Act of Deceit

Chapter 48

“T his is pointless.” Brother Melvin said as Donnally drove his truck through the same intersection near the San Francisco Airport for the fifth time that afternoon. “I’m just getting confused.”

Donnally felt like an archeologist of Melvin’s memory, trying to reconstruct the past from fragments buried by time and by shame. It was the longest of long shots that Melvin would remember the route Sherwyn had taken on that night twenty-five years earlier, but it was the only path left that might lead to Sherwyn’s exposure.

Melvin was certain that Sherwyn had gotten off the freeway and merged onto a wide commercial street. The wing and taillights of airplanes taking off had sparkled behind them. They turned right-or was it left?-along another busy street, then left-or was it right?-into a residential neighborhood.

It was a big house. A mansion. Spanish Colonial. Three stories. Stucco. Melvin was sure of that. Salmon-colored, at least back then, with a long driveway, or it seemed so to a scared kid facing the unknown in the distance.

Even after their repeated failures to find the house, Donnally didn’t want to give up, for he was running out of angles.

Sherwyn had anticipated the pretext call from Melvin that Donnally had staged the day before in an attempt to trick him into making an admission. Sherwyn expressed the false doubt that he was even talking to Melvin, claimed client confidentiality, refused to meet in person, and hung up.

It was, just like Sherwyn’s background investigation of Donnally and his choice of the word “tenuous,” a confession that only Donnally could hear and no court would accept.

Melvin pointed toward the evening fog rolling in from the Pacific and obscuring the western hills.

“It’ll be dark pretty soon anyway,” Melvin said.

“You willing to stay over and give it a try tomorrow?”

Donnally watched Melvin gaze at an airplane taking off, heading north.

“You can’t keep running,” Donnally said.

“It’s less running than hiding,” Melvin said. “I didn’t realize until after we talked in Vancouver that prayer is a phenomenal form of repression, and I’ve spent the last decade praying like my sanity depended on it, which it did. I didn’t understand until now why so many priests become alcoholics. It’s prayer in a bottle.”

Melvin paused in thought for a moment, and then returned his eyes to the road ahead.

“It was weird watching Father Phil and Sherwyn drink together. They sometimes acted like giddy children who’d broken into their parents’ liquor cabinet.”

“They were both alcoholics?” Donnally asked, turning toward the freeway on-ramp.

“As far as I could tell, but only Father Phil looked the part. His face had that windburned look and his eyes were always watery. Sherwyn was different. It didn’t show. I think that alcohol was part of their seduction routine and they knew their parts, drunk or sober.” Melvin emitted a disgusted laugh. “You should’ve seen those teenage boys standing around at the beginning of the parties with their glasses of Chardonnay, acting all sophisticated. And the men waiting for them to get drunk. Not leering. That would be too crude. Just waiting. Sweating with anticipation.

“There was one guy there. I think he owned the house. He kept a kind of regal distance from everything, like he was a producer taking in his Tony Award-winning play. Enjoying the perfection of it all. He was older than the other men, maybe mid-sixties. I never saw him doing it with anybody. Some of the boys believed he was impotent, but I wasn’t so sure.”

Melvin paused for a moment as he stared ahead.

“Some of those old guys seemed to get off just watching the show.”