Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  “But he had to talk publicly about all the ugliness. Then he made a big splash when the bishop hid behind the lawyers. My parents would have worried that people assumed Pat guilty by association. It’s hard to explain—an Irish thing—at least with that generation.”

  It seemed a minor point so I didn’t press her, though I didn’t understand what she meant. Paulie Finnegan, whose folks were off the boat from County Galway, would have been of her parents’ generation, and he hadn’t cared a whit what others thought. A man who loved to mix it up for the sake of mixing it up, Paulie had spent most of his evenings at a pub two blocks from the Chronicle, arguing with all comers. If people wanted to call him a hard-drinking mouthy mick, so be it.

  “Did you see your brother much?”

  “Not as much as I would have liked. I work the evening shift—I’m a nurse. He worked every weekend, of course. Sometimes we’d meet for lunch in the middle of the week, in Augusta or somewhere else that was more or less halfway between Portland and Bangor. If he brought Father DiAngelo with him we’d meet on the coast—Belfast or Rockland. Michael—that’s Father DiAngelo—liked to walk the beach, and loved eating outside at lobster wharfs.” Her tone edged toward giddy.

  “The three of us used to pretend to be tourists from New York. They’d call me Charlene. My brother was Leonard. Michael was Ricardo. It was our secret life, carefree vacationers, whiling away an afternoon eating fried clams and poking around in antique shops.” A sob came through the phone loud and clear. “Now Leonard’s gone.”

  She said it as though Leonard was real, not her brother the priest, jaunting about without his collar for a few hours.

  “Tell me more about that, his lighthearted side.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t. And please don’t print that little anecdote. Our silliness was private. I don’t know why I’m going on about such personal things.”

  “The profile I’m writing of your brother will be better if I can show all sides of him. He’s beyond being embarrassed that he goofed around pretending to be a tourist or whatever.”

  She paused, no longer sniffling. “You could say that he was fun-loving, because that was always true. As a child, and an adult, too. There were six of us and he was next to the youngest, one year older than me.”

  “A good student?”

  “Extremely. Valedictorian of his high school class. Active in the drama club, always starring in the plays and musicals. The one I remember best is The Crucible, because he played John Proctor.”

  “Isn’t the Proctor character an adulterer? How’d your buttoned-down parents feel about that?”

  “He didn’t tell them. When they saw the show they were so impressed that he was the star, they didn’t say a word.”

  She cleared her throat. “If you don’t mind, could you leave that part out too? He also starred in Oklahoma! He was Curly McLain—you know, the ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’ guy? You can feel free to mention that.”

  When I asked about the funeral she said the diocese was handling the arrangements. Interesting, I thought. The Church he challenged so openly now wants to plan his funeral, probably to make sure nobody talks about what it’s tried so hard to keep hidden.

  Kathleen started crying again when I asked if she had pictures of her brother as a boy, but she agreed to show me photo albums if I was willing to drive to Bangor. We made a plan for the next afternoon, the soonest she said she could see me. I wondered if the meeting would occur, or if the state police would have been to see her by then.

  Chapter Six

  The rectory’s telephone number was unlisted, so I drove to Riverside to track down Father DiAngelo in person, wondering when priests had seen fit to remove their residential number from the phone book. Embroidered curtains backed the glass panels that flanked the heavy oak front door. While they made it hard to see inside, I caught a twitch of movement after my first knock, so I didn’t wait before knocking again. Show your determination, Paulie always said. Make it clear you’re not going away.

  The door swung open after my third rap, held by a slight woman with white hair pinned up into an old-style bun. “Can I help you?” Her brogue gave her away as Irish, even if her fair skin and blue eyes behind the wire rims had not.

  “I’m here to see Father DiAngelo.”

  She looked me up and down, her feet planted shoulder width, as though to prevent me from rushing in.

  “Father’s not available. Who would you be?”

  “Joe Gale. I’m a reporter at the Chronicle.”

  The up-and-down appraisal again. “You’re younger than I expected.”

  Unsure if that was good or bad, I pressed on.

  “I’d like to speak with Father DiAngelo about Father Doherty. I’m writing a detailed story for Sunday’s paper, and it wouldn’t be complete without some words from his colleague.”

  The blue eyes narrowed. “Father Doherty’s colleague likely doesn’t want to talk with you. He’s a very private man.”

  “But Father Doherty was a very public man. It’s important that what I write does him justice. I’m talking with his family also. I’d be remiss not to talk with his brother priests.”

  “Call the bishop,” she said. “If there’s something to be said, let him say it.”

  “The bishop is going to hide behind a formal statement. I want to talk with those who knew the personal side of Patrick. I’m sure you did. May I come in and talk with you?”

  The elderly woman appeared to be considering my offer, but appearances could deceive.

  “Not only am I not willing to speak with you inside, I’m unwilling to continue this conversation here on the doorstep. The press is not welcome here, Mr. Gale. Have my words not been clear?”

  “Will you at least ask Father DiAngelo if he’s willing to talk with me?”

  “No need,” she said, her brogue clipped with irritation. “I know him, like I knew Patrick. He’ll have no wish to see you, and it would trouble him to send you away.”

