Charisma (24 page)

He waited until Father Tom Burne was safely out of the office—thumb on the intercom button so that he could hear into the outer office; Marie’s voice coming in at him, even more nasal over the wire than in person, telling Father Tom to have a good day—and then he picked up his phone and made a call on his own. He had always had a suspicion that Marie listened in when he called the chancery. The last thing he wanted now was to be overheard.

Far away—in Bridgeport or Fairfield or wherever the damned residence was these days—the phone rang and rang. It was barely nine o’clock in the morning, and John had a vision of the priests out there, still in bed, ears plugged up with pillows. It wasn’t fair. He’d been a priest out there himself not long ago, and he knew the residence got up early. The bishop liked being able to say that he said Mass, read his Breviary, had breakfast, and started work before seven.

The phone was picked up, and a low voice that sounded half-irritated and half-asleep said, “Our Lady of Peace Rectory.”

John Kelly couldn’t remember when they’d renamed the residence Our Lady of Peace. He only remembered when he’d started hating it.

“Stephen?” he said.

“Oh, crap.” There was a hacking cough, the sound of phlegm being cleared from a throat, a snort. “It’s you. What the hell is going on down there, anyway? We’ve been up all night over here and all we know is it’s all your fault.”

“I’ve been up all night, too.” That wasn’t true, not quite, but he didn’t want to go into it. He just wanted to get Stephen off the phone. There was something in him that didn’t like priests who swore too casually—something not as strong as but related to the thing that didn’t like priests who made fun of solemnity in the Mass. Sometimes he thought he was turning into an old fogey much too young.

“Look,” he said, “is Riley around? I’ve got to talk to him.”

“Oh, Riley’s
around,
” Stephen said. “At least, he’s around for
you.
The rest of the world could be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust in the next three minutes, he’d been unavailable, but he’s around for
you
.”

“Stephen—”

“Never mind,” Stephen said.

There was a
thunk
on the other end of the line, the phone going down on the telephone table in the hall. John Kelly could picture it, right to the muddy red light thrown out by dim sunlight coming through the stained-glass windows that flanked the door. He got his secret stash of cigarettes out of the center drawer of his desk and lit up.

A few minutes later, he heard the wheezing wind of what he knew must be Monaghan Riley coming down the stairs to the phone—Monaghan Riley, who had his mother’s maiden name as a first name like a Protestant, and who had had to pick a new first name when he was ordained, because that was in the days when the Church insisted that Her children be called after saints. Maybe She still did.

The phone was picked up and wheezed into. A voice tinged with brogue said, “John? Is that you? I’ve been waiting to hear from you all night.” It was sometimes hard to remember that Monaghan Riley, now officially David Monaghan Riley, had been born in Waterbury, Connecticut.

John took another drag of his cigarette, put it down on the edge of the desk, and said, “Yes, Your Grace. Good morning. I didn’t call you last night because I didn’t have anything to say.”

“Don’t call me ‘Your Grace.’ ” Riley coughed. “They said in
Connecticut
magazine I missed the days when people went around kissing my ring. They were lying.”

“Yes, Yo—yes.”

“Well?”

John picked up his cigarette again. The ash on the end of it was huge. He tapped it into the waste-basket and watched the pieces fall.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve had Tom in here this morning. I suppose you knew I was going to do that.”

“I expected it. You had to.”

“I know I had to. I wish I hadn’t had to. It was a mess.”

“Tom wasn’t being cooperative?”

Another drag on the cigarette got rid of his irritation. As much as he tried to hide it—assuming he tried at all—Riley admired Tom Burne for not “being cooperative.” “Being cooperative” was Riley’s code for what he called in private “those masters of conformity, the Spirit of Vatican II priests.”

“I think,” John said carefully, “that we’re going to have to accept from the beginning that Tom isn’t going to let us clean this up quietly. To tell you the truth, Father, that’s an understatement. He wants a full-blown media exhibition.”

“You couldn’t talk him into any kind of compromise.”

“I could hardly get a word in edgeways. What kind of compromise could there be anyway? Either there’s going to be an ecclesiastical investigation and we’ll have control of it, or there’s going to be a civil investigation and we won’t.”

