Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  But Gregor didn’t say any of that. He knew what George meant, and he didn’t have time to make the kind of explanations he would have to if he was going to be understood. He snapped his suitcase shut, locked it, put the key on his key ring, and dragged the suitcase onto the floor.

  “Now,” he said, “if I can just get out of here without Bennis knowing I’m leaving.”

  “You intend to go by the window, Krekor?”

  Gregor shot George one of his nastiest looks, but he should have known. As soon as he opened the bedroom door, she was there—spatula in hand, dough on nose, flour in hair. She should have looked terrible, but she didn’t. She was, after all, Bennis Day Hannaford. And Bennis Day Hannaford was a beautiful woman.

  A beautiful young woman. Gregor thought he’d heard her say once that she was thirty-five, but she looked twenty-five. God only knew she had the genes for it. Even her mother, ravaged by illness, looked younger than her age.

  Unlike her mother, however, Bennis Hannaford had the force of character of an Armenian grandmother. She looked down at his suitcase, tossed her great cloud of black hair, and said,

  “Honestly, Gregor. The way you go sneaking out of here, you’re like a man who’s been cheating on his wife.”

  [2]

  Twenty minutes later, Gregor finally managed to cover the two blocks and single street cross to Father Tibor Kasparian’s apartment. Two minutes after that, he was ringing Tibor’s doorbell and wishing the suitcase wasn’t as heavy as it was. He felt wrung dry. Bennis could do that to him, even when he managed not to tell her anything, the way he had managed not to this time. Lord, but that woman was a gypsy witch. He wondered what she’d done with herself when she was living with that young idiot in Boston, playing at being the Perfect Modern Woman. She wasn’t the Perfect Modern anything, no matter how big a career she had or how much money she made. She had a very big career and she made a great deal of money. Anyone who wandered past a newsstand in an airport knew that, with the paperback editions of her books spread out on the racks that way, with their silver-foil titles and gold-embossed covers. Well, the books weren’t modern, either, even though the past they chronicled had never existed. And Bennis, like the women of Cavanaugh Street, had mastered the ancient art of taking control of her men.

  On the other side of the door, chains and locks rattled—not because they were being opened, but because Tibor never remembered to work them shut. The door slid inward and Tibor’s head popped out, coming no higher than the middle of Gregor’s chest. Gregor always had to remind himself that this was a man who had spent most of his life persecuted: in Soviet Armenia, in Siberia, in God knew where. Tibor had such quick dark eyes, such fundamental humor, such visceral optimism. Gregor had known upper-middle-class men with no more pain in their histories than the boredom brought on by too much leisure who had a less hopeful vision of the world than Tibor.

  Tibor stepped back, drew the door in a little farther, and said, “I was looking out for spies. The street has been very quiet today, Krekor. I don’t like it.”

  “Two of the spies are back at my place,” Gregor said, coming in from the cold. The weather was typical for late March in Philly, a steady half-frozen rain that turned to mud as soon as it hit the ground. “Bennis just gave me the third degree, and Donna is in my kitchen talking about, talking about—”

  “Orgasms,” Tibor said. “Yes, I know. Donna and Bennis, they have been talking about orgasms for a week now.”

  “Marvelous.”

  Tibor shut the door and led Gregor toward the living room, down a narrow hallway crammed with boxes wrapped in plain brown paper. The boxes were full of clothes to be distributed at the homeless shelter Tibor’s friend, Father Ryan, was running in the basement of Our Lady, Queen of Angels Roman Catholic Church.

  “Still,” Tibor said, “there is Lida Arkmanian to be considered. I haven’t seen her, and it is nearly noon. That is not normal, Krekor. Not on a day when you’re leaving town.”

  “How is it that everyone in this place always knows when I’m leaving town?”

  “Well, Krekor, that is only to be expected. Would you like me to make you some coffee?”

