Little Altar Boy

By John Guzlowski

Crime Fiction Lover’s Top Five Books of 2020

On a snowy Thursday night in Chicago, there is a knock on Detective Hank Purcell’s door. Sister Mary Philomena has seen something terrible at Saint Fidelis Church — a violation of all she holds sacred.

The next Monday, she is found murdered in the convent basement, next to a furnace stuffed with old papers and photographs.

And Margaret, Hank’s teenage daughter, has disappeared.

Hank and his unconventional partner Marvin Bondarowicz try to force their way through a wall of ecclesiastical silence to find the killer, while their search for Margaret takes them from swank lakeside flats to drug dens to south-side basement blues clubs…and the snow keeps falling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kasva Press
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781948403177

John Guzlowski

Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, John Guzlowski came to America with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany during the war. Growing up in “Murdertown” — the tough immigrant neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago — he met hardware-store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned their dead horses, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. In much of his work, Guzlowski remembers and honors the experiences and ultimate strength of these voiceless survivors.An acclaimed poet, Guzlowski is also a respected teacher, literary critic, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. His recent poetry collection 'Echoes of Tattered Tongues' won the 2017 Montaigne Medal of the Eric Hoffer Awards as one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.Guzlowski received his BA in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his MA and PhD in English from Purdue University. He is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Book preview

Prologue

Nights in the winter in the snow, the old man would kneel in front of the church, weeping until the priest came out and told him to move on.

The old man did as he was told. He was a good Catholic, a good boy, and he always did what the fathers asked him to do.

He struggled off his knees and turned toward home.

And then the priest went back into the dark church and found a pew near the confessionals and prayed for his own soul.

Chapter 1

Eleven days after Christmas, Hank Purcell was still grumpy, still feeling like Ebenezer Scrooge.

It was 8 pm, and he had been waiting for his daughter Margaret to get home for the last two hours, since supper. And he wasn’t getting any less pissed off.

She’d called him from her friend Maureen’s house, and she’d said she was coming right home, and maybe she had set out, but the snow coming down probably wasn’t helping any. Or maybe she hadn’t set out for home. And maybe she hadn’t been calling from Maureen’s house.

She was always late. Or absent. Or fucked up.

He didn’t know why she was like that. He remembered her as a kid, always reading big old novels by Louisa May Alcott and Charles Dickens and drawing pictures of pandas and talking to him and her mom about turtles or sea anemones. Back then, Margaret loved science and the water, and her favorite thing was going down to Fullerton Beach and looking for spiders or ants or any little thing that somehow had managed to survive all the garbage the City of Chicago dumped into Lake Michigan every single day.

But she wasn’t like that now. She was nineteen years old, and now she seemed to be more interested in garbage, the shit she and her friends were hearing about love and sex and drugs from the rock and roll records they were listening to. All those Beatles and Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplanes with their songs about living in yellow submarines and spending the night together and taking pills to get high and then taking other pills to get unhigh.

And it seemed worse since Christmas.

Standing next to the Christmas tree, Hank looked out the window at the falling snow. It was coming down in big wet flakes the size of moths, and he knew the snow would be pretty heavy and deep by the time morning came. He had a funny thought. Maybe work would be cancelled, and he wouldn’t have to go down to Shakespeare Substation. That would be nice. It had been a long time since he had a vacation. Even a small one. It would be good not to have to go and try to make sense of the shit that was always going down at the police station.

He remembered when he first made detective. That was seventeen years ago, back in 1950, after five years as a patrolman. He thought making detective was special back then, thought he was special, going down to the station house every day, trying to figure out who the bad guys were and what he was going to do about them. He remembered his first case — the one where the Polack gambler stabbed his wife in the face and gouged her cheek open with a fountain pen. He even remembered the guy’s name: Dulik. The guy pleaded not guilty due to temporary insanity. He claimed he had spent four years in the Buchenwald concentration camp and claimed his wife said something to him in German that sounded like something a guard said to him once. It drove him nuts.

Hank knew it was probably all bullshit, but it was the kind of bullshit that made sense. He had been in the war too, seen Buchenwald and some of the other camps, knew what the German guards were like. He wished he could have given Dulik a pass, but he couldn’t. His wife’s face was a mess, and it would always be a mess because of what Dulik did to it, no matter how many stitches they sewed into her cheek.

