In God's House (29 page)

I watched the fellow as he sat in the shade, his back resting against a wide oak. He was tossing a rubber ball onto graves. The ball bounced crazily off the tombs and rolled into one of the grass pathways between the rows of old burial sites. The dog followed the ball like radar, leaping over dead people and grabbing it in his mouth, returning to his master. Then they played the game again. Moroux said, “I wonder if that old fellow really is a priest. That’s what they say. If he is, he’s found the perfect congregation out there. Nobody can complain to him about anything.”

I needed to get to the airport, but Moroux had called my office and asked to see me in person. “What is it you asked to see me about?”

“Renon, I want you to know I am confident you are not the source of those newspaper articles. I know you’ve had problems with the lawyers about this.”

“Monsignor, I’ve told you that I’ve never even heard of the priests
The Courier
named.”

“I’m afraid you are right about our lawyers needing to scapegoat someone because everything is going wrong. Between us, I am in agreement with you. It seems clear to me it’s their fault things are out of control. By the way, send me a bill for your services to date.”

I nodded as he continued, “Last night, at their monthly meeting, I had the diocesan financial advisory committee approve your contract with Dubois and the diocese as guarantor of Dubois’s legal fees and all expenses of his defense without any cap. I got the bishop’s signature too. I had a copy of the minutes of the meeting mailed to your office this morning. No one can threaten to fire you again. You are doing me a big favor in going to see this Father Patterson. It’s what the canon lawyer for our papal nuncio wants. I hope it gets them off of my back.”

It was now my place to take a turn. Driving over to the chancery, I had made a decision to take a leaf out of Johnny Wilcox’s playbook, the frontal assault.

“Monsignor, the reason I came here today is that I am confident that I can prove in 1971 that Bobby and Dwayne Richard, altar boys in Willow Springs, were murdered by Father Owen Dante Ellison.”

Moroux moved more quickly than I had ever seen him move, spinning away from me as if I were a wild animal about to devour him. He walked behind the ornate desk and put all that wood between us.

I moved to a chair and settled in, signaling that I was not about to leave until I had answers.

Moroux’s mouth and eyes closed tightly. When he opened his eyes, I saw pain, as Jean-Paul Moroux surveyed the office until he found something to focus on besides me. He finally made an audible noise. “Ummm… ummm… ummm.” It was the only sound he made. His mouth never opened.

I waited.

Moroux opened a desk drawer and retrieved a pack of cigarettes. He struck a match. His hands trembled as he aligned
the flame with the cigarette. Shaking the fire off the match, he let the burnt stick fall to the thick carpeting.

I waited.

Moroux took two deep drags off the cigarette in silence, then extinguished the butt on a saucer under a demitasse coffee cup. He got up and went to the doorway, closing the door slowly, almost gently, but securely. Once he was back in the desk chair, he turned his focus on me again. “Ummm… ummm.” He smiled inappropriately. “Ummm… I don’t see how any purpose can be served by delving into things of the past. You see, we have this situation, Renon. This situation with Father Francis. It’s uhh… uhh, where we must focus. Ummm… ummm, I don’t see how anything I might say to you might make any difference. Ummm… Ummm… I don’t see how anything you might know at this point could make any difference. Ummm…” Another inappropriate smile spread slowly across his face as he closed his eyes tight against what was in front of him.

“Monsignor, there were two boys murdered by a priest in this diocese and you were vicar general by that time. Reynolds had been installed as bishop by then too. You knew about it. You had to know. The bishop knew about it. He must have known. It was not just the sex crimes of priests against children that were covered up. The bishop, you, and other men in this building covered up two murders.”

“No. It wasn’t that way. We are priests. Matters of confession are private and confidential even under civil law. This applies to the confessions of all sinners in Holy Mother Church, including her priests. What one hears in confession can never be spoken anywhere, not in a court, not here today in this room. I have nothing more to say about this other than to offer my opinion that O. D. Ellison is a very sick, very old man. All of his faculties as a priest were removed long ago and he was given extensive treatment and then sent into the most complete isolation and finally into an old folks’ home.”

“I know where he was sent. I know where he is. My investigator
visited him a few days ago in Florida. There is no statute of limitations on murder in this state. He can be brought to trial. These murders can be prosecuted.”

“He is very old.”

“The boys were very young.”

“He is sick.”

“He’s guilty.”

“Ummm… ummm… I implore you to think about this for a long time, before you drag that old man back here. What would be achieved?”

“Justice.”

Monsignor Moroux sat in the desk chair, stood and seemed shaky, and fell back into the chair, his head in his hands. When I could see his features again, there was a redness around his eyes, a pallor in his face. He tried for another cigarette, but his tremors were too severe to handle the packet or matches.

Staring out at the cemetery, Moroux said, “Thank you for coming, Renon. Travel well.”

“I’m leaving now, Monsignor, but I’m not forgetting. I will never forget that Father Owen Dante Ellison killed two brothers named Bobby and Dwayne. He deserves to be brought back to this legal jurisdiction in leg irons and handcuffs.”

Moroux continued to stare at the big cemetery.

