Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

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Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries) Page 22

by Jane Haddam


  Declan Boyd was bundled up against the cold in a 1950s-style car coat, complete with toggled closings. He had a big fake fur Russian hat on his head and heavy red wool mittens on his hands. Where he had found mittens big enough, Judy didn’t know. Judy herself was wearing no hat and no gloves, and her coat was open. She had on one of her favorite sweaters, which made her look pretty but the coat difficult to close. The temperature was barely ten above and she was freezing.

  “The thing is,” Declan Boyd was saying, “I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and I think she ought to go to the police.”

  “Who ought to go to the police?” Judy asked him.

  “The woman I told you about,” Boyd said. “I saw her when I went back to call the ambulance, after Andy died. She was standing right there.”

  “Right where?”

  “Just off the anteroom in the hall.” Boyd scowled. There was, Judy thought, no other word for it. He looked like he was having a tantrum. “She must have seen everything, don’t you see? And maybe—maybe she touched something.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever there was to touch.”

  “If you mean evidence, Dec, forget it. Not if she was in the anteroom after Andy died. I just talked to Ka—to Sister Scholastica.”

  “So?”

  “So Sister Scholastica just talked to the Cardinal, and the Cardinal had just talked to that man. Demarkian. He was at the police station. The lab reports are back.”

  “They are?”

  Judy Eagan was one of those bright women who secretly thought she wasn’t really bright. Faced with invincible stupidity, she usually thought it was being put on to annoy her.

  “Of course they are,” she said, her voice sharp. “They’ve had more than twenty-four hours, for Christ’s sake—”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Oh, I don’t want a lecture on my language. Shut up, Dec. I mean it. Shut up. The lab reports came back. Andy was poisoned with nicotine, but there wasn’t any poison in the pitcher, and there wasn’t any in the bottles, either. It must have been in the chalice, and the chalice wasn’t in the anteroom.”

  “Then what was she doing there?”

  “How am I supposed to know? Dec, it’s freezing out here. I’ve got to—”

  “She was looking at the books in the bookcase,” Boyd said stubbornly. “I saw her. She wasn’t taking them out or anything, she was just looking at them. But she must have been there for a long time—”

  “Why?”

  “Well, she could have been. She could have been. I was supposed to call the ambulance and then come right back, but I—I felt sick. You know. So I sat down and tried to get my stomach back, and I must have tried for maybe fifteen minutes. She could have been there the whole time.”

  “Who?” Judy asked again.

  Declan Boyd was not about to tell her who. That was a big part of his strategy in this conversation. That was a big part of the reason Judy was ready to kill him, too. Every time she asked, he just got that mulish look on his face and changed the subject.

  Now, Judy saw, he was onto Our Responsibilities As Good Citizens and Good Catholics. All Declan Boyd’s speeches had titles.

  “If she doesn’t agree to go, I’m going to have to go for her,” he was saying. “I can’t just let it pass. It wouldn’t be right. And it didn’t look right, either. There he was, dead all over the floor, and there she was, looking at books. Does that sound right to you?”

  All of a sudden, light dawned. “Dear Mother of God,” Judy said, “you think it was one of us.”

  “I don’t think it was anybody. I saw—”

  “I don’t care what you saw. It couldn’t have been one of us. We were all in the pews in full sight of—” She stopped.

  “You see.” Boyd was triumphant. “You weren’t.”

  “We were at the time you’re talking about,” Judy said, “right after the murder. It wasn’t until later—”

  “This wasn’t later. This was right after, practically, before that Demarkian person started snooping around. I’ve been so upset about it, I haven’t been able to eat. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “What made up your mind?”

  Boyd went smug. “I did what I was supposed to do. I called the Chancery and asked for advice.”

  “On Good Friday?” Judy was stunned. “Dec, for sweet Jesus’s sake, the Cardinal must be ready to kill you.”

  “I didn’t talk to the Cardinal directly. I know enough not to bother the man. But I had to have advice and I got it. She has to go to the police. That’s the only thing that will do.”

  “Fine,” Judy said. “I hope she does. Whoever she is. I’m going to work.”

  “Miss Eagan—”

  “It’s Ms. Eagan, thank you very much, and I’m late. Get out of my way.”

  She had to physically push him out of the way to get him to let her pass. She didn’t want to do it—in spite of feminism and assertiveness training and self-actualization and all the rest of it, she was still at heart a nice Catholic girl; it went against her earliest training to manhandle a priest—but she did it, because if she hadn’t, she’d never have gotten to her car. For the same reason, she shut her mind to the words he called after her as she ran to Ellery Street.

  “You could convince her,” he yelled after her, “you could tell her and she’d listen to you.”

  Judy didn’t know who “she” was, but she didn’t want to know. She climbed in behind the wheel and made sure all the doors were locked and started the engine. She wanted to be on the road before Dec got the bright idea of sitting on her hood. Or something. She reached into her purse and got out her cigarettes and lit up.

