“You go first.”
She gave me the stare, but we’d walked this road too many times for me to let it rattle me. I sat with my hands folded and waited her out.
“Usual ground rules, Gale. We are off, off, off the damn record.”
“Okay, but I have a job to do. Once we talk, will you point me to someone who will talk on the record?”
“There will likely be a press conference about this tomorrow. I’m offering you the opportunity to do a little research ahead of time.”
“Research about...”
“The big corrupt business that is the Catholic Church.”
“That covers a lot of ground. Where shall we start, the Middle Ages?”
“Recent corruption, of course. Not the priest abuse. The dismantling of churches.”
“Patrick was coordinating that for all the churches in this area.”
“Right, and you’re going to hear at this press conference tomorrow that it was his job to pack up all the valuables—the stained glass, the gold, the silver—and ship it to a designated spot where it would be kept safe. The question you might want to ask is kept safe for whom.”
“Is there some allegation that Patrick did something illegal?”
Barb raised her eyebrows, cocked her head to the right.
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
She did the eyebrow raise again, even more exaggerated this time.
“Wrecker’s going to stand up in front of the microphones and say that tomorrow? Two days before Patrick’s funeral?”
“He was overheard shouting during a closed-door meeting yesterday, making the point the thick of a homicide investigation is no time to be pulling punches.”
“Maybe not, but I hope he’s got a hell of a lot of proof if he’s going to trash Patrick’s name before he’s in his grave.”
“Wrecker won’t be that direct. He’ll insinuate enough so anyone with information will understand they’re being asked to come forward. Then if you guys ask whether Patrick is suspected of wrongdoing, he’ll look at you like you asked a rude question.”
“Holding a hurry-up press conference fits with something I heard on the wind last night.”
“What was that?”
“That Wrecker’s pulled the organized crime team into this investigation.”
The chief cocked her head to the left this time. “They don’t call you a newsman for nothing.”
“Well they didn’t make you chief for the hell of it, so here’s my tip for you—J.C. Bozco.”
Barb frowned. “That intense guy with the bullhorn?”
“That’s the one. Gets the chants going, whips the protesters into a frenzy.”
“‘God Knows, We Won’t Go’?”
“Exactly.”
“What about him?”
“A reliable source tells me he talked out loud about staging a kidnapping to motivate the bishop to slow down on the church closings.”
“Kidnapping Patrick?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Was he serious?”
“My source thinks so, and he’s got a history. You’ll see when you pull his sheet. He’s a convicted felon with a record of violent assault.”
“Prison time?”
“For four years he was a guest of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.”
“Now he’s out and has remade himself as a crusader for the cause.”
“I’m guessing you already know this, because he’s probably on your bomb-maker short list.”
“Actually, I know who Mr. Bozco is, but the fact he’s got a serious sheet is news to me. I’ll jump on it.” Barb tossed a five on the table. “Stay in touch.”
* * *
Roz Fortuna was intrigued by Barb’s tip about theft of Church property, and fascinated by the notion that the state police were going to convene a Saturday morning press conference to talk about it. “This is a priest we’re talking about, and not some small-town priest known only to his parishioners. Patrick has been in the public eye for more than a decade. You’d think out of respect for him and the Church itself—or maybe it’s more accurate to say out of fear that the evidence they’ve gathered isn’t going to hold up—they wouldn’t be doing this unless there was a very good reason. It’s got to be tied to the mob stuff I picked up yesterday.”
“Why does mob involvement put everything on the fast-track?”
“Because they know how to make evidence—and even witnesses, if it comes to that—disappear. Wrecker Rigoletti is known for his ambition, and the only thing bigger than a collar of Patrick’s killer is tying it to a mob operation that likely is a lot bigger than Riverside, Maine.”
I stopped myself from canceling my day off. Despite Christie’s bantering tone when I left the Rambler that morning, I knew how much she’d been counting on getting away from her myriad responsibilities for a day. Finding time to be alone had not been easy since Theo came home from Florida. It also gave me a queasy feeling in my stomach to imagine Rigoletti getting off on casting a shadow on Patrick’s name. Maybe Roz was right, and the mob angle required an all-out effort, but it felt wrong to me.
Roz usually didn’t work weekends, but she said she’d be glad to handle the theft story in general and cover the press conference in particular. I didn’t confess my squeamishness.
“I’ll be available by cell if you need me,” I said. “But I’d really like to sneak away for the day.”
Roz’s bright red lips twitched.
“I hear the newsroom gossip. I know your woman moved to Africa last summer. I’m glad you’re back in gear because you’ve been looking kind of hangdog for the past few months.”
Sidestepping any further personal conversation, we divvied up our work for the rest of Friday. Roz worked fast and sure digging into the theft angle while I massaged the prose in my Sunday edition profile of Patrick. Within an hour she’d tracked down a professor at a Catholic college outside of Boston who told her the Church had set up a regional system of ecclesiastical salvage. Materials from Maine would have been directed to a warehouse in Manchester, New Hampshire, he said.
