by Jane Haddam
This bizarre view of what was going to happen in the wake of Andy Walsh’s death was made worse by the Cardinal’s anxiety about a process he knew everything about: the development of a first-rate media scandal. The Cardinal had dealt with enough of those in his day to be able to plot the course of the disaster the way a geneticist plots the hereditary progress of a mutant gene. Last night, it had been the local television news: not as bad as it could have been because “Father Tom committed a little holy sabotage.” (Gregor got the impression that Tom Dolan had managed to muck up the camera lenses with hair gel or Vaseline, in full view of both congregation and television crews but without being noticed. Gregor considered it a coup equal to anything that bad old Boss had ever dreamed up for the Bureau.) This morning, there had been the ever-tasteful Colchester Tribune, with a picture of Andy Walsh lying stretched out behind the altar and a headline in thirty-two point that said DEATH MASS. Neither the Tribune nor the local stations, however, were what the Cardinal was worried about. Tom Dolan had already fielded half a dozen calls from the major networks. They’d come in the night before, at nearly midnight, when Dolan and the Cardinal were struggling through the changes that had to be made in the city’s Mass schedules now that St. Anges’s Church would not be available for use. There had even been a suggestion—which, according to the Cardinal, had made Tom Dolan nearly hysterical—that Dan Rather wanted to come up to Colchester in person.
“It’s because of my reputation,” the Cardinal had said, at the end of this litany of his media woes. “Did you know I had a reputation? The Attila the Hun of the American Catholic Church.”
“Let’s just say I knew you were a—what did you call it?—theological conservative,” Gregor said.
“You probably thought I ate the raw flesh of nubile young women for breakfast,” the Cardinal said. “That’s what they make me sound like. Except when they make me out to be the champion of the homeless, which they like.”
“I think, Your Eminence, in this case, it’s more the circumstances surrounding the death they’re interested in.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the Cardinal said. “If this had happened in Hunthausen’s bailiwick, there’d have been one little story in People magazine and that would have been it. For national, at any rate.”
Here, Gregor thought, was unreality again. The Cardinal was obviously one of those people with suspicions of a leftward bias in the press. Gregor’s personal opinion was that the story would have been just as big if, as the Cardinal put it, it had happened “in Hunthausen’s bailiwick.” Hunthausen had a reputation, too, even if it was the political antithesis of O’Bannion’s own. And Hunthausen had been the object of vigorous media attention on more than one occasion.
But the Cardinal was off Cardinal Hunthausen and his troubles as a theological conservative. He was back onto his troubles as the religious superior of Father Andy Walsh. He sat hunched forward over his desk, giving the impression of a man on the run from his creditors.
“This murder,” he said, “seems to me to be more than a murder. There’s an element of malice in it I don’t like. An element of malice against the Church.”
“You think Andy Walsh was murdered just to embarrass the Church?” This was paranoia beyond belief even for the Cardinal.
Fortunately, the Cardinal was shaking his head. “I don’t know why Andy was murdered,” he said. “I suppose there must have been some direct reason. But the way he was murdered—my God, Demarkian, Andy was all over the place. In people’s houses. On television channels. In homeless shelters—although he wasn’t at places like that a lot. No Samaritan, our Andy. He could have been killed any one of a hundred places. Why do it in St. Agnes’s at Holy Thursday Mass if not to embarrass the Church?”
Actually, Gregor could think of a dozen answers to that question, one of which was, precisely, “to embarrass the Church.” Maybe it would have been more to the point to say “to embarrass the Cardinal.” Gregor could see O’Bannion was a man a lot of people might think needed to be embarrassed. Still, he didn’t like that explanation. It required as a murderer a man or woman who was truly insane, “organically brain diseased,” as the doctors back in Behavioral Sciences would have put it. If there was someone like that wandering around this case—and Gregor couldn’t think of anyone—he or she was in much better control than most of their kind.
Leaving out the organically brain diseased, there was only one explanation for why Andy Walsh had died when and where and as he had: because he had had to. There was no other way. It was the circumstances that had caused there to be no other way that multiplied as answers to the Cardinal’s question. Gregor considered telling the Cardinal all this, but decided against it. He had gone over the arguments in his own mind between the moment Andy Walsh had collapsed and this one. Going over it all again with the Cardinal wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He did want to get somewhere.
He said, “I take it, from things you’ve said and things you haven’t said, that you want me to—unravel this mess for you.”
“You already know that. For me and not for—”
“John Smith?”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t cooperate fully with the police.”
No, Gregor thought, you’re not saying it. But you mean me to understand it. He let it pass.
“Will you answer a few questions for me?” he said. “Questions that might not seem to be relevant at the moment.”
“Of course I will.” The Cardinal was surprised. “Unless there’s some consideration, like the seal of the Confessional—”
“I don’t think there will be, Your Eminence. It’s little things I’m interested in, mostly. Like that lavaliere they found at Black Rock Park.”
“What does Black Rock Park have to do with it? That was twenty years ago.”
