Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  “If I had to say, I’d say one man and one woman.” Stella was drawing out the tale, loving her role as dispenser of information. “They were arguing. I told Chief Wyatt I couldn’t really hear them clearly, but I think the one with the higher voice was saying something like ‘I stayed,’ or maybe ‘I paid.’ Then the explosion happened, and I lost track of them when people came running.”

  “How big was the crowd?”

  “Big. Some people I recognized from the protests. Others I didn’t know. At least a hundred people. Rubberneckers, mostly.”

  “Did J.C. Bozco—the bullhorn guy—show up?”

  “Right away. Him and a bunch of the protest gang. And that tall redheaded gal, too.”

  “Peggy McGillicuddy? She wouldn’t have been with Bozco.”

  “I don’t know that she arrived with him, but I saw her talking with him. Giving him what for, it looked like. Hands on her hips, not giving him a chance to get a word in edgewise.”

  * * *

  I wasn’t about to call Peggy as the hour was nearing 1:00 a.m., so I emailed her instead, asking her to call me on my cell as soon as she saw the message. I had a brief doze interrupted by a coughing spell. It hurt to fill my lungs with air, but I was breathing, and the coughing fit did not involve blood, so I rearranged my pillows and was about to drift off again when someone tapped at my front door. I was slow getting up. The second knock was even softer.

  When I flipped on the porch light Peggy was starting back down the steps. She turned when I opened the door, relief washing over her face. I collapsed back onto the couch as she moved through the downstairs of my house, pulling curtains closed and window shades down.

  “What are you doing?”

  She ignored my question, her face pinched with fear. She folded her tall frame onto the easy chair across from my makeshift bed. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I’ve come here to tell you the truth,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About me. My past. Trust me, I’m not coming clean of my own volition. I want you to have context for what’s about to hit the fan.” Her face was flushed, her eyes guarded behind her big glasses.

  “Why do I feel like I’m on some kind of medication that’s messing up my head?”

  Peggy’s mouth twisted sideways, but it wasn’t a smile. “There’s a blackmailer in our midst, threatening to tell old tales about me. His goal is to discredit me. I think he’ll hurt himself more than me, but I don’t want people I care about—people like you—to hear it the way he’ll tell it.”

  She was almost vibrating with anxiety.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Many years ago, before I moved to Maine, I made my living as a prostitute.” Peggy’s eyes were in her lap, where her hands were clasped in a death grip with each other. Her voice was tight. “Not a streetwalker, but not high end either. I turned tricks for a living.”

  I tried not to show any emotion, in case she looked up. “Who’s threatening to publicize this?”

  “Bozco.” She spit the name out like it sickened her, then raised her eyes to mine.

  “I was the prostitute he assaulted in Philly in 1997. He shattered my jaw and fractured two ribs. If one of the other girls and her trick in the room next door hadn’t heard the commotion, he would have gotten away with it.”

  My mind struggled with the notion that Peggy McGillicuddy—six feet plus in her oxford shoes, bejeweled only with a crucifix worn on a chain around her neck—had been a prostitute.

  “Your testimony put J.C. Bozco in prison?”

  “Mine and the customer of the girl who was working next door. He was a stand-up guy. He broke down the door of the room where Bozco was trying to kill me and took the blackjack right out of his hand. The girl he’d been with called 911. Not something a pro does very often, but Bozco was scary. Waaay out of control.”

  “So the cops came and took Bozco away, and you made sure the charge stuck.”

  “There’d been assaults on other girls in the previous month or so. The cops believed he was the perp on several of them, but none of those girls would testify. Self-preservation, you know. But the prosecutor asked for a good long sentence and Bozco spent four years in the big house.”

  “What is he doing in Riverside?”

