Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  He went on with his chore, but his gaze kept going back to that dead garfish upriver. Finally, he creaked and cracked back to his feet, wiping the drying fish scales off his hands on the seat of his britches. He walked along the bank, toward the bend in the river, squinting against the sun.

  Wasn't no dead garfish, after all, thought Tornado Jones as he got closer. Not unless garfish had figured out a way to grow hair.

  Daman Rourke found a parking place two blocks from Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, just as the bell began to toll for the eight o'clock Mass. He shut off the Bearcat's engine and turned to look at his daughter, who was in the passenger seat next to him.

  She didn't look as if she could ever cause her daddy a day of misery, sitting there in a yellow dress all frilled up with ruffles and lace, little white cotton gloves on her hands and her First Communion missal in her lap. Her straw hat covered most of her massacred hair, but she still smelled strongly of lye soap, thanks to Mrs. O'Reilly, who'd had her on her hands and knees in the kitchen earlier this morning, scrubbing up frog slime.

  She turned just then and looked up at him, and Rourke had to work hard to keep from melting beneath the power of her smile.

  He cleared his throat and tried to look as a responsible daddy ought. “And while we're sitting there in church, young lady,” he said, “I want you to be thinking about nothing but frogs and the wages of sin.”

  She heaved such an exasperated sigh that the brim of her hat flapped. “Sweet Jesus,” she said, in a dead-on imitation of Rourke himself. “I just don't know why you're making such a big fuss over a few frogs in the kitchen. I bet you did lots worse when you were my age.”

  “Watch your mouth, and my sins are not under discussion here. Besides, boys are allowed to do worse. It's part of the grand scheme of things.”

  “Sweet…” She caught his eye and changed her mind. “…mercy. Who made up that rule? I bet it was a boy.”

  “Hunh.” Rourke tried to sell her an I-got-your-number look, but she wasn't buying.

  Instead, she tried to sell him a little-miss-innocent look in return. “It's supposed to be a really big sin, isn't it, Daddy? To miss Mass on Sunday?”

  “You'd better not be going with this where I think you're going…”

  “I'm only saying that, shouldn't Mrs. O'Reilly be setting a good example for me? If she's going to be my nanny, and all?”

  “Mrs. O'Reilly's relationship with God and the Holy Catholic Church is her own business. And you might as well give it up, Miss Katherine Elizabeth Rourke, because she's not only staying, she's going to end up reforming us both.”

  Bells rang and incense drifted in a heady cloud above an altar draped in white silk. From his knees, Daman Rourke watched his brother raise the golden chalice above his head for all to see and adore. “His est enim calix sanguinis mei…”

  If you were a Catholic who still believed, then what you were witnessing was a miracle: where bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ, and if you partook of Him, then your salvation was possible.

  His est enim calix sanguinis mei…Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant.

  If you still believed…If you were who you were, though, and always thinking of yourself as so damn tough, doing what you had to do and relying only on yourself, then you would long ago have turned away from the faith of your childhood and gone looking for your own brand of salvation in the arms of a woman or the bottom of a bottle, or in a betting slip or a bourré pot, and you would have learned not to pray for favors or forgiveness until eventually there came that day when you realized that you had forgotten how.

  Only if you were a priest…

  If you were a priest, you not only must believe in miracles, it is you who must make them happen. I am a priest. Father Pat had written those words in his notebook. Written them emphatically, pressing the lead hard into the paper, digging three deep lines under the words. Father Pat. He. She. Even as he wrote those words, she had to have seen the lie in them. The woman who called herself Father Patrick Walsh could never be a priest in the eyes of the church he had vowed to serve. But if so, then had all her miracles been false ones?

  And what about Paulie? As he performed his miracle on this Sunday morning, as he changed the wine and bread into the living blood and flesh of Jesus Christ who died on the cross so that all God's children could know eternal life—what lies was Father Paul Rourke living even now?

