by Bryan Gruley
I wasn’t a big fan of Frenchy but figured it wouldn’t be smart to let Joanie know. “The freelancer, huh? Just how freelance is he?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you pay him for this?”
She pulled one of her legs up under the other on her chair. The chartreuse polish on one foot’s toenails didn’t match the frosted pink on the other’s. “When you need something fast-you know, background stuff-Frenchy can get it faster than anyone.”
“Always first, frequently right,” I said.
“How did you know that?”
“Know what?”
“Frenchy says that.”
“So does Whistler. Must be a Free Press thing.”
“Brand X,” Joanie said. “Anyway, Frenchy said this is pretty cursory, he didn’t have much time, but… well, see what you think.”
I watched her click through more than forty pages of documents Frenchy had unearthed from the Internet and scanned onto the CD. Some of them-Breck’s birth certificate, his home address, a couple of newspaper photos, even the clipping I had seen in Mom’s lockbox-came from public sources. Others, like the Social Security number, derived from sources I preferred to know nothing about.
Joanie returned to the first screen. She opened a drawer, pulled out two fresh notebooks, and handed one to me.
“Wow,” I said. “You’re rich.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“Got a pen?” she said. “You can’t take the disk.”
“I’m not sure I want it. Why are you taking notes?”
“The Times covers Michigan, you know.”
Same old Joanie. She hit Enter.
Wayland Breck was born to Gregory Breck, a draftsman, and his homemaker wife, the former Susan Veronica Wayland. On the boy’s second Christmas Eve, his father was killed in a car crash with a drunken driver, who was issued a ticket and released. When Wayland was five, he moved with his mother to Livonia, a suburb near Detroit’s western border anchored by Michigan’s only Thoroughbred racetrack, since closed, and one of the first shopping malls in the United States, since demolished.
Breck graduated in 1966 from Livonia’s Franklin High, 1971 from Michigan State, 1975 from University of Detroit Law. A grainy copy of a photograph showed Breck in his cap and gown, unsmiling, in front of a stone clock tower.
“Typical lawyer, eh?” I said. “Not making money yet, not happy.”
“Maybe he’s just itchy in that robe.”
By the late 1970s, Breck’s name was showing up on state documents registering him as a principal-apparently the sole principal-in a firm called W. E. Breck Legal Associates, with an address in Livonia. Based on what Frenchy had unearthed, Breck did mostly routine domestic work-divorce, probate, minor tax issues, some workers’ compensation. His mother died in 1988. He divorced a wife of twelve years in 1990.
Joanie rapped the Page-down key seven or eight times. A series of blank pages flashed on the screen. “Here’s where it gets interesting.”
There followed a sequence of documents that had been copied and copied over again. As Joanie scrolled down, I saw what appeared to be many pages of legal filings, followed by two or three photocopies of newspaper clippings, followed by more legal filings, then clips, and so forth, until the pages went blank again.
All of the documents were dated in the 1990s.
Joanie backtracked to the beginning of the sequence. She sat back and folded her arms across her Rats jersey. “The guy was doing oppo research,” Joanie said.
“Opposition? Digging dirt on someone?”
“Not just anybody.” She leaned into the keyboard. “This really sucks, Gus.”
“You want-”
“Yeah.” She stood. “Take over.”
We traded seats. I began to tap through the documents on the screen. They were a collection of affidavits connected to various lawsuits filed in the circuit courts of Wayne and Oakland counties. The plaintiffs’ names were blacked out, but the case numbers varied, so I was able to count eight separate lawsuits. In each case, one of the defendants was the Archdiocese of Detroit.
My stomach tightened as the nature of the lawsuits became clear. Eight men, ranging in age from twenty-three to fifty-four, had accused priests at parishes in the archdiocese of sexually abusing them when they were young. Because the original complaints were not included, it was impossible to know the specifics of the charges.
For that, I was grateful.
“My God,” I said.
“Just like old times.”
