The Judgment (52 page)

“Frankly, for a couple of reasons,” I said, still quiet and persuasive, “three, actually. First of all, without any prompting from me, when you spoke of Sam Evans as ‘bad news’ and ‘sinister,’ you used the past tense, as if to say he’s no longer with us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s nitpicking. I was probably thinking of him in the past tense as a worry that was now out of my life.” Then he added, “Thanks to you.”

“All right then, what about this? When I told you Sam Evans had been murdered, you said he’d been shot. In fact, he was, but I didn’t say so.”

“Aren’t firearms responsible for most homicides today?”

“And finally,” I said, “there’s the matter of the shot that killed Sam Evans. Bud Billings told me that it had probably been fired from a grove of trees some five hundred yards away—all that distance and it was a clean hit right through the heart. He said that only a master marksman could have hit on a shot like that.” I gestured to the trophy heads on the wall. “If anybody in Kerry County fits that description, you certainly do.”

He had nothing to say to that, so I got up and walked over to the gun rack on the wall. I lifted one down.

“It was probably something like this that took Sam Evans out. Maybe this is the very weapon that did it. Bud Billings said they thought it would probably have been a 30-30 that did the job. Is that what this is?”

“That’s what it is.” He said it in a slightly removed, thoughtful sort of voice.

“You know when they find the slug that killed him, they can match it perfectly with the gun that fired it. It’s just like fingerprints.”

I examined the rifle, hefted it. It wasn’t nearly as heavy as it looked, well balanced, a beautiful piece of lethal machinery. I noticed flanges along the rear of the barrel. Holding it up to him, I pointed them out.

“What are these?” I asked. “They couldn’t be mounts for a telescopic sight, could they?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what they are.”

“Do you have a telescopic sight for this rifle, Father Chuck?”

“I have one around here somewhere.”

“Bud Billings said it would have taken one of those to place the shot that killed Sam Evans. Has this gun been fired recently?”

I turned the rifle around and smelled the barrel.

“Careful, Charley,” he cautioned. “Even unloaded guns are dangerous.”

“No, it smells like it’s just been cleaned.”

“All my weapons have just been cleaned.”

“Look, Father, wouldn’t it be better if you came in with
me and talked to Bud? He’s a parishioner. He’ll understand. Tell him about Sam Evans: how he tried to blackmail you, threatened to bear false witness against you the way he did in that miserable business of the civil suit that they threatened against you. Let me assure you, he’ll understand.”

“I understand far more than you think I do,” he said. He seemed to have collected himself, readied himself for some sort of counterattack. “I understand that you’re conning me. You know that if I go in and let them question me about Sam Evans’s death, it won’t stop there. They’ll go on and question me about all kinds of things, things I don’t want to talk about, things that should remain hidden. Very few would understand them, and most of them are saints, dead and gone.”

“Father Chuck, you’re not making good sense.”

“Oh, I’m making sense, all right, better sense that you do with all your modern rationalism, your defense of the real criminals who prey upon us. You and your ‘suicide doctor’! I’m surprised you haven’t found an abortionist to defend. You know, Charley, you make me sick. You really do. I honestly don’t know how you live with yourself, the way you seem to seek out the dregs of society and add them to your list. What do you say? ‘I got this drug dealer off, this murderer, this rapist.’ Do you keep count?

“I tried to talk to you,” he ranted on, his voice louder, rising to his feet. “You called it a debate, but then you began cross-examining me! I didn’t break, you did! I’d like to have seen
that
in court, the witness breaking down the lawyer in cross-examination. Let me tell you, Charley, God is with me. He spoke to me and told me to protect the innocents, and He told me that the only way to protect them from this world of drugs and violence was to take action. What could I do? What could anyone do but protect the innocents from such a world? And how do you do that? You send them to God in their pure state, without sin but just at the age of reason. Couldn’t you understand that yourself? Why couldn’t you? I wanted you to. I
wanted you to with all my heart! Oh, but clearly, you have turned your back on me, just as you’ve turned your back on God. Why, Charley? Why can’t you understand?”

