In God's House (3 page)

Before leaving Thiberville for New Orleans airport, I stopped in at the office of the district attorney, Sean Robinette, for the appointment he had insisted on having with the lawyer representing the priest. Sean and I were friends. He was older by about twenty years and we worked on opposite sides of the street, but we got on well. He was the best poker player I knew. Older lawyers said before he became DA, he supported himself with
all-day
card games in the law library of his office.

When I walked into his office, he was feeding the fish in the large aquariums that lined a wall of the richly paneled room. I liked it that he was feeding the fish. Over the years I had learned that Sean Robinette busied himself with the fish tanks when he was unsure of his position in a case.

Sean greeted me with a scowl. “So, Bishop Reynolds sent you, Ren. Damn! Bad break. I was kind of hoping for—”

“Hoping for what?”

“Ah, ya know, Ren, someone I can reason with. You’re the last guy they should have hired. Your balls are bigger than your brains.”

I said nothing.

Sean smiled and shook his head side to side. “Okay, whatta ya want me to say? If you don’t have fifty or sixty life sentences in your pocket, go back where you came from.”

Sean walked to his desk and touched a thick stack of files that
looked pretty much like the material I had just picked up from Monsignor Moroux at the chancery.
The monsignor is wrong,
I
thought
. There’s more than one set of these files in Thiberville
.

“I got these files from Brent Thomas, a plaintiff lawyer in Bayou Saint John who has ten civil cases pending. I also have the psychological work-ups done by a Doctor Kennison for six kids that Brent Thomas got settlements for last year, as well as the ten cases he has pending. Thomas’s settlements on the first six cases were sealed, but it’s illegal to withhold evidence of crimes. I got more detailed information on one case from Kane Chaisson, who represents a boy called Rachou – a long, sworn affidavit. Chaisson threatened me, said he’d call a press conference if this priest was not indicted and in jail awaiting trial soon. I told Kane to kiss my ass.”

I laughed. “Bet he liked that.”

“Hell, he’s run against me for this job twice, spent a fortune on those campaigns. Bastard would rather embarrass me than get another wife – and he’s had more wives than I can count. You know we’ve got no use for each other.”

“Look, Sean, deal is… I need some time,” I said.

“Yeah, that right? Everybody needs something, but me. I have seventeen victims – little kids, victims of this priest, Father Dubois. Seventeen witnesses who’re gonna lock your client up for life. Every time that priest raped a kid under twelve, he was drawing into a full house, the big house, mandatory life, no parole or probation. You need a calculator to count the life sentences he’s facing.”

“I really need some time, Sean.”

“Ren, if I gave you till hell freezes over, you’d never come up with a defense for him.”

“Maybe there’s a valid legal insanity plea—”

Sean cut me off. “For the priest or for you? You’re crazy to defend this sick son-of-a-bitch.”

“Look, Sean—”

“You gonna file an insanity plea? You know our insanity
statutes and jurisprudence are modeled on the English McNaughton Rule – essentially the only question for the court to address is ‘Did the defendant know the difference between right and wrong at the time he committed the offense or offenses?’ You gonna argue that a Catholic priest who preached about right and wrong every Sunday from the pulpit didn’t know the difference between right and wrong when he sodomized little boys? Fuck me, Renon. That’s bullshit and we both know it.”

“Sean, look, wait a minute—”

“There’s no room to negotiate. When the smoke clears, I think Father Francis Dubois may prove to be the worst child molester in the history of this state. He may be one of the biggest pied pipers in the country. And I’m gonna make him the most decorated piece of shit in the history of this legal jurisdiction.”

Robinette walked over to one of the aquariums and began to feed the fish again.

I took my leave, trying to figure out why Sean was feeding his fish, what it was about this case that made him uneasy. The conclusion I reached was that probably the parents of the children were resistant to the idea of their sons testifying in a public criminal trial, which would mean all he had was stacks of paper, no live witnesses to put on the stand in a court trial.