  Gregor did not want to be made some coffee, especially not by Tibor. Tibor’s coffee was even worse than his own, and could only be made palatable by large doses of sugar. There would be no sugar in Tibor’s apartment during Lent. Gregor took a pile of books off the biggest chair in Tibor’s living room—the only one that would hold him, given his height and bulk—and sat down. The twenty minutes Bennis had taken out of him had made his time a little tight. He didn’t have the leeway he’d intended to have, to talk things over. And he needed to talk things over. He didn’t think he’d ever dealt with a man as exasperating as John Cardinal O’Bannion.

  Tibor had disappeared momentarily. Now he came back, holding two cups of coffee, both steaming. He looked around this room that was really no more than a warehouse for an extraordinary number of books and a corkboard for news of the Soviet Bloc, and passed both cups to Gregor so he’d have his hands free to clear another chair. Books were the first thing Gregor had ever noticed about Father Tibor Kasparian. Tibor had books the way other people had dust.

  Tibor pitched a six-volume collection of the complete works of Aristotle—in the original Greek, of course—off his rocking chair and sat down. “Look at this coffee,” he said. “I have a new machine for coffee. Hannah Krekorian gave it to me for Christmas. You put coffee in a little tray. Then you pour water through this funnel that is over the tray. Then the water comes through at the bottom and you have coffee.” He blushed suddenly. “Sometimes you have coffee, Krekor. Sometimes, I forget to put the little jug into the bottom, and the coffee goes all over the floor.”

  Gregor gave the coffee a try. It was just as bad as Tibor’s usual. It might even have been worse. He put one cup down on the pile of books that were covering the table at his elbow and passed the other to Tibor. Hannah Krekorian had a lot to answer for, even without this.

  “So,” Tibor said, “you are finally going to Colchester. It’s the middle of Lent, Krekor. How will you be able to keep your fast?”

  The Eastern churches—Greek, Armenian, Russian, and the like—were on a different calendar than the Western ones. For Cavanaugh Street and Holy Trinity Church, Easter wouldn’t come this year until three weeks after the American one. This tended to be a boon for children, who weren’t required to fast and who often ended up with two sets of Easter baskets, chocolate bunnies and all.

  For adults, it was different. No meat, no eggs, no cheese: as a child, Gregor had often thought that Lent had been named for the fact that lentils were the only thing you were allowed to eat while it was going on. In the years he’d lived away from here, in his entire adult life, he’d never kept the fast once. Now that he was back on Cavanaugh Street, he had to. Any other course would be a slap in Tibor’s face, and the faces of everybody else he cared about in the neighborhood. But he had to admit he was looking forward to Colchester on at least one count. He wanted red meat.

  “If you’re going to worry about fasts,” he told Tibor, “worry about George. He’s over at my place with those two women, and they’re making gingerbread houses.”

  “Tell me about John,” Tibor said. “Two days ago, he calls me here, he’s the next thing to hysterical. It isn’t like him, Krekor.”

  Gregor nodded. He didn’t doubt that John O’Bannion had been hysterical, or that it wasn’t like him. The few times Gregor had spoken to him, the good Cardinal seemed to be a man with an exceptional amount of self-discipline. That was what made his blinding obsession with Father Andrew Walsh so inexplicable.

  “The trouble with your friend,” Gregor said, “is that he wants to hear what he wants to hear, and that’s it. If you tell him something different, he just blocks you out.”

  “You told him something he didn’t want to hear?”

  “I told him there was nothing I could do about that priest of his, and he certainly didn’t
want to hear that.” Gregor shifted in his chair. There was a spring loose somewhere in the cushion, and it was biting right into his rear end. “Has he told you anything about this? About Father Andrew Walsh and the bran muffins?”

  “Bran muffins?”

  “What about St. Agnes Parish? Or the CYO? He throws all these names and initials at me and I have a hard time keeping them straight.”

  “Tcha,” Tibor said. “With the Roman Church, there are always names and initials. They have orders of nuns with names so long, you forget the first half of them by the time you get through the second.”

