is possible, you see,” the archbishop went on as though Rourke had answered aloud, “to love a thing that keeps on breaking your heart.”
“I don't want to be telling you your business, Your Grace,” Weldon Carrigan said. He'd been busying his hands with lighting a long, narrow cigar. He blew its sweet smoke out in front of him now and looked into it with amused eyes. “But if you're going to bribe a man's soul, then you need to know his price. What my son-in-law loves above all else is being a cop.”
Rourke's gaze had gone to the window, to watch a blue jay take a bath in the fountain. The bird was really going at it, flapping its wings and shaking its head, spraying water all over the place, and he wondered if a bird could feel happiness.
“Your priest was tortured,” Rourke said. “The soles of his feet were burned with votive candles and he was hung from a crossbeam in a macaroni factory, with nails through his wrists.”
The archbishop sought Rourke's gaze again and held it while he let a silence build for one beat, two. “And the one who did this evil will face a day of reckoning more terrible than any we on this earth can provide. Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord.”
“I'll concede the Lord His vengeance,” Rourke said, and that time he almost did laugh aloud at his own arrogance. “The truth is what I'm after. Had you known Father Pat was a woman?”
The archbishop's hand jerked up, as if he was reaching for his own throat. Instead, he wrapped his long, thin fingers around the large crucifix he wore around his neck. He closed his eyes and gripped the cross so hard his knuckles whitened. “Known? How could any of us have known? Known and then allowed it to go on and on, all these years. Even now it seems a thing that defies belief and acceptance.”
He opened his eyes and let his hand fall back into his lap. “Yet I should have seen that he was not a true priest. He had a way about him…her. Rebellious, flamboyant. The things he would say sometimes during those homilies of his, and that way he had of celebrating the Mass, throwing open the doors of the church and inviting Jesus on in as if the consecration of the body and blood was some kind of salvation show. He—” His lips pulled back from his teeth as if the word had suddenly burst sour on his tongue. “She…”
He. She. Until Rourke had walked into the morgue this morning and looked down on the naked body of Father Patrick Walsh, he had never truly understood before how the collection of tissues and corpuscles and bones that made a human being was so defined by a pronoun. He. She. To know Patrick Walsh as a priest was to think of him in one way. To know this priest was a woman was to think of him in a wholly different and seemingly incompatible way.
“Yet I've been told Father Pat was well liked, even loved, by all those who knew him, including yourself,” Rourke pressed, feeling a little mean as he watched the skin jump in the papery cheek, the aged hands tremble. The archbishop must have been feeling betrayed by Patrick Walsh in the same searing, elemental way a wife would feel betrayed to discover that her husband had been married to another woman for the last twenty years.
The trembling was in the archbishop's head now as he shook it. “You must stop calling her Father. Patrick Walsh, or whatever this…person's name turns out to have been, was never Father to any Catholic. Priests act in the person of Christ Jesus in the lives of the faithful, they are Chr
ist's disciples on earth, and woman was not created to serve in this role.”
“Perhaps an exception was made.”
The archbishop's mouth tightened and he averted his eyes. “You mock what you fail to understand. If our Lord had wanted women ordained, He would have ordained his own blessed mother, Mary, who was free of sin, but He did not. Patrick Walsh was no priest.”
“And what then of the babies he baptized, the sinners he absolved? He celebrated the Mass, married the faithful, comforted the grieving, and buried the dead. He did those things for twenty years. If he was not a true priest, then in whose name were all those acts of faith and sacraments made?”
The archbishop brought his gaze back to Rourke, and all the fear and anguish he felt was betrayed now by his face. “And so you see why this must never become known,” he said. “Never. For it may be a test of faith that is too difficult for some to bear. Surely it is possible that this woman was the devil in disguise, or one of his minions sent to betray the priesthood, to make a mockery of it? She has done grave harm to God's Holy Church, and the peril to more souls should be weighed against this truth you seek. We must have a care that in an effort to find her murderer, a further, greater harm is not done.”
