“Yes, go on,” John said.
There was a pause. “Go on? Shit, I haven’t started yet.”
“Please don’t curse,” John said sternly.
“So who’s cursin’?” The woman hesitated again. Then: “Debbie, you’re one stupid jerk to think this would do a damn bit of good!”
She was talking to herself. He let that curse word slip past, because Darryl used it all the time and even the monsignor was prone to it. “It might do some good,” John said. “If you’re sincere.”
“Oh, sincere!” She laughed softly. She had a smoky voice with a strange accent. “Father, sincere’s my middle name!”
“I’m listening,” John told her.
“Yeah, but is God listenin’?” she asked pointedly.
“I believe He is.”
“Good for you.”
John waited. The young woman didn’t say anything else for a moment. Gathering her thoughts? John wondered. She certainly sounded bitter, torn up internally, in need of confession. Her accent, he’d figured out, was Southern: Deep South, maybe Georgia, Alabama, or Louisiana. Whoever she was, she was a long way from home.
“I don’t have anything to confess,” she said suddenly. “I’m okay. It’s just…well…” She trailed off. “This is harder’n I thought it was gonna be.”
“Take your time,” he advised, but as he said it he glanced at the watch.
There was a longer pause. Then: “A friend of mine is dead.”
John didn’t reply, urging her to continue by his silence.
“She got killed. I told her not to work that scuzzbox. I told her not to! Janey never listened to a damn thing anybody ever told her! Hell, you tell her not to do it and that just makes her want to even worse!” She laughed harshly. “Listen to me, babblin’ on like I’m really talkin’ to somebody!”
“Go on,” John said quietly.
“Janey was somebody. Hell, she was a movie star! She did five flicks in two weeks, and I swear to God that’s got to be a record. We went to Acapulco together last year, and we met these two Mexican lifeguards. So Janey says, Debbie, let’s make us a Mexican double-decker sandwich and really get it on.”
John’s eyes had widened. The girl on the other side laughed, softly now, a laugh of remembrances. “Janey liked to live,” the girl said. “She wrote poetry. Most of it was crap, but some of it…some of it you could tell her was good and really mean it. Oh, Jesus…”
He heard something break inside her. Just that quick, the tough shell cracked. The girl began to sob—the heart-crushed sobbing of a lost child. He wanted to soothe her, reach through the grille between them and touch her, but of course that was forbidden. The girl caught back another soft sob. He heard her open her purse and fumble in it. There was the sound of a Kleenex being pulled out.
“Damn, my mascara’s all over the place,” she said. “I got it on this white cloth over here.”
“That’s all right.”
“Looks expensive. Man, you holy guys really know how to spend the bucks, don’t you?”
John heard her fighting against more tears. “I’m not such a holy guy,” he said.
“Sure you are. You’re plugged into God’s hotline, aren’t you? If you aren’t, then you’re in the wrong job.”
He didn’t respond. He had stopped looking at the wristwatch.
“Some freak killed my friend,” she went on quietly. “I called Janey’s folks. They live in Minnesota. You know what that sonofabitch told me? He says: We have no daughter. Then he hung up in my face. I even called before the rates went down, and that’s what he has to say!” She hesitated, battling a sob. Her voice had gotten full of grit and fire. “The county’s gonna bury her. That shit she had for an agent said she was just a lost investment. You ever hear anything to beat that?”
“No,” John said. “I never have.”
She blew her nose into the Kleenex and snuffled. “Shits,” she said. “Dirty, rotten shits.”
“When did your friend die? I can look into the funeral arrangements if you—”
“Janey hated the Catholics,” she interrupted. “No offense meant. She just thought you guys were screwin’ everything up by not lettin’ people use birth control and all. So, thanks, but no thanks.” She snuffled again. “It happened last night, over on Broadway. Janey was workin’. A freak shot her. That’s all I know.”
