True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “I don’t know,” Peter Rose said.

  “Probably to get a look at my computer,” Scholastica said. “It’s got a password on it, but we all use the same ones. Benedicamus Domini. There are a couple of others. It wouldn’t have taken her much to go through them.”

  “What would be on your computer that Sister Harriet Garrity would want?” Gregor asked.

  Scholastica and Peter Rose looked at each other. Scholastica took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “nothing, really, but Sister might have hoped there was. We’ve been having a lot of, well, friction, since I got here in January.”

  “Friction about what?”

  “About the First Holy Communion Mass, for one thing,” Scholastica said. “I’m all for the traditional event, with girls in white dresses and veils. She was all for something more ‘relevant,’ except that wouldn’t have been the word she would have used. More ‘feminist,’ maybe. Anyway, we had a fight about it, and I won that round. She might have been looking for embarrassing information to use the next time we had a run-in.”

  “And there was no such information?”

  “Good grief, Gregor, I’ve been here less than two months.” Scholastica laughed. “Not that there isn’t enough embarrassing information in my past, but Harriet wasn’t going to find out about it in my office. She might have discovered that I’ve been less than strict about the academic requirements in the case of one or two of the kids, but that isn’t anything Father Healy didn’t know about. Besides, she was the one who was always saying that grades were a tool of white-male hegemonic oppression.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “What happened after ten-forty-five? Did Sister Rose see her come out of the office?”

  “No,” Peter Rose said. “She was in there as late as one o’clock without ever coming out to the extent of using the fire door or passing my office.”

  “You were in a position to know that throughout that whole time?”

  “Yes. There’s a rosary at twelve, but I didn’t go. I had a lot of work to do.”

  Gregor thought about it. “So,” he said. “She was in that office at least until one. What happened at one?”

  “I ran over to the convent to have some lunch.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I taught my class until three. Then I made sure everybody had their coats and their backpacks. Then I made sure everybody got on the bus.”

  “You didn’t go back to your office?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Peter Rose said.

  “Fine. What about Sister Harriet Garrity? Did anybody else see her at any time during the rest of the afternoon?”

  “No,” Lou Emiliani put in. “We’ve asked everybody in the place. Nobody saw her after Sister Thomasetta and Sister Peter Rose saw her at ten-thirty. Somebody even went looking for her and couldn’t find her. Ah—”

  “Sister Bridget,” Garry Mansfield put in. “She had phone duty. Somebody was looking for Sister Harriet from something called GALA.”

  “Gay and Lesbian Support Advisory,” Scholastica put in. “It’s an advocacy organization that deals with gay community issues. It was practically the only thing Harriet belonged to that the Chancery didn’t scream about, although they probably would have liked to. GALA did a lot of work on behalf of the plaintiffs in the pedophilia suit.”

  “Did anybody look for Harriet in Scholastica’s office?” Gregor asked.

  “I doubt it,” Scholastica said. “I mean, why would they? Although we could always ask.”

  “Ask,” Gregor said. “Just in case. What about time of death? Do we have that yet?”

  “Later on this afternoon,” Lou Emiliani said. “But you know what that’s like. We won’t get anywhere near a narrow enough band to pin down something like this—”

  “I know, I know.” Gregor sighed. “But we can always hope. You’re sure that nobody could have come past you and into Scholastica’s office between ten-forty-five and one?”

  “I’m positive,” Peter Rose said.

  “And you didn’t hear any sounds coming out of the room? You didn’t hear thrashing, or a scream?”

  “I’d hope I’d do something about a scream,” Peter Rose said. “I didn’t hear anything unusual. What could I have heard?”

  “There might have been nothing to hear,” Garry Mansfield put in. “It would all depend on just how much—”

  “I know,” Gregor said. He walked over to the coat tree and took his coat down. “I think,” he said, “we’d better go have a talk with Father Healy.”

  2

  Gregor Demarkian had spent enough time around the Catholic Church, and around priests of other denominations, to understand that he was unlikely to find Father Healy standing at the altar of his church at any odd hour of the day, but as soon as he came out of the office building he veered in that direction anyway. Garry and Lou still weren’t used to him. They veered when he veered, but they were clearly very surprised. He let himself in the church’s side door and walked out to the center aisle. It was a high-ceilinged, mock-Gothic building, and, like most of the churches in the era in which it was built, very ornate. The backs and ends of the pews were carved into rolls and swirls. The marble of the Communion rail was sculpted into a smooth raised curve. The altar was marble, too, and it looked nothing at all like the ersatz tables so many Catholic churches went in for these days. For one thing, there were cracks and discolorations, the kind of small thing that went wrong with expensive buildings when their owners didn’t have quite enough money to keep them up. Gregor walked down the aisle to the back of the church and looked back the way he had come. He walked back up to the altar and paced back and forth in front of the rail. The church was nearly empty of people. The few who were there did not look up.

  “What are you doing?” Lou demanded. “Father Healy is in the rectory.”

  “I just wanted to check something,” Gregor said. “Bernadette Kelly was found here, at the front, near the altar?”

