VC03 - Mortal Grace (15 page)

“He’s the only one who wouldn’t use a condom.”

“Of course, condoms can fail—”

“All right, I’m ninety-nine percent sure.”

Bonnie waited for the safe familiar silence to reenclose the study. “You’ve been through a lot of pain and a lot of betrayal. It’s natural you’d see things in the worst possible light.”

“I’m seeing this in the only light there is.” The girl’s breath was coming in sharp pants. She stared at Bonnie, blaming her for something, blaming her for everything.

Bonnie sighed.

“If it takes you this long to say yes,” Nell said, “that means you’re going to say no.”

“You’re so sure of how things are going to turn out.” Bonnie was thinking that that certainty was the most treacherous gift God could bestow. “You’re so sure of what you want.”
But so am I
, she thought, and the realization shook her.

“That means no, right?”

Bonnie shook her head. “No, that doesn’t mean no.” She rose and crossed to the desk and opened the parish check ledger. “How much did you say that doctor wants?”

NINETEEN

“O
H, GOSH, I’VE KNOWN
Father Joe like forever.” Johanna Lowndes waved her cigarette. “He’s one of my all-time favorite people on earth. A truly simpatico mensch.”

“How did you meet him?” Cardozo said.

“Through work.” Lowndes was a little younger than Cardozo remembered, though she was trying to act older. In her blue jeans she was slender, and with a window backlighting her she was blond.

She affected a slightly goofy, actressy manner—he had a feeling she’d taken diction and breathlessness pointers from old Audrey Hepburn tapes.

“I’ve been in three of Father Joe’s shows—as you can see.” She flipped a nod toward the walls. Her walk-up Greenwich Village studio apartment was hung with posters strikingly framed in gold-brushed ebony—one each for
Anything Goes for Broke
,
Anything Goes Again
, and
Stingin’ in the Rain.

“How would you say Father Joe got along with his performers?”

“I’d say he got along swimmingly. I mean, I wish I had the relationship with my own
father
that I have with Father Joe.” She gave him that same look she’d given him in Vanderbilt Garden:
Why don’t you come play with me, Daddy?

“He never had arguments with any of them?”

“Come on, we’re talking
theater.
Of course he argued. Some of his performers are assholes. But he never shouted.”

“He never mistreated a performer?”

“Oh, maybe verbally—but only when they deserved it.”

“Do you know of any performers who were ever injured during rehearsals or performances?”

“By Father Joe? No way. He never put a hand on anyone.”

“Did any performers ever injure themselves?”

She was thoughtful. “There was a girl called Louisa—a couple of years ago. She twisted an ankle and sued.”

“Anyone else? Any other ankles?”

She tilted her face toward the ceiling. A puff of cigarette smoke floated above her like a thought balloon in the funny papers. “Not that I recall. Not offhand.”

“Was Father Joe especially close to any of his performers?”

She took a sip of her ginseng soda. “Close?”

“Did you ever see him make advances or hear of any advances?”

She flashed a drop-jawed stare. “You’re kidding. You’re not kidding? Father Joe wouldn’t know
how
.”

“So you’re saying no.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “I mean no. Christ, why are words so
complicated
? You know what I mean. Father Joe is not of this earth. He certainly is not of this city.”

“Did you ever see him drunk or drugged or disorderly?”

“You guys just don’t want to get it, do you? Father Joe’s a saint. A genius and a saint. Period.”

“Have you ever seen this girl?” Cardozo showed her the artist’s reconstruction of the face of Ms. Basket Case.

There was a beat of hesitation. “Oh, God—is she the one—the one I found?”

Cardozo nodded.

“I’m sorry…I don’t recall seeing her. Alive, I mean.”

“At St. Andrew’s maybe? In rehearsal?”

“I honestly doubt it. I know it’s only a drawing, but she doesn’t look like a performer.”

He handed her another picture. “What about this girl?”

“Now,
she’s
a performer. Great eyes.”

“Her name’s Sally Manfredo.”

Johanna Lowndes’s face was a flawless, unwrinkled blank.

“She was in the chorus of
The Boy Friend.
She played Emily in
Zip Your Pinafore.
She was going to be in
The Pajama Game
, but they replaced her.”