  Her heart was pounding and her head hurt. Dec, the little bastard, had frightened her badly. She was having a hard time breathing and she wanted to cry—and the worst of it was, she didn’t know why. What did it matter if “she” had been in the anteroom? There had been nothing in the anteroom. Nothing at all. And the books on the bookshelf there were less than nothing: Bibles, a concordance, an expanded glossary of Mass themes, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints.

  She looked up and saw that her cigarette had grown a long column of ash. She tapped the ash into the dashboard ashtray and felt the air coming out of the heater to be sure it was warm. Then she shifted into gear and eased the car along the otherwise carless curb. She had never been good at parallel parking or at extracting herself from parallel parking.

  The light at the corner of Ellery and Carter was red. She pulled to a stop in front of it and thought: Damn Declan Boyd. Damn him damn him damn him damn him damn him.

  That said it all.

  [3]

  The Sisters of Divine Grace, like every other traditional order of nuns in the United States, had made its compromises with the “spirit” of Vatican II. Both its habits and its periods of silence had been shortened. A great many of its rules had been relaxed, and some of them had been done away with altogether. Sisters could now see their families whenever they wanted to and go on vacations and read secular books. The nuns of St. Agnes’s convent had become particularly fond of the novels of Stephen King. They sometimes sat around the fire at the beginning of the long cold nights of winter and scared each other silly reading aloud about vampires and haunted cars. That made the restrictions that were still in force hard to take, like the one that said Sisters should neither discuss nor “dwell on” their secular pasts. At quarter to two on Good Friday afternoon, Sister Mary Scholastica decided that that particular restriction had become impossible to take.

  It was less than an hour before she was supposed to lead the procession of schoolchildren that would go from St. Agnes’s school to the Cathedral for Stations of the Cross. She had had a long day in which she had accomplished only half of what she should have. The desk in her office was still covered with the paperwork for First Holy Communion receptions and the equally hard to organize seating for the Confirmation Mass. On any other day, she would have gulped a sandwich at her
desk and worked without a break until Peter Rose or Benedict Marie physically dragged her away.

  Somebody was going to have to come here and drag her away from this. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to make herself move otherwise. She was sitting at her place at the table in the convent’s dining room, looking at a pair of fists she had written out on a pair of sheets of lined notebook paper. The genesis of one of these lists, marked Confirmation, was off to the side of the notebook paper. It was a faded black-and-white group picture that had been taken at her own Confirmation, with each of the children identified in a caption at the bottom by their Confirmation rather than their regular names. The genesis of the other fist, marked Goat, was her own memory, which she didn’t think was very good. It had been too long, and it wasn’t something she had paid much attention to even when she was supposed to. She picked this list up, crumpled it in her hand, and tossed it across the table.

  She had retrieved the Confirmation picture from the convent basement, where it had been filed with all the other Confirmation pictures ever taken at St. Agnes’s in a big metal file cabinet that stood next to the boiler. Then she had brought it up here and made her list. She had had to, after Barry had shown her his tape, because Barry was right. There had been something besides Black Rock Park going on with Andy Walsh on the day he died.

  The table was cluttered with miscellaneous junk and the junk was beginning to bother her. She pushed aside the books Tom Dolan had brought for Gregor Demarkian and the extra bottle of wine Judy had dropped off for “nunly medicinal use” and Barry’s tape, left so she could view it again at leisure, and bent over her list. She noticed she had started it with herself, and smiled.

  Me, it began—there was egotism for you—and Martha for Martha and Mary. Then:

  Judy: Therese for the Little Flower

  Barry: Francis for St. Francis of Assisi

  Tom: Joseph for the foster father of Jesus

  Peg: Clare for St. Clare of Assisi

  Andy: Thomas for St. Thomas the Apostle

  She considered the list one more time and added:

  Cheryl: Bridget for St. Bridget of Sweden.

  Scholastica put her pen down and closed her eyes. It was so like Cheryl to have taken a name like that, a pretty name, the land of name girls always seemed to have when they were the pampered daughters of indulgent fathers. Cheryl hadn’t been the pampered daughter of anyone, and there hadn’t been much indulgence in her life.

  Thinking about that life and that death, Scholastica thought, was enough to make you despair.

  On an impulse, she got up and got the wine Judy had brought, then moved to the sideboard to look for a corkscrew. It was for “nunly medicinal purposes,” wasn’t that what Judy had said? Scholastica had a nunly medicinal use for the stuff right now. In another hour, she’d go into the long Good Friday-Holy Saturday fast, and she wouldn’t be allowed to drink at all.

  The corkscrew was where it belonged. She opened the wine and looked at the glasses on the shelf above her head. There were small ones and goblets, both made of crystal. If you’re going to cheat, Scholastica told herself, you at least ought to cheat big.

  She took down one of the goblets and filled it so full it started to spill.