“I’m trying, Father Chuck,” I said. “I really am. But I’ll tell you, though, that in all honesty, I think you need some help, not help in the parish, or with the outlying churches. No, I think you need help for yourself. Do you remember who sent me here in the first place to help you out with the Sam Evans problem? It was Bishop Solar. I think that from what I’ve heard from you, and from what I’ve observed from your drinking, I really owe it to him and to you to tell him about your difficulties here. I think he’ll recommend psychiatric help for you. I think you need it.”

“Oh no, Charley, I don’t think I do, and I don’t think I can permit another one of those doctors looking inside my head to tell me that I had a serious problem with repression, and that what I was doing was living an abnormal life. I like my abnormal life. I believe in celibacy. I believe in the Church, the way it’s been for two thousand years, give or take a decade or two.”

He regarded me in exasperation and then shook his head in angry disapproval.

“I really don’t like you waving that rifle around the way you’re doing. It shows ignorance, for one thing. I told you that even unloaded guns are dangerous. Even though I emptied that one you’ve got in your hand this morning—yes, and I took the telescopic sight off it, too—I know that it’s still dangerous to wave it around like that. It’s also useless, if you’re trying to threaten me. This, on the other hand, is a loaded gun, and if I threaten you with this, you should indeed feel afraid.”

He had brought up a pump shotgun from behind the desk, one of his trap guns, and he leveled it at me.

“Are you threatening me with it?” I asked.

“Yes, I guess I am,” he said. “Now, I think the best thing for us to do would be to walk out to the back to settle this.”

Stupidly, ignorantly, I had not counted on a development
such as this. Defense lawyers deal with violence all the time, but we deal with it at a remove, safely distanced from any threat to ourselves. What did he have in mind?

“Do you want me to raise my hands in the air or something?” I tried to make it sound like a joke, but it seemed flat even to me. What he said then made it seem that much flatter.

“I don’t care what you do, just so long as you remember that there’s a shotgun pointed at your back. Go down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the door.”

I walked on ahead of him, opening the back door as I came to it, going on ahead into that wide expanse behind the rectory and the parking lot that ended in the woods a few hundred yards away. It must have been about four o’clock, not yet dark but getting close to it. It was almost winter, after all, and the cold in the air confirmed it. It was damp, too; there would be a snowfall soon.

“What’re you going to do?” Another attempt at humor. “Wrap me up in plastic and set me by the side of the road?”

“Not at all. There’s going to be a terrible accident,” he said. “I was giving you a lesson in trap shooting, and you handled the gun so awkwardly that you shot yourself, fatally. I’ll call the police, the local police, of course. I know all five of them by their first names. There shouldn’t be any need to involve your friend Bud Billings in this at all. Why should he be interested in a shooting accident?”

“He might be. I’ve told him all about you, Father Chuck.”

“Charley, you’re bluffing. Remember, I’m an old poker player. I’m calling your hand, and I’m not impressed with what you’ve got to show.”

For once I didn’t have a ready reply. Yet he had a lot to say, it seemed, and I had no choice but to listen to him ramble on.

“You know, you’re very clever, questioning me the way you did about the death of that little moron, Sam Evans. You called him a moron yourself. You were so sympathetic,
offering me a way out, suggesting that he might have threatened to bear false witness against me just as he had before. No, not that kid. He saw me out on Clarion Road that night, all right, and he recognized me. And you know what he wanted for his silence? À new pickup truck. That’s right, he wanted just enough for a down payment in the beginning and then enough for payments every month. Isn’t that disgusting? The greed for things. It’s a universal disease these days. But you almost got me with your talk, you really did. I actually wanted to say yes, I killed that worthless little excuse for a human being. He tried to make me sound like a queer, and he deserved it. I did it with one shot, and you were right, it was a damned good shot. I may not hunt anymore, but I keep my shooting eye sharp working on targets. Probably not another man in the county could have placed that shot at such a distance.

“But of course if I had admitted to that, I would have admitted to all the rest. Those four children. And there’ll be more, believe me. But you don’t understand about that, do you? They die painlessly, and I honor them for their purity. That’s why I put them out in the snow. What could be purer than new-fallen snow? Their little bodies washed, their clothes cleaned, lying out there in the snow, the white, white snow. But their souls, their sinless souls, are with God.

