Father John Smith had a full head of black hair, a clean-shaven face, the aforementioned perfect suit, and a Roman collar, along with the most highly polished black shoes I'd ever seen, including my time in the Marines. I guessed him to be in his mid-fifties.
“Welcome,” he murmured. He offered and I shook a soft, damp, fish-shaped hand. He led us to the chairs opposite the settee. As we sat, he offered us tea. We declined. High tea at the cathedral rectory. Next they'd invite us to Solemn High Vespers.
He began with consolation. “You have my deepest sympathy in the matter of your missing nephew. I pray for his immediate safe return.” He proceeded to chat about the baseball season and about teaching school and gave us minor tidbits of idle gossip about the new archbishop's getting used to his position. Cardinal Bernardin had been elevated to Prefect of the Congregation of Religious in Rome. The new man had arrived three months before.
Tiring of his smooth chatter, I broke in. “We're here about Father Sebastian's death.”
My change of topic occurred without a murmur or hint of discomfort on his part. I explained our concern, and our knowledge of a cover-up on the part of church officials, and demanded information.
He smiled, took a bite of cookie, a sip of tea, replaced saucer and cup on the tray, and wiped each finger individually with a monogrammed cloth napkin, which he then proceeded to fold neatly and place next to his teacup. If he touches one more thing on that tray I thought, there'll be another death in the clergy.
But he didn't. He crossed one leg over the other, steepled his hands, and placed the tips under his chin. “The situation at St.
Joseph's Church is most unfortunate. We need to find the most diplomatic way to resolve all the issues involved.”
“You've got a possible murder, a married priest with a baby, and a possible kidnapping by one of your priests.”
“You have no proof for your first and last assumptions,” he said. Smith was the kind of guy who, when he was a kid, loudly dealt out insults begging for fights so he could run and tell teacher when someone finally got mad enough to beat the shit out of him. In college, his kind organized study groups to show off how much more he knew than anybody else the night before the test. He would brag about an A paper, hoping you got an F. He was a nerd with a chip on his shoulder.
“Why is there a cover-up?” Scott asked. “And how can you get the police to go along with it?”
The entire output of the spring run of Vermont maple syrup was as nothing compared to the sugared tone the priest now adopted.
“We don't expect outsiders to understand the workings of Holy Mother Church,” he said. “History has proven we know what is best. You speak of matters you can't possibly fathom. We need to leave these complicated matters in the hands of those of us who are used to dealing with such issues.”
“You mean lots of priests die every year whose deaths you have to cover up?” Scott asked.
“I refer, of course, to the level of complexity rather than specific issues,” Father Smith replied.
“What happens to Father Clarence?” I asked.
“After a decent interval he'll be transferred to a quiet parish.”
“And the woman?” I asked.
“We have ways of dealing with such issues that I'm not at liberty to discuss. Suffice it to say that most of the women in earlier cases have found it advantageous not to make a public scandal.” He harrumphed. “I'm sure you're not naive enough to think that Father Clarence is unique.”
“I thought the kid might be a little unusual,” I said.
“A trifle,” he conceded, “but well within the ability of this diocese to handle.”
“Like you cover up for priests who molest kids,” Scott said.
“You raise an unfortunate issue. Yes, we have priests with faults. Some are alcoholics, a few are thieves. Jealousy, ambition: we are not exempt from human vices. You judge us harshly?”
“You bet your ass I do. You're in the do-good business. You set yourselves up as better,” Scott said.
“Some people might direct the same kind of comment towards you as a baseball player and gay man. I make no judgment. In the church we try our best. Some fail. Most are good priests doing excellent work in thousands of quiet ways for good and decent people.”
I said, “Father Clarence told us about the cover-up.”
Another sugary smile appeared. “Please, gentlemen. He's a frightened man with his world crumbling around him. It's unfortunate your nephew misunderstood some garbled words.”
I began a protest, but he held up a hand to forestall me.
“Spare me. You're intelligent men. You've told some of your suspicions to the police.” It was a statement, not a question, but I nodded anyway. “Well, they haven't been here,” he continued. “If they choose to give no credence to a twelve-year-old, who am I to insist to the contrary?”
“You pompous son of a bitch,” I said.
He chuckled. “That's been said to me since first grade. I find it a natural ability that is essential in my job as diocesan trouble shooter.” He paused, rubbed a hand thoughtfully along his jaw, then resumed. “I have a bit of advice for you gentlemen. Don't you think it better for your reputations, and because of the nature of your relationship, to avoid the possible publicity and inherent dangers of this kind of meddling?”
