Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  Christie gave my hand a squeeze. “We can talk more tonight. You still coming over for supper?”

  “Between this and the bombing investigation, I’ll be running all day, but I hope to. I’ll let you know if something changes.”

  Christie was plating up my mushroom-and-cheese omelet when Rufe Smathers arrived, his crew cut and trim beard still wet from the shower. He parked on the stool next to mine.

  “What’s the morning scoop?”

  It was Rufe’s habitual question when we met at the diner. Most mornings I handed over my copy of the Chronicle, since I’m one of the few Riversiders who still takes home delivery of an actual newspaper. That day I had no newspaper because I’d run out the door before the papergirl arrived. The morning’s top news wasn’t in the paper anyway. I gave Rufe the gist in a low voice.

  “You’re kidding me? Pat’s dead? I saw him two nights ago.”

  I’d never heard the dead priest called Pat rather than Patrick, and I didn’t realize Rufe knew him personally. I let my omelet cool.

  “Where’d you see him?”

  Rufe kept his eyes on Christie’s efficient grillwork. When he spoke his voice was husky. “In Portland. Bumped into him when I was doing an errand. He looked tired, but fine, you know?”

  “You’re not Catholic. How’d you even know him?”

  “Everybody knew Pat. His face was on the TV all the time, and page one of your paper. He was a gregarious guy, didn’t keep his distance when you bumped into him at the farmer’s market or barbershop.”

  Sitting shoulder to shoulder, we watched Christie flip pancakes.

  “I can’t believe he’s dead,” Rufe said.

  “I’m guessing heart attack.”

  “Boom. It’s over.”

  “No time to say goodbye, but likely no suffering either.”

  “He suffered enough in his life.”

  I assumed Rufe was referring to Patrick’s commitment to respond honestly, instead of with platitudes, to the anger and pain that erupted when it turned out Maine hadn’t been immune from the horrific sexual abuse scandal that had devastated countless devout Catholic communities. A decade earlier, many in Maine had cheered Patrick as a hero when he publicly repudiated the bishop in the middle of the priest abuse scandal, resigning his unasked-for job as spokesman for the diocese and standing in support of those who had been wronged. His penance came years later, when the combination of falling attendance and costly lawsuits led to what the diocese called “downsizing,” as though it were a corporation closing underperforming divisions. When Patrick was assigned to manage the consolidation of parishes, a sizeable segment of his once-adoring public had turned its back on him, furious that he was in charge of disassembling and selling their beloved places of worship.

  The experience probably took years off Patrick Doherty’s life, as had the increased pastoral demands of his dwindled flock, which was devastated to learn that the churches where generations of their family members had been baptized, married and eulogized were going to be auctioned for cash.

  “It must have been hell for him.”

  Rufe looked sideways at me, appearing almost irritated at my casual use of the expression, but then used it himself.

  “Hellish, indeed,” he said. “I bet almost no one had a clue what he was going through.”

  I thought about that comment as I jogged back to my house. If Rufe—who was no bandwagon jumper—was that quick with an opinion, I knew I’d be hearing an avalanche of similar sentiment.

  I let my aging dog Louisa out into the fenced yard while I called the office of a psychologist I’d been scheduled to interview that morning about the likely pathology of the person or persons—more likely kid or kids—behind the detonation of several homemade bombs near Riverside High School that fall. What had seemed at first to be a practical joke had turned dead serious, and that morning I’d been hoping to learn what I could about people who get their kicks blowing things to pieces.

  Patrick’s death was going to force the bombing story onto the back burner, so I postponed my interview with the shrink and spent the next hour interviewing businesspeople, officials at Riverside City Hall and even a taciturn panhandler about their memories of the dead priest.

  “He always did the right thing, even when it was hard to do,” the Town Council president said. “I admired Father Doherty tremendously. But it would do him a disservice to put him on a pedestal, because he was a regular guy. A really brave, kind, regular guy.”

  The owner of a hair salon echoed that sentiment. “Patrick didn’t hold himself above the rest of us,” she said. “He was easy to talk to even if you weren’t Catholic.”

  The ponytailed guy collecting cash on the corner of Main and West Streets had a terse take on the news.

  “Lot of bad juju around here lately.”

  Chapter Two

  When I walked into the Chronicle’s newsroom at 9:15, Al Lombard was sitting at Leah’s elbow, a button-pushing sight if there ever was one. When I’d suggested someone get the official Church reaction to Patrick’s sudden death, I assumed she’d put a junior reporter on it, not Al “Kiss Ass” Lombard.

  If it were possible for there to be a precise antithesis of my mentor Paulie Finnegan, Al Lombard was it. Paulie had been the newsroom’s unchallenged dean, a reporter’s reporter who knew exactly what to do when a big story broke. Lombard weaseled around the newsroom, poking his nose into reporters’ cubicles, offering unwanted advice and boasting of his chummy relationship with the boys in the publisher’s office.

