Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  If the nicotine had been placed directly in the chalice, then either there had to be a fair amount of it in there before Andy poured the wine—to correct for both the dilution and the fact that Andy, having announced that he was going to distribute under both species, wouldn’t drink the contents of the cup down—or it had somehow to be placed on top of the wine. Gregor couldn’t imagine Andy Walsh putting it there himself. Nobody had suggested that the priest was suicidal, and he certainly hadn’t looked suicidal on Barry Field’s talk show. Far from it. Gregor couldn’t imagine any way for anyone else to get it in there, either, in the right position. It would have been a conjurer’s trick. The poison had to have been in the wine bottles, or in the pitcher. Those were the only sensible explanations. And yet—

  And yet, Gregor thought, I must be losing my mind. I’ve started imagining things. I’m letting a personal antipathy clutter up my judgment, and all that’s going to do is make me look like a fool. Which, in this case, I might very well deserve.

  He moved away from the altar. At the back of the church, he could see three Minicams pointed in his direction, although not exactly at him. What the television people were interested in at the moment was the corpse. Father Tom Dolan was standing among them, talking earnestly and gesticulating like a ham actor in an old-time silent movie.

  Gregor got to the anteroom door, opened it, and slipped inside.

  [3]

  Gregor had expected to find Sister Scholastica. He had expected to find Father Declan Boyd—and maybe Father Boyd being sick, since the priest had gone green when he’d had to cross in front of Andy Walsh’s body just twenty minutes before. Gregor had not expected to find Judy Eagan, but it was Judy Eagan he found. She was standing in the middle of the anteroom floor, smoking furiously on the cigarette in her right hand and running her left through her hair. From the vestibule below came the frantic bleatings of the goat.

  She looked him up and down as he came into the room, took a deep drag on her cigarette, blew a stream of smoke into the air, and said, “Oh, God. I forgot about you. Sherlock Holmes to the rescue. This is just what we need.”

  “I’m not anything at all like Sherlock Holmes,” he said. Then he sent up a little prayer that Judy Eagan would not repeat this description to anyone else, like a reporter. Being an Armenian-American Hercule Poirot was bad enough.

  Judy Eagan flicked ash onto the anteroom carpet. “I quit smoking these when I was a junior in college,” she told him. “I was being very virtuous and healthy. Now I wish I’d died.”

  “Do you normally keep a pack on you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. These are Peg’s. She keeps a pack on her from her seventh month on. Just in case she goes into labor.”

  “I didn’t know women were allowed to smoke in labor.”

  “Women are allowed to do practically anything in labor. There isn’t a doctor on earth who wants an hysterical woman delivering on his table. Besides, from what Peg tells me, you do a lot of labor before you ever see a doctor. Were you trying to find out if I’d left the building?”

  There was a chair pushed up against the table that still held the bottles of wine. Gregor pulled it out and sat down in it.

  “I think I was just making conversation,” he said. “I came in looking for Sister Scholastica, but she isn’t here.”

  “She’s out front waiting for the police. Why she wants to wait for them, I don’t know. Kath never made any sense to me. That’s Sister Scholastica. Kath, I mean.”

  “I know. The former Kathleen Burke.”

  “I forgot you’d been briefed by the Cardinal. Anyway, I didn’t leave the building. I would have, but I can’t figure out how to do it. I’m not allowed to leave without the goat.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said, “the goat. Do you have any idea what Father Walsh wanted with the goat?”

  “Do you?”

  “No. I thought for a while that he might want to wash its feet—”

  “So did I,” Judy Eagan said. “That’s exactly what I thought he was going to do with it, in fact. Either that or bring it out for his homily. It was the right kind of homily, too. All that stuff about animals.”

  “I didn’t understand much of it.”

  “Nobody did. Including Andy. He was always like that. God, but it’s going to be so weird to have him dead.”

