True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “Let me try to explain this as well as I can,” Gregor said, “because I’m having a very hard time making it make sense. Sister Harriet Garrity was found dead in Sister Scholastica’s office at St. Anselm’s Parish complex by Sister Scholastica herself around six o’clock—”

  “Our Sister Scholastica?” Tibor asked.

  Gregor nodded. “Our Sister Scholastica. She’s been assigned as principal to St. Anselm’s Parochial School. Yesterday evening, she had dinner with friends, and when she got back to St. Anselm’s she decided to stop in to her office and see if she had any messages. The door to her office was locked. She unlocked it and found Sister Harriet, blue and just beginning to stiffen with rigor. She had a fit. She found Father Healy. Father Healy called the police. So far so good?”

  “Perfectly sensible,” Tibor said. “Sister Scholastica is a very sensible woman.”

  “Things get less sensible very fast,” Gregor said. “When Father Healy called the police, the call went out on the police band, which Roy Phipps’s people were monitoring.”

  “Why?” old George Tekemanian said.

  “I don’t have any idea,” Gregor said. “But they were, and they heard it. They sent somebody up the street to see if they could find out anything more, and they managed to get hold of the information that it looked very much like Sister Harriet had been poisoned—”

  “Had she been poisoned?” Tibor asked.

  “I would guess so, considering what she looked like,” Gregor said, “but we’ll have to wait for the autopsy. Back to the point here. They found out that Sister Harriet was assumed to have been murdered by poison. They then put two and two together and got forty-six. They decided that since both Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly had been poisoned, and Scott Boardman had been poisoned at St. Stephen’s, then all the poisonings were being caused by the people at St. Stephen’s—”

  “Why?” Old George Tekemanian looked confused.

  “—and,” Gregor said, “that there was therefore some kind of police plot to protect the gay members of St. Stephen’s parish from the adverse publicity that would result if the public knew that one of them was the prime suspect in a series of murders. So—”

  “Pfaw,” Tibor said, slapping his hand against the booth table. “This is ridiculous. It is not even coherent.”

  “I agree,” Gregor said. “But that’s the story Phipps gave to the police.’

  “Listen,” Tibor said. “I have met this man. He is a fanatic. He is a demagogue. He is not stupid. He is especially not this kind of stupid. This is the cover story of a mentally retarded sociopath.”

  “I agree,” Gregor said again. “But again, it’s the story he gave to the police, and he’s sticking to it. What I can’t figure out is why. Why the demonstration and why the story.”

  “Is there someone at St. Stephen’s who is suspected of the killings?” old George Tekemanian asked. “I thought it was only the girl at the Catholic church, and then they thought her husband had done it, because she was so very ill and he hurt to see her suffer.”

  “No, no,” Tibor said. “There was another one. At St. Stephen’s. You had to listen carefully, but it was there.”

  “Right,” Gregor said. “There was Bernadette Kelly. Her husband brought her body to St. Anselm’s Catholic Church, then shot himself. There was Scott Boardman, who died in a parish office at St. Stephen’s.”

  “But is one of the people of the parish of St. Stephen’s suspected of killing them?” old George asked.

  “Nobody is suspected of killing them,” Gregor said. “We don’t even know where Bernadette Kelly died, yet. She didn’t die at St. Anselm’s Church. We don’t know anything about the death of Scott Boardman at all.”

  “But this Sister Harriet Garrity,” Tibor said. “She died in Sister Scholastica’s office?”

  “Oh, yes,” Gregor told him. “The vomit was still on the floor next to the desk. Autopsies can always bring surprises, but I don’t think this one will. I’d say it’s better than ninety-nine percent certain that she died where she was found.”

  “I’d say it’s better than ninety-nine percent certain that you’re not going to get to eat this in peace,” Linda Melajian said, arriving at the table with a large oval plate full of food. Behind her was Bennis, in jeans and clogs, her wild black hair pinned up into a knot on top of her head. “I didn’t suggest it to him,” Linda said to Bennis. “You know what he’s like.”

