by Jane Haddam
“Two Catholic priests and a nun?”
“Why not? And who’s to say they were the only people she saw? But look at the situation, Tibor. That won’t work, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I was going to go in for mercy killing—especially the mercy killing of an old friend—I’d have made damn sure she was comfortable, not lying in an alley somewhere.”
“Maybe she was made comfortable, Krekor. Maybe she was given a hotel room and then, between the time she swallowed the poison and the time she died—”
“She wouldn’t have made it out the hotel room door. Nicotine would have killed her in minutes.”
“Could she have been moved?” Tibor said.
“Could she? Definitely. There are, however, two problems with that. In the first place, I asked the Colchester police to check the hotel registers, which they did. No Cheryl Cass registered anywhere. In the second place, if she was moved into that alley, then whatever happened was not a mercy killing.”
“Ah,” Tibor said.
“You can say ‘ah,’” Gregor said. “Look what I’m dealing with. None of it makes the least amount of sense.”
“What does John O’Bannion say?”
Gregor laughed. “Oh, Tibor. I told you. The Cardinal thinks this is the answer to all his problems.”
“How could it be?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “the Cardinal likes the suicide idea. What he wants is for me to prove that Andy Walsh said something to Cheryl Cass to put the idea into her head. Or to push her over the edge. Or something. Anything, Tibor, really. I’ve tried and tried to tell him we couldn’t prove it even if it were true, but he just won’t listen to me. He won’t listen to anybody. He’s driving me out of my mind.”
“Then why are you going, Krekor?”
Gregor dropped back into his chair. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s just that something happened to Cheryl Cass, and I’d like to know what it was.”
TWO
[1]
THE CITY OF COLCHESTER was incorporated by the British Crown in June of 1776, just in time to turn traitor and join the American Revolution. From that time to this, it has been a city of warring camps. In the nineteenth century, it was divided by geography: the farmers fought the townsmen and the new industrial barons for the strips of land that stretched like points of a star from the old town common. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was divided by religion: the shag end of the Protestant revival fought the new Spiritualists for the hearts and minds of the rural denizens of Upstate New York. By the time Gregor Demarkian first saw it, it was divided by technology. The old industries were dying. The meager veins of coal that had once threaded the hills near the lake were exhausted. The great foundries and tool-and-die plants had lost ground to the Germans and the Japanese. The new industries seemed to have no place in them for the people who had built the city. The jobs they offered paid well and offered unheard of benefits, but there was almost no one in the area equipped to take them. A tool-and-die man couldn’t turn himself into a hardware engineer overnight. A body assembler couldn’t turn himself into a software designer, either. The Colchester Tribune was full of help wanted ads, almost all of them unanswered. The jobs were filled elsewhere—in recruiting offices on college campuses in California and New Jersey, in headhunters’ hospitality suites in the World Trade Center, from black-bordered box ads placed every Friday in The Wall Street Journal and every Sunday in The New York Times. The new people were as different from the natives of Colchester as Martians might have been from Vesuvians. They had too much money, too much credit, and much too little time.
In Gregor Demarkian’s opinion, they also had much too little taste. Coming up on Amtrak from Grand Central with nothing else to do—he could never read on trains; he got restless—he had been paying close attention to the landscape. At first, what he had seen had been what he had expected. Westchester and Duchess counties were rich suburbs of New York. Their towns were strung out along the track like so many exhibits in a museum of post-World War II architecture. Only the train stations themselves had any authenticity, and it was the authenticity of poverty. Obviously, New Rochelle and Rhinebeck and Hudson and Cleary didn’t believe the stations had any right to be kept up.
Farther North, the atmosphere changed, literally as well as metaphorically. For one thing, it got colder. New York and Philadelphia were both feeling the effects of the last assault of winter, but in both places there was a sense, just beneath the surface, of change coming for the better. North of the Duchess County line, that sense disappeared, and Gregor found himself staring at the dead black heart of the snow season. He came to the uneasy conclusion that the dead black heart never really disappeared. Around him, the hills rose higher and higher as the people seemed to sink lower and lower. The houses he could see from the window next to his seat were at best jerry-built tract boxes. At worst, they were little more than huts.
