Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  For another thing, there were a lot of boys Judy had grown up with whom she wouldn’t speak to in high school. A nerd was a nerd. She was much too smart not to realize you didn’t risk your reputation as the second most popular girl in the entire city of Colchester for the sake of mere sentiment. She’d been on shaky ground to begin with. Her family had been almost as poor as Tom’s, if more respectable.

  She reached out, clicked the glass doors of the bar cabinet open, and stared at the bottle of Scotch she had come to pour a drink from. Two drinks. Stuart was in the television room, watching the six o’clock news on WLTL. Maybe she was feeling all those things she thought she ought to be. Maybe she was in too much shock to recognize them. She was having such a very hard time trying to think. Instead of contemplating ways and means—how to turn this perfectly awful situation into something that wouldn’t ruin all the work and planning she’d done for the past two years—she kept coming back to Andy and Tom and Barry, Peg and Judy and Kath. She almost wished she hadn’t thrown out all those things Peg had kept, like her yearbooks.

  It was Andy who’d gotten them the weed, every time they’d ever had it. It was Andy who’d brought the LSD that day to Black Rock Park, too, and who’d brought Cheryl Cass, and who’d had the idea for the rest of it—or the beginning of the rest of it. Judy had never been able to believe that the way it turned out was the way it had been planned. She’d only wondered if she ought to feel guilty, because they had left poor Cheryl Cass alone with the boys.

  She got the Scotch off the bottom shelf, two glasses off the top shelf, and two ice cubes out of the automatic ice maker in the cabinet’s side. Her head hurt. The television was blaring. Stuart had the volume turned all the way up, the way he always did, as if he were deaf. On a shelf next to the bar cabinet was a big prepackaged Easter basket, wrapped in amber cellophane and dominated by a grinning chocolate bunny wearing sugar-candy harlequin glasses. It was Stuart’s Easter gift to her. It was supposed to be an inside joke.

  “Judy?” Stuart said.

  Judy dumped an ice cube in each glass and opened the Scotch. “Just a minute,” she shouted: She had to shout. He couldn’t have heard her otherwise.

  He probably didn’t, anyway. He said, “Come in here quick. I can’t believe what I’m seeing here.”

  Because Judy knew what he was seeing—and could believe it all too well—she didn’t hurry. She filled both glasses two-thirds full with Scotch, drank half the liquor out of one of them, and then filled that one up again. Then she looked around the living room and wondered what she’d been thinking of when she’d furnished it. It was all glass and chrome and leather, all sharp edges and shiny surfaces. It looked expensively bought and expensively maintained, both of which it was. Its problem—in parallel with the problem of her reactions to Andy Walsh’s death—was that it didn’t look anything else. Like human. Or even real.

  She drank another half glass of Scotch, refilled the glass again, then picked both glasses up and made her way down and around the little back hall to the television room. Stuart was sitting scrunched into one of her two Harmon high-tech chairs, glued to the set. He had his jacket off, his vest open, his shirt unbuttoned, and his tie hanging loose around his neck. None of that bothered her—it was a relief to know he was capable of relaxation—but the expression on his face did. He was happy as a clam.

  “Look at this,” he said. “Just look at it. That damned place must have been like a circus.”

  Judy handed him his drink. The picture on the screen now was of the goat, rearing and bucking against its rope. Melissa Morris Wayne, Judy’s least-favorite local anchor-woman, was making wild speculations about what Andy had intended to use it for. The picture was blurry and uneven, as if someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens. Judy remembered Tom Dolan at the back of the church, talking to the cameramen just after Andy Walsh had died, and smiled. Somebody probably had.

  “They did at least two minutes on the Cardinal refusing to let the police have the wine for analysis,” Stuart said. “Can you beat that?”

  “The Cardinal refusing or the two minutes?”

  “Either. They talked to that man, too, the one the Cardinal brought up from Philadelphia. I keep thinking he’s somebody I ought to know about.”

  If Stuart ever got to the House of Representatives, Judy thought, he was going to forget the name of the Speaker. Maybe she should start writing relevant information on the insides of his shirt cuffs, so he wouldn’t embarrass her in public.

  She sat down in the other Harmon chair and said, “If you’re waiting to see my face on the screen, you can forget it. I managed to avoid it this afternoon.”

  “Did you? That was very intelligent of you.”

  “Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. This is going to be a very big story, Stuart, and I am president of the Parish Council. Never mind the fact that I was the one who brought the goat. They’re going to want to talk to me sometime.”

  “Sure they will. But if they’d talked to you today, you would have looked involved.”

  “The man the Cardinal brought up from Philadelphia is Gregor Demarkian. He’s an expert on murders.”

  Stuart tried to turn sideways in his chair. It was difficult in a Harmon. The seats were narrow and the arms were square cut-out pieces of soldered chrome. A pained expression crossed his face and Judy thought, He’s pinched himself again. Then she took a long draft of her drink.

  “You’re mad at me,” Stuart told her. “I can tell. What are you mad at me for?”

