Harlot's Moon (2 page)

"I mean it's raining, and I feel like I may be getting a head cold but I don't care. I'm not going to be depressed."

"I'm proud of you."

"I'm not even going to think about Frank this morning," she said.

"That's the way to do it."

"You don't give a damn about any of this, do you? You'll say anything to shut me up. You won't even tell me the truth about my buns when I ask you, will you?"

"Oh God," I said, "not the buns thing. It's too early in the morning."

Felice is a woman I met at a seminar I spoke at last year.

She attended because the subject of psychological profiling, which I did during my years with the FBI and which I now do for law firms and police departments who need specialized help from time to time, interested her. She hadn't enrolled in college. She just attended seminars.

You can take her the wrong way, Felice, and a lot of people do. They see the doe-eyed beauty and the reckless poise, and they hear all about the money, and they think she's a cream-puff. But they don't bother to see the sorrow. Two bad marriages, with her being cheated in all meanings of that word by both husbands. Nor do they see the neurotic, alcoholic parents who raised her. Or the three miscarriages that ultimately landed her in a mental hospital up in Dubuque. Every few months she tries some new anti-depressant but none of them ever work very well for her. She's walked down some long, hard road, Felice has.

Lately, she's become obsessed with her buns. This started about a month ago when she went up to the mall to try on swimsuits for summer and happened to get a glimpse of her bottom in a four-way mirror.

"I'm going to walk over to the window, all right? And you watch my buns as I walk, okay?"

I sighed. "All right."

"And be honest now."

"Of course."

"You bastard. You really don't care about this, do you?" She was genuinely on the verge of tears.

"God, look, Felice, I like your buns. Just the way they are, I mean."

"And how are they?"

"How are they what?"

"They're drooping, aren't they? That's what you're afraid to tell me, aren't you?"

"They aren't drooping."

"Then they're sliding."

"They aren't drooping and they aren't sliding, either."

"You're sure?"

She stood at the head of the bed completely naked, her backside to me, her fetching face in profile over her shoulder. Her flesh would be nice and soft and she would smell wonderfully of sleep. I liked her butt, I liked her arms, I liked her ears, I liked her elbows, and I liked every other part of her, too. I especially liked her soul. For all her self-absorption, she was one of the sweetest, most tender women I'd ever known.

Then she smiled. "God, I can't believe I'm doing this again. Can you? The buns thing, I mean. All the poor people who don't have anything to eat and all the poor people in mental hospitals and all the poor people dying of some terrible disease — and I'm whining about my butt."

"You said it. I didn't."

"I don't know how you can stand me. You're such an . . . adult, Robert. You really are. And I'm — I'm—"

She apparently couldn't find a word derogatory enough.

The six-unit apartment house sits on a shelf of rock above the Cedar River. On sunny days you can see half a mile upriver, to the first bend where the speed boats race on Sundays. Now the windows were hard gray and dirty with city rain. Rain has a tyrannical effect on Felice's moods. Fortunately, her bad moods are sometimes tempered by her sense of irony. As now, when she suddenly realized that the buns thing was getting tiresome.

The phone rang.

She smiled at me. She has a lovely damned smile. She really does. "I'm tired of talking about my buns. How about talking about my left breast?"

"I think I'd rather talk about your right one, if you don't mind. We always talk about your left one."

She laughed. "I'm sorry I started in on the buns thing, Robert. I really am. Do you think they offer night-school courses in how to be an adult?"

That's the other thing about Felice. She apologizes like the morning-after drunk who destroyed your living room the night before.

I picked up on the fourth ring.

The funny thing was even though I had seen him only sporadically over the past fifteen years, I recognized his voice immediately.

"Robert Payne?"

"Hey, Father Gray. How are you?"

"You don't have to call me "Father," Robert. You know that."

Steve Gray and I had grown up in the same rural town where I still kept the house where Kathy and I had lived, Kathy being my young wife who'd died of an aneurysm four years earlier. Steve had always been the jock and I'd always been the book reader. I'd been a more likely candidate for the priesthood than him. He'd had plenty of girls, had put away more than his share of teenage beer, and had even smoked a few illicit joints in his time. He went to the University of Iowa for two years, made the first-string JV football squad, and then suddenly transferred to the seminary in Dubuque. His beloved father had died of cancer over a grim two-year period. During that time, Steve drove back home from college every chance he got.

Watching his father die had changed Steve. He suddenly understood the 'idea' of Jesus Christ, he'd explained to me one beery night a few years back. Even if you didn't believe that Christ was divine, you had to believe in the compassion and dignity of His words, Steve said. So Steve became a priest. He was now a Monsignor, and a very young Monsignor, at St Mallory's here in Cedar Rapids.

I suppose we distrust the kind of religious calling Steve got. We're too cynical about such things. Some people really do want to live their lives helping others.

The last time I'd spoken to Steve I'd asked him if he could give me a general dispensation for sins such as fornication and masturbation but he said he didn't think he could do stuff like that. Not and keep his Roman collar anyway.

"It's great to hear your voice, Steve."

A hesitation. "Robert, I need to ask you a favor and if you don't want to do it, I'll certainly understand. It may be . . . illegal."

"What's the favor, Steve?"

Felice was watching me carefully. The word 'Father' had gripped her attention.

"I'd like you to come to the Palms Motel."