I smiled and Scott laughed out loud. My lover said, “I guess you think you're making a threat. We aren't impressed. The truth's coming out with or without your help.”
In the middle of the silent elegance of the room, Smith calmly
raised an eyebrow. “Is there anything else I can do for you gentlemen?”
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On the street I said to Scott, “I feel like I've just been raped by the entire Chicago Bears football team at high noon in the center of Daley Plaza, and no one's going to do anything about it.”
“You know,” Scott said. “Change that black suit and collar to a button-down shirt and gray sweater, and he could be the guy the bartender at Roscoe's described who met Sebastian on Sundays.”
Scott was right. I thought of going back and asking, but assumed that the most we'd get was another suave denial.
We had several hours to kill before our next appointment. I wanted to try following Priscilla again. Monica and Neil had told us she'd be at a Neighborhood Crime Watch meeting at Halsted and Aldine until ten.
We dined at My Brother's Place in its usual quiet elegance. We don't get there often enough.
We hit the streets around nine-thirty to be buffeted by a rising wind off the lake. On the car radio we heard that the National Weather Service had issued a winter storm watch for the metropolitan area. If the temperature plummeted close enough to freezing, we could be in for some nasty weather. At the moment, fifty-degree temperatures held.
Even though we'd given ourselves extra time, we almost missed Priscilla. We couldn't find a parking space anywhere near the Beat Representative Office of the Twenty-third District. In Chicago each police district has a Beat Representative program. It's sort of like a community relations office with overtones of ombudsperson thrown in. As opposed to the bad old days of Chicago police riots, nowadays the department is more conscious of the necessity of positive dealings with the non-crime-committing sector of the public.
We wound up having to park south of Belmont and had to hurry back through the gathering wind.
Our plan of attack was simple: Follow Priscilla. All the church leads seemed such dead ends I wanted to chance chasing her despite any risks, and as small as the possibility was that it would lead to the solution of Father Sebastian's death. Since last night's fiasco, we wanted to be sure she hadn't taken precautions against our following her. Certainly she'd be cautious, might even have someone follow her to be extra safe. If a shadow protector existed tonight, even if we lost Priscilla, we could follow that other person to a hiding or meeting place.
Through the plate-glass windows we saw the group members standing in small clusters, pulling on winter garments. We hid in the shadows up Aldyne. We'd approached down the cross
alley from Melrose and met no one. Facing due east, we felt the force of a rising wind almost directly in our faces.
Priscilla stood at the door in what looked like amiable conversation with a uniformed officer. Moments later she finished pulling on her gloves and strode out the door. She turned north on Halsted. We waited.
A minute passed. Scott whispered, “We'll lose her if there's no protector and we don't follow soon.”
Fortunately, none of the others had walked north. A few waited at the bus stop across the street. Others had scattered in different directions. I began to move forward but caught myself at the last second. A well-muffled figure stepped from the shadows on the other side of Halsted. The layers of heavy winter clothes prevented identifying it as male or female. I saw a short person in jeans with glasses under a furry hat who turned north also.
“Is that the one?” Scott asked.
I shrugged. We were just starting out, and already our plan had serious flaws. “We've got to try it,” I said.
Following turned out to be surprisingly easy. The figure peered carefully from side to side and forward into every shadow but, fully confident in the role of protector, never looked back. After a few moments of following, I felt much better. We caught occasional glimpses of Priscilla a block and a half ahead. Up Halsted we went, past Addison, with a darkened Cubs park a few blocks west, glanced in the windows of the Twenty-third District police station, beyond a few gay bars and the bus turnaround to where Halsted ends at Grace. There our little parade continued up Broadway all the way to Irving Park.
With no hesitation we followed the westward turn down Irving Park. With the wind now at our backs, walking became far more comfortable. At any time Priscilla could suddenly have taken a car, hailed a taxi, or been joined by a friend, any of a thousand possibilities. Fortunately, she walked on. I was determined to keep following until we got whatever information we
could get. I knew we didn't have any factual evidence, but Priscilla was right up there with Father Clarence at the top of my kidnappers list.
When we got to Graceland Cemetery, following became more difficult. The south side of Irving Park Road has a chain link fence and no possibility of concealment. The north side of the street has a brick wall with extremely limited hiding places. We found one spot where the wall jutted out and waited. We saw the protector cross Clark Street. We hurried forward, still staying on the opposite side of the street. The figure passed the Burger King and post office and kept going.
