“They tried to stop me. God knows they tried, but I refused to listen to them.”

“Why? Why did you refuse?”

“As I said, I was obsessed.”

“So what you’re telling me is that making your illegal pilot was worth going broke over. It was worth spending every last cent you had to commit a murder? Wait! And possibly going to jail for!”

The cripple sighed sadly. “In those days I wasn’t very rational. In those days an idea was more important to me than money. I wasn’t the first person who obsessed over an idea to the point of self-destruction. And I daresay I won’t be the last. General Billy Mitchell—”

“Stupid,” said the producer.

“Worse. Insane…to a certain extent.”

“What do you mean ‘to a certain extent’?”

When DP Brady was ordained a priest, he requested and was assigned his old grammar school’s parish, St. Matthias, and began his priesthood there. He lived in the rectory of St. Matt’s and did what a priest does in a local parish: took confessions, married some folks, baptized others, and buried the dead. It is said a priest takes care of the family from the cradle to the grave. Father Brady performed those duties with grace and enthusiasm. His parishioners quickly grew to love the young priest. So did his boss and mentor, Father William Deuber. Father Deuber, the pastor of St. Matt’s, was a former football star at the University of Pennsylvania and an Episcopalian turned Catholic during the Korean War. Why he did what he did, switch religions like that, Father Deuber never explained.

Father Deuber and Father Brady became good friends.

Father Deuber, a once stocky and muscular halfback, had aged appreciably. The fringe around his head had turned a silver gray and a serious paunch was growing larger and larger, bulging over his belt. The old warhorse—who had been running the St. Matthias parish for more years than he liked to admit—had become more and more persnickety as he grew older. He scolded and sometimes punished his young assistant pastors as if they were kids and he were their daddy. Father Deuber was called “the old prick” by the newer priests, but always behind his back.

The monsignor was different with Father Brady, who reminded Father Billy Deuber a lot of himself when he was the young priest’s age. He considered Brady a clergyman of exceptional calling: fiercely loyal to the church, a strict disciplinarian, and at one with his flock. There were, of course, those parishioners at St. Matthias who didn’t share Father Deuber’s opinion of Father Daniel Patrick Brady. Most of the younger members thought Father Brady too prissy and old-fashioned, too caught up in old clergy precepts, too tied to all of the Vatican’s dated and out-of-style laws, too strict. But those malcontents were in the minority, for churches in those days were not filled with the young.