  Lombard had been the Chronicle’s religion reporter when the priest abuse story broke, but his kid-glove deference to the Church got him “promoted” to the copy desk. When I was assigned to take over the story and approached it like the scandal it was, Lombard went ballistic, griping about me to anybody who’d listen. Paulie had my back, but as soon as he was in his grave, Lombard began rewriting my stories from his perch at the copy desk—removing facts he thought didn’t belong in a family newspaper. When I complained, Lombard was forced to admit he’d substantively changed my work without consulting me, a big no-no. The negotiated détente involved making sure my stories about the exploding priest abuse scandal were routed to editors who didn’t share Lombard’s obsequious approach to news coverage about his church.

  Years down the road from that battle, Al was closing in on retirement, punching in and out every day and doing as little extra work as he could get away with. Leah hadn’t been at the Chronicle when Lombard and I were tussling over the church scandal story, so she had no knowledge of the bad blood between us. When she beckoned me to join them, I was peeved but not entirely surprised to hear him angling for a last reportorial hurrah.

  “On his own initiative Al began working the phones, collecting reaction from the diocese and religious leaders around the state,” she said. “He volunteered to come off the desk to help on this story. We need to map out what you’ll each do.”

  I’ll cover the news, he’ll kiss the bishop’s ring. It was all I could do not to say it out loud. Instead I summarized the profile of the dead priest I’d been outlining in my head on the drive into Portland.

  “The thing that set Patrick apart from other public figures is that he didn’t sidestep tough questions. That’s going to be my focus. He was too honest to mouth the corporate line.”

  “The corporate line. That’s insulting, Gale.” Lombard’s moonlike face was flushed. “I know you fancy yourself the tough reporter—constantly antagonistic to the Church as an institution and insensitive to those of us who find strength there—but that attitude is inappropriate in the face of this tragedy.” He turned to Leah. “I got tired of arguing years ago when it became clear my point of view wasn’t appreciated by the politically correct people who’ve taken over the newsroom.”

  I kept myself in check while he
argued for “setting aside all the ugliness” in the paper’s coverage of Patrick’s death. “And it’s wrong to refer to him as Patrick. He was an ordained priest. You should have the respect to call him Father Patrick, at the very least.”

  Leah swung her head in my direction.

  “In print we refer to him as Father Doherty,” I said. “Face to face, he made it clear he wished to be called Patrick, not Father Patrick. So when I speak of him, I’ll continue to use the name he asked me to use. But to Al’s larger point, Patrick was a man of the people whose life’s work was confronting painful truths about the church he loved. It would dishonor him to downplay that.”

  I described the first time I’d seen Patrick Doherty. He was sitting in a circle of chairs in a basement meeting hall, pain etched on his face, answering every taunt, every furious barb, every uncomfortable question thrown his way.

  “I’ve never seen a public figure in the middle of a firestorm with such courage,” I said. “We can’t cover this story without context. The greatest work of Patrick’s life was confronting the sins of his own church. That was his legacy—the honest way he handled people’s unimaginable pain. I’ll be damned if I let you bury that truth behind polite euphemisms.”

  “A good man is dead.” Lombard smacked his hand on the table. “It would be wrong to focus on the evil of others in his obituary.”

  “His willingness to confront that evil is what made him a hero,” I said. “That’s the story here.”

  Leah listened to the back and forth for another few minutes then waved us to our respective corners. On my way to my desk I passed Roz Fortuna, the Chronicle’s metro columnist, who was filling in as assistant city editor while my buddy Gene Pelletier was on a bucket list vacation in Ireland. Roz’s ruby lips wore a sly smile, and she offered a slow wink of one of her violet eyes.

  “You are dead right.” She pointed with her chin toward the copy desk, where a red-faced Lombard was talking on the phone. “Al is dead wrong.”

  “You heard it all?”

  “Every ridiculous word. I know you’re a big boy, but if you need me, I’m right here.” Roz’s column was perceived as the voice of the newspaper, which gave her clout inside the newsroom and out. Most days she ignored me—Roz and Paulie hadn’t gotten along for some ancient reason and her dislike for him seemed to have splashed onto me—so her support was a pleasant surprise.

  My desk line held a terse voice mail message from my best source inside the Riverside Fire Department. I assumed veteran paramedic Denny Arsenault was calling about the high school bombings, because he’d been feeding me inside information on the spate of chemistry lab-inspired blasts since shortly after the initial explosion, which happened on the first day of school.

  But it turned out Denny wasn’t calling about the school bomber investigation at all.

  “Got something you want to hear about today’s call over to St. Jerry’s,” he said. “Can’t get into it on the phone.”

  “Can you give me an hour or so? I’ve got to pull a story together.”

  “Meet you at the Fix at eleven.”

  I was crafting the lead on my story about Patrick’s death when Leah texted me.

  Al’s heading Upstairs.

  Jack Salisbury’s office. Of course. Salisbury was the local honcho for Chapman Media Group, the Chronicle’s owner for the past year. A man with zero journalism background, Salisbury thought his job was to limit coverage of controversial topics, lest the paper be sued or criticized. He and Lombard were made for each other.

  There was nothing I could do about Al crying to Salisbury, but I forwarded Leah’s text to Roz, so she’d be in that particular loop as well, then finished my straightforward account of the discovery of Patrick’s body in the garden behind the rectory. I layered in what a cursory online search told me about his background. I left out the part about Father DiAngelo on his knees in the garden, weeping. Paulie Finnegan taught me long ago the difference between news and exploitation.

