“Father…”
I look up. Michelle Hammond is standing just outside the meeting room, the host table between us. The attendant stands, afraid he has committed some offense by refusing entry to someone the congressman’s wife appears to know. “Mrs. Hammond, I’m sorry, is this gentleman—”
“Not gentleman,” she corrects. “Priest. His name is Father Jerome.”
The attendant takes a pen from the table and flips to a page in the book with open spaces. “I can add him, ma’am. It’s not a problem.”
She smiles and puts a reassuring hand on the nervous man’s shoulder, her gaze never leaving me. “Father Jerome will not be attending.” The attendant puzzles at her statement. “Father, will you join me for a moment?”
Her hand pulls back from the attendant and she slips back through the doors. I follow her into the meeting room, trailing her as she walks to a spot in the far corner, near a dais set up with lectern bisecting a long head table. She stops, finally, and turns to face me, hands behind her back.
“I suppose I wasn’t clear at our Chicago house,” she begins, the subtle reminder of status slipped in, as if our first exchange could have taken place at their homes in Vail or Palm Beach. “You have nothing to say to my husband.”
A pit bull in silk blouse and skirt. That is what I sense here, the equivalent of a low, warning growl being shared. Bared teeth come next. And then…
“Are you used to this role?” I ask. “Denier in chief for your husband?”
There is not a hint of anger, not a twitch of emotion. She is steel, practiced and polished. “Father, let me ask you—do you see our discussion here leading to what you want? The chance to bother my husband with accusation and innuendo?”
“Why don’t we see if he’s man enough to handle it?”
She grins almost to the point of laughter. “Father, you’re not clever enough to pull off such menace.” To her right is a door, large EXIT sign above it. She glances toward it, signal enough of what she desires.
“You expect me to just walk away?”
“I expect you to realize that is the intelligent thing to do.”
I imagine all possible outcomes of a refusal to leave. Security being called. Police. And what will I do, scream out accusations against John Hammond, taking the transgressions against my vows fully into the open. To be explained to officials in suits or uniforms with badges, who may allow the same thing to happen which has for the past five years—nothing.
“Father,” she begins, though there is finality in her tone, and even in her stance, which shifts slightly away from me, as if she has already completed our discourse and is disposing of the moment. “Let me offer a final thing that you may know, or may not, but you really should by now—I will do anything to protect my husband.” Her pliant smile gone now. “Anything.”
She turns and wades back across the meeting room, unconcerned with my presence, not looking back to see if I go or not. Because I will, and she knows that.
* * *
For a while I stand outside the hotel. I have come this far and to leave without any semblance of success, much less progress, seems impossible. Yet Michelle Hammond has made that my reality for this moment. She is her husband’s protector. Keeper of his secrets.
Perhaps Chris is right to worry. Perhaps I will end up floating in the Potomac before my return flight in a few hours. When cornered, Michelle Hammond’s reaction might very well be to strike. To seek clarity through closure. Through the kind of silence echoing about James Estcek where he lay crumpled in a Chicago alley.
Perhaps.
The truth be told, if that were to happen, at least I would know without doubt, as my dying breath slipped free of my mortal body, that Katie’s death was a mystery no more.
Chapter Twenty Three
The Next To Die
My flight was delayed. The time I spent waiting at the gate, twisted into a supposedly ergonomic seat, I could have used to read further into John Hammond’s past. Searching for some morsel which would lead to another, which would point ultimately to a connection with my sister that transcended gossip.
But I did not. My laptop remained closed in its bag, as it did during my return to O’Hare, skimming the tops of hazy clouds lit dimly by the waxing moon. Instead, my thoughts idled through recollections of James Estcek. His obscured image in motion on the surveillance tape, the foul smell and sickly sight of him past the barely open door of Jacob Raidenburg’s apartment, the laugh of his, the snap of his head as my fist connected with his jaw.
Someone else has recollections of James Estcek, similar to a certain degree. The person who beat him and left him in a heap like a pile of garbage. If Chris is right my pursuit of James Estcek was the genesis for this other’s visit of violence upon him. Fatal violence.
