Gregor Demarkian had never wanted to be a private detective. Even being a consultant had, at the beginning, seemed like more of a commitment than he would be able to handle. These days, he didn't know what to call himself. He still wasn't set up the way a business should be, even though what he did was certainly a kind of business. Bennis had tried to show him how to use Quicken to keep books and prepare bills to be sent when his work was finished. He had listened politely to everything she had had to say and then gone back to playing Free Cell as soon as she was out of the room. Even Tibor was better at this sort of thing than he was. Bennis had shown him how to keep books for the church, and he had followed directions and kept them. Gregor hated to admit it, but he would rather not be paid at all than go through the complicated procedure of sending bills and keeping records for tax purposes. He reminded himself, often, that he had more than enough money for his needs and no desires that could be called particularly expensive. He would have liked to have bought a coffee machine, but the fact that he hadn't had nothing to do with what one cost. It was more a matter of not being able to understand the choices, and being afraid that if he bought the wrong one, he'd be condemned to drinking cappuccino forever.
Today it was the day before Valentine's Day, and he had a list of things to do. At the top of it was buying a card and a big, gaudy box of chocolates for Bennis. Bennis liked boxes with ribbons and bows on them, as ridiculously ostentatious as possible. Bennis was out. If he got going fairly soon, he ought to be able to do some shopping without her knowing
about it and without Garry Mansfield and Lou Emiliani jumping down his throat, hot on the heels of a new theory. Bennis was always nudging him to get a cell phone, but Gregor knew better. A cell phone meant he would never be left in peace.
Out on Cavanaugh Street, Donna Moradanyan had outdone herself. Her own houseâthe new town house she and Russ had renovated last summerâlooked like it had been turned to silk. Red and white silk ribbons covered every inch of the facade, dotted here and there with metallic glittered hearts. In fact, metallic glittered hearts seemed to be what she was most committed to, this particular holiday season. There were a dozen or more on the front of Holy Trinity Church, and even more than that around Lida Arkmanian's front door. Gregor's own house had been decorated weeks ago. Donna always did this one first, because it was where she had started to do them in the first place, all those years ago, when they had all just met.
Bennis was not only out, she was at a local writers' conference, teaching a seminar on How to Make Fantasy Reality. Her notes were taped all over her refrigerator, which seemed to exist for no other reason than to hold notes. Lord only knew there was never any food in it, and when there was it tended to have grown green mold and taken on a life of its own. They should do something about the apartments, like knock them together and put a staircase between them, but everything he could think of to do seemed to have implications that would lead to repercussions on Cavanaugh Street. Of course everybody knew that they were sleeping together, and most people were relieved, since they'd gone on for years in a kind of relationship limbo where neither of them knew what was happening between them. Still, unmarried people didn't move into apartments together in neighborhoods like this, unless they wanted to spend most of their time explaining themselves to the Very Old Ladies.
He was procrastinating. He hated going out to shop. He also hated being in Bennis's apartment rather than his own, because he couldn't get to any of his things, and she filled her life with bits and pieces that made no sense to him at all. She had sachet in her underwear drawers. She had silk flowers all over the windowsill in the living room. If he went down to his own apartment, the phone might ring, and it might be
Garry or Lou, and then he would be stuck. He picked up his coat where he had left it on Bennis's couch and went out instead and down the stairs.
He couldn't visit old George Tekemanian, because old George was having lunch in the city with his nephew Martin. Martin was always taking old George to restaurants where they set things on fire, and old George was always ready to order something that would be set on fire. Gregor went out on the street and looked up and down. Hannah Krekorian and Sheila Kashinian were standing together a few blocks up in front of Hannah's house, looking at something in what seemed to be a magazine.
Gregor went up a block and a half and turned in at Holy Trinity Church. He went down the alley at the side and around the back to Tibor's apartment. The front door was unlocked. No matter how often or how loudly Gregor lectured people on Cavanaugh Street about the importance of keeping their doors locked, nobody listened to him.
“Tibor?” he called out.
“In the kitchen,” Tibor called back.
Gregor went into the kitchen, where Tibor's computer was set up at a small table set against one wall. There was also a big table in the middle of the room, with enough chairs to accommodate an old-fashioned family of eight. Tibor's computer screen was the largest Gregor had ever seen, and the brightest. Bennis had bought it for him for Christmas.
“What are you doing?” Gregor asked.
“I am reading a newsgroup,” Tibor said. “I have become a subscriber to several newsgroups. Also to several e-mail discussion lists. The discussion lists are easier than the newsgroups, but the newsgroups have a more interesting mix of people.”
“A newsgroup is what?” Gregor asked. “The same thing as a chat room?”
“No, no,” Tibor said. “Krekor, you really have to learn the Internet. Your ignorance is embarrassing. Chat rooms are not worth the trouble. They're full of people making bad sex jokes, and then it turns out that half of them are FBI agents looking for sexual predators. Back in Armenia, Krekor, I would not have believed that so many men could be pedophiles.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“Well, it makes no sense, Krekor. What does a man want with a child? By the time I was twenty-six, I couldn't look at a woman much younger than thirty.”
“You're an unusual human being,” Gregor said. “What do you talk about on this newsgroup?”
“It's called alt.atheism. We are supposed to talk about atheism. Most of the time, there will be someone from a Christian church who comes to try to convert, and the atheists will swear at him. We have flame wars. Do you know about flame wars?”
“No.”
