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to whom could this priest be talking?
    "Failed?"
    "Yes." Father Ferrick snapped the regulations closed and sat back in his chair, relieved to have done his duty.
    "But, Father, I hoped for a chance to explain myself."
    "Loyola College Law School procedures require no explanations of you, since none would mitigate the ruling. 'Ipso Facto' is the operative phrase, Mr. Dillon."
    "But if I fail this course, that means I can't take the bar next month."
    "I know that. I said as much to Professor Corrigan. He was adamant."
    "Can't I take the exam tomorrow?"
    The dean shook his head. "Professor Corrigan's position is that there is a principle here that must be upheld."
    "But if I—"
    "You will have to repeat the course next year. It is offered again beginning in January."
    Dillon thought his melting knees were going to collapse under him. Next year! Impossible!
    The stinking monstrosity he and Hanley had hauled out of the blood pipes had finished him for working in the yards. Another year in the slaughter pits—impossible!
    To stiffen his quaking legs, his quaking self, he used them to step toward the priest. "Father, you have to listen to me—"
    But he stopped himself, afraid of the emotion he felt stinging the backs of his eyes. A voice in his brain instructed him, "Like a lawyer. Do this like a lawyer. You are a lawyer for yourself."
    The lawyer's first idea is that discipline takes the place of feeling. Dillon forced a quality of detachment into his voice. "Father, I was late for the examination, too late to reasonably expect to take it, because a man was dead at my feet. I am speaking quite literally here. And my
choices were two—either to abandon him before authorities arrived to deal with him or to maintain the vigil proper to the deceased despite the delay it caused. For the crucial time, it fell to me and me alone..." Was that true? Was it wrong to omit mention of Hanley? But Hanley might as well have been absent. The Jesuits themselves had taught Dillon the principle of the Pertinent Truth."...to care for the dead, which I took to be my serious moral obligation. When help came I left at once and got downtown as fast as I could. I'm sure my rough appearance was part of what put Professor Corrigan in such a state."
    "You work at the stockyards." The priest's hand went unconsciously to a closed manila folder, Dillon's own file, he realized.
    "Yes. I am a steamfitter's helper." Jack Hanley's helper, he added to himself, and with a shock he realized that, moving with a lawyer's instinct to the best possible case for his behavior—with this Jesuit, a moral case based on the absolute Catholic obligation to respect the dead—he had, despite his careful rationalization about Pertinent Truth, just told the priest an explicit lie. He had stayed so long beside the corpse not for the dead man's sake, or for God's, but for Jack's. To someone else these distinctions might have seemed innocuous in the extreme, but to Dillon, a line had been crossed.
    "And you say a man was dead?"
    "I helped pull the body out of a blood sewer."
    A stricken look crossed the dean's face. "I know what a hard place the stockyards are. It doesn't take much of a slip..."
    The priest thought it was an accident. Dillon felt impelled to protect Father's innocence, as if murder were some kind of sexual sin the clergy should not hear of. He shrugged noncommittally. "It happened just at the end of my shift. There was no possible way for me to get here by five."
    Dillon paused. Knowing the value of seeming to concede, how it undercuts an opponent's sense of power and makes him generous, he said, "I've offered my explanation not as an excuse, but because I want you to understand that only a conflict of conscience could have kept me from being here. I understand now that there is nothing you can do—"
    The upraised hand again. "It is I who apply the regulations. Professor Corrigan..." And an upraised eyebrow, a hint of condescension which Dillon grasped at once.