  “I’m not mad at you,” Judy said, “I’m just tired. It’s been a long day. And Andy Walsh is dead.”

  “You’re in mourning for Andy Walsh?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Judy.”

  “Yes, I am. I’m not mourning for Andy Walsh, but I don’t want to gloat over all this, for God’s sake. It was horrible.”

  “I’m not gloating over it. Well, it solves a lot of things, you know. You won’t have to associate with Andy Walsh anymore, because Andy Walsh won’t be around to associate with.”

  “I wasn’t having any problems associating with Andy Walsh.”

  “I was. I mean, I was having problems with you—”

  “Never mind, Stuart.”

  “Don’t tell me never mind,” Stuart said. “I don’t think you understand me at all, Judy. I really don’t. Sometimes I think you don’t even try.”

  Judy Eagan looked down into the small puddle of Scotch and melted ice in her glass. It looked as forlorn as she felt, but muddier. She wasn’t muddy in the least. She put the glass down on the carpet at her feet and thought: My God. This man is an unmitigated and unrepentant ass. And I’ve always known it.

  Stuart had hauled himself out of his chair. He was pacing across the small room, trying to look very stiff and very stern.

  “I think,” he said, “that we ought to have a good long talk.”

  Judy thought of telling him he reminded her of Sylvester the Cat in one of his rages, but she didn’t. She just said, “Stuart, I only have good long talks with people who can think their way out of paper bags.”

  [2]

  “Listen,” Barry Field’s secretary said when he finally got back to the office. “The Reverend Candor’s office called. I said you’d call them back, but that was at one o’clock this afternoon, and—”

  There was a plastic digital alarm clock on the secretary’s desk, the kind of thing people kept on night tables to wake them up in the morning. The two of them looked at it simultaneously, and then looked away again. It was 6:22. The secretary was still at her desk because she was Dedicated, as all Barry’s people were Dedicated. Barry was always surprised at just how Dedicated they would be. Long hours, low pay, late nights, erratic schedules: none of it ever seemed to faze any of them. They were so consistently cheerful, they made Barry think of the Stepford Wives, except that a lot of them were men. His secretary, however, was a woman. It was part of his commitment to Traditional Values to have
a woman as a secretary.

  His secretary’s name was Moira Dean. She was fifty and looked like somebody’s mother and always wore flower-print rayon dresses open one button at the neck, so that everyone who met her could see the gold cross she wore on a chain there. Sometimes, like today, she also wore a pin just under the line of her right shoulder. This one said CHRIST DIED FOR US ALL in fat, squiggly, quasi-psychedelic script. Barry stared at it for a minute and then looked down at his shoes. People liked to pretend all conservative Christians were either idiots and dupes or hypocrites, but it wasn’t true. Moira really was dedicated. She believed in the Risen Christ the way a botanist believed in trees. She saw Him whole and solid before her every waking minute of her life. When she prayed, she heard His voice as clearly as she heard her married daughter’s during the hour-long Colchester-to-Sarasota telephone call she made every Saturday afternoon at three. Moira was one of the nicest and most decent people Barry Field had ever met, and she was no fool.

  Now she was staring at him across the desk, frowning and concerned. “It’s been a bad day, hasn’t it? I heard the news about Father Walsh on the radio, not half an hour ago.”

  “I almost stopped into a bar just to get a look at a television set,” Barry said. “And then I didn’t. I just didn’t want to know.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  “I don’t drink, Moira. You know that.”

  “Oh, I know. I’ve always wondered about it. If you don’t drink because you don’t want to or if—you know.”

  “I’m not a recovering alcoholic, either.”

  “Good.”

  He was still wearing his heavy winter coat. More than any other piece of clothing he owned, it made him feel fat and shapeless. He shrugged it off and hung it on the coat-rack. The coatrack was splintered and worn. The carpet under his feet was bald in half a dozen places. Everything in the studio and the offices was shabby, except for the technical equipment. That was the compromise he had made. It had been a good one. He bought the technical equipment at the best place in New York City. He bought everything else marked down at K-Mart and used it until it disintegrated.

  “You might as well know,” he told Moira, “because everybody’s going to, sooner or later. I was there.”

  “At that church?”

  Barry willed away all recognition of her surprise. “That’s right. I was sitting on the aisle right behind a lot of schoolchildren when he keeled over and—died.”

  “He was murdered, according to the radio.”

  “I guess he was.”

  He had been staring at the coatrack too long. That, he was absolutely sure of. He turned away from it and sat down on one of the long plastic-cushion-covered couches that stood against the wall opposite Moira’s desk.

  “He asked me to be there,” he told Moira. “At the church, that is, for that particular Mass—”

  “Was he trying to convert you?” Moira had grown up when Catholics were trying to convert everybody, whether they wanted to be converted or not.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think he was—planning something. Something he wanted me to see.”

  “Did it have something to do with a goat?”

  “Was that on the radio, too?”

  “They made a point of it.”

  “I don’t know if it had anything to do with the goat,” he said. “We never got to the point where the goat came in. If it was meant to come in at all. Andy—died first.”

