Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  The best way not to think about the past was to get involved in the present. It was too bad John Cardinal O’Bannion seemed to have done everything possible to ensure there was nothing for Gregor to get himself involved in. Or at least, nothing until tomorrow. Gregor supposed the Cardinal would come back to earth as soon as the crunch of Holy Thursday was over. In the meantime…

  Gregor looked across the courtyard to St. Agnes’s Roman Catholic Church. In the meantime, he thought, since everybody else is going to church, so will I.

  [2]

  For a while, he hesitated between using the back door of the church—which was close—or going around to the front. He decided on the back because it was so cold. It was, in fact, much colder than it had been when he left the convent for the rectory. A solid sheet of clouds was blanketing the sky, shutting out the sun. The wind was much stronger than it had been. Besides, he could see people going in and out of that back door, including Sister Benedict Marie. If there was no way to get from it to the main body of the church without causing a scandal, she would redirect him.

  He slipped and slid along the asphalt walk—capped with ice as all the walks had been the night before—and got to the door just as the woman in the red coat was coming out of it. Beyond it, he could see a half-flight of steps leading down and the goat.

  The red-coated woman looked him over and said, very bluntly, “Who are you?”

  “Gregor Demarkian,” he answered her, as pleasantly as he could. Then he remembered something. “You’re Judy Eagan. The president of the Parish Council.”

  Judy Eagan was taken aback. “That’s right. I am. How did you know?”

  “Father Boyd described you to me.”

  “Oh,” Judy Eagan said. “Father Boyd.” She looked back at the door she was still holding open in one gloveless hand and frowned. “Are you going in there?”

  “If it’s all right,” Gregor said.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” Judy Eagan told him, “as long as you’re careful of the goat. The damn thing bites.”

  “Goats usually do.”

  “Well, it’s very nice that you know that, but this is the first goat I’ve ever met. It ate one of my gloves. And now I’ve got to get the wine.”

  “The wine?”

  “For Communion,” Judy Eagan said impatiently. “It wasn’t delivered when it was supposed to be. I had to go pick it up. I’ve got it in the trunk of my car and if I don’t get it there won’t be any.”

  “The church ran out of wine?”

  “I think Andy drinks the stuff with dinner. If you’re going to go in, you ought to go. I’m in a rush.”

  She let go of the door and trotted off, not so much as wobbling on the ice. In heels that high, it was a good trick.

  Gregor opened the door again for himself and went down the interior stairs to meet the goat. It was, he saw, a prime billy goat, old enough to have grown a substantial set of horns but young enough to have a temper. It was tethered by a very short rope to the newel post of another half-flight of stairs that rose to the left.

  The half-flight that led to the right was much more interesting. The door at the top of that had been propped back, and through it Gregor could see a little constellation of people rushing back and forth through what appeared to be an anteroom leading to a short hall. One of those people was Declan Boyd. Another was the very pregnant woman he had seen with Judy Eagan from the window of his room this morning. None of them was Andy Walsh.

  Gregor had just decided to go up the steps in that direction—although he had a feeling it was the wrong direction—when Judy Eagan came running back in. She was carrying four bottles of wine under her left arm and a fifth in her free hand, and she looked more frazzled than she had before.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said as she saw him. She was making a wide arc around the goat and trying to get to the front of the stairs at the same time. It was a nearly impossible problem in mathematics, but she just managed it. “You’d better come if you’re going to come. Everything is such a mess.”

  She raced up the steps and into the anteroom. Gregor followed her.

  Once inside, Gregor could see that the anteroom was bigger than it had seemed to be. One wall was a built-in bookcase, crammed with volumes about rites and saints. In one of the corners that had been out of his sight as he stood in the vestibule, there was a long table, covered with a wrinkled white tablecloth. On this table, Judy Eagan had put the bottles of wine. Now she was opening them with the help of a corkscrew on a Swiss Army knife. She was, Gregor saw, very adept at opening wine. She jabbed, she twisted, and the cork was out.

  Next to her, the very pregnant woman was patting hair into place and looking green. “The Cardinal just came through the door,” she was saying, “and you know what that means. He’s going to go absolutely crazy if this Mass is late.”

  “This Mass is not going to be late. Go get me the pitcher.”

  “Why are you opening so much wine?” the pregnant woman said.

  “Andy wants the congregation to receive under both species. There are six hundred people out there.”

  “Well yes, Judy, I know. But they’re mostly children. And you’d need a dozen pitchers to—”

  “Peg.”

  Peg blushed, shook her head, and headed out the door that led at a right angle away from the vestibule stairs. Somebody on the other side of that door was trying to get in. Peg stepped back and waited for a tall, young, ascetic-looking man to pass her.

  “Oh, Tom,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here. Everything is just so crazy.”

  “I can see that,” Tom said.

  Peg went back to rushing out the door.

