Charisma

by Orania Papazoglou

  “A sleep-in?”

  “It was a gesture of solidarity. My parish priest—Father Reynolds, out in Branford, at Saint Thomas Aquinas—Father Reynolds has a really inspiring passion for social justice, a real sense of empathy for the poor. It was his idea. We were all—the whole church, except tiny children and sick people and like that—we were all supposed to bring sleeping bags and spend a night in the basement of the church to show our solidarity with the homeless—”

  “Oh.”

  “—and practically nobody came!” The receptionist looked triumphant. “Can you believe that? Nine o’clock on the night, a Friday night, nobody has to work on Saturday morning, and still there were only six of us there. It’s Ronald Reagan, that’s what I think. He turned the entire country into a pit of mindless greed.”

  “Mmm,” John Kelly said again. They were walking through windowless winding corridors. John thought that the floor must have been gutted and reconstructed to accommodate the studios, or actually built for the studios. He couldn’t imagine any other kind of business that would need this kind of arrangement. After a while, the windowlessness ended, but what windows there were didn’t look out on the street. They looked in at rooms, full of couches or equipment, lit by dim fluorescent lights. In the rooms with the couches, men in jeans and sneakers and flannel shirts were smoking cigarettes. In the rooms with the equipment, they were fooling with dials.

  “Are you going to want to smoke?” the receptionist asked him.

  “What?”

  “Smoke,” the receptionist said patiently. They had stopped before a door with a window in it, looking in on the shabbiest carpet and the shabbiest couches John had seen yet. The receptionist was frowning at him sternly, maybe because she had tagged him just as surely as he had tagged her. He was a lump with his consciousness unraised.

  “Smoke,” she said for a third time. “It’s the way I told you downstairs, the only place you can smoke—as a visitor, I mean; people can smoke in their own offices—the only place you can smoke is in the green room. This is the green room.”

  “It is a green room,” John said, “yes.”

  “It would be called the green room even if it wasn’t. That’s just the name for it. I don’t know why. If you don’t want to smoke, you can go directly to Studio Four.”

  “I do want to smoke.”

  “That’s all right. A lot of people do, their first time on television. They get intimidated.” She popped open the door of the green room and looked around. “It’s really a mess, isn’t it? Everybody thinks commercial stations are practically minting money, but it doesn’t seem to be that way around here. We are going to get this room redecorated, though. Dan Murphy arranged it.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Well,” John said, “as I understand it, it’s a man named Victor Coletti who owns this station, not Dan Murphy. Why would Dan Murphy want to get the green room redecorated.”

  “Victor Coletti?” the receptionist said. “I don’t know, Father. You must be mistaken. I’ve never even heard of anyone named Victor Coletti.”

  She put her hand on his arm, pushed him into the room, and closed the door behind him.

  3

  Half an hour later, after he had read through his first issue of Hustler in growing alarm and smoked enough cigarettes to make his throat ache, someone came for him. He was relieved beyond measure to see that it was not the receptionist, but a young girl dressed in much the same way the men he had seen were dressed, in jeans and sneakers and a flannel shirt. She had her hair pulled to the back of her head in a rubber band and a wedding ring on her left hand. She introduced herself as, “Tracey, you know, the story editor on your series.”

  “Story editor?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Father. In your case, all I do is make sure the art people get your name straight on the intro board and work with your title.”

  “I don’t have a title.”

  “Let me have your script while you’re in makeup. I’ll read it and we’ll come up with a title.”

  He had the “script”—which he thought of as a “paper”—in a folder in his briefcase. He took it out and handed it over and then let Tracey lead him out of the room and back into the hall. They were going deeper and deeper into the building, past more and more rooms with windows on the corridor. It was an alien place, and for a while he let himself drift with it. Consoles and cameras and lights on tripods. People moving either too quickly or not at all. Silence. The whole floor seemed to be soundproofed.