He was almost at the Colchester city limits when the landscape changed again, and this time the change was startling. Here, too, were tract houses, but tract houses on a grand scale: exuberantly ugly interpretations of French manor houses, Spanish haciendas, Swiss chalets, and Dutch gambrels, all of them too large and too brightly painted. Carriage house lights adorned their doors. Split-rail fences divided their lawns from the wide black asphalt roads that wound between them. The effect was hallucinatory. If the rabbit hole Alice had fallen into had been Truman Capote’s nightmare instead of Lewis Carroll’s, this is what it would have looked like. Gregor found himself tempted to forgive John O’Bannion his incoherencies. This would have made anyone with any sense as incoherent as hell.
Then the tracks curved and curved again, and Gregor was presented with the land of landscape he understood. A billboard painted in dull green and electric blue announced, MAVERICK INN—DOWNTOWN COLCHESTER AT ITS BEST. A white banner in its lower left-hand corner said, Closed for Renovations, February 17—June 1. Beyond were dozens of small buildings made of concrete block, frosted with snow and crowned with roof signs advertising warehouses, delivery services, plumbing supplies and office space for rent. There was always office space for rent in places like this. Gregor could never figure out who would want to rent it. God only knew, a doctor wouldn’t do too well if his patients had to come down to a district like this.
Gregor stood up, got his suitcase from the overhead rack, and looked down at the tie he had borrowed from George Telemakian. It was still intact, but unfortunately it was still pink. He shrugged a little and put on his coat, buttoning it all the way to his chin so the tie would be hidden. The train had shaken itself free of the planet of concrete block. Gregor leaned over to look out the window one more time. Colchester was a city of brick and stone, a city that had fallen into disrepair and recently been spruced up again. The signs were unmistakable. He caught another sign for the Maverick Inn with another white banner announcing renovations and shook his head a little. Whoever had thought up the wording on that one deserved to be shot. It was too confusing and too prominent—and it had probably had the effect of a bell on a leper.
Somewhere up front, the engineer hit the brakes. The wheels squealed. The train lurched. And Gregor Demarkian nearly fell on his ass.
Somehow, he couldn’t help seeing it as a very bad omen.
[2]
Colchester Station wasn’t bad as stations went. It had been built during the mania for high ceilings and marble floors and wrought-iron balconies, and it looked a little like the hall of justice in a tiny European principality. Unlike the station in Philadelphia, it was well equipped with newsstands and novelty stores. Once through the barrier that divided the main station from the platforms, Gregor was surrounded by pink plastic Easter eggs, fluffy yellow nylon chicks, evil-looking chocolate rabbits wrapped in red tinfoil, and fuzzy blue bunnies wearing pink polka dot bow ties. Every newsstand had its ceiling hung with baskets wrapped in amber cellophane. Every store had cardboard cutout posters of chicks breaking
out of eggs cluttering up its windows. Even the inevitable Maverick Inn signboard with its inevitable white renovations banner had been decorated with green and yellow ribbons. Bright green cellophane grass was everywhere.
Gregor bought a copy of the Colchester Tribune at the first newsstand he came to—dodging baskets and green crepe paper streamers to do it—and tucked it under his arm. Cheryl Cass’s body had been found on the first Sunday of Lent, no more than five days after she might have died. That combined with the fact that the Archdiocese of Colchester was taking an interest made it virtually impossible that he would find anything about her in the paper he just bought. From the reports he’d heard, she’d been the next best thing to a bag lady anyway, not the kind of person whose death the media paid attention to. If it had been O’Bannion himself who had died, Gregor would have been able to get all the details he needed from the farm report in Tecumseh, Iowa.
