Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “I thought we were talking about Cheryl Cass.”

  Andy leaned forward, and Barry looked away. They’d had this discussion innumerable times over the past few months, ever since Barry had told Andy that Candor was interested in picking up this little local Christian show for his nationwide cable network. Andy was a cynic. When he heard Mark Candor’s name, all he thought of were dollar signs, toll-free numbers and tax-free contributions.

  “We were not exactly talking about Cheryl Cass,” Andy said. “I was telling you she came to see me today.”

  “That doesn’t constitute talking about?”

  “Well, you hadn’t said anything at all. Let’s say I was making a speech.”

  “Okay.”

  “So.” Andy smiled. “Cheryl Cass came to see me today. In feet, according to her, she came all the way to Colchester just to see me. She’d seen my picture in a magazine and decided to look me up.”

  “Wasn’t that a little odd? She can’t be living anywhere close to here. One or the other of us would have run across her before this.”

  “She lives in the South. Or lived. I don’t think she’s living anywhere now.”

  “She came all the way up here from down South just to see you?”

  “Cheryl was never very bright, Barry. Now she’s not only stupid, she’s fuzzed. Medication.”

  “For what?”

  “Cancer.”

  Barry winced. “That’s too bad. It really is. She wasn’t really a bad girl. She always—meant well.”

  “She always meant a guaranteed screw, and you know it. Never mind. I suppose she wasn’t really bad in the moral sense, just not too well glued together. God. When I realized who I had on the phone, I thought I was going to faint.”

  “Why?”

  Andy was surprised. “Are you joking? I may not sound like it sometimes but I like being a Catholic priest. I like being a parish priest especially. I’d like to stay both.”

  “What does Cheryl Cass have to do with all that?”

  “Dear God,” Andy said, “sometimes I think you’re as stupid as she is. As you might have noticed, our esteemed Cardinal Archbishop does not like me.”

  “Well, Andy, you did call him a pile of petrified wood running to fat. On the air.”

  “I know I did. I’ve done a few other things, too, just to wake people up a little. Catholics need to be woken up. Most of them are still living in the days of Pius XII. O’Bannion would very much like to get rid of me.”

  “Why doesn’t he?”

  “Because it’s a new world, Barry dear. He can’t just throw me out on my ass because he feels like it or even because I act up a little. He has to have a good excuse. Cheryl, you know, could give him a very good one. He’d just love to know I was one of the people responsible for what happened in Black Rock Park.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Barry said. “That was—that was twenty years ago.”

  “It was a cause célèbre at the time. And they rake it up again every year or two in the Tribune, when they’ve got nothing else to do.”

  “I can’t imagine O’Bannion would care one way or the other. After all this time.”

  Andy cocked his head. “Tell me,” he said, “do you think your Mark Candor would care? If he found out the same thing about you?”

  Barry Field froze. “Oh, no,” he said. “Candor is—”

  “Very nervous about who he lets on his network these days? I shouldn’t wonder. He’s one of the few of those jerks with a decent reputation. He probably wants to keep it.”

  “I had to go through a security check,” Barry said. “And Candor had me investigated even before that. He said I was the first clean candidate he’d seen in years.”

  “Except you aren’t.”

  “I might as well be,” Barry said. “You aren’t going to tell anybody about it. I’m not going to go confess it to Candor. And the rest of them—”

  “All have good reasons for keeping their mouths shut? I agree with you. With one exception. Cheryl Cass.”

  “But why would she want to? Is she trying to blackmail you? Does she want money?”

  “No, Barry, she doesn’t want to blackmail me. She just doesn’t think about Black Rock Park the way we do.”

  “What other way is there to think about it? The whole thing was—grotesque.”

  “According to Cheryl, it was the second best day of her life.”

  “What?”

  Andy stood up. “Barry, Barry, Barry. Cheryl Cass is stupid and she was never really pretty and her parents were a pair of drunks and she never had any friends until we came along. And we weren’t really friends, but she never had sense enough to know that.”

