by Jane Haddam
“Yes, Your Eminence,” Gregor said. “Andy Walsh was a sitting duck. But there was a time factor involved here, too. Cheryl Cass had come back to Colchester on Ash Wednesday. She had spent the day visiting the people she thought of as her old friends. She had talked to Andy Walsh twice, once in the morning and once in the evening, once before she saw her murderer for the first time and once after. She did a lot of talking. She even talked to Father Boyd here.”
“Talked my head off,” Boyd agreed. “On and on. None of it made any sense, either. All about love and romance and valentines and I don’t know what.”
“I do,” Gregor said. “I have to make some assumptions, however. The first of these is that Cheryl Cass did not actually tell Andy Walsh about the single event in her life that would eventually get her killed. If she had, this whole thing would have come to a head much sooner, and Andy Walsh would have been dead much sooner. What she did, I think, was to hint. A little suggestion here, a little suggestion there, nothing that Andy picked up on right away. But I think her hints bothered him, nagged at him, and he kept trying to work them out. Then, probably sometime Wednesday of Holy week, he did work them out.”
“It was Wednesday night,” Judy Eagan said. They all turned to stare at her and she blushed again. “I saw him Wednesday night,” she said, “and he—he was onto something. I could tell. He was just flying:”
“Andy Walsh and his flying,” Gregor said. “The result of his working this out was his decision to use the goat at Holy Thursday Mass. Judy Eagan told me that Andy didn’t say anything about it until late Wednesday night, and then he told her to get out of bed at some ungodly hour and pick it up. The goat was going to be the first foray in one of Andy Walsh’s famous campaigns of public twitting. He hadn’t shied away from embarrassing the Governor of New York. Why should he shy away from embarrassing someone he’d known all his life? And he was in better shape than he usually was, because he shared, with everybody here except Father Declan Boyd, a certain set of information, a memory. That includes you, Your Eminence. You were the one who told me about it. It consisted of the contents of a pamphlet called Living with the Saints, given out every year by a teaching Sister named Joseph Bernadette to her second-grade class at St. Agnes Parochial School—”
“But for God’s sake,” Barry Field said, “that pamphlet was nonsense. A lot of superstitions and folk customs from Ireland, without so much as an imprimatur—”
“It didn’t matter if the information in that pamphlet was true, Mr. Field. It only mattered that it was recognizable by a certain group of people. As I said before, that group included the Cardinal himself.”
“Do you really think Andy expected us to remember what was in that thing?” Scholastica said.
“I don’t think he expected you to remember right away,” Gregor told her. “He did expect his murderer to remember, though, because he talked to his murderer before the Mass. And, I think, jogged his memory. I have a copy of that pamphlet on me at the moment. There are probably several copies still floating around the Archdiocese, in basements and attics, in school libraries and convent archives—”
“We’ve got some,” Scholastica said.
“Are you sure?” Gregor asked.
“Yes, I am. I—found the pamphlet when I was looking for that picture I gave you. The one of our Confirmation class.”
“Did you look in the pamphlet at all? Did you check out what it said about goats as a symbol for saints?”
Scholastica smiled wryly. “I made a whole list of goats as a symbol for saints. None of it did me much good. None of it made any sense.”
“It didn’t make much sense to me for a while, Sister. I was trying to find a motive that fit into the incident at Black Rock Park, that was about the incident in Black Rock Park. By then, I knew Cheryl Cass hadn’t been killed for the obvious reason, to cover up someone’s involvement in what had happened there. But I also knew that there was some connection. I was looking at it backward.”
“Backward?” Tom Dolan said.
He was holding his coffee balanced on one hand, stroking the edge of the saucer with one finger. The cup was still full. “Drink some of that, Father,” Gregor said. “You look tired.”
“I’ve just slept for thirteen hours.”
“You look tired anyway,” the Cardinal said.
Tom Dolan shrugged. “I don’t see what you mean by backward,” he said. “If you’re trying to say one of us killed her, and one of us killed Andy Walsh, and one of us killed—killed Peg, what other reason could there be? What else do we have in our pasts that could possibly be a motive for murder?”
“Nothing,” the Cardinal said.
