Charisma (22 page)

He picked up the stack of message slips, turned it over, and put it down again. He listened for sounds in the outer office and heard nothing at all. Marie wasn’t due in until nine and wouldn’t arrive until half past. Most of the rest of the world wouldn’t think it was polite to bother him until after ten. He had never told anyone how early he sometimes came to work, not even the bishop. His office was his refuge from the other Jesuits in his house and the problems of his job. The woman at the switchboard—the one who had taken the messages—knew enough not to put any calls through unless they were from the bishop himself.

As a matter of fact, he was expecting the bishop to call and was a little surprised that he hadn’t. He had given the bishop all the information necessary for one of his patented rampages—all the news on Father Tom Burne, Dan Murphy, and the three women who had died with the Eucharistic symbol carved into their foreheads. Now that the third one had been found, the papers had stopped asking “Is there a Catholic connection?” and started screaming instead. The subhead on the second lead story in the
Register
John had picked up on his way in had used the term
religious mania
in a way that made him feel distinctly queasy. The lead story had been worse:
FATHER BURNE, DAMIEN HOUSE, SUBJECT OF SEX ABUSE PROBE.
It was like the sixties, only worse, because this time the enemy wasn’t made up of discontented parishioners itching to be part of the
Playboy
generation or long-haired radicals who didn’t really believe in God at all. This time the enemy was the City of New Haven.

John Kelly got up, went to his door, and opened it carefully. Just in case Marie had come in early—an event as probable as a visit from little green men from Mars—he didn’t want to startle her. The outer office was empty. He went back to his desk and looked at his clock: 8:06. The digital underline said: December 17.

Father Tom Burne was six minutes late.

In the end, Father Tom Burne was twenty minutes late. He came bounding through John Kelly’s door at 8:20:04 without apology or explanation—and without warning, either. It was the lack of warning that got John so upset. By then, he had half convinced himself that Tom Burne wasn’t going to show up, that he’d cut his throat and made a run for it, that the whole situation was going to turn out to be nothing more than another wearying scandal to be handled by his best efforts at damage control. His mind had swerved off on other things, like the fact that he was due in the studio to tape the first of his broadcasts at four thirty-five today. He kept trying to picture himself on television and failing. When he closed his eyes, the face he saw staring out at him from the screen always belonged to Fulton Sheen.

He was trying to banish this ghost when Father Tom Burne came in and threw himself unceremoniously in a chair. He was carrying a Styrofoam cup with a plastic lid on it in one hand, and it was steaming.

“Too hot,” he said, putting it down on John Kelly’s desk. “Everything in my life these days is either too hot or too cold.”

John Kelly was still all tangled up with Fulton Sheen. He cleared his throat, looked out the window, looked at his hands, looked at his feet. Finally, he looked at Tom Burne, but it didn’t help. “Yes,” he said. “Well.”

Tom had taken the plastic top off the cup. He sniffed at the coffee and grimaced. “If you want to know why I wasn’t here when I was supposed to be, I was out looking for Marietta.”

“Marietta?”

“Marietta O’Brien. Older woman. She’s been working as our housekeeper for—I don’t know. Years.”

“And she’s missing?” John Kelly looked down at his paper, folded on the corner of his desk. He had folded it carefully, so that he could see nothing of the stories that upset him, but he could feel them there.

Tom Burne looked at the paper, too. “That’s what I was trying to get across. With—everything that’s going on, I don’t like not being able to find her. It’s not right.”

“Did she—does she live at Damien House?”

“Oh, yes. Up on the third floor with the girls.”

“Ahh,” John Kelly said.

Tom Burne stood up and began to pace—reminding John Kelly that he always paced, that he was one of those people who could never sit still.

“The problem is, the whole thing’s so weird. She’s in her sixties, at least. She makes a big show of how well she gets around, but she doesn’t really. We’ve been talking about finding a different place in the house for her to stay, trying to figure out a way to keep her downstairs without getting her offended. She’d never just go wandering around in the middle of the night on her own, even in a better neighborhood.”

“How do you know she went wandering around in the middle of the night?”

