Authors: Keith Gilman
“This isn’t the way home.”
“One more stop. Do you mind?”
“I’m your partner, remember.”
They pulled up in front of Annunciation church, where a group of elderly parishioners were climbing the wide stone stairway. Lou circled through the church parking lot, parked behind a small mound of dirty melting snow, a trickle of water from underneath it finding its way slowly to the street. There were a handful of other cars in the lot, a few late model Cadillacs and Lincolns, a few minivans, and a black BMW with tinted windows that had come in behind them and parked in the back row.
A freckle-faced kid in a Flyers jacket and hat kneeled over a stack of newspapers on the corner. He cut the rope off the bag of papers with a pocketknife. A few old guys were standing around him, flashing dollar bills, waiting for a paper. A bell was ringing in the steeple, and the reverberation reached them like a sonorous pulse that seemed to give pause to everyone who
heard it. The boy stopped cutting the rope for a moment to listen. Old ladies clung to their husbands arms on the stairs. Lou looked up toward the sound and was blinded by sun, hanging over the church like a fiery yellow eye. Lou turned away, wondering how the sun could be so bright while it was still so cold.
They weren’t dressed for church and Maggie was visibly self-conscious. He reached for her hand. Their cold fingers interlocked and they climbed the stairs in unison. The crowd was sparse, mostly elderly men and women, similar to the early morning walking club at the mall. Most of them looked as if they’d had their exercise already, as if this was just another form of it, preparing them for all that kneeling and standing.
“What are we doing here?”
“Lisa Barrett said that Carol Ann Blackwell had transferred from here. Sarah Blackwell had said the same thing, that she’d taken Carol out of school. I guess I just wanted to get a look at the place, see if anyone remembered her, could tell me more about what happened.”
“You talk about her as if she were already dead.”
The church was red brick, with a series of tall, narrow stained-glass windows on each side, depicting Jesus carrying a heavy wooden cross over his shoulder, a Roman soldier cracking a whip across his back. The pictures were glowing and vivid in the afternoon sunlight, and as Lou’s wandering eyes traveled from one scene to the next, a buried memory surfaced of his decrepit old kindergarten teacher, Sister Ursela. She’d slap the back of his hands with a ruler for whispering in class, for coloring on the desk, for any petty crime he refused to confess to. If he closed his eyes, he could still feel the sting.
In front of the church, in the center of a small courtyard, stood a lifelike statue of the Virgin Mary, in white marble. Three old women kneeled and prayed before it like supplicants before an idol. On a granite pedestal supporting the statue, the name
of the church was carved in block letters. It was a place where Lou would have wanted his family to worship, where he might have gone if his mother had stayed in South Philly, a place where God seemed to grant his blessings with greater abundance. It was also the place where Carol Ann Blackwell was banished under a cloud of controversy and he wanted to find out why. He couldn’t imagine the church abandoning her because her father committed suicide.
He pulled open a great wooden door and held it for Maggie. She entered ahead of him. It was bright inside, without the glare, a diffuse glow from the sun through the windows. The sanctuary was almost empty. There seemed to be more people gathered outside than inside. He and Maggie took seats in the last aisle and waited.
Lou picked up a small black prayer book, opened it to the table of contents, and held it on his lap. There seemed to be a prayer for every occasion in a person’s life. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in church. Yet, he’d found himself praying more and more. He wasn’t asking for help—he’d never asked for help from anyone in his life and wasn’t about to start. It was more like asking for directions. Some guys refused to ask for directions. Even if they were lost in a strange city, they’d drive around in circles, hoping to find their way, rather than stop and speak to a stranger.
A couple of people entered and formed a line at the back of the church. They were waiting to give their confessions. A priest had entered from another door and a small white light came on signifying his readiness to hear. Lou closed the book and replaced it in the shelf.