  We are each of us two people, Rourke thought, the one you see and the one nobody sees. And it is often those we love the most and should know the best, who most elude us. He did know, though, that in order to unmask Father Pat's killer, he was going to have to rip the masks off the souls of the priests in this parish. All of their souls, including his brother's, and if Paulie broke under the exposure, then so be it.

  A man relied only on himself, and he did what he had to do.

  Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: misere nobis. Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.

  One by one the communicants knelt at the chancel rail and took the body of Christ into their mouths and they were saved. At least until they sinned again.

  Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tanum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea. Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.

  Katie went, but Rourke did not, because he had sinned plenty since his last confession. Too many sins, he thought with a smile that should've been ashamed of itself, but wasn't—the most recent being last night, when he'd made love to a sex goddess three times, out of wedlock.

  Rourke watched, though, as Floriane de Lassus Layton and her own daughter knelt and received the Host. The woman teetered on her high-heeled shoes a little as she stood up, and the man who'd preceded her turned back to take her arm, and it seemed to Rourke for a flash of an instant that she'd cringed beneath his touch, and Rourke thought, hunh.

  As if he felt Rourke watching him, the man looked up just then and met Rourke's gaze, and he smiled. A challenge there, perhaps, and Rourke thought, hunh, again.

  Father Paul Rourke ended the Mass by bending over and kissing the altar, and as he turned, Rourke searched his brother's face for signs of joy or even of wonder, but he didn't see any.

  The closing hymn had a dying fall in it, a musical swoon, and as the last notes floated up to the vaulted ceiling, Rourke turned to his daughter and said, “Sit here and wait for me, honey. And think about frogs.”

  Katie made a face at him, but then she laughed. He kissed the top of her straw hat and then made it out of the pew in time to intercept the Laytons as they were coming down the aisle.

  Flo Layton looked pretty in a yellow linen cloche hat with a white silk rose, but she still had that shame going on deep in her eyes. “Mornin', Lieutenant,” she said softly, and then looked over at her husband as if she were drowning and she thought him more likely to push her under than save her.

  Albert Payne Layton had light red hair, the color of orange peel, and a smooth, heavily freckled face. He toyed with a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from the thin gold chain that stretched across his brown and yellow checked wool vest, and Rourke saw that he even had freckles on the backs of his fingers.

  “A terrible thing, Detective,” he was saying. “What was done to Father Pat. I trust you all are close to apprehending the murderer. Otherwise, one shudders to think that simply no one is safe and we could all be slaughtered in our beds.”

  “I shouldn't worry if I were you,” Rourke said. “It seems to have been a selective killing.”

  “A personal vendetta, then, you think? And not the act of a madman?” A secretive little smile seemed to be playing around the corners of the man's full mouth. “All the more reason then, surely, to hope that everyone…” And he paused to give his wife a look that served to underline the word. “That everyone has been cooperating fully with the police in
their investigation. I'm willing to oblige, too, of course, but I don't know what I can tell you. As Holy Rosary's accountant, I had some dealings with the Father, but we weren't particularly close. My wife, on the other hand…” He turned to her again and touched her arm, and this time Rourke was sure he saw her flinch. “Y'all were especially fond of each other, weren't you, darling? You and your precious Father Pat.”

  “Bertie, don't. He was our priest.”

  “I'm sorry. Was I being flippant? I didn't mean to be.”

  Rourke smiled at him and said, “I'd like to know where you were, Mr. Layton, during the late hours of Friday night. Say, between midnight and three.”

  It happened sometimes when you were interviewing a suspect or witness. You saw it deep in the back of their eyes—a little click, like the shutter on a camera. A revealing flash that told you that here was someone with something to hide.

  And Albert Payne Layton appeared to be a man who relished his secrets, sucking on them and savoring them like they were hard rock candy. “Must we go into that here, Detective?” he was saying, lowering his voice and looking around the emptying nave. “We are, after all, in the presence of the Holy Eucharist.”

