I Detest All My Sins Read online

  Copyright by Lanny Larcinese, October 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, magnetic, and photographic including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 9781940758800 Paperback

  ISBN-13: 9781940758817 E-Pub

  ISBN-13: 9781940758824 Mobi

  Cover design by: Rae Monet

  Published by:

  Intrigue Publishing

  11505 Cherry Tree Crossing RD #148

  Cheltenham, MD 20623-9998

  PROLOGUE

  Bill Conlon lay on his belly in the yard of Graterford prison. His head rested on a crooked arm; his right hand clutched a rosary fashioned from raisins and thread unwound from a sock.

  Thirty yards away, Mikey Osborne lay on his back, moaning, gripping his throat with both hands, tightly knitted fingers failing to dam the blood throbbing through them.

  Rubber bullets from guard towers whizzed throughout the yard. Bill’s mind screamed, They got Mikey! They got Mikey! He was desperate to help, yet dare not move; instead, he shouted, “Help him! Somebody help him!” None of the prison staff or other convicts lying prone in the dusty yard came to Mikey’s aid. Seconds became minutes and puddles of bloody mud settled around Mikey’s neck as a spray of rubber bullets spat dirt next to Bill’s outstretched hand.

  He let go of the rosary at the sound of the loudspeaker command.

  “You! You with something in your hand! Let it go or you will be fired upon!”

  He put his intertwined fingers behind his head and squeezed his eyes shut, and with every pulse of Mikey’s punctured jugular, the chance to make his own life right drained away with it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Eight months after Mikey’s death, Bill was released, having served his full twelve-year sentence. On the bus from Graterford into town, he touched his hand to his shirt pocket and felt his improvised rosary but chose to read from his prayer missal instead. It was still no use.

  He put it back in his pocket and swayed en route to the halfway house in the north part of town. They’d give him a bed until he got on his feet. A security job waited at Temple University under their Jobs for the Formerly Incarcerated program.

  Twelve years of mea culpas failed to reconstitute his hollowed-out soul. On the road to priesthood back in Jesuit seminary he had yearned to master cultivating goodness, but easier said than done. Philosophy and theology had opened his mind, but sinful impulses were insidious. Not even the slammer could purge them, maybe made them worse.

  He walked from the bus stop. The neighborhood hadn’t changed much since he last saw it thirteen years ago back in ’72-litter-strewn sidewalks, pawn shops, check-cashing stores and storefront churches with names like Pearly Gates Soul Saving Station. At Susquehanna Street he came upon a whore whose deep V-neck barely tamed her floppy tits dangling like eggplants into the open window of a Lincoln. He shook his head, yet his breath shortened and anal muscles contracted at the sight of ass cheeks rebelling against shorts too small and too tight to cover much. He reached up and touched his gold cross. Even praying was hard.

  He rang the bell at Radiant Hope Residential Re-Entry Center and was greeted by a short man with rounded shoulders and beard of gray stubble; useless as cover for the rosacea painting his nose and cheekbones.

  “Hi, brother,” the man said. “You Bill?”

  “Yeah, you Albert?”

  “Yeah, welcome.” He went to grab Bill’s duffle bag, but Bill wouldn’t let go.

  “‘S’okay,” Albert said. “Follow me. I’ll take you to the office.”

  They walked down the hall to an office with a frosted glass window. Hand painted in a spidery script all wrong for office lettering was the name Henrietta Jackson, MSW. Albert gave a tap on the window. A soprano voice from the inside chirped, “Yes? Come in.”

  “It’s me.” Albert said, sticking his head in the door. “I brought the new guy.” He stood aside as Bill faced an attractive woman of indeterminate ethnicity. Her pasted-on smile was framed by a generous application of scarlet lipstick on luscious lips. She was dressed in a loose-fitting blouse buttoned to the top. Anything that could push out the blouse’s loose pleats begged concealment and constraint; especially in a five-story brownstone filled with men whose last taste of a woman was years ago.