Dolan took his cup out of his saucer with his free hand, took a long sip from it, then put the cup back. It took a minute. At first he was just as he had been, sitting with his legs stretched out across the carpet, tired and calm. Then he jerked forward, dropped the cup to the floor, and began to choke.
“Dear God,” the Cardinal said, “Tom, what the—”
Scholastica jumped up, grabbed him, and began to hit him on the back. “Get me a glass of water somebody for God’s sake,” she said. “He’s coughing, not strangling. He swallowed the wrong way.”
The Cardinal’s Sister appeared out of nowhere, bearing a glass of water she seemed to have called miraculously out of the void. She pushed Scholastica away from Dolan, got the priest’s head tilted back, and poured water down his throat.
Seconds later, the choking sounds stopped, and Tom Dolan was on his knees on the floor. At first, Gregor thought he was having a physical collapse. Then he realized that Dolan was just retrieving the coffee cup.
“Vinegar,” Tom kept saying. “Vinegar, that was what was in it. Vinegar and—”
“Vaseline,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Tom Dolan stood up.
“You made a ridge of Vaseline in the chalice when you were taking it out to the alter,” Gregor told him, “or after you got there. You poured the nicotine onto the ridge. Nicotine from the plant poison that the Chancery buys in bulk and distributes to the parishes of the Archdiocese. You didn’t need much, as long as you could get it to near the top of the cup. Vaseline is clear and Andy Walsh would not have noticed it because the altar was dimly lit. The ridge would have collapsed when the wine was poured over it, but that didn’t matter. The nicotine would have ended up being in the first of what Andy Walsh drank from that chalice. And you really didn’t have any other way to get it done. It was Holy Thursday. You barely had the time or the freedom to do what you did.”
At the desk, the Cardinal had stopped smoking. Now he stood slowly up and said, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. Father Dolan had no reason whatsoever to kill Cheryl Cass or Andy Walsh or anybody else. I’ve already told you. He confessed his involvement in Black Rock Park to me before he was ordained.”
“I told you,” Gregor said, “that this murderer did not kill to keep from being found out as one of the participants in the events at Black Rock Park. Black Rock Park was the catalyst for the motive, but not the motive.” He turned back to Tom Dolan, still standing motionless in the middle of the room. Dolan was smiling in a sick, paralyzed way that looked like a rictus of death.
“You should have taken the wedding ring off her finger,” Gregor told him gently. “If it hadn’t been for the wedding ring, we would never have known she was married, and if we hadn’t known she was married we would never have discovered she was married to you. In the eyes of the Church, she was married to you on the day you were ordained, and your ordination was valid but not licit. You’re not properly a priest in the Roman Catholic Church at all.”
EPILOGUE
The Feast of the Ascension
Jesus appeared to the Eleven and said to them…Signs like this will accompany those who have professed their faith: they will use my name to expel demons, they will speak entirely new languages, they will be able to handle serpents, they will be able to drink deadly poison without harm�
�
—from the Mass for the Feast of the Ascension (cycle B), taken from Mark 16:15-20
[1]
FOR THE PRESS, THE problem with the Colchester murders was that the investigation into them had not gone on long enough. The press tended to start its calculations with the death of Andy Walsh, and from that until the death of Peg Morrissey Monaghan had been less than three full days. The story lacked what stories like it had always provided before: bizarre revelations, police bumbling, press conferences, a citywide siege of terror. It left a gap. The local television newspeople and the network anchors had had a few good days. The Colchester Tribune and the national sections of the more important dailies had had a few good headlines. The magazines and magazine shows were dumped flailing into the void. There were the usual recaps of the murders and the investigation and the arrest, but after that it seemed there was nothing more to do. This lack of direction caused tremendous frustration. There was no doubt at all—in the minds of the market research people at Time and Newsweek and Esquire and The Ladies’ Home Journal—that there was still enormous interest in what had happened in and around St. Agnes’s Roman Catholic Church. The supermarket tabloids were printing money, putting psychics on their covers who claimed to have spoken to Cheryl Cass and Andy Walsh and Peg Morrissey Monaghan’s unborn child. With one exception, the respectable press were caught with their thumbs up their behinds, as awkward and unimaginative as seventeen-year-olds putting out a high-school paper under supervision. The one exception, of course, was People magazine.