  Tracey led him down a corridor even narrower than the others, past doors marked MEN and WOMEN, and finally into a warren of cubbyholes that looked like miniature dentists’ offices. All but one of them was empty. The one that was not was occupied by a short blond girl with straight bangs that fell into her eyes.

  “Debra,” Tracey said, “I’ve brought you Father Kelly. He’s got to look like he’s not made up.”

  “They all have to look like they’re not made up,” Debra said. She looked like she was made up. Her lips were a deep purple with white hearts painted into the centers of them. She gestured to her dentist’s chair without looking John Kelly in the face and turned away to get her makeup box. “I just had a woman in here, fifty if she was a day, and what she wanted was pink. Can you imagine that? Pink.”

  John Kelly didn’t know what was wrong with pink. He put his briefcase on the floor, sat down in the dentist’s chair, and folded his hands over his stomach.

  “Can I ask you two something, just as a point of information?”

  “Ask away,” Tracey said.

  “I never really know the answer to anything,” Debra said.

  “Have either of you ever heard of a man named Victor Coletti?”

  “Victor Coletti?” Tracey looked at Debra. Debra looked at Tracey. They both shrugged. “Who’s Victor Coletti?” Tracey said.

  “You’ve never heard the name before?”

  “No,” Debra said. “Should we have? Is this Victor Coletti in television?”

  Chapter Three

  1

  PAT MALLORY COULD THINK of a lot of things he would like to do with his evening, and not one of them was dancing attendance on Bishop Monaghan Riley. There was a row of women’s pictures across the top of the corkboard in his office, just like the row of women’s pictures that was going to appear, no matter what he tried to do about it, on the front page of the New Haven Register tomorrow morning. There was a stack of files on the deaths of boys lying on his desk, just like the duplicate stack of files on dead boys Anton Klemmer kept at the morgue. There was what he had come to think of as the Problem of Susan Murphy, which had to be worked out, one way or the other, before he ran into her again. On that score, he was a little surprised at himself. He didn’t subscribe to Anton’s analysis of existential angst. If existential angst was what Pat Mallory had on those days when he felt too tired to get out of his chair to go to the bathroom and couldn’t remember what it was life was supposed to be for, then women had never cured it for him. Only work had ever made him really free. He had enough work now to be free as a bird indefinitely.

  Still, Bishop Monaghan Riley was Bishop Monaghan Riley. He was not only visible and effective guardian of Pat’s soul for as long as Pat lived in the diocese of Bridgeport, he was a politically important man in the State of Connecticut. He was not as important as Archbishop Whealan of Hartford, but then archbishops were always more important than bishops, or almost always.

  Queen of Heaven Rectory was in one of the nicer parts of New Haven, way up on Prospect Street past Albertus Magnus, near the Jesuit rectory. Pat got there by car, for once unworried about where he was going to park. As chief of Homicide, he was technically allowed to park anywhere he wanted to on public property as long as he was on duty, but he didn’t like to. It tended to get the ordinary civilians pissed off, and he didn’t blame them. Queen of Heaven Rectory had its own private parking lot, however, and it was next to a big chu
rch that had a private parking lot, too. The parking lots were around the back so that they didn’t mar the pristine loveliness of upper Prospect Avenue.

  On the street, he hesitated between the rectory and the church parking lots. The rectory lot was closer, but narrow and harder to get in and out of. He chose it anyway, because it had started to half-drizzle, half-sleet again. Pulling into the space beside the big black car that had probably brought the bishop up from Bridgeport, he looked for Father John Kelly’s car and didn’t find it.

  He did find John Kelly. As soon as Pat got out of the car he saw him, standing on the small back porch. The porch light was on above his head. The rectory’s back door was open. He looked tired and a little odd, wearing one of those old Jesuit cassocks nobody bothered with anymore.

  “Father Kelly?” Pat said. “Is that you?”

  “Yes, Pat. It’s me. Hurry up and get inside. It’s lousy out here.”