  She pointed to a chair beside the desk. “Take a load off, Mr. Conlon, relax. I’m Henrietta.” She held out her hand. Bill refused to let his gaze wander to the hem of her skirt although it was hiked four inches above kneecaps blanched by the pressure of ecru pantyhose. Instead, he looked her in the eye and offered his own hand, suddenly self-conscious of the jailhouse tats his sleeves refused to hide. She leaned back in her chair and swiveled slightly as she spoke, her nattering on automatic pilot.

  “We are a social service agency whose mission is to empower the formerly incarcerated by easing their transition into the community…” He fought to push away images of the penitentiary and Mikey bleeding-out in the yard. The outside world of 1985 was still so new, and yet wasn’t.

  Transitions? What transition could be worse than going from civilization as a Jesuit brother teaching in a private high school and into prison where existence was tenuous, mood was fragile, and respect measured by the timbre of voice or inches given or taken?

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “Nope.”

  “You may want to participate in some of our meetings,” she said.

  “I will,” Bill said. He wanted to be helpful, but also needed to find deadly Eddie Matthews, get to know him, look for an opening and satisfy his suspicion that it was Eddie who shivved Mikey in the yard. Somehow, Eddie had managed to slither away from the gaggle of cons who surrounded Mikey and sang happy birthday to him when he got killed, so when Eddie was up for parole a month before Bill got out, the little shit got green-lighted.

  The social worker stood and pressed a button on her desk. “Albert will show you to your room and go over house rules. I hope you find your stay at Radiant Hope meaningful.”

  Albert escorted Bill to a third-floor room with two bunk beds, two desks, and two wooden straight-back chairs. The mattresses were folded in half.

  “Is this the deluxe suite?” Bill asked. He didn’t care; he didn’t even need to be there but for his mission. His surreptitious pal from the joint, Deputy Warden Lewis, dropped a dime on his behalf. Bill had nowhere else to go. His parents had disowned him. They couldn’t forgive him for his brother’s suicide. Besides, Bill wanted to track down Deadly Eddie, and Radiant Hope was a good place to begin, not through Henrietta, she was already too tense, but through Albert. Albert was an ex-con too. Henrietta might be good for something else. There was that impulse again. Instead he bit his lip.

  “You’re lucky,” Albert said, “this room just vacated. You get first dibs on a bunk.” Bill threw his duffle bag on an upper with a view onto Broad. Albert said, “Let me show you where the linens are…”

  “You mean bed sheets?”

  “Yeah, them.” Before they left the room, Bill grabbed his d
uffle bag.

  “You can leave that here,” Albert said.

  “I’d rather not,” Bill said, “It’s my teddy bear.”

  “I hear ya, Bill. It’s like in the joint, ain’t it? Nobody better touch my shit.”

  Bill smiled. Albert knew the score.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bill punched out the number to Jericho Lewis’s private line. He pictured the deputy warden picking up with a mitt so huge it made phone receivers look tiny, as if they came from Toys R Us. His gargantuan size aside, Jericho was the toughest guy at Graterford, prisoner or staff, but nimble enough to navigate the labyrinth of admin, guards, prisoners, and byzantine bureaucracy.

  Their relationship began soon after Bill cleared Intake Processing after transfer from Holmesburg, and Jericho had picked up on Bill’s stint at Jesuit seminary. He called Bill in and wanted to know about it—purportedly to have Bill teach classes—but in later conversations Bill gleaned the big man’s personal anxieties over the loss of his faith and trouble at home, so Bill guided him into soft landings. As time went by, their rapport met the spiritual needs of one and survival needs of the other.

  In Bill’s exit interview, he and Jericho speculated whether Mikey’s hit had anything to do with recent prisoner agitation over rotten food, a percolating scandal waiting to roil. Each of the two events had been treated separately by the press, but how long would it be before some enterprising journalist connected the dots?

  Jericho barked into the phone,” Lewis here. What is it?”

  “Have you heard from her?” Bill asked.

