32.

Distrust

Wednesday, April 24 - 9:10a.m.

Jennifer was late for her morning appointment with Father Lowry, but not by much. She was curious why the priest insisted on talking to her. She suspected that their conversation might be as surprising as her meeting with Mike’s lawyer, or his doctor for that matter. She knew he was the priest who had saved Mike from being shot by Tony Malone, but she hadn’t actually met him that night because she had been rushed to the hospital. Still, she couldn’t imagine what he wanted to talk about. Had he known Mike, even before the attempt on his life? She wondered what Mike had told him. Did he know Mike had been the reincarnation of Christ? She wondered how he would react to that idea. Had he seen the Sightings episode? What does the Church think about Mike? She had a thousand questions.

He greeted her with a warm smile as he opened the front door of the rectory. “You must be Jennifer. Come on in.” He ushered her inside.

As they walked down the poorly lit hallway, she noticed a faint smell of cigarette smoke in the air. There was something odd about the smell. It reminded her of something, but she couldn’t quite place it. She wondered if she should tell him she was pregnant. With Mike’s baby. Out of wedlock. There was a time in her life when she felt obligated to confess her sins, but that was back in the days when she blamed herself for what her father did to her. Years of therapy later, she could finally accept that she was the victim. Besides, she told herself, what Mike and I did was too beautiful and loving to have been a sin. She decided it was best if she asked the questions and contributed as little as possible, like a good little reporter. After all, this meeting was about Mike, not her or her baby.

He took her down the hall and sat her down in a small but comfortable office with a desk. Then he said, “I’m making a pot of coffee in the other room. Would you like a cup?” When she nodded yes, he said, “Excuse me for a moment,” and walked out of the room.

Jennifer noticed a computer sitting on the desk displaying an e-mail screen. She thought, Times have sure changed in two thousand years. Now priests can build Internet sites for their churches and e-mail sermons to each other. She wondered if Internet addiction would replace alcoholism as the number one problem for the clergy.

While she waited in his office, he took a tray out of a cabinet in the kitchen. He set two saucers, coffee cups, napkins, spoons and his sugar bowl on the tray. Next, he retrieved a carton of cream from his refrigerator and added it to the tray, then poured fresh, hot coffee into both cups. Then he reached inside his jacket pocket, pulled out a small bottle and took the cover off. He shook it sideways until two tiny white pills rolled into his hand. He put the cap back on the bottle and slid it back inside his jacket. Then he plopped both pills into one of the coffee cups and stirred it until the pills dissolved.

He came back from the kitchen displaying his tray proudly and placed it on the desk between them. He took the closest coffee cup, took a sip and smiled.

She asked, “Is it okay if I use my tape recorder?” He seemed surprised but said it was okay. She took the machine out of her purse, set it on the desk between them and switched it on.

“Wednesday, April 24^th. Interview with Father John Lowry. Why did you want to talk to me, Father?” she asked.

“Over the past several weeks, I’ve read several articles in the newspaper that you’ve done on that rock singer, Mike Tomson. I think you’ve gone too far on this topic. I’m concerned that your articles may be doing more harm than good. He’s dead now, and I think it would be better if you just ended it there.”

She thought it was a bit out of line of the priest to ask her to quit writing about Mike. After all, what did he care? “I have no intention of ending it there. I believe Mike had something important to say to this world. As a matter of fact, I’m actually planning to write a book about him.”

He frowned. “That’s exactly the kind of thing I was worried about and that’s the reason I needed to talk to you. I’ve got to tell you, Jennifer, I think a book would be a big mistake. I think this whole thing has been blown way out of proportion, so I want you to hear my side of the story.”

“Go on.” She didn’t want to lead the witness, but she was suddenly uncomfortable. She had assumed all of the people Mike had touched would be believers.

