Cross Dressing (23 page)

Mr. Saltzman pointed at Ruth. “I think she cheats,” he grumbled.

Mrs. Zamora put her old elbows on the table. “Quit complaining and dance,” she said.

Dan began waving his hands wildly. “No! No dancing!” he yelled. “You people get dressed. The game’s over.” Everyone groaned and began putting their clothes back on. Despite their combined four hundred years of experience at getting dressed, the process was slow and painful to watch. The shock of all the pendulous flesh momentarily knocked the Holy Spirit out of Dan, much the way a sharp blow to the thorax knocks the wind out of you.

“You’re looking better.” Ruth stared at Dan as she slipped on a shoe, the only thing she had lost in the game. “I’ve missed you.”

“Yeah,” Dan said. “I missed you too.” He didn’t know where to start. He couldn’t just blurt out the truth.
Say, listen, Mom, I’m really Dan. I’m afraid Michael’s dead and I’ve committed a couple of felonies. And I’d appreciate it if you could keep that to yourself.
He had no idea how she’d react. Would she go goofy and blow his cover? He couldn’t take that chance. Dan noticed that Ruth was looking intently at him. He worried that she had some secret way of telling him from Michael that he never knew about. He turned slightly so she couldn’t see his face full on. “Have you been taking your medicine?” he asked.

She smiled. “I haven’t been arrested lately, if that answers your question.” She stood and walked to the door.

Dan could tell that Ruth’s mind was fixed on something, but she wasn’t sharing it. Or maybe he was being paranoid. He decided that unless she asked directly about Dan, he would avoid the subject. He also decided not to tell Ruth any direct lies, his thinking being that a sin of omission was less serious than a sin of commission.

“So,” Ruth said as she headed out the door. “Have you heard from your brother lately?”

Goddammit
, Dan thought.
What did she mean by that? She said “your brother,” not “Dan.”
Was it an innocent phrasing or a sly acknowledgment that she knew he wasn’t Michael? “Yeah,” Dan said. “He’s in New York on a business trip. Something to do with that Fujioka campaign.”
Okay, so I lied.
Still, it was better than upsetting his mom and running the risk of being exposed. He couldn’t save this place from jail, after all.

“That’s nice.” Ruth tried to get a good look at her son’s face. “You know, it looks like you’ve put on some weight in the last couple of weeks. So tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Dan looked skyward and prayed for guidance.

S
cott Emmons had been raised without benefit of religion. His father considered church attendance an unforgivable waste of anyone’s time. He didn’t forbid his wife from taking Scott to the occasional Unitarian service, but he usually made sarcastic remarks about it. “While you’re there you better ask forgiveness for not using your time more productively,” he’d say.

The result of all this was a spiritual yearning that Scott completely misinterpreted. While he was vaguely aware that something was missing in his life, he had no idea what it was. Influenced by his father’s lack of faith, and the lack of prayer in the public schools he attended, Scott looked elsewhere to
fill his spiritual void. He dabbled in a series of pop psychology movements, New Age flightiness, and, most recently, motivational tapes. With each new approach, he felt a brief sense that he had finally tapped into the real thing, the answer to his vague question. But each time the feeling would pass like a cheap high, and Scott would be forced off on his continuing search for meaning and direction.

At the moment, however, standing at the door of St. Bernadine of Siena Catholic church, Scott felt sublimely focused on his life’s mission. He entered the church carrying a Bible, thinking, among other things, that it would help him blend in. The Bible was a pulpit-size, jumbo set of Scriptures, hefty enough to use as a weapon. After purchasing it at a used-book store, Scott took it home and edited it. Using a single-edge razor blade, Scott cut a large hole through both Testaments. It was not a coincidence that the hole was in the shape of his Ruger Super Redhawk .44 magnum.

Scott paused at the large baptismal and saw his reflection on the surface of the holy water. Curious, Scott dipped a finger into the water and tasted it—it was salty and somewhat oily. He spit. There were only a few people in the church, some seated in pews gazing at the altar, some kneeling, deep in prayer, a few standing in line for confession. Scott took his place in the line, clutching the Bible tightly to his chest. He wasn’t exactly sure what he would do if he got into the little box and heard Dan’s voice coming from behind the screen. He’d just have to improvise.

