Father Jimmie went into the vestibule of the church and smelled the wind and rain and leaves blowing in the street. He wished he had not answered the phone in the rectory. It was a gray, wet day, with a touch of winter in the air, but it reminded him of Kentucky in the late fall, just before Advent, when a great dampness would settle on the Cumberland Mountains and the color would drain out of the sky and the fields and the leaves of the hardwoods would turn to flame in the hollows. It should have been a day to watch football and eat soup and hot bread and perhaps jog in Audubon Park. But he could not refuse a request for reconciliation, no matter how neurotic, self-absorbed, or irritating the source was.
He opened the door to a side corridor that led to the back entrance of a confessional, placed his stole around his neck, and sat down inside. He heard someone open the door to the adjoining box and the person's weight depress the kneeler that was attached to the partition separating the penitent from the confessor. Father Jimmie pushed back the wood slide that covered the small, grilled, gauze-covered window through which the penitent, in this case a man who smelled of street damp and hair tonic, would make his confession.
But the man did not speak.
"Are you the gentleman who called the rectory?" Father Jimmie asked.
"That I am, Father."
"What is it you'd like to tell me?"
Father Jimmie could see the outline of the man's head. The ears looked like they had been carved around the edges with a paring knife. He heard the man snuff down in his nose and shift his weight on the kneeler.
"Been a while since I've visited one of these," the man said.
"Yes?"
"I'm a bit flummoxed. Hold on a bit, Father, while I organize my thoughts."
Father Jimmie heard what he thought was the man's lunch box clattering open inside the confessional. "What are you doing in there?" he asked.
"Nothing." The man was breathing hard now. "I met a Catholic sister on the train. I was rude to her. She's a friend of yours. So I apologize for that."
"Oh, you're the fellow. Well, she already called me. I'll pass on your apologies. Is that it?"
"I scared the shite out of her. She tell you that?"
"Don't do it anymore and it won't be a problem. Is that all you have to tell me. Because if it is "
"No, it is fucking not, sir."
"What did you say?"
The man was breathing hard through his nose now, a ray of light from outside the confessional glimmering on the planed surfaces of his face.
"I said give me a fucking minute, if you please," he said.
"Are you drunk?"
The man did not reply. He seemed to burn with energies he couldn't express. He rocked on the kneeler and twisted his head from side to side, then made a grinding noise in his throat. The lunch box clattered with sound again, as though the man had dropped a heavy object in it and snapped the latch on the lid.
"Tell the nun she's a splendid woman and I hope she lives long enough to have a bishop for a son. Send up a thanks to your patron saint, Father. Maybe buy a Powerball ticket while you're at it," the man said.
He flung open the door of the confessional and stalked through the vestibule and out the front of the church. Father Jimmie followed him as far as the front steps and watched him walk toward Canal, a golfer's cap pulled down on his head, his narrow shoulders hunched forward in the rain, his lunch box glistening with moisture. The man looked back over his shoulder at Father Jimmie, his face contorted, as though he had just fled a burning building.
It had rained through the night in New Iberia, and in the morning the sun rose like a pink wafer out of a blanket of fog that covered the cane fields. When I got to the office the parents of Lori Parks were waiting for me. Sometimes the survivors of family members who meet violent deaths have no place to direct their anger and loss other than at the police officer who is assigned to help them. Their rage is understandable, particularly when a cop is straight up and informs them the percentages are not in favor of justice being done. But sometimes the anger of the survivors has more to do with guilt than grief.
The father was sandy haired and tall, with an aquiline nose, the tops of his forearms sun freckled, his hands long and tapered. The wife was built like a stump, a ring of fat under her chin, her hair dyed dark red, her perfume a chemical fog.
"I hear you're questioning the employees of the daiquiri shops in town," the father said.
"Yes, sir, that's correct," I said.
He and his wife had not taken a seat when I offered them one. They looked down at me, from across my desk, stolid, angry, their defenses and denial rooted in concrete.
"Are you saying our daughter was DWI?" he asked.
"That's the conclusion of our lab."
He nodded silently, the color in his eyes deepening, the skin around the rim of his nostrils whitening.
"So the truck and bus drivers are off the hook?" he said.
"I don't think they're players in this," I said.
"Excuse me?" the wife said.
"I think your daughter and her friends were served alcohol illegally. I'd like to put the people in jail who empowered them to drink and drive. But to be truthful I don't think that's going to happen."
"Our daughter is responsible for her own death? Is that it? A seventeen-year-old girl burns to death and it's her goddamn fault?" the father said.
I leaned forward on my desk and picked up a paper clip from the ink blotter, then dropped it. "Dr. Parks, I'm sorry for your loss. Your daughter had a history. It's one a lot of kids have today. But the fact won't go away that she'd had her license suspended previously and she was on probation for possession of Ecstacy. Was she ever in any kind of treatment program?"
"How dare you?" the wife said.
"How about it, sir?" I said to her husband.
"You're scapegoating my daughter, you sonofabitch," he said.
"We're done here," I said. I folded my hands on my desk blotter and avoided eye contact with them.
"We'll be back," the father said.
"I have no doubt about that," I replied.
At mid-morning I walked down the street, across the railroad tracks, and had coffee and a piece of pastry at Lagniappe Too on Main. When I got back to the department a black woman in blue slacks, a beige shirt, and polished black shoes was waiting for me by the dispatcher's cage. She carried a zippered satchel under her arm.
What was her name? Andrepont? No, Arceneaux. Clotile Arceneaux. Clete had said she looked like a black swizzle stick with a cherry stuck on the end. He should have been a writer rather than a chaser of bail skips, I thought.
"Got a minute?" she said.
"For you, anytime," I said.
She walked with me to my office. I closed the door behind her. "N.O.P.D. hasn't busted you back to meter maid, have they?" I said.
"Thought I might show you some photos of an interesting guy who just got to town," she said.
"You want to tell me who you are?"
She smiled at me with her eyes and removed a manilla folder from her satchel. "You ever see this guy before?" she asked.
There were four black-and-white photographs inside the folder, three taken with a zoom lens, one taken in the garish light of a Toronto booking room. The man in the photographs made me think of a ring attendant at a boxing gym or a horse groom at the track. "Nope, I don't know him," I said.
"His name is Max Coll. He's been questioned or been a suspect in thirty-two homicides. Not one conviction. Interpol thinks he worked for the IRA but they're not sure. Miami P.D. says he's freelance and jobs out for the Mob. We had a tail on him yesterday, but he shook it. We think he showed up at your friend Father Dolan's."