I tried to work with Doctor Kennison’s psychological files on the child victims as soon as the plane took off from New Orleans. The child psychologist’s work was detailed. Soon the seat next to me was littered with folders, for I opened one after another, then closed them almost as quickly. I couldn’t bear to read the contents of the dossiers. I didn’t think anyone could stomach reading the material.

There was a section in each boy’s file detailing different kinds of sexual interaction between the priest and the boy,
events bearing descriptive titles identifying the location where the criminal acts occurred as well as defining what the criminal acts were:

I couldn’t finish reading the listing.
My children, my own children
, I thought.
My God, if this had happened to Sasha, Jake or Shelby
. My heart hurt and raced as adrenalin coursed through my veins, and my head ached, throbbed like the pain stabbing my stomach.
A priest, a fucking ordained Catholic priest, had done these things and this monster predator would be my client
.

There were pictures of the children in each file, 5x7 enlargements of school yearbook photographs. Looking at the pictures, I felt I could discern which children were photographed before being sexually abused by Father Dubois and which pictures were taken after the abuse began. Some of the children’s eyes were bright like the beautiful eyes of my little girl. In other pictures the children’s eyes were blank stares, the child appeared dead.

Through Doctor Kennison, these small voices told a huge story. The psychologist noted in his covering letter that: “All patients whose care is summarized live in a rural area. They were invited to become altar boys by a priest they called ‘Father Nicky’, a man who had been entertaining (seducing) them with magic shows and puppet plays since they were in kindergarten. They were targeted at age five, almost cultivated to be harvested at the time of their first communion.”

I read part of a transcript from a recorded interview with a child named Simeon: “Father Nicky always had guns at his house – his camp. He would point guns at us. He said shooting someone in the eye would kill them fast. It scared me.” The same child had talked about all the snakes at Father Nicky’s camp, how the priest was not afraid of snakes. And he said sometimes at the camp Father Nicky smelled.

Turning back to Doctor Kennison’s covering letter, I read: “An unusual aspect of the scenario that played out at the priest’s rectory or home, his fishing camp, and in motel rooms on trips, was the group nature of the sexual victimization. Every week night, Father Nicky had four or five boys stay with him. The ostensible reason was so their parents would not be inconvenienced bringing them to altar-boy practice at six o’clock the following morning. Apparently the trust the parents had in this priest was absolute. On these nights, as detailed in the case histories enclosed, the boys and the priest engaged in every conceivable sexual activity two males can engage in. ‘Vile depravity’ is too soft a phrase to describe the actions of this predator priest.”

A long time passed while I left the folders on the seat. The flight attendant had given me a couple of glasses of ice and a handful of tiny bottles of gin. For a time I stared straight ahead. If I turned at all, I’d see the photographs of the children. I knew there were other pictures. Something I saw in one of the files stated that “Father Nicky took pictures all the time, pictures that come out fast. We were naked as jay birds, but he didn’t care.”

I didn’t want to read any more. I didn’t want to know any more. Each of the boys recounted that Father Nicky had said he would have to kill their parents if they ever found out. I had been told by Monsignor Moroux that some of the boys’ fathers now wanted to kill not only the priest but the bishop as well.

The last page of one child’s file, a kid named Joey, contained this statement in the child’s own words: “Sometimes when we were finished with playing with ourselves and Father Nicky, he would bless us sometimes. One time he showed me a picture of
Jesus eating supper with some men. And he said this was how holy men loved each other. He called me his ‘holy boy’.”

When I put the files away and stared out the window into the black night, something happened that would stay with me for the rest of my life. I saw an image of myself in hell, my face framed in flames, fingers of fire catching my hair, my skin melting away from my skull, nothing but a deep darkness beyond the fire, an abyss never ending in its blackness.

I knew it was just a distorted likeness of my face in the curved aircraft window, my head engulfed by the reflection of the flame from my Zippo cigarette lighter. But it was such a powerful vision that I slowly closed the lighter without touching it to the tobacco. An imprint of the image seemed to burn through my retina into my brain, and there it remained.