“Mike Tomson came to my church several weeks ago. He was all stressed out and acting kind of crazy. He spent two hours kneeling by a statue, praying, even talking to himself. I thought he was coming unglued, so I approached him to see if I could help. He said that the statue had spoken his name. Then he started ranting and raving about how he was the reincarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Jennifer was surprised. This didn’t sound too much like the gentle Mike that she had known. Still, she figured, a priest might interpret Mike’s message as lunatic ranting. Maybe even threatening.

The priest kept talking. “I told him that was impossible because Christians don’t believe in reincarnation. He just kept insisting that he was the reincarnation of Christ. He started talking about how the world got Christ’s message all screwed up. He said he needed to fix the situation, to deliver the right message, but he didn’t know how.”

Father Lowry’s telephone rang. He glanced back, annoyed at the interruption. “Excuse me for a minute,” he said, and picked up the phone. “St. Paul’s.”

While she waited for him to get off the phone, she glanced around the office, trying to get a better understanding of the priest. She picked up her coffee cup, started lifting it toward her, then her attention fell on his computer again. Something had caught her eye and she tried to decide what it was. Then she saw it. The last e-mail on the screen had an odd subject line. It said, “Tomson Book.” But how could that be? She had only just told him about the book she was writing. She set the coffee cup back down and wondered. Did Lowry already know about her book, or was the e-mail about the book Mike had been writing? It wasn’t like Mike to share that. Either way, it seemed suspicious that the priest knew. Her instincts told her he was putting on an act.

Then something clicked in her mind. She figured out why the smell in the hallway had struck a chord in her. She had smelled the same thing just seconds before a bullet had ripped through her arm. It was the smell of Italian cigarettes. The smell of Tony Malone, the man who tried to kill Mike, but shot her instead.

She started to worry. Suddenly, she felt very vulnerable in this small office that smelled like Tony Malone. Could Malone be out on bail? Was he lurking in the shadows of the rectory, waiting to take her out too? And why here in the house of God? Did Lowry know? He had been there, too, the night she had been shot. Could he have been in on it?

She glanced back at Father Lowry, trying to put some meaning to the short phone conversation, he was having. Then she turned back to the computer, trying to understand. Father Lowry followed her gaze to the computer. He ended the call quickly, then he switched off the computer screen. “I’m so sorry for the interruption. Where was I?”

She tried not to seem nervous. She needed to keep him talking. “You said that Mike told you that the world got Christ’s message all messed up.”

“Yes, yes. That’s right. Then he asked me for ideas on how to deliver his ‘corrected’ message. Can you imagine that? Asking a priest how to usurp the authority of Christ’s teachings? I thought he must be crazy.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him he wasn’t Christ and that he should stop telling people he was. I told him not to try to teach.”

“What did he say?”

“He obviously ignored me, because the next thing I knew, he was preaching his message at the casino. I warned him that his ranting would get him into trouble, but he didn’t listen. Instead, he changed the subject. He started asking about the final days. The end-times. He started ranting about being a cult leader and his triumphant return through Jerusalem’s Golden Gate.”

This sounded less and less like the Mike she knew. She let the priest talk, but didn’t pay much attention to what he said. She didn’t need to: she had the tape recorder. What was foremost in her mind was the smell of Italian cigarettes. Her attention was drawn back to reality when she heard the doorbell ring.

Lowry said, “Excuse me. A priest’s work is never done.” He got up and walked down the hallway to answer the door.

She heard him talking to a parishioner at the door about some upcoming fund-raiser. Curiosity overcame her. She knew he would be distracted for a few minutes, so she stood up, leaned over the desk and switched the computer monitor back on. She pressed enter on the keyboard to open the e-mail. She read the e-mail aloud, whispering the words into the tape recorder.

Fr. John.

Sorry to hear our man did not return from his assignment but glad it was a success. He served God’s purpose and will be forgiven.

