CHAPTER 3
Ed’s was a sad little room. The minimal furniture was cheap, old, and stained with years of use. Apart from a meager selection of clothes there were only books, papers, an overstuffed manila folder bound with rubber bands, an ancient transistor radio, and a couple of shoeboxes of oddments, all stacked haphazardly on a set of shelves made of planks and cinder blocks. The place looked less like the home of a priest than it did a dorm room that had been hurriedly vacated. A crucifix hung on the wall, but the place was otherwise unadorned except for an Amnesty International calendar. As Jim had said, there was nothing here, certainly nothing of value. Thomas’s trip—save the pizza and basketball part—was likely to be done within the hour. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have bothered coming. Now he had to kill time before the lawyer arrived with the paperwork.
He sat on the bed. The mattress was thin and uneven, the springs pressing insistently through.
God, what a place.
It felt empty, joyless: not unlike his own house, Thomas thought wryly. This was what Ed had chosen, what he had dedicated himself to, sacrificing God-alone-knew-what for this blank little cell with its cheap crucifix for company. Thomas had found a certain comfort in calling Ed’s life an escape, a way of dodging the soul-killing business of everyday life, but sitting here now he had to admit that if his brother had thought in those terms he had been sadly deluded. But Thomas suspected that his brother had known exactly what he was getting himself into and, perhaps more tellingly, what he wasn’t.
Thomas picked up one of the boxes and emptied it carefully onto the bed. Most of what spilled out looked like junk (a ticket stub from a Cubs game, a few faded and unframed photographs, a dusty cassette tape, some weird little silver trinket shaped like a fish, a stub of pencil), but it all felt saved somehow, hoarded as if it had all once been special, meaningful. The thought depressed him.
He flipped one of the photographs over and his breath caught. His own face looked up at him from the paper, a smiling, confident face Thomas had searched for in the mirror for the last six years. Next to Thomas was his brother in full clerical array—vestments, collar, the works—but somehow still looking like his brother as he had been when he taught him how to read a curveball or showed him the best comic books. And beside Ed was Kumi, her long black hair up and knotted in a suitably Japanese arrangement, the white of her wedding dress almost too bright for the camera to capture. They were all beaming, glowing with happiness, standing in the weedy garden only yards from where he now sat. Thomas closed his eyes, permitting himself to remember her as he so rarely did, suddenly feeling her absence as he had done when she first left.
The picture was almost ten years old, but she’d been gone for more than half of that. It struck Thomas that his wedding day had been the beginning of the end of his relationship with his brother. They had always been a little different, but that day, the sheer rightness of it—in spite of everything that had followed—had been their last moment of harmony. The next time he’d seen Ed, things were already unraveling. The three of them would never be caught smiling like that together again.
When the doorbell rang the first time, he ignored it, but when it rang twice more it occurred to him that he might be the only one in the building. Then he remembered the lawyer who was coming to meet with him about what was laughably referred to as his brother’s “estate.” He moved swiftly down the narrow hall and rickety staircase, only pausing for a second to wonder what he would do if it was a homeless person as Jim had assumed him to be, or someone with some pressing spiritual crisis. He opened the door and gasped as the cold wind struck him forcibly in the face.
The man outside had taken a few steps back as if to look up to the windows for signs of life. He looked at Thomas for a second without moving, one hand holding a black attaché case, the other thrust deep into his pocket.
“You Knight?” he said.
“Yes,” said Thomas, a little taken aback by the man’s brusque manner. “Come in.”
“Parks,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Parks,” he repeated. “Ben Parks.”
He stepped past Thomas without extending a hand. He was maybe thirty, thin-faced with curly hair, a goatee, and hard eyes that didn’t meet Thomas’s when he spoke. The coat he wore looked old and a size or two too large. He didn’t look like a lawyer.
Thomas led him back into the spartan kitchen.
“Do you want to go straight to his room or what?”
The look on the lawyer’s face was reminiscent of Jim’s when he had realized that Thomas wasn’t looking for a handout.
“His room?”
“I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “You are the lawyer come to see about Ed’s stuff, right?”
“Ed?”
“Ed Knight, my brother. The priest who died.”
There was another split second of uncertainty and the man’s eyes tightened. For a moment he was silent, and then his demeanor changed, lightened so that he looked like a different person entirely.