On the right up ahead loomed the mass of Lake View High School. Across from it on the block between Greenview and Ashland stood a structure that surpassed the high school in immensity.
At the corner of Greenview and Irving Park, the protector gave several last searching glances around. From our hiding place a half block away, we could see clearly. On the last few blocks he or she had been much less careful. After a last look back, the person scuttled down Greenview. We hurried forward.
The structure was a huge old church-school complex, all interconnected. It took up more than two thirds of the block. We were in time to see the protector slip through the hedge surrounding the complex.
For a moment an indoor light silhouetted him or her in a recessed opening in the building.
Carefully, in case they'd set up observers, we explored the outer perimeter of the structure. It looked to be a church school from the old days when religion was the center of community life. I'd been to enough meetings of gay activist committees in such structures to make a fair guess at the interior from the placement of the windows. The front half consisted of church on the top floor, with offices on the ground floor under it. The back half, several stories taller than the vast front, looked to consist of basement and first-floor classrooms
and a second and third floor auditorium, probably with a stage. I suspected the fourth floor contained a low-ceilinged gym.
The outer walls of the complex stood anywhere from ten to twenty feet inside a thick evergreen hedgerow that surrounded the entire place. Scaffolding, at various points piles of planks, and stacks of bricks all looking recently used, lay strewn about the open spaces between hedge and building.
We carried on a whispered conversation in the alley that separated the complex from the few houses on the rest of the block.
“The Lesbian Radicals from Hell meet in a church?” Scott asked.
“I don't think it's been a church for a while,” I said. “All that construction shit scattered around smacks of rehabbers on the loose. That one corner where the streetlight hit the building full on showed all new window frames. No ugly grill work, no dirty opaque windows. No, this place had been fixed up, by somebody with a ton of money. Even you might need an investment group for this kind of shit.” I eyed the exterior of the building carefully. “We're going exploring,” I said.
“I hate that tone in your voice. It tells me you've had a moment of wild inspiration and daring. Usually it means mess, chaos, and deep shit up to our nipples.
“Jerry could be in there.”
“Yeah,” he conceded. “Then let's get the police.”
“Are you serious? Even Frank Murphy, a cop we know who likes us, doesn't buy this shit. And while that Chicago cop may be gay, I don't trust him yet.”
A dramatic sigh from Scott.
“Look,” I said. “The place is absolutely dark. They've got to be holed up in some inside room. My guess is with all the construction crap still lying around, they're in the middle of renovating. We could explore for a week and not run into anybody. We'll hear them or see their lights long before they see us. Besides, Jerry could be in there. I'm going in.”
“Alarm system?” Scott sounded resigned.
“If it's homemade, hopefully my training in Vietnam will be good enough to catch it before we trip it. If it's built in, that's why I have you along.”
He's a mechanical genius. He fixes the decrepit appliances at my place, does repairs, major and minor, on my old Chevette that I kept even after I bought the truck this year. One time he installed an entire burglar alarm system around my place. I have absolute faith in his abilities.
We eased ourselves through the swaying bushes and hurried to crouch behind a stack of tarpaulin-covered two-by-fours. A short dash brought us to what must once have been the main entrance to the classrooms.
He punched my arm and pointed up. “That's the old alarm,” he said indicating a foot-square box in the dim light.
I looked for holds for him to climb up. None that I could see.
“Boost me up,” he muttered. He wound up standing on my shoulders. I braced myself against the side of the building to ease some of his weight. I'm six-foot-three and in great shape, but at six-four he's not a light burden. My shoulders seemed to endure several hours of this agony, while the rest of the universe probably felt a half a minute pass.
“Okay,” he finally whispered.
I crouched down and he dismounted. He rubbed his hands on his jeans. “It's still connected,” he announced, “but it hasn't been functional in years. The whole inside is rotted out.” Around the building we crept, looking for an opening and more modern alarms.
Amazingly enough I found the alarm and managed to render it dysfunctional, in an odd way, without any assistance from Scott. The outside of the building had numerous abutments, decorative buttresses, cornices, along with nooks, crannies, and cubbyholes. Peeking around one of these I lost my footing, stumbled over a board, and with a soft crunch put my foot through the top of a box. I managed to accomplish this with only a slight thump from the box as my foot caved in the top. That is, if you didn't count the
muffled laughter coming from immediately behind me. All right, it may have been funny, but was this the time to laugh?