  She crossed her arms across her chest. “This house needs no more trouble.”

  * * *

  I went home for a late lunch and complained to Lou, who hears out all of my reportorial frustrations.

  “Friggin’ gatekeeper,” I said. “It was like I’d asked for an audience with the queen or something.”

  “Who you callin’ a queen?”

  I hadn’t heard Rufe come through the kitchen door. He was dressed in his work overalls, which made him look paunchy even though he’s a man who stays in top shape.

  “The little Irish lady who guards the rectory door. I went over there today to talk to the other priest, DiAngelo. She treated me like a criminal.”

  Rufe opened my fridge, pulled out a carton of orange juice, poured some in a glass he plucked out of the dish drainer. “Does Stella have an in with her? They’re next-door neighbors.”

  “Could be. I’ll ask. You hungry? I can make you a turkey sandwich.”

  He waved me off. “I ate an hour ago. I saw your car and thought I should apologize for bailing out in the middle of our conversation yesterday afternoon. But I was shocked when you told me Pat may have committed suicide.”

  “They’re now thinking that wasn’t the case.”

  “Thank God,” Rufe slid into one of my kitchen chairs. “I couldn’t wrap my head around that.”

  I weighed my options, decided to be circumspect. “I was told this morning the tox screen was normal. No one knows why the bottle in his pocket held only three pills, when he’d filled the prescription only the day before. But he didn’t swallow the rest himself.”

  “Yesterday you didn’t tell me the part about him having filled the prescription so recently,” Rufe said. “I guess that explains why people jumped to the overdose conclusion.”

  “I guess so.” I was determi
ned to keep my mouth shut about the head injury mentioned by Chief Wyatt. That too could turn out to be baseless, and if Rufe freaked out over the idea of suicide, I couldn’t imagine how he’d react to the idea Patrick was murdered.

  I finished making my sandwich and sat down across the table from Rufe. “So tell me, how did you know Patrick? He was an outgoing guy, and so are you. But I wouldn’t have expected you to know each other.”

  Rufe got up to pour himself more juice. “Through the theater. He was a season ticket holder. Apparently he’d acted when he was in school, and got a kick out of coming to our shows.”

  “Did he volunteer, or just spectate?”

  “I think he worked with some kids learning their lines for a play one Christmas. Helped build the set for West Side Story. But he wasn’t a regular volunteer.”

  “So was it the theater gang you wanted to talk with yesterday?”

  “Yeah, a few people with whom he was especially friendly. I found a couple of them, told them the suicide thing was iffy, but they should be prepared. They’ll be glad to hear this news.”

  Kicking myself for opening my own mouth too soon, I worked to keep my face neutral. While I didn’t typically dish inside scoops to Rufe, I wasn’t used to being on guard around him.

  I glanced at my watch and jumped up from the table. “I’ve got to go see one of the church-closing protestors.”

  “You’re covering all the bases, aren’t you?”

  “It’s my job, man.”

  “Must feel like a sad job right now,” he said. “Did you write the obituary that was in this morning’s paper?”

  I nodded.

  “I hated reading it. The words on my screen made it feel more real.”

  * * *

  The word that best described Peggy McGillicuddy was gawky. An inch taller than my six feet, with a jumble of curly red hair, she peered down on the world through smudged eyeglasses several decades out of style. She wore sensible shoes and a heavy silver cross around her neck. A leader of the movement fighting the church closures, she was a longtime parishioner at St. Jerome’s. Well-read and well-spoken, Peggy struck me as one of those people who becomes the backbone of a social movement through pure, steady, determined work.

  Her second-floor apartment was in a brick building two blocks east of Riverside’s Main Street. From her porch I could see the Saccarappa Mill, now in the last stage of its transformation from derelict factory to hipster haven. That line about all publicity being good publicity must be true, because the fact a murder victim’s long-dead body had been unearthed in the old textile mill’s basement hadn’t hurt sales. The grand opening was several months away, but all the artist lofts and three-quarters of the condos were already sold.

  By the look of Peggy’s apartment, she made her living in high-tech and the dining room was her workspace. The table was covered with computer equipment and paperwork, and a half-dozen cords were plugged into a heavy-duty power strip. She led me into a cramped kitchen. “We’ll be more comfortable if we sit in here.”

  Though Peggy had been the sharpest of the thorns scratching Patrick’s side since he’d been charged with implementing the bishop’s plan to consolidate all the Portland-area churches into five regional parishes, their periodic biscuit-breaking at the Riverside Rambler made it clear they were anything but enemies. She confirmed that fact as soon as we sat down.

  “I want to put this on the table right off the bat. I had the utmost—the absolute utmost—respect for Patrick. He was a holy man, a true servant of Jesus. He took a courageous stand ten years ago when he refused to participate in the bishop’s effort to downplay the abuse perpetrated by priests in this diocese. I was sorry when he was put in charge of closing churches, but anyone who thinks Bishop Guilfoyle is above assigning vindictive penance is naïve. Pat had no choice. And I had no choice but to debate him, challenge him, implore him to push the Church to do the right thing. I hope my confrontations with him aren’t, in retrospect, misunderstood.”