“Oh, you’re his brother. I’m so sorry. I’ve never actually met Father Knight and I didn’t know him by his first name. I assumed you were a priest.”
Thomas laughed at that.
“No,” he said. “My brother got the spiritual gene. Or the Catholic gene. Something. Me, it skipped. So,” he said, moving quickly in case his confession had made the lawyer uncomfortable, and because it was bravado and not really true at all, “you want to look over his room?”
“Sure,” said the lawyer. “That would be great.”
Thomas led the way.
“Been in town long?” said Parks.
“I live here. Well, Evanston,” he said, adding for no particular reason, “the cheap end. I came as soon as I heard. I figured I’d need to be here a few days, but Ed seems to have owned so little—unless you know something about assets I don’t—that that might not be necessary. And no doubt Mother Church will make sure everything is in order.”
“Right,” said the lawyer.
Thomas opened the door to the miserable little bedroom.
“Chateau Knight,” he said.
The lawyer stood in the doorway and looked carefully around without moving, as if he were afraid of disturbing a crime scene.
“I don’t think there’s much I’m going to want,” said Thomas. “Unless he turns out to have had some offshore account worth millions, I think the order will get the lot.”
“Do you know much about your brother’s life, any assets we might not immediately find?”
“The car outside is his, I think,” said Thomas, “though it’s only worth a few hundred bucks at most. Maybe it belongs to the parish or the Jesuits. He probably had a suitcase or two with him. I don’t know.”
“Anything else?”
“Look,” said Thomas, “we weren’t what you’d call close. Didn’t really see eye to eye on a lot of stuff.”
“I see. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m just saying that if you talk to people here, people he worked with, I mean, you’ll find out a hell of a lot more about him than you will if you ask me. I didn’t know anything about him.”
He was angry and ashamed to say it, but there it was. It was the truth.
“Where did he die?”
“I’m sorry?” said Thomas.
“You said he had a case or two with him. He was on vacation somewhere?”
“Kind of,” said Thomas, glancing out of the window, “I don’t really know.”
“And you don’t know where?” Parks sounded faintly incredulous, even irritated.
“No,” said Thomas, weary and with a swelling sense of failure and humiliation. “Overseas somewhere. I’m sorry. Does it matter?”
The lawyer hesitated for a second, his eyes uncertain, and then the smile snapped back on, reassuring and dismissive.
“I shouldn’t think so,” he said.
“Do you mind if I just leave you to it?” said Thomas. “I’m just going to get in the way.”
“Sure,” said the lawyer. “If I need you, I’ll holler.”
Gratefully, Thomas descended.
Thomas sat at the kitchen table for twenty minutes, staring at his chipped mug, wishing there were something to fill the silence, wishing he could go home. There was, after all, nothing for him here. It was as he had expected. If this was closure it was amorphous and deeply unsatisfying, though what else he could have hoped for he really didn’t know. Abruptly he got up, snatched a pen from inside his jacket, and fished for something to write on in his pockets. He spread a creased napkin onto the tabletop and scribbled quickly:
“Jim. Gone home. Barring anything surprising, see that Ed’s stuff goes to the people and causes he cared for. Neither include me, and you are a better judge of what he would have wanted. Sorry about the game. Thanks, TK.”
He looked at the note. It would do. It felt a little cheap, a little easy, but this was not the time to be his brother’s keeper. He hadn’t been so for the last six years; why pretend otherwise now?
He was on his way to the front door when he heard it open and men’s voices drifted through to him from the windswept street: Jim, and someone else. Thomas grabbed the note and stuffed it quickly into his pocket as the priest entered the kitchen.
“All right, Thomas?” said Jim. “This is Father Bill Morretti. We met on the street.”
The other man was sixty and stooped, but his eyes were bright and shrewd.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said, extending his hand.
“Thank you,” said Thomas.
“Do you want to get started right away?” said Jim, looking expectantly from Thomas to the other man, who was shrugging out of a heavy, old-fashioned overcoat.
“Started with what?” said Thomas.
“I’m sorry,” said Jim, grinning at his absentmindedness. “This is the lawyer who has come to go through your brother’s possessions with you.”
For a second Thomas just stood there.
“If you’re the lawyer,” he said, at last, “who’s upstairs?”