In terse, clinical language, the affidavits delineated evidence that the accusers were mistaken, hypocritical, compromised, delusional, lying: “Mr. [NAME REDACTED] was terminated from his job as an assistant foreman at Detroit Diesel on February 4, 1993, because he had repeatedly shown up for work inebriated.” In these papers, the victims of abuse were now adulterers, debtors, wife beaters, gambling addicts, tax cheats: “Despite his protestations to the contrary, there is ample evidence that Mr. [NAME REDACTED] disregarded the plain truth in the pleadings related
to his ongoing divorce proceedings with [NAME REDACTED].”
Each affidavit was executed and signed by Wayland E. Breck, “Special Counsel,” on behalf of the law firm of Eagan, MacDonald amp; Browne.
“He wasn’t part of Eagan, MacDonald, was he?” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Joanie said. “Looks like he was just a contractor.”
“These are bad people, boy.”
The affidavits cited little if any supporting evidence for their assertions. Which made me think that the assertions were probably laced with falsehoods and half-truths while containing just enough verifiable fact-a tax document that could be interpreted in various ways, a statement from a jealous coworker, the testimony of an aggrieved wife-to put a scare into these men who already had been scared so badly as boys, to fling them back upon the dark certainty they had carried for most of their lives that whatever misfortune befell them was their fault and theirs alone.
As the archdiocese’s hired hatchet man, Breck had assembled affidavits that might give a man pause, especially a man laboring under a burden of guilt laid upon him in a rectory, a sacristy, a confessional. Maybe that man, that accuser, would withdraw lest he be forced to face his supposed flaws in public. Or maybe, at the very least, he would acquiesce in a mutual silence in return for money.
The photocopied newspaper clips that Frenchy had interspersed told this very story. Taken from the Times, the Free Press, the Birmingham Eccentric, the Northville Record, the articles, none more than six paragraphs long, told of how each of the men-all of them named in the stories-had agreed to settle with the archdiocese. The accusers declined to comment, in accordance with the terms of the settlements.
Other terms were not disclosed.
Joanie laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “What are you thinking?” she said.
“So the guy was your basic household lawyer for years, then in the 1990s he starts taking on these errands for Eagan, MacDonald.”
“For the archdiocese,” Joanie said.
I was trying to think about all of it, all at once: Mrs. B dead. Nilus. The murdered nun. Tatch’s camp. Breck. The digging. Tatch and my mother in jail. The piece of what appeared to be a map. The rosary. The archdiocese. Breck again.
Joanie clapped a hand on my thigh and leaned in close enough that I glimpsed pale freckles through the laces at the neck of her jersey.
“Wake up, Gus,” she said. “Why are you here? Why do you care about this guy? What does all this have to do with what happened to Phyllis Bontrager?”
“My mother knows something.”
“About these pedophile priests?”
“No.” I shifted my legs so that her hand came off my thigh. “About a nun who was killed in Starvation a long time ago.”
I told Joanie about Sister Cordelia and the man who had been accused of killing her, Breck’s grandfather. I told her about Nilus and his womanizing. I left
the lockbox out of it.
“Is that why you asked about meeting with the archdiocese?”
“I wanted to know more about Nilus.”
“Good gut, then.”
“Maybe. Interesting that Eagan, MacDonald is their law firm.”
“Why?”
“The firm’s been quietly buying up land on a corner of the lake. It’s not prime land, it’s not even on the water, but all of a sudden everybody’s interested in it.”
“And you’re thinking…”
“I wonder if they’re buying it for the archdiocese.”
“Because…”
I hesitated, not sure I wanted to say it yet. “I don’t know. We can ask tomorrow.”
“You mean today.” She leaned back to look at the clock on her stove. “Holy cripes, it’s almost four-thirty.”
Through the blinds on her sole window I heard traffic stirring on the Chrysler Freeway. Her new look aside, Joanie was now the Joanie I remembered, shoving me toward conclusions, as she had when she was at the Pilot and we were looking into the past of a hockey coach. She unfolded herself and stood, the Rats jersey falling to her knees. “You know,” she said, “I don’t miss Starvation much. But I do miss you.”