When I went out to my car, I spent some time double-checking the big briefcase Mo had packed for me. By the time I drove away and made the turn in front of the iron gates to the cemetery, Monsignor Moroux had left the chancery building. I slowed down and watched him as he walked the grass paths between the graves. I felt certain that what the monsignor and bishop had learned from O. D. Ellison was not information protected by confessional privilege recognized by the law, but straight-out admissions to murder. As Ellison was not an active priest, his file would not have been purged. Somewhere in the vault of the secret archives was a damning indictment of a murderer and his mentors.

Moroux had lost all composure in my presence at the mention that I had proof of the murders. In a matter of a moment, the monsignor’s facade had fallen. I knew something deep within him, perhaps in a part of him he did not know existed, had been stabbed by a burning sword. I thought of what he had told me one night about how odd it was that we didn’t worry over what God knew, but cared more about shameful actions that might be discovered by fellow humans. If I had my way, one day Ellison would pay and the world would know murders were covered up by chancery officials. I knew Moroux knew this and it was weighing heavily on his mind as he walked among the dead.

Snow fell all day and night on Friday. I knew it had snowed all night because I had stood at my hotel window all night, unable to sleep, my mind tormented by the murders of those two boys at the hands of that priest. By morning, the weather was so bad that President Reagan’s second inauguration festivities were canceled.

When it was 8 a.m. in Thiberville, I phoned Julie.

“Morning, Sunshine.”

“Hi, Ren. It’s not sunshine here. Raining so much I think I saw an old guy with a long beard building a big boat around the corner, rounding up animals.”

I laughed. “Sorry, I have little time this morning, Julie. I need you to do something for me, if you will.”

“Talk to me.”

“Can you go back into the secret archives again? I need ya to copy another file.”

“They’ve all been… how’d ya say it… sanitized, right?”

“Not this one. It’s not the file of an active priest. It’s an old one. It’s bad. Worse than Dubois.”

“What can be worse than Dubois?”

“Murder.”

There was a long silence. In a weak voice, Julie said, “What’s the name?”

“Owen Dante Ellison. He was pastor in Willow Springs when it was part of the diocese.”

“I’ll get it tonight, Ren. You okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“I guess. Take care.”

“You too, Julie.” I rang off. I wanted to say “I miss you” but the words did not come out.

The streets were deserted as the taxi navigated its way to Hope House. Father Matthew Patterson was waiting for me in the lobby. He was wearing a bright red sweatshirt over a blue polo, faded blue cords and hiking boots, and he had a pair of expensive sunglasses dangling on a cord around his neck. He looked more like a movie idol than a priest or doctor.

Father Patterson led me into his office, where a bearded man in an Irish fisherman’s sweater and blue jeans sat with his cowboy boots propped up on the desk. On the wall behind the desk, centered over the credenza, was an enormous photograph of a golden retriever with a tattered paperback copy of
Alcoholics Anonymous
, the AA Big Book, in his mouth.

Father Patterson pointed to the picture. “That’s my dog, Mozart. He loves to fetch the AA Big Book. It’s the best use I’ve found for that book.” As Matt Patterson gently lifted the fellow’s cowboy boots from the surface of his desk, he said, “This guy is Desmond McDougall. I’ve never found a use for him. He works in the Vatican Embassy as a canon lawyer.”

I recognized the name Desmond McDougall from the conversation I’d had with Monsignor Moroux. I was surprised to encounter him at Hope House. McDougall was built like a compact, muscled fullback. “Hi, Renon. I work with Matt on sensitive shit like this deal down in Thiberville, but we do different things. Sorry about having to meet in this head-shrinking joint. This place gives me the heebies, but I tell ya, if you could see where I work every day, it would creep you out worse than this – there’s pictures of dead guys hanging all over the place.”

Father Patterson motioned us to a round table in the corner of the room. Father Desmond McDougall carried a cup of coffee
with him from the desk. “What the hell is wrong with this coffee? It tastes like hot brown water.”

“That’s because it is hot brown water. There’s no caffeine in this building, no sugar, nothing like that. We can’t have our patients getting buzzed on anything.”

“Lovely place. Cheerful,” Desmond said.

It quickly became obvious that our meeting had nothing to do with any discussion about Father Dubois or a possible medical evaluation of Dubois. McDougall took over as soon as we were seated, and the questions he asked did not even touch on my client’s psychological condition, treatment regime, or his history as a pedophile.

“So, tell me about the situation in Louisiana. Has there been any publicity? Are there going to be trials?”

“On the criminal side, if I don’t get a twenty-year sentence for Father Dubois in a plea bargain with the DA, there will be a trial. I’m pretty well locked out by the diocesan and insurance defense lawyers down there, but I think new cases are being filed almost weekly now – against Father Dubois and against other priests. I’m pretty sure there will be at least one civil trial, a case involving a family called Rachou.”

Father Patterson fiddled with the sunglasses around his neck as Desmond McDougall scribbled notes.

“The plaintiff’s attorney in the Rachou civil case is a lawyer named Kane Chaisson.”