  By this time, Gregor had taken up a post against the wall next to the door that led to the vestibule stairs. He’d only intended to pass through this place on his way to a pew. He hadn’t expected to find himself so fascinated. For weeks—for months—he had been listening to John Cardinal O’Bannion’s tales of St. Agnes Parish. It had been like reading a book by an author who didn’t describe things very well. Until he’d arrived in Colchester, he’d had no idea what any of these people looked like. Andy Walsh—at least as he appeared on television—had turned out much the way Gregor had expected him to. So had Declan Boyd, whom O’Bannion had referred to only as “the associate pastor” and Barry Field, although Field had been shabbier than Gregor’s imaging of him. Sister Scholastica, on the other hand, had been a surprise, and so had Judy Eagan. Now he had the last two to look over. They were surprises as well.

  Peg, Gregor thought, had to be Peg Morrissey Monaghan, who had identified the picture of Cheryl Cass in the Tribune and brought this whole mess to the Cardinal’s attention. The Cardinal hadn’t said anything about her being pregnant, and he’d given the impression that she was just a bit mentally dim. Well, she was very pregnant, and Gregor thought she probably wasn’t dim at all. Far from it. In all this strain and confusion, to a vulnerable physical state, she had enough presence of mind to look at Judy Eagan with a skeptical eye.

  Tom, now, had to be Father Tom Dolan, John Cardinal O’Bannion’s chief aide. Gregor had expected a cross between a saint and a monument to efficiency. He had gotten a man exhausted to the point of physical collapse. Gregor had seen agents more rested after a week of all-night stakeouts.

  Tom Dolan was leaning against the table where Judy Eagan was still fussing with the wine. Judy Eagan was gazing on him with venom.

  “What,” she asked him, “are you doing here?”

  “I’m seeing how you’re getting along,” he said. “The Cardinal asked me to.”

  “Of course the Cardinal asked you to,” she said. “The Cardinal thinks he’s the only one in the whole damn Archdiocese with a brain in his head.”

  At that point, Sister Scholastica came running in from the door Peg Monaghan had run out of. “Judy,” she said, “the books have been put away again. I don’t know if I know where—”

  “I don’t know where, either,” Judy said.


  “I’ll go look in the loft,” Scholastica said. She passed Gregor, gave him a little smile, and ran into the hall he had noticed from the vestibule.

  Seconds later, Declan Boyd came running out of the same hall, carrying a large gold chalice and a flat gold plate. “Look what I found,” he said. “Look what I found. Stuffed into the sacristy cupboard and nobody knew they were there.”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” Tom Dolan said, “I’ll take them out.”

  “I have got too much wine,” Judy Eagan said.

  Declan Boyd shoved the chalice and plate into Tom Dolan’s hands. “I’ve got to go back for the cloth,” he said. “The cloth is in there, too. I forgot about it.”

  “You’d forget your ass if you didn’t have to sit down on it,” Judy Eagan said.

  Tom Dolan shook his head, stood back to let Peg Monaghan come in again, and then went out himself. Peg put a large silver pitcher on the table next to the wine.

  “I’m sorry I took so long,” she told Judy, “but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Nothing is ever where it was supposed to be around here.”

  That depends on who’s defining what’s supposed to be.” Judy filled the pitcher half-full of wine, then looked at all the other open bottles on the table and shook her head. “I’m losing my mind. I must have thought I was giving a spritzer party.”

  “I told you that.”

  “Just take the pitcher out and put it on the table.”

  “I will.”

  Peg picked the pitcher up and departed, leaving Judy Eagan to jam corks back into wine bottles with an angry hand. Then Declan Boyd reemerged from the hall carrying a small white cloth that was stiff in the center. Then Scholastica appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, carrying two large, heavy, gilt-bound books. They both marched out the door beside Judy’s table. Minutes later, Tom Dolan marched back in.

  “You’d better go out there and check it for yourself,” he told Judy. “Dec and Peg and Scholastica are all out there racing around, and I’m too tired to take it in.”

  “It’s Andy who should go out there and check,” Judy said.

  “Let’s not get into a fight about Andy now. Go take a look. Expect the great Father Walsh to make his entrance at one minute and thirty seconds after ten.”

  Judy sighed, made a face at the bottles of wine, and turned toward the door. Just as she did, she caught sight of Gregor out of the corner of her eye. She halted in mid-twirl, turned back and stared at him.

  “Good God,” she said. “It’s you. Have you been there all this time?”

  “I’m just a bit lost,” Gregor said. It was half a lie, but he said it in his pleasantest voice.

  “Well,” Judy said, “you’d better come with me. The Mass is going to start any minute and I have to go to the altar anyway.”

  “I’m going to go to the altar?”

  “Of course not. You’re going to go across the altar and down the side chapel steps and find yourself a seat. Do I have to think for absolutely everybody around here?”

  [3]

  The seat Gregor found himself was at the very back of the church, on a folding chair instead of in a pew. It was, however, on the aisle, and he sank into it grateful for the view. Judy Eagan’s estimate of the crowd had been conservative. St. Agnes’s was a large church, and it was packed. At the front, taking up nearly a third of the pew space, were row after row of parochial-school children in neat little green plaid uniforms. Behind them were several rows of children in mufti who must have been from the public schools. Behind them, on the Gospel side, were John Cardinal O’Bannion and Father Tom Dolan. O’Bannion was so extravagantly dressed up, he looked like an actor in a PBS production of a medieval morality play.

