Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue From the Cold War

THE LAST CONFESSION BY JOHN LESCROART

They didn’t call it Asperger’s Syndrome in those days, but my younger brother Julian probably had it.

Certainly, everybody who remembers him agreed that he was not quite normal and probably had some highly functioning version of autism. When he was very young, he was silent, withdrawn, and clumsy much of the time, although excellent at almost all mental games, and blessed with a sly sense of humor that was all the more surprising for his lack of verbal skills. He is the one, for example, who put the Saran Wrap over the toilet bowl in my parents’ bathroom, although I think that to her dying day, in spite of my denials, my mother thought it was me.

I was the firstborn, a baby boomer in 1948. Julian and I were “Irish twins,” eleven months apart in age to the day. I guess big brothers can go one of two ways with awkward siblings, especially if they are close in age. I could either ignore the difficult little rat who was taking so much of my parents’ time and energy, or as a dutiful first child I could become my parents’ ally as his protector, playmate, and friend. I don’t remember actually choosing, but by the time he started school, I had fallen into and was completely committed to the latter role.

We were a good Catholic family, which meant we belonged to St. Benedict’s parish and went to Mass every Sunday, and confession at least every two weeks. I was an altar boy from second grade on, and amazingly to everyone (except me, who tutored him relentlessly), Julian followed me one year later. He couldn’t always get out what he knew in English, but he could memorize and spew Latin as well as or better than anybody.

Of course, being a good Catholic family also meant that my parents followed the rhythm method for birth control, which in turn meant that the other kids followed along on a regular schedule. Michelle arrived twenty-one months after Julian, then in short order followed Paul, Louise, Marian, and Barbara. With each new child, and my parents’ commensurate lack of time for any individual one of us, my responsibility to Julian became greater. I understood his moods, I could entertain him, translate for him, and occasionally, very occasionally, I would let him win at some physical contest — hoops, ping-pong, mini golf.

And then, when he was in sixth grade, Julian suddenly changed in a fundamental way. And perhaps more remarkably, some of the other kids stopped treating him like a freak. Astoundingly, and maybe because the director wanted to make a point that whom so many called the “retard” actually had a good brain, he was cast as Rolfe in the school musical, The Sound of Music, and it turned out that he had a beautiful singing voice. The rehearsed words in the play came out with a natural ease that somehow carried over to his day-to-day speech. Still in sixth grade, he later won the school’s Spelling Bee, and went on to place second in the entire county. Kitty Rice, the prettiest girl in his class at St. Benedict’s, got a crush on him and they actually walked around the school yard holding hands for a couple of months.

In short, Julian had become “normal”—though of course not in all ways. And not to someone who knew him as well as I did. Not to his protector and confidante and best friend.

The basic problem, and it was a paramount issue for a preadolescent young man in the late 1950s, was that in spite of his achievements and advances in apparent normalcy, he suffered from a medical condition over which he had little control. He was, in fact, different, even as he improved in his day-to-day coping with the Asperger’s.

He felt things more than other people did.

That was simply a fact.

When Kitty Rice broke up with him, for example, he went into a brooding silence that went on for over a month. Another time, our younger brother Paul had shot a really beautiful bird out in the backyard with his BB gun, and when he’d brought it inside to show it off, Julian took the little broken thing into his hands, petting it, breathing on it, trying to will it back to life. Afterward, exuding silence like a black miasma, he hid himself away in his secret place in our unfinished attic and slept up there until the next morning.

And some kids still teased him. Friendly and trusting by nature, Julian was sometimes smart enough to realize that people were having fun at his expense, but unfortunately he lacked the gene for irony. Consequently, he could be led a long way down the primrose path before he realized that he was the butt of a joke. All too often, being a year ahead of him, I wasn’t around to cut things off and shut the bullies up before he got hurt.

These not-infrequent episodes would always leave him demoralized, depressed, and silent, and they drove me to near-homicidal rage that I only rarely acted on. But I was a good Catholic, and anger was one of the deadly sins, so I generally offered my anger up to the poor souls in Purgatory, and life went on.

But sometimes, it almost didn’t.

By the time Julian was in eighth grade, I’d moved on to Mother of Mercy (“MOM”) High School in Burlingame, just south of San Francisco, and so for the very first time in Julian’s life, he was on his own back at St. Benedict’s without my protection at school. It wasn’t a good time for him, as the hazing and general abuse kicked up a big notch or two. Doubly upsetting to me, though, was his reaction to it. Instead of fighting back or lashing out, as I would have done, he reverted back into his silent shell.

