Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  “So they deal in art?”

  “Beautiful things of all description. Art. Antiques. Jewelry. Precious metals.”

  “Last night you implied they were dangerous people.”

  “I was exaggerating a bit. They are connected with the mob, and the mob is not a rational outfit. But the men I introduced Pat to are not thugs.”

  “Okay, these particular guys aren’t thugs. But they know thugs, and will call on them when need be. Why would Pat want to know people like this?”

  Doug picked up his mug, took a long sip of coffee.

  “It seems that in the course of overseeing the closing of the first few parishes, Pat was upset to learn the institutional Church would be selling all of the contents—valuable and not—and using the money for its own purposes, which these days most likely means paying the uninsured portions of court judgments. According to my acquaintances, Pat insisted the Catholic Church should dip into its investments or sell other property—some art, for example—to come up with the cash to pay those judgments. When closed churches were sold, Pat thought every penny should have been used to support the remaining Catholic community, not appropriated to pay for institutional sins.”

  “I see his point.”

  “Me too, frankly.”

  Doug again hid behind his coffee cup for a few seconds.

  “About six months ago, Pat came to me looking for a connection with businessmen who would purchase some valuable property from him no questions asked. He didn’t tell me it was property owned by the Church. He said he had some family heirlooms that, for personal reasons, he wanted to sell privately. He didn’t volunteer more than that and I didn’t probe. Like I said, he was a Frig It brother. Ask and ye shall receive, you know?”

  “What did he fence through your friends?”

  “Stained glass. Marble-topped tables. Gold chalices. Carvings. Some pieces of religious art that hung inside church sanctuaries.”

  “Not quite family heirlooms.”

  “That was the story he told me, not them.”

  “He didn’t pull this stuff out of the closed parishes himself?”

  “No. My clients connected him with a contractor who had the know-how to carefully disassemble a church. The contractor made sure most of the pieces went where they were supposed to go—to a central warehouse where materials from churches all over New England are being stockpiled. The contractor diverted certain items identified by Pat, and routed them to my clients for resale.”

  “How much did they get for the things Pat sold through them? And how much of it went back to him?”

  “They couldn’t provide me numbers today. I’ve asked that they tote it up.”

  Rufe put his head in his hands and tried to balance what Doug was telling him against his own knowledge of Father Patrick Doherty.

  “You believe them when they say they didn’t knock him off?”

  “I told you, they aren’t killers. They helped route some valuable property from churches being closed under Pat’s supervision to willing buyers. They and Pat were business partners, that’s all.”

  “That may be, but the odds are good this business arrangement—maybe not the sell side, but the steal side—had something to do with Pat’s death. If your clients are the relatively innocent businessmen you claim they are, will they come forward?”

  “I asked that precise question,” Doug said. “They’re thinking about it.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Hazelwood home was sleek and modern, tucked in a leafy Bangor neighborhood with a view of the Kenduskeag Stream. The October colors were brilliant in the afternoon sun, though at least half the leaves seemed to be down, covering the street like a multi-colored quilt.

  Kathleen was not at all what I expected. Based on the information provided by the funeral home, I knew she was a couple of years younger than Pat. Our conversations on the phone led me to expect a buttoned-down, possibly matronly woman. Patrick’s sister turned out to be a lean, startlingly pretty woman in her mid-fifties. Her short hair was dyed a color of red that was close to maroon and spiked with gel. Multiple earrings glinted from her right ear when she opened the front door a crack.

  “You’re Joe, right?” She had to almost yell over a riot of high-pitched barking. “The dog’s trying to escape. Come in quick.”

  She pulled the black lacquered door wide enough for me to squeeze through. A dog that was part poodle and part something else attached itself to my right leg.

  “Oh, Ritz, stop that!” She reached down and pulled the dog away. “He’s so damn forward.”

  Without further greeting she gestured for me to follow her down a tiled hallway to a giant kitchen—family room combination with enormous windows that showcased the October foliage. An oversized table was covered with paperwork. I was glad to see three old-fashioned photo albums anchoring one end.

  “Do you want a drink? I’m having one, so don’t be shy.” She pulled a bottle of bourbon out of the cupboard next to the stove and cocked her head in my direction.

  I said yes, having learned from experience that rapport is built by drinking what your interview subject is drinking. If someone is pouring tea, I have tea. If they’re offering a belt of bourbon, I say sure, and nurse it while I keep them talking

  She poured us each two fingers and sat down at the head of the table. In the bright kitchen, I could see her eyes were puffy and her face bore the blotches of someone who’d been crying a lot. Ritz hopped up and sat at her elbow, studying me with his dark eyes.

  “I’m Kathleen Hazelwood, in case I forgot to introduce myself.” She pulled a tissue out of a nearby box when tears began spilling down her cheeks. “I’m sorry for crying. I’m glad you’ve come. Being here by myself isn’t easy.”

  “I’m terribly sorry for your loss. I had great respect for your brother.”

  “Pat’s dead,” she said. “Murdered. This whole thing feels surreal, like I’m in a movie or something.”

  I noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, so chose my words carefully.

