He touched his suit jacket pocket, where he had put the crucial recording of Doil’s confession. When and how the taped information would be released, or if it would be made public at all, would be someone else’s decision. Ainslie would turn over the tape to Lieutenant Newbold, and the Police Department and the state attorney’s office would handle it from there.
Jorge began, “Was Animal—”
Ainslie interrupted. “I’m not sure we should call him Animal anymore. Animals only kill when they have to. Doil did it for—” Ainslie stopped. Why did Doil kill? For pleasure, a religious mania, uncontrollable compulsion? He said aloud, “For reasons we’ll never know.”
Jorge glanced sideways. “Anyway, did you find out anything, Sergeant? Something you can tell me?”
Ainslie shook his head. “I have to talk with the lieutenant first.”
He checked his watch: 7:50 A.M. Leo Newbold was probably still at home. Ainslie picked up the phone from the seat beside him and tapped out the number. Newbold answered on the second ring.
“I thought it was you,” he said moments later. “I presume it’s all over.”
“Well, Doil’s dead. But I doubt very much if it’s over.”
“Did he tell you anything?”
“Enough to know the execution was justified.”
“We were certain anyway, but it’s a relief to know for sure. So you got a confession?”
Ainslie hesitated. “I’ve quite a bit to report, sir. But we don’t want this going out over the wire services.”
“You’re right,” the lieutenant acknowledged. “We should all be so careful. Okay, not on a cell phone.”
“If there’s time,” Ainslie told him, “I’ll call you from Jacksonville.”
“Can hardly wait. Take it easy, Malcolm.”
Ainslie switched off the cellular.
“You’ll have plenty of time; the airport’s only sixty miles,” Jorge volunteered. “Maybe enough for breakfast.”
Ainslie grimaced. “The last thing I feel like is eating.”
“I know you can’t tell me everything. But I gather Doil must have confessed to at least one murder.”
“Yes.”
“Did he treat you like a priest?”
“He wanted to. And I guess, to a degree, I let him.”
Jorge asked quietly, “Do you believe Doil is in heaven now? Or is there some other fiery spot called hell that’s run by Satan?”
Ainslie chuckled and asked, “Why, are you worried?”
“No. Just wanted your opinion—is there a heaven and a hell?”
You never leave your past behind totally, Ainslie thought. He remembered parishioners asking him much the same question, and he was never certain how to answer honestly. Now, turning toward Jorge, he said, “No, I don’t believe in heaven anymore, and I never did believe in hell.”
“How about Satan?”
“Satan’s as fictional as Mickey Mouse—invented as an Old Testament character. He’s fairly harmless in Job, then in the second century B.C. he was demonized by an extremist Jewish sect called the Essenes. Forget it.”
For years after leaving the church, Malcolm Ainslie had been reluctant to discuss his beliefs, disbeliefs, and religion’s sophistry, even though he was sometimes sought out as an expert because of his book on comparative religions. Civilization’s Evolving Beliefs, he learned from time to time, was still widely read. Lately, though, he had become more up front and honest about religion, and now here was Jorge, who so clearly wanted guidance.
They were well clear of Raiford by this time and in open countryside, the grimness of the prison and its dormitory towns behind. The sun was shining brightly, the beginning of a beautiful day. Directly ahead was a four-lane highway, Interstate 10, which they would take into Jacksonville, where Ainslie would catch his flight. He was already happily anticipating his reunion with Karen and Jason and the family celebration.
“Mind if I ask another question?” Jorge said.
“Ask away.”
“I always wondered how you got to be a priest to begin with.”
“I never expected to be a priest,” he said. “It was something my older brother wanted. Then he was shot and killed.”
“I’m sorry.” Jorge was startled. “Do you mean murdered?”
“The law saw it that way. Though the bullet that killed him was intended for someone else.”
“What happened?”
“It was in a small town just north of Philadelphia. That’s where Gregory and I grew up …”
New Berlinville was a small borough incorporated near the end of the nineteenth century. It had several steel mills and ironwork factories, as well as producing ore mines. The combination provided work for most local residents, including Idris Ainslie, the father of Gregory and Malcolm, who was a miner. He died, however, when the boys were babies.
