The Skeleton Box

EIGHTEEN

Joanie lived in a rented loft apartment near the Eastern Market. The old floors creaked as we made our way down the shadowed corridors. Passing one door, I heard the muted cadence of a weatherman telling Detroit it would be cloudy and cold. No news there. I smelled bread toasting, pictured someone climbing out of a shower.

Secretly, I felt a little nervous as we made our way to the end of one hallway and Joanie’s place. I’d once had a girlfriend who had lived two floors up in that very building and, so far as I knew, still did. She worked at the Free Press and was often out schmoozing sources this late. I’d shot five a.m. pool with her at Aggeliki’s, in fact; she was damn good at sinking the nine on the break.

I was relieved to have Joanie’s door shut behind us.

Her apartment was spare and neat, except for the two cheap wooden desks shoved against the wall beneath her loft. A knot of wires and surge protectors surrounded two computer terminals and keyboards crowded atop one of the desks. The other desk was stacked a foot deep with dog-eared files, stuffed into accordion folders. More files were piled on the hardwood floor next to the desk. Leaned against that stack was the backpack from her Pilot days.

“Still got that thing, eh?” I said. “It’s big enough, you could use it for your hockey gear.”

Joanie was lighting a candle. It smelled of tart berries. “The guy next door smokes like a chimney,” she said. “Back in a minute.” She disappeared behind a door in the wall behind the wooden ladder ascending to the loft.

I listened. From behind the door came a few clicks, then a mechanized voice. “You have one new message,” it said. “Call received today at twelve fifty-eight a.m.” There came another click, then a whooshing sound, probably traffic, maybe in a freeway tunnel. “Hey, babe,” echoed a man’s voice. “I think I got what you-”

Joanie cut it off before Frenchy could say anything more. But an alarm of recognition already had gone off in my head. Frenchy was the guy my old girlfriend, the one who’d lived upstairs, had thrown over for me years before. I had never met him. But I had heard that voice, the one I’d heard over the pool table at Aggeliki’s, on an answering machine just like Joanie’s in an apartment just like Joanie’s. My old girlfriend’s apartment. He left a lot of messages on that machine. Too many.

He had been a computer tech at the Free Press. My girlfriend, whose name was Michele, had called him Albert, or Bert, or Bertie. I didn’t remember her calling him “Frenchy.” She would have thought it a silly nickname, which it was. Maybe he’d given it to himself later. I did remember the things he had threatened to do to her after she had stopped taking his calls. And how, instead of squealing to her bosses at the paper, Michele instead mentioned the guy’s threats to a couple of cops she knew, who had a men-to-man talk with him. After that, she never heard from him again. He eventually left the Freep amid rumors that he kept showing up at the college dormitory of a summer intern he’d had a fling with.

I sat down on one of the vinyl-backed chairs at Joanie’s kitchen table, wishing I was back in Starvation. Joanie emerged barefoot in gray sweats and a white River Rats jersey striped in gold and blue. I recognized it immediately as one I had worn as a kid. The number, 35, was faded, and the “R” and second “E” in “CARPENTER” across the back had peeled away.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

“Your mom. She sent it with a nice note about the time I spent with her up north. Would you like to read it?” She looked ruefully at her desk. “Not sure I could find it.”

“I think I’ve had enough surprises for one day.”

“I think your mom’s sweet.” Joanie motioned toward the fridge. “Do you want anything to drink?”

“No, but I’m starving.”

She reached into a cabinet over the sink and came out with an opened box of brown sugar Pop-Tarts. She tossed it to me. “Sorry, toaster’s on the fritz. Let’s get to work.”

She sat at her computer. I pulled up a chair. She reached under the desk. The machine whirred as she slipped a CD into it. A long minute passed. “Come on, piece of crap,” Joanie said. The screen went all white, then all blue. Then some words materialized in white at the top:

Subject: Breck, Wayland Ezra

Social Security Number: 292-41-6654

Date of Birth: 04/26/48

Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan

“So he’s… fifty-one. Almost fifty-two. He looks younger.” Must be the cross-eyed thing, I thought. “Jesus, you have his Social Security number?”

“I’m not going to give it to anybody.”

“You just gave it to me.”

“Frenchy’s pretty good at what he does.”

I wasn’t a big fan of Frenchy but figured it wouldn’t be smart to let Joanie know. “The freelancer, huh? Just how freelance is he?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you pay him for this?”