Thanks for the info on the book. Vatican network security has been breached and we believe F and T were behind it. Your orders are to free Malone and stop the book at all costs. Keep me posted. Yours, Vilotti

As she finished reading, she felt panic start to rise inside. She turned off the monitor, grabbed her tape recorder from the desk, switched it off and put it back in her purse. She wanted to scream and run. Instead, she forced herself to walk slowly, back through the hall to the front door where the priest was still talking to the parishioner. Father Lowry heard her coming and turned around, surprised.

Trying to sound calm, she said, “I’m sorry, Father, but I’m late for another appointment. We’ll have to reschedule.” She lied, but she needed an excuse to get out of there. She said, “Thank you for the interview,” and swished out the door before he could say a word.

She got in her car and sped away from the rectory like a bat out of hell. She drove without thinking until she saw a casino. Thinking they’d never find her in the sea of cars, she pulled into the parking lot and turned off her engine. Taking a few deep breaths, she tried to calm down. She pulled out her tape recorder, and replayed the last few seconds of the tape. Her own voice whispered the words in the e-mail. “Your orders are to free Malone and stop the book at all costs.” She wondered how far would they go. They killed Mike–she was sure of it now–so why not kill her too? Thank God she hadn’t tried the priest’s coffee; it was probably drugged.

She knew now that she needed help, and needed it badly. But if you can’t trust a Catholic priest, who can you trust? The police, maybe, but she was sure they would only laugh at her story about a conspiracy involving a Catholic priest trying to kill her. And if it was a conspiracy that went all the way to the Vatican, she was in great danger and none of her regular haunts would be safe: her well-advertised work place, her apartment, or her mother’s house. She needed to find a place to hide. She pulled out her notepad and started looking through the list of people who had left her voice messages. Any of them could be part of the conspiracy, and out to kill her; she had no idea how far this reached. She ran her finger down the list and found the name of Rabbi Louis Goldberg.

Wednesday, April 24 - 9:30a.m.

Father Lowry was upset that Jennifer hadn’t stayed a bit longer. If she had, he might have been able to talk her out of writing the book about Mike, a book that he knew would be dangerous or even fatal to the health of the Church. Reluctantly, he poured her coffee down the drain. After a few sips, she would have been knocked out cold and Tony Malone could have dealt with her. She would have been much more cooperative in the hands of a professional. They might have even been able to avoid killing her. At least he hoped so.

He had been given direct orders from the Vatican to stop the writing of this treacherous book, and now that he had failed, he was going to have to find another way to solve the problem. Things were not all bad, though. He had a lot of things going in his favor. First, Mike was dead and wouldn’t be spreading any more heresy. Second, he had help. He had sprung Vilotti’s man, Tony Malone, out of jail the previous day and his trial wouldn’t be for another month. Malone was probably already on his way to break into Mike’s apartment and take care of a big part of the problem, Mike’s records, which they would send to Vilotti for analysis. And third, as far as he could tell, Jennifer wasn’t onto them yet. . . or was she?

He wondered why she had bolted out of the rectory in such a hurry. He went back to his office to send Vilotti an e-mail. When he turned on his computer monitor, he noticed something strange. The e-mail Vilotti had sent him earlier about Mike’s book was now open and he was sure it hadn’t been when he’d switched the monitor off.

Suddenly, things didn’t seem under control as they had a minute ago. The way she had been eyeing the monitor made sense now. She had obviously read Vilotti’s e-mail. Now they would have to take more drastic measures. Unfortunately, he was sure Tony Malone knew exactly how to do that.

He looked up at the painting of the crucifixion on the wall, a vision straight of out his dream. He shuddered then walked back to the sanctuary. He needed to pray before he wrote his reply to Vilotti.

Excerpt from The Gospel According to Mike

He said, “When you start each day, ask yourself, ‘What is today’s lesson?’ Then pause and reflect inwardly for the answer. If no answer comes to you, make one up. If you can’t think of one, tell yourself that today’s lesson is to learn about an aspect of love.”