  “Right in the middle of the center aisle,” Garry said.

  “What about her husband? Where was he when he shot himself?”

  “Same place.” Garry looked around. “You can’t tell, can you? They really cleaned it up.”

  “There was a mess?” Gregor asked. Then he waved this away. “Of course there was. Don’t pay any attention to me.”

  “There was blood all over everything,” Garry said. “The front pews. The carpet. The Communion rail. Head wounds bleed the worst. They must have gotten professionals in to do this kind of job. It’s impressive.”

  “Mmmm.” Gregor paced back and forth in front of the altar again. His first question was answered. There was enough room. Marty Kelly had not been cramped. He looked around at the people in the pews. They were bent over the pews in front of them, their eyes closed, prayer. “The time,” he said. “It was just before Mass?”

  “An hour before,” Garry said.

  “But the report you gave me said that the Church was full of people,” Gregor said.

  “Father Healy lets the homeless people come in here and sleep,” Lou put in. “There’s a shelter around here somewhere, but it gets full fast in the winter. And some of these people would prefer not to go there.”

  “It’s nicer here,” Garry said. “And you know, the shelter feels like an institution, and a lot of these people, especially the women, they’ve spent most of their lives in institutions. I’d think they’d want to go back, but they don’t.”

  “Jail is jail,” Lou said. “No matter what you call it. And even if you’re crazy.”

  “But there were nuns here, too, weren’t there?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Garry said. “They do things. Bring flowers for the altar, that kind of thing. And that girl, Mary McAllister, she was here, too. She gets the homeless people before Mass and brings them out to the soup kitchen. Unless they want to stay for Mass. Then one of the nuns stay in the pews with them to look after them, you know, and somebody takes them over to the soup kit
chen for the second breakfast sitting.”

  “The place sounds like an airport,” Gregor said. “Did Marty Kelly know all this when he brought his wife here that morning? Did he expect an empty church?”

  “I don’t know,” Garry said. “There’s a lot we don’t know about Marty Kelly. Do you think he would have come if he’d realized there would be a lot of people here?”

  “I wouldn’t have,” Gregor said. “And there’s another thing. Are you sure he brought her here? She couldn’t have been somewhere on the grounds, out of sight? I know about the forensic evidence from the truck, but that doesn’t really prove anything. She must have been in that truck dozens of times.”

  “She was dead better than ten hours when we found her,” Garry said. “If she died on the grounds, you’d think somebody would have run across the body. Or somebody would have smelled something. She had to have vomited. Somewhere. With arsenic—”

  “Yes, I know,” Gregor said. “There was no vomit found in the truck?”

  “None,” Garry said.

  “And none in her home, either, I would presume,” Gregor said.

  “She and Marty lived in this trailer park,” Garry said. “Except it wasn’t what you’d think. She kept that trailer as neat as anything. As neat as this church. Everything polished. Everything washed.”

  Gregor was startled. “You’re sure that wasn’t done afterward? Somebody could have been cleaning up after—”

  “Not like this, they couldn’t have,” Garry said. “It was more than just clean. It was bone clean. You know how those places get. The cooking smells are into everything. The stains. This was spotless.”

  “Spotless,” Gregor repeated. He walked back and forth in front of the altar again. “Where did he bring her in?” he asked. “From the side over there, the way we came in? He couldn’t have brought her in the front.”

  “We think he brought her in the side, yeah,” Garry said. “But nobody saw him. He could have come in from the basement.”

  “You’ve checked?”

  “More than once.”

  “Okay, walk me through this,” Gregor said. “Let’s say he brought her in the side door. He walked through into the church and he saw it was full of people, but nobody was at the altar. And the homeless people—would they have been mostly sleeping?”

  “I’d guess,” Garry said. “A couple of them weren’t. Or said they weren’t, afterward. They said they’d seen him shoot.”

  “Okay. So. He brings the body of his wife into the church, he walks to the altar—across this front part?”

  “That’s right,” Garry said.

  “And he lays her body down in front of the Communion rail. According to the report, that would be almost exactly in the middle, in front of the middle aisle. Then what did he do?”

  “He shot himself,” Garry said.

  “Just like that?” Gregor asked him. “He laid her down, he stood up, he took a gun out of his pocket, and he blasted away?”

  “Oh,” Garry said. “Well, yeah, pretty much. He didn’t talk to anybody, if that’s what you mean. He put her down. Then, according to one of the Sisters who were here, he sort of looked around. Then he took something out of his coat and shot himself in the head.”

  Gregor rubbed his eyes. It was incredible, how little feeling he had for this man or his wife—well, no. That wasn’t what he meant. He had so little feeling of them, was more like it, he couldn’t imagine what they had felt or hoped or wanted. What was worse, he had the impression that Garry Mansfield was just as clueless as he was. He shook his head.

  “He brought her here,” he said, “because she was very religious, and he wanted her to be where she would have wanted to be herself. He shot himself—why? Because he was despondent at her death? Because he felt responsible for her death?”