She pulled one of her legs up under the other on her chair. The chartreuse polish on one foot’s toenails didn’t match the frosted pink on the other’s. “When you need something fast-you know, background stuff-Frenchy can get it faster than anyone.”

“Always first, frequently right,” I said.

“How did you know that?”

“Know what?”

“Frenchy says that.”

“So does Whistler. Must be a Free Press thing.”

“Brand X,” Joanie said. “Anyway, Frenchy said this is pretty cursory, he didn’t have much time, but… well, see what you think.”

I watched her click through more than forty pages of documents Frenchy had unearthed from the Internet and scanned onto the CD. Some of them-Breck’s birth certificate, his home address, a couple of newspaper photos, even the clipping I had seen in Mom’s lockbox-came from public sources. Others, like the Social Security number, derived from sources I preferred to know nothing about.

Joanie returned to the first screen. She opened a drawer, pulled out two fresh notebooks, and handed one to me.

“Wow,” I said. “You’re rich.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

“Got a pen?” she said. “You can’t take the disk.”

“I’m not sure I want it. Why are you taking notes?”

“The Times covers Michigan, you know.”

Same old Joanie. She hit Enter.

Wayland Breck was born to Gregory Breck, a draftsman, and his homemaker wife, the former Susan Veronica Wayland. On the boy’s second Christmas Eve, his father was killed in a car crash with a drunken driver, who was issued a ticket and released. When Wayland was five, he moved with his mother to Livonia, a suburb near Detroit’s western border anchored by Michigan’s only Thoroughbred racetrack, since closed, and one of the first shopping malls in the United States, since demolished.

Breck graduated in 1966 from Livonia’s Franklin High, 1971 from Michigan State, 1975 from University of Detroit Law. A grainy copy of a photograph showed Breck in his cap and gown, unsmiling, in front of a stone clock tower.

“Typical lawyer, eh?” I said. “Not making money yet, not happy.”

“Maybe he’s just itchy in that robe.”

By the late 1970s, Breck’s name was showing up on state documents registering him as a principal-apparently the sole principal-in a firm called W. E. Breck Legal Associates, with an address in Livonia. Based on what Frenchy had unearthed, Breck did mostly routine domestic work-divorce, probate, minor tax issues, some workers’ compensation. His mother died in 1988. He divorced a wife of twelve years in 1990.

Joanie rapped the Page-down key seven or eight times. A series of blank pages flashed on the screen. “Here’s where it gets interesting.”

There followed a sequence of documents that had been copied and copied over again. As Joanie scrolled down, I saw what appeared to be many pages of legal filings, followed by two or three photocopies of newspaper clippings, followed by more legal filings, then clips, and so forth, until the pages went blank again.

All of the documents were dated in the 1990s.

Joanie backtracked to the beginning of the sequence. She sat back and folded her arms across her Rats jersey. “The guy was doing oppo research,” Joanie said.

“Opposition? Digging dirt on someone?”

“Not just anybody.” She leaned into the keyboard. “This really sucks, Gus.”

“You want-”

“Yeah.” She stood. “Take over.”

We traded seats. I began to tap through the documents on the screen. They were a collection of affidavits connected to various lawsuits filed in the circuit courts of Wayne and Oakland counties. The plaintiffs’ names were blacked out, but the case numbers varied, so I was able to count eight separate lawsuits. In each case, one of the defendants was the Archdiocese of Detroit.

My stomach tightened as the nature of the lawsuits became clear. Eight men, ranging in age from twenty-three to fifty-four, had accused priests at parishes in the archdiocese of sexually abusing them when they were young. Because the original complaints were not included, it was impossible to know the specifics of the charges.

For that, I was grateful.

“My God,” I said.

“Just like old times.”

In terse, clinical language, the affidavits delineated evidence that the accusers were mistaken, hypocritical, compromised, delusional, lying: “Mr. [NAME REDACTED] was terminated from his job as an assistant foreman at Detroit Diesel on February 4, 1993, because he had repeatedly shown up for work inebriated.” In these papers, the victims of abuse were now adulterers, debtors, wife beaters, gambling addicts, tax cheats: “Despite his protestations to the contrary, there is ample evidence that Mr. [NAME REDACTED] disregarded the plain truth in the pleadings related

to his ongoing divorce proceedings with [NAME REDACTED].”

