In the Wrong Hands, page 10
Barren and almost unchanged…almost.
“Phew! Yuck!”
Leo’s office had its own bathroom, complete with a sink, toilet, and sixty years of embedded odors. It helped to keep the door closed. When left ajar, even slightly (as it was), urine, mold, and disinfectant went straight up the nostrils.
The priest was getting used to his situation. He spoke to be heard.
“Someone left the bathroom open, and it sure as shit wasn’t me.”
Done fuckin’ around.
Three angry strides took him to the stinky door. He gave it a yank.
Empty.
The hand soap wasn’t where it usually was, but that was easy to explain. It was always falling on the floor, and Archbishop Fellini had used the bathroom the day before.
Leo checked the window. As expected, it was swollen and could only open downward a few inches. No one could fit through it. He looked out. Through the leaves of the courtyard’s large maple tree, he saw a gardener pulling weeds but nothing else. No killer in sight.
He checked the remaining two rooms, including the pastor’s office. The only door left was the fire exit at the end of the hall.
“Yeah, that’s how he got out…shit.”
The guy was just a little too fast for the Dirty Harry wannabe from South Philly.
In the distance, he heard the main entrance to the sanctuary open and close… Lynch and Gomez no doubt. They were probably going to tear him a new asshole for not going to the street as instructed.
7. Sitting in Zed Zed
Silently, Arthur acknowledged that the Unjudged was Samuel’s idea, but that didn’t change the fact that, despite his strength of vision, Samuel was no war-time president. Arthur had finally come into his own. Everyone rallied behind him as he waved an invisible banner bearing the sigil of Jeremy. There was no confusion on the matter. They were at war.
Sitting in Zed Zed, once again across the street from Frankie and Jimmy’s, Arthur wished his wimp of a former advocate could see...
You’d have just let this bastard slide. I know it! Take a look! This is what you do when someone throws down the gauntlet! This is how you repay someone who is trying to take it all away from you!
The van was almost full. Traci was in the passenger’s seat. Bubbs, Rick, and Steven were in the back. Traci tapped Arthur on the shoulder and pointed down the street.
“How about that alley?”
“Too close to the bar.”
“We can’t run him all over town.”
“I said it’s too close.”
Rick spoke up.
“I don’t see what the problem is. The industrial complex is right across the bridge.”
“Too far.”
“Artie, it’s not too far. It’s just across the bridge.”
Artie turned ready to jump over the seat and pummel Rick for his impudence, but Traci got herself between them.
“Artie come on. He’s just throwing out ideas like the rest of us.”
“Fucking stupid ideas!”
Rick refused to let up.
“The industrial complex will work.”
“It fucking will not! How are we going to outrun an entire bar from here to the industrial complex, jackass?”
“You just got done saying the alley is too close!”
“Fuck you!!”
Steven and Bubbs thrust their arms in front of Rick, partially to shield him and partially to shut him up. Arthur took a sloppy swing around the back of his captain’s chair and caught Bubbs on the forearm. It was like punching a bowling ball. He let out an intimidating scream to hide the pain, but no one was fooled. He faced forward to wiggle his fingers in private.
Rick swatted away his protectors and pressed his lips together to show he’d surrendered to the futility of arguing.
At the risk of making things worse, Traci made herself heard again.
“We don’t have to run.”
Arthur didn’t have friends. His ambition, self-absorption, and general assholiness left no room. He allowed no one into his life that didn’t have something he could exploit. Bubbs had moron strength; Steven could get drugs; Rick hated cops; Traci had a devious mind and a sweet ass…and whenever she made one or the other available, Arthur paid attention.
“Explain.”
“We’ll need a patsy.”
She paused to make sure she had Arthur’s interest and approval. She had both, so she continued. She also knew she needed to clarify things for Bubbs.
“Someone will need to risk getting caught. I was thinking maybe someone…with a bicycle.”
The corners of Arthur’s mouth turned up slowly. He didn’t much relish the idea of dealing with the little puke again, but he had an inkling of where Traci was going, and he liked it.
Without taking his eyes off of her, he turned on the radio and slid his hand up her shirt. The three in the back collectively rolled their eyes, broke out the cards, and played Skat for cigarettes while Traci hopped onto Arthur’s lap and rode him like a ranked bull.
Ah! The spoils of war!
