The Strange Death of Father Candy: A Suspense Novel - Hardcover

Roberts, Les

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312566336 ISBN 13: 9780312566333

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2011

Synopsis

Vietnam veteran Dominick Candiotti has been long estranged from his family. His late parents were close to the ruling mob clan in Youngstown, his sister was a bad-tempered and dissatisfied nag, and his middle brother was a corruptible police lieutenant. But in 1985, their oldest brother Richard Candiotti---beloved by every Italian Catholic in Youngstown as "Father Candy"---dies, and Dominick returns home for the funeral.

Dominick is greatly disturbed by Richard's death, which has been ruled a suicide. Dissatisfied with this answer, he sets out to find the truth, revealing secrets and coming face-to-face with brutality and violence.

Award-winning author Les Roberts pens a riveting and moving tale about walking the fragile tightrope between love and hatred.

About this title

About the Author

Les Roberts won the initial PWA Best First Private Eye Novel Competition and is the author of the Milan Jacovich mystery series. He is a winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature and the Sherwood Anderson Literary Award. Roberts lives in Ohio.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE
 

The high funeral Mass was held during the second week of October—the best-attended funeral service in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1985—and almost every mourner was crying. Even the ones who didn’t shed obsequious tears struggled bravely not to. The church was mobbed with almost two thousand people, a larger attendance than most Cleveland Indians games enticed during the 1980s. The overflow—those who arrived too late to be seated in the main cathedral—were shuffled into the auxiliary auditorium of the parish social hall next door, where they could watch the service on closed-circuit television and do their crying in there. The lamenting in both rooms was loud and unabashed, the moaning rumble a counterpoint to sniffles and nose blowing.
At most funerals, the only ones who cry are the close relatives of the dear departed; everyone else simply looks sad, fights boredom, and tries not to sneeze away the fumes of burning incense. But this was no ordinary funeral Mass, because the deceased was not just an ordinary citizen who had lived honorably and religiously and who had died quietly of old age or an incurable disease. This one had perished long before his time, and the bishop himself was up there behind the ornate podium, droning away as he always did. The silent occupant of the closed casket had deliberately put a pistol in his mouth and blown out his brains.
He was Richard Candiotti—my elder brother.
His death was eating a hole in my liver, but I couldn’t do a damn thing about it after the fact. One of the first things a kid learns as he’s growing up is that no matter what else, gone is gone—for good. Still, I was one of the few sorrowing churchgoers who didn’t cry. Not openly. I wept for Richard alone, inside, where no one could see it.
Richard had been the parish priest of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows in Youngstown for thirteen years, but older parishioners remembered him as a rangy, tousle-haired kid, growing up in the Italian neighborhood called Brier Hill, living with his two younger brothers and a sister in a tall, skinny mill house. Our parents rented the bilious blue home from the steel company, to which our father trudged to work six days a week, down the hill at Burlington Street with his metal lunch box under his arm, then crossing the road and moving over the walkway into the mill itself and onto the hellishly hot floor.
Brier Hill is a little world unto itself—with several bocce courts, a veterans’ social club for Italian-Americans, an Italian Fair every spring, taverns where the bartenders were always named Vinnie or Mario, and an aggressive citizenry that took care of their own, decades before anyone ever heard of a “neighborhood watch.” Nobody ever called the cops, because they didn’t have to. Whenever a problem arose, we policed ourselves. Some steelworkers from the Hill got old and passed away, but many of them are listed as alive and on the payroll—even five and ten years after their deaths. Runners for the local mob still collect their paychecks.
It’s that kind of a neighborhood. Tony Janiro—a big-deal middleweight fighter from the Brier Hill area—made his mark in the forties, although he never won a championship. They talked about him a little bit in the Raging Bull movie, but that was all about Jake LaMotta, who had nothing to do with Youngstown. But Janiro was Italian, and Youngstowners still sing his praises, even the people who weren’t even born when he was fighting professionally.
Damn near everybody from Youngstown could fight professionally if they wanted to. That’s how we survived—like my father. In his heart of hearts, he was a gentle man, but his environment, his neighbors, and the 120-degree summertime temperature of the floor of the steel mill at which he earned his living turned him into a guy with a quick temper and a quicker fist.
All us Candiotti kids were too smart to walk in our father’s footsteps, and Richard was the sharpest of us. After a survey of careers available to him, he’d enrolled in a Catholic seminary in southern Ohio—bankrolled in large part by the head of an infamous and powerful Italian mob family—and dedicated his life to Jesus. At the time of his death, he’d become more than a priest. He was a neighbor, a friend, a teacher, a listener, and a spiritual guide—and according to all the younger kids who begged him to come outside and play with them on a brisk fall Saturday when the fallen leaves crackled under your feet and almost every house had a comically carved pumpkin on the front porch, he could toss a football a country mile.
