In God's House (10 page)

Joe Rossi had amassed more political power than anyone in Thiberville, maybe as much as anyone in the state. His meaty hands were on everything. His days began in the dark when he had coffee with his lawyer friend Jonathan Bendel in Bendel’s mansion. It was in Bendel’s kitchen, an hour after he woke, that the rotund Rossi routinely cheated on the diet he vowed to begin every day. Rossi required little sleep. His days always started early and his evenings ended late as he worked the phones in the
run-down
kitchen of his own beat-up home, eating hot doughnuts delivered by a police cruiser, and chewing the fat with a wide array of contacts.

Born to a short-order waitress and a roughneck in the east Texas oilfield, he had gained a degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M and migrated to south Louisiana to strike it rich in the oil and gas play unfolding there in the fifties. He soon learned that everything that was worth anything in Louisiana, including oil and gas concessions, was controlled by the corrupt politics for which the state was famous. He applied himself and soon mastered the art of politics, and his influence and affluence grew.

His oil royalty checks, that he called “post office money”, were substantial, but his lifestyle was simple, deceptive. He drove used Lincoln Town Cars and still lived in the small house he’d bought when he sold his first oil deal. Sometimes in winter he walked with a cane to compensate for a bad knee that was the result of a
beating he’d received in a teenage gang war. Though he was always garrulous, sometimes outrageous in his personal demeanor, he was a private person. No one knew of the generous scholarships he’d established at Texas colleges for kids whose financial circumstances were much as his had been when a local oilman had paid his way to college.

As a child, he had realized how powerless his family was and for the rest of his life he pursued power, valued power above everything. His high-school sweetheart would not wait for him to finish college, and after she married another man, Joe Rossi had only one love left, a love he remained loyal to – power.

It was evening before Joe Rossi spoke with his answering service and learned that Monsignor Moroux had placed two calls to him. He called Moroux, who asked him for a morning meeting. Rossi insisted their meeting take place immediately.

As Rossi entered the Old Bishop’s House, he was wearing house slippers, stained sweat pants and a light blue oxford cloth shirt. Walking straight to the kitchen, he asked loudly, “You got anything to eat?”

Even though Moroux had been around the bombastic Rossi before, he was knocked off balance. The monsignor had a business discussion in mind and already the upper half of Joe Rossi’s generous torso had disappeared into his refrigerator.

“This religion ain’t got no class in this country, Padre.” The grammar was suspiciously unnatural and the voice sounded funny echoing off the inside walls of the refrigerator.

“Ya go to a priest’s house in the old country and ya find pasta piled everywhere… fruit, bread, vino. You got some vino, right, Padre? Hell, we can get it out the cathedral, right? What is it you drink on the altar? Should be Italian vino. When I was an altar boy in Port Arthur, we had an old Italian priest who said that Mass don’t count, God don’t listen, if it’s not Italian wine. He said ya can’t use French wine ’cause all the French are going to hell.”

Monsignor Moroux knew Rossi had been educated in College
Station, Texas, had a master’s degree from the prestigious Texas A&M University. The longshoreman’s language, the
mispronunciation
of the simplest words, and the ruffian, uncouth persona Rossi often affected, amused Moroux. He knew it was only an act, maybe something Rossi believed would cause people to underestimate him. But no one who knew Rossi would ever take him lightly.

Rossi loaded a plate with ham, a piece of melon, some cheese, a handful of crackers, a large dill pickle, and an orange. As he filled himself a glass from a large jug of wine, he became calm enough for Monsignor Moroux to brief him. He listened intently, then wiped his brow and face with a paper napkin as if he were sweating.

“Hell, Father, you telling me the insurance companies already coughed up over three and a half mill? I bet that came up about as easy as a fur ball. They only did it because they thought they were buying the whole poker hand. They weren’t thinking this punk lawyer Brent Thomas was gonna raise the bet. It might take surgery to get the rest of the money out of these bloodsuckers. There’s only one lawyer around here can deal with those Noo Awlins insurance lawyers.”