The Polack got two years in Joliet for his bad memories of Buchenwald.

Hank shrugged and wondered for a moment if Joliet was anything like Buchenwald. He doubted it, but he wished he could ask Dulik anyway. But he knew he couldn’t. The Polack gambler who stabbed his wife in the face was dead, killed by some Simon City gangster in a shower — about a year into his sentence.

Memories. Hank had a boatload of them. More than twenty years a cop. A couple of years busting his ass in the army before that. And twenty years of living in the city before that. A lot of it was shit, the Great Depression, the World War, the killers and thugs he met every day. He could sure use a small vacation and some warm summer wind, the kind of wind Frank Sinatra was always singing about in that song about walking on golden sand.

But Hank bet he wasn’t going to get one. Not even a tiny vacation.

Where was his daughter? What the hell was she doing? Listening to some Rolling Stones mumbo jumbo. Get off of My Cloud? 19th Nervous Breakdown? Mother’s Little Helper? All that shit in those songs about how the kids’ fathers and mothers were messing with their minds.

Hank didn’t trust any of her friends either, the girls or the guys. Hippies and druggies. Dropouts and boozers. Every one of them. When he asked her about them, she would always say the same thing. Man, they’re cool.

Cool?

He shrugged and shook his head and said, Fuck. Said it out loud. Said it like he hoped his wife Hazel back in the kitchen could hear him and explain to him where they went wrong in raising their daughter.

The doorbell rang just then, but he knew it wasn’t Margaret. She never rang the bell. Mostly she snuck in the back way, hoping to not run into Hank and his smoldering anger.

From the kitchen, Hazel called out, Hank, could you see who that is?

Sure, honey, he said, and went to answer the front door. It had to be a real eagle scout, he thought, to be walking through all that snow flaking and clumping down from the cold, purple evening clouds.

It wasn’t.

Sister Mary Philomena! he said as he opened the door.

The nun hadn’t changed much in the ten years or so since he had worked with her on that Suitcase Charlie business. She was still short and plump and formidable. But now her black coat was white with snow.

Sister, you’re covered with snow. Come on in.

Thank you, she said, stepping in. It’s snowing quite hard. I was afraid the Diversey Avenue bus wasn’t going to be able to make it here. It kept sliding on the snow. At one point, it almost smashed into a parked car. I started praying as fast as I could then.

I guess those prayers must have worked, Sister, Hank said, smiling.

Hazel came in then. Sister, you must be freezing. That snow is so wet. Hank, please take her coat. And I’ll get the sister something warm to drink. Maybe some tea?

Hank looked at his wife. He gave her the look he usually saved for impossible situations that made no sense and had no solution he could figure out. Hazel lifted her eyebrows.

Hank took the nun’s coat and hung it in the closet near the front door. He smiled. Sister, I’m surprised anyone’s out on a night like this. It’s really coming down.

Detective Purcell, I don’t know where to begin, but I must. Is there someplace where we can talk in private?

Hazel looked confused.

Sure, Sister, we can talk in the basement. We’ve got a rec room down there, some nice couches and chairs. It’s a good place to talk.

Divider

Once downstairs, Hank watched the nun sit down on the couch, and then he sat across from her. He kept thinking this was not going to go well. For a long time, she didn’t say anything. She seemed worried, confused. Unsure of herself. She sat there rubbing her chin and running her fingers along the line where her habit met her right cheek.

This wasn’t the way she usually looked. Usually she was determined and purposeful, focused. He remembered when she helped him make sense of some of the clues in the Suitcase Charlie murders. Back then, she acted almost like an evidentiary professor, giving a lesson she had given a thousand times before.

He waited for her to be like that again, to compose herself. Pull herself together.

Detective Purcell, I need your help.

Sure, Sister, anything, you just name it.

It’s hard to talk about what I have to talk about, she said and paused for a moment, looked around the rec room.

Take your time, Sister. There’s no rush.

But there is, Detective. There’s something terrible happening. I saw it today, for the first time, and it stopped me like a death.

Hank pulled back a bit, and then he leaned forward and listened.