  That, Gregor thought, was one way of putting it. It might even be an honest way. He wondered what these people had really felt for Andy Walsh. Sometimes, with someone who had been a fixture in your life for many years, it was hard to know.

  Gregor looked at the bottles of wine. They did not appear to have been moved since he had seen them before, but that was hard to know, too. He started to sigh and stopped himself. Sighing made him feel like John Cardinal O’Bannion.

  Judy had finished her cigarette and was lighting a new one with the butt. “Dec’s left the building,” she said. “He’s gone for a walk in the courtyard. He was feeling sick.”

  “He was looking sick, a little while ago.”

  “I suppose I don’t blame him. If I’d seen it, I’d be feeling sick too.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  Judy shook her head. “I’ve been in here the whole time, looking after the goat. Not that the goat took much looking after, mind you, but there was always a chance it could have got loose. According to Kath.”

  “It was Sister Scholastica’s idea to have you stay here?”

  “It was her idea to have somebody stay here. She couldn’t stay herself because of the children from the school, and she didn’t want Peg to because of Peg being pregnant. I don’t think she much trusts Father Declan Boyd.”

  “Nobody does, do they?”

  “Trust Dec?” Judy was startled. “I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it. He’s just so—young.”

  He was also something of an idiot, at least on superficial acquaintance. Cregor had to concede that to the parishioners of St. Agnes’s and the staff of the Chancery. Even if he was the finest priest in the Archdiocese, Declan Boyd would have a hard time getting himself taken seriously. Gregor shifted in his seat. It was made of wood, hardbacked and unyielding. It made him uncomfortable, and he was feeling uncomfortable enough without it. He was always uncomfortable when he felt at sea.

  “Tell me something,” he asked Judy Eagan, “when was it Father Walsh first started talking about this goat?”

  Judy stopped breathing in middrag. Then she coughed, long and hard. “The goat,” she said, when she was finally able to catch her breath. “You know, that’s very weird. In a sense, Andy never started talking about the goat.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Well, it was like this. I was at the rectory last night, late, going over some last-minute details. There were supposed to be all kinds of things going on today that I suppose aren’t going to happen. Things to do with the school, I mean, like a special auditorium program Andy had worked up about Lent and, I don’t know, a few things else. So I was there, and we talked, and then I left. And when I got home, I had a call from him on my machine.”

  “This was late?”

  “Oh, yes. I didn’t get back until maybe ten o’clock, and Andy’s usually in bed by then. Was. But the message said to call back whenever I got in, so I did.”

  “And that was the first you heard about the goat?”

  “Exactly. But you know, it wasn’t necessarily the first Andy had heard about the goat. He might have been planning it for weeks.”

  “Do you think he was?”

  “You’d have to ask what’s-his-name about that. The guy who owns the goat. All I know is, Andy wanted me to pick it up and bring it to the church, first thing in the morning, and he was adamant. Positively adamant. And it was already all set up.”

  “Last night,” Gregor repeated.

  “That’s what I said. And I didn’t have time to talk to him about it, either. He just told me he was going to bed and hung up. And this morning—”

&nbs
p; “He was nowhere to be found.”

  “Naturally. Once Andy decided to do something he shouldn’t, he was a regular invisible man.”

  Gregor started to shift this through the other information he had heard—the Cardinal’s insistence that Andy had corralled the television reporters with the goat; the Cardinal’s further insistence that Andy was trying very hard not to upset the Chancery—but what he had was still too jumbled and incoherent to be made sense of. The only thing he was sure of was that there was something wrong here.

  If he’d had a chance to ask Judy Eagan the next question that came into his head, he might have cleared a little of it up. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a chance. Just as he was opening his mouth, the vestibule door burst open below them, and Father Declan Boyd came running up.

  “They’re here!” Boyd was shouting. “They’re here! The ambulance! The police! Everybody’s here!”

  Judy Eagan went absolutely white. “Oh, God,” she said, “I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t afford to be seen on television.”