  Bennis picked up the plate and moved it to the other side of the table. “I’ll eat this,” she said. “Bring him the fruit platter.”

  “I don’t want the fruit platter,” Gregor said. “And I won’t eat it.”

  “If you get to tell me to quit smoking, I get to tell you to go on a diet. Linda, do you have any grits? Could I have two sides and some extra butter?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Gregor said.

  Bennis speared a sausage and looked at every side of it, as if it could tell her something she didn’t already know. Then she put it down again and let Gregor take the plate from her. “I don’t see how you can eat that stuff,” she said. “The fat practically oozes out of it.”

  “I don’t see how you can eat grits, with or without butter,” Gregor said. “It’s good to see you actually awake in the morning. Unusual, but good.”

  “Oh,” Bennis said. She stood up and reached into the back pocket of her jeans, coming up with a wadded mess of what looked like fax paper. “I wanted you to look at this,” she said. “I wanted to know what you thought I could do about it. And don’t tell me I can’t do anything, because I’m not going to listen.”

  Gregor opened the papers and looked at the title just as Linda Melajian came back yet another time, with yet another pot of coffee. “Reconsidering The Death Penalty,” the papers read, “by Edith Lawton.”

  Gregor shook his head, and said, “Why does the name Edith Lawton sound so familiar?”

  2

  It was late, much later than he had expected it to be, by the time Gregor left the Ararat. Ohanian’s was all the way open when he came out, and Lida Arkmanian was already getting into a cab for her twice-weekly trip to the serious department stores. She was wearing her three-quarter-length chinchilla coat, and taking with her poor Hannah Krekorian, who had all the fashion sense of a psychotic duck. But then, Lida and Hannah had always been this way, even when they were all growing up together on this street, and instead of town houses the blocks were filled with tenements. Lida was the most beautiful girl in school, the one who always knew what to wear and what to do and what to say. Hannah was the quiet little lump in the corner of the dance floor. As Gregor passed them, they waved, and he saw, glinting in the start of the winter morning, the gold of the cross Lida always wore around her neck. Hannah wore one, too, and so did all the older women on this street. When Gregor was growing up, it had almost been part of a community uniform, for the men as well as for the women. Gregor tried to remember if old George Tekemanian wore one, but old George tended to wear shirts buttoned high up on his neck or turtleneck sweaters his niece-in-law bought him at Neal’s. The women, though, definitely did. The very old ones wore theirs outside the high collars of their dresses, as if they wanted very much to have them seen. Gregor stopped where he was, in the middle of the sidewalk, and looked up the street to Holy Trinity Church. Bennis stopped with him, shoving her hands into the front pockets of her jeans.

  “I’m freezing,” she said. “I forgot to wear a coat.”

  “You always forget to wear a coat. If I wasn’t stumbling over it all the time, I’d think you didn’t have a coat.”

  “Whatever. Maybe we should go inside.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About Edith Lawton?”

  “About religion,” Gregor said. He walked a little farther up the block and stopped again. Holy Trinity was a very traditional church. All Armenian churches were. You wouldn’t find an Armenian-American community building a Crystal Cathedral. Gregor crossed the street and then cross
ed again, heading always for the church. It seemed to him that Armenian people, or at least Armenian-American people, were—what? He had been about to think “more liberal than other Americans,” but that wasn’t true. In a lot of ways, they were a lot more conservative. They believed in marriage and family and putting children before career, for men as well as women. They believed in working hard and doing without to get ahead, and they were very antagonistic to the idea of welfare. Their church had held the same doctrines and practiced the same rituals, word for word, for over a thousand years. And yet—and yet. Gregor stopped when he got to the sidewalk in front of Holy Trinity and looked at the building. It was made of rough stones and set back from the street, small but sturdylooking, built in the 1920s by people who had had very little money to give to its construction, but who were not willing to live without what they felt it could give them. And yet, Gregor thought again.