"Out on 49?"

"Right."

"Come now, you mean?"

"Yes. But I need to tell you the rest of it."

"All right."

"There's a dead man in the room."

"I see."

"A priest. He worked with me at St Mallory's."

"Don't say anything more on the phone. I'm working for lawyers in a murder case and the other side may have bugged this phone."

"They really do things like that?"

"They really do things like that." I swung my legs off the bed. "What's the room number?"

"154. Ground level. Around back."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes."

"Is it illegal, you coming out here this way?"

"Probably. But I'm not going to worry about that right now."

"I really appreciate it, Robert."

When I got off the phone and stood up, Felice said, "You'll want to take the first shower."

"Thank you, honey — that would be helpful."

She stood there lusciously naked, hip-switched, her sweet face that of a little girl who wants to ask her father a question but is afraid to.

"You probably don't want to talk about it, do you?"

"The phone call?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know much more than that there's a dead priest in a motel room."

"God. A dead priest. Wow."

All the time we talked, I grabbed socks and underwear and shirt and slacks and tie.

She came over and touched my arm. "I'm sorry about my butt. For bugging you about it, I mean."

I kissed her quickly. "I'm not sorry about it. In fact, I'm very happy about it. You have a wonderful butt. A glorious butt."

"Honest?"

"Honest."

"You're nice." She kissed me back.

"So're you," I said.

Then she grabbed my left cheek.

"You've got a yummy butt, too, Robert."

I was showered and dressed in under five minutes. I'd recently had my hair cut very short. Didn't even need a drier these days.

"You look good," she said.

I kissed her again.

"I hope your friend is going to be all right. The priest."

"I hope so, too."

A priest in a motel with another priest, this one dead. All sorts of lurid possibilities came reluctantly to mind.

I gave her another kiss, this one as much for my sake as for hers, and left.

Fifteen minutes later, I turned into the parking area of the Palms Motel. It was the sort of place the tabloids love, the peeling paint and broken neon sign and cracked windows symbols of the peeling and broken and cracked souls who inhabited the rooms themselves. Whores got murdered here sometimes — usually forlorn black girls from the wrong end of the south-east side, or ample farm maidens from one of the small towns surrounding Cedar Rapids.

I found Room 154 and pulled into the closest available parking spot.

I lingered a moment in the cold morning rain, the hard relentless kind of spring downpour only the farmers love. I looked around to see if anybody was watching. Down at the far end of the sidewalk, a man in a white cowboy hat and a brown western suit came out of his room, carrying a thick briefcase. He rattled the door knob several times to make sure it was locked, then got into his big Chevrolet van.

When he was done backing up and turning around, headed in the opposite direction, I walked over to 154 and knocked. Father Steven Gray opened the door immediately.

T
he room was dark and tomb-cold. The only light came from the bathroom in the back. There was a mixture of smells: mildew, dirty rugs, towels, linen, and death. The dead man had shit himself. He lay hunched fetus-style in the middle of the double bed. He was without shirt or socks. His pants were unbuckled. I wasn't sure what to make of any of these details. His mouth was open as if in a silent scream, the lips violent red with blood.

I stood in the room and let myself be suffused with its history; all the betrayals and loneliness. The furnishings, stained, chipped, and dusty, looked too dirty to sit on.

"What's his name, Steve?"

"Father Daly. Peter Daly."

"From St. Mallory's?"

"Yes."

I took a penlight from my sport jacket and knelt down next to the bed. I wanted a closer look at the wound in the chest. It was a large one. I suspected he'd been stabbed several times in the heart. But his open mouth was even more perplexing. This was not commonly seen in a murder victim. I shone my light inside and gagged. My entire body spasmed. I'd never seen anything like this.

"What is it?" Steve said.

"His tongue has been cut out."

"Oh, my Lord."

I went in the back and looked in the bathroom. Though I saw no blood I smelled some, probably in the dirt-and-mustard-colored carpeting. The police lab man would use a test called Luminol to see if there was indeed blood in the rug.

Steve Gray followed me around like a child trailing a parent. He wore a white button-down shirt, a blue windbreaker, chinos and Reeboks. I wondered if the Pope ever dressed like that.

"You looking for anything in particular, Robert?"

"Not really," I said.

When I came out of the bathroom, he said, "We need to talk"

I shook my head. "Talk is for later. What we need to do now is call the police. You can't afford to stall them any longer."

"I called two other people," he said. "And they're on their way over."

"Who are they?"

"Bob Wilson, who is the President of the Parish Board, and Father Ryan. He's the only priest left at St Mallory's now — besides me, I mean." He stared down at the dead priest. "We don't always agree, Father Ryan and I, but this time we do."

"Why invite them now?"

He raised his gaze from the corpse on the bed.

"They're better at press relations than I am. I'll need their help."

I surveyed chairs, end-tables, bed and bathroom counters for anything that had been left behind. There was a golden earring on one of the end-tables. It had been cast in the shape of a heart. I left it where it was. The lab folks would be very angry if I didn't. An open condom wrapper on the bed proclaimed itself to be of the ribbed variety, with a "special" tip.

"Is that what they call a French tickler?" Steve said.

"Uh-huh."

He made a face. "He was quite a guy."

I didn't want to touch the phone so I walked out of the room and went up to the office. Steve walked alongside me.