It was People magazine Gregor Demarkian was reading, going back to Cavanaugh Street on the bus with Father Tibor Kasparian, trying to keep the two kittens he had been delegated to hold from shredding his suit jacket into aesthetic conformity with his already shredded blue tie. It was the Feast of the Ascension in the Roman calendar, two and a half weeks after Easter in the Armenian one, a Friday. The streets of Philadelphia had been stripped of their Easter decorations. Fluffy pink bunnies and fluffier yellow chicks had been replaced by the first hints of an approaching Mother’s Day. Through the rain and grit that was typical of early-April weather for most of Pennsylvania, Gregor sometimes caught a glimpse of pyramids of mugs stamped with the word Mom and revolving displays of candy boxes whose covers read “To Mother with Love.” He and Tibor were on the bus because they had just taken the kittens to a veterinarian on Bollinger Street. The kittens had been dumped on Tibor by a pregnant alley cat who had wandered through the door of Holy Trinity Church just about the time Andy Walsh was being murdered, given birth, and promptly died. Tibor wanted to be sure his six weeks of hand feeding and general fussing had had results as good as they seemed to have had. Gregor wanted to be sure he’d have one day this week free of Bennis Hannaford’s nagging. Since Gregor had come back from Colchester, Bennis Hannaford had been impossible.
Gregor detached a kitten from his shirt collar with one hand and handed the copy of People to Tibor with the other. AFTERSHOCKS, the headline read, and then, “In the wake of the spectacular murder of Father Andrew Walsh, the people who knew him find that his death has changed their lives forever.”
“Andy Walsh,” Gregor said. “Cheryl Cass is too boring for them and Peg Morrissey Monaghan is too gory, so they give me Andy Walsh.”
“I don’t think those are the reasons,” Tibor said. “They do a great deal on the little baby that survived. They had a whole article last week.”
Gregor took the magazine back and sighed. Nothing that was in it was news to him. He got regular reports from Sister Mary Scholastica, who had taken to phoning him late at night to discuss “just how strange everything around here has gotten after all this.” Gregor thought it was her way of not thinking too strongly about Peg and what had happened to Peg. Because he didn’t believe in the fashionable psychology of “working through your feelings,” he let her. It was a mitzva, as a former colleague of his in the Bureau would have said. Besides, it kept him from thinking about himself. He knew that the wine, unneeded by the police after Tom Dolan’s confession, had been poured down the sacramentorumo. He knew that Barry Field had canceled his contract with the Reverend Mark Candor’s All Christian Good News Gospel Network and returned to the Catholic Church. He had also refused to sell his broadcasting station to his second in command and entered negotiations with a group of people who wanted to use it for an all-movie channel. Then there was Judy Eagan, who had broken up with her political boyfriend and announced her intention of entering the Democratic primary for a soon-to-be-vacant House seat against him. As Scholastica put it, “She thinks she can have more fun in Washington on her own, and the only thing that bugs me is that I told her that three months ago and she wouldn’t listen to me. Stuart is such a dolt.” About Scholastica herself, Gregor had only the vaguest information, and that with undertones he couldn’t quite work out. She had told him that she would be going back to the Motherhouse of her order in the summer, to take up the post of Mistress of Postulants under the direction of a new permanent Mistress of Novices, Sister Alice Marie. There was something about the way Scholastica said that word, permanent, that made Gregor wonder. For some reason, it seemed to amuse Scholastica no end.
He just wished the magazines would give up the interest they’d taken in him. Even in this article on “aftershocks,” he was there, in words and pictures, described as a “master detective” and a “specialist in bizarre and socially sensitive murder investigation.” Where they had gotten the “socially sensitive” business, he didn’t know. He did know they’d dragged out the old epithet from The Philadelphia Inquirer, and called him an “Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” He closed the magazine and shoved it under his feet, out of sight.