Still, he thought, a paper was a good thing to have, especially in a town you knew nothing about. Colchester seemed to have escaped the great homicidal psychopath wave of the 1980s. While the police departments of every other large- and medium-size city in the country were unearthing unidentified bodies in shallow graves, Colchester must have been relatively quiet. If it hadn’t been, Gregor would have heard about it. That was what he had been doing with his life in those days. Ted Bundy, Donald Miller, John Wayne Gacey, the Zodiac killer, the Green River killer, the Hillside Stranglers. It was an honor roll of some sort, Gregor just didn’t know of what sort. No wonder he had burned out on his job. Even without the terrible months of Elizabeth’s last year, a steady diet of bludgeoned skulls and mutilated faces would have frazzled him eventually. Sometimes, looking back on it, he wished he had been what The Philadelphia Inquirer insisted on calling him: an Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. When Hercule Poirot involved himself in a murder, it was never one of thirty and it was never messy.
He gave passing thought to the possibility that Cheryl Cass had been the first victim of a roving psychopath and then dismissed it. The kind of psychopath who would have been interested in a woman like Cheryl—meaning a man-on the prowl for the weak—would not have used poison. He would have gone for a blunt instrument. In Gregor’s experience, the only psychopaths who used poison were nurses and day-care workers and, like a plague, they killed the very young and the very old.
“Getting old,” he said, under his breath, to that part of Elizabeth that was always with him. “Probably getting stupid, too.”
He thought he heard her say “tcha, tcha, tcha” and sigh. Elizabeth had never had much use for what she called his “tendency to self-denigration.”
Straight in front of him, at the end of a long and very wide corridor, he saw the marble-railed double staircase he had been promised would lead him to the main waiting room and headed for it. With any luck, whoever O’Bannion had sent to fetch him would be waiting with a sign. Otherwise, Gregor thought, they might never find each other at all.
[3]
The man at the top of the stairs wasn’t carrying a sign, but he was wearing a Roman collar and looking from one side of the landing to the other. That would have been enough, if he hadn’t been so unlike the man Gregor had thought he’d be. For some reason—nothing specific and nothing John Cardinal O’Bannion had said—Gregor had assumed he’d be met by Father Tom Dolan, O’Bannion’s chief aide. This man couldn’t be that. He was much too young and much too vague. A cardinal’s chief aide would have to be intelligent. Gregor judged this priest as just borderline bright. He’d probably struggled his way through the seminary on a barely respectable C average and been ordained more for his character than his brilliance. On the other hand, his character had a few flaws in it, too. The reason Gregor saw the priest before the priest saw Gregor was that the priest’s attention was constantly being distracted by a display of chocolate bunnies in the window of a novelty store near the outside door. There was no question at all of where the man had acquired his flab.
Gregor shifted his suitcase from one hand to the other—it was amazing how suitcases got heavier the longer you carried them—and made his way over to the round-faced priest. There was something out of kilter about a face like that on a big, gone-to-seed football player’s body. The face was so cherubic, it belonged on the body of a small china doll.
Gregor touched the priest on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me. I don’t know if you’re who I’m looking for, but my name is—”
“Gregor Demarkian!” The cherubic face lit up. The too blue eyes widened and danced. A hand the size of a Virginia ham shot out and grabbed Gregor’s free one to shake. “Hello. I’m Declan Boyd. Father Declan Boyd. I’m associate pastor at St. Agnes Parish.”
“Ah,” said Gregor. “I see.” He didn’t really. O’Bannion seemed to have sent him Andy Walsh’s assistant, and that didn’t make any sense at all. But then, Gregor thought, O’Bannion had never made any sense to him. The man’s mind seemed to work on a different track from other people’s.
Declan Boyd was hopping from one foot to the other, with the natural restlessness of a man who had once been athletic. “The Cardinal sent me to get you,” he was saying, “because he’s tied up in church and so is Father Dolan and so is everybody, even the nuns, because tomorrow is Holy Thursday. You wouldn’t believe what goes on around here on Holy Thursday. This is a very Catholic town.”
