I shifted uncomfortably on the hard chair; my mother, fleeing Fascist Italy because of religion, didn’t want that to define her daughter’s life in the New World. “I’ll pledge you my word. When I give it I do my utmost to keep it.”
He grunted. “I guess that’ll have to do. And the other thing you wanted from me?”
I took a breath and said in a rush, “Lacey Dowell. She knows something about Frenada, about his shirts, why he made those Mad Virgin T–shirts and then pretended he hadn’t. She won’t talk to me.”
“Magdalena. I never can think of her by that silly stage name. You think I can make her give up her story?” His full mouth twisted, whether in amusement or scorn I couldn’t tell. “Maybe. Maybe. You being a detective and all, I suppose you know what fancy hotel she’s staying in while she’s in town. She sure avoids the old neighborhood, unless she’s got a team of cameras following after her.”
30 The Mad Virgin’s Story
Father Lou was gone about twenty minutes. When he came back he said if I could wait he was pretty sure Magdalena would be along to the church sometime this evening.
I suddenly remembered Morrell, waiting for me at a restaurant on Damen, and asked for a phone. Father Lou took me into his study, a shabby but far more comfortable room than the parlor we’d been using. Boxing trophies were scattered about shelves stuffed with old papers. The desk, with a simple wood crucifix over it, was stacked with financial reports and old sermons. He didn’t have many books; I noticed a collection of Frank O’Connor short stories and, to my surprise, one by Sandra Cisneros—trying to keep up with parishioners, he explained when he saw me looking at it.
He had an old black rotary phone, heavy and clunky to hands used to plastic Touch–Tones. He listened in unashamedly as I made my call—I suppose to make sure I wasn’t going to set a mob heavy on Frenada’s sister—but when he heard me ask the ma?tre d’ for Morrell he brightened.
“So you know Morrell,” he said when I hung up. “You should have told me that sooner. I didn’t know he was back in town.”
“He got thrown out of Guatemala,” I said. “I don’t know him well.”
Father Lou had met him during the Reagan years, when American churches sometimes gave sanctuary to El Salvadoran refugees. St. Remigio’s had sheltered a family that fled to Humboldt Park, and Morrell had come to do a story on them.
“Does a lot of good, Morrell. Not surprised he got thrown out of Guatemala. He’s always covering underdogs of one kind or another. If you were meeting him for a meal I suppose you must be hungry.”
He took me down a long unlit corridor to his kitchen, a cavern of a room, with a stove even older than the rotary phone. He didn’t ask me what I wanted, or even what I wouldn’t eat, but fried up a pan full of eggs with an expert hand. He ate three to my two, but I kept even with him on the toast.
When Lacey still hadn’t arrived at nine, we watched Murray’s show on a set in the parish hall. It was so old that Murray’s face danced around in a wavy line of reds and greens. The report was subdued and lacked Murray’s usual punch: he’d apparently been rattled by my information, however angrily he’d tossed me out this morning. Most of the report focused on the Mexico–Chicago drug route, with only ninety seconds on Lucian Frenada, “an up–and–coming entrepreneur whose untimely death means a lot of questions with no answers. Was he the point man for a drug ring, as the five kilos of coke found in his shop last week suggest? Was he murdered by associates he’d run afoul of? Or was he the innocent bystander his sister and other friends claim?”
Murray segued from that to footage of the shop, footage of the coke inside a bolt of T–shirting, and some old footage of Lacey and Frenada in front of the very church where I was sitting. “Father Lou Corrigan, who trained Lucian Frenada as the city champion lightweight boxer in this building, wouldn’t talk to Channel Thirteen, either about Frenada or his other prizewinning student, Lacey Dowell.”
He went on with details of Lacey’s life, showed footage of his two–week–old interview with her, and closed with a summary that seemed lame to me. Father Lou was furious, but I thought it was a much more muted report than Murray would have made without my input. Of course, the priest had known Frenada for thirty years. It was a personal story to him.
We were back in his study, still thrashing it out over a second pot of tea, when the doorbell rang, a harsh, loud buzzing that fitted the priest’s own voice. He pushed back from the chair and moved out to the hall on his light dancing step. I followed: if Lacey was bait in a Global trap I didn’t want to be sitting under a crucifix waiting for it.
The star was alone, her cloud of red curls tucked inside a motorcycle helmet. No one would have known her in her nondescript jeans and jacket.
She put an arm around the priest. “I’m so sorry, Father Lou. Sorry about everything.”