Imagine feeling that a priest could be a regular friend of his, maybe even a close one. It was surprising, the charge Hardy got out of Cavanaugh’s company. Jim’s conversation was a soup, a stew, a goulash of politics, sports and what he called the “cheap m’s” of popular culture-music and movies-all seasoned-peppered more like it-with roughly equal parts vulgarity and poetry. Like, who else but Cavanaugh would have known off the top of his head that Linda Polk wasn’t, couldn’t have been, descended from James K. Polk, eleventh President of the United States? Because Polk had been childless.
He was also fun to hang with because you met a lot of women. Though the guy had to be close to sixty, he had three times Hardy’s hair, and all of it looked better. While they talked and drank (Cavanaugh in some baggy khakis and a loose blousy light-green thing with an open neck), three women had joked with them, butting in, leaving openings you could drive a truck through. But he’d closed the door on them all with a practiced grace that told Hardy this happened all the time.
Another reason they probably got along, he told himself, was that they still had Eddie Cochran in common. Except for Jane, it was pretty much the only thing on Hardy’s mind, and once he’d started talking, Cavanaugh had seemed as obsessed with it as Hardy was himself. It didn’t get boring-at least going over it with Jim, who still leaned toward the late Sam Polk as the murderer even after Hardy said that he’d been visible that whole night at a party his wife had thrown.
That was the bitch of the whole thing-none of the suspects could have done it unless one of them had at least one accomplice. And there was no indication of that at all.
Back in his office, undressed for bed, Hardy saw the three darts stuck on either side of the 20. About five drinks (and one double) unsteady (which he thought wasn’t very), he pulled them from the board and went back to the line in front of his desk.
He took a deep breath and held it, then let it out slowly. He shook his head once quickly, then let fly the first dart, nodded as it plocked into the 20.
“Okay,” he said.
One thing was certain-neither he nor Cavanaugh accepted Ed’s death as a suicide, although Jim’s feeling seemed to be more visceral than Hardy’s. To Hardy, even forgetting the suspects and their alibis, the facts simply didn’t support that finding. With Jim it was more an article of faith. Eddie Cochran wouldn’t have done it-not that way, not any way.
Hardy’s second dart hit the tiny slice of triple 20, a good shot by any standards. He put the last dart down on the desk. Tonight, for a change of pace, he’d quit winners.
The wooden chair was cold against the skin of his butt and back, but he forced himself down into it. There were scraps of paper on the desk-dribs and drabs of ideas he’d entertained over the last week or so, and he wanted to clear the decks for the morning. He was damned glad he hadn’t seen Moses this afternoon. He probably wouldn’t have been able to have stopped himself from bragging that the case was solved, which it pretty emphatically was not.
Suddenly the drink-and-talk-inspired euphoria faded. Hardy looked at the scraps of paper in his hand and wondered what the hell any of them meant. Fancy theories and clever words.
Absently, he reached over to his phone machine. He wanted to hear Jane’s voice again, and he didn’t think he’d erased the messages. The last thing had been Jim’s phone number. There it was, in fact, on one of the pieces of paper.
He flicked the machine.
“Thank you,” he heard. The end of Jim’s earlier message.
Then Jane’s voice again. “I’m just thinking about…”
But then he stopped listening. Something jangled deep in his brain, and the hairs on his arms and legs stood up over the chicken flesh. He switched the machine back to reverse.
“… 5081. Thank you.”
He closed his eyes, rewound again, listened. “Thank you.” He played it over in his mind, hearing it fresh.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
He had put the police tape into the drawer down to his right. He held his breath, irrationally terrified that it wouldn’t be there anymore, but it was. He spun around on the chair and carefully placed the tape into the machine. It was short enough. “There is a body in the parking lot of the Cruz Publishing Company.” A tiny, strained pause, perhaps trying to think of something to add. Nope. Then just, “Thank you.”
Back at his desk, he lifted the phone machine and brought it over next to the tape recorder. He played the two “Thank you’s” one after the other, first one then the other, both ways.
Cavanaugh’s message of earlier that night. The formal, cultured, unaccented voice without a personality, a smile, an attitude to color it.
Put it together, Diz, he said to himself. That’s why the call had come from halfway across the city. Cavanaugh had been driving home. Or took a bus or a cab. Or got home and went out again, not wanting to call from the rectory, and maybe not knowing they had automatic tracing on 911 calls.
He played the police tape another time, hearing the voice he’d been listening to most of the night. The voice that had been telling him more than he’d been hearing. Jesus.
There was a safe in the room where he kept some papers and his guns. He opened it, took both tapes from their machines and put them inside, closing it then and spinning the combination.
Going back to his bedroom, he picked up the last dart. He put his weight on his left foot, feeling the tape with his toes. “Double bull’s eye,” he said out loud. He threw the dart.
Sure enough.
Chapter Thirty-one
Dominus… ” he began, his arms spread wide. Immediately he caught himself. “The Lord be with you.”
Slipping back into Latin. His mind must really be miles away. Raising his eyes to the tiny congregation, he realized that no one, not even the altar boys, had noticed the slip.
He had to concentrate. He was, after all, saying a Mass, and even a sinful priest loses none of his powers. Believing otherwise was formal heresy.
But it was difficult to pay attention. He had the altar boy pour quite a lot of wine into the chalice hoping a little hair of the dog would help the nagging headache. Still, he knew it wasn’t his throbbing temples that were distracting him.
He had so hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but last night with Dismas it was pretty clear that the police weren’t going to be satisfied with their suspects. And that meant the search was still on. If there was no new evidence, though, they would be forced to leave it a suicide, or give up, and his horrible… mistake would never be known.
And he couldn’t let it be known, ever. It would do irreparable harm to the Church, to say nothing of the further pain it would cause all those close to him.
All right, he’d made his peace with God now. He’d confessed, and that ought to be the end of it until he went before St. Peter.
Could God forgive him? He had to believe He could. Could he ever forgive himself? No. He knew that now. Killing Eddie had been far, far beyond the worst peccadilloes he’d indulged in over the years to ease the terrible burden of living a holy life, the unending boredom of sinlessness. He thought he’d grown inured to the twinges of conscience that the occasional sin, the moments of temporary weakness, had driven him to. But killing Eddie had been, if there was such a thing, unforgivable.
When Eddie had come to the rectory that night-Erin’s first son, the son they should have had together-with that special fire that only he possessed, and told him he and Frannie were going to have a baby, he finally could stand it no longer.
How did one boy deserve all he had been given? Surely he, Jim Cavanaugh, who had spent his whole life denying, denying, being denied, should have been given a chance, one brief moment, for this boy’s happiness?