True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “How’s it going?” Jackman asked.

  “All hell’s breaking loose.” The man was white, and not quite young, in spite of the fact that his pasty face was still pocked with acne. He turned to Gregor Demarkian and held out his hand. “Garry Mansfield,” he said.

  “Garry’s a homicide detective,” Jackman said drily.

  Garry had his eyes trained on the television set again. “This is not going to be good,” he said. “People have been way too bored in this city for way too long.”

  Jackman waved Gregor in the direction of the chair on the other side of the coffee table and pulled his own chair out from behind his desk to sit down. Gregor was watching the set carefully, but the scene was too confused to evaluate. Obviously, the press-release part of the program was over, because now the reporters were asking questions. They all seemed to be talking into air instead of microphones. Gregor would hear half a question, and then the voice would disappear.

  “Maybe we’d better turn this off,” Jackman said after a while. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Were there any surprises?”

  “You mean with the press release?” Garry shook his head. “He read it verbatim. And he’s trying not to speculate. But you know how it is. Everybody will be speculating in a minute or two. The evening news shows are going to be ridiculous.”

  “Are you the detective in charge of this case?” Gregor asked.

  It was the kind of thing Jackman should have told him in the elevator, or when they first came into the room. Instead, they seemed to have been talking in code. But Garry Mansfield was nodding.

  “It depends on which case you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m in charge of the Marty and Bernadette Kelly case. The Scott Boardman case belongs to Lou Emiliani.”

  Gregor raised his eyebrows. “There’s the first thing. I knew this mess was going to be full of inaccuracies. The Cardinal gave me to understand that there weren’t two cases, but only one connected one.”

  “There probably will be in a day or two,” Garry Mansfield said. “But Boardman died first, at least as far as we knew—”

  “We’ll get to the times later,” Jackman said. “That’s driving everybody up the wall.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” Garry said. “Boardman was the first case. He died over at that church, St. Stephen’s, in some office they have over there. You’d have to ask Lou. But nobody thought much of anything about it. I mean, the man practically breathed coke, morning, noon, and night. Somebody like that has a few convulsions and dies, you figure it’s cocaine poisoning. You don’t get all worked up about it.”

  “When I talked to the cardinal, he said that there had been an exception made to allow the family to prepare the body for burial before the final autopsy reports were in.”

  “Ask Lou,” Garry said again. “From what I understand, it was more complicated than that. Anyway, Boardman came first that we knew about, and that got assigned a detective, and then Marty did his little jig in St. Anselm’s, and I got assigned to it, so it’s still two separate cases. But it won’t be for long. You read the press release?”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “I’ll give you a copy. It’s very cagey. The Boardman thing is just a line on page three, but it’s not like nobody’s going to notice.”

  “I’m surprised there’s anything about the Boardman ‘thing’ at all,” Gregor said. “And, for that matter, I’m surprised about the press release. Why take so much trouble to attract publicity? Doesn’t the medical examiner’s office usually play it more closely than that?”

  Jackman stood up. “He’s covering his ass, that’s what the problem is,” he said, starting to pace. “He screwed up on the Boardman thing, and now he’s covering his ass. Don’t get me started, Gregor, I’m serious.”

  “You should have heard the language he used,” Garry said.

  “At this rate, he won’t make commissioner before he’s sixty,” Gregor said.

  Jackman sat down again. “You remember the sex-abuse thing, a couple of years ago, with the old Archbishop and all that jazz?”

  “Trobriand Islanders remember the sex-abuse thing,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah, well. The commissioner,” Jackman stared at the door, as if he expected the commissioner to burst in at any moment. “The commissioner,” he repeated, “seems to think we look like we’re picking on the archdiocese. And he doesn’t want to look like we’re picking on the archdiocese. And that’s especially true because Boardman was one of the plaintiffs in the sex-abuse case. So, the bottom line is, the commissioner wants to hire you.”

  “I think I’ve already been hired by the archdiocese.”

  “Did they pay you any money?”

  “Of course they didn’t pay me any money.”

  “Well, then,” Jackman said, “you weren’t really hired. So go over to the precinct with Garry here, and listen to Lou Emiliani, and come on board. You’d rather work for us than for that son of a bitch anyway. And we won’t tie your hands.”

  “Unless you say no,” Garry Mansfield said pleasantly.

  Gregor leaned forward and turned off the television set. It had gone to a commercial for Pampers, which was the kind of thing he could never watch without getting confused.