Over the years, the image reappeared in other settings: in the glass china cabinet of a dining room when candles were lit on a child’s birthday cake, on the surface of a still lake near an Aztec ruin in central Mexico, and in the window of a chocolate shop in a Paris railway station.

In my nightmares, the sequence always opened with my
thirty-six
-year-old face on fire. Then my face would begin to age, morphing as it melted in the fire, slowly changing until I looked heavier, older, grayer. Ultimately, I appeared ancient, older than I imagined I would be at my death, and I was still on fire. In the nightmare, the fire never completely burned down and I never completely burned up.

For several hours, Sister Julianne pretended to work in her office in the chancery. Finally, sure that the building was empty and she was secure, she had descended the polished wooden stairs to the basement, navigating slowly through the darkness to the room that held the secret archives of the Diocese of Thiberville.

She sat alone at a long table, flashlight in hand, reading a file. It was hot and humid. She had taken a fifteen-mile bike ride in the country before going to the chancery that evening, and now her shorts and halter top stuck to her, and her sweaty palms made watermarks on the pages. She feared turning on the
air-conditioning
system because the chilling unit for the whole building was located outside Monsignor Moroux’s residence – the Old Bishop’s House that adjoined the chancery building – and it made a terrible noise, which would probably disturb Moroux and prompt him to investigate.

After Sister Julianne had been in the secret archives for an hour, she heard footsteps upstairs, heels hitting the hard floor of the marble hallway. She turned out the flashlight. Frozen in her chair, she listened intently. The sound of footsteps stopped. Above her in the bishop’s office, lights went on. The beam of light coming down the stairwell shone on her like a spotlight. Too terrified to move, the nun remained seated.

Heavy carpeting in the bishop’s office absorbed the footfall above her. She could not tell where the person was standing;
whether the person was moving or about to start down the stairs and discover her.

She decided to try and hide. As she got up, in slow motion, the chair made a slight scratching but nearly inaudible noise on the concrete floor. To her it sounded like the howl of a wild animal. She was sure she would be found and she knew she would never be able to explain what she was doing here. She had never been good at making up lies, and she knew no lie could cover or explain what she was doing in this file room well past midnight.

Leaving the files on the table, Sister Julianne crawled underneath the stairwell on her hands and knees. She was wringing wet, perspiration almost cascading from her face and dripping onto the floor. There was no sound above her, only the light shining into the secret archives. Time stopped.

“I know you are here somewhere,” the voice above her said.

Though the distance between the bishop’s office and the secret archives beneath it was short, she could not immediately recognize the voice.

“I know you are here somewhere!” came the voice again, more loudly this time.

She realized it was Monsignor Jean-Paul Moroux.

Above her hiding space, Monsignor Moroux opened and closed the drawers of a desk and then a credenza until he located what he was looking for – an unfinished wooden mask. “There you are. Found you.” With the mask tucked under his arm, he made his way toward the hallway.

The sound of footsteps hitting marble faded then stopped. The big door leading to the Old Bishop’s House slammed shut.

Flipping on the flashlight, Sister Julianne searched for the aluminum water bottle she always carried on her bike. It was under the table. She gulped water and considered abandoning her task. Her watch showed 2:15 a.m. She could be finished before the monsignor reappeared after morning Mass at 6:30 a.m.

By the time the first stream of sunlight reached into the stairwell from the windows in the bishop’s office, the basement table was covered with personnel folders. Sister Julianne hurriedly jammed them back into drawers, worrying that some were not properly placed by year or alphabetical order, and that some documents had not been properly re-fastened to the folders. She was flustered by the sight of the overflowing wastepaper basket, filled with copies that had been discarded when the copy machine had jammed during the night. Soon she could find herself trapped in the secret archives.

She stuffed her large camping backpack with the material she had copied in the night, scooped up the trash can and carried it up the stairs with her. Out in the dawn light, she threw the whole can into a large garbage dumpster behind the chancery. Backpack over her shoulders, she raced away on her bike, her heart pounding.