John Lescroart - Dead Irish

“She just asked. Frannie’s at her house. She didn’t go home after the funeral yesterday.”

Hardy should have remembered that somewhere. He wasn’t thinking very well.

“Why do you want to know?” Cavanaugh asked.

Hardy shrugged. “Just something I wanted to remember to ask her.”

They had come up by a lake with lots of couples in paddleboats. It was a slow midafternoon, still and warm. They walked along a red cinder path, covered over closely with pines, dotted sporadically with horse dung. On the lake, swans floated among the paddleboats while, nearer the dock, a dozen ducks quacked for a young girl’s bread.

“Innocence,” the priest said. “What a beautiful thing.”

Hardy looked sideways at the priest, alert for a touch of the blarney, but Cavanaugh seemed genuinely moved. His eyes roved around, to the trees, the sky overhead. He seemed almost to be memorizing this moment, as though its innocence-if he wanted to call it that-were something he’d later need to draw on in a different life.

“I just couldn’t get going this morning,” Cavanaugh said enigmatically. Their steps crunched in the cinders. Hardy, hands in pockets, nodded. “I really appreciate this,” the priest repeated, apologizing for the third or fourth time.

Reversing roles. That’s what he’d said. There’d been a bond, he felt, with Hardy. Instant. Two guys, Catholic backgrounds. A lot in common there.

He needed to confess. No, more, he needed absolution. And not from another priest. He didn’t just need the form of forgiveness, but its substance-the understanding of one of his fellow men.

So sure, Hardy had said. Why not? He felt oddly drawn to the man himself-victimized perhaps by the charisma, but most of Hardy’s friendships had started like that. Some spark, something a ittle unusual, as long as there was that confident presence. And Jim Cavanaugh had presence to burn.

But this apologizing was getting a little old. “Hey, Father. You talk, I’ll listen. Then maybe you buy me a beer. If I get bored, I’ll let you know.”

“How about you call me Jim?”

“Okay, Jim, what’s the problem?”

Jim waited until a couple on horseback had passed. “I feel like…”He stopped, and Hardy had the sense he was going to apologize again, but he didn’t. “Nope. That’s not it,” he muttered to himself. Then he took a deep breath. “I am fairly certain that I sent Eddie to his death.”

The crunching sound of their footsteps suddenly sounded more loudly in Hardy’s ears.

“He came by last week. I’m kind of, I guess you’d say, the other father figure in that family.” He chuckled without any mirth. “I’ve always prided myself on my… how can I put this? My moral courage. It’s what people talk to priests for, I guess. What they want to hear.

“The rest of the world says to compromise and just get by, but I’ve always viewed our role-my role, the priest’s role, that is- as counseling that the hard choices, the right choices, get made.”

“And Eddie had some hard choice?”

“I’m sure it’s why he came to me. He wouldn’t have bothered if he didn’t want to hear it.”

“You’re sure of that? Maybe he just wanted to talk.”

Jim Cavanaugh shook his head. “No. He’d had a fight-more a disagreement really-with Big Ed… his dad. If he didn’t want to hear somebody else come up with his answer, he just would have driven home and forgotten about it.

“You can tell, Dismas. Our Jewish brethren have a saying, ‘If you’ve got to ask, it’s not kosher.’ This is a little the same thing. Ed felt he had to ask me.” He laughed again at himself. “He wanted to hear that the right thing to do was what he planned to do anyway. More, he wanted to see if he could get away with not doing it. And, moral authority that I am, I told him he couldn’t. Although his father had said he could.”

Suddenly the priest stopped up short. He kicked at the wooden border to the riding trail so violently that it broke. “Fuck!” he said. The wooden slat had splintered at the vicious kick. Cavanaugh stood shaking his head, the outburst over. He went down to a knee and tried to pat the border back in place. Then, still genuflecting, he made the sign of the cross. A few seconds later he stood and faced Hardy, shamefaced.

“I’m sorry.” That self-effacing chuckle. “Some priest I am, huh?”

Hardy shrugged. “Shit happens,” he said.

Cavanaugh hadn’t heard that one before. He laughed, looser now. “Well,” he said, “now you know why I didn’t want to go to regular confession.”

“So what was it Eddie had to know about?” They were walking again, turning down now through lengthening shadows onto the paved road again.

“You know about the troubles at Ed’s work?”

“The distribution thing? A little.”

“Well, that’s not all. I mean, it was bad for the company, all right, but Eddie thought they could just tighten belts and build up again within a year or so. He was talking to this new company -some other newspaper…”

“ El Dia? ”

“Yeah, El Dia , I think. Anyway, he was also trying to get back in touch with the guy who’d cut them off.” Cruz, Hardy thought.

The priest continued. “To make a long story short, it was just a matter of time before they were rolling again. At least that was Eddie’s opinion.”

“So what’s the moral dilemma there?”

“That’s not it. That’s background. The problem was that Eddie’s boss-Polk, I think his name is-he was having a hard time dealing with the long-term approach.”

“He didn’t want to rebuild the business?”

“Essentially, that’s right. He’d recently married a younger -woman-very much younger, evidently very beautiful.”

“She is.”

“You’ve seen her?”

Hardy nodded. “So have you. They were at the funeral.”

That stopped Cavanaugh. “Son of a bitch,” he said. Hardy was again surprised at the man’s flair for Anglo-Saxon.

“What?”

“I think if I’d known that, I might have… I don’t think I could’ve done the service.”

“Why’s that?”

“I think we’re going on the assumption that somebody killed Eddie, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t think he killed himself.”

“Well, if somebody did kill him, I’d just about bet my breviary that Polk was involved.”

“Don’t tell me Ed was sleeping with Polk’s wife.”

Dusk was catching up with them. They came out of the park halfway down to the ocean and turned back up toward the Shamrock.

Clearly the thought had never occurred to the priest. “I was Eddie’s confessor, Dismas, and I’m not abusing the secrecy of the confessional when I tell you that he was faithful to Frannie. Completely. He was madly in love with her.”

Hardy thought he knew that, but it was still nice to hear it. “Okay,” he said, “so what about Polk’s wife?” Cavanaugh was grappling with something. “All this, you understand, is just trying to get at the truth,” he said. “I don’t want to be saying things that may be scandalous if they’re irrelevant to what you’re do-ing.”

Jesus, Hardy thought, suddenly remembering all too clearly why he had left the Church. If you took it all seriously, as Jim Cavanaugh certainly did, the rules could bind you up ’til you couldn’t even think, much less take any action.

“Why don’t you let me decide? This is confession, remember. It ain’t going anywhere else.”

The priest considered a moment, then nodded. “Eddie thinks -thought-that Polk’s wife was in it for the money. And after the drop in business, when the company started losing money, suddenly maybe Mr. Polk wasn’t so attractive anymore.”

“Did he know this, or was it just a feeling?”