“Have you heard from your friend Dan Murphy? Has there been any hint that he’d do a deal—go away and pretend that none of it’s real as long as we issue reports about internal investigations and get Tom out of there?”

“No.” The cigarette was burned down to the butt. John opened the center desk drawer again, rummaged around inside, and came up with a small ashtray. “No,” he said again. “I know what you’re thinking. It was the first thing I thought of, too. You ever been down to Congress Avenue?”

“Of course I have. I go every year. You’ve been there with me.”

“Mmm.” It was true, of course. The bishop went not only to Congress Avenue, but to all the other first-class awful neighborhoods in New Haven—and the first-class awful neighborhoods in Bridgeport and Danbury, too. It was part of the new “pastoral orientation” that was the rage everywhere, even with men like Monaghan Riley, who ought to know better. To be fair, Riley knew it was all a crock. He didn’t fool himself into believing he did some good by marching through the trash cans and the ruined buildings, or that he saw much of reality while he was doing it, either. He did it because he was expected to and then went home and got down to serious business.

“The thing is,” John said, “that march down there, it’s like the Empress Catherine and the Potemkin Villages. They clean the place up for you and you know it. I take it you’ve never been down there when nobody knew you were coming.”

“Not since it got bad, John, no. I used to go down there when I was a kid, in the forties. It was different then.”

“Everything was different then.” John lit another cigarette. “Right now, what you’ve got down there is a lot of prostitution. On the side streets, you’ve got a lot of child prostitution—”

“On Tom’s side street? On Amora?”

“No. Father, on Amora there isn’t much of anything but Damien House. The place is abandoned. I’m talking farther up, closer to civilization. If you got up there and off to the side, you find a lot of girls, eight and ten years old, walking the streets. You also find a lot of movie houses, little hole-in-the-wall places, with discreet little signs—”

“Kiddie porn?”

“Yes, of course. Do you know a man named Pat Mallory?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line, cough, wheeze, rumble. The rumble was half a laugh.

“Big man,” Riley said, “really massive. Shaggy hair. Very Irish in the face. Has an attitude.”

“He’s chief of Homicide for the City of New Haven.”

“Good Lord.”

“He’s been very helpful to us here on one or two occasions, Father. There always seems to be someone up here with a son in trouble or a daughter on drugs. Of course we don’t get much homicide among the parishioners—”

“—Of course not—” Dry.

“—but he has influence and he uses it for us when he can. A couple of months ago he took me out to dinner.”

“Did you ask him if he still goes to Mass?”

“No, Father, I didn’t.” John took another drag on his cigarette, put it down in the ashtray, rubbed his forehead. Did Riley really expect him to have asked something like that? It was hard to tell. “Actually, Father, the conversation was on somewhat more mundane matters. The police had just recovered a missing person for us—for a parishioner out in Dellford Heights, to be exact. It was his daughter—the parishioner’s, I mean. She was nine. They found her on one of those side streets I was telling you about, off Congress. She was—”

“I can guess.”

“They found her fast, Father. Fortunately they found her before much damage could be done. Unfortunately, since it was before much damage could be done, the girl didn’t really know anything about the operations down there. And when Mr. Mallory bought me dinner, he said something—something I kept thinking about the whole time Tom was here this morning—and—”

“What?”

“It’s hard to put into words.” Actually, it wasn’t hard to put into words at all. It was hard to think about. John took another drag, tapped another ash, walked over to his window, and looked outside. The sky was darker now than it had been when he first came in, and there was something coming down out of it, neither rain nor snow. He turned his back to the glass and sat down on the windowsill.

“According to Pat Mallory,” he said carefully, “there’s a ring operating in this city, selling very young boys to rich older men for sex—”

“Boys?”

“That’s what I said, yes. Apparently girls aren’t that big a draw—I’m sorry about this, Father, but I’m trying to repeat what I heard as accurately as I can. Anyway, the big money is in boys, specifically boys between the ages of eight and twelve. Somewhere in this city, somebody has an entire stable of them, a kind of kiddie call-boy service, specifically for establishment types with thick wallets. Every once in a while the police would find one of these boys, all dressed up in designer clothes, usually dead of a drug overdose. They have always been white. They have more often than not been blond. They have always been—delicate.”