“Oh.” The realization hit him that Janey’s death was connected with the shooting at the porno parlor. And if Janey had been working over there, then this girl on the other side of the booth was probably involved in that business too. His heart had started beating a little harder, and her musky scent filled his nostrils. “I’ve never been over there,” he said.
“You ought to walk the strip sometime. It’ll give you an education.”
“I don’t believe I want that kind of knowledge.” He sat up a little straighter.
“Hell, you’re a man, aren’t you? And sex makes the world swing round.”
“Not my world.” He had the sensation of things getting out of control, of damp heat at the base of his spine.
“Everybody’s world,” she said. “Why does a priest hide his head in books all day, and take cold showers ten times a day? God made the world, right? He made sex too.”
“Miss…” he began, but he didn’t know what he was going to say. He just wanted to stop her. “That’ll be enough,” he managed.
She laughed again. “Can’t stand the heat, huh? I figured you guys were pretty close to the edge.”
Had it shown in his voice that quickly? he wondered. And shame hit him, hard and fast. He thought her perfume must be drugging him or something, because his brain gears were clogging up.
She leaned close to the grille. He could see her full, slightly parted red lips, the same color as her nails.
“Anybody ever asks you,” she whispered in that smoky, knowing voice, “you can tell them you met a real-live movie star. Debra Rocks. That’s me. I’ve got a movie showin’ on the strip. Tell all your friends.” He watched as her tongue slid wetly along her lower lip, and he realized she was getting a real thrill out of baiting him. The realization angered him, but it started the clockwork mechanism that neither praying nor spiritual literature nor philosophical contemplation could halt. His groin began to throb.
She pulled her mouth away from the grille. “Sorry,” she said. Her voice had changed, gotten softer again. “It’s in my bones. Listen…all I’m askin’ is that you…like…say a prayer or somethin’ for Janey. Okay?”
“Okay,” John answered. His voice sounded as if he’d been gargling with glass.
“I feel a lot better now,” Debra Rocks said, and then she got up and John heard the booth’s door open and close. Then the click of high heels on the marble floor. She was walking fast, in a hurry to go somewhere—or just in a hurry to get out of the church. The chimes began to ring, signaling the end of confession.
John had a sheen of sweat on his face, and his insides felt as hot as a blast furnace. She would be almost to the door by now, about to return to the street. The chimes rang on. He was not supposed to leave the confessional until they ended, at exactly four-thirty. But his hand reached for the latch, grasped it, and hung there. The pounding at his crotch was almost unbearable, a pain that he’d thought he’d forgotten.
He glanced at the watch. The seconds were moving too fast. The chimes went on.
John turned the handle and stepped out.
A slim girl with long black or dark brown hair, wearing a tight red dress, was just reaching for the door. It opened, letting in a glare of chilly sunlight, and then Debra Rocks was out the door and it closed behind her.
There were two more chimes. Then silence.
John took a deep breath, his heart hammering. He could still smell her perfume, and he thought it must be caught in his clothes. The palms of his hands were slick with cold sweat. He thought he might be about to faint, but surely he was made of stronger stuff than that. His black slacks had bulged at the crotch
, and he knew he had to get to his bathroom shower and turn on that freezing water fast.
“God help me,” he whispered as he hurried out of the sanctuary.
3
JUST WHEN HE LEAST expected it, he would catch a hint of her fragrance. He was sitting in the Scaparelli Seafood Restaurant in North Beach, with Monsignor McDowell on his right and the mayor’s chief aide on his left, when he smelled it in the garlic-and-rosemary sauce. He was reading his report on the homeless figures and the soup kitchen’s budget when he caught it, and he quickly sniffed his fingers as if he were scratching his nose. Her scent was everywhere, yet nowhere. And gradually it dawned on him that her aroma lingered in his mind.
A dark-haired woman wearing a red dress came in, and snagged his attention while the mayor’s aide was talking to him. John watched the woman, holding hands with a date or her husband, as she neared the table and passed it, and he heard her say something to the man in a voice that was nothing like Debra Rocks’.