  TWO

  [1]

  NOT ALL POLICE DEPARTMENTS are created equal. Gregor Demarkian knew that from his own experience. He also knew that the relative competence of those departments did not depend absolutely on the size of the municipalities that engendered them. The most efficient investigation he had ever been involved in had been run, on the local level, by a “department” of two men—or one and a half, to be precise. The half had been a part-time deputy with a full-time job in the local hardware store and an infinite patience for photocopying. The one had been a man named Richard George Derren, chief of police of the town of Marion, New Hampshire. The case had been a particularly nasty one, as serial murders went, although not as nasty as the ones involving the killing of children. It had concerned the casual slaughter of hitchhiking high-school girls—so many of his FBI cases had involved hitchhiking that Gregor had promised to tie and gag any one of his nieces who tried it—and by the time he’d run into Richard George Derren, it had been dragging on for nearly a year. Nothing dragged on in Richard George Derren’s jurisdiction. Two weeks after arriving in Marion, Gregor had been on a plane back to Washington, D.C. The killer was in the county jail. The physical evidence—and there was a lot of it; Richard George Derren loved physical evidence and he knew how to get it—was all bagged and taped and labeled and in the custody of the state police. Gregor was feeling a little punchy, as if he’d been sleeping with a whirlwind, which maybe he had.

  Experience or no experience, Gregor’s subconscious still held to the prejudice that big was better than small. Colchester, being a good-size city, ought to be able to run a professional homicide investigation. That Colchester could do nothing of the sort came as a shock.

  It was fifteen minutes before twelve, and the crowd was getting restless. Under ordinary circumstances, the Mass would have been over by eleven or before. These people had jobs to go to and appointments to keep. Even encased within the thick brick walls of St. Agnes’s Church, they could tell the weather outside had taken a turn for the worse. Something that sounded like sleet was battering the stained glass windows on the church’s north side. It might have been hail. Wind was whipping across the roof above their heads and making the rafters creak. Getting anywhere from St. Agnes’s, especially with the noon rush hour coming up, was going to be a lengthy and unpleasant ordeal. Besides, they couldn’t see why they were being kept in their pews. The children had been allowed to leave. The altar was occupied by a bewildering array of official personages: uniformed cops, white-coated ambulance men, rumple-suited police photographers, and even Father Tom Dolan for the Archdiocese. Father Tom Dolan was standing next to the chalice, keeping the consecrated wine out of the hands of uniformed cops and technicians, although the congregation only knew that he was there and not why. They also knew something was very wrong. Father Andy Walsh was dead and no one was paying any attention to him at all. His body was still stretched out behind the altar, his head projecting into view at one end. People had begun to make suggestions, cautious but pointed, about what exactly had happened up there.

  Gregor thought it was going to be another five minutes before someone said what everyone had started to think: that Father Andy Walsh had been murdered in his own church in full sight of a large contingent of his parishioners, including the entire population of St. Agnes’s Parochial School. In the meantime, it was still possible to avert the breakout of inevitable indignation and panic, if the police moved fast. This they were manifestly not going to do. Gregor wondered if Colchester was one of those places where the uniformed officers were afraid to do anything on a murder investigation until the homicide detectives showed up—and then he wondered where the homicide detectives were. They had had plenty of time to get here. Even assuming someone in Colchester Homicide was being intelligent enough about this to insist on sending the same detectives who had worked on the Cheryl Cass case out here—and after what he had seen in the past hour and a quarter, Gregor couldn’t believe anyone in Colchester Homicide was intelligent enough to keep his hands off the lit burner of an electric stove—they had had more than enough time to get here.