  “We interviewed his mother,” Garry said drily. “She’s a barfly from way back. Totally pickled. The only thing she was completely clear about was how much she hated her daughter-in-law’s guts. But don’t get your hopes up. She couldn’t have managed something as elaborate as an arsenic poisoning if her life had depended on it.”

  “This was out in the trailer park? The same trailer park?”

  “Right,” Garry said. “Out in Wilmot Township. Which is one hell of a long drive from here, even in the middle of the night with practically no traffic. And don’t ask me why they lived in the same place his mother did, because I don’t know. She seemed to think they were persecuting her.”

  “Maybe they were trying to get her off booze,” Lou said.

  Garry snorted.

  Gregor sat down in a pew. He always felt strange, sitting in pews very close to the altar in a church. It was as if he thought that if he were going to be so near what mattered, he ought to be standing, or kneeling. But he never knelt, even when he came to liturgy at Holy Trinity on Cavanaugh Street, to please Father Tibor.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s straighten this out. Bernadette and Marty Kelly were poor. True enough?”

  “True as it gets,” Garry said.

  “What about Scott Boardman?” Gregor asked Lou.

  “Middle class,” Lou said. “Not poor, not rich. Had a decent enough profession. Got a lot of work. From a working-class family. Nothing significant in the bank. But, you know, there was the settlement money. From the pedophilia suit. I don’t think any of the men got a lot, but it came in every month.”

  “What about Harriet Garrity?”

  “She was a nun,” Garry said. “I thought nuns weren’t allowed to own any property.”

  “She could have a family that owns property,” Lou said. “Rich people become nuns.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Garry said. “But I don’t see it, do you? She dressed like a bag lady.”

  “She didn’t dress like a bag lady,” Lou said. “She was just being modest.”

  “She dressed in sacks,” Garry said.

  Gregor waved them quiet. “Love and money,” he said. “That’s what we’ve got to concentrate on. Love and money. And none of them had access to any money, as far as we know.”

  Garry frowned. “That’s not exactly true,” he said. “Sister Harriet was the parish coordinator. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but she might have had access to the parish budget. And I’d bet the budget around here isn’t small.”

  “What about Scott Boardman?” Gregor asked.

  “He didn’t officially have access,” Lou said, “but he might have been able to get it unofficially. He volunteered a lot over there. He did office work. If you know how to tap into the computer files, you could do anything. And St. Stephen’s was the administrator for Scott Boardman’s reparations payments. Him and about five other guys, I think. That probably came to something.”

  “All right. That leaves us with Bernadette Kelly. And there, I take it, we come up blank.”

  Garry and Lou looked at each other and shrugged.

  Gregor stood up. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we’ve got three bodies, each one of them murdered almost identically, as far as we can figure out. We’ve got no connections. Do you realize that? We don’t have a single thing to hold these three people together except that they attended the two churches located on this corner. And last I heard, that was not a credible motive for murder.”

  “Maybe it is,” Lou said. “Maybe we have one of those serial killers you used to chase, and he’s targeting parishioners.”

  “And he starts doing that by following Bernadette Kelly out to a trailer park in Wilmot Township?—wait.”

  “Wait what?” Lou asked.

  “Arsenic,” Gregor said.

  Garry and Lou looked at each other again.

  Gregor headed for the side door they’d come in by. He felt good for the first time since he’d started looking into this—not because he had the solution, but because he finally knew that a solution was at least possible. Solutions were not possible in all cases. There were perfect murders, and he had had the misfortune to be on the team inv
estigating one or two. Life not only wasn’t fair. It often didn’t make sense.

  Outside, he turned down the path that led around to the back and the rectory, moving quickly because his coat wasn’t buttoned, and he was cold. He had to talk to Father Healy, and after that he had to sit down with some scratch paper and think. Bennis would want him to think on the computer, but at least this time he wasn’t going to listen to her.

  The wind was whipping through the courtyard, icy and stiff. His hands were cold. His nose was numb. Only his mind was warmed up and working.

  Arsenic, he thought, solved the problem of place.

  FIVE

  1

  Father Robert Healy had had a very hard time sleeping the night before, so hard a time he thought he might not have slept at all. What he remembered clearly was getting up in the dark and the silence to look at his clock. It was three in the morning, and so deathly still he might have been waking in his own grave. It was also deathly cold. He found himself wishing that he had chosen one of those old-fashioned windup clocks that ticked to put on his bedside table. It seemed less important to him, then, that he not be woken by the sound of ticking than that he not feel so thickly encased in isolation when he did wake. He tried closing his eyes and praying silently. He tried opening them and lighting the candle in front of his small statute of the Virgin, as if it might be possible for him to will her to speak. Under ordinary circumstances, he considered most of the traditional prayers to Mary—except, of course, for the Ave—to be embarrassingly overwrought and sentimental. In his room with the candle lit, with his narrow bed and its black horsehair blanket, they seemed to be only reportage, a documentary description of the apocalypse. To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. He could remember himself in third or fourth grade, squirming and impatient under the eyes of old Sister Benedicta, while his confirmation class recited the Salve in unison. If he’d been born twenty years earlier, he would have learned that prayer. He would have been happier.