Or he could have fallen victim to one of his own kind, one drug addled thug ending another, the circle of life and death common on the streets taking yet another spin around the karma wheel. Just a coincidence.
But I think not. Life is not ruled by happenstance, no more than Katie’s murder was the random act I had for so long believed. Things happen for reasons. Because a microbe multiplies a tumor grows. Because a secret became too risky to keep my sister was killed. Because James Estcek was no longer a killer anonymous to any who might care, his life was taken.
Because my eyes have opened a danger has reawakened.
Why these thoughts fill me I am not sure. They are not new, or heightened by fresh fact. Still, from the gate at Dulles to deplaning at O’Hare, and while driving from the airport lot to the rectory, I consider what it means.
And I have no answer. My thoughts seem in service of themselves these past few hours, and do even as I pull into the driveway and nose my car toward the garage, musings caught in some infinite loop. I wonder if, oddly, it is all some subconscious exercise in escape, my brain playing things over and over to avoid giving quarter to less pleasant thoughts.
Like failure.
It might be that. There is no guarantee I will reach that which I seek. Running headlong into the wall that is Michelle Hammond could convince one that failure is near certainty. Was it she who, years ago, saw to it that her husband’s dalliance did not impact his rise toward political stardom? Did she learn of Katie and end her involvement with her husband in the most extreme manner possible, only to exert some influence on police officials to put the brakes on the ensuing investigation? Has she now become aware of renewed interest in Katie’s murder from an old source tied to the police department? Is she now doing exactly what she told me she would, protect her husband at all costs? Has she sent a nameless stranger to park outside the rectory to intimidate me? Did the same stranger next see that their path crossed with that of James Estcek? Deserving or not, is he the latest victim of Michelle Hammond?
Who, I wonder, will be next?
Or am I subjecting myself to unwarranted acceptance of her hyperbole? Could exhaustion be catching up with me? I have no clear idea how much I have slept in recent days. As I turn off the car and step from it, my laptop bag slung on one shoulder, a tiredness does weigh on me. It is late and I can feel my body craving sleep, a desire to reach my bed quickening my pace as I slip in the side door, the space dim and quiet. Light dribbling through the thin curtains guide me to the stairs, a nightlight just past the top step revealing the way up. The expected creaks sound under foot as I near the second floor, my room straight ahead, door in sight.
But I do not make it in the few quick steps it would take. A sound stops me near halfway down the hall, across from Jimmy G’s room. Father Taylor’s door is closed, no rattled breathing slipping past the barrier, just the sound I have heard on nights too many to tally. I stand outside for a moment and listen to the
drip-drip-drip
.
For a moment the night before, when he came to my door without two bagged Cabernets in his arms, I had hoped a change was coming for Father Taylor. That maybe he had decided a manner of escape from past demons existed beyond the realm of the bottle. That talking about all he had been through in distant—
Dammit
.
I suddenly remember—he wanted to talk. A little more than twenty four hours ago he had come to me asking for a moment, and I had put him off until the next morning. A time now passed. It was an unintentional oversight, verging on inexcusable, yet I cannot let my mind go where it is at the moment—that my innocent snub of him has led Father Taylor back to his nightly habit. Still, I feel terrible for slighting him, and in the morning I will apologize. And we can then talk.
I open his door, as I have on occasion when hearing what I do, the slow drip of wine from a toppled bottle needing to be stopped. The latch clicks, a bit too loud, enough that I fear he will be roused by the sound.
He will not.
By the dim light of the bedside lamp I see him as I step into the room. He lies on his bed, fully clothed down to shoes, no bottle of Cabernet in sight, red-stained hand resting upon his chest, straight razor clenched. The opposite arm hangs straight out, suspended like the span of some truncated bridge, neat gash upon the wrist, blood dribbling slowly out, falling
drip-drip-drip
to a dark pool spread wide upon the hardwood. Almost to where I stand.
