Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

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Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries) Page 12

by Jane Haddam

“Oh.” Tom lost interest. “He’s on Barry Field’s talk show a lot, Your Eminence. The switchboard always lights up.”

  “I know that. I also know that not one week ago I sent a letter to every Catholic in this Archdiocese, and a personal letter to every priest, practically threatening them with excommunication for watching the thing, never mind appearing on it. He just doesn’t listen.”

  “He never did, Your Eminence.”

  “He used to listen to direct orders.”

  That, Tom thought, wasn’t precisely true. Andy used to listen to some lands of direct orders. He thought the Confessional ought to be abolished, but he let Dec hear confessions in one anyway, because the Cardinal told him to. He thought Masses ought to be said in private houses and open fields, but he said them in St. Agnes’s Church, just to avoid a hassle. Faced with other direct orders, he was adamant. There were still altar girls in Andy Walsh’s parish church, and women giving out Communion. There were Masses for the CYO with Andy in nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. There were group penance services given with the tacit understanding that the people who attended them didn’t have to make individual confessions at all—and that was in violation of canon law. Andy, like a lot of his better-heeled parishioners, was a cafeteria Catholic.

  “I take it you’ve given up on Mr. Demarkian’s getting Andy out of your hair,” Tom said.

  “Not exactly,” the Cardinal said. “I haven’t given up on Mr. Demarkian. You did schedule an appointment?”

  “Tomorrow at eight fifteen, Your Eminence, yes.”

  “I hate to conduct business on Good Friday, but I suppose it can’t be helped. At any rate, I’m still interested in Mr. Demarkian, and he might get Andy Walsh out of my hair, as you put it.”

  “It’s good you’re still interested in him, Your Eminence. I don’t think he’d like to have been dragged all the way up here for nothing.”

  “Well, it won’t be for nothing. There is something—ragged—about the official explanation of Cheryl Cass’s death.”

  “If you say so, Your Eminence.”

  “Never mind what I say. Think about Andy Walsh.” O’Bannion took the cigar out of his mouth and stared at its tip. There was a big fat ash there that was threatening to ruin his suit. “Did you know Paul Hessart was sick?”

  “Archbishop Hessart in Mobile?”

  “Cancer,” O’Bannion said. “He’s fifty-two. Terry Baldwin out in Los Angeles has a heart condition that keeps him in bed half the time. He’s fifty-eight. I’m sixty-four.”

  Tom felt panic spurt up his spine and battled it down with difficulty. “Is there something wrong with your health, Your Eminence?”

  “No, no,” O’Bannion said, “not that I know of. But there it is. There could be something I don’t know of. Tom, I’ve spent a lot of time in this Archdiocese. I’ve done a lot of work here. I’ve nearly got it turned around.”

  “You have got it turned around, Your Eminence. It’s just a question of letting the numbers pile themselves up again.”

  “Maybe. What would happen if I was put out of commission tomorrow?”

  “You won’t be—”

  “But what if I was? Who do you think would take my place here?”

  “Your Eminence, at the moment, we have a very conservative Pope. He wouldn’t put a man in who—”

  “He might have to,” O’Bannion said stubbornly. “He can only work with what he’s got. I want to make sure he’s got the kind of man he needs.”

  “And I’m it, Your Eminence? An ex-juvenile delinquent with a family history that reads like a novel by Frank Norris?”

  “St. Augustine was an ex-juvenile delinquent. And your family history is nobody’s business but your own. Good heavens, look up there. I believe we’re going to move.”

  Tom turned away from the Cardinal and looked, through the partition and the windshield, at the intersection. They were indeed going to move. He checked his watch.

  “We may still get there in reasonably good time, Your Eminence. Barring further delay, it should be about ten of.”

  O’Bannion gave him a long, slow look, through the haze of smoke coming out of his cigar. “Every time I go to St. Agnes’s,” he said, “I feel like I’m attending my own funeral.”