“I saw her just before I went to bed. She came downstairs for hot milk. Actually, she came downstairs for a painkiller. She’s got wicked arthritis. Her legs kill her.”

John Kelly rubbed the side of his nose. “What are you going to do about it? What can you do?”

“What I did do. I got Pat Mallory out of bed and asked him to go down to Damien House. Personally.”

“Will he?”

Tom Burne stopped pacing, caught John Kelly’s eye and held it. He wasn’t smiling, but John felt there was a smile there and it made him uneasy. It was as if emotion were a climate and the weather had changed.

Tom Burne grabbed the chair he had been sitting in, pulled it back, and sat down in it again. Then he put his elbows on his knees and rested his head on his hands.

“The police,” he said carefully, “as far as I can figure it, seem to believe that I am going to be crucified, in all my innocence, by the political ambitions of one Daniel Murphy.”

The problem with talking to Father Tom Burne, John Kelly decided as the morning went on, was that he wasn’t quite human. At least, he wasn’t quite human as priests were supposed to be human. His words never meant what you expected them to mean, and his emotions were—out of whack. John Kelly could have understood a Father Tom Burne who was afraid, or close to cracking under pressure, or overcome by remorse. He could even have understood a Father Tom Burne who was working very hard to keep his courage up. What he couldn’t understand was this—distance, this utter calm, as if nothing very surprising had happened at all. What was worse, it was the same distance, the same calm, that Tom Burne always wore. John Kelly amended his initial analysis. With Tom Burne, it wasn’t as if nothing surprising had happened, but as if
nothing
had happened. They went around it once or twice, but there was only one place to settle, only one real topic of conversation—unless Tom Burne could be made to think about damage control, which John Kelly didn’t think he could.

“What worries me,” he told Tom, even though it wasn’t what worried him at all, “isn’t so much the accusations themselves. You’ve built up a lot of emotional capital in this town—”

“Is that what it is, emotional capital?”

“Public support,” John Kelly said, flushing, feeling he’d said the wrong thing again. “If these were financial accusations, I wouldn’t be worried in the least. But child abuse—”

“Yes, John? What about child abuse?”

“Well. Oh, for God’s sake, Tom, what do you think? Don’t you remember Bruce Ritter?”

“Of course I remember Bruce Ritter. He was the one who managed to end up getting lynched by his own Church.”

“Oh, for God’s
sake.
” John Kelly shot up and started pacing himself, even though he hated to pace. “Will you please see reason? What the hell else was the Church supposed to do? What if—?”

“What if Father Ritter actually did the things he was accused of doing? Maybe he did. We’ll never know.”

“But Tom—”

“Three investigations, all done internally by Church authorities. A report whose presentation of evidence was damn near nonexistent. A lot of government investigations suddenly dropped—”

“That’s better than what could have happened. The government investigations could have kept going. Why can’t you see it’s much better like this? There’s no—no record—no—”

“No trial?”

“A trial—” John Kelly felt as if he were choking. No, he knew he was choking. He was suffocating.

“I think you’d better understand something, Father. If it comes to me, I will demand a trial. I will demand it publicly. You’re right when you say I’ve built up a lot of public support. Some of that support is with the media. We can talk about this all you want. I will talk about this all you want, but you’d better understand this: I will not put up with being treated as Bruce Ritter was treated. I will not retire to a monastery. I will not keep my mouth shut when reporters come around. I will not cooperate in internal investigations which issue reports full of bland declarations that supposedly discovered ‘evidence’ that would not hold up in any court of law—”

“That’s not true,” John put in desperately. “They didn’t do that. The child abuse thing is—”

“What?” Tom Burne said. “Entirely different?”

“The rules are different.” John settled sullenly into his chair. “You must know that by now, Tom. Even the Supreme Court says—”

“Yes,” Tom said softly, “I know what the Supreme Court says. We can tear up the Constitution, deny a defendant the right to discovery, deny a defendant the right to confront his accusers, turn the whole damn legal system into a career mill for men like Daniel Murphy—because child abuse is different. Trust me, John, I know child abuse is different.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” John said. “I don’t know what you want anybody to do. What the hell good is it going to do you to go to trial?”

