Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  He’s getting ready to pull something, Gregor thought. What?

  The canon over, Andy Walsh had lifted a large Host over his head and was going into the familiar words, the one part of the Mass that had not been changed.

  “‘He broke the bread, gave it to His disciples, and said, Take this, all of you, and eat it; this is my body which will be given up for you.’” Andy Walsh broke the bread, and ate it. Then he gripped the edge of the altar and knelt quickly down. Just as quickly, he came up.

  Gregor held more tightly to the seat in front of his. He was leaning so far over, he was nearly suspended in space. Andy Walsh was consecrating the wine.

  “‘…this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant…’”

  Andy Walsh raised the chalice in the air. He brought it down again. He took a long sip of it and put it on the altar. Then he looked out across the congregation and sang, in some of the most perfect plainchant Gregor had ever heard,

  “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.”

  That was when it happened. Right then, with the notes of the plainchant still hanging in the air and Andy Walsh’s arms outspread as if he were being crucified and his head thrown back as if he were about to laugh, everything changed.

  It started as a tremor in Andy Walsh’s chin. It became first a stiffening and then a snapped rigidity, as if someone had electrocuted him from behind.

  Gregor was out of his seat and in the aisle before he knew what he was doing. He was halfway to the little table where the pitchers had been when Andy Walsh fell.

  In death, as in life, Andy Walsh created a scene.

  He crashed backward, overturned a chair, and hit the great crucifix hanging on the back wall. The crucifix had been hung and not fastened, with iron rings that slipped over hooks mortared into the wall.

  After Andy hit it, it came crashing down after him.

  PART TWO

  Holy Thursday to Good Friday

  Jesus was led away, and carrying the cross by himself, went out to what is called the Place of the Skull (in Hebrew, Golgotha). There they crucified him, and two others with him…

  —from the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday; taken from John 18:1-19

  ONE

  [1]

  LATER, GREGOR DEMARKIAN WOULD think of the things that had happened immediately after Andy Walsh died, and consider himself witness to a miracle. There should have been panic, pandemonium, and stampede. The church was crammed full. The only breathing space in the room was around the altar. The crucifix had glanced against Andy Walsh’s back and fallen to the side, smashing through the seat of a chair and overturning a small table of candles. The candles had been lit, and one or two of them stayed that way after they hit the carpet. From his vantage point in the center aisle, Gregor could see a tiny flame working to take hold in the brown rayon nap.

  The crowd’s first reaction was shock. If it had been allowed to wear off, there would have been a disaster. That it hadn’t been was due entirely to John Cardinal O’Bannion. While everyone else—even Gregor—stayed frozen in place, O’Bannion rose majestically from his pew, strode down the center aisle, climbed the few short steps to the altar and positioned himself behind the lecturn. In his red robes and heavy gold cross he looked, not like a prince of the Church, but simply like a prince, the reigning sovereign of this particular monarchy. It was, Gregor thought, an object lesson in the nature of authority. John O’Bannion was a short, fat, coarse-looking man. Out of uniform, he could be mistaken for the kind of Irish-American workman who thought of his labor union as an eighth sacrament. Faced with a crowd on the edge of hysteria, there was nothing left of that face.

  There was a microphone attached to the lecturn, but O’Bannion didn’t use it. He had a good strong bass, resonant and clear, and he used that instead.

  “My brothers and sisters in Christ,” he said, leaning as far over the lecturn’s angled shelf as his short body would allow, “as all of you must realize, we have a very serious situation here. Father Walsh has been taken ill. He is at least hurt. He may be in danger of his life. It is extremely important, for Father’s Walsh’s sake and your own, that you keep your seats. Father Dolan, Father Boyd, Sister Mary Scholastica, and I will work out a way to get you out of here as quickly and painlessly as possible. We will endeavor to get the children out first. Until then, I beg of you, sit still and do nothing.”

  There was a buzzing in the pews, and a small sob from the ranks of the parochial-school children at the front. There was nothing else, even though the children in the first pews must have been able to see what Gregor could from his place in the aisle: the tiny candle flame had finally got its bite into the carpet. A tiny circle of black had formed near the fallen table and was growing, slowly, retarded not at all by the sea of melted wax around it.