“Sure, as long as you don’t have to work for me.”
“Time for bed, eh?”
I looked around the room. There was nothing but hard-backed chairs. No sofa, no armchair, not even a beanbag chair.
“Hell,” I said, “maybe we ought to just go get some breakfast.”
“You don’t like Pop-Tarts?” She slid onto the bottom step of the ladder to her loft. “I’m going up. What about you?”
The silence that followed probably was shorter than it seemed to me. “I’ll be OK,” I said. Joanie regarded me for a second, then started up the ladder. She was cute and tough and passionate, which made her beautiful, in her way. I made myself think of Darlene in Dad’s tree house the night her mother died.
I watched Joanie climb away from me.
She stopped at the top. Something, maybe a pipe, made a lurching sound inside a wall. “Nothing has to happen, Gus.”
“I know.”
She waited. I stayed. “All right,” she said. “See you in three hours.”
NINETEEN
My cell phone woke me.
“Damn,” I croaked. I’d thought I had turned the thing off. I jumped up from where I had dozed off on a wool rug with my coat balled up beneath my head for a pillow. The phone was in my coat. I pulled it out and answered.
“Where the hell are you?” Luke Whistler said. I checked the stove clock. Not quite seven. On the floor at the foot of the loft ladder lay the Rats jersey Joanie had been wearing earlier, covering the boots I’d taken off to sleep.
“I had to run an errand.”
“At seven in the morning? You know your mom’s in jail?”
“I do.”
I heard a chair squeak through the phone. Whistler was at the Pilot. “Got the coroner’s report.”
“They released it?”
“Not publicly.”
I glanced up at the loft, turned my body away, lowered my voice.
“How come you bullshitted me about Breck?” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I asked you if you knew Breck. You said no. But you’ve been checking up on the guy.”
“You going through my mail?”
“It’s Pilot mail, pal.”
“OK, boss,” Whistler said. He sounded annoyed, but I didn’t care. “You got me. Although I didn’t really lie. I didn’t, and don’t, know this character. But I was trying to get to know him, for a story.”
“What story?”
“He’s supposedly in hot water with the state. They might disbar him. Which wouldn’t be good for the born-agains’ tax appeal.”
“First I heard of it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure it’s true.”
“Do me a favor and keep me posted.”
“I will. Sorry. Really. If you can’t trust a fellow scribe, who can you trust? It’s me and you and the rest of the world, right?”
“What about the coroner’s report?”
“Confirmed homicide,” he said. “Blunt trauma to the head, from a blow and from falling to the floor. She had a pretty bad gash above one eye, but that wasn’t the cause.”
“It wasn’t just a heart attack or something?”
“Everybody dies of heart attacks,” Whistler said. “A guy gets shot in the head, he dies of heart failure. Could be the break-in artist freaked out, so it wasn’t premeditated. But it’s a dead body. Your pal in the pokey may have a problem.”
“Have they charged him yet?”
“Nothing yet. And the cops ain’t talking a lick. I got in the sheriff’s face a little and your girlfriend threatened to usher me off the premises.”
“My ex-girlfriend.”
“Really? I don’t get that impression.”
I wasn’t about to engage Whistler on Darlene and whatever Tawny Jane had told him across the pillow.
“You don’t think they really believe Tatch did it, do you?” I said.
“Nah. I think they want him to give up the other guy. Meantime, some of the local yokels have been making noise about that Tex kid not playing in the big game. D’Alessio’s got them all riled up, saying this is all Dingus’s fault, he arrested the wrong guy. They’re getting up a posse to go demonstrate at the Jesus camp.”
“When?”
“This afternoon. People got signs in their windows: ‘Free Tex.’ Why’s he called Tex anyway?”
“Long story. Does Tatch have a lawyer?”
“Had that Flapp guy for a few hours. Then Breck took over. He supposedly told the cops Mr. Edwards isn’t going to say a word.”
I heard Joanie stir, glanced up, saw her naked shoulders, white as winter.