Gregory was only a year older than Malcolm, and they were always close. Gregory, big for his age, took pride in protecting his younger brother. Victoria, their mother, never remarried after the death of Idris, but brought up her sons alone. She worked at unskilled jobs, her income aided by a small annuity inherited from her parents, and spent all the time she could with Gregory and Malcolm. They were her life and they, in turn, loved her.
Victoria Ainslie was a good mother, a virtuous woman, and a devout Catholic. As time went by, it became her greatest wish that one of her sons become a priest, and, by precedence and his own willingness, Gregory was chosen.
At eight, Gregory was an altar boy at the community’s St. Columkill Church, and so was his close friend, Russell Sheldon. In some ways Gregory and Russell were an unlikely, contrasting combination. Gregory, as he grew, was tall and well built with blond good looks, his nature warm and outgoing; he was also devoted to the church, especially its rituals and theatrics. Russell was a short, tough bulldozer of a boy with a flair for mischief and practical jokes. On one occasion he put hair dye in Gregory’s shampoo bottle, turning him temporarily into a brunette. On another he placed an ad in the local paper offering Malcolm’s new and beloved bicycle for sale. He also placed Playboy pinups in both Gregory’s and Malcolm’s bedrooms for their mother to find.
Russell’s father was a police detective in the Berks County sheriff’s department, his mother a teacher.
A year after Gregory and Russell became altar boys, Malcolm was recruited, too, and, through succeeding years, the trio were inseparable. And just as Gregory and Russell had differing natures, so did Malcolm. He was an unusually thoughtful boy who took nothing for granted. “You’re always asking questions,” Gregory once said irritably, then conceded, “But you sure get answers.” Malcolm’s questioning, combined with decisiveness, sometimes put him—though younger than the other two—in a leadership role.
Within the Church the three were obedient Catholics, their minor sins confessed weekly and consisting mainly of Indecent Sexual Thoughts.
The trio were all good athletes and played for South Webster High’s football team, where Russell’s father, Kermit Sheldon, was a part-time coach.
Then, toward the end of the trio’s second football year, there arose—expressed in biblical terms, as Malcolm Ainslie would remember it—“a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.” Unbeknownst to school authorities, Cannabis sativa was procured and used by a few senior members of the football team. Before long, other team members learned of marijuana’s pleasurable, exciting highs, and soon, inevitably, almost the entire football team was smoking pot. In some ways it was a preview of how cocaine use would expand, more seriously, in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Ainslie brothers and Russell Sheldon were latecomers to cannabis, and tried the “weed,” as the players called it, only after being harassed by their peers. Malcolm tried it once, then asked innumerable questions—where the substance came from, what it was, its lasting effect. The answers convinced him cannabis was not for him, and he never used it again. Russell, though, continued using it occasionally, and Gregory more i
ntensively, having convinced himself it was not a religious sin.
Malcolm at first was inclined to question Gregory’s growing habit, then let it go, believing his brother was indulging in a fad that would shortly disappear. It was a lapse in judgment that Malcolm would regret for the rest of his life.
The marijuana came mostly in “nickel bags”—plastic bags containing a small quantity of pot and selling for five dollars on the street—meaning the area around South Webster High. However, the total amount consumed by the football players and, by now, other students consistently increased, prompting greater trafficking and competition.
Even in those times, drug gangs were beginning to proliferate, and initially one such gang, the Skin Heads, based in Allentown, supplied the New Berlinville students’ needs. Then, as demand expanded and with increasing cash flow, a gang in nearby Reading, the Krypto-Ricans, looked covetously at the territory. One day they decided to take it over.
It was the same afternoon Gregory and Russell left school and headed for a seedy part of town. Gregory, having been there before, knew exactly where to go.
At the doorway of an abandoned house a burly white male with a shaven head confronted him. “Where you headed, punk?”
“You got four bags of weed?”
“Depends if you got the green, man.”
