The 7th Canon (3 page)

You’re stalling.

Just hoping for one more.

The dormitory looked like an army bunkhouse with metal-framed beds perpendicular to the wall, but it was the best use of the space. Several boys lay watching grainy images on the television mounted to the ceiling. The shelter received only four channels, none clearly. Cable was not in the budget, which explained the cardboard box of well-used videocassettes.

The new arrival sat on the edge of the bed nearest the window. Father Tom had never seen him before. Sadly, the faces in the Tenderloin changed too often. Getting a boy to come to the shelter was difficult, and establishing trust that first night, critical.

The boy had been unwilling to provide a name. This being his first night, Father Martin decided not to push it. The boy said everyone called him Red. With bright-red hair, it wasn’t difficult to figure out why. Father Martin watched Red take a quick drag on a previously concealed cigarette and flick the burning butt through the grate covering the window. He prohibited smoking in the shelter, as well as drugs, alcohol, and fighting.

Father Tom stepped lightly; he liked to make the boys think he could materialize out of thin air, everywhere and nowhere. “How’s it going?” he asked.

Red’s head snapped as if on a string. Strands of red hair fell across his face. He’d shaved the other half of his head nub short. Silver loop earrings pierced his left nostril and right eyebrow on a face pockmarked by acne. Father Tom estimated him to be fifteen, though in the Polk Gulch, age was often difficult to determine. The boys grew up fast. Red’s problem at the moment was he had not exhaled his last drag.

Father Tom looked out the window as if to consider the darkening sky. “Looks like a storm,” he said. “Why don’t we close the window so we’re not heating the neighborhood, as my mother liked to say.”

Red’s face contorted. His brow furrowed.

“Do you smell smoke?” Father Tom asked. He turned to Danny Simeon. The young man sat in a corner of the room working with an array of circuit boards and computer parts. “Danny, do you smell smoke?”

Simeon lifted his head and sniffed the air like a dog detecting an odor on the wind, all part of their routine. “You know, Father T, I think I do smell smoke.”

“I hope it’s not a fire, could burn the whole building down.”

Unable to hold out any longer, Red coughed a gray cloud. When he’d stopped hacking, Father Tom smiled and pointed to the sign on the wall—a cigarette outlined in a red circle with a slash through it. “You have any more?”

Red shook his head.

At check-in, each boy stored his valuables in a locker in Father Tom’s office. Cigarettes fell into that category. It prevented bartering and intimidation. Everybody at the shelter was equal. Each had nothing.

“OK. Any questions?”

Red shook his head. Then he blurted, “Yeah. Are you really a priest?”

“Don’t I look like a priest?”

Red shook his head. “No.”

Father Tom wore blue jeans with holes in the knees and a white T-shirt stretched tight across sinewy muscles. His shaved head, diamond-stud earring, and tattoo had caused considerable alarm in the upper-middle-class parish to which the Archdiocese of San Francisco had first assigned him. Those parishioners’ rejection had given him the opportunity to pitch the archdiocese his idea to open a shelter for troubled young men. When the shelter finally opened—after a long detour around roadblocks, red tape, and vocal opposition—an article in the
San Francisco Examiner
had dubbed Father Tom “The Priest of Polk Street.”

Father Tom smiled. “Yes, I’m really a priest.” He pulled out a large ring with multiple keys. “Though sometimes I feel more like a janitor. At the moment, I need to go lock the front door. Then I’ll come back, and we can talk.”

He walked to where Simeon sat, deep in concentration. Once a street kid himself, Simeon had been Father T’s first real success. They’d met at a homeless shelter. Simeon had an affinity for computers, and Father Tom eventually convinced him to enroll in technical classes at a local junior college. To get Simeon off the street, Father Tom had him supervise the dormitory at night. With Simeon’s class load increasing, however, he needed more privacy to study and kept a room at the back of a restaurant where he worked as a busboy.

“One kick-ass computer, Father T,” Simeon said. He fit two pieces onto a circuit board. “Though this is like putting parts of a sixty-five Chevy into a new Cadillac.”

“Sorry, Danny, right now we need lights and heat more than a computer.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Simeon put down the stubborn pieces. “Lockdown?”

“We’re a shelter, Danny, not a penitentiary.”

