“What? From adults?”
“Hey, I’m an adult.”
“You’re a dork.”
“You’re the dork. What would you do?”
That was Eddie. Like his kid brother’s advice really counted. But he hadn’t had any advice to give. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe I’ll ask Father Jim.” Eddie seeing the face he made and saying, “What’s the matter with him now? It’s getting so you think something’s wrong with everybody.”
“He’s okay.”
“But you don’t really think so?”
“I’m getting that way with everybody, ’cause everybody’s that way.”
“Not Father Jim, Steven.”
“Doesn’t he make you sort of nervous? A little, even? You know, when he flips out, like?”
Eddie had laughed. “That’s not flipping out, it’s just letting go a little. It’s harmless. Even a priest can be too serious all the time.”
“Sometimes it just makes me a little nervous, is all.”
“That’s ’cause you’re not very mature.” But teasing, kidding. Then saying, “I’m gonna call him.”
So right there, in that bedroom, Eddie had called and talked to Father Jim, making an appointment to see him the next night. The night he’d been killed.
And Steven remembering that only now. And Eddie had kept the appointment-how else could Father know about Frannie being pregnant? Then Father went to where he kept the gun?
(He, Eddie and Father had gone shooting enough times below Candlestick. Like the switchblade, or the races down Highway I just flying along against the ocean, it was one of those secrets between Father Jim, Eddie and himself. Mick had never made the cut-he was too uptight. The secret things about Father Jim had been another of the bonds between Eddie and himself.)
It was still too far a stretch to imagine Father Jim thinking he was going to kill Eddie, or wanting to, but he could play with it for a minute, see where it led him… Eddie had gone to visit Father, thinking about this problem he was having with a guy from work. (Steven wished he paid more attention about the details of that, but it had just been another thing Eddie was doing.) Then Father might have said that meeting a guy alone at night, trying to mess with his business, might be dangerous. He’d go along as moral support, and also, just to be safe, he’d bring the gun.
He wouldn’t use it. They wouldn’t plan on using it. But what if the other guy shows up and he’s got a gun, too? Might as well be safe. It hurts nothing. Eddie might have thought the whole idea was dumb, but if Steven knew Father-and he thought he did- he’d make it seem like some kind of game and Eddie would go along with it.
Okay, so now he had Eddie and Father Jim together, with the gun, at the lot. And there it stopped for him. Maybe they’d been goofing around, shooting at things, and there’d been a mistake, an accident, and after that Father had gotten scared. Sure, that made sense. Father didn’t plan to kill him. Steven could see how he’d feel, being like one of the family and all. And having to explain to Mom and Pop about the gun. They might see it as his -Father’s-fault. And it wouldn’t have been. It could easily have been an accident…
And how about this? Father burying Eddie in the Catholic cemetery, absolutely-he used the world “morally”-certain that Eddie hadn’t killed himself.
For all of his carrying on, Father was first and foremost a priest -he would never have buried Eddie in sacred ground unless he knew for a fact he hadn’t committed suicide. And how could he know that if he hadn’t been there?
Steven leaned his head back against the pillow. In the front of the house he heard his mother vacuuming.
Mom. That was the whole problem now. Her thinking that Eddie had somehow rejected them all, didn’t love them enough. It was eating her up.
And suddenly there it was! The solution to everything. It was easy to explain, although it would be pretty hard to do. Except Father Jim and he were friends and maybe it was time to break out of the kid thing and take Eddie’s place a little, be a little more adult. He wasn’t as good at arguing as Eddie, but he was way better than Mick, and if he could only catch Father in the right mood, and alone, he might be able to get to him.
See? All Father had to do, he figured, was tell Mom. That’s all. Not Pop. Not Hardy or anybody else. Mom was closer to Father, was more likely to forgive him. And that would be that. And he -Steven-would be the one who’d pulled it all together. For Mom. So she could start being okay again, and maybe find some room to fit him into her feelings.
Convincing Father to tell Mom, that would be the hard part. But really all he had to do was make Father realize how it had affected Mom, how she would certainly continue to waste away. Like him, like Eddie had been, Father couldn’t stand it when Mom was unhappy. So all he had to do was make it clear to him that she was miserable, and why.
But first he had to make sure it had happened the way he’d figured it, and there was a way to do that. Just ask Father.
Hardy watched Glitsky disappear into the hallway. A guy sitting at a desk nearby, having heard Glitsky’s heated exchange with Hardy, nodded after the sergeant and said he thought a blow job would be out of the question, and Hardy went back to Abe’s cubicle to get his stuff and return the Walkman.
He still wanted verification on the voice prints. But, hey, he thought, I want to win the lottery, too. Still, the voice comparison looked do-able.
The room had gone back to its business. There was somebody there, he was sure, that he could hit on and get the thing done as a favor. Everybody by now knew he was a friend of Abe’s. Whether that was good or bad was a toss-up.
He stood, leaning against the particleboard that denned Abe’s space. Lieutenant Joe Frazelli opened his door far to Hardy’s right, scanned the room and called out a couple of names.
Two guys sitting at desks facing each other doing paperwork stopped and got up. “Yo,” one of them said.
Hardy thought the woman he’d gotten the Walkman from was promising. She sat about midway between Glitsky’s cubicle and the lieutenant’s office, where the door had just opened, so Hardy found himself walking parallel to the two guys, back toward Frazelli. He was just about to open his mouth to the woman when he heard the lieutenant say: “We got an apparent suicide over at St. Elizabeth’s Church. You know the place, out on Taraval? Carbon monoxide. You guys want to check it out? Get out of the office a while?”
Behind Hardy, another voice called out. “Hey, Joe, where was that?”
Frazelli looked right through Hardy at the voice behind him. “St. Elizabeth’s.”
Hardy saw Griffin saying something to another guy in his cubicle. When he turned back to Frazelli he saw Hardy standing there, staring at him. He spoke to the two officers who had been on their way to the lieutenant’s office. “You guys mind if me and Vince take it? It might tie with something we’re on.”
“Sure, it’s yours,” one of them said.
Hardy spoke up. “I’m gonna tag along.”
Griffin said, “It’s a free country.”
Steven woke up alert. The pills didn’t seem to be knocking him out as bad as they had. Or maybe it was that there was so much for him to think about. Probably that was it.
The vacuuming had stopped. He heard his mother messing around in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, emptying the dishwasher. It was something how quiet the house was with no TV or radio going, no records on, Mom not humming or singing while she worked. She’d stopped doing that, and she used to do it all the time.
In the quiet, the quiet deepened. Mom wasn’t moving at all, maybe just leaning against the counter, or sitting at the table. The telephone rang and he heard her say: “Oh, hi, Jim.” She paused. “What’s the matter?”
Steven reached for the extension phone by his bed and picked up the receiver in time to hear Father Jim saying: “… can’t believe this is happening again, right on top of…”