  Roz was covering the desk while Leah was in the morning meeting. The clash with Al Lombard somehow put us on the same team, because she offered to do some footwork on Patrick’s family and career after she edited my story for the online edition. I promised to bring her back a large latte and headed out to meet my helpful paramedic source.

  Denny already was at the counter when I arrived at the wood-paneled Legal Fix, a Portland java joint far enough from both the Chronicle and the firehouse to assure us confidentiality. After I bought his coffee and a cup for myself we settled ourselves well away from the other occupied tables.

  “I was over there this morning, when they found the priest. Everyone seemed to think heart attack. What else is there to know?”

  Denny took a long sip and set the cup down precisely in the middle of a paper coaster. “Up close, it didn’t look like a heart attack. He might have done it to himself.”

  I stared across the table.

  “They found a pill bottle in his pocket.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  “Sleeping pills. The kind known to cause some people to sleepwalk.”

  “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Patrick was having trouble sleeping. He’d been under a lot of stress.”

  A kid with a dishpan came out of the back and began clearing a table near us. We shut our mouths until he was out of earshot.

  “It was a new prescription. He’d filled it—thirty pills—three days ago.” Denny quirked his mouth to the side. “There were only two left in the bottle.”

  “You’re saying he overdosed?”

  “I only know what my EMTs saw. The ME will assign a cause of death.”

  I sat back in my chair, uninterested in my coffee. Patrick had been a walking stress bomb. Having once been considered a hero, he was denigrated as a heel by some of the most in-your-face anti-church-closing protestors, which had to feel awful. But had it been bad enough to drive Patrick to suicide? His detractors, while mouthy, were a relatively small subgroup. The week before he died I’d seen him having lunch at the Rambler with Peggy McGillicuddy, a leader of the anti-shutdown forces. The two of them were laughing so loudly I turned from my seat at the counter to ask what was so hilarious.

  “Nun stories.” Patrick wiped tears from his eyes. “Sharing our youthful humiliations.”

  Now Denny was telling me the man who could find common ground with pretty much anyone might have killed himself. I struggled to find the right question.

  “Could he have been sleepwalking?”

  “Not if he took a fistful of those pills. His system would have shut down if he took five times the normal dose, never mind twenty times. More likely he went out to sit in the garden before swallowing them.”

  “But we don’t know if he took twenty times the normal dose, or even five times,” I said. “All we know is he had a nearly empty pill bottle in his pocket.”

  “The tox screen will tell the tale.”

  “If you hear anything more, will you call me?”

  “Sure bet.” Denny’s phone chirped, but he ignored it.

  “What’s the latest on the bombings?”

  “State Fire Marshal’s looking at an apparently ‘well-adjusted boy’ from a ‘prominent family.’” Denny waggled his fingers in air quotes when characterizing the suspect and his folks. “I’ll let you know if I hear an arrest is imminent, but things are often hush-hush when it involves a kid, especially a rich kid.”

  We didn’t need to rehash the incidents that had Riverside on edge, but we did anyway, sipping our coffee while we speculated about patterns.

  At seven fifteen on the first morning of the school year, as fresh-from-vacation students were streaming onto the grounds, an enormous smoke bomb had been detonated in the flower bed that ringed the sign in front of Riverside High School. Investigators and school officials chalked
it up to a prankster who’d spent the summer plotting how to start the new school year with a bang.

  A few weeks later a real bang got everyone’s attention when a device the fire marshal’s experts determined had been made out of dry ice and two large plastic bottles exploded inside a nearly empty dumpster in the parking lot adjacent to the football field. The bomb went off at eight o’clock on a Friday night when the Red Hawks were on the road. A chalked message on the back wall of the school promised more to come: next time maybe for a crowd.

  The words got as much attention as the deafening explosion, because the football team was scheduled to play its next two games on its home field, fifty yards from the crime-scene-tape-draped parking lot. Barb Wyatt held a press conference the next morning, at which she laid out in no uncertain terms that the Riverside PD was not amused. School security was ramped up to hyper for the next several weeks—especially at the football games—and all the frisking and backpack-checking appeared to send the perp to ground.

  But the Saturday night before Patrick’s death—a few minutes before midnight—another bomb blew half the visiting team’s bleachers to smithereens. The state police bomb squad showed up for that one. After extensive interviews with a number of on-edge neighbors—many of whom were sleeping with their windows open despite the October chill—the cops theorized a crude pipe bomb had been tossed over the chain-link fence that surrounded the football stadium, possibly by someone in a passing car.

  “I’m hearing copycat on bomb #3,” Denny said. “The first two were placed. The third one was thrown.”

  “The first two also didn’t do any real damage.”

  “Yeah, but it’s like fire-setting. The bomber craves bigger thrills every time out.”

  “Scary thought,” I said.

  “Terrifying, actually.”

  * * *

  Back in the newsroom, I kept Denny’s name to myself when I told Leah and Roz it was possible—way too early to say so in print, but possible—that Patrick’s death was due to an overdose.