Instead of giving Monsignor Moroux the name of the lawyer, Rossi piled cheese and ham onto a cracker and chewed it up, chasing it with wine. “Ya know, a Noo Awlins lawyer is a different kind of deal than the lawyers we have around here. Dealing with ’em is like dealing with a Noo Yawker whose got manners. Half of ’em in Noo Awlins are homosexual or bisexual too in my opinion, real dandy types. And mean – meaner than a chained dog. And ya know, a chained dog will do just ’bout any damned thing. If things get bad enough, a chained dog will even hang itself without leaving the ground. Those boys in Noo Awlins are like that. But they got nice clothes, nice manners, even if they got no morals.”

Monsignor Moroux smiled tightly. “We’re not talking about morals, are we? We’re talking about law.”

Moroux shifted uncomfortably in the chair. He knew Joe
Rossi’s close tie to the bishop was a money connection. In fund drives, Rossi raised more money than the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Rossi relished the competition, calling it “oil money versus old money”. But this was not a money problem, not yet.

“And who would you recommend, Joe?”

“Jonathan Bendel. Bendel is the only one I’d say to get. He’s my best friend. Lots of people say bad things ’bout Bendel, but the two disbarment proceedings were against his law partners, not him. He married three times. The last time when he was caught with a mistress, he married the mistress. That’s ’bout as honorable as a lawyer can be around here.”

“Is he Catholic?” the monsignor asked.

“Father, you need a good lawyer. Not a good Catholic.”

“I don’t know, Joe.”

Rossi leaned across the table. “Bendel’s a warrior. Nobody ever gave Jon nothing. He come into Thiberville hitchhiking. Today he’s got the biggest firm that represents everybody who’s anybody. He’s a damned warrior, I tell ya… and under pressure he’s as cool as the other side of the pillow.”

Moroux shrugged.

Rossi put his arms up as if a gun were on him. “Hey, Father, the point is this – if you want to hear the point. Jon Bendel knows the game. All law is anymore is a game. Trick or truth.”

Moroux sat in silence, wishing he had another option, and Rossi continued, “Ya want me to call Bendel? We could eat shrimp. Together. Tonight. My treat.” Rossi bit into a slice of cantaloupe and wiped the juice from his chin with the back of his hand. “A friend of mine just opened a new seafood place.”

“No. I’ll put in a call to Bendel tomorrow.”

“Maybe we oughta start picking up some money. Second collections. Tell ’em it’s for some cursed country. We could do some special Masses, High Masses with incense. Give ’em the smells and bells like the old days.”

“I know you’re joking, Joe. Holy Mother Church may make her share of mistakes, but she does not deal in that kind of chicanery.”

“Joking? Who’s joking here, Father? We got the best business on earth, the best source of cash there ever was. And it’s tax free. Who’s joking? Ya gotta be kidding me, Father? I ain’t joking about nothing here. We’re selling salvation. Everybody’s buying that. And we buy back guilt at discount. Everybody’s selling that. We own the franchise on forgiveness. Who’s joking?”

Rossi laughed heartily. Moroux remained stone-faced.

Rossi continued, “I think we’re gonna need to spend some of our own money here. Insurance ain’t gonna pick up the ticket for Bendel and other costs you’re gonna have. We can pick up some new money, Father. We just gotta call on some heavy hitters, Monsignor, people who have a guilt load. Lots of people around here owe me something, but all of ’em owe God something.”

Moroux lit a cigarette and sipped a soda he’d pulled from the refrigerator.

“You know Manning Giroud, Father? The one they call Tee-Man? He’s flush and feeling bad. He just had another friction fire.”

“Friction fire?”

“Yeah. Ya know. When a big mortgage payment starts rubbing up against an empty bank account there’s friction. Throws a spark. Burns the building to the ground. Then the insurance money comes. It’s his third friction fire. I can get maybe
twenty-five
or fifty K outta him myself. Tee-Man Giroud don’t want to go to hell.”

Moroux smiled and shook his head. Sometimes he had to admit Rossi could be funny.

Rossi lowered his voice and upgraded his grammar. “Now, Father, I wanta be in close on this one all the way. This could get serious. Gotta keep a lid on it, keep it in the pot, cook it down. I wanta stay in the kitchen till we burn it off.”

Moroux nodded.