  Next to him, Bennis wrapped her arms around her body and shivered. “Do you at least want to tell me what we’re doing?” she demanded. “I’m turning into an icicle.”

  “I’m thinking about religion,” Gregor said. “Would you say that Tibor is a very religious person?”

  “Of course Tibor is a very religious person. He’s a priest.”

  “I don’t think that necessarily follows,” Gregor said. “What about Lida? Would you say she’s a religious person?”

  “I guess. Why?”

  “I would say she was a religious person,” Gregor said. “She believes in God. She goes to church every week. She really does think somebody is watching over her. What about Hannah Krekorian?”

  “All those women are religious,” Bennis said. “At least in the way you’ve defined it. And the older women, too. But I wouldn’t count on Howard Kashinian.”

  “I never do,” Gregor said. He looked the building over one more time. He could remember being very young and being brought here by his parents, at a time when the church was shabby and in desperate need of repairs. Later there would be a boom or two and the work everyone had done for so long would begin to pay off, but then there was still no money. He would sit in his pew at the long service and count the holes in the plaster walls and the chips in the gold paint in the molding that sat hip high on the iconostasis. He remembered looking at those pictures and wondering what they meant, because in spite of all the Sunday school he’d attended, nobody had ever told him. He still didn’t know what most of them meant. He only knew that they represented the saints of the Church, and that a great many of them seemed to have died violent and agonizing deaths.

  “Gregor?”

  “I’m going inside. Do you want to go inside with me?”

  “At least it’s got heat,” Bennis said. “Do you want to pray? I didn’t think you did that.”

  Gregor led the way up the walk and in the front doors. Unlike St. Stephen’s and St. Anselm’s, there were no high ceilings, except in the vault of the church itself. Nor was there much of anything in the foyer. The Armenian Church in America was not large enough or rich enough to put out dozens of pamphlets on the spiritual life. Gregor went through into the church itself, which was dark. In Catholic churches, the altar was exposed to the people, and often, just behind it, the Host was displayed for adoration. In Armenian churches, as in most churches in the Eastern tradition, the altar was hidden behind the iconostasis, whatever the priest did was supposed to be a mystery.

  Gregor sat down in the very last pew on the left. Bennis sat down next to him, let her clogs drop to the floor, and tucked her legs up under her. With anybody else, Gregor might have protested. He had begun to think this was the only way Bennis was comfortable sitting down.

  “So,” Bennis said. “What is this? You’re getting religion in your old age?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten it or not gotten it,” Gregor said. “I don’t think about religion much. Do you?”

  “Um, no. Why would I?”

  “Well, Bennis, people do. The people I’ve met in the last twenty-four hours think about religion a lot. Not just Roy Phipps. The Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia. Your old friend Sister Scholastica.”

  “It’s what they do,” Bennis said reasonably. “I mean, it’s their profession. They’ve got to think about it a lot.”

  “You don’t think ordinary people do that?”

  “Oh,” Bennis said. “Well, yes. Of course they do. Some of them.”

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “And I can’t really figure out why. I’ve got three dead bodies, all in churches. Four, if you count Marty Kelly, and I’d think you’d have to. Yes, he committed suicide, but he committed suicide because his wife died and his wife is one of the three bodies in churches. If you see what I mean.”

  “I thought it was pretty clear that Bernadette Kelly had died somewhere else,” Bennis said. “I mean, I thought that was the whole point of the press conference.”

  “The whole point of the press conference was to get the information out in a way that the media wouldn’t be able to understand its importance. It failed. But back to Bernadette. She was killed elsewhere, too. But something about her death had to have something to do with a church. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have ended up in one.”

  “Maybe she only ended up in one because her husband was religious.”