“Did Tom Burne find a few of these boys, too?”

“No, Father, he didn’t. According to Pat Mallory, Father whoever’s operating this service must have connections somewhere, in City Hall, at Yale, somewhere, because no matter what has surfaced, no matter what evidence we find, no matter what bodies show up, we never get close to the people who are running it, and we never get any real publicity. It’s not only been very quiet, it’s been invulnerable.”

“All right.”

“Well, Father, a couple of weeks ago, something very strange began to happen. A number of these boys began to turn up dead, not from drug overdoses but from gunshot wounds to the back of the head—Tom Burne called them ‘gangland-execution’ style killings. He said that the word out on the street, what his kids have been telling him, is that these executions were warnings. What he’s heard is that there’s a boy out there, named Charlie Burton, who used to be part of this stable—”

“Used to be?”

“Yes, Father. Used to be. That’s the point. What ordinarily happens in this situation is that, when a boy reaches the end of his usefulness—”

“Oh, Lord Jesus
Christ.
”

“Yes, Father, I know. It’s hard. But you have to listen to this. When a boy reaches the end of his usefulness, he’s gotten rid of—another drug overdose, a nice jump in the river—”

“They kill them
all
?”

“Tom says they have to. The boys know—things. Who sold them, for one thing. Who bought them, for another. So the boys are gotten rid of. But this one wasn’t. He just—disappeared.”

“Right,” Riley said. “So. These killings are supposed to—what?”

“Warn him off telling anyone what happened to him. And especially who did it to him.”

“Right,” Riley said again. His wheeze now was mostly indignation. John found himself thinking how odd it was that Riley’s emphysema could almost always be cured, momentarily, by the rites of righteousness. He got off the windowsill, went back to his desk, and sat down again. His cigarettes were still lying right out there in the open, but he didn’t take one. He was suddenly feeling much more relaxed. Whatever other problems he had, at least he didn’t have a problem with his bishop. Monaghan Riley wasn’t one of those new clerics who “understood” everything and everyone, who only half believed in sin, if that. Monaghan Riley knew sin when he saw it and knew he didn’t like it. He would have made an excellent fire-and-brimstone preacher.

“Listen,” John said, into Riley’s wheeze. “The thing is, these killings have not been quiet. They couldn’t be. They were—”

“Supposed to be public service announcements, so to speak.”

“Exactly. They haven’t got the play you’d have expected, because we’ve had other things going on—”

“Women being killed.”

“Yes, women being killed. But then there’s the problem that the boys are prostitutes. The papers shy away from it. Lower-class crime. Still, they haven’t been quiet and they have been murders of children. Tom Burne says the case is going to have to be solved one way or the other, or Dan Murphy’s going to end up looking bad. And if Dan Murphy ends up looking bad, he’s the kind of man who’d make sure to make the police department look worse.”

“So?”

“So Tom thinks that’s what this is all about. Not an investigation into possible child abuse at Damien House, but an attempt to set him up to take the fall for the boys—”

“For the
killings
? Tom
Burne
?”

“Father, please, listen. You remember I told you about that missing person case, and about Pat Mallory taking me to dinner?”

“Yes. Yes, of course I do.”

“Well, that’s the thing, you see. When Pat took me to dinner, he said something I forgot about for a long time, but when Tom was here I remembered it. Pat said that they found her too easily—the girl, I mean. They found her too fast. They should have had to make a search. Instead, they just found her wandering around. It was as if whoever took her had been made to feel they’d made a mistake, and she’d been dumped where she could be found. And Pat said there was only one way that could have happened, and that was if these people had someone inside the police department, or someone connected to the police department, who was connected seriously with—”

“Stop,” Riley said. The wheeze was entirely gone. John listened carefully but could detect no sign of it. With the wheeze gone, Monaghan Riley sounded like a much younger man.

“Pat Mallory,” Riley said, “is the man working on these murders, right now?”