  “Is there anyone who will be coming home later, or able to stay with you? Children?”

  “I don’t have any kids or a husband, either,” she said. “Four years ago I divorced the bum I’d been married to for twenty years when I caught him running around. He’s a big shot here in Bangor, didn’t want word getting around that he’d cheated on his wife. I agreed to let our divorce be—” she lowered her voice to a whisper “—discreet so long as I got to keep the house. I hate change. You know how that is?”

  “Change can be hard.”

  “That’s why it’s just me and Ritz rattling around here these days. Usually it doesn’t feel lonely, but today it sucks.”

  “I’m sure it does.”

  I assumed we wouldn’t wind up talking about her family because she’d be obsessed by the fact that her brother had been murdered. The opposite turned out to be true.

  “I’m still wrapping my mind around the news about Pat. I’m not at all ready to talk about it.” She stopped to gauge my reaction. “I’m an emergency room nurse, which means I’m skilled—maybe too skilled—at compartmentalization. Right now the idea someone deliberately killed my brother is in a mental box that I don’t want to open, okay? Maybe later. When we know more.”

  “That’s fine, of course,” I said. “I came to talk about your bond with Patrick, which I can tell from our conversation yesterday was quite close.”

  Her wistful smile was that of a kid sister, not a middle-aged spitfire with a punky haircut, desperate to push aside the horror that her brother had been murdered.

  “Pat and I were the youngest two and the only rebellious ones in the family, always tight. The other four Dohertys were straight-arrow.”

  “You grew up here in Bangor, right?”

  She nodd
ed. “A big Catholic family, six kids marching down the middle aisle every Sunday morning and Holy Day of Obligation, tallest to shortest. Symmetry mattered to our mother. I was the baby—only a year and a half younger than Pat—and always the shortest of the bunch, so I brought up the rear.”

  “It sounds like your family was devout.”

  “My mother said the rosary twice a day, praying to be forgiven for sins she’d never committed. My father passed the collection plate at Sunday Mass, and was active in the K of C. He wasn’t as prayerful as Mum, but carried that hard edge of Irish Catholic expectation, so you were scared to let him down.”

  “You said you and Patrick were the mavericks. What do you mean by that?”

  She reached for one of the photo albums and paged through it until she found what she was looking for. She squeezed her eyes shut before handing it to me, but her tears escaped the pressure.

  “This is Patrick in his James Dean stage.” A slightly out-of-focus photo showed a lean, teenaged boy wearing jeans and a leather jacket, fair hair combed away from his face, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

  I smiled. “Pretty authentic looking, but James Dean was a star in the fifties. Long before Patrick’s time.”

  “Sure, but somehow Pat knew about him, and adopted the look. He bought that leather jacket at a secondhand store. He was suspended for wearing it to school—the brothers who ran the place didn’t go for the hood look. They were shocked when Patrick announced not long after graduation that he was going to join the priesthood. No one saw that coming.”

  Kathleen eyed my still-full glass of bourbon, shrugged and rose to refill her own. Ritz jumped to the floor and followed her across the room, then detoured to a sheepskin dog bed about a quarter of the size of my Border Collie’s.

  “Pat and I marched against the Vietnam war when we were in junior high, insisted on wearing black armbands everywhere we went. In high school we smoked dope whenever we could get our hands on it. Pat grew his hair long until my father threatened to cut it off while he was sleeping. Our parents didn’t know what to do with us. Our older sisters and brothers had toed the line while they were living at home, saving up their wildness until they’d fled Bangor for less judgmental pastures.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Two are dead, one is homeless. The other’s pretty much estranged.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s sad. Six kids. Two dead before their time.” A little yelp. “I mean three—three of my siblings are dead, and the other two are effectively gone.”

  She broke into full sobs then. I sat and looked at Ritz, trying to think of something appropriate to say. After a few minutes Kathleen plucked another tissue and blew her nose loudly, which set Ritz to barking.

  “If this is too painful for you to talk about...”

  She cut me off with a wave of her hand. “It’s okay. The truth hurts, but it’s the truth, you know? Bobby—the oldest—was killed in a car crash when he was in his early twenties. Mary fought breast cancer for quite a while before she died six years ago. The only blessing was that my parents died before she did. Losing another kid would have done them in.

  “Matthew, he was the one everyone thought would wind up rich and famous. Top grades. National Honor Society. College acceptances out the yin-yang. But less than two years after he graduated from business school he was living on the streets.” Her eyes leaked tears again.

  “Matt’s what they call dual-diagnosis. Schizophrenia and substance abuse—a tragic combination. As far as I know he’s in Santa Fe. Patrick kept track of him, bailed him out of trouble a few times.” The silent crying again gave way to sobs. “I’ll need to figure out how to contact Matthew. He needs to know his brother is dead.”

  The grim litany was starting to get to me, but I knew I couldn’t disrupt it. That’s the bargain you strike when you interview a grieving person. If they need to talk, you need to listen. Kathleen was single, had no kids and no siblings to whom she could turn. I hoped to hell she had friends other than the bottle.

