Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  She said neither the bishop nor any other ranking Church official was available for an interview. Great. Two brick walls in less than an hour.

  On my way back to the Chronicle I took a deep breath and called Patrick’s sister Kathleen. No doubt she’d been informed that her brother’s death was being investigated as a homicide, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d change her mind about walking me through the family history. My new-to-me Subaru wagon—acquired the previous winter after I’d totaled my old one—was a modern wonder equipped with Bluetooth, making it possible for me to drive and talk at the same time. Kathleen picked up on the first ring, her voice tremulous. When I identified myself she gasped a sob.

  “I was informed an hour ago that Patrick didn’t die of a heart attack. He was murdered. I can’t believe it.”

  The words came out in a rush, like they were scalding her tongue and she couldn’t wait to spit them out.

  “Did the state police come to see you?”

  “A detective did this morning, unannounced. He said the autopsy showed Patrick didn’t have a heart attack.”

  Her voice’s pitch was rising. I softened mine in response.

  “I’m so sorry. Your brother was a good man, a good priest. A real leader in this community.”

  “I know that. I do. Really. And I have no idea who would hurt him. It didn’t sound like the police have any leads.”

  I took a long, steady breath, girding myself for rejection. “I’ll certainly understand if you don’t want me to come to your home this afternoon like we’d planned.”

  “If you don’t mind me crying, come on ahead. I’ve already pulled all the photo albums out.” Her voice squeaked again. “It will help to talk about my brother.”

  I snuck in the newsroom’s side door and slouched in my cube while writing up the press conference, hoping to avoid Al Lombard. Roz Fortuna gave me away when she marched over the moment I hit Send, wanting to hear it all firsthand. When Leah saw us with our heads together she pointed to her big worktable, which allowed Lombard to sidle up and pretend he was trying to be helpful.

  Roz was working on a column sourced to a friend in the ME’s office who said Patrick’s head injury was inconsistent with the position of his body when it was found in the garden. “That has them looking for other evidence, according to what my friend overheard the detectives say during the autopsy.”

  “Did Rigoletti attend the post?”

  “Nah, some real detectives.”

  “Poor Tony. Everybody but his wife thinks he’s a jerk, but I’ll bet she can’t stand him either,” I said. “He’s such a goon.”

  That was Lombard’s cue for a mini-lecture on the cynicism of the young.

  “A priest—a man of God—has been deliberately killed in our town and you three are cracking wise about the lead detective? What is wrong with you?”

  The man of God line was from the bishop’s statement verbatim, which told me Lombard also had called the diocese looking for comment, despite being told to back off. I wondered if he’d smarmed his way past the Irish housekeeper and talked with Father DiAngelo as well, to prove his point that his sources were better than mine.

  “No one is laughing at the situation, Al.” Leah shot me a cool-it look. “I’m sure you remember how frustrating it is to be stonewalled. Our job is to find out what’s happening, and the police think their job is to keep information close to their vest.”

  “The police talked to me when I was a reporter,” Lombard said. “They talked to me because they knew I respected them, that I wouldn’t print things that would impair their investigation.”

  Paulie Finnegan had told me all about Lombard’s stint on the cops-and-courts beat. Lombard thought he had access. In fact, he was a lackey for detectives who loved the idea of having a Chronicle reporter in their pocket.

  But I had no time for an argument, so I cut the conversation short. “I’ve got to get back out there on the mean streets and try to shake some news out of the trees.”

  Lombard retreated to his lair while I killed some time collecting my jacket and laptop. Instead of approaching Leah’s desk again I sent her a text, tipping her that Al appeared to have called his sources inside the Church, and questioning whether he’d made a trip to the St. Jerome’s rectory as well. I also let her know I was headed to Bangor to see Kathleen Doherty Hazelwood.

  From across the room I saw her pick up her phone, glance at the screen, and tap out a quick response.

  Stay out of trouble, her text message said.

  Chapter Nine

  Joe’s questions were making Rufe nervous.

  He knew reporters were supposed to sniff out the story behind the story, so he shouldn’t have been surprised by Joe’s too-curious look during their conversation the morning Pat died, and that Joe had kept up the intensity in their two conversations since. Damn bulldog.

  Rufe had been Joe’s landlord a dozen years earlier when the twenty-two-year-old reporter showed up in Riverside, with an abundance of common sense except when it came to women. When Joe found a house of his own to buy a few years later—a riverfront wreck that needed total rehab—Rufe had bought him a tool belt and introduced him around the local lumberyard. Together they’d taken that place down to the studs and turned it into a sweet, comfortable home. It was a bonding experience that turned them into brothers despite their twenty-year age difference.

  Over the years Rufe had watched Joe cover hundreds of stories, and even helped him with a few. He knew the questions would keep coming until the whole story was out. But it wasn’t Rufe’s story to tell.

  He puzzled over his conundrum Thursday morning while piping the sprinkler system at the Saccarappa Mill, the old textile factory being rehabbed into condos and artist studios. The job demanded focus that he didn’t have, not when memories of Pat filled his mind.