Rossi continued, “Look, I’ll see that Jon Bendel is waiting for your call in the morning. That’s no problem. But this thing… this thing you talked about tonight. It can be big problems. You did a
good thing the way you put a lid on it last time. We can’t let da lid come off now that the fire got turned up again.”

Moroux nodded. He was surprised to feel comfort in this unholy alliance with Rossi.

“When we get the lid screwed down tight on da pot, then, Father, we got to look at a way to put out this fire for good, the thing that’s causing all these problems. Capiche?”

Moroux reached for another cigarette. Rossi too grabbed one from the pack.

“This defective priest? You got him on ice somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“You keep that priest on ice, Father. He’s gotta disappear. For good.” As he stood to leave, Rossi said, “And, Father, you got any more priests round here having sex with children, I don’t want to know about it. But you better get their sorry asses as far from this place as possible, and do it tomorrow.”

Jonathan Bendel charmed the cynical Monsignor Moroux.

Joe Rossi accompanied Moroux to Bendel's law office and walked him through the sprawling, single-story structure that had the white walls and fashionable paintings of a contemporary art gallery. A skylight crowned the conference room where Bendel received Moroux. Its walls were crowded with framed photographs of Jonathan Bendel standing alongside Republican presidents and Democratic governors. Those political photographs had cost Jon Bendel more than all the art in the building. Rossi made the introductions and left.

Monsignor Moroux studied Bendel, a short stocky man with a shock of gray hair. He listened as Jon Bendel made small talk and made the small talk seem interesting. Bendel's calmness and confidence was contagious, his modulated voice soothing.

“Monsignor, it might be of interest to you that I am not a Catholic,” Jon Bendel said.

“Mr. Bendel, if a requirement for working for our diocese was that one be a true Catholic, some of our priests might be disqualified.” The two of them shared a slight laugh.

Moroux told Bendel the truth about the first six cases, the Halloween Settlement, and the new cases Brent Thomas had mentioned on the eve of Mardi Gras, but he did not tell Bendel the whole truth. As Bendel walked the monsignor to the entrance where Rossi was waiting, he placed his hand on the priest's
shoulder. “Send over all the documents. I will see if I can put this matter to bed.”

When Brent Thomas returned to his law office in Bayou Saint John after lunch, he was handed a phone message slip with Jon Bendel's name on it. He barricaded himself in his office and dialed the number. He had never spoken to Bendel, never before played at Bendel's level.

“Mr. Bendel, Brent Thomas.” Brent waited for Bendel to say, “Please call me Jon,” but he did not.

“I represent the Diocese of Thiberville, Brent. Do you have the eleven petitions prepared?”

“Yes, sir.” Thomas grimaced at the sound of his voice, addressing Bendel this way. Bendel called him “Brent” and he called Bendel “sir”. It was off to a bad start.

“I want the petitions in my office today. I will see that they are filed and sealed in the Bayou Saint John courthouse.”

“I can come to see you in an hour.”

“I don't have time to see you, Brent. Just drop everything off with our receptionist in a sealed envelope with my name on it.”

“Fine. I can do that.”

“And I want you to understand you will not have any more contact with Monsignor Moroux or with anyone in the diocese again. Everything will be handled by me.”

“I understand.”

“Brent, we're both good lawyers and we both know there were fatal flaws in the first set of cases you guys settled last Halloween. These same flaws will exist in these new cases. Had I been involved originally as counsel for the diocese, the settlements would not have happened. Your clients would have received nothing. We both know it is morally wrong to attempt to extort money this way from the Catholic Church for the actions of some demented
man they had no control over. Legally, you've got real problems, Brent. Morally, you've got bigger problems. The diocese has done nothing wrong. They have no liability to your clients, and the priest has no assets. In a word, you have nothing.”

Brent Thomas was frozen by fear. He missed Ricardo Ponce. It might have been a mistake to cut Ponce out of these cases.

Bendel continued in his mesmerizing voice, “You've got big problems and we both know what they are.”