Weldon Carrigan threw his cigar into the empty fire grate with such force it exploded into a shower of sparks. “Right now we've got a lid on this mess, and that lid is staying on.” He smiled, a good ol' boy smile that didn't even try to hide the brass knuckles. “You're going to play ball with us on this, Day, or I'll be on your ass like a rabid dog, and the good archbishop will have your brother sent to a parish so far out in the boondocks he'll be grubbing sweet potatoes with his toes.”
Rourke smiled as well, for they had done this dance before, he and his angel.
He set his coffee cup down on a pearl inlaid table and stood up. When he spoke it was to the archbishop. “I'm not going to sandbag this investigation, Your Grace, just because he has become a she and we're all too scared now of what that really means and of what more we might find when we start kicking over rocks. Whatever else Patrick Walsh was, he was a human being and he deserves for someone, even if it's only the three of us here in this room, to know who killed him and why.”
The archbishop stared at Rourke, searching his face. “You can be a cruel man, I think. But you also have courage and you have honor, and when the time comes you will know what is the right thing to do and you will do it. Come here, my son.” His mouth quirked with a slight smile, as he raised his ringed hand, beckoning. “Come and kneel to receive the blessing of God and your Church, and do at least try to appear a little humble while you are doing so.”
Rourke sat in his car, thinking.
The live oaks cast cool green pools on the velvet lawns and deep galleries, and he could hear the lilting piano strains of a Brahms waltz coming out an open window of the house next door. Two little girls about Katie's age were playing beneath the shade of the trees in the neutral ground. They'd dressed up a big tabby cat in a doll's nightie and were trying to put him in a buggy, but he wasn't having any of it. The cat squirmed, trying to get away, until one of the little girls brought it to her breast, cradling and rocking it like a baby.
Little girls. His Katie loved baseball and played a mean game of street hockey, yet just the other day he'd noticed her talking to the boy who did odd jobs for the speak on the corner and she'd been all giggly and flirty with him, seven going on seventeen, and scaring the living daylights out of her poor old daddy. Rourke wondered now what kind of little girl Patrick Walsh had been, growing up—if the Times-Picayune article had gotten it right—in that orphanage in Paris, Louisiana. Whether she had played with dolls and flirted with the boys. At what point in that life had she become he?
Nobody is wholly who they say they are; even in the confessional you can end up lying to yourself and to God. Yet what was that Paulie had said? I was jealous of his being so in love with God and with His world, and for always being so darn certain. Certain of what it meant to be a priest, of getting it right…What if Father Pat had taken up holy orders not to hide what he was, but rather to be more fully what he was in his heart? A spiritual being in love with God and His world.
A murder victim could be like a kaleidoscope, Rourke thought. You do a little twisting and you get a whole different picture. Ever since he'd looked down on the crucified corpse in the morgue that morning and seen a woman, Rourke had been thinking of the dead priest as someone who had perpetrated an enormous, elaborate, and desperate lie upon the world, but maybe Father Pat hadn't seen it that way. Maybe to Father Pat the terrible lie was the one that God or chance or biology had perpetrated on him, the lie he must have felt like a physical blow every time he looked at his naked body in the mirror and saw an image that didn't match the one he had of himself in his head. He. She.
So who had the killer nailed to the crossbeam last night, he or she? Priest or woman?
Rourke sat in the car, watching the little girls play with their cat, and he felt a sudden rush, like the pop you get from a snort of cocaine. Most murders were spur-of-the-moment, crimes of passion, or crimes born of stupidity, and easily solved. Every now and then, though, he would catch a case like this one, where the killer had nerve and brains and a plan.
He was beginning to know Patrick Walsh now, know him from the inside out. It was like developing a photograph—get the image sharp enough, and then you can see, emerging out of the background, the murderer holding the knife, or the gun, or the nails, in his hands.
Nails. Nails through the wrists.
