Monday 12:01 P.M.
A commotion at the entrance to the room drew their attention. As the noon hour had approached, the room had begun to fill. None of the new patrons had evinced an interest in them. Tresca, trailed by Melanie the waitress, rushed into the room. He dumped his rain slicker onto the end of the last empty booth on the far side of the room. Then he walked up to Turner and his group and pointed at the detective and said, “We need to talk.” No explanation or apology for his late arrival, barely a glance at the others.
Tresca wore a black sweater vest over a gray long-sleeve shirt, and black jeans.
Graffius said, “Hello, Josh.”
Tresca gave him a half-second nod then said, “I don’t have much time.” He turned to Melanie who had hovered. “Coffee. Black.” He pointed to the booth where he’d thrown his slicker. “Over there.” Without waiting to see if Turner followed, he marched to the booth.
“Charming as ever,” Graffius said.
Turner stood up. “He was closest to the dead man.”
He walked over. The booth was two high-backed old church pews, their short ends flush against the wall. This table top was stained Formica. The shaded lamp attached to the wall illumined a painting of a woodland waterfall. Turner tucked the newly acquired briefcase behind his legs under the pew.
Without preamble, Tresca began, “Those two are losers. Demarco won’t be a priest in a year and Graffius will probably be dead in a year.”
“That’s harsh.” Turner thought Tresca was talking unnaturally fast, but perhaps that was his way. He seemed hunched over enough to be thirty years older than he was. Every minute or so, a muscle under his left eye twitched. He thought the man might be ready for a breakdown.
The priest said, “I’ve faced a lot of realities in my life. That’s just a minor couple of them.”
Turner asked, “Who called you Saturday night at the condo?”
Melanie brought coffee and left. Tresca ignored his.
“Detective, how about for now you let me tell this my way.”
Turner gave him a brief nod but thought, if I don’t outright arrest your ass after this, you’ll be lucky.
Tresca did a three hundred sixty degree turn around the café and eyed each of the patrons suspiciously. He hunched forward. Did he think the church had enough minions to spy on him in every café in the city? Was his paranoia justified? Would he really lose that much if the church found out what he was doing? Then again his lover was dead.
“The Cardinal and the Abbot. Both hated Timothy.”
“I thought he worked for them.”
“He did. And he had the goods on both of them.”
“What kind of goods?”
“Well, the Sacred Heart of Bleeding Jesus Order is going broke. It’s the Abbot’s fault.”
“How so?”
“He’s been skimming. He’s been getting them into bad investments. When the stock market crashed the Order lost even bigger.”
“What’s he got on the Cardinal?”
“The Cardinal was in deep with covering up molestations in his last diocese.”
“We checked that. The cops said they had nothing on that.”
“No, no. When he was a monsignor. He was the third in command, but he was the one directly involved with accused priests. This was all before it made national headlines. He’s the one who got them plane tickets out of town. He’s the one who got them reassigned around this country or on continents overseas. It’s a very big Order. There’s lots of places to send people. You want a priest who’s embarrassed the Order out of the way, send him to Mumbai where the Order has seventeen parishes, runs schools, and orphanages. He mostly got away with it because he was in the Order, not officially part of an archdiocese. It was a very clever cover-up scheme. Timothy found all the records of the priests and the victims.”
“Why didn’t they just transfer Timothy halfway around the planet?”
“They couldn’t. He was controlling them. He was controlling any number of archdioceses and the Order. Timothy had real power, and they were afraid of him.”
“Did he keep any kind of records on his investigations?”
“He said he did. I never saw any. I didn’t have a key to his room at the Abbey. We kept our work lives separate.”
“You were his lover, didn’t he confide in you?”
Turner didn’t tell him he may have the very records he was talking about. Nor that he found it suspicious that Tresca didn’t know Kappel kept records.
“He never got transferred. He always got his way.”
“Got his way about what?”
“We were living together.”
“How’d you guys wind up in the condo?”
“That was Timothy again. He knew how to do deals. He knew the guys who lived there before us. He performed services for them.”
“Priestly or sexual?”
“Does it matter? They’re dead. They couldn’t have killed him.”
“Was the place where we found the body familiar to you or your lover?”
Tresca looked away. Turner suspected a lie for sure was coming.
“Never been there.”
“Had Timothy?”
“I don’t know.”
“He never mentioned it?”
“No.”
“The church owns the land.”
Tresca shrugged.
“Why didn’t the powers that be stop him doing investigations?”