  “We can go into it downtown in the squad room,” Rourke said, still smiling. “Where I keep a sockful of nickels in my desk drawer.”

  Layton laughed and gave a little shudder. “Dear me. I've heard about the methods you cops use to beat the truth out of your suspects.” He paused and then made his eyes go wide, as if suddenly shocked. “Am I a suspect? Good heavens, I rather hope not, since I grow queasy at the merest sight of blood, especially my own…” Another pause, followed by a little sigh of surrender and a chagrined glance at Mrs. Layton. “If you must know, I spent the night, the whole night, with a woman other than my wife, but one who can and will support my alibi, and in public if necessary. Should that be necessary.”

  “We can be discreet, but we will need to talk to her,” Rourke said, thinking: That, Mr. Albert Payne Layton, was smoothly, if a bit too obviously, done. And all the while there had been laughter in those pale eyes. Laughter and something else.

  That little click.

  Rourke found his brother with the two altar boys back in Holy Rosary's oak-paneled vestry. One boy was helping the priest take off his chasuble, the vestment worn to celebrate the Mass. It was a heavy satin and brocade cloak, green for this time of the liturgical season, and thickly embroidered with silver and gold thread.

  The other boy was putting the holy oils away in a mother-of-pearl cabinet and laughing about something. Laughter that cut off abruptly when he glanced up and saw Rourke in the doorway.

  “Give me a few minutes alone with Father, would you please?” Rourke said.

  The two boys looked to their priest, who nodded.

  “Well, Day,” Paulie said, when they were alone. “I wish I could believe it was devotion that brought you to Mass this morning, but I am thankful nonetheless.”

  Rourke said nothing. He looked at his brother and saw that since yesterday morning the fear had found its way into the cast of his eyes and the set of his mouth. Their mother's mouth, Rourke realized suddenly, and for the first time. Paulie had their mother's mouth, and the thought made him feel sick.

  Paulie turned his back to him, going to the big walnut armoire that housed the priests' vestments. “What've you done with your Katie?”

  Rourke waited another beat and then said, “I parked her in your Sunday school and told her to think about frogs. Maybe it'll do her some good, although I doubt it.”

  “Never did you any good. In fact, the way I remember it, you used to terrorize the poor nuns who taught Sunday school at St. Alphonsus.” He took off his cincture and stole and hung them in the wardrobe. “So how come Katie has to think about frogs?”

  Rourke recounted Katie's latest campaign to rid the Conti Street house of Mrs. O'Reilly, telling it in such a way that he soon had his brother laughing. In a street brawl, it always helped if you distracted your opponent before you nailed him with your sucker punch.

  “You reap what you sow, little brother,” Paulie said, when he was done. “Remember how we used to go out and catch crawfish in the ditch after it rained and that one time when you found a baby alligator? You tried to make a pet out of him. You used to take him for a walk on a leash just for the pleasure of seeing all the neighbor ladies run off screaming into the night.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I remember,” Rourke said. “But don't you ever go telling Katie that story. Not if you care at all about my peace of mind.”

  Paulie laughed again, but he was still being careful most of the time to avoid Rourke's eyes. He untied the amice from around his neck, took it off and folded it, making a slow and careful production out of it.

  “Who's the woman?” Rourke said.

  Paulie's head snapped up. He blinked and his mouth actually fell open, just like a character's in a comic strip.

  “What woman?” he finally said, having waited way too long to go into his innocent act. “I don't know what—”

  Rourke had closed the distance between them in two strides. He grabbed his brother's shoulders and slammed him up against the wall, so hard he heard Paulie's teeth knock together.

  He asked it again, punctuating each word with a slam, so that his brother's head was smacking a tattoo against the plaster. “Who is the woman?”

  “God,” Paulie said, the word exploding out of him. “Will you look at yourself? You're just like—” He cut it off, stopped by the pure, unadulterated fury on Rourke's face.

  Rourke held his brother hard up against the wall, his fists crushing the fine linen of his priestly alb, held him until he felt the flesh beneath his hands begin to tremble, and then he let him go.