  “I always felt guilty about the way we treated her,” Barry said miserably.

  “You always felt guilty about everything. The problem is, she’s here, and she’s dying, and she’s wandering around town talking to people. She says it makes her happy to talk about old times.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Exactly,” Andy said.

  “But what are we going to do?” It was such a useless question. When he felt like this, he was incapable of doing anything. He stared at Andy, so sleek and perfect, so much the way he had been in high school. Andy had always had the knack of looking good. Even when he was doing evil. “Andy,” Barry said, “what can we do?”

  Andy threw himself down in the club chair again. “Think,” he said. “What we can do is—think.”

  [7]

  It was seven o’clock, and Cheryl Cass was sitting on the big double bed in her room on the third floor of one of Colchester’s most expensive hotels. Whether it was also “exclusive”—which was the way she wanted to think of it—she didn’t know. She did know it was the nicest room she had ever been allowed to sleep in. The carpet on the floor was a thick mauve pile. The bathroom had a shower stall and a bathtub with a whirlpool and was almost the size of her living room in the apartment back in Maryland. The lamps were made of brass and topped with pleated mauve shades. Best of all, there was room service. She would have been much too frightened to order from it herself, just as she would have been much too frightened to check into a room here, even if she’d had the money, in cash, in her pocket. Now all that had been done for her and the food sent up, with tip already paid. It was all so wonderful, she felt a little stunned. She couldn’t begin to guess at what it must have cost.

  She picked at her lobster and thought that the food and the room and the bottle of sweet wine were all very nice, but not the important things. She had had a wonderful day. She had seen everyone she wanted to see. She had talked it all over with the only people who could possibly understand. She had been treated so well, so kindly, it had made her a little dizzy. Even Peg Morrissey had been nice to her, and niceness hadn’t been Peg’s thing back in high school. Peg had taken down all her old yearbooks, the three they were all in together and the two that followed—because Tom, of course, had graduated a year after the rest of them—and they had spent an hour looking at the pictures. That was just the kind of thing Cheryl had come North hoping to do.

  Cheryl got out a cigarette and lit up. Then she poured wine into the wineglass that had come up with the room service tray and struck a pose in front of the mirror that rested against the opposite wall, trying to look like a sophisticated lady. It didn’t work. She’d felt more sophisticated drinking the wine out of the water glasses from the bathroom, the way they had when the two of them had drunk it together, after she first got the room. It was really wonderful wine, from Italy, as sweet and thick as syrup, and it had been bought for her specially at a fancy liquor store on Compton Street on their way here. They’d made the taxi stop and wait at the curb while they ran in to get it. Then, once they were here, there’d been a lot of fumbling in the bathroom with glasses and corks, out of her sight. The little cork-lined tray meant to hold complimentary soap and perfume became a wine server, with two glasses half full of heavy red liquid flanking the recorked bottle. The scene
had enchanted her, and the wine had enchanted her just as much. It reminded her of the Communion wine she’d had once in a newfangled church in Baltimore, where people received under both species.

  She put the wine down without drinking it, took some more lobster, then put her fork down and went back to smoking. She had been running around all day and she felt very bad, really awful. Her joints ached and her head was heavy. Her bones felt stuffed full of needles. If she hadn’t stopped taking painkillers, she would have used two or three to put herself to sleep.

  Maybe, she thought, I’ll take a whole lot of them at the end of the week, on my last night here. In the meantime, she could ask her friends to get her to a doctor for a new prescription or get a prescription some other way. Then she could lie in bed for the next six days, knowing that everything was wonderful and nothing was going to get worse. There had been times in her life when that was all she’d wanted: just to know that nothing was going to get worse.