“They couldn’t. Partly he was good. Partly he did help them out and got rid of thorns in their side. Partly he had the goods on them. He was a sort of out in the open double agent.”
“A dangerous game.”
“Up until this weekend he was winning.”
“Besides the Abbot and the Cardinal, who would want to kill him?”
“I don’t know enough about his investigations to say who would be angry enough to kill him.”
“He called you several times that evening. The calls lasted only a minute. What were they about?”
“Just routine schedule checks.” Tresca’s eyes looked away. Turner wondered if the bishop knew he was such an incompetent liar.
“Did he sound worried?”
“No. You have the records from his phone?”
“Yes. Is that a problem?”
Tresca gulped coffee. “Uh… No.”
“Why were you wearing your cassock Saturday night?”
“I’d just come from an official function. I’m stuck attending far more than I care to.”
Turner wasn’t sure he believed much of what he was being told. It just all seemed so smooth, so pat, almost rehearsed, certainly not spontaneous. He switched tacks. “We know he paid escorts. That can be dangerous.”
Tresca turned very red. He hung his head and lowered his voice. “We loved each other for years. I wasn’t perfect. Neither was he.” He looked at Turner. “For however smart he was, Timothy could be stupid about things, maybe naïve is a better word.”
“How so?”
“Say he’d be in a restaurant, and he thought the waiter was cute. He’d go back several times. Or he’d wait for an opening the first time, and he’d offer the guy money.”
“He didn’t visit web sites?”
“No. He liked the danger of personal contact. He said it gave him a rush to approach a stranger.”
“Wasn’t there a risk they might be hostile straight guys, or at the least that he’d get thrown out of a restaurant or attacked?”
“He never got thrown out, but there was one time at The Proletarian Workers Sandwich Works on Belmont. He gave a guy a hundred dollar tip and told him there was a lot more where that came from. Guy’s name was Hal. He got really angry and tossed his money back at him. Timothy told me about it. He found it exciting. I thought it was embarrassing. It should have been embarrassing. I told him to be more careful. You have to be careful with straight guys. Even in this day and age, they can get very angry, very quickly.” He smiled.
“What?” Turner asked.
“Have you met his brother, Terry?”
“No.”
“Very straight, but back in the seminary he’d beat off for us guys. He’d never let us touch him. He just liked putting on a show. Very friendly, but kind of frigid.”
“Did you ever meet any of the other members of his family?”
“No.”
“Could one of the straight guys he tried to pick up have been angry enough to attack him?”
“I don’t know.”
He and Fenwick would have to visit Hal.
“But him using escorts didn’t make you angry?”
“Why should it?”
“You were living together.”
“We’d arranged things. He had different needs than I did.”
Tresca hunched closer to his coffee cup, glanced at the other table with Turner’s earlier companions. “You can’t trust anybody.” Tresca sipped his coffee.
“Why did he let himself be appointed to all these controversial positions?”
“He wanted to be. He loved being in the thick of intrigue and scandal. Timothy was the kind of man who loved to debate. He loved discussing obscure things such as Roman Canon Law in Reformation England. He could go on about the philosophical implications of liturgical movements and rulings from the fifteenth century.”
“He would have been killed over canon law?” Turner asked.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Tresca said.
“Why are you telling me all this?” Turner asked.
“Because I loved him and somebody killed him. Whoever did it has to pay.”
Turner was still having trouble believing the guy.
“Where were you at the time of the murder?”
A train rumbled into the station. The noise level silenced them. Tresca began to stand up.
“Who called you at the condo?”
“I must leave. Now. Find who killed my lover.”
Turner could have physically stopped him, but to what purpose? Tresca had come without a lawyer, but had implicated other people. The cleric rushed out.
A moment later Melanie arrived with Tresca’s bill. Turner handed her a five and told her to keep the change. He stopped at the table where the other three sat.
Ian raised an eyebrow. “Anything helpful?”
“Hard to tell.”
Graffius slapped a hand onto the table. A bit of coffee sloshed out of his cup. His mashed a napkin in his trembling hand and tried to mop up the spill. Demarco took the napkin and wiped up.
“Thank you,” Graffius said to the younger man. He began to rock in his chair and pointed a shaking finger at Turner. “Do not believe a thing that lying son of a bitch told you.”
Demarco held the old priest’s hand until the rocking and shaking stopped.
Turner said, “Father Graffius, I wish you well. If there is ever something I can do for you, call me.” He took out his palm size notebook and wrote down his number and gave it to Graffius.
“Thank you, young man.”
Turner reiterated how much he appreciated their help and left.