Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  There had been a time, soon after Andy’s death, when the dying had been all she’d been able to think about: Andy stretched out behind the altar, his face turned toward the congregation, his hands thrown up above his head. She had moved to a seat on the center aisle to get away from that face. She had found it too hard to look at and too terrible to think about. Even with an aisle seat and no view of the body, she had had to fight off waves of nausea worse than any morning sickness she’d ever experienced. Her heart had been beating so hard and so fast, she’d thought she was going to put herself in premature labor. She kept remembering Andy kissing her on her mother’s doorstep the morning after the sophomore-junior formal. It had been seven o’clock in the morning and they had been out all night. While everyone else on the street was wandering around in pajamas and robes, they were still in full formal dress. She was still wearing her crown. At one point in the evening, she had promised Andy she would never take it off. Winning it had been such a surprise. Until then, it had always been Kath who was elected Queen of things. After that, it was always Peg.

  Peg put her tea down on the family room coffee table, took out her cigarettes, and lit up. If she’d had to come home to an empty apartment, she’d probably still be brooding about Andy and Andy’s dying. There would have been nothing to stop her. Instead, she’d come home to find work to do and, being conscientious, got down to doing it. The work had taken her mind off her shock and steadied her. Then her sister had brought her children home, and Joe had come in from work, and the news had come over the radio. There had been so much to do and so little time or energy to do it with, she’d had no room to indulge herself in emotional obsessions. Little by little, she had started to think.

  It was true that Andy Walsh had been a tease, and a twit, and a lunatic. It was not true that his lunacy was in any way random. He could sometimes be haphazard in small things, like the homilies he gave on El Salvador and Nicaragua. His large-scale outrages had always been carefully planned to create an effect. There had been all that nonsense with consecrating the oat bran muffins at the CYO Mass. The papers had made it sound like sheer whimsy, but it hadn’t been. Andy had been making a point—or thought he had been making a point—about idolatry. He’d been giving homilies for a week beforehand about how Catholics tended to show more respect to Christ’s flesh than they did to His person. Peg suspected that Andy hadn’t really believed in transubstantiation, but that was beside the point. The point was that he’d never done anything really abominable without a reason.

  Starting from there, it was an easy step to the realization that there must have been a reason for the goat. Just having the animal in the church was enough to give the Cardinal a heart attack. Andy would have known that. Therefore, Andy had brought the goat to accomplish something.

  Thinking it through like this had made Peg very pleased with herself. It was as if she were the heroine in one of the murder mysteries she liked to read, where ordinary housewives beat the police at finding out who had stabbed the local septuagenarian librarian. Unfortunately, once she had decided that Andy had had a purpose, she couldn’t seem to get any further. What purpose? She’d expected him to wash the goat’s feet, in protest against the Church’s dictum that he could not wash the feet of women. Instead, he hadn’t washed anyone’s feet at all. Then she’d thought he was going to give the goat Communion, but that line of speculation had hit a brick wall. What for? She’d read a story once that St. Francis had fed Communion to the birds, and the Church hadn’t excommunicated him.

  It was while she had been washing dishes after dinner that she’d thought of something else. The idea had seemed so right, and so obvious, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it first thing. She should have thought of it back in church, when she was looking at those books. Well, she’d thought of it now. That was why she had come into the family room, to see if she could find—

  The north wall of the family room was a solid mass of built-in bookshelves. Most of the shelf space was taken up by her collection of memorabilia. There were her yearbooks. There were her bound volumes of old newspapers, including the ones with all the stories about Black Rock Park. Toward the bottom, there were books left over from her days at St. Agnes’s Parochial School.

  She braced herself against the back of the love seat and lowered herself slowly to the floor, until she was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. What she was looking for wasn’t really a book, but a pamphlet, a thick pamphlet called Living with the Saints. Like everyone else who had gone through St. Agnes’s Parochial School in the early sixties, she had been given it, as a First Holy Communion present, by a nun named Sister Joseph Bernadette. Other nuns in the school had given out other things—Sister Donatus distributed Miraculous Medals, and Sister Valeria Anne favored brown scapulars—but Sister Joseph Bernadette had been a demon on the saints. She’d known more about the saints than Peg now knew about childbirth.