After the early morning Mass, the six o’clock one, I was measuring the altar for a new altar cloth, and I thought I was alone in the church. It was so silent. Not many people come to those early Masses anymore. Mostly it’s just the old widows who live near the church. But even they were gone by then, and the church was empty. I couldn’t hear anything. I dropped my tape measure. It was one of the new ones that roll into themselves, and it dropped behind the altar, and I bent down to pick it up, and I looked through the door to the sacristy, and I saw something there.

Sister Mary Philomena stopped then.

Hank had seen this before. He knew she had something to say and what she had to say was going to change everything, change the world as she knew it, and he knew she couldn’t bring herself to say it because she was afraid of what this new world would be like.

Hank didn’t want to press her. She had to bring it out herself at her own time, her own speed. He waited.

She looked down at her hands. It looked to Hank like she wished she had a rosary in them.

Sister Mary Philomena looked up then, and for a moment made eye contact with Hank.

I saw one of the parish priests there, and he was doing something. It was something bad.

She said it, and she stopped. She looked back at her hands.

Hank knew what she was feeling. Whatever she had seen the priest do had somehow transferred to her. Women were like that. They were good at taking on the sins of the world, making them their own. He was surprised Jesus Christ hadn’t been a woman. It would have made a whole lot of sense in a hell of a lot of ways.

Then she looked up again, and Hank saw something in her eyes. He knew he was going to hear what it was the priest had been doing, and it was going to come out straight and fast. And it was going to be bad.

She stood up then and said it.

When I looked, it was sort of dark, and the father’s back was to me, and there was an altar boy sitting on his lap, like the father was Santa Claus and this boy was telling him what he wanted for Christmas. I could see his face, the boy’s face, and I recognized him. He’s one of Sister Patricia’s sixth graders, Tommy Sawa. He saw me too, and there was a frightened look on his face. Like he knew he was doing something bad. And he was. I saw the father’s hand was near Tommy’s right thigh. I don’t know if Tommy’s zipper was up or down, but I could see the father was doing something with his hand, maybe he was shaking something or rubbing something. I couldn’t see what. But I think I know what it was. The boy was so frightened, and he looked so guilty. It had to be bad, really bad. I think the father was doing something, and Tommy knew it was wrong, and I knew it too, and Tommy saw me and he looked frightened and guilty, and he knew I knew, and he knew he was in trouble.

Sister Mary Philomena stopped then. Hank could see she wasn’t done, but he knew she had to stop. She was going where she knew she had to go, but she would need more courage than she had ever had before, and it would take her a while to gather that courage together, bring it up from the back kitchens of her soul.

Just then, he heard the back door to the rec room open, the door that led in from the backyard and the garage beyond it.

It was his daughter Margaret.

Hey, Daddy, she said in a lazy drawl as she stepped into the rec room and stopped when she saw the sister standing in front of the couch.

Margaret was stoned.

Hank knew it by the way she smiled and didn’t look at anything at all really.

He turned to Sister Mary Philomena and smiled.

Hi, honey, he said to his daughter, I’m talking with the sister about a case right now. You look soaked. You look like you’ve been walking in the snow for hours. You better go upstairs and change out of those wet clothes. We can talk later.

All right, Daddy. Sorry for barging in. I’m going to my room. Long day.

Hank watched Margaret carefully climb the stairs pretending she wasn’t stoned. She was a bad actor, or maybe he was a good detective, one who had been looking at junkies and seeing through their bullshit for years.

Sorry, Sister, he said. My daughter.

Sister Mary Philomena nodded as if she understood the problems he was having with her. And maybe she did.

Hank waited a moment, and then he asked her the question he needed to ask her: Which priest was it?

Still standing, she didn’t hesitate. Detective Purcell, it was Father Ted, Father Ted Bachleda.

Are you sure?

Sister Mary Philomena didn’t say anything for a moment. She just looked at Hank as if he were a clueless third grader. Yes, I’m sure, and I want you to talk to him, and I want you to tell him you know what he was doing with that poor boy Tommy Sawa, and I want you to tell him to stop.

And then she sat down.