  O’Bannion had seen it, too. When Tom Dolan, Declan Boyd, and Sister Scholastica got to him, he whispered into Scholastica’s ear and pointed at the flame. She looked at it, flushed, and ran to put it out. Moments later, Declan Boyd was off in the direction of the anteroom where everyone had been going frantic before the Mass. Scholastica, having put out the fire, had gone to kneel over the body of Andy Walsh. John O’Bannion spoke again to Tom Dolan and then looked down the center aisle at Gregor.

  “You’re Mr. Demarkian, aren’t you? I recognize you from your pictures. Could you come here and give us a hand?”

  Gregor wanted very much to go up and give the Cardinal a hand. He wanted to do something. This was only the second time in his life he’d been the first man—the first trained investigator, official or otherwise—at a murder scene. The FBI was always called in after the fact, even on murders on federal lands, where it had jurisdiction. It had taken the Hannaford case to make him realize how important it was to get to the body and whatever was around it before the technicians had a chance to muck it up.

  In this case, the Cardinal’s soft words about Father Walsh and illness notwithstanding, there was a lot Gregor wanted to see. It was his lack of franchise that was frustrating him. In the Hannaford case, he had not only been first on the scene, but the only one both suitable and capable of taking control. Here, he had no more standing than any other member of the congregation. The police, when they got here, might think he had less. This was a Catholic church in Colchester Archdiocese. It was John Cardinal O’Bannion who had the first and last words.

  After Vatican II, most American Catholic Churches had done away with their altar rails. St. Agnes’s was made of marble and more or less part of the floor, so it still stood. There was a gate in the middle of it and another on the left side. On the right side, where the door to the anteroom was, there was no opening at all. Gregor paused at the rail when he got to it, to make sure: If you came out of the anteroom onto the altar platform, to get off you had either to pass the altar itself on your way to one of the gates, or turn around and go back into the anteroom. No, Gregor thought suddenly, that wasn’t exactly true. You could always climb over the altar rail. But if you did that, in front of hundreds of good Catholic laypeople, somebody would be sure both to notice and comment.

  Scholastica had finished with the body of Father Andy Walsh. She stood up, brushed off the skirt of her habit, and headed across the altar platform to the anteroom door. Her face was set, but her walk was brisk. She did not look as if she were in shock or in mourning. She could, Gregor thought, have been a nurse in a hospital for the dying, the kind of woman for whom death has become a routine.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” Cardinal O’Bannion said.

  Gregor opened the gate at the center of the altar rail and went up onto the platform. “Cardinal O’Bannion,” he said, when he got to the lecturn, “it’s nice to meet you. Finally.”

  “Nice under these circumstances?”

  It was clumsy maneuvering, so Gregor ignored it. He turned to a puzzled-looking Father Tom Dolan and said, “We ran into each other in the anteroom before Mass. I was looking for a way into the church.�
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  Dolan’s face cleared. “I remember you. I thought I did. I’m sorry. I’m very tired.”

  “I don’t see how you could have remembered any of that,” Gregor said. “It was bedlam in there.”

  “Tom,” the Cardinal said. He nodded to the back of the church. They all turned, and saw that one of the television cameramen—Gregor thought it was the one from WRSX—had shouldered his Minicam and started shooting. Gregor had forgotten all about the television people. He always did. The press never seemed quite real to him, even when it was in the middle of beating him up.

  “Oh, Lord,” Tom Dolan said. “They always do it, don’t they? I wonder how Andy got them here.”

  “Andy got them here with the goat,” the Cardinal said.

  “I don’t think so,” Tom Dolan said. “Well. All right, Your Eminence. I’ll take care of them. I just hope I can take care of them without getting them mad.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.” Tom Dolan went down the side stairs and out the side gate.