8. Father Leo’s Office
Leo sat behind his desk still recovering. Lynch sat across.
“I thought you said you were going to be at St. Matthew’s today.”
“Yes. I meant to be. Pastor Karney got called to the Diocese and asked me to hear confessions.”
Lynch had been writing in his notepad since he sat down. Leo might have felt more intimidated were he not preoccupied with adrenaline and feeling stupid.
“Do you know why?”
“Why what?”
Lynch didn’t look up.
“Why he got called to the Diocese?”
“He didn’t say specifically… (topic shift) …Jim, I hope you don’t think I was trying to throw you off my trail this morning when…”
“No, no, no. Not at all. I get it.”
He tapped his pencil on his pad and locked eyes without lifting his head.
“What I don’t get is why you were in the church when I arrived and not out on the street like I told you.”
“Oh yeah. About that… I’m a moron.”
Lynch laughed.
“Fair enough. May I guess that you wanted a look at the guy in case he got away?”
“You may, and you’d be correct.”
“I’m not gonna lie to you. It was pretty dumb, but no blood no foul. You got a Mulligan so…”
“So, in the unlikely event that I ever find myself in a similar situation again, my ass is in the parking lot.”
Lynch smiled inquisitively. He’d never heard a priest swear before. Leo read the look correctly and responded to it.
“The word ‘ass’ is in the bible you know.”
“Yes, but in the bible, it means ‘donkey,’ doesn’t it?”
“Fine, then I’ll bring my donkey to the parking lot.”
“Well played. So, what happened today?”
Leo recounted the events from the moment Constance finished her confession to the moment Lynch arrived as they were forever burned into his brain.
“Well Father, the guy has…”
Balls? Stones? Cajones?
“…nerve. I’ll give him that.”
He flipped over another page and clicked his mechanical pencil.
“Mind if we talk about Saturday, Leo?”
Do I have a choice?
Lynch started off with all the standard questions: “Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Bishop Ryan?” and so forth. Leo wasn’t much help. As he’d said, he didn’t know the Bishop very well. Then the questions turned to the hotel arrangements.
“Who knew where the Bishop was staying?”
“There was a big foul up when he arrived. I was told he wanted to get together after Mass to talk about the groundbreaking ceremony.”
“At the steak house. Right?”
“Yes. I, however, was not told that he never drove on the highway after dark. Apparently, the church always put him up somewhere in town if he chose to stay late.”
“Who made the arrangements, then?”
“I did, about ten minutes before Mass started.”
“Cutting it close.”
“Tell me about it. That’s usually when I write the Homily.”
The joke was completely lost on Lynch.
“So, who knew?”
“Just Bishop Ryan, Pastor Karney, and me, as far as I know.”
Leo realized how that sounded but figured it would be best to let Lynch ask for an alibi. He didn’t. By the surveillance footage, the police knew when the murder took place. From the server logs, they knew that the church voicemail was checked from Father Pascucci’s office phone twelve minutes later. Even with no traffic and all green lights, (which never happened in Potterford) it would have taken just about that much time to get from the Marriott to St. Aloysius. When they tacked on a few minutes for things like getting from the crime scene to the car, parking at the church, and actually getting to the office phone, Father Pascucci was all but taken off the suspect list. Lynch still asked about Pastor Karney.
“Like today, he was at the Diocese. Someone there can vouch for...”
Suddenly …
BRRING BRRING BRRING BRRING BRRING
…the room was overtaken by a deafening alarm. Lynch looked wide-eyed at Leo and hollered.
“Exactly what is that!!? The fire alarm!!?”
“I don’t know!! I never heard it before!!”
They both rose to investigate. The din stopped as Lynch broke the plane of the doorway. The silence revealed screaming…in Spanish.
“I wonder who that could be.”
With hands in pockets, he took a few casual steps to his right, looked to his left, and discovered Gomez having a fist fight with the fire exit.
“The puta went off when I opened the door!!”
Leo returned to his office to call off the fire department. Lynch filled a cup at the water cooler and handed it to his partner.
“Here.”
“Thanks, and by the way, it took me a few minutes, but I realized why you had me interview the landscapers, and I don’t fuckin’ appreciate it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You figured they were Latino.”
“They weren’t?”
“Eastern bloc asshole!”
Leo reappeared. Lynch spoke.
“Father, do you have a key to the rest of these doors?”
“There’s one in the secretary’s office. Why?”
