by Steven Gore
He paused and looked around at the walls and windows and doors, and it struck him that the house, which could’ve been a home in some people’s lives, had devolved into just a way station in which both of them had gotten stranded.
Chapter 43
“I didn’t expect ever to see you again,” Margaret Perkins said to Donnally as she walked into the Schubert, Smith, and Barton conference room. Her pressed slacks and steaming Starbucks cup gave her a fresh Monday morning look. She held up the records release signed by Charles Brown that Donnally had faxed over the night before. “And I sure as hell wasn’t expecting this.”
Donnally smiled and extended his hand. She slipped by it and gave him a hug.
“And I wasn’t expecting that,” he said.
Donnally turned and pointed at the Golden Gate Bridge framed by the floor-to-ceiling window.
“Nice view.”
Perkins shrugged. “Just one of life’s illusions. Most of the world is composed of trampled dirt. Not so pretty.”
She then pointed at a chair and they sat down next to each other at the table.
“I somehow thought we were on the same side from the beginning,” she said. “I wanted to know the truth, too. The problem is that court is rarely a place to discover it.”
Donnally smiled. “Maybe something should be done about that.”
“It won’t happen in our lifetimes.”
Perkins looked toward the glass wall separating the conference room from the reception area where two suited men waited, hands gripping briefcases as if afraid they’d spring open and confess to some uncharged crime.
“We spend most of our time around here trying to keep the facts and the truth from getting into court.”
“I guess that’s because your clients are usually the ones with something to hide.”
Perkins nodded. “You got that right. Charles Brown may turn out to be our single exception this year.” She smiled. “Of course, we didn’t think so at the time.”
She took a sip of coffee and then set down her cup.
“I ruined a paralegal’s Sunday evening and had him do some research on Lou Pagaroli and his firm, starting with what you discovered on the Internet. The child molesting case you found wasn’t the only one he’s done. The church has become his cash cow over the last ten years.”
Donnally raised his eyebrows. He had also researched Schubert, Smith and Barton’s clients. SSB represented the Vatican in litigation in U.S. courts.
“Different church,” she said. “The work we do for the Vatican is entirely separate. Both from a financial and a legal perspective. You can’t get there from here. Trust me. Lots of plaintiff’s lawyers have tried. There simply is no Vatican-controlled entity in the United States.”
“What about the pope’s dominion over his flock?”
“That’s hearts and minds, not corporate structure.” She grinned. “That you’ll find in the Cayman Islands.”
“Which means?”
The playfulness disappeared from her face.
“I’ll do everything I can to help you nail that child-molesting priest.”
“Just because Pagaroli is involved—”
“Yes, it does. It means exactly that. You know that old hymn, ‘His eye is on the sparrow?’ Well, Pagaroli is the shotgun the church uses to blast it out of the sky. All Pagaroli has done for the last decade is represent California dioceses in their worst sexual abuse cases.”
“But I didn’t find any cases where Philip McGrath was named as a defendant.”
“That just means that no victims have come forward.”
“Why not? There’s a lot of money in it.”
“Most are too ashamed,” Perkins said. “Would you want to get up on the stand and get cross-examined about some priest sticking his—”
“Other people do it.”
“And it truly, truly amazes me.”
Perkins reached for the banker’s box containing Brown’s file and pulled it closer. “I’m not sure the police were even aware that Father Phil had ever been at Anna’s house. His name doesn’t come up at all.”
“What about guys named Artie and Robert?”
Perkins cast Donnally a puzzled look. “Who are they?”
Donnally shrugged. “It’s not important.”
“Important enough for you to mention.”
The question was hard to answer without raising other ones, so he asked, “You ever been to a crime scene?”
“Only the occasional corporate headquarters,” She smiled. “But I’m sure that’s not the kind you have in mind.”
“The idea is to search through and collect or record everything that might be relevant.”
“And Artie and Robert are in the ‘might be’ category.”