“I know. John Smith told me that one of the few pieces of evidence they found up there was a souvenir lavaliere from a Cathedral High prom—”
“It could have been lost up there any time. Black Rock Park wasn’t like it is now in those days. People went up there all the time—”
“Could that lavaliere have belonged to Cheryl Cass?”
“No,” the Cardinal said.
It was a very definite no, and this time it was Gregor who was surprised. “How can you be sure? From everything I’ve heard about this Cheryl Cass, she was an extremely sentimental woman.”
“Of course she was. I suppose, given the circumstances of her life, she was bound to be. People who have very little joy in their lives hang onto what they can. That lavaliere was from the junior prom at Cathedral Girls’ High that happened the month before Black Rock Park happened.”
“So?”
“So Cheryl Cass didn’t have a lavaliere from that prom. She didn’t go to that prom. She never went to any prom, as for as I can tell. I know this sounds cruel, Mr. Demarkian, but there wasn’t anyone who would have asked her.”
Gregor mulled this over in confusion. “From what I understood,” he said, “she was a very popular girl.”
“No, no,” the Cardinal told him. “Not popular. Judy Eagan was popular. She was popular even though her family was dirt poor. So poor she had to borrow prom dresses from her friends. That’s character for you. Peg Morrissey—Peg Monaghan now—she was popular. And Kath Burke who’s now Sister Scholastica. Cheryl Cass was—uh—well, it wasn’t that boys didn’t take her out, you know, but they only took her out to, uh—”
“Get laid?”
The Cardinal was actually blushing. “I’ve got to hope that mostly they didn’t. But yes, that’s about it. The boys took her out when they didn’t have anything else to do, or when their, er, hormones got in a twitch. But real dates, no. And not a prom, not the way proms were looked at in those days. It would have been too important.”
“It was a prom at Cathedral Girls’ High, you said. Cheryl Cass would have done her own asking.”
“She would have been turned down.”
“You’re very sure.”
“I’m surer than you know. It was the junior prom—Peg’s and Kath’s and Judy’s year. I was one of the chaperons.”
“All right.” That seemed to take care of that. Cheryl Cass had not had a souvenir lavaliere to lose in Black Rock Park because she hadn’t been at the prom where the lavalieres were given. There might have been another way she could have gotten one, but that road looked full of unnecessary complications. Gregor changed course.
“Tell me,” he said, “about Andy Walsh’s goat.”
The Cardinal laughed. “Andy’s goat again? You don’t know how sick I am of Andy’s goat. He was probably going to give it Communion, you know. I’m almost sure of it.”
“I’m not so worried here about what he was going to do with it in a practical sense, Your Eminence. It’s just that something occurred to me. Peg Morrissey told me yesterday that Andy tended to have reasons for his more outrageous behavior—”
“If you could call them reasons.”
“She seemed to think he must have been using the goat for some purpose important to him, not just to make you crazy. And she said something else that stuck with me. She said Andy Walsh liked to find out embarrassing things about people and then twit them, in public. In roundabout ways, if I understand it right.”
“That’s true,” the Cardinal said. “You mean you think Andy might have been meaning to make some point to someone—I’m getting messed up, here. Let’s see. You think the goat must have symbolized something to someone—”
“Let’s say goat was a kind of code, the way people sometimes have pet words for things. I used to know a couple in Washington who used the term “intellectual discussion” when they meant sexual intercourse.” The Cardinal winced. Gregor went on. “It was a catchphrase between them, a private joke. I was wondering if the goat could be something like that?”
“If it was a private joke, I couldn’t know about it, could I?”
“I don’t think it could have been all that private. It would have had to be an allusion that at least a limited number of people would have recognized.”
“You mean the Colchester Five?”
“Six,” Gregor said blandly. “I’d have to add you to the suspect list. You had both means and opportunity—”
“What about motive?”
“You’ve got the only known motive I can see. Come to think of it, I’d have to add Father Declan Boyd to the list, too. Make it the Colchester Seven.”
“Wonderful.”
“In the beginning, I thought the allusion might be straightforward. A reference to what happened in Black Bock Park. But John Smith told me there hadn’t been a goat, or the carcass of a goat, at the scene.”
“Of course there wasn’t. It was all stray cats and dogs. Animals going to wild. What was close at hand. I don’t think what happened was premeditated.”
Gregor nodded. “That’s the impression I get, too. Something innocuous that went very haywire. Possibly under the influence of drugs.”
The Cardinal’s suspicion was back, and his bristling edge-of-anger voice. “Why drugs? There was never any evidence of drugs.”
“There wouldn’t have been, if they were the kind of drugs I’m thinking of. LSD, peyote, psilocybin. Hallucinogens.”
“There was never any evidence of drugs,” the Cardinal repeated firmly.
Right, Gregor thought. “After a while I thought of something else,” he went on. “I was wondering if a goat might mean something, in a religious sense. If it might be part of some standard symbolic system.”
“Standard symbolic system?”
“I took an art course in college where they told us all about the symbolism in religious paintings,” Gregor said. “Eyes on a plate for St.—Lucy was it?”