The priest answered his own question. The killer couldn’t have gone out through the fire exit. He would have tripped the alarm. If he entered the hallway, there was only one possibility: He locked himself in one of the other rooms, and if that was the case, he was still there. Leo’s chest revved up again. Lynch spoke slowly and calmly, confident everyone was on the same page.
“Father, Detective Gomez and I have this. Where is the key, exactly?”
“Top desk drawer on the right.”
“Do you remember what you said earlier about finding yourself in this situation again?”
Leo nodded and made his way to the street.
Gomez drew his sidearm and planted himself in the corner of the hallway, while Lynch retrieved the key. The half-century old hard-wood floors and wainscoting amplified Gomez’s voice.
“Okay, jagoff! Here’s the deal! We know you’re in one of these rooms! We are assuming you are armed! Under that assumption, we are going to open all four of these doors, one at a time! If anything moves on the other side of any one of them, we are going to start squeezing triggers! That means that things will go a whole lot smoother for everyone involved if you come out on your own!”
Nothing happened. Lynch walked from the secretary’s office and jingled the key.
“You hear that, jagoff? That’s my partner with the key! Let’s get this party started!”
They opened all the doors. They found nothing. Lynch spoke.
“Let’s get this party started?”
“What should I have said?”
“Not that.”
“Whatever. You wanna hear this?”
Gomez did his interviews with a digital recorder. Lynch normally cursed the device, saying it slowed things down and made two steps out of a one-step process, but he gave in. It was the voice of one of the gardeners, and he might as well have been speaking Spanish.
Dee man come to da door. Den vee vork. Den man ask if vee see a man running. Vee tell him no.
For better or worse, it confirmed Leo’s story.
“How in the sweet name of Elvis did he get out of here, then?”
Crime Scene had arrived, so Gomez went to see if they had any success getting prints from the confessional. Lynch met Father Leo in the parking lot. The priest had kept his word.
“What happened?”
Lynch told him what little there was to tell. Leo replied with five words that he found, considering the day’s events, difficult to say.
“Jim, I have an idea.”
9. A Random Intersection
The elderly couple at the stop light felt compelled to say something. They had their windows up, the radio on, and they still heard the screams coming from the car next to them. At first, they thought something was terribly wrong. The man in the car appeared to be having some sort of mental or nervous breakdown. Muffled waves of guttural agony spilled from within, accompanied sparsely by the thump of his fist against the roof of his car and the staccato honks of his horn as he beat his head against his steering wheel. They feared for the man’s safety and were about to call the police when they curiously realized that he wasn’t screaming; he was laughing. He was hysterically laughing. They went from being scared to being puzzled. They still suspected some sort of psychotic episode and were only put at ease when the hysterical laughter was halted by a victorious cheer. The man wasn’t out of his mind; he appeared to be, to their best estimation, celebrating something. Relieved, the elderly woman rolled down her window, managed to catch the eye of the elated man, and signaled for him to roll his down as well.
She hollered across the white line with a thumbs-up.
“Congratulations on whatever it was!”
Philip answered.
“Oh! Thank you very much, ma’am! It has been a good day at that!”
There was another longer honk from behind them. The light had turned green. The woman waved goodbye as she and her husband drove past and into the intersection. Barely able to see through his tears, Philip spit out another guffaw and turned right.
Gotta love Bill Clinton. No one used the term “sexual relations” before him. When Philip told the priest he was lusting after his fictitious sister, he was hoping for “fornication” or “carnal knowledge of,” but the priest exceeded all expectations by replying with “sexual relations”. Philip suspected the priest heard him say “yessss” under his breath when it happened. He almost flat-out lost it after confessing about the (also fictitious) boner in the pool but managed to get himself back in check by beating his head against the wall. He was sure the priest heard that, but it didn’t seem to matter. Neither misstep invoked a comment, so Philip figured he was clear to launch into the masturbation portion of his story. Once he felt he had the priest off balance, he threw him the bone about the hotel parking lot and left. It was brilliant. The only thing more brilliant was his escape.
He didn’t quite execute Plan C, but he now knew it was possible. He checked his watch. As usual, he was running late.
10. Lunch
Gomez drove. Lynch chewed over his notes. Leo’s idea was scribbled in at the end:
Father L. will email blitz his congregation for pics taken at Sat’s Mass – mentioned someone named Constance???