A few minutes later it was Scott’s turn. He entered the confessional and stood there with all the uncertainty of a first-timer. It was cramped, dark, and a little scary. He wondered where he was supposed to sit. He groped around until his foot hit something. It was too low and narrow to sit on, so he knelt.

The priest waited patiently for Scott to declare his guilt; however, since Scott was unfamiliar with confessional protocol,
he didn’t know he was supposed to make the first move. There was a long silence as they each waited for the other to speak. Finally Scott decided to break the ice. He cleared his throat. “More is more,” he whispered.

The priest, who was, admittedly, new on the job, wasn’t sure what to make of that. After a long silence, the priest decided to guide the sinner. “Have you come to ask forgiveness?”

Scott twitched at the voice, which seemed familiar. Scott opened his Bible and removed his gun. “Yes,” he said, hoping the man would speak again.

“How long has it been since your last confession?” The voice had certain qualities that reminded Scott of his former boss. Scott’s heart began to race as he raised the gun. Still, he wanted to be sure before he did anything rash. “Could you say that again?” Scott asked. The priest repeated his question. Scott tried to look through the small screen, but all he could make out was a silhouette of a man’s face. It
might
be Dan, he thought.

The priest, thinking the penitent was hard of hearing, raised his voice. “I said, how long has it been since—”

Click. It was the unmistakable sound of a large gun being cocked. The priest stopped breathing for a moment. There seemed to be only a couple of explanations for such a sound in a confessional. The best one, from the priest’s perspective, was that the man on the other side was so distressed at his sins that he was contemplating suicide. The more worrisome explanation was that the sinner had an ax to grind with the church. “Listen to me, my son,” he said, his voice steady. “I hereby absolve you of whatever sins you have committed as well as all sins you may commit in the future.” Then he made his move.

Scott felt a sudden rush of air when the priest bolted. Assuming it was Dan trying to escape his past, Scott dove out of his side of the confessional and blindsided the man, sending
him sprawling onto the floor. Scott scrambled to his feet and freed himself from the curtain in which he was tangled. The curtain fell to Scott’s feet and he stood there—Bible in one hand, gun in the other. He looked down and saw the terrified priest. He was a short guy with red hair in his thirties who was, at this point, prepared to make a deal with the devil if it meant not dying like this. Scott stared at the man, wondering if he’d ever find Dan. “Shit,” he said. He put the gun back in the Bible and headed for the door.

“D
ammit!” Monsignor Matthews was doing his best to help the poor, but he had just hit an internal fire wall in the Church’s intranet while trying to access some directories that, technically speaking, he lacked authorization to access. He wanted to do one of his sleight-of-hand fund transfers for the Care Center, but someone had made that damned difficult.

Frustrated, Monsignor Matthews dragged a hand across his face while considering the virtue of patience. It used to be that the highest level of security was simple password protection, but that was before someone started airing filthy bits of the Church’s laundry—various soiled items that were supposed to remain hidden in a large directory of obliquely named files. After the breach, the higher-ups brought in computer consultants who retrofitted the system with some serious fire walls. Now, despite his fluency in several computer languages, Monsignor Matthews doubted his ability to hack past these new features. If he couldn’t get in, no funds would get transferred, and if he didn’t transfer the funds, there was no telling what Sister Peg might do. He tried a wormhole-tunneling maneuver that had worked for him in the past, but access was denied again. “Dammit!”

Matthews hadn’t always been such a dissident. When he became a priest, he wanted—and expected—to spend the rest
of his life serving Jesus Christ through the Church, ministering to the sick, caring for a congregation, that sort of thing. But instead of a parish, he got a computer terminal. Sure, he got to sit in on the celebration of a mass now and then, but for the most part he served the Lord by dealing with the sophisticated financial matters of the Church.