  [3]

  Sister Scholastica had given strict instructions that she was not to be disturbed until after the ten o’clock Mass. By quarter to ten, those instructions had been violated twice—once by Benedict Marie, who had come to tell her the goat had gotten loose in the vestibule and eaten a stack of leaflets for the Sacred Heart Driving League and earlier by Father Declan Boyd, who had come to tell her what Andy Walsh had said on Barry Field’s talk show. Or what Dec thought he’d said. To Scholastica, the report had sounded garbled and confused. In some ways, it had made a lot of sense. In others, it hadn’t made any sense at all. Dec had eaten up a great hunk of her morning giving it to her, as he always did whenever he came to talk to her about anything. Whether the matter was momentous or trivial, Dec liked to turn it into an epic. Epics being complicated things, he’d had no attention to spare for her reactions—which was a very good thing. She had been behaving very oddly. The part of his report that had made sense to her was not good news. In fact, it had been a shock. She’d had no idea of how to cope with it, so she hadn’t. From what she remembered, she’d been monosyllabic and cold and short-tempered, three things she was usually careful not to be with parish priests. If Dec had noticed it, maybe he’d put it down to all the trouble she was having with the organizational details of the ten o’clock Mass.

  Now she leaned against the window of her office that looked out on Ellery Street and watched the vans from WLTL and WRSX and WCCN that had parked outside the church. Whatever Andy had told his friends at the local news programs, it must have been ripe. They wouldn’t have turned out in full battle gear for anything less than a carnival. In a few moments, her students would be filing down Ellery Street, passing right in front of those airhead vultures. It was an idea she didn’t like very much. Unfortunately, she liked the idea of using the courtyard route to the church’s back door even less. After Benedict Marie had told her about the pamphlets, Scholastica had had the goat moved there.

  What in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph did Andy Walsh want with that goat? What could he want with it? What could he have wanted with all that trash he’d talked on television this morning? Sister Scholastica had never thought of Andy Walsh as a dangerous man—he was too ridiculous—but now it occurred to her that he might be one. He didn’t think.

  There was a knock on her office door. Scholastica turned, said “come in” in a faintly inquisitive way, and waited while the school secretary, little Linda Healy, came in. The little that was monotonously appended to Linda Healy’s name was strictly a literal adjective. The cultural connotations of the word—like cuteness and youth and immaturity—did not apply. Linda Healy was four foot ten and weighed eighty pounds. She was also well into middle age, hatchet-faced, and bad tempered on principle. If she hadn’t worked for the school since the day after she graduated from Cathedral Girls’ High, Scholastica would have fired her.

  Linda closed the office door, came into the middle of the room, and stopped. In her hand, she held a blue visitor’s slip. On her face, she had fixed an expression that could only have been appropriate if she’d just found a leech attached to the underside of her thigh. Scholastica wondered what the problem was this time. Or, most likely, who.

  Scholastica pointed at the blue slip and said, “I take it there’s someone to see me. Now.”

  Linda Healy pursed her lips. “I know you asked not to be disturbed, Sister. And I told him this was a bad time. But he insisted.”

  “Is it Father Walsh?”

  “Of course not.” Linda seemed to hesitate. As much as she wanted to be insulting, she didn’t want to get caught at it. She didn’t want to come right out and say it wouldn’t be Father Walsh, because Father Walsh was busy at the church. Finally, she forced herself to cross the
room and hand the visitor’s slip to Sister. “He was really very rude,” she said. “Of course, I don’t know what else I should have expected, considering, but I would have thought even apostates observed the norms of common courtesy. I suppose I must have been wrong. That’s my problem, you know, Sister. I have much too optimistic a view of human nature.”

  Scholastica wanted to say that the only person she’d ever heard of with a less optimistic view of human nature was Savonarola—but it wouldn’t have been politic, and she wouldn’t have been able to get the words out anyway. She was staring down at the visitor’s slip. She had read it. Then she had read it again. Then she had wondered if she was going crazy. “Good God,” she said. “Barry Field.”

  “I’m surprised he has the gall to show himself in this parish,” Linda Healy said.

  “He lives in this parish,” Scholastica said absently. “In that little apartment building down the block from Peg Morrissey Monaghan.”