  Gregor looked around the church. The Cardinal had come down from the lecturn, but he was still in front of the crowd, pacing and restless between the altar rail and the first row of pews. Tom Dolan, next to the chalice, looked exhausted enough to feint. Every once in a while he forgot the police injunction to “touch nothing” and reached out to steady himself against the altar. Most of the others had simply buried themselves in the congregation. Declan Boyd was sitting next to a bent, ancient woman, patting her hand and whispering in her ear. Judy Eagan had ditched her red coat in an unsuccessful attempt to be inconspicuous—she was so evidently rich, and the people around her so evidently not, she made Gregor think of a Lhasa apso surrounded by wire-haired terriers—and was curled up on a folding chair at the back. Barry Field had made his way to the very middle of the twelfth pew from the back on the Gospel side and was pretending to read the hymnal. Sister Scholastica was standing in a knot of nuns and parishioners near the Holy Water font at the door. Only Peg Morrissey Monaghan was easily found and easily identified. She had taken a place at the center aisle end of one of the pews left vacant by the departure of the children. She had her head on the back of the pew in front of her and her eyes closed.

  Gregor had been standing against the wall on the Gospel side of the church. Now he moved away from there—toward the back, to avoid running into the Cardinal—and went up the center aisle to where Peg was sitting. He knelt down next to her pew and said, “Mrs. Monaghan? Are you all right?”

  Peg raised her head. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry. I heard you come up. I should have—done something.” Her eyes were red and bleary, as if she’d been crying and nauseated at once.

  “If you’re feeling ill, I could probably get you out of here. They’ve got no reason to keep you, you know. You’re not likely to go running off to Barbados in your condition and they’ll know where to find you if you give them your name and address.”

  “You mean they’ll think I’m tied down by family life, just like Judy Eagan?”

  “Is Judy Eagan tied down by family life?”

  “No.” Peg smiled wanly. “Judy thinks I am. At least, that’s what she always says. Andy used to say it, too.”

  “Do you want to get out of here, Mrs. Monaghan? Do you want me to go drill some sense into the Colchester police?”

  Peg looked at him, long and curiously, as if she were searching for something in his face. Then she looked away and put her hand on the top of the bulge under her jumper. Something was jumping around in there, active and impatient and feeling too confined.

  “No,” Peg said. “That’s all right, Mr. Demarkian. I’d rather stay here and get it over with. Kath called my sister to come and look after my kids. I don’t have any place I have to be this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon isn’t likely to get it over with. Especially if…”r />
  “If it turns out Andy was murdered? Kath thinks he was, you know. She told me.”

  “What do you think?”

  Peg shot a quick look at the visible tip of Andy Walsh’s head and as quickly looked away. “I keep wondering who would want to murder Andy Walsh,” she said. “A lot of people didn’t like him, but nobody really hated him. Not even the Cardinal. And he was so harmless.”

  “I don’t think the Cardinal would agree with that.”

  “Oh, the Cardinal would be talking theologically. I suppose Andy was practically a heretic. I know he was a schismatic—I mean somebody who denies the authority of the Pope. Not that Andy ever said that in so many words. He wouldn’t have. But he did go on and on about the Pope.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “But Andy was harmless on a personal level,” Peg said. “This isn’t medieval Italy. People don’t kill each other over theology these days, except maybe in Islamic countries. I don’t even think Andy cared about theology much. It was just sort of beside the point with him. He just liked to—twit people.”

  “Didn’t the people he twitted get angry?”

  “Oh, yes.” Peg laughed. It was a very real laugh, and she hurried to muffle it behind her hands. “He gave this homily about liberals once. Mario Cuomo was campaigning for Governor and he came to St. Agnes’s for Mass. I don’t remember why. But Andy got up and he started saying, ‘I don’t believe in social welfare programs. I think they’re bad for the country and bad for the people they serve. I think they should be abolished. But I am a liberal. There is room enough in liberalism for every shade of opinion.’ It was because of Cuomo and the abortion thing, you know. Because of all that stuff about ‘I am a Catholic but I think people should get state money for abortions.’ He had a really good eye for the kinks in things. But it only goes to prove what I said.”