  Peg went through her second-grade books—English, history, religion—without finding the pamphlet. Then she went through her third-grade books and didn’t find it there. She leaned back, got her cigarette out of the ashtray she had dumped it in before getting down on the floor, and took a deep drag. She could sit here for the next half hour, searching for the idiot thing, or she could do something sensible. She put her cigarette back in the ashtray and did the unsensible thing, just in case. She went through her first-grade books. The pamphlet wasn’t there.

  If she hadn’t been pregnant, she could have stood up and gone through the books from grades four, five, and six. Because she always kept everything, she knew the pamphlet was here. It was just a question of hunting it down.

  But she was pregnant, and she was tired. Moving, with the twins this big inside her, often caused her physical pain. The phone was sitting right there on the end table, next to the ashtray, in arm’s reach.

  Peg leaned over and pulled the phone toward her, by the cord. She wasn’t the only one who always kept everything. The nuns did that, too. They had boxes and boxes of things in their basement, going back to the day in 1901 when St. Agnes’s Parochial School had first been established.

  All she had to do, to find out what she wanted to know, was call Scholastica. She didn’t even have to tell Scholastica what she really wanted. There was no reason to make a fool of herself, if she was wrong. She could just say she wanted to visit, and call it confidential…

  FOUR

  [1]

  COLCHESTER CHANCERY, LIKE COLCHESTER Cathedral, had been built at a time when the American Catholic Church was in the grip of a mania for the Gothic. It grew past State Street to the north of the Cathedral itself, complete with spires and towers, and reminded Gregor Demarkian of a cross between the stereotypical Benedictine Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. Of course, the Houses of Parliament weren’t Gothic, but nostalgic manias rarely translated themselves into equally strong manias for historical research. The Houses of Parliament had probably looked Gothic to whichever Archbishop had decided to build the Chancery.

  It was eight o’clock on Good Friday morning, and Gregor was at the Chancery for a meeting with John Cardinal O’Bannion. Finally at the Chancery, was the way he thought of it. Late the night before, lying in his bed at Rosary House, it had begun to seem to him that his trip to Colchester was some kind of gigantic practical joke. The Cardinal had hauled him all the way up here from Philadelphia and intended to keep him around as long as possible, but not to actually let him do anything. Even Gregor’s talk with John Smith had been cut short by Father Tom Dolan—deliberately and on the Cardinal’s orders, Gregor was sure. The Cardinal seemed to think he had a right to control not only his Archdiocese, but the police within its borders and any stranger who happened to wander through. He knew what he wanted of Gregor Demarkian. He expected Gregor to know it, too, without being told. The atmosphere around the Cardinal made Gregor feel strangled—and the sense of strangulation was made worse by the fact that Gregor knew who had killed Father Andy Walsh. He had known it within min
utes of the moment when Andy Walsh had fallen dead behind the altar in St. Agnes’s Church. He had known it with certainty, because although there were a great many people who could have murdered Andy Walsh at the time and place and in the way he had been murdered, there was only one person who would have.

  In the weeks after the successful conclusion of the Hannaford case, Bennis Day Hannaford had given Gregor a stack of murder mysteries to read: Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and Ellery Queen. Gregor had read them on the nights he was alone in his apartment and at loose ends. At first, he’d thought they’d amuse him. One of his great problems since his Elizabeth had died was distracting himself from his mourning for her. She had been so much of his life for so long, his lack of her sometimes seemed the only salient fact of his present life. He had a tendency not only to brood, but to slip into depression. It wasn’t healthy, and it wasn’t a suitable emotional monument to Elizabeth’s memory, either. She would have hated it in him.