  “Our other sister is Kerry. She left the Catholic Church when she married a Baptist guy. They have six kids of their own. That was common when I was young, but who has that many kids these days? They’re missionaries, traveling the world trying to spread their beliefs to people who aren’t Baptist. Her mailing address is Rhode Island, but she’s in Korea this fall. She doesn’t have reliable email but I can track her down through her in-laws. I can’t imagine she’ll care about missing Patrick’s funeral. They were never close.”

  She reached for another tissue. “I’ll be all by myself in the pew reserved for family. Maybe I can ask Ricardo to sit with me.” She twisted her mouth into what she must have intended to be a smile. “I mean Michael, of course, Father DiAngelo. He’s kind of like family.”

  * * *

  Kathleen and I paged through the photo albums together for an hour after she finished telling her sad tale, setting aside several she agreed I could take with me for use with my Sunday profile. Her cell phone rang as I stood to leave. She motioned for me to wait and slipped into the next room, Ritz close on her heels.

  I flipped through the top album again, struck by how handsome and put-together Patrick had been as a young man—broad-shouldered and lean, with dirty blond hair and a toothpaste-ad smile. The man I met several decades later was still slender, but his gray hair was shaggy and heavy bags cupped his pale blue eyes. When he wasn’t wearing a cassock he dressed like a longtime bachelor who’d forgotten how to present himself to the world. Rumpled shirts. Pilled cardigans. Scuffed shoes. Nothing like the good-looking young man in the photos.

  I reached for the third album, which we hadn’t touched. The photos were maybe twenty years old rather than forty. Patrick’s hair was darker and shot through with gray, but he looked more like the young man in the James Dean pose than the stalwart priest who stood up for his beleaguered flock. Tall, dark Father DiAngelo and tiny Tillie the housekeeper were in a few photos, smiling in front of a Christmas tree, posing in front of a rhododendron in full bloom.

  When Kathleen returned to the kitchen she had big news—the bishop himself had been on the phone, calling both to offer his personal condolences and inform her of the arrangements that had been made by the diocese. She related their conversation in a mocking tone, but I could tell she was touched by the personal gesture.

  As was traditional for a prominent person, Patrick’s casket would lie in state. The wake would be in the lower chapel at St. Jerome’s on Sunday, with parishioners and the general public invited to pay respects between 3:00 and 7:00 p.m. A funeral Mass at 10:00 a.m. on Monday would be attended by priests from all of Maine’s sixteen counties along with ministers, rabbis, pastors, imams and clerics of all faiths. Kathleen did not say if the bishop mentioned the murder investigation, and I honored her wish to stay away from that subject by not asking.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to get through all of it, but I will,” she said. “Some of my fellow nurses will come. Michael—I mean Father DiAngelo—will be there. You will, too.”

  I wasn’t sure how I’d been elevated to the status of her longtime colleagues and friends, but it occurred to me that I might use her sudden emotional bond with me to get past the rectory’s gatekeeper. I pointed to the photo of the two priests and Tillie in front of the Christmas tree.

  “I met Miss McGuire the other day, when I went to see if I could talk with Father DiAngelo. She acted like a mother hen, wouldn’t let me in the door.”

  “I can hear the brogue now,” Kathleen said, imitating the cadence of the housekeeper’s speech. “Father DiAngelo is not available to visit with the likes of you.”

  “Spot on,” I said. “Can you let him know I’d like to talk with him? Please tell him that I’m respectful of the grieving process, but it’s important for me to speak with those who knew Patrick best
in order to do him justice in my stories.”

  “I can do that,” she said. “If you’ll promise the story about me and Pat smoking dope in high school won’t find its way into your newspaper.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I drove south on autopilot, turning my interaction with Kathleen this way and that inside my head. She had the compartmentalization thing going on, that was for sure. In my experience it’s common for traumatized people to shove painful knowledge into a little corner of their brains and meter their thinking about whatever awful loss they’ve suffered, calibrating it at a level they can handle. Almost inevitably, though, the reality of the situation washes over them without warning, a sensation that’s almost paralyzing.

  I hadn’t seen that happening with Kathleen. She wept about the big picture—that only three of the six Dohertys were still alive and she was mostly unconnected to the other two—but mostly managed to skirt the horror that someone had killed her brother. I couldn’t figure out how she could avoid thinking about that. The booze only dulls so much. Maybe she was on medication as well, something designed to boost her away from depression. If so, she shouldn’t be swigging bourbon on top of it. I hoped her fellow nurses would close ranks around her quickly. Ritz wasn’t going to be much help when she really fell apart.

  The trees were blazing as the sun dropped in the sky, putting on their annual show before winter set in. Patrick’s wake would be Sunday and his funeral on Monday, which left Saturday for a possible foliage hike. If no more bombs went off in Riverside, maybe Christie would be game for a two-person jaunt to Maine’s western mountains, and I would be able to enjoy my scheduled day off. I used my buddy Bluetooth to call her at home to let her know I wouldn’t be around at dinnertime.

  “I’m on my way home from Bangor, hoping to make a pit stop in Augusta to see if I can track down a contact who works at the state medical examiner’s office.”