“This guy was delighted I called him. He says it’s been an underreported piece of the Church downsizing story. Everybody focuses on the people camping out in the churchyards. No one thinks much about all the stuff inside. Who owns it? Who has the right to sell it? Once it’s sold, who keeps the money?”
“Before we even reach those questions, we need to know if there’s an inventory control system in place to make sure everything winds up where it’s supposed to go,” I said.
“One would think there is, but the professor didn’t have the details on that.”
“Who would know?”
“I’m going to jump on the phone and find out.”
Leah made a beeline for me as soon as she emerged from the midday news meeting. “Conference room next to the data center, right now please.”
I gathered up my notes. She shut the door behind us, collapsed into a chair and ran her hands through her gray curls. “Jack Salisbury’s pretending to care about journalism again.”
Salisbury knew more about selling microwaved burritos than he did about putting out a newspaper, but that didn’t stop him from strutting around like Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men.
“What’s his gripe today?”
“Have you read the reader comments to your last two stories?”
“Do I look insane?”
Like most reporters, I hate online comments. What started out as a promising forum for give-and-take has been taken over by trolls with an agenda. A news story often is simply a jumping-off place for scattershot vitriol. I couldn’t remember the last time I voluntarily clicked on Read Comments at the end of one of my stories.
“Jack t
hinks there’s valuable information to be mined from the comment board, insight from readers about aspects of stories that we might otherwise miss, or, in your case, misreport.”
“Lemme guess. Devout churchgoers think I smeared Patrick’s name when I reported he died, and I should be fired for reporting that his death is being investigated as a homicide.”
“Jack said two different commenters claim they gave you relevant information that would cast the whole story in a different light, but you haven’t reported it.” She put her hand up. “And one of them said you bribed him not to go to the cops.”
“Jack knows these people are nuts, right?”
“Unfortunately, the answer to that would be no. He thinks we need to track down these commenters so someone—probably yours truly—can ask them for details.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No, sir. And in the meantime, I have been told to pair you up with another staffer, presumably someone who’ll keep an eye on you.”
I started to laugh. “Salisbury’s serious, huh? Where does he think I would come up with the funds to bribe some crazypants who spends his day on the comments board or internet chat rooms? My salary doesn’t leave a lot of extra bucks to throw around.”
Leah took one of those deliberate breaths people take when they want you to take one, too.
“Look, Joe. I don’t know why someone would claim you tried to buy him off when he whispered some inconvenient facts in your ear. The whys do not matter. Jack talked to Ron, and Ron told him to call Chapman Media’s lawyer.”
“That new guy?”
Leah nodded. Chapman had replaced the longtime Chronicle lawyer, an articulate champion of the First Amendment, with some corporate law dude who cared not a whit about journalistic principles.
“The advice was to keep you on short leash until the IT people figure out the identity of the commenter and he or she—it could be a woman, I suppose—can be duly interrogated.”
“Short leash? What’s that mean?”
“You’ll work closely with another reporter, so there’s someone to look over your shoulder.”
“Please tell me Salisbury didn’t order you to pair me up with Lombard.”
“He did not. I’m assigning Roz to be your minder.”
“She’s already helping me with research.”
“Into what?”
“A source told me that during the closure of some of the area churches, somebody skimmed some of the stuff with value. It’s unclear if they suspect it was Patrick himself or somebody working for the contractors involved in cleaning the places out. Sounds like whatever was stolen might have been fenced through pros, because this morning Barb Wyatt confirmed—off the record of course—that Rigoletti has pulled in the organized crime team. Apparently plans are being made to hold a press conference tomorrow. I can’t imagine anyone will talk about it tonight, but between me and Roz, we might be able to get enough through backchannels to source a story.”
“Please assure me that if I hadn’t yanked you in here to talk about comment-gate, you would have briefed me on this on your own volition.”
“Absolutely. You know I don’t keep stuff from you.”
Leah pushed back her chair and rose slowly to her feet, as though incoming weather was making her arthritic knees ache. “I’m sorry. You’ve given me no reason to ask such a question. I spent too much time with Jack Salisbury this morning, and his paranoia is catching.”
“Next thing you know he’s going to make me wear an ankle bracelet.”
“Shush,” she said. “He’s probably outside the door listening, and you don’t want to give him any ideas.”
Chapter Fifteen
After a quick shower, Rufe put on an Oxford shirt and a pair of dress pants and walked from his house to the priests’ residence. Both of his trucks were easy to identify, and he’d prefer his visit to remain private. That wouldn’t happen if he was parked out front of St. Jerome’s when Joe passed by, or if Stella Rinaldi had her nose out the window.
The man who answered the bell seemed surprised to see Rufe on the doorstep. Extraordinarily tall and well-built, his black hair brushed back off his forehead, he wore a white shirt buttoned to the collar but no necktie. His dark eyes brought to mind a pre-Raphaelite painting.