  Cardinal O’Bannion turned to Gregor Demarkian and sighed. “What I meant,” he said, “was that the publicity is likely to be the same no matter what kind of mood they’re in. They won’t have much choice, will they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. Among the other things in my life, I’ve served as the publicity director of an Archdiocese. I know how newspapers work.” He turned around and stared at the body of Andy Walsh. It was hidden from most of the congregation by the altar, but visible from the lecturn. “Well,” he said, “I don’t suppose you think Andy keeled over from a heart attack. That would be too much to ask.”

  “It would be too much to ask even of yourself,” Gregor told him. “You don’t think so either.”

  “No?”

  “If you did, you’d have sent Sister Scholastica to check on Father Walsh’s pulse. First thing.”

  The Cardinal permitted himself a smile. “Ah, yes. Well, Tibor Kasparian said you were good. You are, aren’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “I hope you’re very, very good. I have a feeling that I’m standing in the middle of a situation that is already out of hand. Do you think he died of nicotine poisoning?”

  Gregor looked at the body again. It was visible, yes, but not visible in the way he needed it to be. Andy Walsh’s body was stretched out on the floor, the head tilted against the back wall. Unfortunately, Walsh’s face was turned away from the lecturn, and there wasn’t enough other skin showing to take a reading on its color. Not at this distance.

  “I’d say he died of some kind of poisoning,” Gregor said slowly. “From what I saw, that seems inevitable. What kind is not that easy to determine without a close examination.”

  “But it could have been nicotine? Just like that woman, Cheryl Cass?”

  “Oh, yes. It couldn’t have been arsenic, because there would have been vomiting and the vomiting would have gone on for a reasonably long time. You can almost always do something for victims of arsenic if you get them within half an hour after they’ve ingested the poison. But it couldn’t have been cyanide, either. It took too long.”

  “It took too long?”

  “Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “Assuming the poison was in the wine, nicotine would be just about right. He had two or three minutes after he drank before he fell. With cyanide, he’d have been dead instantaneously, or the next thing to. He’d never have had time to put the chalice back on the altar.”

  O’Bannion lowered his head and frowned. “Does it have to have been in the wine? Couldn’t it have been in something he ate?”

  “It could have been on the Communion wafer, yes, Your Eminence, but then we’re not dealing with nicotine. If you’re implying it might have been in something he ate before Mass, then we’re dealing with that great detective story invention, the slow-acting poison.”

  “You mean there are no slow-acting poisons?”

  “It depends on what you mean by slow. According to what I heard when I got here, Father Walsh was in the church building somewhere, dressing before Mass. There are one or two poisons that might have taken that long to work, especially if he’d just eaten a large meal. But they would have had some effect almost immediately.”

  “He would have felt ill, you mean.”

  “Or odd,” Gregor said. “Certain of the diathalmides take almost an hour to kill, but they cause a great deal of muscle pain in the meantime. He would have found it difficult to move. With any significant dose, he would have found it impossible to genuflect at the altar the way he did.”

  “He wouldn’t have eaten a large meal right before Mass,” the Cardinal said. “He didn’t eat large meals under any circumstances. Andy was always careful about his weight. But before Mass he would have been taking care about the fast.”

  “I thought Father Walsh wasn’t—meticulous about that sort of thing.”

  “He wasn’t. But this is, after all, Holy Thursday. Didn’t you notice he was doing his best not to get me angry?”

  “You mean because there were no altar girls and no women ready to distribute Communion,” Gregor said.

  “That’s right. He wouldn’t have sat down to bacon and eggs—or maybe it was alfalfa sprouts and tofu—anytime I could have heard about it.”

  “What about the goat?”

  “I have my suspicions about the goat,” the Cardinal said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever have them confirmed, now.” He sighed again and smoothed his long scarlet robes and adjusted his gold cross. “I don’t know if you realize it, Mr. Demarkian, but we’re going to have a bigger problem here than we seem to have.”

  Gregor Demarkian blinked. He wanted to ask how much bigger the problem could get. That was the obvious question. Andy Walsh was dead in his own church in front of six hundred witnesses and three television cameras. The case was going to make the cover of People faster than Mike Tyson had knocked out Michael Spinks. And Colchester, that very Catholic city, was surrounded by a rural fastness of anti-Catholic Fundamentalism.