  “I told him you had much too much to do to see him today,” Linda Healy said, “but he just wouldn’t listen. He insisted I come in here and bother you.”

  Scholastica went to her desk, sat down, and laid the visitor’s slip out on the desktop, where she could go on reading it. She had no idea what it was she was going to go on reading. All the idiot thing said was, Mr. Barry Field. 9:45. Scholastica suddenly had a vision of herself, aged fifteen and curled up in the backseat of Barry’s brother Ben’s 1962 Mercury, explaining in euphemisms worthy of the great Mr. Bowdler himself just why she wasn’t going to let Barry take off her bra. In the front seat, Ben and his girlfriend, Janie MacIver, were going at it like extras in a blue-movie orgy scene. The Mercury was parked in a clump of bushes at the top of Borodin Hill.

  There was that, and there was the matter of Barry’s name. He wasn’t Barry at all, but Barrymore, after his mother’s favorite actor. Scholastica couldn’t remember if it had been Lionel or John.

  Linda Healy had come to stand closer to the desk. She cleared her throat and twitched her nose. Heaven only knew what the twitch was for.

  “Now that he’s clearly seen I’ve been in here to speak to you,” she said, “I’ll go right out there and make him go away. Why he thought he could just barge into your office and—”

  “Show him in,” Scholastica said.

  “What?”

  “Show him in,” Scholastica repeated. “Right now.”

  “You’re due in church in,” Linda checked her watch, “thirteen minutes.”

  “I’ll be at the church. Right now I want you to show him in.”

  Linda Healy was not a woman who contradicted priests, or nuns, or anyone else officially connected to her Church—at least not out loud. She had too many other ways of making her disapproval clear.

  This time, she went rigid, and hooded her eyes, and drew her lips into a smile that made her look as if she had the face of a thresher shark. Then she said, “Of course, Sister, I’ll show him right in.”

  Scholastica watched her back until she was safely out the door. Then she took the visitor’s slip from the top of her desk and tore it into strips.

  SEVEN

  [1]

  BY NINE O’CLOCK, GREGOR Demarkian had begun to wonder if Barry Field sold videotapes of his television programs, or reran the morning ones later in the day. Watching a videotape or a rerun was the only way he was ever going to know for sure what Andy Walsh had said on the air this morning. Watching television with an excited Declan Boyd was an experience Gregor would not want to repeat. Declan jumped, Declan paced, Declan shouted—at himself, Gregor, the television, and the furniture. What he had to say was perfectly clear. The Cardinal went absolutely livid at any mention of what had happened twenty years ago in Black Rock Park. Dec didn’t know why, but there it was. When the Cardinal got livid, he lashed out. Under the circumstances, he would want to lash out at Andy Walsh—but Andy had a habit of vanishing when the lashings out came and of staying vanished until the storms of the Cardinal’s temper were spent. By the time Andy showed up for his inevitable dressing down, the Cardinal would be angry, but subdued, and too tired to do any real damage. In the meantime, he would have hit at the first thing in his path. Declan Boyd knew who that would be. It would be who it always was. Himself.

  “Andy always does this to me,” Declan Boyd had said. “Always. The time he consecrated the bran muffins at the CYO Mass, he went to Stowe, Vermont, for a week.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. He would have said something else if he could have thought of something to say, but it didn’t really matter that he couldn’t. Declan Boyd wasn’t listening to him.

  “I am not going to get beaten to a pulp over this,” he was saying. “I am not. Not this time.”

  “But Father Walsh can’t disappear this time,” Gregor said. “He has to say Mass in, what, an hour?”

  Declan Boyd shot him a pitying look. “He’ll show up just in time to start celebrating. The Cardinal can’t get to him while he’s in the middle of saying Mass. Then, when the Mass is over, he’ll just disappear.”

  “Where?”

  “How do I know? Maybe Judy Eagan hides him in her basement. They’re so thick all the time.”

  If they were so thick all the time, the Cardinal probably knew about it, which meant Judy Eagan was one of the first people he would question in any search for Andy Walsh. It was logic, but Declan Boyd was not in the mood for logic. Gregor had begun to wonder if the man was even capable of it.

