THERE WERE two places where Ray Dunn allowed himself to be kept waiting. One was anywhere his boys were. The other was the Archdiocese of Boston. After an hour in a plush and purple hallway, Ray was admitted to the presence of Monsignor Martin Pasqua, chancellor of the Archdiocese, Cardinal Cushing’s hatchet man.
Ray had dealt with Pasqua many times before. After Ray covered up the business with the spanking priest, Pasqua sent him a box of Cubans and a gracious note. When the embezzling pastor was delivered to the chancery with a blanket over his head, and the press none the wiser, Pasqua told the Cardinal to tell the DA to make Ray first assistant. Hatchet men love hatchet men.
Ray declined coffee, tea, and sherry. He felt jangly and nervy. He might say anything this morning. He might even tell the truth.
“I’m here about Father George Sedgewick,” Ray said, as both men sat down.
“A horror,” Pasqua sighed. “Do you have any leads?”
Ray told Pasqua what he had: a savage beating on a snowy runway and vague descriptions of a squat man in knit cap and peacoat stalking Sedgewick through the terminal.
Pasqua took it in. “How much do you know about George Sedgewick?” he asked.
“Only what you learn at an autopsy,” Ray said.
Pasqua winced, but let the remark pass. “George was the best we had. A great and liberal preacher, a scholar, a scientist. We were in seminary together. George went to Harvard after ordination, and became a psychotherapist. He was way ahead of his time. He held every job a priest can hold—rich parishes, poor parishes, a chair of theology, Navy chaplain—and excelled at all of them. He was a saintly man, a model to us all.”
“So you were friends,” Ray said.
“Close friends.”
“You ever take his confession? Don’t look so shocked. Priests confess, right?”
“Yes, I took his confession.”
“Anything out of the ordinary?”
“That is an outrageous and offensive question.”
Deep inside, Ray was sick of Pasqua and himself, of hatchet men everywhere.
“Ever see a scapular?” he asked the chancellor. “I’m told they’re not very liberal or modern. The coroner found scars on Father Sedgewick from self-inflicted wounds, years’ worth. It’s called scourging, and it, too, went out with the Inquisition. Something was on Sedgewick’s conscience, eating him alive. So I’ll ask again: was there anything out of the ordinary in Sedgewick’s confessions?”
Pasqua was speechless. This was a new Ray Dunn.
“Whoever killed Sedgewick had a motive,” Ray explained, backing down. “And something else: Sedgewick saw it coming. Sedgewick knew the killer and the killer knew him.”
Pasqua wouldn’t have it. “It was a mugging like any other. It was random, simply random.”
“There were three Massport patrolmen in that terminal, Chancellor. Yet Sedgewick rushed right past them to get away from his pursuer. If Sedgewick knew he was about to get jumped, why didn’t he flag a cop?”
Pasqua fled to the window.
“Why did Sedgewick go to Rome?” Ray asked his back.
“Business,” Pasqua told the drapes.
“What business?”
“I have no idea.”
“Then how do you know it was business?”
“He had many friends in Rome. He was fluent in Italian—”
“And a model to us all. Did you send him?”
Pasqua turned from the window. “George Sedgewick’s death was a random tragedy. There’s nothing else I can say to you.”
A MASSPORT detective was waiting for Ray at the courthouse with a new witness: the customs inspector who had checked Father Sedgewick and two bags through passport control on New Year’s Eve. The inspector gave Ray a statement, which squared with the others. Sedgewick came in from Rome, met a white male in a knit cap by the glass doors, then took off.
“Did you see Sedgewick say anything to the man in the knit cap?” Ray asked.
“They had a word or two. Then Sedgewick scrammed.”
“Running?” Ray asked.
“Like run-walking. Looking over his shoulder. His luggage was slowing him down. He dropped his little carry-on valise because it was getting tangled in his legs. Plowed over a Christmas tree, then disappeared out the far door, with the other guy after him. That’s the last I saw of ’em.”
“Sedgewick dropped the little bag?” Ray asked.
“It was slowing him down,” the inspector said.
But not the bulkier suitcase, Ray thought.
The story was wrong, somehow. Ray took the inspector through the whole thing again. “You walked Sedgewick through customs?”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
“He had them bags. I thought I’d be a nice guy.”
“Why? Why did Sedgewick get the red-carpet treatment?”
“Well,” the inspector said, as if Ray were being obtuse, “Sedgewick was a priest. Don’t know about you, but I was raised to show ’em respect.”
“But how did you know he was a priest? Sedgewick wasn’t in habit that night.”
“No,” the inspector said, “but what the hell else is he going to be? Carrying the Blessed Sacrament and the priest suit in his luggage and all.”
Ray went cold. “Carrying what?”
“Sacrament. Hosts. I told ya: I inspected his bags at customs. He came in from Rome with a priest suit folded up in his suitcase and a bunch of communion wafers—thousands of ’em in clear plastic bags. Jesus, what a sight! He had some fancy letter from the Cardinal saying if anybody but a priest touched them, we’d all go to hell.”
FOR the second time in five hours, Ray found himself with Chancellor Martin Pasqua.
“You said it was urgent,” Pasqua prompted irritably.
“Sedgewick came back from Rome with a suitcase full of Eucharist wafers,” Ray said. “He also had a letter of authority signed by Richard Cardinal Cushing. You lied to me this morning. Why?”