“That’s right,” the Cardinal said. “Because St. Lucy had her eyes put out as part of her martyrdom for the Lord. There are things like that. St. Agnes is often represented by a lamb, because her name means lamb, like in the Agnus Dei.”
“What does a goat mean?”
The Cardinal threw up his hands. “I’ve never heard of a goat used as religious symbolism for anything,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Isn’t there a list of this kind of thing?”
“There are probably a couple of hundred lists of this land of thing,” the Cardinal said. “This isn’t like—like the teams in a baseball league or the fifty United States, where everybody agrees on what they are. There are dozens of systems of symbols of the kind you’re talking about. And some saints have more than one symbol even in the same system, and some symbols serve for two or three or six saints. Then there are the various categories—”
“Categories?”
“The saints as saints. The saints as patron saints. The saints as martyrs.”
“Patron saints,” Gregor said. He liked that. A patron saint would serve double duty, saying who but also saying what. Maybe there was a St. Margaret, patron saint of euthanasia. Or a St. Declan, patron saint of associate pastors being driven relentlessly insane by their parish priests. Gregor decided he must be tired. He was getting silly.
“Patron saints,” he repeated firmly. “I’d like to start with those. There must be a list of those, surely?”
“There’s an official list,” the Cardinal said pleasantly, “because to be a real patron saint, you have to be designated as such by Rome. However—”
“Don’t tell me.”
“I might as well. The middle ages, you know, were both highly religious and highly disorganized. In church terms, I mean. The procedures for canonization weren’t in place. A lot of times, localities circumvented what procedures there were and just declared some recently dead worthy to be committing miracles, and there you were. The same is true of patron saints. There’s an official list, but there are also other lists.”
“Would Andy Walsh have known anything about these other lists?”
“Probably quite a bit. About some of them, at any rate. Because of the nuns. You probably don’t know much about the history of Catholic education in this country, Mr. Demarkian, but I can tell you it was mostly an exercise in crisis response. There’s a lot about separation of Church and State these days, in the schools as in every other place, but it wasn’t like that then, in the nineteenth century. There were plenty of prayers in the public schools in those days, and those prayers were Protestant. Aggressively Protestant. The Church’s response was to build the largest private school system on earth and build it first.”
“But what—”
“Fast is the important word. We needed teachers, and we needed those teachers to be nuns. Lay teachers would have cost too much and made the tuitions too high for parishioners to afford. So we got ourselves a lot of nuns, we trained them in no time flat, and we sent them out to teach. The problem was, they were trained and not educated. A few of them were marvels of intelligence. A lot of them were essentially uneducated peasant girls who hung onto “the superstitions of their native Ireland—most of them, in the beginning, came from Ireland—with all ten fingers. They passed those superstitions, and their more conventional but still unorthodox traditions, down to generation after generation of students.”
“Wouldn’t they have been dead by the time Andy Walsh got to school?”
“Oh, yes. But they’d have had their spiritual and intellectual descendants. You forget the time period. Andy went to St. Agnes’s before the changes of Vatican Two. I remember St. Agnes’s in those days. A lot of little old nuns passing on devotions never heard of out of the Sisters of Divine Grace. Saints that didn’t appear in the calendar and who probably never existed. Legends like the one about how, if you chewed a consecrated Host, you’d die and when they did the autopsy they’d find bite marks in your heart. I always did like that one.”
Gregor didn’t even consider that one. He felt as if he were swimming through a sea of lime Jell-O, meeting too much resistance and unable to see an inch in front of his n
ose. It was only the fact that he knew the goat must have meant something to Andy Walsh—and that that something was bound to be important—that kept him from giving up.
“Isn’t there any way to find out what Andy Walsh had been taught about saints and goats?” he asked, a little desperately. “Was any of this kind of thing written down? Or printed?”
Gregor expected to hear a flat negative, followed by a lot of chuckling references to the labyrinthine research required of anyone who dared to investigate these byways of Church history. That was the way this discussion, and this investigation, had been going. He saw no reason for it to change course now.
But for the first time since he’d come to Colchester, luck was with him. The Cardinal was not chuckling. The Cardinal’s expansive face was not beaming with the pleasure of being able to frustrate a simple desire for information. Instead, the Cardinal was leaning across his desk, tapping against the wood and nodding sagely. He had put on a sympathetic expression—which looked phoney, Gregor thought—and the air of someone who was happy to help.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “there are a number of ways you can find out what you want. Especially if you’re willing to settle for what the Sisters of Divine Grace were teaching back when Andy was in grade school. There was a nun there, Sister Joseph Bernadette, who used to give out this pamphlet every year to her second-grade class. That pamphlet drove me crazy.”
“That ought to be good enough for a start,” Gregor said.
“Good. Well. In the first place, I don’t know if we have a copy of that pamphlet, but I can loan you some books. Official books and others. Down in the basement of the Chancery, we’ve got a collection of teaching materials used in this Archdiocese over the years. There just might be what you’re looking for.”
“I can have access to the basement?”