“Tell me about it.” Simeon stood. “If we were a pen, we’d get a lot more money from the state, and better food.”

Father Tom couldn’t argue the logic.

Simeon faced the bunks and spoke in an uncanny Sylvester Stallone impersonation. “All right, convicts, lockdown. Warden here is taking the keys. Anyone leaves, better hope to find a stairwell smells like urine to sleep in.”

Father Tom smiled and shook his head. He walked out the door, checking his watch. He was really late. He hurried down the hall, sandals slapping the worn linoleum. A streak of lightning flashed overhead. He looked up to the chicken-wire-reinforced skylight. It shone blue. Seconds later, thunder rumbled. Music to his ears.

Then the lights cut out.

“Damn,” he said, stopping. He hoped it was the weather and not PG&E cutting power to the building. He was late paying his bills again, though he’d called and they’d said they’d work with him. He hoped it was just a blown fuse. The building was old and still on a breaker system, and fuses were cheap.

From down the hall, he heard the dormitory door open. “What’s going on?” Danny Simeon asked.

“Could be the storm,” Father Martin said. “I’m going to check the fuse box. Get the flashlights out of the closet, and keep everyone inside the room.”

The fuse box to the building was in a closet located at the back of the recreation room, which was situated across the hall from Father Tom’s office. Father Tom kept a flashlight in the closet. He sorted through his key ring in the limited ambient light from the skylight, found the key, and unlocked the double-wide doors. Stepping in, he hurried across the room. In the dark, the life-size ceramic Nativity scene at the front of the room looked like a group of San Francisco’s homeless huddled against the cold.

He’d made it halfway across the linoleum when his sandal slid out from under him and he fell backward. Instinctively, he put out his hand to brace his fall, catching his left wrist at an odd angle. He heard it snap. An electric bolt of pain shot up his arm, momentarily sapping the world of color. On the tile floor he writhed in agony, fighting the nausea and urge to vomit. When he was finally able to sit up, he cradled his arm to his body. A cold sweat broke out across his forehead. He’d broken his arm, no question about it, and he’d need to get to the hospital, which meant calling an ambulance and leaving Danny in charge. He looked to the spot where his foot had slid; he needed another leak in the roof like he needed a hole in the head.

Instead of a puddle, however, he noticed a series of spots, a linear pattern that didn’t fit with a leak. Neither did the dark color, too dark to be water, even with the lights out. He touched a spot with the tip of his finger and held it up to the dim light. Still uncertain, he touched his finger to his tongue and recognized the bitter, iron taste.

“Blood.”

He checked his hands and elbows but found no cuts.

In pain, and with his nausea worsening, he managed to get to his feet. Clutching his arm, he followed the trail of blood to where the three Magi knelt shoulder to shoulder alongside a lamb and cow, all in adoration of the child in the manger.

“Oh, no.”

Father Martin stopped. Though his brain urged him forward, his feet remained anchored to the floor. He dropped to his knees and reached out, hoping to touch porcelain but instead feeling flesh.

Andrew Bennet’s body lay in the manger, arms draped over the sides, knuckles dragging in the puddle of blood beneath the straw.

Lightning crackled overhead, a strobe of sharp, blue light. A second later, thunder rocked the building, and the first drops of rain splattered on the glass roof.

The storm had arrived.

Chapter 3

Donley shut the door on his way out of Benny’s room and stepped over Bo, their Rhodesian ridgeback. Bo lay in the middle of the hallway, trying to get as close to the heater vent as possible. The lights glowed in their bedroom, but Kim had rolled onto her side, with her back to him, covers pulled tight. He picked up the legal file from the filing cabinet doubling as a nightstand, slid into bed, and adjusted the flexible lamp clipped to the headboard. No rest for the wicked. He needed an argument to explain why another of Lou’s clients, Vincenzo Anitolli, was of sound mind at the time he executed a codicil to his will, re-inheriting his three sons.

It would not be easy. Witnesses for the stepmother, thirty years Anitolli’s junior, would testify that Anitolli claimed to be Elvis Presley the day before he executed the document and had broken into a spontaneous rendition of “Jailhouse Rock” in the retirement-home cafeteria—still apparently nimble enough to get up on a table, arms and hips swinging until his pajama pants slid to his knees and the orderlies corralled him.