  “Trying to get back at me, from what I can tell. I almost had a heart attack when he walked into a Save Our Churches meeting last fall. He stared at me from across the room for an hour, a smirk on his face. When the meeting ended he walked right up to me and put out his hand like we were old friends. ‘I’ve been reading about you in the newspapers, Peggy,’ he said. ‘You’re doing such good work up here.’ Then he walked me away from the coffeepot and warned me in the softest voice that you can imagine that if I made a scene, he’d drag my name through the mud.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Left as soon as I could. Sat up all night waiting for a knock on the door. Bought better locks the next day.”

  She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes for a few seconds, took a couple of shaky breaths.

  “He cornered me again the next time I saw him, claimed he’d gotten counseling in prison and put his crazy, violent past behind him. Said he’d found God and wanted to make amends. I didn’t believe a single word of it. A snake is a snake. A couple of weeks later he showed his stripes with a blunt blackmail ask. Since then I’ve made sure never to be alone with him except to hand him an envelope of hush money once a month.”

  “Why is he threatening to make this known now? Have you changed your mind about paying, or has he upped the ante?”

  “Neither. He was hauled in for questioning two nights ago by the state police. They knew about his record of course—all they had to do was pull his sheet—but one idiot mentioned my name when they were grilling him. His weasel mind jumped to the ridiculous conclusion that if I’d never mentioned his name, they never would have discovered his violent past. He called that night and declared war. No matter that I’ve paid him $500 a month since he arrived in Maine almost a year ago. All bets were off when he heard that careless cop speak my name.”

  I wondered which statie Barb Wyatt tipped off, and which one blabbed. I remembered Peggy’s careful construction of a story about how she came to know about Bozco’s criminal past.

  “So you didn’t need to go online and dig into his background. You knew all about it.”

  She shrugged, sheepish. “Right. And I used you to get word about it to the right people. My motives were good. I wasn’t trashing him to trash him. He’s dangerous and unbalanced, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he had a role in Patrick’s death, and in these recent bombing incidents, too.”

  The pain in my throat was intensifying, but I needed to understand the whole story. “He thinks people are going to care about how you were living your life nearly twenty years ago?”

  “They will care,” she said. “They aren’t judgmental exactly, but none of them have my background, and they won’t understand. Bozco’s a keen observer of people. He knows the Church has become my home. My safe place. And he wants to destroy that.”

  “So until the state police mentioned your name, you’ve successfully placated him, and continued to work together on the church-closing protests.”

  “We haven’t worked together. He barged into the group because I was part of it, and he figured out right away that it mattered to me. He tried to take over, but his domineering personality put off a lot of people. While it isn’t obvious to outsiders, there are now two very distinct protest sub-groups. Mine is committed to nonviolence and creative problem-solving. His gang is plotting the revolution.”

  “Revolution? Like with guns?”

  “It’s my understanding they are making plans for in-your-face actions. For all I know it may incl
ude weapons. Patrick’s death has amped them up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they roll out something aggressive tomorrow.

  “At the funeral? There’ll be cops everywhere after what happened tonight.”

  “Don’t be surprised if that’s the first salvo in their holy war,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Rufe slept like hell again Sunday night and was wide awake before dawn. While showering, he gave himself a talking-to about the terrible day ahead. You’ve done a hell of a lot more difficult things in your life. You can get through this. He dressed carefully. Charcoal suit, white shirt, purple patterned tie. Buttoned-down and gay at the same time.

  The funeral didn’t start until ten but he drove into Portland at seven and grabbed breakfast at an always-busy waterfront diner. He avoided the Rambler because the regulars would be keyed up, and he didn’t think he could handle anyone else’s intensity on the morning of Pat’s funeral.

  There were four cars—two of them unmarked police cruisers—in the parking lot nearest St. Ignatius when Rufe pulled into a prime spot a few minutes before eight. He thought about how much time he’d spent sitting outside churches of late, smiled when he imagined how delighted his mother would be.

  But it’s for the wrong reasons, Ma. A good man is dead and nobody knows why.