Donnally nodded.
“And should have been noted at the time if the detectives were doing their jobs properly?”
“Along with Father Phil and Sherwyn.”
Perkins’s eyes widened. “Sherwyn?”
“Sherwyn. Now that I know how Pagaroli fits in, my guess is that Father Phil molested Melvin, and the church sent Father Phil to Sherwyn for treatment instead of turning him in to the police. Sherwyn testified in Brown’s hearing that most of his practice was in the area of sexual abuse.”
“Sherwyn never disclosed that he—”
“And the police were tunnel-visioned in their focus on Brown.”
“But how could that happen?” Perkins said, voice rising. “What are the chances that Sherwyn would be picked to do the competency evaluation?”
“Easy. There were only a handful of shrinks in the whole Bay Area who did them. It was a little cottage industry. Still is. For the defense one week, for the prosecution the next, whoever called first. Maybe Sherwyn saw Brown in the legal pipeline and elbowed someone else aside.”
Perkins’s eyes moved like searchlights shining on an internal battlefield, trying to pick out the enemy from among the shadows.
She finally looked at Donnally and asked, “You think Father Phil murdered Anna to keep her from going to the police?”
“He was the one facing living in prison as a child molester,” Donnally said. “And he was the last one we know for certain who was at Anna’s house, and her diary says that she warned him that he was deluding himself if he thought her investigation of him was over. He left, then probably snuck back in and killed her. And Sherwyn put himself in a position to keep the case from ever going to trial.”
Donnally didn’t say it, but finished the thought in his mind: That meant that Artie and Robert had been murdered in revenge for a crime they hadn’t committed and that Sherwyn had been protecting himself, not the former New Sky members who’d beaten them to death.
Perkins glanced at the banker’s box. “But I thought Sherwyn put Brown on lithium so he’d become competent. That’s what his lawyer sued to stop.”
“It was just the opposite. Sherwyn overdosed Brown on lithium. It made him physically sick and even more crazy.”
She exhaled, almost a whistle. “Why would he take a risk like that?”
“Maybe money. Who knows how many priests he was treating. A hundred and fifty dollars an hour, eight hours a day. Over a quarter of a million dollars a year. Maybe because Sherwyn’s first attempt at treating Father Phil had been a failure, and Melvin was the father’s second victim.”
“And if Brown went to trial, the defense might have figured out that the real killer was Father Phil—”
“And complete the circle back to Sherwyn. He’d be seen by the public as a failure and the church wouldn’t—couldn’t—hire him anymore.”
Donnally watched Perkins shake her head, as if clearing her lawyer’s mind.
“But all this assumes that Melvin, whoever he is, really was a victim of molestation,” she said. “And you’ve got no proof of that. It’s what we call in the netherworld of law a lack of foundation.”
“Maybe I should drop by Sherwyn’s office and ask him.”
“He�
�d just make that little rabbit face he does, then slam the door. You’d probably have better luck with Father Phil.”
Donnally’s cell phone rang as he was driving past the gold-domed San Francisco City Hall on his way back toward Janie’s.
“Got some bad news for you,” Perkins said. “Father Phil is permanently exercising his right to remain silent.”
“You mean—”
“Dead as a church doornail.”
“How’d you find out?”
“I went to law school with one of the plaintiff’s lawyers in the lawsuits against the San Francisco Diocese.”
“You mean they had a case against him?”
“Never got that far. They couldn’t turn up a victim.”
“Back up. You’ve got me confused.” Donnally pulled into a yellow zone in front of a bank. “Try it again.”
“My friend told me that a parishioner at St. Mark’s in Berkeley had some suspicions about Father Phil. Her name was Theresa Randon. She warned the monsignor, who sent Father Phil packing. She later became a member of Holy Names in San Francisco and was shocked to find him there. She complained a second time and was told that they’d discovered no evidence that he’d molested anyone.”