  He started to turn away, then spun back around and pointed his finger between Paulie's eyes. “I can help you. But you got to stop fuckin' lying to me.”

  Paulie stayed flattened against the wall, as if he'd been hung there, and then all the air seemed to collapse out of him. He tried for a smile, failing badly. “I suppose it's useful to have a cop for a brother, but I haven't committed any crime, Day. Not even spitting on the sidewalk, as God is my witness.”

  He groped his way along the wall until he found a chair and eased into it. His hands clutched his thighs and he looked at the floor.

  “What,” Rourke said, “was the bargain that you made with Father Pat?”

  Slowly, Paulie lifted his head. A tic had started up at one corner of his mouth. Their mother's mouth. In his eyes was the reckless desperation that you often saw in the eyes of the man sitting across the bourré table from you, when he suddenly realizes he might have to cover a pot he can't afford.

  “My God,” Paulie said again. “How do you find out these things?”

  Rourke didn't tell him it was a simple matter of reading the dead priest's notebook. He tried pushing the anger out of himself, coming down off the balls of his feet and putting his hands in his pockets. “Is there any wine in here that hasn't been made into a miracle?”

  A set of cupboards bracketed the locked showcase that displayed Holy Rosary's treasure: gold-plated patens and a pearl-encrusted pyx, and a tabernacle fashioned of beaten silver. Rourke looked in the right cupboard first and found a bottle of bourbon and a glass in the bottom drawer.

  He poured the bourbon in the glass up to the rim and put it in Paulie's shaking hands. Paulie drank it down fast, in two swallows, and with some apparent experience, and Rourke thought of how often they'd both heard their father say that all a man needed to get through the day was a little booze and God's good grace.

  Rourke refilled the glass, and his brother drank some more, slower this time. “Let's start with her name,” Rourke said.

  Paulie shook his head, and the rim of the whiskey glass clicked against his teeth. “If I tell you everything else, can we leave her name out of it? She's in a…difficult marriage, and they have children. They could all be hurt.”

  “Go on then for now,
” Rourke said. “Maybe we'll get back to her name later after I hear what you have to say.” He'd know the woman's identity before long anyway. Since yesterday evening, they'd had a tail on all the priests of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. Sooner or later, Paulie would lead them right to her.

  “It happened last spring,” Paulie said to the floor, “when I was still over at Immaculate Conception. You can't imagine how lonely I've…” He stopped, laughing harshly. “No, of course you can't. Not my little brother, who just happens to be sleeping with the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “Sometimes,” Rourke said, “a bedroom can be the loneliest place on God's earth.”

  Paulie was quiet for a moment, and then he sighed. “Forget I said that. I'm probably only jealous because, priest or not, I wouldn't have the confidence even to say hey to your kind of woman.” He waved an impatient hand. “It's not about sex, or celibacy and the Church, anyway—not only about that.”

  He went silent again, but this time Rourke waited him out, knowing that his brother had come to that place where he had to unload at least part of the burden because carrying it had become unendurable.

  “It's as if,” Paulie finally said, “I spend my life caught inside some kind of giant soap bubble. I can see things, but they're all blurry. I can hear, but the sounds are muted. Worst of all, I can't touch anybody and nobody can touch me. People come to me—they come to me, and they confess how lonely they are, and I tell them to look to God, that God will give them a friendship more glorious than any they can ever imagine, and all the while I'm thinking that I don't even know where God is anymore. Then one Sunday I mount the pulpit to give my homily and I look out over the congregation and I see her, and it was as if someone had come along and whitewashed the world.”

  Paulie raised his head. He had been crying again. “I thought all I wanted was the closeness, you know? To be able to put my arms around her and feel her head on my shoulder. To sit across from her at the kitchen table and wait for her to look up at me and smile. But then after a while the holding and smiling weren't enough and I realized that I was lusting after her in my heart, and now you're laughing at me.”