  She picked up the wineglass in one hand and the ashtray (with the cigarette in it) in the other, and lay back on the pillows. Pain, pain, pain, she thought. If I drink enough, I won’t have any pain. She wrapped her mouth around the rim of the glass so she wouldn’t spill and took a long gulp of wine. It went down her throat feeling hot and spread its heat against the cancer dome of her belly.

  It was good she’d had that first year in Maryland and that day in Black Rock Park and this day here. Nobody should have to die without having had some real joy in their lives. Nobody should have to die without ever knowing a moment’s ease. Her own mother had died after a life like that. Cheryl had always thought it was cruelly unfair.

  She put the wine and the ashtray on the night table. It was one of the minor problems caused by her illness that it made her need to use the bathroom a lot. She swung her legs off the side of the bed and headed for the bathroom door.

  Funny, she thought. I must have been smoking too much today. Everything tastes like cigarettes.

  She turned on the bathroom light and went in. She looked at herself in the glass and thought: I wish I’d had one really pretty dress. Just one.

  That was when the cramps hit her.

  PART ONE

  Wednesday in Holy Week to Holy Thursday

  Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord.

  —Cor. 11:27

  ONE

  [1]

  “THE PROBLEM,” DONNA MORADANYAN was saying, “was that he’d read these magazines that said women were supposed to have orgasms, and if they didn’t have orgasms they got very angry, only it was some kind of secret anger so you couldn’t always tell, so when I wouldn’t have an orgasm, even if I didn’t have one because I didn’t want one—”

  “Oh,” Bennis Hannaford said. “I know. He’d work at you for hours.”

  “Exactly, and when I’d say, for God’s sake, I’m not women, I’m me, he’d turn around and go—”

  “‘How do you think this makes me feel?’”

  Donna burst out laughing. “Exactly! Exactly! And then—”

  In the bedroom, Gregor Demarkian stopped inspecting a functionally ruined red tie to close the bedroom door. Then he looked across at George Tekemanian royally ensconced in a newly delivered red wing chair, and said, “They’ve been at it like that for hours. Bennis got in from Bryn Mawr at six, got Donna down here at seven, then they started making whatever it is—”

  “Gingerbread houses,” George said helpfully. “I talked to Lida Arkmanian. They are making many gingerbread houses to give to children in the hospital.”

  “Wonderful,” Gregor said. “They’ve also been talking nonstop about orgasms. I know things about Peter Desarian I don’t know about myself. And I’m scared to death Lida is going to show up, and I’m going to find out even women of my generation talk about orgasms.”

  “Krekor, Krekor. Even women of my generation talk about orgasms, and most of them are dead.” George considered it. He was more than eighty, and he looked it, but he didn’t mind it. “I think,” he said, after a while, “that the women I grew up with wouldn’t have called it orgasms.”

  Gregor considered the tie again, decided he must have run it through the disposal and forgotten he’d done it. He threw it in the wastebasket. His wife had always marveled at the state to which he reduced his ties. Now that she was dead, he had to marvel on his own. How did he get a perfectly ordinary piece of stitched red silk to split into strips and tie into knots and fray from the inside? He reached into his underwear drawer, pulled out a blue silk tie in the same shape, and tossed that into the wastebasket, too.

  It was eleven o’clock on the morning of March 27, and he was packing to go to Colchester, New York. Finally. Over the last six weeks, he had begun to feel that all he did was argue with himself about whether or not to take the train North. Even now, he wasn’t entirely sure why he’d decided to go. Granted, John Cardinal O’Bannion was a friend of Father Tibor Kasparian. Granted, Gregor owed Father Tibor a great deal. On the other hand, O’Bannion’s problem was not the sort of thing Gregor had been trained to solve. Nobody could solve it but O’Bannion himself. The Cardinal was just going to have to accept the necessary responsibility, dig in his heels, and get the dirty work done.

