When Mr. Ortega returned to the waiting room, he seemed to have regained control.
‘All right,” he said. “What next?”
“We’ll need to gather some more information, if you don’t mind,” Johnny Cruikshank said. “There’s a little coffee shop just around the corner. Maybe we could go there and talk.”
Esther’s Diner was a long, dingy place with a counter on one side and a string of booths on the other. At mid- afternoon on a Saturday, the place was virtually deserted.
Even so, Johnny led them to a booth in the far corner. With no peanut butter anywhere on the menu, Joanna settled on ordering a tuna sandwich. Johnny Cruikshank ordered key lime pie, while Randy Trotter and Diego Ortega had coffee.
“Please tell us about your sister,” Johnny urged Diego once their gum-chewing waitress had departed with her order pad.
Diego’s eyes dimmed with tears. “She was always such a cute little kid,” he said.
“She was what my mother called an afterthought-one of those babies that come along when women think their childbearing days are over. My brothers and I were all in high school or college when Carmen was born. My parents were good Catholics. They wanted to have a whole bunch of kids, but after I showed up, Mama had several miscarriages in a row. The doctor told her she’d never have another child, but he was wrong. When Mama was forty-two, along came Carmen.
“When she was born, things were different from the way they had been when the rest of us were little. For one thing, Dad was making good money by then. We older kids always had to make do with secondhand clothes and hand-me-downs. But then we were all boys, so that made a difference, too. Everything Carmen got was brand-new, from her crib to her clothing.
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“The truth is, I think my brothers and I all resented her a little -thought she was spoiled rotten. And she was, too, but it wasn’t her fault. Dad and Mama just worshiped her and wanted her to have the very best. Which is how Carmen ended up going to St.
Ambrose, a private Catholic school, while all the rest of us went to public schools.
One of the parish priests at St. Ambrose is the one who molested her.”
“But she didn’t tell the family about it right away,” Johnny Cruikshank put in.
“Of course not,” Diego agreed. “That’s not the way child abuse works. When it came time for Carmen to go to high school, Mama and Dad were ready to enroll her in another private high school, but she wasn’t having any of it. She wouldn’t go. In fact, she absolutely refused. About that same time, she stopped going to church, too. She wouldn’t attend mass or go to confession. It broke my mother’s heart. But Mama’s never been one to take something like that lying down. She insisted that they go to counseling.
That’s when she first learned that Carmen was … well… different.”
“You mean that she was a lesbian?” Johnny asked.
Diego nodded. “It’s also where Carmen first told our mother about what had happened to her all those years ago when she was in second grade. Mama was furious. She went to the bishop and found out that the priest had been transferred to another parish-one right here in New Mexico, I think.”
“Right,” Randy Trotter said. “It’s common knowledge that for a long time the Catholic Church used New Mexico as the dumping ground of choice for pedophile priests.”
“Sure enough, the priest was still up to his old tricks,” Diego Ortega continued.
“Mama hired a lawyer and took her case first to the bishop and then to the cardinal.
I think she would have
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gone all the way to Rome itself, except the Church settled. It was one of the early settlements, the ones that came complete with a nondisclosure agreement. In other words, they paid, but the terms of the deal kept all parties from revealing the amount of the settlement or even that a settlement existed.”
“Hush money,” Joanna murmured.
Diego nodded again. Their food order came then. Joanna’s tuna sandwich was surprisingly good, but she had to edge herself into the far corner of the booth to keep from smelling everyone else’s coffee.
“The settlement was large enough that it paid for Carmen’s education, with some left over, but Mama always said it wasn’t enough. She’s convinced the abuse Carmen suffered is what made her turn out the way she is. I don’t think that’s true, and neither does …” He paused and took a deep breath. “Neither did Carmen,” he corrected.
“She told me once that she always knew she was different. But Mama’s set in her ways, and none of us are about to try convincing her otherwise.”
Joanna nodded. “Good plan,” she said.
“So, anyway,” Diego continued, “when Fandango wanted to do a piece about the pedophile priest scandal, Carmen went knocking on their door and begged them to let her work on it. She had done some other freelance work for them prior to that. They hired her for the project and teamed her up with Pamela. Carmen told me that when she and Pam met, it was love at first sight for both of them.”
“Tell us about Pamela Davis,” Johnny Cruikshank urged. She had finished her key lime pie and was taking detailed notes.
“Her father, Herman Davis, was an executive for one of the big studios,” Diego Ortega said. “Herman died of a stroke years ago, but I understand he was one of the off-screen movers and
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