  He pulled out his phone to check email and found a long thread by the Frig It men about whether and when they would arrive. Recovered from whatever had been ailing him, Sam wanted to know how many seats to save. There were ten responses, including one from Chuck, who’d cooled down since the Friday night debacle at Doug’s house.

  I’m still confused as hell about why Pat was hanging with thieves, but he was my buddy so I will be there well before 10, Chuck wrote. Please save me a seat. I need you guys today.

  Thom was not among those who replied to the email, nor was Doug. Rufe wondered if that meant they wouldn’t show, or that they wished to sit anonymously in the enormous Romanesque church, grieving apart from their Frig It brothers. As to Doug, the question was answered a few minutes later when the retired lawyer’s smoke-gray Audi slid into the parking space next to Rufe’s truck. They each raised a hand in a half wave. Doug got out and walked around to Rufe’s window.

  “Still talking to me?”

  Without conscious thought, Rufe let go of his grudge. “Of course. This has been a hell of a time for all of us, but we’re solid.”

  “Me and you? Or the whole group?”

  “Both. Me and you for sure. And most of the group, anyway. To a man we know that life is complicated, and I think with a little distance from the pain, most everyone will come back.”

  Doug tapped the truck’s hood. “Can I get in?”

  “Sure. Come on around.”

  They talked for a while about the previous night’s explosion inside St. Jerome’s, sure to be the hot topic of the day. Doug had no particular insight. He’d paid his respects early and was dining in Portland when, thanks to the omnipresence of Twitter, he heard about the explosion. “The news rolled through the restaurant like a tidal wave,” he said. “Even the tourists were talking about it.”

  Rufe told Doug how Joe went inside on an instinctive search-and-rescue mission and wound up in the ER.

  “He’s covered several high-profile cases I’ve tried,” Doug said. “Not surprised at all he went into a smoke-filled building. Gale’s a bulldog.”

  “He won’t be here today, even though he’s been covering Pat’s murder. His bosses want to make sure he recovers fully. Probably worried about a Worker’s Comp claim.”

  They sat without talking for a while. Rufe spent the time wrestling with himself about whether to bring up the contentious matter of Doug matchmaking Pat with criminals. Before he could decide whether to go there, Doug did it for him.

  “I am sorry I put my lawyer face on Friday night—and during our initial conversation too—when I was trying to explain my role in helping Pat find a way to sell Church property. You didn’t deserve that. None of you.” Doug steepled his index fingers and looked sideways at Rufe. “The persona. It’s automatic.”

  “Suddenly, you seemed like somebody else,” Rufe said. “That was as difficult for me as the fact of what you were saying. It threw me for a loop to learn that Pat was tied up in something illegal. But your imperviousness when you talked about it—like it was the most normal thing in the world to walk both sides of the honesty street—that made me feel like I’d stepped through the looking glass.”

  Doug was silent for a long moment. “As a defense lawyer, I had to learn how to take terrible things people did—assault, embezzlement, murder—and make it seem less aberrant. Maybe not reasonable behavior, but not depraved, and maybe even understandable, if all the circumstances were taken into account. That was my job. To advocate for human beings who made terrible mistakes, hurt people they loved, or maybe people they didn’t even know. To find the human core in the criminal wrapping, to encourage the jurors who would be judging my clients to think ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”

  “I can tell you were good at it.”

  Doug turned sideways, searching Rufe’s face. Looking for sarcasm? Or understanding?

  “In this case, Pat felt he needed the help of people who knew how to unload hot merchandise. For some reason, he was stealing valuables from the Church to which he’d dedicated his life. We may never know the reason. He never offered me an explanation. When the shock wears off, I hope people in general and the Frig It men in particular—who knew a side of Pat few others knew—will balance his many accomplishments against this transgression. It’s painful when someone you love disappoints you. But there was so much good in Pat. I hope that’s what people remember.”

