by Jane Haddam
“If you want. I can save you the trouble, though. Tom knows where everything is. I’ll tell him what you need and he can bring them over to Rosary House for you later this afternoon. In the meantime, you might try the easy way.”
“What way is that?”
“Ask Kath Burke, of course. Sister Scholastica. She went to St. Agnes’s with Andy. She’s SDG. They’ve got a collection of teaching materials over there, too, and even if they didn’t, she’d probably just remember.” The Cardinal leaned back and started to look expansive again, always a bad sign. He said, “St. Scholastica, by the way, was the biological sister of St. Benedict. She’s the patron saint of nuns.”
[2]
The problem with that conversation, Gregor thought later—over an hour and a half later, while he was standing at the curb on the far side of Marshall Street from Colchester Police Headquarters—was that, like all the conversations he had with the principles in this case, it had gone everywhere and nowhere. As far as he could tell, he had come out of it with exactly one and one half pieces of useful information. The half was the business about patron saints. By now, he was unshakably convinced that Andy Walsh had been trying to tell somebody something. Once he found out what that something was, he was sure it would point directly at the person he expected it to. It would have to.
The whole piece of information was much more interesting, even though it had been delivered to him only as a hint, or possibly a lapse in vigilance. It had confirmed something he had suspected since soon after Andy Walsh died: that John Cardinal O’Bannion knew everything there was to know about who had been involved that day in Black Rock Park.
On the far side of the street, the crossing sign changed to walk. Gregor stepped off the curb into the slush and made his way toward the granite-and-marble pile that was headquarters. He had a new tie around his neck and another new tie in a box in a bag under his left arm. He was beset by that queasy feeling of disorientation that is the result of moving through a landscape that doesn’t make sense. Colchester Police Headquarters was “all the way across town” from the Cathedral, far enough away to have escaped the Cardinal’s restraining hand. The stores around him were awash in baby animals and bright pink bows. A seven-foot-tall stuffed rabbit took up most of the space in the plate glass window of a hyperantiseptic novelty store. It was made of baby blue and white plush, dressed in a three-piece suit, and carrying a half-open Mark Cross briefcase full of fancy marshmallow eggs. The facade of the Unitarian Church was worse. It sported a makeshift cross wrapped in pink and yellow ribbons, as if its minister, being unused to dealing with the concept of the Trinity, had confused the celebration of the Resurrection with decking of the Maypole. In the midst of all this, Colchester Police Headquarters was a relief. It was a monument to municipal graft in the twenties, when graft had really been graft, and Gregor could look on it with fondness. Politicians on the take didn’t invent a lot of pious nonsense for themselves in those days. They stole and knew they were stealing and reveled in it. Then they came up with something suitably high-minded to say on public occasions. To Gregor’s mind, that beat the tortured self-justifications of the present collection of venal senators and psychopathic congressmen by a mile and a half.
What the Cardinal had said that had startled Gregor so much was, Nobody who was involved in that mess at Black Rock Park would have killed Andy Walsh to keep me from finding out about it.
In and of itself, the sentence was not damning. It was the way it had been delivered that had turned Gregor’s suspicion into conviction set in stone, as Tibor would say. It should have been delivered with an air of dismissal, or even irritation. Instead, the Cardinal had been smiling, full of triumph and amusement, so that he looked like a hundred other men Gregor had known in his other life. It was the look of a serial killer, brought in for questioning, who thinks he has stopped the police in their tracks. Gregor’s most vivid recollection of that look was from his one and only interview with Theodore Robert Bundy, a year and a half before Behavioral Sciences reached that status of a full department of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One of the things that would always make Gregor think of Bundy as an extraordinarily special case was the fact that that conversation—and that look—had happened after Bundy’s second conviction for murder and after his second sentencing. The state of Florida had just made it perfectly clear that they would electrocute the man twice if they had to, but they were going to make sure he was dead.
Of course, the Cardinal was no psychopath, but Gregor had never subscribed to the comforting theory that psychopaths were irredeemable other, alien beings, not human at all like you and me. That glee at putting something over on authority was endemic in the human race, and the Cardinal certainly had it on the subject of Black Rock Park.