And then the big event: another one of the girls, Andrea, in his class asked him to the first dance of the year and instead, without canceling with Julian, went with another guy. As it happened, I was at MOM’s homecoming dance that same night and got home around midnight. The rest of the house was asleep, but in our shared room, Julian wasn’t in his bed. I waited for him, figuring he was late getting home from his own dance, but all too soon it was near one o’clock, and that was just plain wrong.

(Times were different then. My parents tended not to wait up and felt no guilt about it. When my own daughter went out on dates through high school, Bonnie and I would never sleep until she got home.)

On my way to wake up my parents to see if they knew something about Julian being gone, I thought to check the attic hideaway and found him there.

“How you doing?”

No answer.

“Did something happen?”

He just looked at me for a long time.

“Come on out,” I said finally. “Let’s go downstairs and get a Coke.”

He shook his head. “No Coke.”

“Okay, no Coke.” I sat down across from him, Indian-style in the tiny enclosure. One bare dim bulb glowed from the low ceiling. Julian’s face looked empty and lost.

“What happened?” I asked again.

He stayed silent for a long time. Then: “It’s not worth it,” he said.

“What’s not worth what?”

“Life.”

“What are you talking about? Of course it is.”

“Maybe for you. You’ve got a future.”

“So do you.”

Staring at some place behind me, he shook his head. “No.” Gradually he told me about his night — my Mom driving him by Andrea’s house to pick her up and being told by her mother that there must have been some misunderstanding. Andrea had been going steady with Kevin Jacobs for months now — surely Julian knew about that.

This was bad enough, but on top of Julian’s super sensitivity…

Just as he was finally finishing up, I saw the pistol.

My father was a cop in our town and he had a few guns that he normally kept in a dresser drawer next to his bed. (Another huge difference between then and today, when I have my three guns in a locked safe at all times.) But beyond his service weapons, he also had a target practice .22 revolver that he kept — unloaded to be sure, but with easily available bullets in the nearby drawer — hanging from a peg in an old-fashioned quick-draw holster down in the garage.

“What’s that doing here?” I asked.

No answer.

“Julian. Give me a break. Let me have that thing.”

He stared at me for a long time, then finally picked it up by its barrel and passed it across to me. It had one bullet in it.

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” he said. “I wasn’t going to do anything.”

“Julian. She’s just a dumb girl with an even dumber boyfriend.”

“I know. It’s not her.”

“No? Then what else was it?”

“Everything,” he said. “Everything. Life. Like I told you.”

Much to my everlasting regret, I didn’t mention anything about the gun incident to my parents. That was the ethic among brothers with secrets — and who among us didn’t have them? — and I bought into it entirely. I must say, though, in my own defense, that even if I had gone to my parents, they probably would not have done anything. The idea of seeking professional help for psychiatric or psychological distress was not in the range of solutions my parents would have pursued.

Let’s remember, Julian had always been difficult and different… and he’d gotten progressively “better” over time. So I viewed this as a setback, certainly, but not as a true crisis, not as a warning about his future behavior.

At all-men’s Mother of Mercy, we started every school year with a two-day retreat, which was supposed to be a time for all of us young sinners to examine our lives and renew our commitment to prayer, to the Catholic Church, to spirituality, and especially to the love of Jesus Christ. These retreats were usually hosted by a priest from one of the missionary and/or teaching orders. In my sophomore year, a Maryknoll priest, Father Aloysius Hersey, was back after a truly thrilling performance the previous year, when he had talked about his own history of self-flagellation and then removed his cassock on the last day, folding it down over his waist, to reveal the scars on his back to prove that he practiced what he preached. While conceding that this form of self-torture wasn’t absolutely necessary either for salvation or for leading a holy life, Father Hersey was also unmistakably proud of the sixteen young men who came forward at the end of the second day to volunteer to take the lash — over their shirts, of course, in deference to those possibly squeamish mothers who might have objected if they found out, and if any of their sons’ skin had actually been broken.

Seven of those sixteen flagellants quit MOM before the year was out to enroll in the seminary. This was seen as further proof of Father Hersey’s charisma and power. And in truth, I must say that even among those of us who started the retreat as skeptics, Father Hersey had induced a powerful kind of religious hysteria among all of us. And this, in turn, heightened expectations about what would be in store for this year’s retreat.