Where Lou found all these people, and how he had managed to run a law firm for forty-plus years without charging them, were two of the great mysteries of his practice. Lou’s clients knew him from every walk of his life, and every one of them professed to know and love Lou like a brother. Thank God one of those was Archbishop Donatello Parnisi, who had grown up with Lou in North Beach, and whose friendship explained why the Catholic Archdiocese had rejected the downtown law firms for the solo practitioner with the crazy clientele to handle its legal matters.

Too tired to concentrate, Donley set aside the file and reached to turn off the light. He hesitated when he saw Max Seager’s business card on his nightstand.

Seager was a highly regarded and successful plaintiff’s attorney who had approached Donley in the Superior Court halls after one of Donley’s trials. Seager offered him a job on the spot at a salary three times what Lou could afford to pay him. He told Donley to set up an appointment with Seager’s assistant after the holidays.

Donley turned out the light. Lightning flashed outside the bedroom window, coloring the cloud layer a purplish hue. He counted, as his mother had taught—a way to calm a frightened child.

One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand . . .

Thunder rumbled, finishing with a boom. Donley listened down the hall but did not hear Benny call out.

When another streak of light pulsed, Donley reached only “one thousand one” before the boom rattled the windows and rain tapped a ticker-tape beat on the roof shingles. Again, he listened but did not hear Benny. Mother Nature was putting on a show, but Kim, a sleep-deprived medical resident, looked intent on proving she could literally sleep through a storm. He pulled back the covers to check on Benny when Kim said, “Let him sleep.”

“You’re awake?” Donley slid over and spooned her, feeling the radiating warmth.

“Who could sleep through this noise?” She rolled toward him. “He’ll be three in a month. You have to let him go to sleep alone; at this rate, you’ll be sleeping in his college dorm.”

He rested his chin on her shoulder. “I just don’t want him to be afraid,” he said.

She found his hand under the covers. “You had something to fear, Peter. He doesn’t. And if you don’t start getting to bed earlier, we may never have sex again.”

The magic word.

“Is that an invitation?” When Kim didn’t respond, he brushed strands of dark hair from her face, tracing the contours of her Korean features with his finger. “You were quiet when you got home.”

“Two of my students got into a fight.” Despite her schedule at the hospital, Kim continued to teach tae kwon do classes at a local YMCA. “It’s the stuff they watch on television. Teenage mutant turtles. What the hell are those things, anyway?”

“Well, it is martial arts,” he said, tweaking her.

She inched close, as if to kiss him. “Tae kwon do is taught up here,” she whispered, gently touching his temple. “It has nothing to do with this.” Her hand beneath the covers grabbed his groin.

“Ow. Hey, OK, OK, I’m sorry.”

She laughed. “Two can play at that game, Mr. Donley.”

He rolled on top of her, pinning her arms. “I tease you only because it makes you horny.”

“It does not.”

She halfheartedly struggled but was physically no match for him. At six feet two inches and 215 pounds, he outweighed her by nearly a hundred pounds. He kissed her.

The telephone rang.

Kim groaned.

“Let it ring.” He ran his fingers along the curves of her body.

“It could be the hospital,” she said.

“You’re not on call tonight.”

“It could still be the hospital.” She reached for the phone, but he grabbed her arm.

“Not tonight,” he said.

Chapter 4

They treated him as if he were something to be placed in a plastic evidence bag, zipped closed and tagged. Father Martin sat in a folding chair, the events continuing to swirl around him, the pain and nausea causing the room to tilt and whirl, everything black and gray.

Uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives, and crime-scene technicians came and went, stepping around yellow sticky notes marking the drops of blood on the floor. They took photographs, dusted for fingerprints, and drew sketches. A doctor from the medical examiner’s office and his assistants attended to Andrew Bennet’s body. Static echoed from radios, and flashes of red, white, and blue lit up the windows from the lights atop the patrol cars parked in the street.

Father Martin cradled his arm, now immobilized in a splint and elastic wrap but still painful. His wrist had swollen to the size of a lemon, and he remained so light-headed, he thought he might lift from the chair. He pressed the soles of his sandals to the floor, desperately trying to keep the room from spinning.