Gregor went up the steps and through the revolving glass doors into the headquarters lobby, half thinking about the Cardinal, half-thinking how dangerous it was for police headquarters to occupy a building with revolving glass doors. Then he put the Cardinal firmly aside and concentrated on his coming meeting with Lieutenant John Smith.
SIX
[1]
FOR BARRY FIELD, MORNINGS and evenings were always the busiest times of day. In the evenings he had the Make a Joyful Noise Gospel Music Hour, when he sang baritone in a choir of fifty. Allowing himself to be just one of a crowd of blue-robed figures was good for his image. It made him look humble, not a limelight hugger like Bakker and Swaggart. Besides, he enjoyed it. He had been a member of the choir at St. Agnes’s as well as an altar boy, attending two Masses every Sunday to get them both in. Being part of the crowd relieved him of the shyness he had never been able to overcome on the subject of his singing, although he sang well. And it relaxed him. After Make a Joyful Noise he had to deliver his most widely heard sermon of the day. At nine o’clock, with the dishes out of the way and the children mostly in bed, his viewers were ready to indulge themselves in hellfire and damnation—especially if it was somebody else’s, but made to sound like their own. Barry always had to screw up his courage for that one, and crib his texts. He wasn’t a natural hellfire and damnation anything. Fortunately, he was better educated, if not necessarily smarter, than his competition. He didn’t have to plagiarize Jerry Falwell or look to Oral Roberts for inspiration. When he got stuck, he rewrote the sermons of Jonathan Edwards.
In the mornings, it was worse. At least in the evenings there was only one hour of real pressure. After his sermon he could fade into the background of the circus that was Your Prime-Time Encounter with Jesus—misnamed, because it was really a floating talk show that wound its way through the depths of the night. Prime-Time had singers, dancers, testifyers, witnessers, missionaries, and Fundamentalist Queens for a Day, all going on and off the air in short little spurts. Barry always thought of these as “Commercials for Christ,” and then felt ashamed of himself. The people who came on the show were all painfully sincere and often really hurting. They were ex-alcoholics and ex-juvenile delinquents and ex-wives, with no money and no education and no prospects, slogging their way through personal hells Barry knew he couldn’t have stood himself for one minute. Maybe that was why they didn’t mind as much as he did the casual assumption of outsiders that Fundamentalist Christians were stupid. Maybe they were used to being thought stupid and had come to think that way themselves. Barry didn’t know.
He did know that mornings were one long agony of pressure, starting at seven o’clock when he gave his first sermon of the day, moving through the service and the talk show, going on to the Bible study and the commentary on the news. He had to stay psyched up and alert for four hours in the morning, and then, between eleven and twelve, he had to talk to telephone callers on the air. He didn’t have Pat Robertson’s organization. He couldn’t afford the kind of people who could screen callers the way Wayne Gretzky could make hockey goals. At least once in every program he got a full-fledged loony, and then—
And then. It was eleven o’clock on Good Friday morning, and instead
of being out on the set sitting by the phone, Barry Field was in his office, looking at a four-color print of El Greco’s Crucifixion. He had recovered from his torpor of the night before. He no longer felt drugged or as if he might suffer a mental collapse—into catatonia—at any moment. He did not, however, exactly feel like himself. It was Douglas Banner, his second in command, out there on the studio stage right now, something Barry had never permitted before and should not be permitting now. Doug had a wild light of ambition in his eyes Barry knew all too well, and he was a pretty face. Anyone with eyes could see that Doug would make a better televangelist than Barry would, even though he would be less trustworthy.