“But the church sent him for therapy with Sherwyn,” Donnally said, “so they must’ve had some proof.”
“The plaintiffs’ lawyers didn’t know about that until I told them just now.”
“They would’ve found that out from church records. The plaintiffs must have subpoenaed—”
Perkins cut him off with a bitter laugh.
“I guess you’ve forgotten what shredders are for. And no one owns more of them than the church and its lawyers.”
Chapter 44
Finding Theresa Randon wasn’t as easy as Donnally had hoped. Ninety-year-olds typically don’t have driver’s licenses. They don’t apply for credit. They stop doing any of those things that get their names into databases. She had almost disappeared into the vast emptiness of anonymity that Donnally himself sometimes craved.
Almost.
Donnally had learned from his grandmother that elderly church ladies tend to keep track of one another. They visit old folks’ homes. They keep lists of people to pray for when they’re ill. They bring meals to the homebound.
And they tend to be well organized.
The eighty-year-old woman looked up at Donnally with a grin when he stopped her on the sidewalk at the bottom of Holy Names’ front steps. He had timed his visit for just before the start of a meeting of church volunteers. He described himself as a former Sunday school student of Theresa’s.
She withdrew a photocopy of a two-page spreadsheet from her purse, titled “Holy Names Visiting Schedule.”
“I don’t know how we used to keep track of all this without computers,” she said.
Donnally could see that about a dozen names, addresses, and telephone numbers were highlighted. He guessed that they were the woman’s own assignments.
She scanned the list, then pulled out her cell phone, punched in a number, and repeated Donnally’s story to the person at the other end of the call.
“Is Theresa back from the hospital?” she asked.
A frown came to her face, which soon transformed into a smile.
“Just a false alarm. That’s wonderful. Thanks, dear.”
She disconnected and turned the sheet toward Donnally and let him write down the address.
“I hope you won’t be disappointed, Mr. Donnally.” The frown returned. “Theresa is no longer Catholic.” She brightened. “But we still consider her one of the girls.”
“It’s not nice to lie to old people,” Theresa Randon said to Donnally an hour later. She was still dressed in the pastel green sweat suit she’d worn to her Stretch and Tone class at the San Francisco Woods Retirement Center.
“I never taught Sunday school,” she said. “I was banned like a modern Socrates. They were afraid I’d corrupt the youth.”
“I didn’t think the lady would help me if I told her the truth.”
Theresa smiled. “You got that right, buster.”
Donnally looked around the atrium from where they sat at a small marble table next to the fountain. The running water muted the classical music filling the room.
“Nice place,” Donnally said.
“I bought Microsoft at five dollars a share.” She held up two fingers, close together. “Bill Gates and I are like this.”
“Not like you and Father Phil were.”
Theresa’s cheeks wobbled and her silver hair shook as her body shuddered. “Creepy. He was damn creepy.”
“But you never found any proof?”
“His being booted out of St. Mark’s in Berkeley and later from Holy Names over here was proof enough for me. He molested boys in every parish they tried to hide him in. What we never got was justice.”
“And that’s why you left the church?”
“I didn’t leave the church, it left me.”
She folded her arms on the table and inspected Donnally’s face.
“You haven’t exactly told me what you’re up to. How do I know you’re not part of a secret Vatican plot?” She glanced around and hunched her shoulders. “They have agents everywhere, you know.”
Donnally felt himself stiffen. Not another Berkeley lunatic like Trudy.
She straightened up and laughed. “Gotcha.”
Donnally smiled. “Yes, you did.”
“Spill it.”
He nodded, then lied to another old person.
“I’m trying to help a lawyer prove that the diocese knew about the molestations by Father Phil and others, but I’ve dead-ended. The last lead I have is the first name of a kid that he may have molested. Melvin.”
“Melvin.” Theresa squinted up toward the chandeliers, then looked back at Donnally. “Did he have a nickname?”
“Not that I know of. Just Melvin.”
