Page 70 of The Family Cross

“Make you angry?” Sampson asked.

Campbell tilted his head. “No. What’s this about?”

“I think it did make you angry. I think you hated it, Choir Boy. Maybe enough to target her other clients.”

“Target?” he repeated, frowning. He sipped from the gin.

Sampson said, “Like that reverend who was with Corey an hour before you were.”

“What reverend?”

“The one you shot and lit on fire in an Audi under the Bridge to Nowhere.”

That sobered Choir Boy up big-time. He set the gin bottle down on the organ bench. “I didn’t shoot no one and I didn’t light anyone on fire. I don’t hurt people, man. The only person I hurt is myself.”

Sampson looked at me and nodded slightly.

I picked up the questioning. “That’s not how we hear it, Aldous. I spoke with Friar Driscoll at the Trappist monastery in Vermont.”

Campbell’s lips twisted in disgust. “That asshole. What did he say?”

“He told me that you strangled a piglet.”

That infuriated Campbell. He jumped to his feet and sputtered, tears coming down his cheeks, “That is an out-and-out lie! It was snowing and that piglet got out of the pen and was almost frozen to death when I found it. I was drunk, but I still knew what to do.”

Choir Boy claimed he took the piglet into the barn, wrapped it in a horse blanket, and attempted to revive it. He gave it CPR when it stopped breathing, but he couldn’t save it.

“That’s when Brother Glazier, one of the monks who didn’t like me, came into the barn. He saw me working on the pig, smelled the booze on my breath, and told everyone that I’d strangled it. That was a lie, and I have been telling people that ever since. I did not kill that little pig, man. And I for sure did not kill some deviant reverend who was screwing Corey.”

“What makes you say that the reverend was a deviant?” Sampson asked.

The man shot him a look, said, “I assume he was breaking his vows, being with Corey like that. So—deviant.”

He had us there.

“Where did you go after seeing Corey the night of the storm?” I asked, changing tack. “You didn’t stay at the Fall Flower?”

“Nah, I’d spent all my cash on seeing Corey. I didn’t have enough for a room. Like I said, I stayed under the bridge.”

“So you were there when the Audi exploded?”

He nodded. “Heard it blow and saw it burn.”

“Where were you sleeping?”

“I was in Hawk’s shelter, high up.”

“Why were you in his place?” Sampson asked.

“He said I could crash there because he was staying at the Fall Flower.”

I said, “To have sex with Corey also.”

That seemed to surprise Campbell. “Okay. He did not tell me that.”

“When was the next time you saw him?”

“That morning, man, after the Audi went up. He came in through the hole in the ramp and said it was time for me to get going. So I did.”