Blind Tommy & Father Gerard (8)

Father Gerard was stunned. The charge that he had killed the nun was outrageous. Even worse, the detective had woven an entire narrative to explain the crime. According to O’Flattery, the nun was about to have him reassigned for drinking, and Father Gerard didn’t want to leave his cushy hospital job. The story was absurd.

And yet everyone believed it, even the archbishop. He offered Father Gerard scant support; he wouldn’t even find funds for a lawyer.

Perhaps, Father Gerard thought, from the distance he did look guilty. He had been nearby.

He hadn’t liked the nun. But then, no one who knew her did either. She was a severe woman who liked nothing and felt no one else should, either. The only jobs anyone ever gave her were ones she could do entirely by herself.

Father Gerard knew who the murderer was. To free himself, he only had to reveal the confession.

At first, he was in so much disbelief that he didn’t consider doing that. He was in something close to shock – arrested, taken to a small, dank jail, he felt abandoned. For the first time in years he thought of Christ in the garden before his arrest, abandoned by his apostles.

A day passed. He was the only prisoner in the dank cell block, which smelled of rotten cabbage. He wasn’t allowed a drink; his body began going through withdrawal. At the end of the day, Father Gerard decided he would tell everything he knew. Replaying what had happened between himself and Blind Tommy so many years before, he decided that the confession lacked the elements necessary for it to be a “legal” confession. There would be no sin in revealing it.

In the morning, he stuck his face between the metal bars of the door.

“I want to speak to Detective O’Flattery,” he yelled.

The guard at the end of the block lumbered down in his direction.

“What are you saying?” asked the officer.

“I have important information for the detective on my case.”

“You can talk to him tomorrow, at the extradition hearing,” said the guard. “You want my advice, though – whatever you want to say, you ought to save it for your lawyer.”

“I don’t have a lawyer. I don’t need one. I’m innocent.”

The guard began to laugh. “Right Father.”

Father Gerard sank onto his cot, dejected. There was no hope.

(more to come)

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