Why not? Couldn’t hurt.
They’d heard from ballistics. No match was found locally, but they were still waiting to hear from a few nearby jurisdictions. In the meantime, Lynch decided to roll the dice and check the system for Matthew Modine. Also, no match…big surprise.
It was a bit after three o’clock. As long as they were in a holding pattern, the detectives decided to get lunch.
“Now, in contrast to koala bears, pigeons…”
“Oh, sweet Jesus, Ernie.”
“And I’m not sure I completely understand this.”
“Then don’t talk about it.”
“There’s something about a pigeon’s eyes. The frame rate or whatever it’s called. It’s like ten or twenty times faster than in humans, so they see shit in slow motion. That’s why pigeons wait until the last second to jump out of the way when they see a car coming.”
Silence followed. Gomez had, once again, stopped a few yards short of his point. Lynch let all the air out of his lungs with a sigh.
“And?”
“That’s the shit man. That’s how you live.”
Lynch had no idea where to even start with a response, so he returned to the task at hand.
“Julie told me Steaks n’ Stuff has a new sandwich.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Barn Yard.”
“What’s it got on it?”
“A bunch of crap and a fried egg.”
Done.
All twelve seats in the Steaks n’ Stuff deli were occupied, so they got their sandwiches to go. The bag weighed close to three pounds and gave off an aroma that was as glorious as it was disgusting.
For Lynch and Gomez, eating lunch in a parked car traditionally led to playing a game they called “What If?” It was, more or less, an exercise in creativity, which was much needed when a case hit a dead end. In the absence of a dead end, they used it just to pass the time. It also put the brain to work, which appealed to Lynch and his irrational fear of Alzheimer’s.
The premise was semi-simple. Step out of the realm of possibility as to not be confined by it. In other words, they would look for motive, means, and opportunity among those who couldn’t have committed the crime.
The first round always started the same. Lynch went first.
“What if you did it?”
Gomez had to play along, or the game wouldn’t work.
“What’s my motive?”
Lynch went for the first commonality between Gomez and Bishop Ryan that came to mind.
“You’re Catholic. Right?”
“Yes, I’m Catholic, dumb-ass.”
“Maybe you blame Ryan for the diddling.”
“Phew! Yuck!”
Leo’s office had its own bathroom, complete with a sink, toilet, and sixty years of embedded odors. It helped to keep the door closed. When left ajar, even slightly (as it was), urine, mold, and disinfectant went straight up the nostrils.
The priest was getting used to his situation. He spoke to be heard.
“Someone left the bathroom open, and it sure as shit wasn’t me.”
Done fuckin’ around.
Three angry strides took him to the stinky door. He gave it a yank.
Empty.
The hand soap wasn’t where it usually was, but that was easy to explain. It was always falling on the floor, and Archbishop Fellini had used the bathroom the day before.
Leo checked the window. As expected, it was swollen and could only open downward a few inches. No one could fit through it. He looked out. Through the leaves of the courtyard’s large maple tree, he saw a gardener pulling weeds but nothing else. No killer in sight.
He checked the remaining two rooms, including the pastor’s office. The only door left was the fire exit at the end of the hall.
“Yeah, that’s how he got out…shit.”
The guy was just a little too fast for the Dirty Harry wannabe from South Philly.
In the distance, he heard the main entrance to the sanctuary open and close… Lynch and Gomez no doubt. They were probably going to tear him a new asshole for not going to the street as instructed.
7. Sitting in Zed Zed
Silently, Arthur acknowledged that the Unjudged was Samuel’s idea, but that didn’t change the fact that, despite his strength of vision, Samuel was no war-time president. Arthur had finally come into his own. Everyone rallied behind him as he waved an invisible banner bearing the sigil of Jeremy. There was no confusion on the matter. They were at war.
Sitting in Zed Zed, once again across the street from Frankie and Jimmy’s, Arthur wished his wimp of a former advocate could see...
You’d have just let this bastard slide. I know it! Take a look! This is what you do when someone throws down the gauntlet! This is how you repay someone who is trying to take it all away from you!
The van was almost full. Traci was in the passenger’s seat. Bubbs, Rick, and Steven were in the back. Traci tapped Arthur on the shoulder and pointed down the street.
“How about that alley?”
“Too close to the bar.”
“We can’t run him all over town.”
“I said it’s too close.”