“See what I mean?” the aide, a somber-faced man named Vandervolk, asked him. John nodded yes, without really understanding the question.
“No, we do not see what you mean!” McDowell said quickly, his crusty, age-spotted face growing deep wrinkles as he scowled. “Either we get the matching funds, or we’ll have to shut down to half of what we’re doing now. That’s the bottom line.” He glared with his ice-blue eyes at John Lancaster.
The conversation went on, edging toward heat, and John’s attention drifted in and out. He sipped red wine and smelled her. He clasped his hands, and saw her lips behind the grille. He heard a woman laugh, and he looked around so fast McDowell said, “John, what the hell is wrong with you, boy?”
“Nothing. Sorry. I was thinking about something else.” When McDowell got mad, you better pay heed.
“Well, think about the business at hand!” the monsignor ordered, and continued his debate with Vandervolk and the other three men at the table.
John tried to. But it was a difficult task. He kept seeing swirls of red from the corners of his eyes, and then he was gone again. He had taken three cold showers—bang bang bang, one right after the other. Then he’d sat down and concentrated on his jigsaw puzzle, still dripping wet and shivering. He’d gotten four pieces mashed down into the wrong grooves before he gave it up. And then, as if in a sleepwalker’s daze, he’d found himself standing at the window, stark naked and broken out in goosebumps, staring at that red X in the sky.
I’ve got a movie showin’ on the strip, she’d said.
“Isn’t it, Fatner Lancaster?”
John looked, alarmed, into the monsignor’s face.
“Isn’t it?” McDowell asked again, his eyes threatening rage.
“Yes, sir, it certainly is,” John answered, and McDowell smiled and nodded.
“We’ll tackle the porno problem at a later date,” Vandervolk said. “As both you gentlemen are well aware, the mayor is doing everything possible to clean that area up. But those people have got smart lawyers, and they slam the First Amendment in your face like a hot skillet.”
“Well, get better lawyers then!” McDowell thundered. “Pay ’em more! For going on twenty-five years I’ve had to sit on the edge of that filth and watch it grow like a cancer! You know, somebody went crazy over there last night and killed some people! Probably was teased to madness by some—dare I say—whore with the morals of a packrat. When is the mayor going to get that filth out of my parish?”
John had lifted a fork of whitefish to his mouth. Now he paused and looked at McDowell. Looked at him long and hard, as the old monsignor continued to rage about the porno district. He thought he saw a callous face behind that age-spotted flesh that he’d never seen before. McDowell hit the table with his fist and made the silverware jump.
“She was a person,” John said.
McDowell’s mouth stopped. He stared at John. “What?”
John had spoken without thinking. He was trembling inside. He put the fork down, the whitefish uneaten. “She was… I mean, she must’ve been a person. The girl who was shot.”
“What do you know about it?” McDowell challenged.
Now was the moment to tell him about Debra Rocks. Here it was. But John reached for his glass of wine, and the moment slid forever past.
“I say load ’em all up on a garbage barge and send them to sea!” McDowell stormed on. “Maybe you can get a good fishing reef in the bargain.”
John felt a little sick. It was the wine, he thought. Debra Rocks’ scent welled out of it. Someone opened a red menu two tables away. John thought he was sweating under his clothes, and his collar seemed too tight, starched way too stiff. It was rubbing blisters on the back of his neck. And then, terrifyingly fast, the image of Debra Rocks, faceless, and a second faceless girl on the beach with two Mexican lifeguards came into his mind and leeched there and he thought, simply, I’m going crazy.
“What did you say?” Vandervolk asked him.
“I said…this wine’s making me feel a little hazy.” He hadn’t thought he’d spoken, and this new laxness of his discipline frightened him on a deep, primeval level. He felt like a clock without hands, his insides wound up and running but his face totally blank. The taste of garlic was powerful in his mouth, and he suddenly realized how cockeyed this was: men arguing about feeding the homeless from underbudgeted soup kitchens while eating twenty-dollar meals off blue bone china. Something was skewed here, and very wrong, and that awareness coupled with the steamy image of Debra Rocks on a sun-splashed beach made him fear for a second that he was going to be spun off the very earth.