Gregory produced a twenty-dollar bill, which the other snatched, adding it to a bulging roll pulled briefly from his pocket. From behind, another man handed over four nickel bags, which Gregory stuffed beneath his shirt.
At that precise moment a car pulled up outside and three members of the Krypto-Ricans emerged, their guns drawn. The Skin Heads saw the others coming and dived for their guns, too. Moments later, as Gregory and Russell headed for the street to get away, bullets were flying.
Both ran hard until Russell realized that Gregory was no longer at his side. He looked back. Gregory was lying on the ground. By then the wild shooting had stopped, and the members of both gangs were vanishing. Soon after, police and paramedics were called. The paramedics, arriving first, quickly declared Gregory dead, the result of a gunshot wound to the left side of his back.
By chance, because he was driving nearby and heard the dispatcher’s radio call, Detective Kermit Sheldon was the first police officer on the scene. Taking his son aside, he spoke sternly. “Tell me everything fast. And I mean everything, exactly as it happened.”
Russell, still in shock and in tears, complied, adding at the end, “Dad, this will kill Greg’s mother, not just him dying, but the marijuana. She didn’t know.”
Russell’s father snapped, “Where is the stuff you bought?”
“Greg hid it in his shirt.”
“Do you have any at all?”
“No.”
Kermit Sheldon put Russell in his official car, then walked to Gregory’s body. The paramedics had finished their examination and covered the body with a sheet. Uniform police hadn’t arrived yet. Detective Sheldon looked around. He lifted the sheet, groped inside Gregory’s shirt, and found the marijuana packets. He removed and put them in his own pocket. Later he would flush them down a toilet.
Back at his car he instructed Russell, “Listen to me. Listen carefully. This is your story. The two of you were walking when you heard the shooting, and ran to get away. If you saw any of the people with guns, describe them. But nothing more. Stick with that and do not vary it. Later,” Russell’s father added, “you and I will have a serious talk, which you’re not gonna enjoy.”
Russell followed the instructions, with the result that subsequent police and press reports described Gregory Ainslie as an innocent victim caught in the crossfire of an out-of-town gang war. Several months after Gregory’s death, the bullet that killed him was matched with a gun owned by a Krypto-Ricans gang member, Manny “Mad Dog” Menendez. But by that time Mad Dog was also dead, having been killed in another shootout, this time with police.
Not surprisingly, Russell Sheldon never used marijuana again. He did, however, confide in Malcolm, who had already half-guessed the real story. The confidence they thus shared—as well as grief and a shared sense of blame—made their friendship stronger, a bond that would last across the years.
Victoria Ainslie suffered terribly because of Gregory’s death. But the cover-up contrived by Detective Kermit Sheldon left her with a comforting belief in Gregory’s innocence, and at the same time, her religious faith consoled her. “He was such a wonderful boy that God wanted him,” she told friends. “Who am I to question God’s decision?”
Malcolm was impressed by what Russell’s father had done—at some risk to himself—to protect the memory of Gregory for their mother’s sake. It had not occurred to Malcolm before that police officers could be figures of benevolence in the community as well as enforcers of the law.
It was shortly after Gregory’s death that Victoria said to her son, “I wonder if God knew that Gregory was going to be a priest. If He had, He might not have taken him.”
Malcolm reached for her hands. “Mom, maybe God knew that I would follow Gregory into the Church.”
Victoria looked up with surprise. Malcolm nodded. “I’ve decided to go to St. Vladimir Seminary with Russell. We’ve talked about it. I’ll take Gregory’s place.”
And so it happened.
The Philadelphia seminary, which Malcolm Ainslie and Russell Sheldon attended through the next seven years, was an old but renovated turn-of-the-century building, conveying serenity and erudition, an atmosphere in which both young men were immediately at home.
From the beginning, Malcolm’s decision to seek religious orders entailed no sacrifice for him. He was happy and composed when it was made. In what he saw as their order of importance, he believed in God, the divinity of Jesus, and the Catholic Church, which brought system and discipline to those other beliefs. Only years later would he realize that, as an ordained priest, he would be expected to reorient that precedence subtly, so that, as in Matthew 19:30, the “first shall be last; and the last shall be first.”