Rick spoke up.
“I don’t see what the problem is. The industrial complex is right across the bridge.”
“Too far.”
“Artie, it’s not too far. It’s just across the bridge.”
Artie turned ready to jump over the seat and pummel Rick for his impudence, but Traci got herself between them.
“Artie come on. He’s just throwing out ideas like the rest of us.”
“Fucking stupid ideas!”
Rick refused to let up.
“The industrial complex will work.”
“It fucking will not! How are we going to outrun an entire bar from here to the industrial complex, jackass?”
“You just got done saying the alley is too close!”
“Fuck you!!”
Steven and Bubbs thrust their arms in front of Rick, partially to shield him and partially to shut him up. Arthur took a sloppy swing around the back of his captain’s chair and caught Bubbs on the forearm. It was like punching a bowling ball. He let out an intimidating scream to hide the pain, but no one was fooled. He faced forward to wiggle his fingers in private.
Rick swatted away his protectors and pressed his lips together to show he’d surrendered to the futility of arguing.
At the risk of making things worse, Traci made herself heard again.
“We don’t have to run.”
Arthur didn’t have friends. His ambition, self-absorption, and general assholiness left no room. He allowed no one into his life that didn’t have something he could exploit. Bubbs had moron strength; Steven could get drugs; Rick hated cops; Traci had a devious mind and a sweet ass…and whenever she made one or the other available, Arthur paid attention.
“Explain.”
“We’ll need a patsy.”
She paused to make sure she had Arthur’s interest and approval. She had both, so she continued. She also knew she needed to clarify things for Bubbs.
“Someone will need to risk getting caught. I was thinking maybe someone…with a bicycle.”
The corners of Arthur’s mouth turned up slowly. He didn’t much relish the idea of dealing with the little puke again, but he had an inkling of where Traci was going, and he liked it.
Without taking his eyes off of her, he turned on the radio and slid his hand up her shirt. The three in the back collectively rolled their eyes, broke out the cards, and played Skat for cigarettes while Traci hopped onto Arthur’s lap and rode him like a ranked bull.
Ah! The spoils of war!
8. Father Leo’s Office
Leo sat behind his desk still recovering. Lynch sat across.
“I thought you said you were going to be at St. Matthew’s today.”
“Yes. I meant to be. Pastor Karney got called to the Diocese and asked me to hear confessions.”
Lynch had been writing in his notepad since he sat down. Leo might have felt more intimidated were he not preoccupied with adrenaline and feeling stupid.
“Do you know why?”
“Why what?”
Lynch didn’t look up.
“Why he got called to the Diocese?”
“He didn’t say specifically… (topic shift) …Jim, I hope you don’t think I was trying to throw you off my trail this morning when…”
“No, no, no. Not at all. I get it.”
He tapped his pencil on his pad and locked eyes without lifting his head.
“What I don’t get is why you were in the church when I arrived and not out on the street like I told you.”
“Oh yeah. About that… I’m a moron.”
Lynch laughed.
“Fair enough. May I guess that you wanted a look at the guy in case he got away?”
“You may, and you’d be correct.”
“I’m not gonna lie to you. It was pretty dumb, but no blood no foul. You got a Mulligan so…”
“So, in the unlikely event that I ever find myself in a similar situation again, my ass is in the parking lot.”
Lynch smiled inquisitively. He’d never heard a priest swear before. Leo read the look correctly and responded to it.
“The word ‘ass’ is in the bible you know.”
“Yes, but in the bible, it means ‘donkey,’ doesn’t it?”
“Fine, then I’ll bring my donkey to the parking lot.”
“Well played. So, what happened today?”
Leo recounted the events from the moment Constance finished her confession to the moment Lynch arrived as they were forever burned into his brain.
“Well Father, the guy has…”
Balls? Stones? Cajones?
“…nerve. I’ll give him that.”
He flipped over another page and clicked his mechanical pencil.
“Mind if we talk about Saturday, Leo?”
Do I have a choice?
Lynch started off with all the standard questions: “Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Bishop Ryan?” and so forth. Leo wasn’t much help. As he’d said, he didn’t know the Bishop very well. Then the questions turned to the hotel arrangements.
“Who knew where the Bishop was staying?”
“There was a big foul up when he arrived. I was told he wanted to get together after Mass to talk about the groundbreaking ceremony.”
“At the steak house. Right?”