  Pat never knew what to do with comments about the weather. About this one, he did nothing, just jogged a little as he crossed the lot. By the time Pat got to the porch, Father John Kelly was already back inside.

  “The bishop’s been here since four o’clock,” he told Pat, “two hours early, which is par for the course, and now he’s roaring. I hope you’re in a tractable mood this evening.”

  “I don’t have anything to be tractable about,” Pat said. “I hope the bishop’s in a brief mood this evening. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “We’ve all got a lot of work to do. Never mind me. I like the old man. I always have. I’ve just had a very tiring day.”

  “I can bet.”

  “The bishop thinks you’re staying for dinner. If you’re not, don’t tell him until after you talk. Otherwise he’ll spend half an hour making you change your mind.”

  “He couldn’t make me change my mind.”

  “Yes, he could.”

  Father John Kelly had stopped them at the bottom of the stairs. He looked up the long green runner to the landing and shook his head slightly. He looked like a man with something going seriously wrong in his life. Pat supposed that it was just the bishop.

  “You going to take me up or let me go myself?” Pat asked him.

  “I’ll let you go yourself. It’s the first room at the top of the stairs, the one with the double doors. Father Dolan’s study.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “I think so, yes.” John Kelly hesitated, pressing his hands together the way Pat had noticed Jesuits did, as if they were taught how in seminary. “Pat,” he said, “by any chance, have you ever heard of a man named Victor Coletti?”

  “Victor Coletti? I know a Louis Coletti.”

  “Could he have a brother or an uncle or something somewhere named Victor?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Father. That’s not my department. That’s organized crime downstairs.”

  “Oh, fine.”

  “What’s the matter?” Pat said. “Are you involved somehow with this Coletti person? Does he want something from you? A lot of these guys throw a lot of money at the Church. It usually ends up in bad publicity.”

  “I know.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Father John Kelly sighed. “Never mind,” he said. “It’s too complicated to explain right now with the bishop upstairs waiting and everything else that’s going on. Maybe you could do me a favor, or get someone in your office to do me a favor, as soon as you get the time.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like find out who this Victor Coletti is, for one thing. And then find out who owns WNHY-TV.”

  “WNHY-TV,” Pat repeated.

  Father John Kelly was turning away, expecting him to go upstairs and do his business with the bishop. In John Kelly’s mind, business with the bishop probably took precedence over any and all other business, except business with the Pope.

  Pat Mallory was about to make his way upstairs, when he realized that Father John Kelly had turned back to him and was staring. He paused politely and waited.

  “You know,” John Kelly said, “what really bothers me about all this is, I had him checked out before, at the beginning. I’m not a complete fool.”

  “The check didn’t turn up anything?” Pat asked him.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Maybe there wasn’t anything to turn up.”

  John Kelly shook his head vigorously. “If there wasn’t, I’ll eat this cassock. Go upstairs and talk to the bishop, Pat. I’m ready to drop and I still have a million things to do.”

  Instead, Pat Mallory stood where he was, minute after minute, until the sound of Father John Kelly’s footsteps had died into the silence of the rectory.

  2

  “So you see,” the bishop was saying half an hour later, “John isn’t the best person to have in the face of a conspiracy, but he isn’t the worst, either. He’s very good at reading the public pulse. He’s absolutely right about what Dan Murphy can and can’t do to Father Burne. Molestation charges—John’s right about that, too. Charging Bruce Ritter with molesting the children at Covenant House didn’t do anybody any good politically in the Manhattan D.A.’s office or anywhere else. That kind of thing backfires. We may bend the Constitution to get those cases into the courts and get some convictions, but it’s a lot harder to bend the mind of the man in the street, especially when you don’t have anything he’d consider proof. And you know what the evidence is like in sexual child abuse cases.”

  “Either really good or nonexistent,” Pat said cheerfully.

  “The man in the street,” the bishop said, “tends to feel that if the evidence is nonexistent, the crime has not been committed. As a philosophy of law, it has more merit than we give it credit for.”