  “I’ve got to find Sister Scholastica and talk to her about it,” Boyd was saying. “She’s known Andy forever. Maybe she can get us out of this.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. If I knew how to get us out of this, I wouldn’t need her. She’s smart, Sister Scholastica. She’s very smart.”

  “I could tell.”

  “Nuns are always smart,” Declan Boyd said, “except for the ones who aren’t.”

  With that, Declan Boyd bolted for the door, running into the courtyard in his shirt and slacks, entirely unprotected by the weather. There was a stiff wind out there and the start of a new snow, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  The problem, Gregor thought later—much later, after the church bells had struck quarter to ten and he had begun to feel restless—was that Declan Boyd couldn’t stop himself from jumping to conclusions, and once he’d jumped he couldn’t shut himself up. He had started by giving Gregor some very necessary information—the details, as far as he knew them, of what had happened in Black Rock Park—but then he’d rhapsodized about it and beleaguered the point, until all Gregor was absolutely sure of was that Declan Boyd was upset. It was as if Boyd had entered a kind of waking fugue state. And that was too bad. When Gregor had a chance to hear what was coming over the air, he found a lot more to interest him than what he could mine from Declan Boyd’s ravings.

  “It’s not just the sin you have to think about,” Andy Walsh had said, “it’s what the sin engenders. It’s what the sin spawns. If you look at the sin you see an incident. If you look at the life that follows the sin, you see a catastrophe.”

  Gregor tapped the arm of the couch, annoyed. What had come before that? What had come after? He’d been sitting here since Declan Boyd went running off to St. Agnes’s School, and he hadn’t come up with the glimmer of an idea of what Andy Walsh had been getting at. What was worse, he had the impression that Barry Field hadn’t been able to, either. From the short glimpses he’d got of the pudgy evangelist’s face—and very short glimpses were all you got when Declan Boyd was pacing—he thought he’d detected an uncharacteristic expression of puzzlement. It might even have been relief. He just didn’t know.

  What all this reminded him of was a kidnapping case he’d had in Marin County, California, very early in his career at the FBI. It was a very straightforward case and would have been wrapped up in a matter of days, except that the local officer in charge had been a nonstop stream-of-conscious-ness talker and a panicker besides. He’d been scared out of his mind and utterly
unable to control himself—and he’d taught Gregor something about himself. Gregor could work under a hundred different pressures and against a thousand different distractions, but he could not think properly when he was being bombarded by an agitated and uninterrupted monologue.

  Of course, this situation was very different. There was no frail old woman’s life at stake here. There was no time restriction. He wasn’t going to be woken up at four o’clock in the morning by a junior agent who wanted to tell him that the body had been found within a mile of the place he should have expected it to be to begin with.

  He got off the couch, retrieved his coat and scarf from the back of the chair he had left them on, and went out into the foyer. Since Elizabeth’s death, he had been plagued by memory. What he remembered were always his failures, never his successes. There had been many more successes than failures—so many, the press sometimes made the mistake of saying he’d never failed at all—but for some reason they didn’t seem to count. It was the broken bodies he remembered: the kidnapping victims who had not been found in time, the victims of killers who had gone on killing long after he should have stopped them. If he let himself go on with it long enough, he always found himself standing on the lip of that trench that had been dug along the side of the Barnswallow Road outside Corrigan, Massachusetts. In that trench were the bodies of nine small boys, not one of them older than five. In the world somewhere was the man or woman who had killed them, still at large.

  It was the one thing in the world he knew he shouldn’t think about. The trench had been discovered just as Elizabeth entered her last year of life, a long agonizing year whose only real event—in his mind—had been her dying. He’d had every right to withdraw from the case, and every right to expect the man he’d handed it over to to solve it. The fact that that man had not could not be Gregor Demarkian’s fault.

  He just couldn’t seem to stop himself from thinking it was.

  He put his coat on and wrapped his scarf around his neck. Brooding over that incredible mess was worse than futile. He was retired now. The Bureau wouldn’t have let him get back into it for anything less than a direct order from the President of the United States. Gregor had never been on intimate terms with this particular President of the United States.

 

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