  “She was the one who was religious,” Gregor said. “I got that much out of Sister Scholastica. She was religious. She brought him along with her. Scholastica thinks he brought her to the church because he thought he was bringing her where she would want to be.”

  “All right.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Not all right. The most important thing, in any of these cases, is to be able to think your way into the mind of the killer. It’s not that it ever works perfectly. It doesn’t. And it’s a good thing. Sociopathic murderers are bad enough. We don’t need sociopathic policemen. But in this case I just don’t get it. Do you ever look at that thing up there?”

  “What?” Bennis said. “The iconostasis? I look at it all the time.”

  “And?”

  “And what? It’s an interesting example of Byzantine icon making. Interesting but not particularly good. Lida was talking about going to Armenia to find better ones, now that you can travel there.”

  “It’s the saints I’m thinking of,” Gregor said. “Doesn’t it ever make you wonder how many saints of the early Church died bloody and horrible deaths?”

  “Not really,” Bennis said drily, “I was raised a debutante Episcopalian.”

  “What’s a debutante Episcopalian?”

  “A woman with old Main Line money who shows up every week at the Episcopal church to show that she’s still in the Social Register. We weren’t really big on saints dying terrible deaths. But I don’t think most people on Cavanaugh Street are either, and they take religion a lot more seriously than my family did.”

  “Do you know what the rule of thumb is in murder cases?” Gregor asked. “Love and money. That’s why people kill. Love and money. For a long time I thought serial killers were an exception to that rule, but they’re not. They’ve just displaced their love, most of them, onto third parties. And even the mass killers, the school shooters, are running on love and money—on status, which is the kind of thing teenagers have as the coin of exchange. Am I making any sense here?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Let’s just say that I don’t like the idea that I’m investigating people I don’t understand,” Gregor said. “It bothers me. It bothers me beyond belief. Do you think there’s something about religion that causes people to go off the deep end?”

  “Well, Gregor, it’s not just religion. I mean, think of Edith Lawton. A professional atheist. As fanatical about being an atheist as Roy Phipps is about being whatever he thinks he is. There are fanatics of everything. Politics. Religion. Antireligion. Beanie babies.”

  “Do you think anybody has ever killed for a Beanie baby?”

  “I have no idea,” Bennis said, “but I’ll bet that there are people
out there who have wanted to kill because somebody insulted Beanie babies. Would you say that comes in on the love side? Maybe that’s all this is. Somebody is killed because they—I don’t know what I was going to say. Because they insulted the Church, maybe. Or because keeping them alive would mean the Church was harmed. How’s that?”

  “Not bad,” Gregor admitted. “We’ll concentrate on Sister Harriet Garrity, of course, because we’re in on the beginning of that one. The markers are still out there for anybody to see. But I wish I had a better handle on the people.”

  Bennis unfolded her legs and slipped them back into the clogs she had left resting on the floor. “I don’t think you should have all that much trouble with the people,” Bennis said. “Even Roy Phipps is just a petty dictator with ambitions. What worries me is that it will turn out that he wasn’t the one who did it, and none of his people did either.”

  “Why does that worry you?”

  “Because, so far, he’s practically the only one of these people I’d want to have done it. At least, as you’ve described them. Everybody else, except Roy and his church pickets, sounds very nice.”

  “The Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia?”

  “That’s different,” Bennis said. “I wouldn’t want to give Edith Lawton the satisfaction. If it turned out that the Cardinal did it, she’d have an essay up on the Web and in that amateurville freethought magazine in no time at all, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Catholic Church has never been anything but a murderous, hypocritical engine of oppression from the day it was founded until now. And getting half her facts wrong in the process.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  “I’m going to go back to the house and get on the Net. If you come with me, I’ll give you some baklava.”

  “You made baklava?”

  “Lida did. Also some grape leaves. They’re in the fridge. Oh, and that stuff, the meatballs with the crusts on them. That’s in the fridge, too. With microwave instructions.”