“It depends on what I go to trial for.” Tom had settled back, the distance once more in evidence, the calm like a ghost’s shroud covering him from hair to shoes. John Kelly found himself once again shifting uneasily in his chair. He didn’t understand a man who could get so worked up over abstractions—constitutional law, for God’s sake, at a time like this—and remain so unaffected by hard reality.

“I still don’t know what you want me to do,” he said. “I still don’t understand what you think you’re getting at.”

“I don’t suppose you do.” Tom Burne nodded. “The thing is, John, I don’t think Dan Murphy is going to try to stick me with child abuse.”

“You don’t?”

“There are too many problems with it. Too many people still feel as if Bruce Ritter was jobbed—too many people didn’t like the way that whole thing was handled. Too many people out there are susceptible to conspiracy theories.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Whatever else Bruce Ritter may or may not have done, he was one of the most effective campaigners against the kiddie porn industry this country has ever seen. There are a lot of people who think that maybe what happened to him was that mob-connected types decided they didn’t like the way he was interfering in their business—”

“That’s not—”

“True?” Tom Burne said. “No, you’re right, most likely it’s not true. But if I’m right, and if what Dan Murphy is after here is a shot at the governor’s mansion, it doesn’t matter if the same thing is not true here. The mere suspicion of it is a taint.”

“So?”

“So.”

Tom Burne moved forward and took the paper off the desk. John thought he was going to go to the story about himself, maybe point out a paragraph that John had naturally missed, since he hadn’t read the thing. Instead, he flipped through the front section to an interior page, folded the paper into a neat thick quarter, and handed it back.

“Upper-left-hand side,” he said. “Tell me what you think of that.”

The small headline on the upper lefthand side said,
BOY FOUND IN RIVER EXPECTED TO LIVE
. John Kelly stared at it in confusion.

“I don’t understand,” he said. And then he felt he’d said that so often, it ought to end up engraved on his tombstone.

Tom Burne took the paper back. “The boy in question is named Stevie Marks. Not his real name, by the way. You never know their real names. Stevie Marks is ten years old. He’s a prostitute.”

“What?”

“He’s a prostitute,” Tom Burne repeated. “Maybe I should say he was. A very well-kept prostitute, by the way. One of the boys who gets used by the upper-income types for kicks. He’s the third they’ve found.”

“In the river?”

“Shot. In the back of the head. According to Pat Mallory, the other two boys died of what looks on the surface to be gangland-style execution shootings. With this one, whoever it was got sloppy. The shot didn’t go right. The kid lived.”

“What has this got to do with you?”

“I don’t know. That’s one of the things I want you to do for me. Check around. Talk to Dan Murphy. Find out if he put his sister up to volunteering at Damien House.”

“What?”

Father Tom Burne, John Kelly decided, had a smile like a snake. He always looked so damned pleased to watch you fold.

F
OR PAT MALLORY, THE
woman who answered the door at Damien House that morning of December 17 was a mixed blessing. He had met her before, right here in the Damien House living room, when she was visiting with one of her brothers. He had liked her, in a not very focused way, and thought she was attractive. The truth of it was, she was very attractive, in spite of all those years locked up in what was a very conservative order of nuns. Some women coming out of the convent were oddly flat. Their hair didn’t work right. Their makeup ended up looking like paint. Even women who belonged to orders that allowed them to live in lay clothes never seemed to get the hang of looking like civilians. Except for her silence and her reserve, this one might never have been a nun at all. He didn’t know if that was a good sign.

The problem, of course, was that she had another brother, not the Andy she had come down here with—and that brother was Dan Murphy.

He looked her over anyway, automatically, because men did that to women. They learned it in high school and never were able to shake the habit. Then he held his breath and waited for the blasting sermon on sexism he got from so many ex-nuns. It didn’t come.

He was standing under the porch light in the cold, with the wind whipping across his bare neck and his knuckles feeling frozen inside his gloves. She stepped back and let him inside, one arm crossed over the bulky sweater that covered her from shoulders to knees. He looked down and saw that she was in socks but without shoes.