  So Gregor had read the murder mysteries, and waited to be amused, and not been. He had, however, been distracted. To be perfectly honest about it, the damn things had infuriated him. He didn’t mind the unreality of the stories—which was what most policemen objected to in the classic whodunit—because he thought of them as a restricted art form, like haiku. The form had prescribed parameters and any artist choosing to work in it had to stay within them. That was true of the Elizabethan love poetry, too, and the intellectuals who made such a fuss about the “artificiality” of classic detective fiction never complained of the artificiality of that.

  It was the fictional detectives who had made Gregor crazy, because as far as he was concerned their behavior was appalling. It was inexcusable. About halfway through almost every one of the books Bennis had given him, the fictional detective had been described as “knowing” who was rampaging around the countryside, slaughtering civil servants and the odd trembling virgin—but never telling anyone. It was as if Peter Wimsey, Hercule, and company sat back and said, “Well, I know who the murderer is, and since I know, all I have to do is sit back and wait for the next murder, and that will give me the evidence to convict him.”

  Wait for the next murder, for God’s sake.

  Actually, Hercule Poirot was not as bad as the rest of them. Gregor had grown fond of Hercule Poirot, in spite of the fact that The Philadelphia Inquirer persisted in calling him (Gregor) an Armenian-American one. Even so, Gregor had been unable to conceive of a single situation in which he would “know” the name of a murderer and not tell anyone. He couldn’t imagine a case where he’d “know” the name of a murderer and not make sure the man, or woman, was arrested immediately.

  Until now.

  He stood on the steps of the Cathedral, shivering slightly in the thin fall of sleet, and sighed. He knew what he knew through a process of logical reasoning. Andy Walsh had been murdered in the most public way possible, with three television cameramen and dozens of reporters looking on, and from that everything else followed. It had to. Unfortunately, logical reasoning only secured a conviction when it was backed up by physical evidence, and he had none of that. The means were readily available to any number of people, assuming the means to have been nicotine. Even if the police could establish that the concentration Andy Walsh had swallowed was too strong to have been distilled from ordinary cigarettes—and tests weren’t usually that good—there would still be all those commercial plant poisons, available to anyone who wanted them off any garden store shelf. Opportunity might be better, assuming the poison had been put in the chalice and nowhere else, and assuming Gregor could figure out how it had been done. At the moment, he hadn’t a clue. Then there was the matter of motive. Motive wasn’t a legal requirement for prosecution, but it was a practical necessity in any jury trial. That was why Behavioral Sciences always let captured serial killers rationalize their heads off. No matter how crazy the “reasons” sounded—and no matter how much danger those “reasons” posed for any verdict other than “not guilty by reason of insanity”—they were, at least, reasons. Juries like reasons.

  All he had in the way of motive this morning was the vague conviction that all this had something to do with what had happened twenty years ago in Black Rock Park, and that Cheryl Cass and Andy Walsh must have at least known what had happened there, and that the murderer must have been involved in what happened there. The conviction would have been less vague if he hadn’t also been harboring the suspicion that John Smith was right: What had happened in Black Rock Park had happened much too long ago to be the real motive for any real murder.

  In short, what he had this morning was a mess, and he couldn’t see any way out of it. He would be better than the fictional detectives of the thirties. He would go to John Smith and tell the man what he thought and why. He might even be taken seriously. The problem, Gregor knew, was that Smith could take his word as Holy Writ and still not be able to do anything. At this point, Gregor not only had insufficient evidence for conviction, he had insufficient evidence for arrest.

  It had been Gospel in the Bureau that once you knew who your criminal was, you could always find the evidence you needed to pick him up. Gregor knew, from experience, that that Gospel was a lie.