“Can you do me a favor?” I said. “Check on my mom.”
“Sure thing. By the way, your boss called.”
“Philo?”
“He sounds barely old enough to drive.”
Philo must have been calling about that board of directors meeting. I couldn’t believe that that collection of wide-assed retirees collecting per diems for telling the CEO he’s a genius would have the guts to switch the Pilot to online publication only. They would sit around their mahogany table the size of a rowboat and make their speeches about the future of newspapers until one of them motioned to table the subject until the next month’s meeting so they could all retire to the Knife and Fork Club for filets and cigars.
“Hey,” Joanie said. She was leaning over the edge of her loft, blanket bunched beneath her chin. “Who you talking to?”
I ignored her. “OK, thanks, I’ll check in later.” I ended the call.
“You want to shower?”
I looked at the phone, saw it was almost out of power, clicked it off. “No thanks,” I said. “Could we get some eggs before our appointment?”
I was swallowing the last of my second fried-egg-and-cheese sandwich as Joanie swung her Malibu off Beech Daly onto Six Mile Road. I followed in Soupy’s pickup.
I tossed the greasy sandwich wrapper on the garbage hiding the lockbox and grabbed the foam cup of black coffee from the console. I had checked to make sure the box was still there and kicked myself for having left it in the truck the night before in a neighborhood filled with curious late-night pedestrians. At least I’d thought to lock the truck, something I never did in Starvation.
We had sped down the Jeffries Freeway west through Detroit, an eight-lane gully winding between road shoulders pocked with snow and empty wine bottles, past pawnshops and liquor stores and boarded-up supermarkets and tar-papered houses, some of them charred black and literally falling down, where autoworkers had once laid claim to a good life that eventually slipped from their grasp. As a rookie Times reporter covering the cops, I had exited the freeway a few times to interview the bereaved families of shooting victims. But usually the Je
ffries had ferried me to hockey rinks in the western suburbs.
Tunneling beneath the underpass at Telegraph Road, we’d crossed from the city into Redford Township, where those same autoworkers-the white ones, that is-had escaped in the 1950s seeking brick ranches and wider backyards. We’d left the Jeffries and turned north on Beech Daly. We passed a Lebanese bakery, a Little Caesars pizza joint, a vinyl-siding shop, a tool-and-die business hung with a For Lease sign, and what seemed like a dozen insurance agencies. I wondered why people in flat, quiet Redford would live in fear of fires and floods.
Six Mile is five gray lanes scarred with oily potholes and rock salt. I steered around a mattress discarded in the middle of the street. We passed a Catholic church and a used car lot and a Presbyterian church and another liquor store and a bar that advertised karaoke every Friday. The only human I saw was a teenage boy swaggering down the sidewalk in a hooded sweatshirt and headphones beneath a Yankees cap perched backward on his head. Only a Yankees fan, I thought, would be dumb enough to wear just a sweatshirt in that cold.
Joanie put on her right turn blinker and veered into a parking lot ringed by a low wooden fence. A curbside sign identified it as Lost Valley Golf Course. The only other car in the lot was a black Cadillac coupe parked in a handicap spot facing the first tee. I slid Soupy’s pickup in next to Joanie’s Malibu and peeked at the Caddy. I didn’t see any handicap tag hanging from the rearview mirror.
Joanie came up to my door, notebook in hand. I stepped out.
“Ever do an interview at a golf course?” she said.
“Chased quotes once when the U.S. Open was at Oakland Hills.”
Out on the course, old oaks as big as the ones up north stood guard along a flat brown fairway mottled with snow. A sign planted in front of the first tee announced in big black letters COURSE CLOSED. But there were gouges in the matted grass on the tee, and at the end of the fairway, a red flag fluttered in the breeze. I didn’t like golf. If you played a lousy round, you could feel lousy for hours. If you had a bad day on the rink, it went away the second you cracked your first beer.
“Weird,” Joanie said. “But the flack insisted. Said the priest would be more comfortable.”
I started walking toward the pro shop. “Who’s the priest again?”