Contributing exponentially to the volatile mix was an accident of history: on October 22, 1962, the Tuesday two days before the retreat was to begin, President John Kennedy had addressed the nation on television and announced the presence of offensive missile sites in Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis was well underway. In response to that presence, he directed U.S. military forces go to DEFCON (Defensive Condition) 3. By the next day, U.S. ships had set up a blockade of Soviet shipping headed to Cuba, to be enforced at the 800-mile perimeter. On the day the retreat began, in the face of Soviet intransigence (or ambiguity) about the blockade, the President pulled the quarantine back to 500 miles and announced DEFCON 2, the highest level in U.S. history. Driving into school in our carpool (Julian was now a freshman at MOM), we had been transfixed by the news on the radio that all of the Soviet ships en route to Cuba had slowed or turned around — except for one.

After homeroom, we all dutifully filed into the Assembly Hall, which comfortably held all four years of MOM’s students—800 young men — and the entire faculty. The stage had been cleared except for a podium front and center, where Father Hersey would address us, and in the back an altar, where Mass would be celebrated later on.

After I was at my seat in about the middle of assembly, I saw Julian enter and take a seat to my right on the aisle in one of the front rows. He was talking to some of the guys around him, which I took to be a good sign. He seemed to be fitting in well in his new school environment, and I didn’t give him any more thought.

At last, our Principal, Monsignor Tully, strode onto the stage and up to the podium and gave us the usual ground rules for general assemblies — show respect for the speaker(s), no unnecessary talking, no rough-housing, no bathroom breaks, and so on. And then he introduced, fresh from a mission to China and Indonesia, Father Aloysius Hersey.

The cleric cut a somewhat exotic figure — and not only because he’d just arrived fresh from the Far East. In contrast to the black cassocks worn by our faculty priests, he wore a brown monk’s robe, with sandals and no socks. (At MOM, our dress code forbade white socks, to give you an idea of how novel this seemed to all of us.) He also sported a shaggy beard and, pre-Beatles, hair down over his ears. From where I sat this year, I couldn’t make out his eyes, but from the year before I knew that they were a striking and intense shade of blue in an almost shockingly sunburned face. Tall and thin, with a toothy smile and a gentle manner, he seemed to exude holiness, a true ascetic for the modern world.

A consummate showman, Hersey appeared just off the wings and, stepping out into full view, stood with his hands pressed together in a prayerful gesture. As more of the students saw him and recognition kicked in, a round of applause began and grew until it had become a full-blown standing ovation of the entire student body.

When the applause died down, Hersey bowed with a show of humility, walked to the middle of the stage, bowed again, then turned back toward the altar, where he kneeled and made an elaborate sign of the cross. In a large room full of teenage testosterone, a person is lucky if they can command five seconds of quiet attention. But Hersey knelt there praying for at least a minute and there wasn’t a sound in the room. Finally, he crossed himself once more, turned, and came back up to the podium.

“God bless you,” he said. “Let us pray. Our father, who art in heaven…”

As the prayer went on, suddenly Monsignor Tully appeared again in the wings, a few steps onto the stage. As though uncertain about what he should do, he waited until the “Amen” had resounded through the room, at which time he came up next to Hersey and whispered something in his ear.

Hersey’s shoulders noticeably gave under the weight of what he’d been told.

Turning away from the podium, he went back to the altar, where he genuflected, blessed himself yet again, and hung his head.

The silence this time was profound.

Slowly, haltingly, he returned to the podium. “My brothers,” he said. “God bless you. God bless us all.”

Appearing to struggle for control, he drew a breath, raised his eyes to heaven, then settled them upon us. “As I’m sure all of you are aware, the U.S. Navy has been running a blockade on Cuba for the past couple of days. All of our ships have been on highest alert, and have been stopping Soviet ships bound for Cuba in order to enforce the blockade that President Kennedy has ordered.

“Well, this morning, just a few minutes ago really, the captain of one of these Soviet ships refused to allow one of our Navy vessels to send officers to board and search his ship. Words and radio signals were evidently exchanged and then some hothead in charge of one of the navy guns fired on the Russian ship.

“We have just learned that in retaliation, Russia has launched several nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles from its bases in Siberia, just across the Bering Sea from Alaska. Preliminary analysis indicates that these missiles have been fired on targets along the West Coast, including San Francisco, where the first of them can be expected to explode sometime in the next fifteen to twenty minutes.

“I am afraid, my dear brothers, that this is the end of our world.”

Although time for me seemed to stop, it must have only taken a few seconds for the reaction to set in, and that reaction ran the gamut from stunned silence to swearing to screaming. A few of the guys, probably for reasons they didn’t understand, stood up and starting charging from their seats, knocking other classmates out of their way, breaking up or down the aisles, heading for whichever exit was nearest. I remained numb, stuck to my seat, my heart pounding, trying and failing to find an acceptable location to put the knowledge that within a half hour I would in all probability be dead. I would never see my parents or brothers or sisters again, never see Maggie, my girlfriend.