  “The only nuns in this case are called the Sisters of Divine Grace. They run the school at St. Agnes’s,” Gregor said. “Anyway, as far as I can make out, it goes like this. There was Vatican Two, and after that the membership of the Church in America split into two camps, liberal and conservative. The conservatives still don’t use artificial birth control. The liberals not only do, they think everybody ought to. Rome is conservative. Many of the American archdioceses are liberal. Or have been. In the parishes—”

  “Yes, yes,” Tibor said. “In the parishes, there is a mess. I know, Krekor. I play cards every night with other priests, one of them is Harry Ryan. I hear all about it. That is why reunion is so important. The Eastern Churches all together again, the Eastern and the Western Churches all together again. We need each other.”

  “Fine.” Gregor didn’t want to get into a discussion of the Greek Schism. It was one of Tibor’s favorite topics, and it always made him feel as if he’d wandered into a lecture on religious history. “The thing is, Vatican Two was a long time ago. And with this Pope, Rome is not just conservative, it’s very conservative. The bishops he’s appointing, like your Cardinal O’Bannion, are Church hard-liners. But in a way the worst would have been over even without them. Most of the real radicals left for politics or Anglicanism long ago. In Colchester, however, O’Bannion finds himself saddled with a priest who’s more than a little of a—”

  “Nut?”

  “That’s putting it mildly. Very mildly. The name of this priest is Father Andrew Walsh. He likes being called Andy. No Father, no Walsh. Don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me why this man does anything. What he did with the bran muffins was consecrate them at Mass.”

  Tibor’s eyes grew wide. “But Krekor. When you consecrate, you bring the Body and Blood of the Lord. The real body and blood. Not just a symbol. There would have been crumbs, on the floor. There would have been—”

  “Don’t do this to me,” Gregor said. “Cardinal O’Bannion already did. Father Andy has pulled a few more stunts, including telling some women’s lunch group that birth control ought to be a sacrament and delivering a homily at his best-attended Sunday Mass on just how awful he thinks the Pope is. To make matters worse, St. Agnes Parish is within walking distance of the Cathedral. Which means Andy Walsh is always right under Cardinal O’Bannion’s nose.”

  Tibor was confused. “But Krekor, why doesn’t John get rid of this man? Surely he has had enough provocation.”

  “He’s had more than enough provocation,” Gregor said, “and he’d love to get rid of him. Unfortunately, he has to get rid of him to someplace, and nobody else will take him.”

  “But they could take him out of the parish, surely?”

  “Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “And O’Bannion may do it, although he’s going to take a lot of flak if he does. There are liberal as well as conservative Catholics in this parish. O’Bannion thinks they want to hold onto Andy. The conservatives, of course, want him replaced with the ghost of Fulton Sheen. O’Bannion wants him defrocked. That’s not easy these days, if it ever was. He’d have to have evidence of something serious to take to an ecclesiastical court. Post-Vatican Two, oat bran muffins won’t do it. That’s why O’Bannion is hoping to turn this other thing into the answer to all his problems.”

  “What other thing?”

  Gregor eyed the coffee warily, picked it up, took a sip, and put it down again. Why were the only people he knew who could make palatable coffee women? Especially since women didn’t want to make it any more. For reasons Gregor had to admit were totally justified.

  “Several weeks ago,” he told Tibor, “some time between Ash Wednesday and the end of that week, there was a death.”

  “A death?”

  “The woman who died had been a classmate of Andy Walsh’s in parochial school and a student at the sister school of the boys’ school he attended for high school. Her name was Cheryl Cass. She’d moved out of the parish, out of Colchester in fact, before she ever graduated. As far as anybody knows, she’d never been back.”

  “As far as anyone knows?”

  Gregor shifted uncomfortably. “You have to understand, Tibor, I’ve got all my information on this thing over the phone—”

  “And from John O’Bannion?” Tibor smiled.

  “I’m not an idiot, Father. No, I’ve talked to the Colchester police more than once. There’s a lot about this that’s very fishy. It’s just not fishy the way the Cardinal wants it to be.”

  “What way is that?”