Pasqua jerked forward and pulled open his top desk drawer. For a wild moment, Ray thought he was going for a pistol, but Pasqua’s hand came out with a brass pillbox. He placed two pills on the end of his tongue and bit down.
“Water,” he croaked.
Ray poured him a glass from a pitcher on a side table. Pasqua took it, slopping water all over his desk, and drank. His head fell back on his chair. He shut his eyes. Pasqua’s breath returned.
“You’ve laundered the Church’s linen before,” he said. “You’ve kept her secrets well.”
“And I’ll keep this secret too, whatever it is. But the man who killed Sedgewick is an animal, and we can’t let him walk around free. I have to know why Sedgewick was bringing Eucharist back from Rome.”
Pasqua took a pamphlet from his desktop and held it up. It dripped on the rest of his papers. “This document is called Sacrosanctum Councilum, the latest bombshell encyclical from Vatican II,” he said. “Issued by the Pope, this bull decrees mass in English by Palm Sunday. That’s fourteen weeks away.”
This was hardly a secret. “I don’t understand,” Ray said.
“It’s not a very popular decree, Mr. Dunn. Some priests are talking openly of defiant Latin masses. The Cardinal is scared. I’m scared too. We have fourteen weeks to win the hearts of a million Boston Catholics violently opposed to change. We have fourteen weeks to undo sixteen centuries.”
Ray got impatient. “What about Sedgewick?”
“George had been arguing for these reforms all his life. George was special. He went out into the world. He said science was full of miracles—polio vaccines, and computers, and men in orbit. He said the Church had to get in step with the times. Either that, or shrivel up and die. He convinced me, and he and I convinced Cardinal Cushing, and Cushing and a hundred others like him voted in a wave of reform at Vatican II.”
“And the Eucharist in the suitcase at the airport?”
“George understood PR. He said the first English mass should be in Boston, because it was the most conservative Catholic city in America. So start in Boston, as a statement. Sedgewick wanted to bring the Pope here personally to celebrate the first English-language mass, but that was impossible because the Holy Father is frail.”
“And doesn’t speak a word of English,” Ray added.
“So we hit upon the next-best thing. We brought the Pope to the mass in another way. Sedgewick persuaded friends in the Vatican to allow us to bring in four thousand communion wafers consecrated as the Body of Jesus Christ by the hand of His Holiness Pope Paul VI in Vatican City three weeks ago. Under special arrangement with the Holy See, the papal sacrament was to be served to the faithful at a special mass at Holy Cross Cathedral, the first English-language mass on American soil.”
Pasqua took some water. “Sedgewick left Boston on the day after Christmas, picked up four thousand Eucharist at the Vatican, and was bringing it back by hand. The suitcase was never out of his sight. We gave him a letter of transit to answer any questions the authorities might have. The letter explained that Eucharist has no monetary value and is exempt from import regulation—somewhat like a diplomatic pouch, I suppose. Because the wafers were already consecrated Eucharist, they were, under Roman Catholic law, the very flesh of God, and should not under any circumstances be touched by the hands of a nonpriest.”
“Who knew about Sedgewick’s mission—besides you and him?”
“The Cardinal, of course. Rome knew—”
“Anybody else on this side of the Atlantic?”
“No. We thought it was best. Sedgewick may have mentioned to his friends that he was going to Rome. He probably offered to bring things back—Italian coffee, Italian olive oil. He was that sort of man.”
“But even if he told people he was going to Rome, his orders were to keep the Eucharist part a secret.”
“That was our agreement, yes.”
“The stocky man I mentioned this morning, is he familiar?”
“It’s not much of a description,” Pasqua said.
Ray rubbed his face. “What did Sedgewick confess to you?”
“I can’t tell you,” Pasqua said. “You know I can’t.”
“Did Sedgewick ever hurt anyone?”
“Of course he did. We all do.”
“I mean hurt bad. Bad enough to make that person want to kill him. There must be something—in the past, long ago, but something. What about the scapular, and the private little slashes Sedgewick gave himself each night?”
“He had no real enemies,” Pasqua said. “It sounds impossible, but it’s true. I can tell you, as George Sedgewick’s confessor, that he was a saintly man.”
BACK at the courthouse, Ray knocked quietly on Johnny Cahill’s door and waited for the yodelly “Yay-uh” Johnny always gave when he wanted you to enter. Johnny was behind his huge desk in slacks, shirt and tie, and a bright-red cardigan. He seemed especially jolly.
“You got home in one piece,” he said. “Thank St. Christopher for that. The roads were awful, even this afternoon.”
Ray knew that this was as close as Johnny would come to acknowledging that Ray had stormed out of Johnny’s house when they were last together. If Ray didn’t bring it up, Johnny would assume that Ray regretted the scene, and that he would do as he was told and serve whomever Johnny saw fit to make the next DA, even Eddie Cahill. That’s what Johnny wanted—a loyal rearguard. Which was why Johnny even now was changing topics, from Ray’s trip home, to the New Year’s blizzard, to snow jobs as a whole.
“Boss,” Ray said.
“Of course, snow was snow when I was young. No plows or snow tires, none of that—”
“Boss.”
Cahill beamed, benevolent and twinkly. “Yes, Ray?”
“I’ll work for you. I’ll work for your successor. But I won’t work for your son. It’s not because I hate him, or because I want the job myself. It’s because he’s unfit for any office, high or low.”
Cahill’s cheer went undented. “Well, of course, Ray, sure. That’s fine. Anything else?”
Johnny wished him an especially booming good evening, which was how Ray knew that he was in trouble.