  Peggy studied me, her unselfconscious hazel eyes magnified by the glasses. I guessed her to be in her midforties. Single, I thought. At least the tiny apartment didn’t say otherwise. The set of her mouth told me our interview wouldn’t get out of first gear unless I assured her I wasn’t going to write a story that cast her as Patrick’s nemesis.

  “I saw you eating BLTs together at the Rambler a few weeks ago,” I said. “You weren’t arguing that day, you were laughing yourselves silly.”

  “We made it a point to step away from our battle stations from time to time. I know he didn’t enjoy this particular assignment.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Now I wish we hadn’t spent the last year of his life arguing with each other.”

  She stood and fetched a tissue from a box atop the refrigerator. “There are a lot of serious issues facing the Church. I believe its survival depends on the hierarchy listening to the people for a change. Patrick was willing to at least engage in the debate, and he was an honorable opponent.”

  “How’d you wind up leading the charge for truth and fairness?”

  “My father would chuckle at that question. He claimed I argued with the doctor who delivered me.”

  “Was that here in Maine?”

  She shook her head. “A little town an hour west of Philadelphia.”

  I wouldn’t have guessed that. “You talk like a Mainer.”

  “I’ve been here long enough to lose one accent and gain another.”

  “Have you been a community organizer all along?”

  “Community organizer—that’s rich. I support myself as a tech editor, working on computer engineering manuals all day long. I do my church work on nights and weekends. I’m not so much an organizer as a woman who doesn’t talk all day, so I make up for it when I’m off the clock.”

  “You seem to have the gift of saying what a lot of people are thinking.”

  “I should have gone to community organizer school then. Or maybe law school. But instead I’m a self-taught rabble-rouser, and I’m devastated that my most admired adversary is dead.”

  She took her glasses off and set them on the table, giving me a glimpse of a younger, more vulnerable Peggy McGillicuddy. I accepted her offer of a cup of tea and decided as I watched her move around the compact kitchen that gawky wasn’t a fair label. She was simply large for her surroundings.

  “So why’d you come to Maine?”

  “A friend of a friend offered me respite here, during a time when I needed to be someplace sane,” she said. “I was young, losing track of myself. Maine turned out to be a place I could look in the mirror every day and smile at the woman looking back.”

  “It is a good place,” I said. “A real place.” The kettle whistled. “I mean, people live real lives here.”

  She poured the boiling water into a pair of mugs holding tea bags. “Where have you been that people led fake lives?”

  I thought a moment. “College. Not the first couple of years, but certainly by senior year. Everyone was getting ready to head out into the world. There was a lot of posturing. I was too young to recognize it as such, thought everyone but me had the world on a string.”

  “When did you realize they were faking it?”

  “I didn’t figure it out myself. Had some help from an older colleague at the Chronicle who could sniff out pretense a half mile away.”

  “Let me guess. Paulie Finnegan?”

  I smiled.

  “People don’t get more real than that,” she said.

  It’s good to build rapport with a source, but I didn’t want the interview to slip away, so I dove back in as soon as she set my mug in front of me. “How long did you know Patrick?”

  “He was one of the first people I met when I moved to Maine,” she said. “My first job was waiting tables at the Lighthouse, did you know it?”
r />   “That little dive in Portland’s West End that had beer specials on Thursday nights?”

  “That’s the place. I prefer to call it authentic. Of course now it’s been gentrified out of existence. It was a sweet little neighborhood hangout, an everybody-knows-your-name kind of place. I worked there for a couple of years to supplement my income, which was paltry in the early days of high tech. Patrick didn’t live in Portland, but he came to the Lighthouse a lot. One snowy night when business was slow we got to talking about God and life and what did it all mean.” She laughed. “Two talkers pontificating, you know. But after that night we were friends, not a lonely priest and a gal hoping for a good tip.”

  “So you were friends before the abuse scandal broke?”

  “Long before. And we became even closer in recent years. I wasn’t at all surprised that Patrick spoke the truth when the institutional Church was denying Maine had had its share of abusers. Patrick didn’t follow the script written by the Church’s lawyers—you know, deny abuse happened or, if the evidence was strong, blame the victims. He responded like a human being. I know for a fact his very public advocacy for the victims forced the Church to settle a number of claims.”

  I knew all that, but let Peggy talk anyway. I’d met Patrick myself the week I started working for the Chronicle. I was twenty-two years old and cultivating the world-weary attitude I imagined reporters should have. At the first couple of meetings I covered, I assumed the chatty priest had been assigned by the bishop to be the good cop, pretending sympathy when people who’d been harmed spoke their terrible truths. But as the scandal continued to unfold, I watched him sit without defensiveness among the devastated parishioners expressing their communal grief. I watched him weep with them. I never saw him flinch from their anger. In time, my cynicism about the gregarious priest ebbed away.

  “So you really think Bishop Guilfoyle was engaging in a little payback when he assigned Patrick to be the point person on the consolidation of churches?”

  “Patrick never came right out and said as much, but I’m sure his very public advocacy for the victims was seen as insubordinate. It’s fair to assume the bishop was retaliating when he put him in charge of cleaning up the fallout.”