“Sorry.” Johanna Lowndes gave back the photo. “I didn’t play in those shows. I never met her.”

“She looks familiar…very familiar.” Tommy Lanner—teenage waiter/carpenter/check-out-clerk-but-I’m-really-an-actor/singer/dancer—studied the drawing of Ms. Basket Case’s reconstructed face. He put a finger up to scratch the copper-blond curl behind his ear. “I get this little memory click that maybe we were in the same show.”

“What show was that?” Ellie Siegel said.

“She could have been one of the dancers in
Anything Goes Again.
But something happened. She had to drop out.”

“Why was that?”

“I’m trying to remember. These paint fumes must kill the memory cells in the brain.” Tommy Lanner came down from the stepladder. He’d been repainting the kitchen in his East Village railroad flat, and the air was suffocatingly thick. “Maybe she broke her foot rehearsing. Maybe she and Father Joe argued.”

“Which was it? A foot or an argument?”

Tommy Lanner went to the window and toyed with objects on the sill—a flowerpot, a toy fire truck, an empty beer can. In the window beyond his profile, TV antennas and bootleg cable hookups sprouted like aluminum weeds from the tar paper roofs of the East Village. “Maybe both.”

“Did Father Joe argue with many of his performers?”

“It was part of his method for manipulating us. And the manipulation wasn’t to get a performance out of us. It was to get power
over
us.”

“What kind of power?”

“I could write a book.” Tommy Lanner paused as though to mark off a space between himself and what he was about to say. “He asked me up to his apartment for a drink. I should have known he was drunk. But I guess I’m naive—a Texarkana farm boy.”

Ellie Siegel wondered how many naive Texarkana farm boys bleached their hair.

“He put on a video of the Obie Awards—it showed him winning a prize—and I swear, he was feeling himself. Getting himself excited.”

“So he was making a pass at you?”

“I never stayed around to find out what that old creep had in mind. He unzipped his pants and I was out of there.”

Somehow, in the dark, it didn’t seem to count.

Father Chuck felt along the bookshelf behind the leather-bound
Summa theologiae.
His fingers found the bottle. He uncapped it, one-handed, and brought it to his lips.

In a moment, when his nerves quieted down, he clicked the lamp on. It threw a bright splash of light across the broad desk top. The desk was bare except for a marble pen set and a small porcelain figurine of the pieta.

Father Chuck opened a drawer, rippled through documents, brought out a photo and a 3” x 5” file card. He placed them in the center of the blotter. He stared at them.

Sally Manfredo’s dark eyes smiled back at him.

Why this girl?
he wondered.
Why now, after all these years?

A sound broke in on his thoughts. A coin was rapping at the window. He went and poked a finger through the slats of the blinds.

A teenager in an Ice-T tank top waved to him.

Father Chuck pushed the window up.

The boy—with that astonishing agility of the young—climbed in. He stood looking around the study. “How come you priests all like to live in the dark?”

He wore a New York Mets baseball cap and his blond hair was cut in a crew cut and ponytail. It was a very screw-you personal grooming statement.

Father Chuck gestured to the boy to sit. He crossed to his desk. “Have you given any thought to our last talk?” He turned the photo and the file card facedown.

The boy didn’t sit. “I spoke to some friends of mine.”

“Runaways like yourself?” Father Chuck wondered how on earth—in today’s economy, in today’s health crisis—any of these children managed. “Homeless? Starving?”

“We don’t want handouts.” A small crucifix earring dangling from the boy’s left earlobe caught a wink of lamplight.

“I know.” Father Chuck understood the defiant self-respect of those who had nothing left but their defiance.

“We’re willing to work. We want to work.” The boy handed Father Chuck a packet fastened with two pink rubber bands.

Father Chuck snapped the bands off. Photographs. He fitted a pair of half-moon spectacles to his nose.

Images leapt into focus: a young woman sunbathing on a dock, breasts exposed. A young man with tattooed biceps standing in torn Jockey shorts. In all, eight young people displaying their near-nakedness, smiling at the camera with faces that were small-eyed and just a little bit crafty.

Father Chuck felt himself wanting to blush, as though he had been caught peeking through a shower-room window.

“And these young people are the friends you’ve been speaking of?”

“I’m their agent. I make the deals.”