  2

  Gregor had expected that the precinct that housed the police who covered St. Anselm’s and St. Stephen’s would be one of the better-kept ones in the city. The neighborhood was one of the more expensive ones, and all the houses Gregor had been able to see when he walked around the two large churches, hoping to get some sense of direction, had been well kept and devoted to the use of a single tenant. He had failed to reckon with the perversity of Philadelphia street life. New York was supposed to be changeable, but next to this, New York was a model of consistency. No wonder so many of the really rich people here had moved out to the comfort of the Main Line. There was this street with the two churches on it, and the row houses with their polished front doors and gleaming windows. Two streets over, the row houses looked as if they were disintegrating into sand and the one vacant lot was full of garbage and people who huddled over a fire they had made in a tin can. Junkies and drunks: even when Gregor was growing up here, fifty years ago, there had been junkies and drunks, but they had called the junkies “hopheads.” In those days, it had all been marijuana and cocaine. If heroin happened, it happened out of sight, and drugs in general were restricted to the musicians who blew through after a week or two in New York or Detroit. That was one of the great attractions of going to hear jazz on Saturday nights. All the fraternity boys from the University of Pennsylvania tried it. If they were really rebels, they actually bought themselves a joint and smoked it in the alleys in the back before they joined their girlfriends at their round tables and tried to pretend that it didn’t matter that they were the only white people in the room. Maybe because Gregor had never been a fraternity boy, or had a hope in hell of becoming one, he hadn’t tried it. He had been in the Army before he smoked his first marijuana cigarette, and then he hadn’t liked it much, and hadn’t gone back to try it again.

  Still, he had come into the black neighborhoods of this city to hear music when the only place you could hear real jazz was in the storefront cabarets that were supposed to be “for coloreds only”—except that this was Philadelphia, so nobody had been willing to come right out and say it. God only knew, there had been enough in the way of neighborhoods that were “for whites only,” although nobody had been willing to say that, either. And then, as now, the real skids were always the most integrated parts of town. Alcoholism was color-blind. The old men sleeping off the shakes on park benches and heating grates were any color at all, or no color, and they were so far beyond caring that even an official policy of apartheid would not have mattered. Gregor wondered how the South Africans had managed that, or if they had even bothered to try: the community of bums. Could you have a community among people who could barely speak without slurring their words, or who wanted nothing more than another bottle of
booze and oblivion?

  Garry Mansfield was leading him up the stairs of the precinct house. At the top, standing in the half-opened front doors, was a man who looked like he might have been Black or Hispanic or Asian or all three. He was in an ordinary business suit, but he was all cop. Gregor wondered if they gave them walking lessons the way they gave those to debutantes, except instead of walking with books on their heads they’d be required to walk holding a steel baton stretched out behind their backs, so that they would learn to strut properly.

  “What’s the matter with him?” the man at the top of the stairs said.

  Garry Mansfield looked Gregor over. “He’s got the urban blue. Hey, Lou. We got here as fast as we could. Jackman can talk the ass off a cooked chicken.”

  The Black/Hispanic/Asian man must be Lou Emiliani. Maybe it was time for them all to stop trying to pin each other down by ethnicity. It was getting too confusing. Gregor held out his hand.

  “Gregor Demarkian,” he said.

  “Lou Emiliani,” Lou Emiliani said. He stood back and propped the door a little farther open, so that they could pass by him and into the precinct house itself. It was, Gregor saw, filthy in the way these places got. He was sure it was cleaned often enough. It was probably washed down in Lysol twice a day by a cleaning staff that had nothing else to do but try to make the place as antiseptic as possible. The problem was that some kinds of dirt did not come out, not ever, not even if you destroyed the building and reduced it all to dust.

  In the big front room, an old woman in a coat that didn’t quite come down to her knees was standing at the big front desk, tapping her hands against the surface as she tried to explain something to the desk sergeant. On the other side of that counter, three men were handcuffed together and sitting against the wall in wooden chairs. Gregor had no idea what had caused the police to handcuff them in the first place, but at the moment they were closer to sleep than to violence. Bigcity police departments like this were usually unbearably noisy, full of confusion, full of complaints. This one was almost eerily quiet. The only sound Gregor could hear was the old woman talking, her voice rising and falling almost as if in song.

  “Cambodian,” Lou Emiliani said helpfully, seeing that Gregor was puzzled. “We’ve got a lot of them in this precinct. They’re decent enough, but they just don’t learn the language.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” Garry Mansfield said. “I mean, what do you want? They’re old ladies. They watched their families get shot up by machine guns in the old country and they come here, they’re starting over, they’re supposed to be grandmothers, instead they’re cleaning toilets in some building downtown. I mean, Jesus.”

  “I don’t think you call Cambodia the old country,” Lou Emiliani said.

  “I don’t think you bug some old lady when she’s lost her old family and she’s in a new country and she’s only trying to catch a break.”

  “I don’t bug the old ladies,” Lou Emiliani said.

  They had gone through the big front room and into a narrow corridor. They were stopped in front of a steel door with a fire window in it. Gregor pushed the door open and looked inside, at a bare-bones imitation of a conference room. This was where arrested prisoners would be brought to have a private word or two with their Legal Aid attorneys.

  “Gentlemen?” Gregor said.

  The two men both looked at him. Neither one of them could be much more than thirty. They had forgotten he was even there.

  “Oh,” Garry Mansfield said.

  Lou Emiliani pushed into the room and looked around. “Just a minute,” he said. “Marsha was supposed to bring in the file.”

  He disappeared down the corridor, and Garry and Gregor went inside to sit down. Gregor tried to remember if he had ever been in the precinct house in an unadulteratedly rich neighborhood, and supposed he must have. He had once worked kidnapping detail for the FBI, and in general it was rich people whose family members were kidnapped. He couldn’t remember those precinct houses being much different from this one. Even the suburban police stations, if the suburb was large enough, weren’t much different. The differences began to show in rural districts, where crime was almost nonexistent and the police sometimes felt as if they had only been hired for show.