I examined the box. Lettering on the outside indicated it contained parts for an alarm system. After a quick inspection I discovered three other boxes with the same lettering. So they'd never hooked up the damn thing. I'd still wrecked a good part of it. I extricated my leg from its trap and melted into the deeper shadows next to Scott.
“You're a big help,” I muttered. Crouching in the shadows, I paused to reconnoiter. By this time we'd worked our way around three quarters of the building with no luck at finding an opening. I stood up and managed to bang my head on the bottom of an ancient metal stair-step fire escape. We'd seen several of them, although this was the only one that reached to within six feet of the ground. I whispered to him, “My bet is the place isn't wired at all.”
“Good thing,” Scott said. He tapped me on the shoulder and pointed. “While you were doing a ballet with the boxes, I found this.”
In a dark recess behind a stack of bricks he'd found a boarded-up window.
“So what?” I said.
“It's loose,” he said. He proceeded to ease the board back. We peered through the gap. No lights shone inside, but my eyes were fairly used to the dark by now. What I could see looked barren and empty. We slipped through the opening. It was the dim street-lights shining through all the wide new outside windows that made observation possible. An old blackboard on the wall told me this was a former classroom. As we crept forward we found openings, newly made, which would let at least two of the old classrooms, plus a washroom, become in the future one spacious and modern suite of rooms. The only appliances for the moment were the range, refrigerator, and dishwasher, all plunked in the middle of a soon-to-be-kitchen floor. We crept on. Heaps of two-by-fours, stacks of paint cans, and other construction paraphernalia lay in almost every room.
We had to move carefully to avoid stumbling over it. We must have covered over half the building before we heard or saw anything indicating current habitation. The place was a warren of rehabilitation waiting for those wealthy enough to be able to burrow in. The nave and choir loft had been turned into one dazzling series of interconnected lofts and staircases, presumably separate apartments or condos still to be walled off from one another. The whole thing had an Escher-like effect, all bathed in a soft glow of light let in by a vast skylight cut into the former church's roof.
In broad daylight it would take a platoon of men hours to explore the entire structure. Even then there were mysterious dangers, and huge possibilities of missing secret hiding places. I whispered this to Scott.
“Curb your imagination, big fella,” he whispered. “Let's concentrate on what we can see and then get the hell out.”
On the top floor of the back half of the building we encountered the darkest sections yet. No extra light leaked through to guide us. I listened intently but heard nothing. On hands and knees we crawled forward. I didn't want anymore klutzoid tripping. We came across a tiled floor and wide opening. I entered the space and let my hand rove up the wall. I felt a metal fixture. I guessed we were in the shower room section of the old locker room. We found a door opposite the one we entered. I eased it open a crack. Light again but still faint, but now for the first time I heard voices.
We crawled through this opening into a room filled with old lockers stacked in piles eight feet high. We inched across the floor to the farther door. A slit of light shone under it, a welcome beacon after the total blackout of minutes before. No question but that the voices came from behind this door. I eased it open a crack.
Soft lights in recessed sconces glowed around the old gymnasium. The half of the space closer to us was a wooden parquet floor. In places you could see the last flecks of paint
marking the out-of-bounds lines. The low ceiling must have frustrated anybody trying to throw a full court pass.
Six people sat at the far end on folding chairs around two card tables pushed together. Beyond them, on the floor just to the right of a pair of double doors, sat a seventh person. Her bulk rested on a mattress. Eight of these lined the far walls. Piles of clothing and shelves made of bricks and boards separated each person's section. Cartons of what looked to be Chinese take-out sat on the card tables around which the six clustered. They spoke animatedly and without hurry. The figure on the floor drew my attention. She read by the light of a desk lamp that rested on the floor. She was the ugliest person I've ever seen. Her reddish-brown hair hung in lank strands to her shoulders. It looked as if she hadn't washed it yet this year. She wore a white sweat suit with frilly yellow flowers bursting on all sides. The sweat suit clung to the bulges of her figure in a very unflattering way. Her face had the requisite features but in the oddest shapes and sizes. Coke-bottle-thick glasses covered both eyes, over one of which she wore a black patch. Her lips were wide enough to drive a truck on. Her nose tilted off to the right side, as if it had been tweaked at an early age and left permanently off kilter. This had to be Stephanie, whom Monica had described when we'd talked to her after the break-in at the
Gay Tribune.