  “I think she’s with him, Bill,” Jericho said, his voice softened. Bill wondered what there was about a hard man who dominated men, yet a woman could pluck him like a withered dandelion and blow his confidence away.

  “Listen to me, if she hasn’t said anything there’s still hope.”

  “She hates confrontation.”

  “Force the issue.”

  “I’m afraid of what she’ll say.”

  “Look, let’s get together here in the city. We can talk, pray.”

  “That she comes back?”

  “For strength in case she doesn’t.” Crystal would never go back. Bill knew it. Once she had fucked Fernando, Jericho was toast.

  “Okay, we can meet at the Art Museum on Sunday, maybe go down to the cathedral for a late Mass,” Jericho said.

  Bill had been skillful at reigniting the deputy warden’s faith, even though his own drowned in the Schuylkill River along with his brother Dennis. The desire to be an instrument of peace and love was the reason Bill had joined the Jesuits, but he also had other needs, needs that made his insides feel like a cougar in a gunny sack, needs not part of the Jebbie credo.

  “Sounds like a plan. By the way, you know that other thing?” Bill asked.

  “Made any progress?” Jericho asked.

  “Not yet, but Albert is chatty. He knows a guy who knows a guy but wants to be sure I’m legit before he talks. I get the impression he’s afraid.”

  “Ever know anybody who wasn’t afraid of Deadly Eddie?” Jericho said.

  “Yeah, you.”

  “Maybe,” the big man replied. “Remember, he had been sidling up to Mikey, and now that sweet kid is dead and Eddie is alive. Who needs Sherlock Holmes? If Eddie and some other guy were connected and one of them wound up dead, bet your ass Eddie did it.”

  “Yeah, and Mikey was ready to put his proof of the food scam on the table,” Bill said.

  “I can’t figure out how word got around. There has to be some connection, or maybe Eddie just went off.”

  “You know prison, Big Guy. There are no secrets, not for long.”

  “I thought I had it covered,” Jericho said. “Anyway, keep it up, and keep your hands off Henrietta. It’ll screw me up if she has to transfer because of you.” Sage advice, and rightly directed. Over the years, Bill had revealed much of his own stuff to Jericho, including the raging libido which ultimately resulted in Bill’s stretch. But Henrietta wasn’t Bill’s type.

  “I’ll see you Sunday at 2:00 p.m. I’ll be in French Impressionism.”

  “That’s a move.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Deadly Eddie Matthews pictured his parole officer’s face on the dartboard in Dirty Frank’s Bar in a neighborhood unsure if it was a hip urban gayborhood, a red-light district, or haven for lonely creatives. At eleven a.m. he was the only one in the place besides the looked-younger-than-she-was bartender, Louise Bearden, whose severe limp resulted from a shattered fibula. A jammer from the Motown Maidens sent her over the rail with a cheap shot during roller derby finals back when Louise skated for the Quaker City Queens under the nom de guerre of Girly Daynight. Her fair-haired, petite look belied her propensity to turn out the lights of opponents via vicious yanks of their scrunchies, or horse-collars to the back of their jerseys. She was blonde, with hair drawn back into a ponytail which highlighted freckles around a nose busted one time too many. When she opened her mouth you knew she was right for the job of tending bar at Dirty Frank’s.

  “Ready for another, Deadly Eddie?” she asked. “Why do they call you Deadly Eddie?”

  “It’s easy Louisey, ’cause when the shit goes down, you want to be on the right side of me. Yeah, gimme another Schmidt’s.”

  He slid onto a stool and looked at his watch. That fucking greaseball Luca was never on time. He had told Eddie he had a job for him, said it would be easy, said if Eddie did it good there’d be more, and Eddie could give up peddling dime bags on the corner. Eddie thought

  Luca’s so-called job would tide him over until he sprang his big surprise about the prison catering bids, then Luca would see who the pussy was and who the swinging dick. He swiveled his stool around and sent three darts into the wall above the dartboard.

