Tom Funk, author of “Confession”, is a recently retired judge, having served in the state courts of Illinois. He started writing short stories about ten years ago after hearing thousands of them in his job. He has been published in Spitball, Altarwork, Anti-Heroin Chic and Cowboy Jamboree among others.
*****
You told me you had just killed Carlos Vargas. I paused long enough to process the thought and then told ya I wasn’t buyin’. You said you weren’t surprised, nobody would ever think a priest would kill the head of a drug cartel. You held out your right palm and showed me what ya said was gunshot residue on your palm and wrist. Then you opened the drawer to your desk and pulled out a .38 revolver, telling me this is what you shot him with.
You asked me if it wasn’t true that he was found dead in the study of his gated mansion with two gunshot wounds to the chest. That he was wearing a pair of tennis shorts and a powder blue polo shirt. You asked me how you would know that if you weren’t the one that had shot him.
You asked me if it wasn’t true that he was found dead in the study of his gated mansion with two gunshot wounds to the chest.
“Pretty impressive,” I said, given that it has only been an hour since Vargas was found dead, but news travels fast in this social media world and you mighta seen it on somebody’s Facebook by now.
You said how would you have had a blood spatter on your collar if ya hadn’t done it, as you stood up and leaned toward me, sticking an index finger under your collar and showing me the specks of red that were clearly on it. I said you might have cut yourself shaving.
You said you were one of a very select few that had 24/7 access to enter the compound where Vargas lived, that you were his personal priest, having pastored his home parish since he was a boy. That all his security knew you and you knew them. They called you “Padre ” and always cleaned up their language when you showed up. You said you showed up a lot because Vargas was devout in a strange way and always insisted that you hear his confession. You said you’d been doing that for twenty some years.
You said he only trusted you to hear the tales of all the terrible things he had done to people. Only you knew of all the hits he had ordered. Only you heard the tales of how he tortured the foot soldiers from other cartels until they gave up their secrets. Only you knew how he planned and carried out the execution of three different police detectives who had cost him more business than he was willing to tolerate.
You said it finally got to be too much, that you had kept your vows of confidentiality for all those years and bore all those awful secrets by yourself. You said you finally couldn’t bear it and had to do something about it. You said you didn’t trust the police with it because Vargas had too many of them working for him. You said simply telling what you knew wouldn’t guarantee an end to the man’s reign of terror, that you had to take matters into your own hand. And so ya did. That you were perhaps the only person that could bring a weapon into his inner sanctum and not be searched.
You said you’d be happy to wait in the lobby until the ballistics came back on the bullets in his body, that since I wasn’t going to arrest you, the lobby was perhaps the safest place in the world for you to be right now. So I said fine, you’re welcome to wait out there if you wish, but I wasn’t going to arrest ya until I had those reports back. After all, the law was clear that a confession had to be corroborated. Especially a confession from a priest that had been my confessor as well for over twenty years.
You married me and my wife almost twenty years ago. You baptized my children and presided over my mother’s funeral. How could I put the cuffs on you if I wasn’t altogether sure? So when ballistics came in an hour later and told me that there were two slugs in Vargas’ chest and they were .38s, I didn’t go out to arrest ya immediately. The .38 was the favorite handgun of many a thug. Anybody could have guessed that was what was used.
I was sitting at my desk watching you down the hall in the lobby with your head in your hands when Spickard from Missing Persons stopped by my desk. He said he heard I had Father Ramos in custody and needed to ask him some questions. I said what about? He said one of the other priests at the rectory had reported the housekeeper missing since last week. Said she went to Walmart to buy groceries like she always does on Tuesday nights but she hadn’t come back. Said Ramos had been away at a retreat or something and they hadn’t been able to talk to him.
You look shocked when Spickard tells ya about the missing housekeeper. You get up and follow Spickard back to my office. Spickard tells me he’s taking you over to Missing Persons to interview.
No sooner than ya leave, I get a call from Cook in Major Vice. He says he just heard Vargas is dead, wants me to know word on the street is the Vargas cartel has been in a turf war with the Cuteos for control of the southside market. I said I thought they settled that, Vargas got the southside and Cuteo kept the southern suburbs. Cook said they did, but then old man Cueto got sick. His nephew Enrique took over, he said the southside was always Cuteo territory, the deal was off.
Cook said the war was getting hot. Cueto, Cook had heard, kidnapped Donnie Batstone’s mother. Batstone was Vargas’ driver and his personal bodyguard. I knew Batstone, so do you, he drives Vargas to mass every Sunday and sits in the back of the church while the Don is sayin’ his prayers. Vargas loves the kid, Cook says, he goes everywhere Vargas goes. Word is he’s got the Don’s ear on every decision he makes.
Cook says that don’t sit well with Vargas’ two sons, Pablo and Ernesto. They don’t like that he’s got this gringo as his right hand man. Sure Donnie is older so he was working for the Don when they were still teenagers, but to them it ain’t right.
So I said to Cook who do you like for the hit on Vargas? He asks me if there were any signs of a struggle? I said nope, just the two shots fired, no doors or windows busted, nothing out of place in the home, nobody heard shouts or screams.
He said it sounds like an inside job. I agree, that adds up. He says I’d be talking to Donnie Batstone if I was you. I said yeah, I oughta do that. He said Pablo and Ernesto oughta be on your list too. I totally agreed, Enrique Cueto too.
Cook said word was Batstone’s mother’s been holed up in the Cuteo compound since last week, if the Don won’t come to terms with Cueto over this turf thing, she ain’t gonna be for this world too long. Donnie probably don’t like that, but maybe the Vargas kids don’t mind her being there so much.