“Yes. I, however, was not told that he never drove on the highway after dark. Apparently, the church always put him up somewhere in town if he chose to stay late.”
“Who made the arrangements, then?”
“I did, about ten minutes before Mass started.”
“Cutting it close.”
“Tell me about it. That’s usually when I write the Homily.”
The joke was completely lost on Lynch.
“So, who knew?”
“Just Bishop Ryan, Pastor Karney, and me, as far as I know.”
Leo realized how that sounded but figured it would be best to let Lynch ask for an alibi. He didn’t. By the surveillance footage, the police knew when the murder took place. From the server logs, they knew that the church voicemail was checked from Father Pascucci’s office phone twelve minutes later. Even with no traffic and all green lights, (which never happened in Potterford) it would have taken just about that much time to get from the Marriott to St. Aloysius. When they tacked on a few minutes for things like getting from the crime scene to the car, parking at the church, and actually getting to the office phone, Father Pascucci was all but taken off the suspect list. Lynch still asked about Pastor Karney.
“Like today, he was at the Diocese. Someone there can vouch for...”
Suddenly …
BRRING BRRING BRRING BRRING BRRING
…the room was overtaken by a deafening alarm. Lynch looked wide-eyed at Leo and hollered.
“Exactly what is that!!? The fire alarm!!?”
“I don’t know!! I never heard it before!!”
They both rose to investigate. The din stopped as Lynch broke the plane of the doorway. The silence revealed screaming…in Spanish.
“I wonder who that could be.”
With hands in pockets, he took a few casual steps to his right, looked to his left, and discovered Gomez having a fist fight with the fire exit.
“The puta went off when I opened the door!!”
Leo returned to his office to call off the fire department. Lynch filled a cup at the water cooler and handed it to his partner.
“Here.”
“Thanks, and by the way, it took me a few minutes, but I realized why you had me interview the landscapers, and I don’t fuckin’ appreciate it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You figured they were Latino.”
“They weren’t?”
“Eastern bloc asshole!”
Leo reappeared. Lynch spoke.
“Father, do you have a key to the rest of these doors?”
“There’s one in the secretary’s office. Why?”
The priest answered his own question. The killer couldn’t have gone out through the fire exit. He would have tripped the alarm. If he entered the hallway, there was only one possibility: He locked himself in one of the other rooms, and if that was the case, he was still there. Leo’s chest revved up again. Lynch spoke slowly and calmly, confident everyone was on the same page.
“Father, Detective Gomez and I have this. Where is the key, exactly?”
“Top desk drawer on the right.”
“Do you remember what you said earlier about finding yourself in this situation again?”
Leo nodded and made his way to the street.
Gomez drew his sidearm and planted himself in the corner of the hallway, while Lynch retrieved the key. The half-century old hard-wood floors and wainscoting amplified Gomez’s voice.
“Okay, jagoff! Here’s the deal! We know you’re in one of these rooms! We are assuming you are armed! Under that assumption, we are going to open all four of these doors, one at a time! If anything moves on the other side of any one of them, we are going to start squeezing triggers! That means that things will go a whole lot smoother for everyone involved if you come out on your own!”
Nothing happened. Lynch walked from the secretary’s office and jingled the key.
“You hear that, jagoff? That’s my partner with the key! Let’s get this party started!”
They opened all the doors. They found nothing. Lynch spoke.
“Let’s get this party started?”
“What should I have said?”
“Not that.”
“Whatever. You wanna hear this?”
Gomez did his interviews with a digital recorder. Lynch normally cursed the device, saying it slowed things down and made two steps out of a one-step process, but he gave in. It was the voice of one of the gardeners, and he might as well have been speaking Spanish.
Dee man come to da door. Den vee vork. Den man ask if vee see a man running. Vee tell him no.
For better or worse, it confirmed Leo’s story.
“How in the sweet name of Elvis did he get out of here, then?”
Crime Scene had arrived, so Gomez went to see if they had any success getting prints from the confessional. Lynch met Father Leo in the parking lot. The priest had kept his word.
“What happened?”
Lynch told him what little there was to tell. Leo replied with five words that he found, considering the day’s events, difficult to say.
“Jim, I have an idea.”