  Still, Gregor thought, it was strange. No more than four months ago, living alone in this apartment and connected to nobody in this neighborhood, Gregor had thought he’d be more than happy to find a way off Cavanaugh Street, or out of Philadelphia. He’d come here, to this small Armenian-American enclave where he’d grown up, after Elizabeth had died, and mostly because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. His twenty-year stint in the FBI was over. He’d resigned when Elizabeth entered her last crisis, and he had no inclination to go back, even if they would let him. At fifty-five, he had hit the Bureau’s mandatory retirement age for agents. They made exceptions for administrators—which by then he’d become—but he was tired of it, anyway. Ten solid years of serial murderers was enough for anybody. A last case he had bungled remorselessly, bungled because he couldn’t think about it when he had to think so much about Elizabeth, was more than enough. It was time for something different. He just didn’t know what.

  Now, one local murder case and one neighborhood Christmas season later, he would just as soon stay where he was. He had friends here. He was falling in love with Philadelphia, if not its weather. The changes that had come to Cavanaugh Street in his long absence, and that had first disturbed him, now amused him instead. So everybody’s children and grandchildren had grown up and gotten rich and tarted the place up until it looked like a billboard ad for Ralph Lauren Polo. So what? They were only trying to give the old people, who had worked so hard for so long for so little, a taste of what most of the rest of the country had always been working for.

  He should, he thought, have turned O’Bannion down yet again. That was what he’d intended to do. It bothered him to think he might be going North for no other reason than that he was terminably bored.

  He reached into his underwear drawer again, came up with a green tie in the same condition as the red and the blue, and threw that into the wastebasket, too. He would have to buy a tie in Colchester. He was always buying ties. Once he’d actually bought three of them in a single day.

  But that was one of those days he had had to go to the White House. The White House was different. And he’d been younger.

  He went back to his suitcase, counted pairs of socks and pairs of pants, and decided he was packed. He was not as packed as he would have been if Elizabeth had done it for him, but there was nothing he could do about that. He was as packed as he was going to get.

  “There,” he said to George. “That’s it. Now all I have to do is haul this thing over to Tibor’s, call a cab, and go.”

  “I still don’t understand why you didn’t ask Tibor to come over here, Krekor. He would have come. He wouldn’t have wanted you to—haul?”

  “Bennis Han
naford,” Gregor said.

  George blinked, and then a smile began to spread across his face. Bennis Hannaford. Ah, yes. Most successful child of a very old, very rich founding family of the Philadelphia Main Line. Once the most likely suspect in a very bizarre murder case, Gregor’s first as an amateur. And now? Gregor was willing to bet that nobody, not even Tibor, would be able to answer that question. For a variety of reasons, Bennis had decided not to go back to her home in Boston after the murder had been cleared up. Her mother was an invalid, and Bennis spent most of her time out in Bryn Mawr looking after her. What time she had left she spent on Cavanaugh Street—usually in the company of Donna Moradanyan or Father Tibor, and usually in Gregor’s apartment.

  “You know,” Gregor said, “how she gets about things. She’s absolutely convinced there’s more to this problem in Colchester than I’m telling her—”

  “Is there?”

  “Of course there is. What do you take me for? The woman’s obsessed. She thinks I don’t notice those books she’s always carrying around in her tote bag. Agatha Christie. Ellery Queen. She thinks she’s Jane Marple. And she has no caution, George.”

  “She’s very much prettier than Miss Marple,” George pointed out, “and she writes very nice books of her own.”

  “She writes sword-and-sorcery fantasies,” Gregor said, “and I wish she’d get to work on another one. Maybe that would take her mind off crime. Remember the last time, George. She nearly got herself killed.”

  “Yes, yes, Krekor. I know. But she was only trying to help.”

  Gregor thought about telling George that “I only wanted to help” was the most common rationalization of the second-most common (after drug idiocy) sort of murderer: the child who slips an ailing parent a little something extra to put him out of his misery. Hell, it was the most common rationalization of full-blown serial murderers, too. Gregor was of the opinion that the world would be a much less bloody place if people would only stop just trying to help.