“Is he better than the Church and insurance lawyers down there?”

“The lawyers carrying water for the diocese are not even in Kane Chaisson’s league. Chaisson’s moving his Rachou case like a freight train.”

Father Patterson poured coffee for the three of us and retrieved a small bowl from behind a volume on the bookshelf. “My private stash of sugar,” he said. “Let me ask you this – at the moment it’s all still sealed and secret, right? I mean, outside of the diocesan
officials and a few lawyers, no one knows anything about this, right?”

“There has not been any publicity, right?” Desmond McDougall asked.

I pulled out the thick media section of my Dubois file, which included the previous day’s articles from the New Orleans and Baton Rouge newspapers, and handed it to Father Patterson. “On the top are two front-page stories from yesterday – the two largest dailies in Louisiana. Underneath is a three-thousand-word story from the Wednesday edition of the Thiberville weekly,
The Courier
, that named two new priests besides Dubois as child molesters. That article quoted some victims’ parents about meetings they had with priests and monsignors. It’s hardly a secret anymore. All the local reporting has been in this weekly paper. You will see that the articles from the local daily,
The Thiberville Register
, that I have in the file do nothing but praise the diocese and bishop, and condemn
The Courier
. The big stories published in Baton Rouge and New Orleans may be running on the wire today.”

Father Matt Patterson raised a hand in the air as if to ask me to hold any additional comments until he had read the newspaper articles. He and Desmond McDougall began perusing the pages of the media file, reading some of it carefully.

Once I was out of the flow, no longer responding to Desmond McDougall’s rapid-fire questions, tiredness overwhelmed me. I was afraid I would fall asleep in the chair and wished the coffee had contained caffeine. I thought about how I could no longer sleep without sedating myself with alcohol.

Father Patterson may have sensed my predicament for he said, “It will take some time for us to digest this. You can walk around the facility if you wish.”

I wandered around the ground floor and found a chapel. Instinctively, I started to enter the church to pray, but something stopped me from crossing the threshold. It was like I no longer knew how to pray, who to pray to, or what to pray for.

When I walked back into Father Patterson’s office, both Patterson and McDougall were laughing as Desmond McDougall was finishing some story he had been telling. “So that little shit of a cardinal, the spaghetti sucker, says to me, ‘The American Church must learn that God lives in Rome.’”

Turning his attention to me, McDougall said, “Next meeting will be at my place. We have espresso.” He picked my media folder up off the table. “I gotta copy these articles and jam them down the throat of the lying son-of-a-bitch, Monsignor Jean-Paul Moroux. That bastard must have barnacles on his soul. Every report of his, even one I got last week, claims there has been nothing in the press about this.”

Father Patterson said, “You represent Father Dubois, right? Not the diocese?”

“That’s right. That’s my only real concern. I’ve been declared persona non grata by the diocesan lawyers, insurance lawyers and their lay advisor. In the beginning, I was trying to work with them, but they saw everything I wanted to do as the wrong thing. Anyway, at first Dubois was my only concern. Now it’s the children he’s hurt.”

“Tell me about the children.”

“Right. I have been advocating since the first week I got into this that the diocese has an obligation to find the victims, all the victims, and offer them whatever they can to facilitate healing.”

“Somebody objected to that idea?” Matt Patterson asked.

“Everybody objected to that idea.”

Desmond McDougall was still writing notes as he spoke. “What’s your greatest concern about the defense of Dubois?”

“Well, worst case has already happened, I suppose. The weekly paper has named other child-molesting priests in the diocese. I think that may have done me in. Until then, my plan had been to portray Dubois as a single, solitary, aberrant, deviant man – one of a kind – which is what I thought he was when I signed on to defend him. If he was alone – the only one – I believed I could get a decent plea bargain out of the DA.”

“And now?”

“It’s doubtful. The DA will want to make an example of Father Dubois. The judge will want to give him the maximum sentence possible, life without possibility of parole. They’ll want to punish him on behalf of the other thirty-one or more—”

Matt Patterson interrupted, “What do you mean – the other thirty-one or more?”

I told him about Chaisson’s subpoena request and for another two hours we talked about the situation in Thiberville. They elicited my detailed views about how I felt every aspect of this crisis should be handled. At last someone was listening to my plan.

Desmond McDougall picked up a phone and made a call. All he said was, “Where’s the old man? I don’t care if the old bastard’s on the squash court. You get his royal ass in his office in one hour. I’m coming to see him.”

Our meeting ended with McDougall asking, “How about we meet for dinner tonight? Seven o’clock?”

I nodded.

McDougall addressed Father Patterson. “Café Roma. Right, Matt?”

As we stood up, McDougall said, “Matt likes this bullshit place, Café Roma. The two old maids who own it always make a fuss over him.”

“You’ll like it, Renon,” Matt Patterson said.

McDougall shrugged, “Hey, ya think I want to eat Italian? My job, my lot in life, is to deal with Italians all day long. I don’t want to see anything that reminds me of my work when the day is done. I work for our papal nuncio in an institution stuck in a time machine – the dark ages.”