  He pressed the bell beside the Chancery’s door one more time—it was only eight o’clock in the morning, and Good Friday, and the Chancery didn’t open until nine even on ordinary days—and then turned around to look at the neighborhood. State Street ran right up to the steps of the cathedral, a collection of small stores and diners and gas stations and parking lots. Carver Street ran south toward St. Agnes’s and north to the business district proper. Up there, the buildings got taller and newer and more elaborate, and most of them, with the exception of the hotels, were topped by billboards. The hotels were topped by signs that looked as if they could be lit up at night, and probably should have been lit up this morning, because it was so dark. On a hunch, Gregor checked the signs on the two hotels that looked closest and found the Lombard and the Maverick. The Maverick had a banner across its sign, much like the banners across its billboards near the train station, that said Closed for Renovations, February 17-June 1. Gregor frowned. Here it was, one more piece of evidence that the Colchester Police Department was criminally inept. One of the homicide detectives Gregor had talked to when he’d still been trying to get information over the phone from Philadelphia had told him that Cheryl Cass had “made her way clear across town to the hotel district.” From what the Cardinal had said, Gregor had known this was untrue. He hadn’t known how untrue. Here was the hotel district. The Maverick and the Lombard, between which Cheryl’s body had been found, was right in the Cathedral’s lap.

  He turned back to the door, pressed the bell again, and blew a long stream of white breath into the air. He wanted a great big Easter basket full of jelly beans and marshmallow eggs and chocolate Easter bunnies. He wanted a steak and a lobster and a lot of cholesterol-loaded butter. He wanted anything, in fact, except to have to go on dealing with these people in this place.

  The Cardinal was a tyrant. The Colchester Police Department could have been an invention of Mr. Mack Sennet, except that it wasn’t funny. The Colchester climate made Philadelphia’s worst days look warm.

  It was all too much.

  [2]

  Father Tom Dolan answered the door in the daze of a man who has been interrupted at just the wrong point in the sleep cycle. His eyes were glazed and rimmed with red. His skin was so white it made his dark brown hair look black. He should have been a mess, and in a way he was. His rough brown Franciscan habit looked neat enough, until you realized it was supposed to have included a cowl. Then the tabs of cloth meant to be used to pin the cowl down seemed to leap up from the base of his neck and hit him in the chin with every breath. His mass of hair, untonsured—was Gregor wrong to think a branch of the Franciscans still committed to habits would also still be committed to tonsure?—had been combed the wrong way, against a good cut. It hung jaggedly along the botto
m of his skull. Looking through the glassed top half of the door, Gregor wished he could see Dolan’s feet. Weren’t monks in habit supposed to wear sandals? Tom Dolan was not the sort of man who would have looked natural in sandals under any circumstances.

  Tom Dolan was throwing the bolts in the Chancery’s front door, one by one, making sharp clicks that told Gregor the bolts were expensive ones, bought with an eye to real security. To Gregor, they seemed as out of place as Tom Dolan in a habit—fundamentally wrong, like a Mr. Coffee machine on a table set with a Georgian tea service. He wondered what the Chancery thought it was protecting itself from.

  Finally, Dolan got the bolts thrown—he had been fumbling, as if he couldn’t get his fingers working right—and the door open. He stepped back to let Gregor in and then stepped forward again to rethrow the bolts. With the Chancery due to open for business in an hour, Gregor thought it was a waste of effort.

  Dolan must have heard him thinking. He said, “I have to lock up again, because if Sister gets here and finds the bolts thrown she’s supposed to call immediately for the police. And I can’t get to Sister to explain.”

  “Sister doesn’t live in the Chancery?”

  It was a monumentally stupid question, but Tom Dolan didn’t notice. “No nuns live in the Chancery,” he said, “only priests in a rectory wing on the other side. But that isn’t the problem. If she was a normal nun, I could just call her up and tell her what I’ve been doing.”

  “What is she if she’s not a normal nun?”

  “Primitive Observance,” Tom Dolan said grimly.

  The bolts were all thrown and snug. Tom Dolan looked them over one more time anyway, then patted them, as if they were sentient and he had to coax them to behave. Then he looked around the foyer and shook his head.