  “I think,” he said, “this problem is as big as a problem could possibly get, short of global war.”

  “You think so?” The Cardinal smiled again. He had his back to the congregation. In this gerrymandered privacy, he could let the mask of his authority collapse. Beneath the grim humor, there was a tired, aging, very worried man. “You say the poison was probably in the wine,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Gregor told him.

  “Then the police are going to want to take away the wine.”

  “But of course.” Gregor was puzzled. “They’re going to have to take away the wine, Your Eminence. All of it. The bottles in the anteroom, the wine in the pitcher, the wine in the chalice. Even if the poison was administered some other way, they’re going to have to run tests.”

  The Cardinal was shaking his head. “They can run all the tests they want to,” he said, “on the wine in the bottles and whatever wine might be left in the pitcher. But they can’t take away the wine in the chalice, Mr. Demarkian. It’s been consecrated. It’s not wine at all. It’s the very blood of Jesus Christ.”

  “But,” Gregor said.

  “There are no buts, Mr. Demarkian. The wine in that chalice will not be removed from this church by any secular authority for any reason whatsoever.”

  O’Bannion gathered the sides of his robe in his hands, turned to face the congregation, and started bellowing out instructions to the nuns.

  [2]

  It was because neither Declan Boyd nor Sister Scholastica had come back from the anteroom that Gregor decided to go into it—because of that, and because he needed to think. It was, he found, almost impossible to think in front of all these hundreds of people. The altar platform was raised just far enough above the main floor to make him feel as if he were on stage, and stages had always made him nervous. He was not a public man. If he had been, maybe he would have welcomed what he knew was coming: the frantic hyperbole of magazine journalists looking fo
r a hook. It was always the magazine journalists who got to him. Newspaper reporters had the day-by-day and play-by-play to hang their stories on. Magazine journalists were always looking for “broad-based appeal.” What appeal could be more broadly based then the exploits of an—as first The Philadelphia Inquirer, and then People, and then Time, had called him—“Armenian-American Hercule Poirot”?

  He had gotten down on his knees next to the body of Andy Walsh anyway. There were things he had to see, before the police showed up and reduced him to being a member of the audience. First, he gave himself a good look at Andy Walsh’s face. There was no blue tinge to the skin, meaning there had been neither cyanide nor massive coronary occlusion. A coronary occlusion would have had to be very massive to cause what had happened here, even if Andy Walsh had had a history of serious heart trouble. Gregor’s impression was that Walsh had been an exceptionally healthy man. He had also been young.

  Gregor got up and looked at the altar. From the residue. of moisture on the inside of the chalice, he guessed Walsh had drunk about a third of what he’d poured into it. That was quite a bit, considering the chalice’s size. He calculated how much liquid nicotine it would have taken to kill a man of Andy Walsh’s size. Properly distilled and undiluted, it wouldn’t have taken much. Pure liquid nicotine was one of the most powerful poisons known to science. The amount contained in a pack of regular-strength cigarettes or a single good-size cigar could wipe out most of the congregation now sitting in St. Agnes’s Church. Even distilled by a rank amateur and heavily diluted—as this poison must have been heavily diluted, in order for the wine to go on looking like wine—the murderer could have gotten away with one part in three, or a little less. Unless—

  The “unless” didn’t seem to be getting him anyplace. Even the clumsiest, most haphazard distillation of nicotine—from that theoretical pack of cigarettes, say—would have produced a poison strong enough to kill in an amount no larger than what could be contained in an ordinary sewing thimble, if that amount were ingested more or less pure. Gregor almost went back to a serious consideration of poison on the Communion wafer, since the Communion wafer Andy Walsh had eaten had been ten times the size of the ones that would have been distributed to the congregation. Unfortunately, no matter what he’d suggested to the Cardinal, it just wasn’t possible. If there had been nicotine on the Communion wafer, Andy Walsh would have been dead before he picked up the chalice.