  The priest’s smile. His roaring laugh. His face washed by tears. Even the edge he tried to keep hidden, the core of pain that Rufe had glimpsed only a few times.

  Rufe hadn’t been lying when he told Joe he’d never been Pat’s lover. That was absolutely true. They were mates, buddies, pals—and that was plenty. But he’d elided the truth when he told Joe not to make the assumption that because Pat was Rufe’s friend, the priest was gay. He’d felt his ears grow warm when he said it, and had parsed the sentence in his mind ever since.

  Don’t be thinking because he was an acquaintance of mine he was gay.

  It was technically true. The fact Pat and Rufe knew each other had nothing to do with the fact the priest was gay. But Rufe had no business sharing Pat’s well-kept secret, even though he was dead, and even though Rufe—until he met Pat—had no patience for gay folks who hid in their closets.

  They’d met four years earlier at Frig It, which, in fact, was made up almost totally of straight guys. Until the night Pat walked through the door with Sam, the group never had a priest for a member, or any clergy for that matter. Pat showed up in civvies—a rumpled pair of khakis and a sport shirt—but everyone knew his face from the newspaper or TV.

  The men sitting in the circle immediately cleaned up their language. Pat was a regular enough guy to realize that a group of men who gathered to talk about the pain hobbling their lives would tend toward salty language. He listened for a while then cleared his throat.

  “The thing I fucking want to know is why you’re all talking like your mothers are listening.”

  His powerful voice alone would have grabbed everyone’s attention.

  “Sam here told me about this group—said you were a bunch of blunt-speaking hard cases who don’t engage in psychobabble or refrain from telling an asshole he’s an asshole.” He paused and smiled around the circle. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Some in the group were wary, but over time Pat won them over, one man at a time. At the outset he di
dn’t talk much, but he was a good listener, causing some to speculate over after-meeting coffee that he’d never be able to stop being a priest. They saw themselves as a band of wounded brothers, and had no interest in being Pat’s newest ministry.

  Their suspicions dissipated when he eased himself into the conversation and turned out to be an honest talker, unloading about his insomnia, his migraines, and after many meetings, how he was devastated when his colleagues turned their backs when he took the side of the victims of abuse. He admitted nerves at first, that he was afraid to trust the promise of absolute confidentiality that bound the group. He finally relaxed when his words—or even the fact he’d joined the group—didn’t come back to him through the back channel of local gossip.

  Like Rufe himself, who didn’t always fully spill his guts to the full meeting, Pat eventually grew close to a subset of the Frig It men, a little group with whom he shared his most personal pain. Rufe was the first of them to whom Pat divulged his gayness, the secret he’d kept his whole life. For the long-closeted priest, saying “I’m gay” out loud was both excruciating and exhilarating. The only other living beings who knew were the handful of men he’d slept with—always far from home, he stressed—and only two of them had been more than a one-night stand.

  * * *

  Though Pat insisted coming out wasn’t the primary reason he joined Frig It, eventually he had to admit that his sexual orientation was integral to every single thing in his life, and denying that simple fact was putting him on the fast track to a heart attack.

  “A fucking heart attack,” Rufe said aloud, drawing a look from an electrician working nearby.

  It took another year for Pat to tell Rufe that he was lugging around a half-ton of guilt for having kept his head in the sand since he first sensed as a seminarian the unhealthy sexual subculture that existed within the priesthood. Rufe and Pat were sipping scotch in a booth at a quiet bar in downtown Portland the night the priest confessed that self-imposed burden.

  “Seminary was a very serious place. I was nineteen years old, praying constantly, taking heavy-duty theology classes. We were lectured constantly about the importance of a priest’s vow of celibacy, yet there was an undercurrent of flirtatiousness from several of our teachers. It wasn’t personal to me, this handful of older priests hit on all of the young men. I knew I was gay—it was partly why I’d joined the priesthood, so I wouldn’t have to explain my disinterest in women—but I didn’t have the slightest interest in messing around with men who were my father’s age.”

  Rufe had responded with an almost flip comment that he’d immediately regretted, something like “But they were all adults, right?”

  “Sure, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t coercive. We weren’t kids—not legally—but there was something exploitative about fifty-year-olds sneaking around with twenty-year-olds. By day these older priests were preaching how important the vow of celibacy was, and by night they were screwing around with students.”

  “Lot of hypocrisy there.”

  Pat took a long sip of his single malt.

  “Oh yeah. And some seminarians flirted right back. There was an elaborate ritual to it, a sense of a secret world within a secret world. I made up my mind whatever was going on didn’t have anything to do with my gayness—which I was desperately trying to pray away—and went out of my way to stay out of the know. The hell of it is, if I hadn’t been so paranoid—if I hadn’t deliberately stayed away from the gossip channels—I almost certainly would have become aware that some of them weren’t gay men at all, they were pedophiles, and they were abusing kids.”

  Rufe had protested that Pat couldn’t blame himself for not exposing the scandal himself. “Dozens of lawsuits have demonstrated parents had been going right to the top—contacting the bishops themselves, but they got stonewalled.”

  “I was inside the institution,” Pat had said. “If I’d opened my eyes I might have seen it, and at least tried to stop it.”

