Father Gielczowski’s picture was on the wall facing the windows, along with the other priests who’d served the parish. Their names, German, Polish, Serbian, Italian, reflected the waves of immigrants who’d come to the South Side to work the mills. The current incumbent was Umberto Cardenal. I imagined addressing him if he was made head of the archdiocese: Cardinal Cardenal.
The desk, which was as battle-scarred as the walls, sat near the windows where Father Cardenal was working. I moved the visitor’s chair across the room, since chunks of plaster were dropping almost faster than the priest could fill in the hole.
When he finally climbed down, a gray sheen covered his face, glued on by his sweat, and the tone in which he asked what I wanted was barely civil.
“I don’t mind waiting if you want to wash up,” I offered. “I can even put the ladder away if you tell me where it goes.”
The lines around his mouth relaxed. “I look that bad, do I?” He opened a closet door and studied his face in a small mirror hanging inside. “Yes, this face would do for the Day of the Dead, but perhaps not for church business. The ladder goes in the utility storage room next to the parish meeting hall.”
I went with him to the hallway, but he headed toward the rectory, waving a vague arm to his left. I opened doors but didn’t see a meeting hall or a utility closet. At one point I found myself in the side aisle of the church, where a young woman was clutching the arm of a short squat man. He looked so much like Danny DeVito, down to the wings of wild hair flying away from his bald head, that I couldn’t help staring.
“Uncle Jerry, please! We just can’t do it anymore.”
He shoved her roughly away. “You should have thought of that when—” He caught sight of me. “Who are you and what do you want?” Even his husky voice sounded like DeVito’s.
“Utility closet, the one where this ladder belongs.”
“In case you didn’t notice, this is the church, not a closet.” He turned back to the woman. “Get out of here before you get me in trouble.”
“Are you okay?” I asked the niece.
“She’s fine. She’s leaving because she’s on her lunch hour and she can’t afford to get fired.”
The niece wiped her eyes with her sleeve and started down the aisle to the front entrance.
I followed her. “Do you need help?”
She turned to look at her uncle, shook her head at me and kept going. I put the ladder down and went after her, but she pushed me away.
“Don’t bother me. I can’t afford—it was a mistake—I just thought—never mind.”
I pulled out a card. “If you change your mind, give me a call. If he’s hurting you, I can get you to a safe place.”
She shook her head again, but at least she pocketed the card. When I turned back up the aisle for the ladder, Uncle Jerry had disappeared through one of the many side doors that littered the building. He’d left behind his old voltmeter, the pre-digital kind. In a spirit of malice, I carried it with me. When I finally stumbled on the utility room, I put the meter on a shelf behind the ladder. Let him spend an hour or two hunting for it.
When I got back to the church office, Cardenal was at his desk, wearing a clean T-shirt, his face scrubbed shiny. He was working at his computer, but he stopped when I carried the visitor’s chair to its original spot.
“What is it you need so badly that you are willing to lug around building equipment?” he asked.
I couldn’t help smiling. “Help with one of your parishioners.”
“And you are not one of them. I recognize most people who come to Mass more than twice a year, but you I don’t remember seeing.”
“You wouldn’t: I moved away from this neighborhood a long time ago.” I explained who I was.
“Frank Guzzo asked me to make some inquiries on his mother’s behalf,” I added. “She’s always been volatile, and now she seems even more so, but—you know she was in prison for a good long stretch, right? For the murder of her daughter?”
“The gossip has been here, ever since Mrs. Guzzo showed up at Mass two months ago,” Cardenal admitted.
“I just spent half an hour with her, and I am worn out and confused. She says she’s looking for an exoneration, but it sounded as though what she really wants is to pin her daughter’s murder on my family.”
Cardenal raised an eyebrow. “Does your family have a vendetta against her?”
I smiled sadly. “Stella used to spread the word around the neighborhood that my mother was seducing her husband. And then, when Mateo Guzzo sent Annie to my mother for piano lessons, Stella became furious with envy, thinking my mother was undermining her with her own child. I was startled when I saw her just now to find out she still is obsessed with the idea. Only she’s added my cousin Boom-Boom to the mix—Boom-Boom Warshawski; he’s dead now, but he used to play with the Blackhawks. Stella ranted at me that Boom-Boom had destroyed Frank’s chance to have a baseball career, that he seduced Annie, then killed her.”