Nothing I had ever hoped for would come to pass.

Dead, immolated, at sixteen.

Oh my God. Oh my dear sweet God. Have mercy on me, the sinner. (I remember the exact phrase that came into my mind. I’m now forty-eight years an atheist, and such was my upbringing and brainwashing that that phrase still shows up in times of overwhelming stress.)

The hysterical, panicked, even violent reactions started to gain the upper hand in the pandemonium that now threatened to engulf the whole student body. Hersey, still up on the stage, slammed his fist against the podium. “Gentlemen! Gentlemen, please. I need your attention right now!”

Such was Hersey’s air of authority, so impeccable his timing on knowing exactly when to rein in the rampant flow of emotions, that almost immediately he had restored order and gained everyone’s attention.

“Listen to me! Listen to me!” He paused, soaking the moment for all it was worth. “What I’ve just told you is not the truth. I repeat, it is not the truth.” The energy in the hall subsided like a tide going out, as we all hung there in frenzied anticipation.

What was he saying? Could it be that we would escape Armageddon after all?

Hersey showed his horsey teeth in a triumphant grin. “I just wanted to scare the Hell out of you.”

What an asshole!

But of course, I didn’t think that at the time. No, at that moment, like almost all the rest of school, all I could feel was a sweeping sense of relief. I literally felt blood rush back into my face. A gradual wave of nervous laughter began in the back of the hall and soon, growing and growing, swept over the entire assemblage.

But there was one glitch ruining the brilliant piece of theater that Hersey had orchestrated, and that was my brother Julian, who shortly after the initial announcement of our imminent death had fainted and even now lay gripped in some kind of seizure in the aisle next to where he had fallen.

The knot of students who had gathered around him called attention to the problem. Seeing where the commotion was taking place, I knew immediately that it was Julian, and though I don’t exactly remember how I managed it, soon I had gotten myself out of my row and was next to him before any of the faculty had made it down. Pale as a ghost, he lay half on his side in an unnatural pose, his teeth clenched, his arms and legs curled up in the fetal position.

I gathered him up against me, his head on my lap, not really having any clue what to do in a medical sense, but somehow knowing I needed to protect him. As I held him, he opened his eyes, shivered violently, and then vomited just as the first of the faculty arrived and took control. Over the next couple of minutes, as he came back to full consciousness, I stayed close by and finally helped walk him out of the assembly and into the nurse’s room, where we covered him with some blankets and called my parents.

Astoundingly, after my parents heard what had happened, they did not blame Hersey, Tully, or anybody else. They thought the priest had made a pretty good point that had worked with the vast majority of other students, who’d surely gotten the Hell scared out of them. My Dad, I think, actually admired the scam. In his view, anything that made you tougher was better. He never expected Julian to be tough, but the more he could deal with in the real world, the better off he was going to be.

Both of them agreed that what had happened to Julian was unfortunate to be sure, but not really that big a deal. Somebody among the faculty who had known about his “condition” might have warned him about Hersey’s prank and saved him some misery and embarrassment (embarrassment!). But Julian had only been at the school for less than a month, so no one really knew except me. And there simply wasn’t much if any understanding of “special needs” in that strict, Catholic environment in 1962. Indeed, my parents had succeeded in getting Julian accepted into MOM by producing documentation from St. Benedict’s grammar school that he had his condition under control, that he wouldn’t disrupt classes, that he was “normal.”

But after that October 24, Julian wasn’t the same. After dinner every night for the next four days, he retired to the attic hideaway. I went up the first two nights, but he simply wouldn’t say a word to me, no matter what blandishments I offered him. This time, I did tell my parents how worried I was. In response, they both talked to Julian and were sure he would be all right. He’d had setbacks in the past, and he’d always pulled out of them. He’d just have to process what he’d been through and he’d be back to normal in no time.

I should just be patient.

Meanwhile, though, I took the .22 off its peg in the garage and hid it in a crawl space under the back of the house.

On the next Monday, Julian went back to school. Evidently, some of the guys in his class — not particularly any more Christ-like than they’d been before that weekend’s retreat — heckled him pretty relentlessly about what a wimp he’d been at the assembly. What’s the matter, couldn’t the guy take a little joke?

Later, police pieced together what they believe happened. Julian simply walked off campus after lunch on Monday and caught a bus to San Francisco. At the city bus terminal, he asked directions at the information booth for the bus that would drop him off closest to the Golden Gate Bridge. On the bridge itself, a tourist couple from Chicago stopped and, seeing a solitary young man at the rail gazing out over the Bay, asked if he was all right. He had assured them that he was. They identified him by his school picture. They had stopped to admire the view a hundred yards farther on and, much to their horror, had seen him jump.

