Joe wasn’t Catholic, but that didn’t seem to bother the priest who welcomed him inside Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral between Mulberry and Mott Streets.
Rainbows spilled from stained-glass windows. Lining both sides of the nave, Gothic chandeliers hung between the cast-iron columns supporting the eighty-foot vaulted ceiling. A long table held a forest of votive candles, some of which flickered in their red glass holders.
At three in the afternoon, barely anyone else was here. A few other souls prayed or meditated in the sanctuary, and low tones drifted from a confessional booth. Joe slid into a pew polished to a high gleam. He needed quiet. Needed to think.
The police commissioner resigned today. Joe had known it was coming, but Richard Enright’s parting still left him unsettled. Enright had been commissioner for eight years, since before Prohibition began. In the last couple, he’d tried to press charges against more than a dozen police detectives, deputy detectives, and captains for failing to enforce Prohibition. The charges didn’t stick. In frustration, he resigned. How the new commissioner would handle police corruption, Joe could only guess.
Police corruption had brought Joe here today.
This was the pew he’d shared with Connor the day he’d followed him here, a little more than a year ago. Connor had been acting strangely, disappearing for unaccounted-for periods of time and then returning pale-faced and cagey. Whatever was wrong, he’d kept it to himself.
So one day, when Connor had been particularly distracted, he’d left headquarters without a word, and Joe followed him. All the way into St. Pat’s, where Connor slumped in a posture of defeat.
Not knowing what troubled Connor, Joe had simply told him he was in the right place for forgiveness.
“Problem is, Joe, I’m not ready to repent,”Connor had said.“And I have the decency not to ask for absolution until I am.”
“Too thirsty?”Joe had asked, knowing full well where Connor stood on Prohibition. No constitutional amendment could entice him to give up the drink.
Connor had looked at Joe with red-rimmed eyes.“Promise that when something happens to me, no matter what, you’ll take care of Aunt Doreen.”
Notif, butwhen. He knew his sin would catch up to him.
The organist began to practice, and “Ode to Joy” unfurled to fill every corner of the sacred space. Beethoven’s methodical notes led from one to the next in constant, mathematical progression. Joe’s own notes progressed in the same even rhythm, only he didn’t like how they were adding up.
He rested folded hands on the back of the pew in front of him and lowered his head to meet them. He had cross-checked raid reports against property seizure receipts and photographs. In addition to the four discrepancies McCormick had found, Joe had found dozens more. Just as in the cases McCormick had identified, there was one missing gun from a photograph of weapons reported as seized in a raid.
They’d all occurred between 1923 and August 1925. Even more telling, Joe noticed by the serial numbers on the guns that several had been confiscated more than once.
Of all the officers listed in the reports, the only one present at all of them was Connor Boyle.
The weight of Connor’s sin hung heavy on Joe’s shoulders. No, he didn’t have proof that Connor had been the one to steal every missing weapon and sell it to criminals. Not enough proof for a prosecutor, anyway. But at least in Joe’s mind, the evidence pointed to Connor.
Why?
Was Connor being blackmailed? Or did he have some outrageous debt he needed to pay off before harm came to him or his aunt?
Who had been killed by the guns Connor had supplied to criminals?
Sitting up straight, Joe looked at his palms and wondered if their blood was on his hands, too. If he had dug deeper with Connor right here on this church pew, all those months ago, could he have stopped what Connor was doing? Could he have turned him back toward the light, or had Connor already passed the point of no return?
Years ago, Joe used to think there was no such proverbial point. That anyone could be redeemed and rehabilitated, no matter what he or she had done. Anyone could be forgiven. These days? He wasn’t so sure.
The door to the confessional booth opened and closed, and a parishioner made his way down the aisle to exit the church. Joe’s gaze traveled to the crucified Christ, hanging in front of the stained-glass window. Christ forgave the thief on the cross beside Him. He forgave the ones who hung Him on that tree. Christ would forgive anyone, and as a follower of Him, Joe knew he ought to do the same.
He’d work on that.
But actions still had consequences.
Joe bowed his head in wordless prayer and let the organ music wash over him. When he rose at last, he was as ready as he’d ever be to write a report of his discoveries and submit it to the attorneys on Connor’s case.
From behind the altar, wooden sculptures of the saints lookedat him. Judas Iscariot, of course, was not among them. A twinge of guilt condemned Joe for betraying his friend, but he quashed it. Judas had betrayed the innocent Son of God for thirty pieces of silver. What Joe was about to do gained him nothing but a chance at justice. Connor Boyle was many things, but he wasn’t innocent.
Lauren drank in the crisp, fresh air of Central Park, the long shadow of Cleopatra’s Needle pointing to the museum from which she’d just come. During the new acquisitions meeting, she’d shared the news she’d received yesterday from the head curator, Mr. Lythgoe, who was still in Egypt. The coffin and mummy of Hatsudora, Hetsumina’s twin sister, had been found on December 1.
Mr. Lythgoe and the Met team, however, had not been the ones to find her. As such, Hatsudora’s final resting place would either be at the Cairo Museum in Egypt, or in France, if the French team that uncovered her had their way. The news had been a stinging disappointment to receive, let alone deliver to the rest of the staff in a long meeting made insufferable by cigarette smoke.
Lauren needed a break to clear her mind, and the Egyptian obelisk behind the Met was the best place for it. She thought of the inscription on the foot of Hetsumina’s coffin and wondered if Hatsudora’s had one to match.Hatsudora, daughter of Hopikras, died untimely, aged twenty-seven. Farewell.