The seminary education, strong on theology and philosophy, was the equivalent of college, followed by three more years of theology, producing, at the end, a doctoral degree. Thus, having graduated at ages twenty-five and twenty-six respectively, Fathers Malcolm Ainslie and Russell Sheldon were appointed associate parish priests—Malcolm at St. Augustus Church in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Russell at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Reading. The two parishes were in the same archdiocese and only twenty miles apart.
“I suppose we’ll be visiting each other all the time,” Malcolm said cheerfully, and Russell agreed, their closeness having persisted through the seminary years. But in fact, because of heavy workloads and a shortage of Catholic priests worldwide, which would continue and worsen, their meetings were few and hurried. That is, until several years later, when a natural catastrophe brought them, once more, close together.
“And that,” Ainslie told Jorge, “is pretty much how I became a priest.”
Several minutes earlier, in the Miami blue-and-white, they had passed through Jacksonville. Now the airport was visible directly ahead.
“So how come you left the Church and became a cop?” Jorge asked.
“It’s not complicated,” Ainslie told him. “I lost my faith.”
“But how’d you lose your faith?” Jorge persisted.
Ainslie laughed. “That is complicated. And I have a plane to catch.”
4
“I don’t believe it,” Leo Newbold said. “The bastard probably thought he was being cute, leaving some phony clue so we’d bash our brains together and get nowhere.”
The lieutenant was responding to Malcolm Ainslie’s report, made from a pay phone at Jacksonville Airport, that while Elroy Doil had admitted to fourteen murders, he had denied killing Commissioner Gustav Ernst and his wife, Eleanor.
“There’s too much evidence against Doil,” Newbold continued. “Just about everything at the Ernst killings matched those other scenes, and because w
e held back so much of the information, no one but Doil knew enough to put all that together. Oh, I know you have doubts, Malcolm, and I respect them, but this time I think you’re wrong.”
A moment of obstinacy seized Ainslie. “That damn rabbit left beside the Ernsts didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit the other Revelation signs. Still doesn’t.”
“But that’s all you have,” Newbold reminded him. “Right?”
Ainslie sighed. “That’s all.”
“Well, when you get back, I guess you should check out that other name Doil gave you. What was it?”
“Ikeis, in Tampa.”
“Yeah, and the Esperanza thing, too. But don’t take too much time, because we’ve got two new whodunits here and more pressures every day. As far as I’m concerned, the Ernst case is closed.”
“How about the tape of Doil? Should I FedEx it from Toronto?”
“No, bring it back with you. We’ll have copies and a transcript made, then decide what to do. For now, have a good trip with your family, Malcolm. You’ve all earned it.”
With ample time to spare, Ainslie boarded his Delta flight for Atlanta en route to Toronto. A light passenger load allowed him a three-seat economy section to himself, where he leaned back and relaxed, enjoying the luxury of being alone.
Despite his efforts to sleep, Jorge’s words kept ringing through his mind: But how’d you lose your faith?
It was impossible to answer simply, Ainslie realized, because it had happened almost without his awareness as incidents along the way, subtly and over time, contrived to steer him in a new direction.
The first effect occurred during his seven-year education at St. Vladimir Seminary, shared with Russell Sheldon. Malcolm, then twenty-two, was recruited by Father Irwin Pandolfo, a Jesuit priest-professor, to assist him in researching and writing a book about ancient and modern comparative religions. Malcolm accepted eagerly, and thus, for the next two years, slaved over the book project as well as completed regular studies. The result was that by the time Civilization’s Evolving Beliefs was ready for press, with a publisher hovering, it was hard to tell how much Pandolfo and Malcolm Ainslie had each contributed. Pandolfo, a small man physically but with a large intellect and sense of fairness, then took an extraordinary step. “Your work’s been exceptional, Malcolm, and you’ll get equal author billing. No discussion. Both our names in the same size type, but mine comes first. Okay?”