So right about then Spickard comes back to tell me he’s done with ya, wants to know what should I do with the good Father? I tell him to sit ya down in the lobby. He says thanks and turns to go. That’s when I see the file he’s holding has the name “Batstone” on the name tab. I said to Spickard, how come you got a file on Batstone, that’s Vargas’ driver’s name?
That’s the housekeeper’s name in my case, Spickard says. Daisy Batstone, the one’s that’s been missing from the rectory.
That’s when the lightbulb went on in my head. Daisy from the rectory. Last year they gave her a big party at the church for having been there 25 years. Father Ramos and the other priest whose name I can’t never remember brought her up front and gave her a big bouquet of flowers at Sunday mass. The Don himself even came up and gave her a big hug at the end. And of course Donnie was right there with him, next in line. She laid a kiss on his cheek. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of the connection before. Daisy is Donnie’s mother.
So I got up and closed the door. I said to Spickard, what did the good Father tell you about his housekeeper disappearing? He said ya weren’t much help, said you’d been up north at some monastery at a retreat. The place didn’t have any phones or internet, so you’d been cut off, you didn’t get the news about Daisy missing ‘til you got back. And you were preoccupied with Vargas and how for twenty years you’d been taking his big donations to pay for things like that gym they added to the church a few years back and having to hear his confessions.
You were just struggling with that and decided ya had to do something. So Spickard told you you’d better stop right there and just asked you one more question- did you have any idea where Daisy might be? You said no, that whole thing was a mystery to ya. You had no clue where Daisy was but ya sure hoped she was o.k.,’cause she is the sweetest person.
So I called you back into my office and sat ya down. I said it wasn’t addin’ up. What you told Spickard about not having a clue about what happened to Daisy and what you know about the Vargas’ business. Now’s not the time to think about your confidentiality vows, Daisy’s life is on the line, I said. If you know who killed Vargas, you gotta tell us, maybe that gives us what we need to go get Daisy. You said I already told you, I did it, why can’t you just accept that that’s the truth?
I pulled the .38 out of my box of evidence and laid it on the desk in front of you. Pick that up and show me how you held that gun when you fired those shots into Vargas’ chest I said. Go ahead, its already been wiped for prints, I said.
You picked it up quickly and pointed it at the wall, pretending to squeeze the trigger. Then you quickly put it back down and told me it was like that, staring at me intently.
I cast a glance at the bottom of the handle, something scrawled into the silver matte of the metal caught my eye. I reached over and picked up the gun, looking more closely at the metal bottom. That’s when I saw the initials “db” scrawled into the matte finish, “db” for Donnie Batstone.
That’s when I found my mind recalling a memory from many years past. My wife standing in our kitchen after Sunday mass. I was washing the dishes and she was drying.
She said she was glad the church had stayed in the neighborhood even though it was turning Latino and lots of the parishioners had moved out. We talked about raising our kids there in a mixed race neighborhood, where most of the kids their age would be Latin.
We talked about how the older kids seemed to like you, our Latino priest. She mentioned Daisy’s boy Donnie. She thought he really looked up to you. She said while most people were calling ya “Padre”, with your encouragement, Donnie always called you “Father.” She thought that showed how much respect he had for ya.
But looking at the butt of that gun, I thought maybe there was another reason for that. You said you’d been taking the Don’s confessions for twenty years. You’d heard his tales of ordering the murder of those that got in his way. You’d heard him try to describe why he needed to kill police officers trying to protect the public from the poison he was peddling. You’d been hearing his stories for twenty some years, faithfully keeping your vows of confidentiality, leavin’ it to God to take care of the consequences of the Don’s murderous actions.
But then there’s an abduction of someone close to you, someone who’s lived under the same roof as you for twenty some years, someone who slept down the hallway from you for two decades, and suddenly ya can’t trust God to take care of it anymore. It’s just too much, ya have to act.
And yes, Father, ya might have gunshot residue on your sleeve and blood specks on your collar, but ballistics can tell us how many times that gun was fired. And I’m bettin’ it was more than twice.
And the Don wasn’t the only parishioner ya took confessions from within that cartel. His driver was there for mass every week. And I’m thinkin’ maybe Donnie Batstone is more than just a parishioner to ya. I’m thinkin’ the Don wasn’t gonna give Enrique Cueto what he wanted to call off the turf war he opened back up, I’m thinkin’ Donnie Batstone knew what that meant for his mother and that if the Don was gone he was ready to step into his shoes, solve the turf war and rescue his poor mother.
The only problem with that was Pablo and Ernesto, they’d come for Donnie in a heartbeat if they thought he’d killed their father. So somebody else had to take the blame, somebody that had access to the Don ,someone no one would suspect, someone who’s word was gold and everybody would believe. So Father, it’s starting to make sense to me why you would confess to this crime.
But one thing is not adding up for me, why would you do this for somebody that’s just a parishioner? Yeah, sure ya love your flock, but enough to take a murder rap that’s gonna make you sleep with one eye open for the rest of your days? No, Father, I’m not buyin’ that!
You said keeping secrets just finally got to be too much for ya and that’s why you did this. But I’m thinkin’ there’s another secret here that you haven’t told us about yet, one that’s been eatin’ at you for a long time and one ya don’t have any vow to prevent you from tellin’ us about. So, Father, is there another confession ya need to make?
*****
If you’ve enjoyed “Confession”, you can visit our free digital archive of flash fiction here. Additionally, premium short fiction published by Mystery Tribune on a quarterly basis is available digitally here.
For online archive of short fiction (longer pieces) on Mystery Tribune website, you can visit here.