“They are fights, but silly fights. Everybody calls everybody else names. Everybody swears. Well, I do not, Krekor, but you understand what I mean.”
“What do you do? Do you try to convert people?”
“No. I discuss the historicity of the Bible with one or two people who are actually very knowledgeable.”
“It seems like the whole street is having conversations with atheists these days,” Gregor said. “There's Bennis with that woman, and some group she talked to. It seems odd to me, that atheists would join groups.”
“Why are you so interested in atheism, Krekor? You're not even interested in religion. You said to me the other day that nobody commits murder for religion, do you remember that? I thought it was silly.”
“I meant that nobody commits these kinds of murders for religion,” Gregor said. “You know what I mean by these kinds. Poisoning. Hiding. When people commit murders for religion, they get a machine gun and raid somebody else's church.”
“Or the houses of doctors who do abortions, yes,” Tibor said. “So what are you doing here? Hiding from the Philadelphia Police Department? You seem distracted.”
“Pedophiles,” Gregor said.
“You have found more pedophiles?”
“No. No, what you said about pedophiles reminded me. Do you know about that case, the scandal in the archdiocese? I don't mean have you heard about it, I mean do you know about it, for real, with the details.”
“I know some, Krekor, yes. You would know some, too, if you ever paid attention to the news. I don't understand why
you buy the newspaper. You never seem to read anything in it but the editorial page.”
“It's the only thing I can be sure is completely accurate. People usually know what their own opinions are. But seriously, that case. How many priests were involved? Were the victims all boys, or were there girlsâ”
“Wait.” Tibor tapped at his computer. A second later, something came up that seemed to be a list. He tapped again. “Here it is, Krekor. They have a web site.”
“Who has a web site?”
“The victims. I ran into it the first week I was on the Internet. I was looking for religion in Philadelphia, and I found it. They were all boys, yes, Krekor, at least the ones who put up this site. And there were a lot of them. Maybe sixty or sixty-five.”
“Sixty or sixty-five priests were molesting their altar boys in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in the 1960s?”
“No, no,” Tibor said. “You don't understand. There were not so many priests, maybe five. But one priest can go through many boysâhere it is. See, Krekor, the pictures of the priests are here. Mug shots. One of them was already dead when the suit started, though.”
Gregor looked at the screen. “THE SHAME OF CATHOLIC PHILADELPHIA,” the headline read, and underneath it there were what did indeed look like mug shots: five men in early to late middle age, wearing clerical collars. Gregor sat back.
“One of them was dead,” he said. “What about the rest of them?”
“Three are retired, Krekor, and live in retirement homes for priests. The last one was still in a parish when the scandal broke, and he was removed and has been sent to a psychiatric facility. This was a large matter for discussion in the religious community when it happened, Krekor, because there are implications that may not be immediately clear. It is very difficult to defend yourself against a charge that you committed a crime thirty years ago. There are many possibilities for abuse.”
“Do you think that happened here?” Gregor asked. “Do you think the priests may have been innocent, or that some of them were?”
“No,” Tibor said. “In the case of Father Corrigan, the one
who is dead, the one who was the most outrageous offender, there are diaries and other material. He kept very good records. The others have all admitted to the crimes. In this case, there are no implications, only mess.”
“What about the one who was still in a parish when the scandal broke?” Gregor asked. “What parish was he in?”
“That would be Father Murphy. He was at Our Lady of the Fields.”
“Had he been there long? Had he been in other parishes?”
“Yes, Krekor, of course he had been in other parishes. That was the practice in those days, when a priest had charges of this sort leveled against him by the parishioners, the archdiocese moved him to another parish. But you have to understand that people did not look on those things then the way we do now. They didn't understandâ”
“No, no,” Gregor said. “I'm not trying to make out a case against the Catholic Church. I'm just trying to figure something out. Was Father Murphy ever at St. Anselm's?”
Tibor looked startled. “No, Krekor, he was never at St. Anselm's. But Father Corrigan was. I'd forgotten that that was where you were looking into the murders.”
Gregor peered at the computer screen again. “Father Corrigan was the biggest offender,” he said.
Tibor nodded. “Yes, Krekor, the biggest and also the most determined. The other men, there are a few incidents, and then that seems to be all. With Father Murphy, there were three boys. With Father Roselli, there were two. You see? But with Father Corriganâhe was out of control, we would say now. There were dozens.”
“All of them at St. Anselm's?”
“Most of them, yes. He was there for twenty-five years.” Tibor clicked at his keyboard again and brought up a page that seemed to be devoted to Father Corrigan alone. The mug shot was reproduced there, at three times the size it had been on the main page. Tibor scrolled down and pointed to a triple-column list of names. “There they are,” he said. “The men who have come forward to claim that Father Corrigan molested them when they were children.”
“Good grief,” Gregor said.
“Yes, Krekor, I know. A shameful thing. An evil man.”
“But how could he have done all that without anybody
realizing?” Gregor asked. “I mean, even in the sixties, after a while, wouldn't the archdiocese have begun to suspect that the man had something psychologically wrongâ”
“But Krekor, Krekor. It is possible that they did not know there were so many. It is possible they didn't know there was even one. The boys would not have been likely to tell anyone. And if they did, they would not necessarily have been believed. And the parents, even if they did believe their children, wouldn't have wanted the incidents to become public. It was a time when children were blamed for causing these incidents, don't you see?”
“I worked for twenty years with serial killers,” Gregor said, “and I know something about patterning in behavior.”