“I'll get you, you sadistic son of a bitch,” Rourke said aloud, and he smiled.
He wanted to shake up the priests of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary some more and see what fell out. He wanted to have a talk with Floriane de Lassus Layton, the “Flo” written with such an excited flourish in Father Pat's appointment book. And he wanted to take a good long look at the crime scene in daylight and talk with a few of his contacts on the street. A good cop knew all the bad weasels in town. Sometimes it was simply a matter of getting the right weasel to tell you who'd done it.
He punched up the engine and slipped the 'Cat into gear, singing “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
It was like the super had said: He loved being a cop. Fucking loved it.
Chapter Nine
Fifteen minutes later Rourke was sitting in his car in front of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, watching in astonishment as Tony the Rat climbed the portal steps and went through the heavy, iron-banded front doors. Rourke waited just long enough for the doors to close behind the loan shark's back, then followed him.
Sunshine streamed through the stained glass of the rose window, casting red and blue blossoms of light onto the interior arches and columns and pilasters. A young woman in a bright pink hat and an older one in widow's black knelt in prayer in the pews closest to the chancel. In the choir above, a chorus of schoolgirls sang the Kyrie Eleison, practicing for tomorrow's High Mass. Their voices rose to the vaulted, frescoed ceiling, hauntingly clear and beautiful, like bells peeling over snow.
Rourke spotted Tony the Rat at the south end of the nave. The loan shark paused to pull a red silk handkerchief out of his sleeve, and pressed it to his perpetually leaking nose. Then he genuflected at the chancel rail and headed for the confessional in the west transept.
The door to the confessor's box was closed and the green light above the lintel was on. Both of the penitent's boxes were empty; Tony went into the right one and pulled the red velvet curtain closed.
Rourke sat in a pew and waited. Five minutes later Tony the Rat, apparently cleansed of all his many sins, pushed open the curtain of the penitent's box and came out. He genuflected at the chancel rail again, and left the church the way he'd come in, blessing himself from the holy water fount on his way.
Rourke thought about following him outside and bracing him, but then decided against it. A guy like Tony couldn't be cracked open without some kind of handle, and Rourke didn't have one yet.
<
br /> Rourke waited around the confessional a half a minute for the priest to emerge, but instead of the priest coming out, the young woman in the pink hat went in, snapping the red velvet curtain closed behind her.
A stooped old man came out of the sacristy just then, carrying an armload of hymnals that he dumped on a table beneath the church bulletin board. Rourke figured he must be the sexton and he approached the man, showing him his detective's shield. He asked where he could find his brother.
The sexton adjusted the glasses at the end of his nose, sucked on his false teeth, and peered long and carefully at Rourke's credentials. “Father Paul's not here,” he finally said. “He got called up to Charity Hospital to give old Mrs. Furillo the last rites.”
“Yeah, okay,” Rourke said, surprised at the depth of the relief he felt to know the priest who had just had a little private meeting with Tony the Rat was not his brother. Because he figured there was as much likelihood of the loan shark coming to Holy Rosary for genuine absolution as there was of the Yankees trading Babe Ruth. “So how much longer, then, will Father Ghilotti be hearing confession?”
The sexton fiddled with his glasses, sucked some more on his teeth, then said, “Father Frank's out back in the boys' clubhouse right now. Confession's not till this evenin'. Five o'clock.”
Rourke went back to the confessional at a run, but the priest's box was empty.
Rourke found the sexton again and got access to the chancery office telephone. He called down to the precinct station house and arranged to have Tony the Rat picked up for jaywalking or spitting on the sidewalk, or whatever it took. Rourke was wishing now that he'd followed Tony out of the church and asked him a few pointed questions, but there was still time for that. Besides, a few sweaty, itchy, coke-hungry hours in a cage might help the loan shark see the value of cooperation.
And in the meantime Rourke was going to have a little heart-to-heart with Father Frank Ghilotti.
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