  Father Dolan’s study was a large room with windows looking out on Prospect Street. The ceilings were high and the boards on the floor were thick and old. In one corner there was an ancient desk neither Pat nor the bishop had been interested in sitting at. In the other there was a filing cabinet. The middle of the room was occupied by a pair of loveseats facing each other across a small coffee table. Pat and the bishop were sitting on those.

  So far, Pat thought, the meeting had been less onerous than he had expected—although it had been long-winded, because Monaghan Riley was a long-winded man. At least he had come to the point immediately and only then gone on to elaborate. Some men started with the elaborations and let you stew interminably before they let you know what they were talking about. The bishop’s point had been simple, emphatic, and illuminating. He was here to ask Pat Mallory to investigate the possibility that someone—possibly Dan Murphy himself—was set on framing Father Tom Burne for the murders of four boy prostitutes.

  It was not a theory Pat Mallory would have thought up on his own. Like most cops, he didn’t really believe in frames—even though he’d seen a few. In most cases, the guilty party was so obviously guilty it was hard to understand how he’d ever thought he was going to get away with it. That was why Pat Mallory generally supported capital punishment for purposes of retribution, but never for purposes of deterrence. If a grown man couldn’t be deterred from passing bad checks by the fact that there was going to be sixteen security cameras photographing him doing it, he couldn’t be deterred by anything.

  On the other hand, he was a man who liked Tom Burne and didn’t like Dan Murphy. He did, however, think he understood Dan Murphy, and, in the light of what he understood, the investigation of Tom Burne had made no more sense to him than it had to Father John Kelly. Not only did Pat not think Tom Burne had molested any of the boys at Damien House, he thought Father Kelly and the bishop were right on the money in their analysis of the situation. The Bruce Ritter investigation had done nothing but harm to the people who started it. The odd way it had been dropped by the public authorities and seemingly shoved under the rug by the ecclesiastical ones had made most people feel that Ritter had been jobbed. The whole mess had done nothing but le
ave a bad taste all around.

  On the matter of the murders, Pat wasn’t so sure. He could see how it would work—brilliantly—but not that it was working. He’d been on the case now for weeks and there was no hint of anything of the kind.

  “The thing is,” he told the bishop, “in order to run a frame, you have to plant evidence. I can tell you right now that no evidence against Father Tom Burne has been found at the scene of any of these murders.”

  “Yet,” the bishop said, “what about the other thing John brought up, that the murders were being committed for a warning?”

  “Less farfetched than you might think.”

  “What about the possibility that the people who run this ring have someone in the police department?”

  “It wouldn’t have to be the police department,” Pat said. “It could be the D.A.’s office or the mayor’s office or even social services. But, yes, I do think there’s some connection, if you want to know the truth. Everybody does. We’ve thought it for years.”

  “There is such a ring?” the bishop asked. “A high-class call service that provides—uh—that provides—”

  “Very young boys to establishment males for the purposes of prostitution?” Pat smiled wanly. “Yes, Your Grace—”

  “—Don’t call me ‘Your Grace.’ ”

  “—there is, not only in New Haven, but in almost every city in the country, major and not quite major, including Bridgeport, from what I hear from people I know down there. This is a growth industry, Bishop Riley, the biggest growth industry in vice in the country. This is what happens to about one of every twenty of the children who are kidnapped—”

  “—One out of twenty?”

  “I get so damned sick and tired listening to social workers talk about how the family is the most dangerous place for children,” Pat said, “I want to scream. The family is not the most dangerous place for children. The street is the most dangerous place for children, and there are millions of them out there. And the foster system—dear Lord Jesus Christ. We managed to put a couple away about a year ago, took in a foster child who’d been removed from a home some asshole social worker had labeled ‘abusive.’ These two foster-parent saints said the child, it was a girl, said she’d run away. Turned out they’d sold her to a pimp in the Congo—and I do mean sold. They got three thousand dollars for her, tax free.”