  Gregor skimmed over the ordinary parishioners and the little knot of television newspeople who had taken up one of the back corners and trained his attention on the altar. The coming and going had mostly petered out. There was only one man up there, a pudgy little man in a badly fitting grey suit, and he didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. While Gregor watched him, he touched the cloth that covered the altar, shook his head, and turned away. Then he hurried off to the side, down the steps, and into the crowd around the pews.

  That was Barry Field, Gregor thought. I know it was. What could he possibly be doing here?

  He started to turn around to see if anybody else had noticed—meaning the television people, who would have reason to notice—but as he did the doors at the back of the church were pulled open and the organ began to moan in the loft above his head. Then the choir started up, and the center aisle was full of people.

  It had been years since Gregor had attended a Roman Catholic Mass—so long, in fact, that the Mass he had attended had been in the old Tridentine Rite instead of this new one. He had been given to understand that the Novo Ordo was a radical break with the past. The Tridentine Rite had been much like the Armenian one he was used to, which in turn was nearly identical to the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom as it had been used in the Greek Orthodox Church for more than 1,600 years. The continuity had been deliberate and inevitable. The breaks between these three churches had come about because of their passionate desires to preserve what they understood their tradition to be, not—as had been the case in the Protestant Reformation—to smash that tradition and replace it with something new. Then along had come Vatican II and, according to the Armenians and the Orthodox, the Church of Rome had fallen into clutches of modernism.

  He settled into his seat, expecting to see something new and different. The procession passed by him, with Andy Walsh at its head, dressed in long red robes embroidered in gold. He looked a lot like Tibor did, during the corresponding day in the Armenian calendar. Behind him came two middle-aged men carrying books. They were dressed in white muslin garments that looked cheap, badly made and half-finished. The altar boys that followed them were dressed in the same way, except that their garments looked even cheaper. That was definitely an innovation. In the old days, the altar boys had been dressed with as much care as a girl on the night of her debutante ball.

  This, Gregor thought, was not going to be as interesting as he’d hoped it would be.

  [4]

  As it turned out, for most of the Mass it wasn’t interesting at all. There was a lot of standing and sitting and making the Sign of the Cross. There was a lot of singing, too. The congregation was supposed to join in, but it didn’t, leaving the vocal exertions up to the choir. Gregor didn’t blame them. The music was frequently insipid and sometimes just plain awful, the kind of thing the Carpenters might have written on a bad day. Insipidity, as far as Gregor could tell, was the chief achievement of this new Mass as translated into English. The Bible readings had power, because the Bible had power. Even a bad translation of the Bible couldn’t avoid letting through some of the passion that had possessed the book’s authors. The new prayers sounded as if they’d been written by and for the sort of person who never graduated from the vocabulary of Dick and Jane. Those old prayers that had been retained had been virtually destroyed, and for no good reason Gregor could discover. The Confiteor had been eviscerated.

  He’d expected something worth hearing in Andy Walsh’s homily—he had heard so much about Andy Walsh’s homilies—but that came to nothing, too. It was as rambling and incoherent as he’d been led to expect it would be, but there were no sideswipes at the Pope or speculations on how much better the world would be if it gave up its commitment to the idea of sin. If the little speech was about anything at all, it was about kindness to animals. That made Gregor think of the goat, and to look for it. It was nowhere in sight.

  According to the little booklet that had been left on his seat, the Washing of the Feet was supposed to follow the homily, if it was to take place at all. Apparently it wasn’t. Andy Walsh finished talking and left the lecturn. The choir tuned up and warbled a little ditty about Peace on Earth. Andy Walsh came down front and center and said, “Could we have the gifts brought to the altar?”

  It
was all very informal and haphazard. There was hesitation in the pews. Then two people, a man and a woman, got up and went to the small table that had been placed far at the front of the center aisle. On that table were a plate covered with a cloth, a small pitcher of the kind used to hold cream, and the larger pitcher Peg Monaghan had been carrying back and forth before the service started. The woman took the plate and the small pitcher. The man took the larger pitcher. The two of them walked up to Andy Walsh and handed the things over.

  It was when the man turned around to go back to his seat that Gregor realized he was watching Barry Field. Again. This time, there could be no mistake. Gregor was staring Field straight in the face. He sat forward, trying to get a better look. Field slipped into a pew and out of sight.

  There were priests in the Catholic Church known to get their Masses over with in no time at all. Andy Walsh must have been one of them. No sooner had Field returned to his seat than the congregation was required to stand. No sooner had they stood than Andy had raced them through what looked like four long paragraphs of prayer in Gregor’s booklet. Then the congregation boomed out another abominable simplification of an ancient prayer—why change “Lord God of Hosts” to “Lord, God of power and might”? what for?—and everyone in the church went down on their knees.

  Gregor’s height was in his body, not his legs. Like the legs of most Armenian men, his were stumpy. Down on his knees, he should have been able to see anything. Instead, he could see nothing but the back of the woman in front of him.

  He leaned sideways into the aisle and tried to get a look at what was going on. Andy Walsh was making his way through the Roman Canon, much more slowly than he had made his way through anything else. For some reason, Gregor found his tone ominous.