“I’ve noticed,” Gregor said. He had, too. Threaded among the icons of ultracute were notes of a more serious nature. The Knights of Columbus had been allowed to put up a table to collect money for the homeless. The Archdiocese had been allotted a small square of billboard space—clearly marked “a public service announcement,” to let everyone know it had been donated—for a poster that said, He died on the Cross. All He’s asking you to do is get up a little earlier on Sunday Morning. Most telling of all, the signboard at the front door included directions not only to City Hall, the Colchester Arcade and the Museum of American Indian Art, but to Holy Name Cathedral. Gregor wondered just how Catholic a town had to be before its train station put up signs telling people how to get to church.
“It’s wonderful being here,” Declan Boyd said. “I was brought up in Missouri, where practically the whole state is Protestant. When I came to St. Bonaventure for college, I could hardly believe it—”
“St. Bonaventure is a local college?”
“Right over the city line. It was wonderful. You have no idea. I just knew I wanted to be ordained here instead of back at home.”
Obviously, Gregor thought, Declan Boyd was the kind of man who told anyone and everyone the story of his life—and, in all likelihood, the story of everybody else’s as well. With a little more intelligence or a taste for malice, he would be an uncomfortable man to know. Fortunately, on the surface, he showed no signs of either. Gregor wondered what he had to say about the Cheryl Cass mess. People like Declan Boyd often saw and heard and knew more than anybody expected them to.
At the moment, the good Father was chattering on, reaching for Gregor’s suitcase and heading for the front door all at the same time. Gregor couldn’t help smiling to himself. If the man was what he appeared to be, he could turn out to be an asset—but he’d always be an asset it was impossible to control.
“The Archdiocese is always such a mess during Holy Week,” he was saying. “You probably expected Father Dolan instead of me—”
“Father Dolan is the man I’ve done the most talking to,” Gregor said, “next to your Archbishop.”
“Oh, we always call the Archbishop the Cardinal. I mean, he is a Cardinal Archbishop. He said you’d probably be looking for Tom. He’s a wonderful man, you know. The Archbishop, I mean, not Tom. He always comes right out and admits it when he’s been wrong.”
“Wrong about what?” Gregor asked desperately.
“About you and Tom Dolan, of course. He said he’d given you the impression and he really shouldn’t have. That it would be Tom who was coming, I mean. And you wouldn’t know Tom never goes anywhe
re practically—”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” Declan Boyd stopped in midstride. They were halfway to the front door and the sign marked taxi stand, surrounded by the first eddying waves of rush-hour commuters. No one was paying attention to them, and because of that several people bumped into them. Gregor was hit by a small round woman in a brown alpaca coat and lake alligator shoes. Declan Boyd bounced a businessman in a toupee that came loose at the first hint of collision. Declan Boyd didn’t notice.
“Father Dolan,” he said, flinging out his arms for no good reason Gregor could see, making himself look like Charlton Heston making a speech in a movie about Moses, “is a very busy man. And he’s an order priest besides. He’s practically a monk. Don’t you see?”
Gregor did not see. He had no idea what an “order priest” was, and he was fairly certain the Cardinal would not have a real monk as a chief aide. On the other hand, O’Bannion being O’Bannion, it was not beyond the realm of possibility that he might. Gregor would have killed for a chance to ask for amplification.
He didn’t get it. As soon as Declan Boyd dropped his arms, he shot out a hand and grabbed Gregor by the shoulder. Moments later, they were both on the sidewalk outside, pumping toward the taxi stand with all the mindless dedication of runners on the last lap of a relay race. Boyd had his coat flapping open and his Roman collar clearly visible, making it possible for him to shoot to the head of the line without protest from the other people waiting. He jerked open the door of the nearest cab and pushed Gregor inside.
“Rosary House,” Boyd told the driver as he climbed in himself. Then he turned to Gregor and said, “You’re going to love Rosary House. It was one of the Cardinal’s best ideas. It’s run by this lovely nun from the Sisters of Divine Grace, Sister Mary Martha, and it’s right on the grounds of St. Agnes’s—”
“St. Agnes’s?”