Hank knew the priest, Father Bachleda. He was probably the most popular of the three priests in the parish. There was the pastor, the old priest who ran the show, Father Thomas Plaszek. Then there was Father Anthony, the Polish priest who always seemed a little unsure of himself in English; and there was Father Ted, the youngest of the priests, the cool one, the guy who ran the Teen Club, the parish’s club for high-school-aged boys and girls. The guy with all the energy and pizzazz. Good looks and a lot of long black hair too, like one of these recent heartthrobs, Warren Beatty or Bobby Darin. He was always taking the kids to bowling alleys or museums or on field trips to sand dunes in Michigan or Indiana.

Sister, let me ask you again. This is important. Are you sure about what you saw? Are you sure it was Father Bachleda?

I’m sure it was he.

Sister, I’ll talk to him, Hank said, but I don’t think talking to him will work.

Do you know what I’m trying to say about what he was doing?

Yes, I do. I know it’s hard for you to say, and I think I understand why you came to me. I’ll try to talk to him, but I don’t think it will do much good. From what I know about men with this kind of problem, talking to them and asking them to change their ways isn’t the way you get them to change. What they’re doing has roots that go deep, and those roots aren’t going to be changed by having a conversation.

Maybe it will be different with the father. He’s a priest. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong, and he knows how to stop it or change it. I mean, isn’t it his job to tell people how to stop doing things that aren’t right in the eyes of God?

Hank thought about that for a moment. Yes, that’s a priest’s job, to understand sin and to understand the sinner and show the sinner how he should and could turn from the sin that’s making him a sinner. But Hank knew about crime and criminals, and this knowledge told him it wasn’t that easy. Understanding sin and stopping it weren’t the same thing. A good talking-to would only take you so far.

Sister, he said finally, I’ll talk to him and see what I can do. Let me drive you home.

No thank you, you’ve done enough. I need some time alone. God bless you, Detective. You’re a good man.

Hank nodded but didn’t say anything. He wished it were true. Both parts. That he was a good man and that God would bless him.

Divider

After he showed the sister out, he went to Margaret’s room.

She had changed out of her wet clothes into some dry pajamas, and she sat on her bed with a teen magazine in front of her, Hullabaloo or Rave or some shit like that.

Standing in the open doorway, he said it slowly, softly. He didn’t want to rile her, stir her up the way she sometimes got when they talked. Honey, please, you got to stop.

Stop? Stop what? she said, not looking at him, just turning a page of the magazine, staring at it like she was studying for a test or looking out a window at something strange, unbelievable.

You got to stop this stuff. You know what I mean. You’re high. You’ve been smoking pot again.

She looked up then and gave him the cold look he knew was coming, and she spoke slowly like he was some kind of idiot and needed to hear each word separately so he could get the point she was trying to make, No, I haven’t. I haven’t been smoking. How can you say that?

Honey, I’m a cop. I can smell it on your clothes. See it in your eyes, too. As soon as you walked in, I knew it. You’ve been hanging out with that Maureen again. Hanging out with her and her junkie, loser friends. I told you to stay away from them. They’re trouble, and they’ll get you into trouble.

She started laughing, but it was a fake laugh. Hank knew it — he had been hearing fake laughs for years. Suddenly she stopped. I’m not stoned, and Maureen’s friends aren’t junkies. You don’t know anything.

He took a step toward her and pointed his finger at her face. He knew he was losing control, but he couldn’t stop himself.

Look at you! Your eyes — your pupils are the size of quarters. You shuffle around the house with your legs barely moving. The goddamn smell of you. Jesus! You’re not stoned? You tell me you’re not stoned? What do you think I am — stupid?

She threw her magazine at him. It hit him in the face before he could brace himself. There was no thought in what he did next. He clenched his fists and took a step toward her, and then he stopped. He knew what he wanted to do, and he knew he couldn’t.

She started laughing again, but this time it was a real laugh. There was nothing fake about it this time. She was laughing at him.

His wife Hazel came in then.

Stop it! she shouted at Margaret.

Margaret didn’t stop. She picked up another magazine from her night stand and threw it at Hank, and then she picked up another and threw that too.

Hank looked at Hazel. You got to fix this. I can’t.

He shook his head, took a breath, and walked out of the room.

Chapter 2

Sitting in the unmarked Ford cruiser early the next afternoon with his partner Marvin Bondarowicz, Hank took a long drag on his cigarette and let the smoke drift out slowly. He watched the haze fill the car, make everything seem dreamy for a moment. Then he took another drag, deeper this time.