All afternoon, through the night, into the dawn on Saturday, Brent Thomas obsessed over the closing comments of Bendel, wondering what the fatal flaw in his lawsuits was, debating whether he should again call in Ricardo Ponce. Bendel had done more than plant a seed of doubt in the mind of the young, inexperienced lawyer. He had created pervasive fear, a fear of losing that rattled around so loudly inside his head that he worried that others could hear it. Brent Thomas was a man who had a deadly fear of looking bad in anyone's eyes, a man who combed and re-combed his hair five or six times before leaving the house.

Saturday morning, Jon Bendel's pilot flew him to Lakefront Airport in New Orleans. Thomas Quinlan had again hastily arranged a Saturday conference of all insurance counsel. The lawyers who awaited Bendel's arrival at the Quinlan firm well remembered the bad news they had received the last time they convened there on a Saturday.

When Bendel broke the news that there were eleven new cases filed against the diocese, the insurance lawyers went off like Roman candles. All of them were talking at once, stepping on each other's sentences, indignantly insisting that they had received assurances on the day of the Halloween Settlement that there were no other claims outstanding.

It was a rough meeting. At its conclusion, it appeared to Bendel that the diocesan insurers were on the verge of revolt, of assuming an adversarial posture wherein they would allege defenses under the language of the insurance policies in an effort to escape further financial liability.

The price of poker had almost doubled in a matter of months and the obvious worry was that it would continue to escalate. How many more victims could there be? How much more could this cost? There were no answers.

Bendel was the picture of professionalism, remaining unemotional, self-confident, and extremely smooth throughout the meeting. He managed to calm everyone down and the meeting ended with an agreement that all of the lawyers would look over the insurance policies again and stay in touch while Bendel devised a stall tactic to slow the claim train down. The one thing all the lawyers agreed on was that it was in the best interest of everyone that these new lawsuits remain secret until a decision could be made by all parties about how to handle them.

Bendel made his way to his law firm's French Quarter apartment. He called his wife to say he had to stay in the city until Monday, and then he called Tammy Baldwin, a former secretary to a Louisiana governor, who was classified as a consultant on Bendel's law office payroll. Through all of his marriages, Bendel had never been without a mistress. Tammy Baldwin had the most time in grade and rank, having been his companion for five years whenever he was away from Thiberville.

Tammy and Jon spent most of the afternoon and night in bed. A hard rain came and went. Late that night, music drifted up from a nearby bar as Jon and Tammy stood on the balcony of the apartment on Jackson Square. Dressed in earrings and Bendel's starched shirt, Tammy was leaning her back against a wrought-iron railing.

“What are you here for now, working on a weekend?” she asked.

“Some cases involving serious sexual dysfunction.”

“Are you a lawyer in these sexual dysfunction cases, honey, or an expert witness?”

They laughed. Bendel said, “There are some kinds of sexual dysfunction that are widely accepted, practiced everywhere, dear, and there are other things that are taboo.”

“Like what we do? Taboo?”

“What we do is more like voodoo.”

From Mardi Gras to hurricane season, things were quiet. Five months later, the secret was still holding. Bendel was stalling Brent Thomas. Brent had trouble even getting a phone call through to Bendel during those months, but he bided his time, deciding not to tell Ricardo Ponce anything about the new cases. He was counting on an announcement from Jonathan Bendel that the settlement documents and checks were ready, at which point he would make a fee of over two million dollars and keep it all for himself. Ponce was sailing off Florida in his new forty-one-foot Morgan, anchoring in Bahamian coves, casting about the Keys, chasing women.

The insurance company lawyers were being a lot tougher this time around, but Jon Bendel was cut from the same cloth as Robert Blassingame, lead counsel for the insurance interests. They had known each other for years and were going to find a way to buy these cases just as the first ones had been bought. Every day that passed without Brent Thomas announcing a new claim led them to believe they were reaching what they referred to as the bottom of the barrel.

Jon Bendel had been in New Orleans so often that Tammy Baldwin was able to redecorate the law firm's flat. They had all but set up house together, and their business arrangement was starting to feel like something else. He had a history of marrying his mistresses, and then taking another in their place, and it seemed history was about to repeat itself.

August crawled onto the coast of Louisiana. Tropical storms
dumped rivers of rain. There were warnings of a big storm to come, a category four or five hurricane, but there were always warnings of big storms to come.