For the first few years that was all right. Then he stumbled across some disturbing files detailing the Church’s legal and financial strategies for handling sexual abuse cases. One case in particular caught his eye. A priest in a large diocese in the Southwest had sexually assaulted a dozen altar boys over the course of ten years. When parents of the boys complained, the Church covered it up. Then one of the boys committed suicide and the story broke. The Church got dragged—kicking and screaming—into the courts. Before it was over, senior Church officials were found guilty of gross negligence, malice, conspiracy, and fraud for ignoring the warnings about the priest as well as for covering up the parents’ complaints.

The jury eventually ordered the Church to pay $119 million to the victims. A Catholic spokesman, who seemed quite put out about the matter, was quoted as saying, “The Church just wants to get the whole thing behind them.” He may as well have said they wanted to act like it never happened. A newly appointed bishop offered a sincere public apology to the victims, but the parents of the dead child had the temerity to note that neither the money nor the apology would bring their son back.

It was enough to shake Monsignor Matthews’s faith. He knew as well as anyone that it was impossible to screen out all the rotten apples in an organization as large as the Catholic Church, so he didn’t blame the Church for the priest’s actions. It was the cover-up that galled him.

Had that been the lone case or if there were but a few more, Monsignor Matthews would have let it go, but it turned
out this was just the tip of the pederastic iceberg. There were hundreds of other files on similar cases. The same diocese had been forced into a $5 million settlement involving two different priests and five other altar boys. In another Southwest diocese, an Archbishop disgraced the Church when the details of his sexual misconduct showed up on
60 Minutes.
The subsequent investigation of widespread cover-ups led to the removal of twenty priests and the settlement of 165 clergy sex-abuse cases totaling another $50 million. No damn wonder the diocese was always crying poor mouth.

Almost as startling as the corruption was the fact that the Church was, to an extent, insured against this sort of thing. Given the Church’s track record, Monsignor Matthews imagined the rates for that sort of coverage were staggering, like insuring the post office against employee shooting sprees.

As Monsignor Matthews worked his way through the files, he discovered that a great many parishes were nearly bankrupted by paying settlements for these types of cases and—most amazing—that some of the money used to pay for these crimes came from parish fund-raising drives. Matthews wondered how they sold that to the congregation. “Remember, next weekend is the big catamite car wash and bake sale …”

Matthews also found what appeared to be a slush fund tucked away in the undisclosed financial records. The money was apparently used to pay parents who were willing to be bought off instead of taking their children’s complaints to the proper authorities.

The Monsignor knew that in some instances the guilty priests were quickly removed from their duties. But in many more instances the Church simply denied the charges, covered up the cases, and moved priests to other parishes where they continued to prey on others. Sometimes they were sent to a “retreat center” in New Mexico for some therapy—the Church’s equivalent of a child’s “time-out”—before being
reassigned to a new parish where they could resume practicing their true faith on new children.

Monsignor Matthews was floored when he tallied everything up. He found that the Catholic Church had paid over $800 million to settle sex-abuse cases in the United States since 1985. Eight. Hundred. Million. Dollars. He shook his head. How many children could be fed with $800 million? He could almost see the shame on St. Paul’s face.

Monsignor Matthews knew he was in no position to confront higher-ups about the policies and handling of these matters—he felt he could do more from where he was than if he were excommunicated—so he decided to play a game of his own, and that game involved diverting money from the slush fund to various charities. Unfortunately for Monsignor Matthews, the Church’s accounts receivable department was breathing down his neck and the newly installed fire wall was impervious to his hacking. It was starting to look like he would have to face the wrath of Sister Peg.

W
hen Dan first arrived at the Care Center, he figured he’d be doing fix-it projects and maybe some cooking and cleaning. Inspired by what he assumed was the Holy Ghost, Dan put in eighteen-hour days fixing every broken window and leaky faucet and light switch in the place. Dan thought he had found his true calling as the handyman to the poor.

Dan was ready for his next assignment, so he went to Sister Peg’s office and asked what she wanted him to do. “I need you to help Captain Boone with his bath and his appliance,” she said.