“Why do I do it? I even told you, but you weren’t listening, you wouldn’t listen to me, I suppose because I’m a priest. It was my nephew, Tom. I said he was the closest thing to a son I’d had, would ever have. I told you that he died, but I didn’t tell you how. He was still a child, seventeen, just into college at U of D. Yes, Detroit, Charley, that cesspool that vomited you up here to Kerry County. He was a bright boy, a good kid, and I thought the Jesuits could keep him on the straight and narrow. But I’m afraid I underestimated the malice and the snares of the Devil. Poor Tom, while he was still in grade school, he fell in with a bad crowd out around Palmer Park. He
died of a heroin overdose at seventeen. I said the funeral Mass for him, and I drove back here to Hub City in the snow. So deep in sadness, I can’t express it. And on my way to the rectory, I saw little Lee Higgins and offered him a ride. And I remember thinking how much better it would have been for Tom if he’d died at Lee’s age. Think of the pain he would have missed, the sin he would have been saved from.

“Look at yourself. If you had died at just such an age, you would have gone straight to heaven. Ah, but Charley, where you’re going now, at best you have long ages of suffering in purgatory before you. But I’ll pray for you, I will, really. Perhaps others will, too. You’ll need all the prayers you can get. And I think you had better begin praying right now for yourself. Do you think you can summon up an Act of Contrition from the dim recesses of your memory?”

“Yes, I think I can.”

“Then you’d better say it now.”

About ten feet separated us. Father Chuck had held the pump shotgun pointed at me, but now he elevated it, resting the butt of the stock on his hip, indicating in a sportsmanlike way that he was ready to wait a bit. I blessed myself, dropped down on one knee, and bowed my head.

Yes, I really did pray, but it was not the Act of Contrition that I said. I’m not even sure that I put it into words, but if I did, it would have sounded something like this: “Higher Power, God, whatever You call Yourself, please give me the strength to stop this sick, mad priest before he kills more children. I may not be much, but I’m the only weapon You’ve got.”

Although my head was bowed, my eyes were slitted open. I watched, and I saw my opportunity when his head tilted slightly upward. A passing bird? Perhaps a late flock of Canadian geese flying south, the hunter’s instinct. I never knew what caught his attention; I simply saw my chance and took it.

From my crouch I threw myself bodily through the air,
a flying tackle. He was taller, heavier, and stronger than I was, but he collapsed under the sudden impact of my body at his knees.

He went down.

As I struggled up to his torso, he began kicking and twisting, trying to throw me off. I hung on. At the same time he was trying to bring the shotgun around to club me. He hit me once on the temple with the barrel. I didn’t feel a thing. I grabbed his hair and beat his head against the ground. That did no good, the ground was still soft. He had the shotgun between us now, trying to get it into my face. I pushed it away. Then, with a mighty heave, he threw me over, rolled on top of me. His bearded face was only inches from mine. The shotgun came up. I jerked it down.

His face, so close, suddenly collapsed.

Did I hear the gun go off? I’m not sure that I did, I only know I was deaf for about an hour afterward and hard of hearing for the next couple of days.

It took a great push to get him off me, but I managed it. I rolled his body over onto his back, and I struggled up to my feet. I stood there, panting hard, my breath coming in racking sobs, and looked at what I had done. His finger was still on the trigger. The shotgun charge had entered at his chin below his beard and blown out the back and top of his head.

It was a suicide wound.

When I saw that, a plan began to form in my mind. Alive, he might have been persuaded to confess; evidence would have been found; a full investigation would have proven the case against him. But dead, he was just poor Father Chuck. No one would ever believe that a priest had done the things that he had done.

I went back through the open door into the rectory. Although I was wearing those new gloves and had never taken them off, in fact I was nevertheless careful about what I touched. I found a mirror in the kitchen, and I saw that there was surprisingly little blood on my coat, but my
chin and part of my throat had been darkened by all that powder from the muzzle of the shotgun. I could wash it off, but not here, not now.