That was before he went down into the basement to the game room of the church in the middle of the night and swallowed a bullet.
What makes a relatively young priest do the Dutch act in his own church, the church where he was baptized, confirmed, and accepted into the priesthood? I fretted over that, sitting miserably in the front pew with my remaining brother and sister, trying not to hear the uninspired voice of the bishop of Youngstown babbling about life and death and redemption, ignoring Father Richard Candiotti’s method of death and saying he was enveloped in the loving arms of Jesus. Richard had grown up in the same house we had, though he was more pious and fastidious than the rest of us—even as a child, he always took too damn long in the bathroom every morning combing his hair. Every Sunday, rain or shine, he hassled his siblings about going to church and being devout.
Then he put on the turned-around collar and rode herd on everybody else to be good Catholics, too, until he threw in all his cards.
I would have cried about his death in any event, and I would have showed up for his funeral; he was the only living member of my family I had much to do with. But priests don’t kill themselves—ever. It’s against the rules of the Church.
I’m Dominick Candiotti—or Nick, as nearly everyone calls me—and I’ve never been a good Catholic. I’ve not been particularly sociable, either, which I guess makes me one of those loners. I dislike the label, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I was a rebel from the beginning, and it was impossible for me to play the game like my three older siblings had.
My next-oldest brother, Alfonso, is a spit-and-polish homicide lieutenant for the Youngstown Police Department—a hypocrite who went through all the Catholic motions without believing them. Shorter in stature than the rest of his family, he learned quickly the art of politics and of power, and never looked back. My sister, Teresa, is a whining, scolding, boring pain in the ass who’s raised bitching to a pure art form, marrying early the poor fool who’d stumbled onto her postadolescent virginity and didn’t have the sense to back away. Teresa hasn’t cracked a smile since she was ten years old.
And Richard—the late Father Richard? He was some kind of saint. It’s too easy to say that about a Catholic priest, but with Richard it had always seemed well deserved, at least to me. I had feelings for all my family, because that’s born into you, but I loved Richard Candiotti with all of what was left of my heart.
So how did he decide to put a cap in the back of his throat?
I didn’t know, either.
I’d tried every angle I knew to put the pieces together, and it frustrated me. I was angry as hell—at my brother, who should have talked it over with me before doing anything rash and stupid, and at the city in general. Richard had embraced Youngstown and everything that came with it, while I’d turned my back on it.
Why did I choose not to call Youngstown my home? It’s a gritty, no-nonsense Rust Belt city that nourishes all its diverse backgrounds and ethnicities. Most of our citizens work blue-collar jobs, go bowling, drink beer, get into harmless punch-outs in tavern parking lots on a Saturday night, and veg out on the sofa to watch Sunday sports. It’s a lot like Cleveland, only smaller.
Yet, sentimental magic came along with a Youngstown childhood, at least while I was growing up. It was a more innocent time, and we kids found our own fun on the streets and in the parks and in the after-school playgrounds. I learned quickly enough that everyone I knew was connected in one way or another to mob crime and civic corruption. It made me squirm, even while the industry that kept the town rocking and rolling, steel, was gasping its last.
It also made me squirm that everyone knew the town was controlled and actually run by two rival Italian mob gangs, and that no matter who you were, you had to go along to get along. If you didn’t, you were hip-deep in trouble.
I couldn’t handle any of that. It was like living in some kind of twisted fairy tale where the wicked witches and child-eating giants were the winners. So I ran, first to the military—a huge mistake—and then to a big city, Chicago. It was every bit as corrupt there as it was in Youngstown, but most Chicagoans were busy with their own affairs and didn’t have the time to care. Besides, all Chicagoans knew that the civic leaders were openly corrupt, and they considered the graft they pocketed just another tax that had to be paid to keep the buses and trains running and the snowplows clearing off the streets all winter.
Richard loved his hometown, loved being atop the pinnacle on which every local Catholic had installed him, kissing his hand and his ring in the process—and probably, in their heads, kissing his ass, too. So he happily stayed where he’d been born.
He was the only human being to whom I could ever open up completely, because I was too young to connect with my parents or my other siblings. I didn’t always follow Richard’s advice, but I never failed to consider it seriously. Now I was furious enough over losing my brother and friend and mentor ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0312566336
• ISBN 13: 9780312566333
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288