Theresa went back to her upward squint. “Melvin. Melvin. Melvin.” She slapped the tabletop, then fixed her eyes on Donnally. “I know who that is. Little Mel Watson. During high school he worked at The Sweet Tooth. Pale-faced, earnest little runt, but man did he know how to pile chocolate ice cream on a cone.”
She paused and her brows furrowed.
“You’re not going to believe it, but he became a goddamn priest.”
As he walked to his car, Donnally repeated in his mind the thought that Theresa had left unspoken: Molested children sometimes become molesters themselves. And what better place for someone like Melvin Watson to disappear than back into the scene of an unprosecuted crime.
Chapter 45
Brother Melvin rested his forearms on his thighs and stared down at his thin hands. He and Donnally were sitting on a concrete bench outside the neo-Gothic hillside chapel of La Sallian University in Vancouver.
“How did you identify me?” Melvin asked.
“It’s a long story.”
Melvin looked over. “I could sue you for defamation or something and make you tell it.”
“But you won’t.”
“No.” Melvin sighed. “I won’t.”
Melvin then gazed out over the Canadian city, oblivious to the hushed rumble of traffic rising up from the freeways crossing the inlet below.
“I know the question in your mind,” Melvin finally said, without looking over at Donnally, “so I’ll answer it first even if I don’t answer anything else: No. I didn’t join the Christian Brothers in order to molest children. If this all becomes public, everyone who’s important in my life outside of the church will think I did. But the truth is that celibacy was my life raft and I’ve never let go. Never.” He looked over his shoulder toward the twenty-acre campus. “The tests of temptation were the students.”
“Maybe you should’ve become a monk.”
Melvin smiled for the first time since Donnally had knocked on his office door a half hour earlier.
“I didn’t like the uniforms.” Melvin’s smile died. “Anyway, isolati
on wouldn’t have solved the problem that Father Phil and the others left me with.”
“What was that?”
“Sexual confusion. It’s not as if a boy becomes gay because his first sexual experience is in the form of molestation by a man. It’s that the act causes you to lose your bearings. It’s a sudden exposure to unlimited possibility, like getting lost in the wilderness, or watching your mother murder your father, or seeing the World Trade Center collapse. The world seems to lose its natural order.
“If your first homosexual experience happens when you’re older, in the army or in a seminary, you can place it into the context of the rest of your life. You know right away whether it’s out of character or a turning point in your understanding of your sexuality—but not when you’re a kid.”
Melvin rubbed his forehead. “And when it’s a priest, it’s even worse. First it seems absurd, then like a betrayal.” He lowered his hand and looked at Donnally. “But what’s really weird is that you start to feel special, even privileged. After all, the priest picked you from all the rest of the boys for his attention. In time, of course, you discover there are others, and then it turns into a secret, exclusive society of the chosen.”
He smiled again, this time with a hint of embarrassment.
“Isn’t it strange that as adults we can be ashamed of our naïveté as children? Delusions of imaginary friends, the mythic power of our blankies, games of hide-and-seek that seem as real as warfare. But for me and the other clients of Dr. Sherwyn—”
Donnally turned toward Brother Melvin. “Sherwyn? You were being treated by Sherwyn?”
He nodded. “Father Phil wasn’t his patient. I was. He called it Reenactment Therapy.”
Donnally stared at the young man, but his mind was seeing past him. “You mean …”
Brother Melvin closed his eyes and rocked back and forth. Tears formed and rolled down his cheeks.
“It seemed as real as the seven sacraments.”
Reenactment Therapy.
Donnally took a sip of beer in the airport bar as he waited for his flight back to San Francisco.
That’s what RT stood for.
He hadn’t told Melvin, but it was his confessing it to Anna Keenan that had cost her her life. And it was that same knowledge that had plagued Trudy since the day of the murder and had sent her into hiding for more than twenty years, all that time twisting herself into a psychosomatic bundle of self-deception.