  “They said that Cardinal was making a big fuss over that wine of theirs, saying terrible things about it being real blood. And not letting the police have it. I thought you said it wasn’t true, that Catholics use real blood in their Mass.”

  “They don’t. They use wine that they put in the chal—into this big cup made of gold. Then they say prayers over the cup and the wine is supposed to be changed into the blood of Jesus Christ.”

  “It sounds like blasphemy to me,” Moira said. “Or voodoo. Or cannibalism. Or something worse.”

  “Does it?” Barry got off the couch. He was too restless to sit still. He was too confused and too agitated by his confusion to care about the effect he was having on Moira. She was looking at him very sharply now, very suspiciously. Her face had settled into a cautious mask, the way it would have if she were dealing with a lunatic. He supposed she thought he had been hypnotized by the Mass. She was afraid he was in danger of succumbing to the Roman error.

  “Did you ever wonder,” he asked her, “why I never bothered to be ordained?”

  “Bothered? I didn’t think it was something you ‘bothered’ about.”

  “Oh, but it is. It is. You bother to go to the seminary. You bother to sit through a lot of boring classes in Bible history and preaching techniques and a lot of other things you don’t need. You bother to let a lot of old men who aren’t as smart as you are feed you a lot of nonsense you knew better than to believe when you were still an infant in diapers—”

  “What seminary are you talking about? Theirs or ours?”

  “I was thinking about going into theirs, you know. We were all going to do that. Andy Walsh and Tom Dolan and me.”

  “Who’s Tom Dolan?”

  “At the moment, he’s Father Tom Dolan. He’s the Cardinal’s chief aide.”

  “You mean you were the only one who escaped?”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “I don’t see any other way to put it,” Moira said. “Why were you the only one who escaped?”

  It was a good question. So good, in fact, that he knew he ought to have an answer to it. God only knew, he had given the answer to it, hundreds of times, over the air and at camp meetings and from pulpits where he was guest preacher even without being ordained. Looking back on it, he thought he had lied so thoroughly and so well for so long, he’d forgotten that he’d ever known a truthful answer.

  Suddenly, he didn’t want to be here any longer: in this office, with this woman, surrounded by the bits and pieces of the life he had built for himself out of the holocaust of Black Rock Park. Andy Walsh was dead, and Andy Walsh was the only man he had ever really been a friend to. The magazines were full of articles about the friendships that grew up between women. Men were supposed to be buddies and not much more. But Andy Walsh had been much more to him.

  Barry went back to the coatrack, got his coat off of it, and put it on again. He wanted to get back down into the lobby and out the front door before he was sick.

  “I’ll call the Reverend Candor in the morning,” he said.

  Moira hesitated. Suspicion had been washed away, leaving only her concern. Barry thought, regretfully, that he was scaring her to death.

  “The reverend did say it was urgent,” she told him.

  “I’m sure he meant it. We can just pretend I never got back to the office today.”

  “Maybe I ought to drive you home.” She bit her lip. “It can’t be comfortable for you, living alone the way you do. You could use someone to cook for you once in a while.”

  “I’ll pick up some Chinese on my way.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. Good night, Moira.”

  Moira hesitated again. Barry was standing with his back to her, the office door open, looking into the hall. He could just imagine the look on her face. She thought he was on his way to commit suicide.

  “Maybe I’ll call you later and see how you’re getting along,” she said.

  Barry walked out into the hallway and closed the door behind him.

  He was not, God knew, going out to commit suicide.

  He couldn’t commit suicide. He was already dead.

  [3]

  By seven-fifteen, Peg Morrissey Monaghan had fed her family, washed her dishes, settled her children in front of a tape of Jesus of Nazareth, and seen her husband off to the Holy Thursday evening Mass at the Cathedral. For obvious reasons, there was going to be no evening Mass at St. Agnes’s. She had also made herself a cup of tea, which was sitting on the counter next to
the sink with so much sugar in it, she would find a layer of sediment at the bottom when she drank it up. She always craved sugar when she was pregnant, just the way she always craved cigarettes when she was in labor. Actually, to be honest about it, she always craved cigarettes, period. Unlike Scholastica and Judy, who had only experimented with nicotine, she had gotten herself well and truly hooked. That summer after Black Rock Park, she had managed—on practically no allowance and even less privacy—to smoke her way through two packs a day. It was the grace of God that she wasn’t still smoking that way now.

  It was the grace of God that Judy had asked for her cigarettes after Andy Walsh had died. If Judy hadn’t, Peg would have ended up puffing away in a pew, no matter what kind of scandal she caused in the rest of the congregation. Now she hesitated between the tea and the cabinet and chose the cabinet, reaching up among the blue and white Chesterware plates for the carton of Trues she had left there, just in case. She had delivered nine children and every last one of them had been overdue, but you never could tell. A premature one could come along at any time. That was why she always bought her cigarettes the day she knew the rabbit had died.

  She found a pack of matches in the drawer next to the stove and tucked them, along with the cigarettes, into the pocket of her apron. Then she picked up her tea and went into the family room.