Grief does not suddenly wash over me. I do not rush closer to him, do not cry out. I stand there and look upon him, face blanched beyond pale, mouth gaping, eyes mostly closed and cast upward. There is no mask of serenity, no smile, no countenance at all about him to soothe.
He is just gone.
Chapter Twenty Four
Comfort
We buried Father Augustine Taylor on Friday, ranks of his brethren priest come to Saint Mary’s to lift his soul to its rightful place in heaven, the whole of us singing
Salve Regina
as his mortal body was carried from church to hearse. His body was committed to the earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the same cemetery where Katie is buried, a generous donor from the parish seeing to all arrangements.
No family attended his service.
In the days between finding him lifeless in his room and now, I have made myself busy with preparations for his funeral mass and interment, attending only to this and what parish business could not be put off. Unlike how I had dealt with my sister’s death for so long, to Tim I opened up, sharing my obvious guilt at having missed a chance to converse with Father Taylor the morning before he took his own life. The natural tendency to wonder if I could have sensed something in the conversation that never was, a hint at what he might be contemplating, plagued me. The possibility that I might have been able to prevent his suicide weighed on me. To all that troubled me, Tim assured me, as I would him, that we cannot know, how ever much we may desire to, all that lurks in mans’ soul.
As he said this, despite the focus of our discussion, it seemed that my friend was speaking as much about me as he was Father Taylor. He knows that something beyond our colleague’s suicide, something predating it, has afflicted me. He may even wonder if I might be pushed to an act of desperation.
Standing at the grave now after all others have left, watching workers fold chairs and roll up the artificial grass concealing a mound of dirt which will soon be shoveled into the rectangle freshly cut in the earth, I know I am not responsible for Father Taylor’s passing.
But what the head knows is not necessarily what the heart feels, and I am sick inside. Doubly so because I wonder why I was not affected similarly when the likelihood that my actions led to James Estcek’s death were made plain to me. His life should not be a lesser loss to me, but it is, and realizing such increases the degree to which I feel less and less worthy to partake of the vocation I have chosen.
No person would brand me horrid for minimizing the murder of a man who shot my sister. But would my God?
The wondering burns as I watch the first scoops of dirt slide into the hole.
O God, come to his aid. O Lord, make haste to help him.
I do not change the object, but this silent prayer which I offer once more is as much for me as it is for the man already gone from this life.
For a while I watch as the hole fills. When the first clods of dirt rise near the level of uncut earth I turn and move between the headstones. Katie’s grave is a short walk away, but I do not go there. I tell myself there is no point in doing so, that I have nothing to offer her. No answer, as if she, in the glory where she now exists, is ignorant of all that happened to her. As if it concerns her at all. Still, it is the reason with which I soothe myself, even if it is, at best, a partial truth.
The greater part, I know, is that there is someplace I need to be.
* * *
There is a gathering at the church hall, tables of food prepared by the Knights of Columbus, soft chorale music played by Ray Martin’s granddaughters. All this I know from arrangements made for this post-burial reception, a chance for those who knew and loved Father Taylor to share in some fellowship following the solemnity of the day’s services. A chance to laugh, to cry, to celebrate the life just ended.
But I do not go. From the cemetery I drive into the city. To a street a block off Lakeshore Drive. I park and step from my car and stand on the sidewalk, looking up at the tower of condominiums the street. My gaze tracks to the eleventh floor, counting upward, until it finds her window. Two from the corner. My hand slips into my pocket and takes my cell. I dial and bring it to my cheek and wait as it rings.
* * *
“I was worried about you,” Chris says, glancing at me as we follow the trail past Belmont Harbor, hardy joggers bundled against the cold chugging by. To the right a collection of pleasure craft at anchor bob in the windy chop, and to the left traffic flies north and south on Lakeshore. We stroll slowly, plodding by the boat basin, the statement she’s just made one of the few things either of us has said since walking away from her building.
“I sort of shut everything out the last few days,” I tell her. She knew of Father Taylor’s suicide, which was reported on every newscast. The dark side of human interest, she branded it when calling to offer her condolences. My distance at that moment, and in the days since, was forced and necessary, and I sensed she understood.