9. A Random Intersection
The elderly couple at the stop light felt compelled to say something. They had their windows up, the radio on, and they still heard the screams coming from the car next to them. At first, they thought something was terribly wrong. The man in the car appeared to be having some sort of mental or nervous breakdown. Muffled waves of guttural agony spilled from within, accompanied sparsely by the thump of his fist against the roof of his car and the staccato honks of his horn as he beat his head against his steering wheel. They feared for the man’s safety and were about to call the police when they curiously realized that he wasn’t screaming; he was laughing. He was hysterically laughing. They went from being scared to being puzzled. They still suspected some sort of psychotic episode and were only put at ease when the hysterical laughter was halted by a victorious cheer. The man wasn’t out of his mind; he appeared to be, to their best estimation, celebrating something. Relieved, the elderly woman rolled down her window, managed to catch the eye of the elated man, and signaled for him to roll his down as well.
She hollered across the white line with a thumbs-up.
“Congratulations on whatever it was!”
Philip answered.
“Oh! Thank you very much, ma’am! It has been a good day at that!”
There was another longer honk from behind them. The light had turned green. The woman waved goodbye as she and her husband drove past and into the intersection. Barely able to see through his tears, Philip spit out another guffaw and turned right.
Gotta love Bill Clinton. No one used the term “sexual relations” before him. When Philip told the priest he was lusting after his fictitious sister, he was hoping for “fornication” or “carnal knowledge of,” but the priest exceeded all expectations by replying with “sexual relations”. Philip suspected the priest heard him say “yessss” under his breath when it happened. He almost flat-out lost it after confessing about the (also fictitious) boner in the pool but managed to get himself back in check by beating his head against the wall. He was sure the priest heard that, but it didn’t seem to matter. Neither misstep invoked a comment, so Philip figured he was clear to launch into the masturbation portion of his story. Once he felt he had the priest off balance, he threw him the bone about the hotel parking lot and left. It was brilliant. The only thing more brilliant was his escape.
He didn’t quite execute Plan C, but he now knew it was possible. He checked his watch. As usual, he was running late.
10. Lunch
Gomez drove. Lynch chewed over his notes. Leo’s idea was scribbled in at the end:
Father L. will email blitz his congregation for pics taken at Sat’s Mass – mentioned someone named Constance???
Why not? Couldn’t hurt.
They’d heard from ballistics. No match was found locally, but they were still waiting to hear from a few nearby jurisdictions. In the meantime, Lynch decided to roll the dice and check the system for Matthew Modine. Also, no match…big surprise.
It was a bit after three o’clock. As long as they were in a holding pattern, the detectives decided to get lunch.
“Now, in contrast to koala bears, pigeons…”
“Oh, sweet Jesus, Ernie.”
“And I’m not sure I completely understand this.”
“Then don’t talk about it.”
“There’s something about a pigeon’s eyes. The frame rate or whatever it’s called. It’s like ten or twenty times faster than in humans, so they see shit in slow motion. That’s why pigeons wait until the last second to jump out of the way when they see a car coming.”
Silence followed. Gomez had, once again, stopped a few yards short of his point. Lynch let all the air out of his lungs with a sigh.
“And?”
“That’s the shit man. That’s how you live.”
Lynch had no idea where to even start with a response, so he returned to the task at hand.
“Julie told me Steaks n’ Stuff has a new sandwich.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Barn Yard.”
“What’s it got on it?”
“A bunch of crap and a fried egg.”
Done.
All twelve seats in the Steaks n’ Stuff deli were occupied, so they got their sandwiches to go. The bag weighed close to three pounds and gave off an aroma that was as glorious as it was disgusting.
For Lynch and Gomez, eating lunch in a parked car traditionally led to playing a game they called “What If?” It was, more or less, an exercise in creativity, which was much needed when a case hit a dead end. In the absence of a dead end, they used it just to pass the time. It also put the brain to work, which appealed to Lynch and his irrational fear of Alzheimer’s.
The premise was semi-simple. Step out of the realm of possibility as to not be confined by it. In other words, they would look for motive, means, and opportunity among those who couldn’t have committed the crime.
The first round always started the same. Lynch went first.
“What if you did it?”
Gomez had to play along, or the game wouldn’t work.
“What’s my motive?”
Lynch went for the first commonality between Gomez and Bishop Ryan that came to mind.
“You’re Catholic. Right?”
“Yes, I’m Catholic, dumb-ass.”
“Maybe you blame Ryan for the diddling.”