The first person in line was a thin, frail-looking woman in a plain brown skirt and a tan button-down shirt tucked neatly inside her narrow belted waist. She stood slightly bent, shoulders rounded, the sagging skin on her neck clinging precariously to
the bone. Her wrinkled face retained little of its youthful color and her hair was a washed-out white. She smiled at the woman behind her. Lou noticed she had two or three teeth missing from the bottom row. She crossed herself and clutched a strand of beads with a silver crucifix attached. She was the first to enter the dimly lit cubicle. Lou couldn’t imagine what sin she could be guilty of.
The second woman in line was easily ten years younger than the first, which put her comfortably into her sixties. She was dressed casually, in a navy blue monogrammed sweater and a pleated skirt. Her hair was a dark shade of rusty red. She looked down her nose at the lady in front of her, an elaborate expression of disdain across her face. Lou imagined her shouldering the older woman out of the way in a mad dash for the door, as if they were giving something away in there and she needed to have it first. He wondered what she was so anxious to get off her chest, wondered why there were only women waiting to confess. Perhaps men didn’t sin. Lou took the last position in line.
He hadn’t done a confession since he was twelve years old and he didn’t remember much about it, except that he lied. He lied about the sodas he stole from the school cafeteria and passed around to all his friends. He lied about taking his shirt off and climbing the rain gutter during summer school, like Tarzan, to look into the girls’ bathroom. It wasn’t really lying. He just hadn’t mentioned it. Now, standing there, his palms were sweaty and his mouth was dry. He couldn’t relax. This was to be an interview with a priest, he told himself, not an actual confession.
As his turn approached, he found himself rehearsing every forced confession he’d made in his life. While he was married, they’d attended church pretty regularly. He told jokes to Maggie during the sermon and made her giggle. His wife found it impossible to sit with him. She’d end up outside, devouring a cigarette, giving him the silent treatment. Lou remembered the
day he told her if God really had any mercy, he would have cut out her tongue. Back then, his sense of humor had a tendency to displace his sympathy. Now, he feared it had transformed into something more like self-loathing.
Lou winked at Maggie and pulled the door closed behind him. The first thing he noticed was that the door didn’t have a lock. He’d forgotten that. The room was about the size of a broom closet, claustrophobic and tight. The light was dim. The accommodations were better in the men’s lavatory, he thought. It gave him the feeling that if he spoke too loud, he wouldn’t be speaking to just the clergy, but to the entire congregation. He realized why confessions were best made in a whisper.
There was a perforated partition separating him from the connecting booth, from a presence he could only sense on the other side of the screen, a sort of shadow, some shallow breathing. He preferred to see a man’s face when he spoke to him, to look into his eyes. Anonymity might be acceptable to God but it never sat right with a cop.
He settled into a folding metal chair and before he could say anything, a quiet, measured voice broke the silence. It was a soft, light voice, almost unnatural, like music with the bass part taken out, as if deliberately disguised. The voice sounded familiar, as if he vaguely recognized it from somewhere, from another place and time. The memory came to him as he waited in the dark to speak.
In his last year at the District Attorney’s Office, Lou had interviewed a suspect in a murder case. It began as a friendly conversation, developed into an interrogation and resulted in a full confession. The guy was tall and weighed over four hundred pounds but had the softest, kindest voice he’d ever heard. He had a full beard and neatly parted short hair. His name was
Eddie Besecker. He’d kidnap house wives from grocery store parking lots, rape and strangle them, and dump their naked bodies back on their own doorsteps in crowded, well-lit neighborhoods, as though he was dropping them off at home after a date.
Besecker had wanted to confess but not out of a sense of guilt. He’d claimed that he always wanted to be a priest, that he was still a virgin and deeply religious but not pure enough for the priesthood. Lou later learned that he had killed another convict in prison who had propositioned him in the shower. He strangled him with his bare hands and tried to carry him back to his cell.
The prison shrink wrote a book about the guy, said that Eddie had been abandoned by his mother when he was five. She’d dropped him off at his aunt’s house and never came back. He never knew his father. The aunt was a real holy-roller. Soon after Eddie had arrived, her husband had passed away. She’d gotten into the habit of taking Eddie to bed with her. She’d been the one that wanted him to become a priest. Eddie crucified her one night and let her hang around for a few months.