Outside, big flat snowflakes fell the way they had been falling since last night. A soft slow swirl through the gray air.

Hank looked out the window at the ice and snow ruts in the street. The mounds between them must be almost eight inches high. Eight inches high and dirty with oil and coal dust, the sludge that always blew around the Chicago streets.

Marvin snapped him back to the present. Hey, what the fuck, Hank? We don’t have all day with this. What’re you stalling for? This is no big deal. We go in, tell the priest he’s been caught with his pants around his ankles, and he better cut the shit out or we’ll cook his Polack ass, and we’re out of there.

Yeah, a piece of cake, Hank said slowly. I’m not worried about it. I’m thinking about Margaret.

Marvin screwed the cap off his half-pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s and took a pull.

Margaret? he said. That cutie? She doesn’t need your worrying, my friend. She’s nineteen, a straight-A college freshman at the Circle, and she’s got it all figured out. In a couple of years, she’ll be going to grad school and dreaming about being a professor.

She came home stoned yesterday. I could smell the fucking pot all over her. She’d been drinking too. It wasn’t the first time.

Come on, man. That’s no big deal. All the kids are smoking now. Grass won’t hurt you. Especially this Hoosier shit the kids are smoking. It’s 95% Polish oregano. It’s LSD you got to watch out for. That’s one fucking weird drug, acid. Makes you see mushrooms growing out of your dead daddy’s ears. The setting sun turning into a bucket of yellow jello. Or some kid on a merry-go-round yelling at you about the Bay of Pigs. I know what I’m talking about. Yesterday, I saw this guy in the station holding-cell who was high on it. He couldn’t even tell you his name or what he had for lunch or whether two and two still made four. He just kept mumbling about Jesus being in the blender and the refrigerator being on fire.

Have you tried it? Hank asked.

Marvin took another pull of the Jack Daniel’s and shook the bottle. Say, you want some of this?

Hank shook his head. Have you tried it? The acid?

Marvin smiled. Yeah, I’ve had acid. It’s tasty in a weird and unpredictable sort of way. But it sure does fuck you up.

Hank rolled down the window and flicked his cigarette butt into the dirty snow in the middle of the street.

You’re not making me feel any better about this, Marv. I’m worried she’s hanging out with some bad kids and she can’t see what kind of trouble she can get into.

Hank, come on, take it easy. You and Hazel raised a great kid. She’s smart, loves school, dreams about the science stuff she’s learning and becoming a teacher. You got a star there, Hank. You been telling me for nineteen fucking years about how great a kid she is and how she loves doing all the right things, and now she comes home a little high, and right away you’re making her into a junkie.

Yeah.

Marvin screwed the cap back on his bottle and slipped it into his overcoat’s inside pocket. Jesus Christ, man. Relax already. You need some fun. Let’s get in there and shake up this priest. Really fuck him up!

I told you already. That’s not what the sister wanted. We’re going to take it easy.

Marvin shrugged and laughed. Whatever you say, daddy-o. I’m cool.

Divider

The old housekeeper showed them into the main sitting room in the rectory, a big room with a couple of couches and some easy chairs set up in a circle. She pointed to an old brown sofa, nodded and said something in Polish, and then turned away.

I think she wants us to sit, Hank.

I guess. I don’t know why people always figure cops want to sit down.

I bet that housekeeper used to be a looker, Marvin said, but that was probably back in Warsaw before the last war or maybe the one before that. Yeah, a real looker. Like Pola Negri. You remember her? That old silent movie broad? She was a Polack too. You remember? Jesus, where do they find these ancient babes? She’s just old raggedy clothes and boobs that stretch down to her knees now. I bet it’s pretty tough for her to even wash these floors.

Hank had stopped listening a while ago, but he nodded anyway.

The door to the vestry opened then, and Father Bachleda came in. Smiling and extending his hand, he said, Gentlemen, please have a seat. The couches are old but still hospitable. Comfy as can be. Can I get you a cup of coffee…some tea? Maybe something a little stronger? It’s getting late in the day, and it will definitely be cocktail time pretty soon.

Hank sat down on the couch nearest the door