“Where would they go?” John asked, with an effort.
“Where would who go?” The monsignor was wiping his plate with a bread crust.
“The women in the porno district. Where would they go if everything shut down?”
“Not if. When.” McDowell frowned, the lines knotting between his bushy white eyebrows. “That’s a strange question, John.”
“It may be.” He looked around, uneasily, at the other men. “But I think it’s a fair question. What would happen to the women?”
“They’d be forced to find decent jobs, for one thing,” McDowell said. “And the important thing is that the filth would be off the streets where schoolchildren wouldn’t have to see it every day.”
“I know that’s important, but…” He paused, trying to figure out how to say this. “It seems to me…that maybe we ought to consider the women—and men too—who work over there. I mean…it’s one thing to say they’d be forced to find decent jobs, and it’s another to believe that they really would find them. I don’t think the city would spring for a fund to reeducate prostitutes and go-go dancers, a lot of whom are probably hooked on drugs.” He glanced at Vandervolk, who had stony eyes. Then back to McDowell, who sat with the bread crust frozen at his mouth. “They wouldn’t exactly become Catholics overnight.” He tried for a smile, but his face felt rubbery. “I guess…sir…that what I’m trying to say is…who’ll take those people in when we throw them out?”
A silence stretched. McDowell chewed on the bread and washed it down with a long swallow of wine. “Your question,” he answered finally, “is not based on the greater good. Those people have chosen their own paths, and we’re not responsible for them.”
“We’re not?” John asked, and in his voice—and soul—there was a deep puzzlement and hurt.
“No,” McDowell said. He put his wineglass down. “We were talking about the homeless problem. How did we get off on this subject?”
No one told him he had sidetracked the conversation himself. The dinner and discussion went on, but from that point no questions were fielded to Father Lancaster. And that was fine with him, because he concentrated on finishing his wine and trying—unsuccessfully—to banish Debra Rocks’ voice from his fevered brain.
I’ve got a movie showin’ on the strip.
4
JOHN FELT THE SWEAT break out on him around two in the morning.
 
; He lay very still, as if he were trapped in a body he no longer could control. He prayed again, and as he said the words he heard the wail of a police car’s siren over on Broadway.
This time praying didn’t work.
He tried concentrating on the textbook lesson he’d read today, reciting it from memory. Jesus wept. Jesus wept. Jesus…
It was a cruel thing, the Holy Bible.
He stared at patterns of light on the ceiling, thrown by cars passing on Vallejo. The Bible was a cruel thing. Oh, a great revolutionary work, to be sure. A miracle of language and perception. But cruel, nonetheless.
They had copped out when it came time for Jesus to have a sex life. They had simply skipped that part of Jesus’ life, and picked the story up when Christ knew where his life was heading and what he had to do. They had left out anything about Jesus being unsure of himself, or needful of female companionship, or interested in anything but saving souls.
And that was a strange thing, because Jesus was Christ, yes, but Jesus had also been born human. And why had the human race been robbed of answers to questions that must’ve perplexed even Christ?
He knew it was said that more wars had been fought, more innocent lives slaughtered, in the name of Christ than for any other reason. So, too, it was true that religion—at least, religion as interpreted by mankind—had fashioned chains to control the sexual urge. The Holy Bible spoke of sexuality in golden tones, yes—but what about the real world, where ordinary people lusted and needed and sweated in the night for a touch of forbidden flesh? The Bible said wait until marriage. No adultery. Be strong. Have faith. Do not covet your neighbor’s wife.
Fine. John understood all that.
But what did the Bible say about wanting the body of a porno star?
He was a virgin. Denial had been tough at first. Gradually he overcame all urges with his reading, his studies, his jigsaw puzzles. He poured his soul into his calling.
But something else was calling him now, something that had sneaked up from his blind side. Something forbidden, and very, very sweet.