“How may I help you, my son?”
Lou wondered how the hell he knew he was his son and not his daughter. He thought maybe the church used the same two-way mirrors as the cops. He could see them but they couldn’t see him, a sneaky trick, for a priest looking for weakness of the soul. Lou waited for him to read him his rights.
“Are you here to confess, my son? The burden of sin is great. Do not underestimate the power of prayer.”
The priest sounded like a used-car salesman explaining the puddle of oil under his deal of the week. Lou decided to get right to the point before he got into the whole temptation-of-evil thing. There was no doubt in Lou’s mind that Satan was real.
The hell Lou knew was on earth, and he didn’t like this guy thinking he could tell him anything he didn’t already know.
“My name is Lou Klein, Father. I’m investigating the disappearance of a young girl and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Well, this is a surprise. Do you think this is the proper place or time? We could speak in my office after mass.”
“I’m sorry for the intrusion. This won’t take long, I promise.”
“I’ll agree, but for a few minutes, no longer.”
Lou leaned his face close to the partition and kept his voice low, as if he was giving away some secret. It felt like eavesdropping, like spying through a keyhole. He noticed the screen was not entirely opaque, the odor of wine and cigarette smoke emanated from behind it.
“I’m trying to gather information about a young lady, a girl who went to school here a good ten years ago. Were you here that long ago?”
“What was the girl’s name?”
“Her name is Carol Ann Blackwell.”
There was a long pause. Lou waited for some response, some word of recognition. He was beginning to think that selective amnesia was good for the soul. His current lapses of memory were strictly the result of whispering into a bottle of Irish whiskey. He wondered what this priest would think if he learned Lou’s father was a Jew.
“Might I ask the purpose of your investigation, Mr. Klein.”
“You might, but confidentiality prevents me from saying much. Suffice it to say that she disappeared under suspicious circumstances and I was asked to find her. I was a friend of her father’s. We were both city cops.”
“And don’t the police usually take care of those sort of things.”
“They do, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of a private investigation.”
“I see. Well, in that case, I did know Miss Blackwell. I mean,
I remember her. She wasn’t exactly one of my students but we’re a small school here, with a low ratio of teachers to students.”
“You mean that you were acquainted with most of the students just by nature of the close proximity with which you found yourselves on a daily basis.”
“That’s right, exactly.”
Another big happy family, Lou thought. “Did you know any of her friends?”
“I don’t believe she was friendly with many of her fellow students.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The impression I got was that she was somewhat of a loner.”
“Could she have had friends outside of school?”
“I’m not sure, Mr. Klein. I can’t say what she did when she left here.”
“That brings me to my next question, Father. I understand that Miss Blackwell left Annunciation under less than auspicious circumstances. Could you explain what happened, maybe shed some light on why she left.”
It was getting hot and cramped inside the confessional. Lou looked for an air vent in the ceiling, listened for a fan. He wondered if the good father was feeling the heat.
“I certainly was aware of the controversy at the time but I was in no way directly involved.”
“I didn’t mean to insinuate that you had anything to do with Miss Blackwell’s difficulties.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to assume that you did. I just wanted to make it perfectly clear. Of course there were plenty of rumors floating around. I never took them seriously and I certainly didn’t spread them.”
“What kind of rumors are we talking about, Father?”
“Surely you must have some idea. The kind of rumors that have the power to destroy lives.”
“What lives are we talking about now, Father, the life of a child or the reputation of a school?”
“That’s unfair, Mr. Klein.”
“I don’t think so. What if the rumors were true?”
“What if they were? We can’t go back and change what happened.”
“We’re talking in riddles. What did happen, Father? You seem to know more than you’re telling.”
“I think I’ve said enough. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Klein.”
“One more question, Father. Do you believe in justice?”
“I am a priest, Mr. Klein. We are all accountable before God.”