“The thing is,” he told Tibor, “I wasn’t very intelligent about that case at all. Not at all. When I figured it out I felt like a complete idiot, and I had every right to. And then that ridiculous scene at the end. Like something out of a country house mystery from the thirties. I could have blown the whole thing and left Smith and his people with nothing.”
“But you didn’t blow the whole thing,” Tibor said, “and it worked out very well. What’s wrong with this kind of scene? You get your facts together—”
“Tibor, I didn’t have my facts together. I only knew a few things.”
“You had the marriage certificate.”
“Yes, I did. Cheryl Cass was wearing a wedding ring when she died, a big heavy one, twenty-four carat gold. She had obviously refused to sell it or get rid of it. Since she was broke to the point of being on the street, it had to be important to her. That was all obvious from the beginning. But Tibor, think of this. I saw Andy Walsh die. I knew he could only have been killed like that if there had been no other way and no other time to kill him. I knew only one person who could possibly have been responsible with those conditions attached. Then I spent two days looking for a motive in the most unlikely places, when the motive was right there staring at me in the face.”
“It was staring everybody in the face, Krekor. They didn’t see it, either. And you knew where to look for the marriage certificate. Take the cat out of your shirt, Krekor. She’s making you bulge.”
“She’s safe in there.” Gregor shook his head. “I only knew where to look for the marriage certificate because Sister Scholastica told me where to look. She said she and Barry Field had decided once they were going to elope, and the place where they were going to elope to was Elkton, Maryland. All I did was guess that if they knew about Elkton, Tom Dolan and Cheryl Cass must have known about it, too.”
“And you were right.”
“I was right, but after that I was speculating. I figured it like this: Cheryl Cass called the Chancery looking for Tom Dolan. I found out later that the Cardinal’s secretary had answered the phone, by the way. At any rate, he agreed to see her, and after he’d seen her he agreed to see her again. He took her to a hotel called the Maverick Inn, which had two things going for it. It was right next to the Chancery, and it was about to close for re
novations. He got her a room—we found out in the end that she’d been registered as Bridget C. Noald, not very bright on his part; Bridget was Cheryl Cass’s Confirmation name—anyway, he got her a room, took her upstairs, ordered room service for her. On the way to the hotel they’d bought a bottle of wine and Dolan went into the bathroom to open it. He did open it. Then he poured two glasses and filled the rest of the bottle full of plant poison. They drank the two glasses together, and then he left. He came back three hours later, as soon as he had a break in his schedule, and found what he’d expected to find. Cheryl Cass Dolan, dead.”
“And then he moved her to the alley?”
“Down the utility elevator and out the back. He was taking a risk, but not much of a risk. It was late and the hotel was half-deserted. A lot of the business they might have had that week had gone elsewhere because of the closing.”
“What about Father Andy Walsh?”
Gregor caught a cat trying to climb the side of his face and put it down the front of his shirt to join the other one. His tie was hopeless anyway. “Did I tell you how to do that trick with the Vaseline?” he asked.
Tibor smiled. “You showed me,” he said. “You showed all of us. You nearly gave poor George Tekemanian a heart attack. He thought you’d changed water into wine.”
“Yes. Well. There isn’t much about that you don’t already know. It was because of the goat. They’d all been given a pamphlet in the second grade about, saints, and their symbols, and one of those symbols was a goat, used for St. Joseph as the patron saint of married men. Your friend Cardinal O’Bannion is something of a tartar, you know. He’s a near fanatic about staying within the rules. As it turned out, Dolan wasn’t just married in the eyes of the Church on the day he was ordained, he was married in the eyes of the law, too. We found the divorce decree eventually, and it was less than eight years old. But that wouldn’t have mattered. Even if he’d been through a civil divorce, he hadn’t been through an ecclesiastical nullification. At the least, if O’Bannion had found out, Dolan would have been canned, sent back to his monastery and told to take up gardening. At the worst, Dolan would have ended up defrocked. The Church was the only safety he’d ever known. He couldn’t bear to give it up. He called Walsh at the Cardinal’s request on Holy Thursday morning, to tell Walsh that the Cardinal was coming to the children’s Mass, and Walsh told him about the goat. From the statement Dolan made, I take it Andy’s hints were a little broader than usual.”