Each affidavit was executed and signed by Wayland E. Breck, “Special Counsel,” on behalf of the law firm of Eagan, MacDonald amp; Browne.

“He wasn’t part of Eagan, MacDonald, was he?” I said.

“I don’t think so,” Joanie said. “Looks like he was just a contractor.”

“These are bad people, boy.”

The affidavits cited little if any supporting evidence for their assertions. Which made me think that the assertions were probably laced with falsehoods and half-truths while containing just enough verifiable fact-a tax document that could be interpreted in various ways, a statement from a jealous coworker, the testimony of an aggrieved wife-to put a scare into these men who already had been scared so badly as boys, to fling them back upon the dark certainty they had carried for most of their lives that whatever misfortune befell them was their fault and theirs alone.

As the archdiocese’s hired hatchet man, Breck had assembled affidavits that might give a man pause, especially a man laboring under a burden of guilt laid upon him in a rectory, a sacristy, a confessional. Maybe that man, that accuser, would withdraw lest he be forced to face his supposed flaws in public. Or maybe, at the very least, he would acquiesce in a mutual silence in return for money.

The photocopied newspaper clips that Frenchy had interspersed told this very story. Taken from the Times, the Free Press, the Birmingham Eccentric, the Northville Record, the articles, none more than six paragraphs long, told of how each of the men-all of them named in the stories-had agreed to settle with the archdiocese. The accusers declined to comment, in accordance with the terms of the settlements.

Other terms were not disclosed.

Joanie laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “What are you thinking?” she said.

“So the guy was your basic household lawyer for years, then in the 1990s he starts taking on these errands for Eagan, MacDonald.”

“For the archdiocese,” Joanie said.

I was trying to think about all of it, all at once: Mrs. B dead. Nilus. The murdered nun. Tatch’s camp. Breck. The digging. Tatch and my mother in jail. The piece of what appeared to be a map. The rosary. The archdiocese. Breck again.

Joanie clapped a hand on my thigh and leaned in close enough that I glimpsed pale freckles through the laces at the neck of her jersey.

“Wake up, Gus,” she said. “Why are you here? Why do you care about this guy? What does all this have to do with what happened to Phyllis Bontrager?”

“My mother knows something.”

“About these pedophile priests?”

“No.” I shifted my legs so that her hand came off my thigh. “About a nun who was killed in Starvation a long time ago.”

I told Joanie about Sister Cordelia and the man who had been accused of killing her, Breck’s grandfather. I told her about Nilus and his womanizing. I left the lockbox out of it.

“Is that why you asked about meeting with the archdiocese?”

“I wanted to know more about Nilus.”

“Good gut, then.”

“Maybe. Interesting that Eagan, MacDonald is their law firm.”

“Why?”

“The firm’s been quietly buying up land on a corner of the lake. It’s not prime land, it’s not even on the water, but all of a sudden everybody’s interested in it.”

“And you’re thinking…”

“I wonder if they’re buying it for the archdiocese.”

“Because…”

I hesitated, not sure I wanted to say it yet. “I don’t know. We can ask tomorrow.”

“You mean today.” She leaned back to look at the clock on her stove. “Holy cripes, it’s almost four-thirty.”

Through the blinds on her sole window I heard traffic stirring on the Chrysler Freeway. Her new look aside, Joanie was now the Joanie I remembered, shoving me toward conclusions, as she had when she was at the Pilot and we were looking into the past of a hockey coach. She unfolded herself and stood, the Rats jersey falling to her knees. “You know,” she said, “I don’t miss Starvation much. But I do miss you.”

“Sure, as long as you don’t have to work for me.”

“Time for bed, eh?”

I looked around the room. There was nothing but hard-backed chairs. No sofa, no armchair, not even a beanbag chair.

“Hell,” I said, “maybe we ought to just go get some breakfast.”

“You don’t like Pop-Tarts?” She slid onto the bottom step of the ladder to her loft. “I’m going up. What about you?”

The silence that followed probably was shorter than it seemed to me. “I’ll be OK,” I said. Joanie regarded me for a second, then started up the ladder. She was cute and tough and passionate, which made her beautiful, in her way. I made myself think of Darlene in Dad’s tree house the night her mother died.

I watched Joanie climb away from me.

She stopped at the top. Something, maybe a pipe, made a lurching sound inside a wall. “Nothing has to happen, Gus.”

“I know.”

She waited. I stayed. “All right,” she said. “See you in three hours.”