  Rufe thought about that for a while. “I don’t have trouble forgiving the theft. I’m sure he had a rationale for what he was doing, and rationalization is a fundamental human trait. We all do it so often we don’t even realize it sometimes. But if the thieving is what got him killed, I’m going to have a hard time with that. Why would he put his life at risk, not to mention his reputation?”

  “If the thieving is what got him killed, I’ll never forgive myself,” Doug said.

  “The events of the last six days have me questioning a lot of things about a lot of people,” Rufe said. “I don’t think of myself as naïve, but I’m coming to realize I take too much at face value.”

  “Don’t go too far down that road,” Doug said. “The truth of the matter—and I say this after forty years as a criminal defense lawyer—is that most people are good. If you stop believing that and wrap yourself in a cloak of cynicism, you’ll find it won’t protect you from the kind of pain you’re feeling now. And it will leach the joy out of your life.”

  They sat in silence, watching the foot and vehicle traffic build around St. Ignatius. There were five police officers within Rufe’s field of vision. He was wondering how many plainclothes cops were on detail when a minivan with tinted windows drove onto the sidewalk in front of the church and screeched to a stop. The sliding doors opened before the vehicle stopped rocking, and a half dozen people jumped out carrying signs. In an instant they’d formed a picket line, and the driver was maneuvering the vehicle off the sidewalk.

  The Lies Have Come Home to Roost, read one picketer’s sign. Patrick Doherty Will Burn in Hell proclaimed another.

  “What’s this? Those nuts from Kansas who picket funerals all the time?”

  Rufe spotted J.C. Bozco standing on the front steps of the church, bullhorn in hand.

  “They’re nuts all right,” he told Doug. “But they’re not from Kansas.”

  * * *

  Joe must have had his cell phone in his hand, because his response to Rufe’s text message was instantaneous.

  WTF? Picketing the funeral?

  Bullhorn man and his minions.<
br />
  Cops moving them?

  Rufe rolled down his window.

  Trying, he texted. Getting lip from Bozco.

  “These folks know exactly what they’re doing,” Doug said. “Guerilla demonstration 101. Show up early and stake out your ground on public property. Don’t give the cops time to set up an approved protest area two blocks away. Then holler ‘First Amendment’ until you turn blue.”

  Be there soon, Joe texted. Take notes til I arrive.

  “Joe’s on his way,” Rufe said. “Bosses be damned.”

  He and Doug got out of the truck. They weren’t quite close enough to hear the back-and-forth between Bozco and the cops over the protesters’ chants.

  “NO! MORE! LIES!”

  A woman Rufe knew from the hardware store sidled up. “You know these people?”

  “I think they’re a subset of the anti-church-closing protest group that has been rallying in front of St. Jerome’s all summer.”

  “A splinter group. That makes sense. I don’t think those protest people are nuts. In fact, I agree with them. It’s terrible that all the distinct parishes are being rolled into one.”

  A new chant began. “HEY HEY. HO HO. LYING PRIESTS HAVE GOT TO GO!”

  “These people are not doing the cause any good,” Rufe’s hardware store friend said. “This is horribly unfair to Patrick’s memory, and to his family.”

  The words weren’t out of her mouth when a tall woman whose curly red hair was escaping her chignon stepped out the big front door of St. Ignatius. She marched down the front steps where to J.C. Bozco had planted himself, yanked the bullhorn out of his hand and scrambled back up the steps.

  Bozco lunged after her, but the crowd was thick and she was quick. Peggy faced the crowd and pressed the button to amplify her voice.

  “I’m Peggy McGillicuddy, and I was blessed to be Father Patrick’s friend.” Her voice was strong and sure. A hush fell over the crowd. Sirens sounded in the distance. “As Ecclesiastes says, to everything there’s a season. A time to protest, and a time to mourn.” She stared down Bozco, who was hemmed in by the crowd three steps below where she was standing. “Today is a time to mourn. I’ll be damned if I allow you to turn Father Patrick’s funeral into a circus.”