  “Let me explain. Cheryl Cass was dying. She’d had a double mastectomy, and the cancer, according to the coroner, had not been caught in time. She was riddled with it. In all likelihood, she had only months to live. The Colchester police are fairly certain she hadn’t been living in town for any length of time before she was found. She wasn’t known at any of the hospitals and they haven’t turned up a local doctor who’d been treating her, although somebody had been. The body showed signs of extensive radiation therapy.”

  “Where had she been?” Tibor asked.

  “They don’t know. She wasn’t carrying a driver’s license—”

  “Isn’t that very unusual? I thought I was the only person in America without one.”

  “She’d been on radiation therapy, remember. And she’d probably been taking painkillers. She probably hadn’t been able to drive for a long time. Unfortunately, without the driver’s license, there’s no way to know where she’d been living.”

  “Credit cards?”

  “She didn’t have any. Maveronski at Colchester Homicide said she didn’t look like she could have gotten them. Her wardrobe was definitely low rent.”

  “A poor woman, then,” Tibor said. “This is very sad.”

  “It gets sadder. As far as anyone knows, Cheryl Cass showed up in Colchester on Ash Wednesday and immediately got in contact with several people. Andy Walsh was one of them. So was O’Bannion’s chief aide, Father Tom Dolan. So was the principal at St. Agnes Parochial School, Sister Mary Scholastica, once known as Kathleen Burke. Cheryl went to visit all these people over the course of the day—”

  “Did she know them, Krekor?”

  “Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “They’d all been at those brother-and-sister schools I told you about. Cathedral Girls’ High and Cathedral Boys’. They were either all in the same year or close to it.”

  “That’s very clear, then, Krekor. This is a poor woman who is dying. She goes back to the town of her childhood and visits her old friends. Just one more time. That is understandable.”

  “I agree with you. So, by the way, do the Colchester police. They think she went to visit all these people and then walked around town some, maybe disoriented. There were no traces of painkillers in her body and none on her person. They think she may have run out and been wandering around in pain. Anyway, wander she did, clear across town to the hotel district.”

  “And?”

  Gregor sighed. “Common sense says she should have rented a room, but she might not have been able to afford one. There wasn’t any money found on the body, either, but that doesn’t mean anything. It could have been taken off her where she lay.”

  “Krekor, I don’t understand. She was outside?”

  “In an alley that connects Schrencker Street with Maydown Avenue, between two of the most expensive hotels in the city, the Lombard and the Maverick. Those, she couldn’t have afforded. The
man I talked to in the Colchester Homicide Department says it looked like she’d just lay down on the ground and let herself die.”

  “From the cancer.”

  “No,” Gregor said explosively. “This is where it gets fishy. From nicotine poisoning.”

  Tibor frowned. “But how—?”

  “What the Colchester police have decided is that she soaked a few cigarettes in hot water and then drank it. Or that she might have swiped some of the plant poison from the greenhouse at St. Agnes’s Convent—the kind they use there is mostly distilled nicotine. Whatever, they’re fairly convinced she took the stuff herself. In fact, they think she came to Colchester as a kind of farewell gesture before she took something. To put herself out of her pain.”

  “And you don’t agree with this?”

  “Tibor, be serious. If she knew she was going to commit suicide, why would she be worried about the cost of a hotel room? She could simply check in, drink her poison, and let the hotel staff straighten things out in the morning. Which, by the way, is the way she’d have had to do it if she distilled her own poison from cigarettes. She’d have needed boiling water.”

  “If she was a very poor woman,” Tibor said, “she might have been afraid of going into a hotel. Especially into a good one. She wouldn’t know what to expect.”

  “There are two dozen medium-price hotels within five blocks of where she was found.”

  “Do you think she was murdered, Krekor?”

  Gregor stood up and went to the window, where he could look at the backs of row houses that were being spruced up for a new generation of yuppie buyers. “When I first heard this story,” he said, “I was sure I knew what happened. One of the people she saw that day, I thought, must have decided to go in for a little impromptu euthanasia. I didn’t see the body, of course, but I’m told it looked terrible. According to O’Bannion, who got it from Father Dolan, Cheryl Cass looked terrible even when she was alive. It made sense to me that one of these people may have decided to put her out of her misery.”