“I see. They’ve appointed you their spokesman.” Father Chuck’s smile was neutral now, guarded. “I could offer part-time employment around the rectory for two or three youngsters. Are any of your friends experienced at lawn work?”

“For two hundred dollars you can have an hour with any of them you want.”

Father Chuck felt himself pulling back without quite knowing why. “An
hour
?”

The boy nodded. “Do anything you want to them.” His eyes said he knew secrets about Father Chuck that Father Chuck was only beginning to guess at. “Light bondage, heavy bondage, spanking, whipping, whatever gets you off. Feel free.”

For Father Chuck this was a new frontier in audacity. If the boy was lying, he was absolutely at peace with his falsehood. If he was telling the truth, he was untroubled by anything remotely approaching guilt. “This is a joke.”

“It’s no joke.”

Then it’s some kind of entrapment
, Father Chuck realized.
Someone has sent this child here to see if I’ll take the bait.
“Who are you working for? The diocese?”

The boy’s eyes said,
Cut the horseshit.
“You gotta be kidding.”

“The police?”

“Oh, sure, I’m an underage cop.”

“A politician? A newspaper? TV news?”

“I’m working for the best company on earth. Myself. Privacy and satisfaction guaranteed.”

Father Chuck knew his limits, and situations like this were among them. He gathered the photos into a neat little bundle. He rose from behind his desk and took six steps toward the boy. “You may take back your photographs.”

The boy didn’t answer. Father Chuck sensed something harden in him.

The boy took two steps toward Father Chuck and at the second step Father Chuck backed off.

“Keep them,” the boy said. “Now that you’ve seen them, you’re going to need them.”

Father Chuck’s hand shot out in denial, as if he’d been accused. “Now, wait just a minute—”

“Father—this is me you’re talking to, Eff Huffington. I’ve been around, I know the score. You don’t have to pretend. Unless you get off on pretending.” The boy turned to go. “Think it over. You’ll be hearing from me.”

TWENTY

“W
OULD EITHER OF
you like coffee?” Cardozo’s daughter Terri asked.

He glanced up at the seventeen-year-old girl. She had prepared the meal—paella, green salad, and homemade kiwi sherbet—and now, moving with slender, dark-haired grace, she was clearing the dishes.

“Sure,” he said. “How about you, Ellie?”

They were sitting at the dining table in Cardozo’s apartment.

“Half a cup for me,” Ellie said.

Terri vanished into the kitchen and conversation drifted back to business.

“If Ms. Basket Case had worked in any of Father Joe’s shows,” Ellie said, “her photo would be in the file.”

“Unless he took it out himself,” Cardozo said.

“Let’s stick with what we know for sure. We’ve interviewed the sixty-one names in Father Montgomery’s talent file. They’re all alive and well and accounted for. Except for Sally Manfredo.”

“Which is a big exception.”

“Except for one thing. Father Joe left your niece’s photo in the file. Let’s say something did happen to her—pray to God it didn’t, but let’s say it did. Let’s say Father Joe was involved. Now, if he removed Ms. Basket Case’s photo because he was involved with
her
, wouldn’t he remove your niece’s photo? You can’t have it both ways.”

“Maybe Father Joe isn’t consistent.”

She looked at him with genuine curiosity. “All right—your niece played in two or three of Father Joe’s shows and she disappeared. It’s painful. But it doesn’t mean Montgomery had anything to do with Ms. Basket Case. You’re a cop. Will you please think like one?”

Cardozo’s gaze went to the files piled on the coffee table in the living room. There were three stacks—Ellie’s, his, and Greg Monteleone’s. Cardozo hadn’t yet read Ellie’s and she hadn’t yet read his and neither of them had read Greg’s.

“The bad news,” Cardozo said, “is that the other priest on the videocassette puts on amateur musicals too. And he uses young people. Father Romero in Queens.”

Ellie seemed to sag. “We have to go through more talent files? I can’t take another unemployed actor. Not this month.”

“Romero says he doesn’t keep files. He says everything’s in his head.”

She tipped her plate to scoop up the last of her sherbet. “Do you believe him?”

“No.”

“Then we need a warrant.” Ellie licked her spoon. “Vince, did any of your actors recognize the drawing? Or your niece?”

Cardozo sighed. “No.”