  SEVEN

  [1]

  ONE OF THE FIRST things Gregor Demarkian had been taught when he was in training with the FBI was never offer unsolicited advice to local police departments. It was a good rule. Gregor had seen the wisdom of it immediately. What was more, unlike many of his colleagues, he had never broken it once in his twenty years as an agent. Maybe it was the combination of his childhood and his educational career. He had grown up in an urban ethnic ghetto, one of those places where the immigrant and the poor were expected to hide themselves while performing the kind of work the outside world seemed to think they wanted, like running small and not very profitable restaurants. At the same time, he had gone through the Philadelphia public school system during an age when achievement, not problem management, was the focus of faculty attention. From the day his first-grade teacher discovered he had learned to read before she’d started teaching him to the day his high-school principal had announced at the senior honors assembly that he had been awarded a scholarship to Penn, he had been subject to the terrifying litany of upward mobility: be good, be better, be better than better, be best, work hard, work harder, work hardest, and never, never rest. Now, he knew, people called that discrimination. Why should the poor and disenfranchised have to be better than the rich and privileged to get the same things? Why should the first black man, or the first Hispanic, or the first woman have to work twice as hard to be a vice president as the pretty boy from Groton at the next desk? There was logic to arguments like those, Gregor knew. He had explored them. On an emotional and experiential level, though, he had never been able to accept them. The obstacle course he had run had turned out to be good for him. It had made responsibility, concentration, and persistence habitual to him. The people who had not run it always seemed to him to lack something, especially as agents—some essential intensity that made the difference between a competent detective and a brilliant one. Too many of the Groton pretty boys lack heart-and-soul involvement in anything. They kept their distance, and, in keeping it, missed things. Gregor thought of them sometimes as men too lazy to wear the glasses they needed to see the eye chart.

  The other thing his upbringing had done for him was to give him a fine appreciation for the tensions of status. Those tensions were particularly acute between federal agents and local officers, because both sides too often thought the federal agents were doing the important work and the local officers playing in the bush leagues. If the federal agent was around long enough he usually learned better, especially if he was attached to Behavioral Sciences. The world had changed in the last twenty years. Local officers, even in smaller cities, were no longer spending their time chasing joy-riding teenagers or breaking up fights in low-rent bars. They were engaged in war, fought with Uzis and hand grenades more often than Saturday night specials, with an enemy better funded and better organized than most governments. That, Gregor knew, was what cocaine had done to the country, and there was nothing bush league about it.

  For this and many other reasons, Gregor had not wanted to give advice to Detective Lieutenant John Smith. The problem was, Gregor had no other way to get what he needed except by asking Smith to get it for him, and that asking constituted advice, no matter how subtle. If he’d still been with the Bureau, he could have tapped resources: called people who could get him what he needed on the side. Gregor supposed he could still do that. He had retired early. A lot of the men he had worked with, and almost all the men he had trained, were still on the job. They would have been happy to run a few checks for him or send out a request-for-information bulletin. Gregor didn’t want to ask them. In the first place, he didn’t like to call in favors except in cases of absolute necessity. Favors wore out, after a while, and there might come a time when Bureau contacts would be all he had to help him through a problem. Colchester had a perfectly well equipped, if not perfectly competent, police department. They were capable of doing everything he could think of needing done. In the second place, he was afraid that if he did go to the Bureau, and Smith found out about it, Smith would have a cow.

  Gregor had been worrying about these things all night, in the intervals when he wasn’t worrying about the death of Andy Walsh, and he was worrying about them still when he was shown into the squad room at Colchester Homicide and escorted through the maze of desks to the corner carved out by Lieutenant John Smith. Smith himself did the escorting. His big body bounced and jiggled from one middle-of-the-room desk to the other, making contact with a lot of tired-looking people Gregor didn’t know and probably would never get to meet. The squad room was a scene of incomprehensible chaos. The desks had been crammed in next to each other and then jostled against once too often, so that they were all out of true. There were papers everywhere, on chairs and windows
ills, on desks, on file cabinets, on the floor. Most of all, there was the noise. The room’s ceilings were high and uncushioned. The walls were made of plaster that had long since begun to dry and turn to dust. The glass in the windows hadn’t been changed since the building was put up and had therefore begun to ripple. The result was a gigantic echo chamber, magnifying and repeating even the slightest sounds. Phones rang and then rang again, and again, and again. Men shouted and then shouted again, and again, and again. A woman screamed and seemed to go on screaming for almost half an hour. No wonder the officers of Colchester Homicide are so disorganized, Gregor thought. They’ve been driven out of their heads trying to work in this place.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and Gregor and Smith had just spent three hours in the basement, going through lab files and morgue records and talking to technicians. At the time, Gregor had thought that odd. It was common courtesy to show a visitor to your desk first, unless the visitor was there especially to visit the morgue. There were things that might need talking about, in advance and in private. Now Gregor thought Smith had been doing him a favor. Nobody unused to the squad room would want to remain in it very long.

 

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