The Good Luck of Right Now(60)

You were gone.

It wasn’t my mother’s voice or the angry little man’s.

Was it my own?

Regardless, I did as the voice commanded me to do, slipping Father’s wallet into an interior pocket of my suitcase that was somewhat hidden behind a stack of clean white underwear briefs.

Good, the voice said. Now call the front desk and tell whomever answers that you need an ambulance sent immediately.

It took about fifteen minutes—during which I sat calmly on the bed, my mind blank, shocked into submission.

Father McNamee was pronounced dead immediately.

Two large men struggled to put his solid round body on a stretcher, but—with much breath and sweat—they finally got him strapped down, at which point they covered him with a white sheet and took him away.

Next, two local policemen interviewed me in my hotel room. One was tall with a mole on the end of his nose and the other was short with long sideburns. They both had freshly sharpened pencils and spiral-bound notebooks the size of bread slices, in which they scribbled furiously whenever I spoke.

“We’re sorry for your loss,” Sideburns said.

“Unfortunately, we need to ask you a few questions,” said the Mole.

“And we apologize in advance if any of the questions seem disrespectful, given the circumstances, but we have to do our job,” Sideburns said.

I nodded.

“What were you doing in Canada with the deceased?” the Mole asked.

“We were on a pilgrimage to Saint Joseph’s Oratory. We were planning to visit Cat Parliament afterward.”

“Cat Parliament?” the Mole said, scribbling.

“In Ottawa,” I said.

The cops exchanged a glance.

“Pardon my asking, but is that a peeler joint?” Sideburns said, scribbling.

“What?” I said.

“A . . . um . . . a gentleman’s club. A place where you pay women to take off their clothes. Strippers.”

“No, Cat Parliament’s a place where feral cats can roam free. I think it’s near the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.”

The police looked at each other again while raising their eyebrows and then continued to scribble.

“Were you drinking last night?” Sideburns asked and pointed the eraser on his pencil at the empty whiskey bottles.

“I wasn’t. Father McNamee drank daily.”

“You found him dead this morning? Dead in his bed?”

“Yes.”

“Traveling with anyone else?”

“Max and Elizabeth are in the lobby. They don’t yet know what’s happened.”

“Would you like me to get them for you?” the Mole said.

I looked up at him, not quite sure why he had asked me that.

“You seem to be in shock,” Sideburns said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be alone.”

I nodded.

That sounded reasonable.

“Max and Elizabeth, you said? Those are the names I should call for?” said the Mole, and when I nodded, he said, “Got it,” and left.

Sideburns walked over to the window and looked out.

“How do you think he died?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Looks like a heart attack, most likely. Maybe alcohol poisoning. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy results for the exact cause of death.”

“Why do you think he died?” I let escape before I could censor myself.

“Come again?”

“Why do you think he died? We were so close. He brought me all this way.”

“I don’t understand,” said the short cop with the sideburns, no longer scribbling my every word into his notebook.

I read his eyes and could tell he was worried, like maybe he was starting to become afraid of me—I’d seen that look many times before—so I didn’t ask any further questions.

“These things are always difficult,” he offered. “Maybe it’s best to leave the bigger questions for another day. A counselor might be better equipped to help you with that sort of thing.”

I thought he was probably right, even though I had failed so miserably with Wendy and Arnie, and when I looked at my brown shoelaces, the police officer looked out the window again.

A few minutes later the tall police officer returned with Elizabeth and Max.

“What the f*ck, hey?”

“Oh my God. I can’t believe it. Are you okay, Bartholomew?”

The police officers looked at each other once more, and then Sideburns said, “We’re going to leave you alone now. But we’ll need your names, passport numbers, and home addresses.”

We told them our names and addresses—Elizabeth used their old address without explaining that they had been evicted, which I thought was smart fast thinking—and they dutifully copied down information from our passports before they gave us their cards and told us to contact them in twenty-four hours, after we had been in touch with Father McNamee’s family at home, so that we could make the proper arrangements for the body to be shipped back to Philadelphia.

Then the police officers left.

“What the f*cking f*ck, hey?” Max said, and slapped the side of his head a few times like he was trying to get ketchup from a bottle.

“What happened?” Elizabeth said.

“I don’t really know.”