  “You know how to make things right, Eddie,” his drunken father had once told him. “The “way you stepped up when that cop was hasslin’ your cousin Jack, and over what? Over a fucking dice game?” It was Eddie’s first serious rap; beating up a cop. That and a lousy lawyer caught him four years and he spent eighteen more of the next twenty-two in one prison or another. His worst sentence was for voluntary manslaughter; for killing his old man who beat his beloved mother half senseless, then did things like grab her by the hair and hold her sobbing, brutalized face up for Eddie to see and say, “See?” Eddie could only stand by, helpless, too small to run, too afraid to leave his mother, but seething like a cauldron of boiling tar.

  He looked at his watch. 1:00 p.m. Fuck it. He wasn’t waiting for no goombah no longer. By now artsy types, writers, and neighborhood twinks trickled into Dirty Frank’s. Not Eddie’s kind of crowd. He saw all the down-low he wanted in the joint, and buried as deep, though not altogether, those times he got his own shit pushed in at West Penn. As he waited for Louise to make change from his twenty, the door opened and a Benicio del Toro lookalike with a forty-dollar haircut and five-inch cornicello dangling from a huge-linked, gold necklace caught his eye. It was Luca Cunnio. Luca motioned for Eddie to come outside and disappeared as soon as Eddie acknowledged him. Eddie got his change and went to the restroom.

  Standing in front of the urinal filled with cigarette butts, he studied the iterations of penises and testicles scrawled on the wall in various media. Hand carved, felt tip pen, smoke, pencil, and one appeared to be smeared shit. He shook out, zipped up, looked at himself in the cracked, flaking and foggy mirror, then lit a Pall Mall and feigned nonchalance with a final look at himself before exiting the bathroom.

  When he got outside, Luca was sitting in his red De Ville blocking the crosswalk. Eddie opened the passenger door and stuck his head in. “Get in,” Luca said. “Put your cigarette out.”

  They headed for Fairmount Park. Eddie tried to conceal his awe over the car. He thought the only Caddy he’d ever ride in would be a hearse.

  “So Eddie, we like what you did for us in Graterford. You must know a lot of the guys from there, right? I mean, you just got out a little
while ago, right?”

  “Yeah, why?” Eddie said as they hit the Parkway.

  “Know a guy called the priest?”

  “Yeah, I knew the priest. Always mumblin’ somethin’ to hisself. I always wondered why they called him that.”

  “Because he’s a priest.”

  “Well, if he ever was, he ain’t no more.” Eddie guffawed. “Why?”

  “He can get you to Jericho Lewis. That’s where you come in.”

  “What’d Lewis do?”

  Luca looked over to Eddie with his thick, black brows furrowed. “He either knows too much or gonna find out too much. Beyond that, it’s none of your fucking business. Alls I wanna know is if you’re up for the job.”

  “What’s it pay?”

  “Two grand.”

  “Let me think about it.” He already knew he would take the gig but playing hard-to-get might jack up the price.

  “What’s a car like this cost?” he asked Luca as they curled around Eakins Oval toward the art museum.

  “You got too many questions,” Luca said, “but plenty.”

  This might be a quick two grand. Nor was Eddie bothered by Jericho’s enormous size. Though Eddie was only 5’7”, he had acute confidence in simple instruments that reconciled his small stature with larger opponents; a pencil to the eye or ballpeen to the cranium, or why God invented the forty-five. Or finding another way, like he did after his father put his mother in the hospital by pushing her into traffic. As the old man had snored in a drunken stupor with spit running out of the corner of his mouth, Eddie took a hatchet to the old man’s skull. Trying to dislodge it resulted in pulling out brain and most of his jaw. Eddie thought that was it, so he left to play cards. When he came back, he mysteriously found his father lying face down in the bathroom with shaving cream on what was left of his face and a trail of blood from the bed to the bathroom. He had survived the attack but in such a state of shock that he got out of bed not realizing his jaw and much of his brain were gone and went into the bathroom to shave.