“I’ve come to see Father DiAngelo,” Rufe said. “Is he at home?”
The handsome man stepped forward and peered into the churchyard.
“I thought you were Miss McGuire. She went to the grocery store a while ago and will need my help unloading when she returns.”
“Are you Father DiAngelo?”
“Yes, I am. And you are?”
“Rufus Smathers. I’m a plumber. I live here in Riverside. I knew Pat.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know we had a plumbing problem. Miss McGuire didn’t mention it.”
“I’m not here in my professional capacity, Father. I’ve come to offer condolences. I know you and Pat were very close.”
The handsome priest closed his eyes for a moment, but they were dry when he again focused on Rufe. “The past few days have been a terrible shock.”
They were still standing on the stoop, with cars whooshing along the street beyond the churchyard.
“Can I come inside for a moment?”
A flash of something—wariness? irritation?—passed over DiAngelo’s striking face, but he composed himself quickly.
“Of course. It’s kind of you to stop by. Please come in.”
The priest strode into a fireplaced parlor furnished with the kind of furniture Rufe’s grandparents had in their home. Stiff settees. Upholstered wing chairs with tatted doilies to protect against God knew what.
“You said you knew Father Doherty. Are you a parishioner at St. Jerome’s or did you attend one of the recently closed parishes?”
“Neither. I knew Pat through the group he attended in Portland once a week. The discussion group.”
DiAngelo cocked his head, like he was drawing a blank.
“You know, for the past several years he’d been going into Portland every Tuesday night, attending a support group.”
DiAngelo cleared his throat. “On Tuesday evenings Father Doherty was part of a prayer circle in Portland, is that what you’re talking about?”
Rufe remembered Pat’s first words to the Frig It men, castigating them for cleaning up their language in deference to him. “It was hardly a prayer circle.”
DiAngelo’s face was as blank as a sheet of paper pulled from a fresh ream. “I only knew about a prayer group.”
Rufe leaned forward, determined to bridge the communication gap between himself and the priest.
“When I said I was Pat’s friend, I mean that. He confided in me. Told me things he’d kept private from everyone else in his life, except you, of course. Like Pat and you, I’m a gay man. I know about your relationship. I’ve come here because I know I’m probably the only person in the world who realizes you haven’t lost merely a colleague, you’ve lost your lover.”
Rufe expected some sort of emotional reaction from the handsome priest. A big exhale. A sad smile. A rush of tears in his eyes. What he got instead was the sympathetic look an adult bestows on a child who has skinned a knee.
“Mr. Smathers, I’m afraid Father Doherty was telling you a story.”
“He told me a number of stories.”
“If they involved the two of us as intimate partners, they were not true.”
There was no defensiveness in DiAngelo’s voice, no push back. His tone was gentle, patient.
“Patrick was homosexual.” DiAngelo used the dead priest’s first name for the first time. “At least he thought he was, and it tormented him. We talked about it every now and then, as friends, certainly. But what he wanted from me was the counsel of
a priest, and absolution for having the thoughts he had. I assured him things that occurred only in his imagination were not sins.”
“You were not his lover?”
“No, I was not. If I were to break my vow of celibacy—and I cannot imagine doing so—it would be for a woman. That was what I willingly gave up when I joined the priesthood, the chance to have a wife, become a father.”
Rufe did not know what to say. DiAngelo was looking him in the eye and speaking in a consoling voice. Rufe had no particular background in spotting liars, but there was nothing about the priest’s demeanor, no hint in his tone of voice, suggesting he was being anything but completely truthful.
“You’re not the first person to whom Patrick voiced this fantasy,” the priest said. “He went to New Mexico a number of years ago, partly on vacation, partly to spend some time with his brother who suffers from mental illness. He was there for several weeks. After he returned I received a letter from a man to whom he’d told a similar story. The man said Patrick told him he was not free to enter into a relationship with him—to have an affair, if you will—because he’d pledged fidelity to his lover at home. Meaning me. He asked in his letter that I release Patrick from that promise, because he’d fallen in love with him.”
“You showed the letter to Pat?”
“Yes, and he confessed that he’d spent considerable time with this man, that he was attracted to him, but he was unwilling to break his own vow of celibacy. So he made up a story about having a lover at home in Maine, to evade the trap he’d set for himself.”
“When was this?”
“Six or seven years ago. I believe it may have been the last time we talked about Pat’s conflict about his sexuality. He was embarrassed that I’d been drawn in to his emotional dalliance. He was full of apology. I forgave him, of course.”
DiAngelo rose to his feet in a fluid motion.
“I appreciate your visit, and your offer of sympathy. Father Doherty was my colleague and my friend. I loved him like a brother, and was tolerant of his foibles—as one is with a brother. Your kindness in stopping by is not diminished by this misunderstanding.”
Truth Beat Page 11