Free True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne

He’d catch cold, I think, an old man like that.”
    “I’ll tell His Eminence that,” Desmond Spellacy said. “I’ll tell him you’re worried about his nose getting all stopped up from saying mass in a tepee. I’ll tell him you think the best way to get rid of a cold like that is not to sniff around any asphalt. He’ll appreciate the diagnosis, His Eminence.”
    “You do that, Des,” Dan T. Campion said. “You take your bathroom scales out to Jack’s place there, and you weigh ten tons of asphalt. It’s messy is what they tell me, but you do it. Then you tell His Eminence and His Eminence will find you a nice little parish in the middle of Nebraska. It’s nice in Nebraska, I hear. You get the change of seasons. A hundred above in the summer, a hundred below in the winter.”
    “There’s one thing I wonder about you, Dan. When was the last time your right hand knew what your left hand was doing?”
    “1908,” Dan T. Campion said, pronouncing it nineteen ought eight, and punctuating it with the loud laugh, the slap on the back.

    “ Et verbum caro factum est . . . ”
    There were times, Desmond Spellacy thought, when Dan T. Campion worried him more than Jack Amsterdam. Not that Dan didn’t have his uses. The Cardinal sneezed and Dan T. Campion reached for his handkerchief. It was the other noses that he was cleaning that bothered Desmond Spellacy. Give him ten hands and he’d be picking pockets with nine of them and making the sign of the cross with the tenth, Chet Hanrahan had said. And Chet was no altar boy. Which was why the new chairman of the Building Fund was so important. He needed his own man. Someone, to put it bluntly, who belonged to him. Someone to keep tabs on Dan T. Campion. Someone to pass the word to Neddy Flynn and Emmett Flaherty and the other Catholic contractors (were there any non-Catholic contractors, he suddenly wondered) that they should bid against Jack Amsterdam on any new construction projects. There was one thing you could say about Neddy and Emmett. You wouldn’t pick up the newspaper in the morning and read that they’d stuck somebody in a dryer. No old stories, never proven. At least no old stories he couldn’t live with.
    The new chairman. Someone who would help him unload Jack. When the time came.
    Who?
    Phil Leahy had all he could handle with the diocesan insurance programs. Ed Ginty would have been perfect, if he weren’t in the penetentiary for embezzling that ninety-three thousand dollars. Devlin Perkins, but he was a convert and his wife was president of the Guild for Episcopalian Charities. A Protestant prune, Dan T. Campion called Adela Perkins. Take a bite out of her and she’d flush you out like a physic. Putting on airs and calling herself an Episcopalian, Dan said, when she was just another Prod. Fernando Figueroa? Not with Tony Garcia already the lay director of the Welfare Bureau. The rich laity wouldn’t like two Mexicans. . . .
    Who then. . . .
    The vicar general was anointing the casket with incense and reciting the prayers for the dead. Why do people buy caskets like that, Desmond Spellacy wondered. All teak with silver handles. A banquet for the termites and the weevils. A send-off you could be proud of. The superdeluxe McDonough & McCarthy send-off. ...
    Sonny McDonough.
    That was a possibility. A real possibility. Member of the county Board of Supervisors. President of the Planning Commission, too. Which was always useful in condemnation proceedings. Dedicating his life to public service now after making his pile in funeral homes and cemeteries. He was letting Shake Hands McCarthy run the business. John McCarthy, Desmond Spellacy thought. He must remember that. Ever since Shake Hands became a Knight of Saint Gregory, he insisted on being called John.
    Desmond Spellacy noted Sonny McDonough’s liabilities. Sonny sang “ Tantum Ergo” in the shower. Or to be specific, Sonny sang “ Tantum Ergo” in the shower after playing golf with Desmond