  Rufe thought about that conversation for a long time after it occurred. He couldn’t imagine the world Pat had lived in, and was moved by the priest’s willingness to reveal the pain that lived behind the genial mask he wore 99 percent of the time. Now that it was too late, Rufe wished he’d found more time to sit alone with Pat, listening to the challenges he’d faced as a priest, and as a man.

  The text-message chime sounded when Rufe was off the ladder, swigging down a thermos cup of coffee. Not Doug, who he’d called while he was driving to the mill that morning. It was Joe, with news that knocked him sideways.

  At State Police press conf—P’s death now a homicide investig. Where r u? can we talk soon?

  Rufe sat heavily on a broad windowsill, stunned. Murder investigation? Since Joe told him the suicide rumor was bunk he’d convinced himself cardiac arrest was the only possible explanation for Pat’s death. Doug’s Tuesday night comment popped into his brain.

  Pat had become acquainted recently with some people who are associated with potentially dangerous people. I had the sense he was seeking them out because he was facing considerable financial stress.

  Rufe knew he needed to respond to Joe, but he had to get clear on a few things first. He dialed Doug’s number, cut off his apology for missing the first call.

  “Pat’s death is being investigated as a homicide. State cops just announced it. We need to talk. Now.”

  Doug swore, but didn’t respond.

  “You said last night you’d introduced Pat to some rough characters. I need to know about that.”

  “Where and when?”

  “I’ll come to your house,” Rufe said. “Be there in fifteen.”

  * * *

  Doug still lived in the gracious historic home where he and his wife had raised three kids. Though his wife was dead and his children were grown and gone, the retired lawyer still maintained an office on the second floor of a carriage house that served as his garage. Rufe had never been in the office before. He supposed it was Doug’s instinct to retreat to the inner sanctum, even though Rufe wasn’t a client and Doug had wound up his practice more than a year before. They were talking about crime, after all, which is how Doug came to afford the fifteen-room Victorian at the enviable address.

  “Thieves and fences,” Doug said as soon as they sat down at either end of an oversized leather couch. “I gave him a connection to guys who I’d defended on theft and sale of stolen property charges.”

  “Whatever possessed you to do that?”

  “He asked. He was a Frig It brother.”

  “I can’t believe it was that automatic—he asked for a name, you provided it. You asked why, and I want to know what he said.”

  Doug studied Rufe, his brown eyes pouched with heavy bags.

  “The client confidentiality thing is deeply ingrained,” he said.

  Rufe took a deep breath.

  “He wasn’t your client. You’ve hung up your spurs, remember? He was a friend—a good friend—and friends keep each other’s secrets. I get that. But he’s dead, damn it! And you may have some information about who the fuck killed him.”

  “If I tell you, where does it go from here? Will you tell the cops? Or your buddy Joe Gale?”

  “I don’t know. Not until I know what it is Pat said. I was his close friend, too. And if some scumbag you introduced him to knocked him off, our duty of loyalty is to Pat, not to the scumbag.”

  Doug gave Rufe another long look.

  “I’d feel better about this if I could have a few minutes of privacy. I need to make a couple of phone calls. After that, I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Rufe noticed an old-fashioned Rolodex on the polished oak desk. Did it hold the numbers of the criminals he’d call to find out who killed Pat? If so, he wondered if Doug would tell him what the phone calls gleaned.

  “I’ll go sit in my truck. Text me wh
en you’re ready for me to come back up.”

  A text came in ten minutes later, but it was Joe, asking again where Rufe was, and when they could talk. Rufe dropped the phone on the passenger seat, as though Joe would know that he was holding it in his hand, deliberately not responding. He watched a couple of kids skateboarding in a broad driveway across the tree-lined street until the phone chimed again.

  C’mon up was all it said.

  Doug was making a pot of coffee, his back to the door. When he turned around he was wearing a look Rufe assumed was his criminal lawyer game face. Calm. Focused. Emotions invisible. He slid into the ergo chair behind his desk rather than the friendly couch, so Rufe parked himself on the other side, in a black armchair bearing the crest of Doug’s law school.

  “The guys Pat contacted know nothing about his death.”

  “Bullshit. You expect me to believe that?”

  “I do. The lawyer-client relationship is like priest-confessor. My clients trust me and they tell me the truth. I now know why he was looking for someone with their—” he paused for a beat “—connections and skills. But they didn’t have anything to do with his death.”

  It was all Rufe could do not to hurl himself over the broad desk and shake Doug out of his lawyerliness. His fury must have shown on his face because Doug held his hands up, palms out. “If you can hold onto your temper, I have quite a lot of information to share.”

  Rufe closed his eyes. Counted to ten. “Go ahead.”

  “The men I sent Pat to see have vague mob ties, but they aren’t Whitey Bulger-types, so put that out of your mind. They are adept at moving valuable property around in a discreet manner. Sometimes the property is stolen, but often it’s not. By and large they’re legitimate businessmen. But from time to time, their portfolio includes items without proper documents of title. For example, they may come into possession of items stolen from private collectors, and the burglars need to get the items into the channels of commerce in order to cover their tracks.”