Missionaries such as Father Hersey, when not on assignment, often got put up as guests in local rectories. During the retreat, he had made a big point of announcing that he would be hearing confessions for all of the next week. He wanted us all to understand that he was a regular guy with a great sense of humor; he promised light penances — no more than three Hail Marys — no matter how grave your mortal sins or how numerous your sins of the flesh — this latter to much laughter. He would be at MOM’s chapel before school, during lunch, and after school hours, and then from 7 to 9 p.m., he would hear confessions at St. Benedict’s every evening through Friday of the following week, when he would be shipping out to India.

On Thursday, we had the memorial service for Julian, which was held at St. Benedict’s parish hall.

The next night, I announced that I was going over to visit my best friend, Frank Sydell. At this time, I had almost completely free rein over my activities. The basic rule for me, as the oldest, was that I should be home by 10:00, and if I was staying over at a friend’s house, I should call just so my parents knew where I was. I dutifully went to Frank’s, about a mile from our house, and at around 7:45 suggested that we go get a pizza at our local Round Table, located in the shopping center across from St. Benedict’s, about halfway back to my place.

When we finished the pizza, I told Frank I wasn’t feeling great — still totally bummed about Julian’s suicide, I wasn’t faking it — and told him I was going home.

I didn’t go home.

Instead, I walked to the dark side of the shopping center’s parking lot, where I’d hidden the .22 on the way over to Frank’s, and crossed the street mid-block, away from any lights. The church itself was large, cavernous, and dimly lit, although as I had anticipated and hoped, at this time Friday night, it was empty of worshippers. Friday was not a normal confession night, and I didn’t really expect any of my fellow retreat members to be taking advantage of Father Hersey’s offer on what was every teenager’s date night.

There were four confessionals, but only the one at the back on my left had the little white light over the confessor’s door that indicated a priest was inside. The doors to the cubicles on either side of the priest’s had green lights over them, indicating that they both were empty.

I pulled the revolver from my belt where I’d hidden it under my letter jacket. Cocking the hammer, I opened the door and knelt down on the padded riser just in front of the sliding window that separated the penitents from the confessors.

That window slid open.

For a long beat, I could not force myself to move. I had been to confession at least twice a month for the past ten years, and every time I had begun with the words “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

This night, though, I was mute.

The figure on the other side of the screen leaned forward and came into my field of vision.

“Father Hersey?” I asked.

“Yes, my son.” No doubt he placed me correctly among the MOM students who’d taken part in his retreat. He came closer to the window. “It’s all right, whatever it is,” he whispered.

“I know.”

I put the muzzle of the gun against the screen of the window — three inches from his head — and pulled the trigger.

After spending most of a lifetime on the bench working in the criminal justice system, I should perhaps be surprised at how cleanly I got away with my one homicide. After all, my father himself was a cop. I was there the whole time he was investigating the case, and neither he nor his colleagues even once looked at me crooked, much less questioned me about my activities on that Friday night. Someone, it seems to me, should have had the instinct or intelligence to put together the ICBM moment at the retreat, Julian’s reaction to it and subsequent suicide, and Father Hersey’s murder, and at least come to ask me some questions. Especially since it was the only gunshot murder in our little town of Belmont during that entire year.

But no one did.

I finished high school at Mother of Mercy, went on to Santa Clara University, then Boalt Hall for my law degree. At thirty-six, I got appointed to the Superior Court in San Francisco, and four years ago, Obama made me a federal judge. Bonnie and I have raised four good young atheists of our own, and two of them have gone into the law as well. The other two are artists — a musician and a painter. Go figure.

Last week, I received my own nonprank death sentence — Stage Four pancreatic cancer — far enough advanced that they have sent me home for hospice. My doctor is a good guy who didn’t want to get my hopes up. He told me I might last another twenty days, tops.

One of the last remnants of my long-dead faith is a stubborn belief in the healing power of confession. I’ve seen hundreds of criminals in the course of my career give in to this basic need to admit the wrongs that they have done. In my case, I find it highly ironic that I don’t know what I would accept as the definition of “wrong.” All my life, I’ve acted and ruled as though murder was the ultimate crime, but I have committed murder and have no feelings of guilt about it. I would do it again tomorrow if the circumstances were the same.

And yet, something in me feels relief at this confession. I don’t need or ask for forgiveness. But someone should know what I did and why I did it.

That seems important.

And so does this: Julian, you are avenged.