  Lou Emiliani came back in, carrying a thick manila folder, and shut the door behind him. “Here it is,” he said. “Marsha got held up by a shoplifting. What is it, these days, with the hookers? Is business bad or something? Why are they all shoplifting?”

  “They aren’t all shoplifting,” Garry Mansfield said patiently.

  Lou Emiliani ignored him. He flipped open the manila folder and stared down at its first page, although Gregor knew that there couldn’t be much of anything there that would make any difference to what he had to say. Gregor had looked through a lot of manila folders in his time. Unless they had been especially arranged for a press conference or a meeting, they were generally incomprehensible.

  Lou Emiliani pushed the folder away. “Look,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here, okay? I don’t know what Garry thinks, but I’m glad Jackman’s bringing you in. Somebody has to deal with the son of a bitch.”

  “I thought we were going to stop calling him that,” Garry Mansfield said. “Jackman said that if we kept it up we were going to slip one day and do it on the air, so you said—”

  Lou ignored him. “It’s not that I’m against the Catholics. You have to understand this. All right? I’ve been a Catholic all my life. And I know what they were thinking, those guys in Rome, when they sent him here, after all the trouble. So. It’s not that. It’s just that I can’t deal with him. I can’t deal with him.”

  “Nobody can deal with him,” Garry said.

  “I take it we’re back on the Cardinal Archbishop,” Gregor said.

  Lou Emiliani stuck his fingers under his collar and came out with a silver chain with a crucifix and a Miraculous Medal hanging on it. Entwined around the metal were the brown cloth strands of the scapular of St. Simon Stock. Lou tucked it all back out of sight.

  “I think the best thing you could do,” he said, “is to be our point person with the archdiocese. You deal with him.”

  “Why don’t we talk about this young man,” Gregor said. “This Mr.—”

  “Boardman,” Garry Mansfield said.

  Lou brought the manila folder back to him and closed it. “It was my fault, more than anybody else’s. It didn’t occur to me that he died from anything but bad cocaine, or too much cocaine. It looked like that kind of death. And you know what autopsies are. They can’t test for everything. They only find what they go looking for.”

  “Back up a little,” Gregor said. “This Mr. Boardman was how old?”

  “Scott,” Garry Mansfield said.

  “He was twenty-eight,” Lou Emiliani said. “Gay. Out, but not very comfortable with it. Not camp, not even a little. If you hadn’t known he was gay, you would never have guessed it.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Garry Mansfield said. “Here we go again. What was he supposed to look like so you could guess it? What, you think the gay guys paint their hair green?”

  Gregor ignored him. “If he wasn’t comfortable being out and he wasn’t distinctively gay, why was he out at all?”

  “He had to be,” Lou said. “He was one of the plaintiffs in the sex-abuse scandal. The way those things work, the defense attorneys made his life an open book. And it wasn’t a secret. He got caught in the garage doing it with another kid in high school. So his father kicked him out. His mother was still in touch, though.”

  “And he came to St. Stephen’s?” Gregor asked.

  “I think it took longer than that,” Lou said. “He was in art college when he got kicked out. He must have finished. Anyway, by the time he died he was a graphic artist, got a lot of work on coffee-table books and book-cover stuff in general. Got a lot of work from New York. Some of the men at St. Stephen’s said he was thinking of moving there.”

  Gregor nodded. “All right. Eventuall
y he came to St. Stephen’s. Was he in a relationship?”

  “No,” Garry Mansfield said.

  “He screwed around,” Lou said. “He’d get stoked up on coke and hit the bars. In the beginning it was just sort of off and on. He’d coke up on the weekends and be clean the rest of the week, or he’d at least be clean enough. But the last six months or so, that changed.”

  “He was zonked all the time,” Garry said. “We all saw him. He was all over the neighborhood. Half the uniforms in this precinct must have rolled him into the emergency room at least once, or rolled him home.”

  “Nobody arrested him?” Gregor said.

  “What for?” Garry Mansfield said. “He wasn’t dealing. Hell, if he got a significant stash, he’d just hole up until he did it all himself. He was a mess. He didn’t need to go to jail. He needed a hospital. There just aren’t any hospitals.”

  “Let’s not debate the drug war,” Lou Emiliani said. Then he sighed. “I know it’s wrong to jump to conclusions. We shouldn’t have assumed anything. But it wasn’t just us. It was Jackman and the commissioner both. Here’s this guy, he’s been stoking himself to the gills on coke for six months, it was only a matter of time before he killed himself. Now he goes into convulsions in a church office and kicks—what would you think it was?”

  “Back up again,” Gregor said. “This was, when? That Scott Boardman died?”

  “January 30,” Lou said. “Just about six o’clock in the evening.”

  “And he wasn’t alone? Somebody saw the convulsions?”

  “A whole mass of people saw the convulsions,” Lou said. “Reverend Burdock, for one. Oh, and that guy, what’s his name. George.”

  “Chickie,” Garry Mansfield said.