The El Greco print was as tall as Barry’s desk was deep, and almost a third as wide as it was long. It had been made to hang on a wall but never had. Barry had bought it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on one of his few trips into Manhattan, and it had just occurred to him that it had been a mistake. El Greco was such a Catholic painter. His whole sensibility—his eye that saw without flinching the terrible agony of palms pierced by nails, the brutal fleshiness of the only honest vision of the Incarnation—was alien to Protestantism as it had developed in the twentieth century in America. It was alien to most of Catholicism as it had developed in the twentieth century in America. Maybe, Barry thought, it was simply alien to America, period—a place where pain was so infrequent and death so deftly managed, they’d both begun to seem like intolerable intrusions into the tepid, smoothly flowing comfort of Real Life.
Barry stood up and walked away from the desk, to the window, where he wouldn’t have to look at the print any more. For some reason, it felt wrong to turn it upside down, even though it had been hidden in a closet for years. There was something about turning it upside down that reminded Barry of Peter’s denials to the Roman legionaires. He put his head against the windowpane and counted to ten. He had to get hold of himself, he really did. He couldn’t afford a religious crisis at just this moment. He had a mess of details to take care of before his hookup with Mark Candor’s network. He couldn’t go coast to coast with the makeshift arrangements he’d been using up to now, and going coast to coast was just around the corner. There was that, and there was the fact that Andy Walsh was dead.
Barry opened his eyes, looked down on the street outside—there was an Easter basket the size of Ruritania in the window of Bernie’s Hallmark Shop—and made up his mind. Then he went back to his desk and picked up his phone. As he started to dial, he caught the eyes of Christ in the El Greco print and winced. He finished up and turned his back to it.
At first, the secretary at St. Agnes’s tried to pretend that Kath was not available, even though it was nearly noon and almost time for her to go back to the convent for lunch. Barry had expected that. He did what he always did with women like this one. He repeated his request, firmly and monotonously, so many times the words began to sound like gibberish. He tried to be careful with them nonetheless, because it wasn’t natural for him to think of his Kathleen as “Sister.”
Eventually, the woman gave up—they always did—and buzzed him through. There was a lot of fumbling and whirring and beeping. Then Kath said, “St. Agnes’s Parochial School. Sister Scholastica speaking.”
“Kath,” Barry said. “Thank God. I thought for a moment we were going to get cut off.”
“Barry?”
“That secretary of yours hates me,” Barry said. “I think she thinks I’m the Devil incarnate.”
There was a pause on the line, the sound of papers shuffling and something hard being knocked over onto wood. Barry felt a spurt of fear. Maybe Kath had gone sour on him. Maybe Kath had been sour on him and her behavior yesterday had been nothing more than controlled politeness, misinterpreted by him. He made himself relax. If there was one thing he had always known, it was who his friends were. Kath had always been his friend and she had made it clear, yesterday, in ways subtle and not so subtle, that she always would be.
The sound of something hard being knocked over on wood came again. Kath said, “Rats—this vase—just a minute—there’s water.”
“Kath,” Barry repeated.
“I’m sorry. I’m knocking everything over and my desk is full of papers for the First Communion Class and—”
“Kath.” Barry took a deep breath. “Hold it for a minute. I’ve got something I wanted to ask you.”
“Well, I figured that, Barry. You used to be an altar boy. You’d know what it was like around here on Good Friday.”
“Not as bad as Holy Thursday,” Barry said. “Never mind that for a minute. Tell me one thing. What were you doing the year after Black Rock Park?”
There was silence again on the line, and Barry recognized his mistake. He should have asked her what she was doing senior year. Only the implicated would think of it as “the year after Black Rock Park.” He sent up a prayer that his phone wasn’t being tapped, by Mark Candor, the IRS, or anybody else.
When Kath’s voice came back on the line, it was hard to read, but at least it didn’t sound annoyed. “I suppose I was doing what everybody else was doing,” she said. “Going to school, doing more work than usual, pretending to like boys I didn’t like too much so that I had someone to ask to my senior prom. I mean, you and I, all of us, weren’t—”
“Speaking to each other,” Barry said. “I know. Are you sure that was what the rest of us were doing? Going to school, I mean? What about Cheryl Cass?”
“Oh.” Kath sighed. “Well. I don’t know about Cheryl Cass. I hardly saw Judy and Peg. I think Cheryl might have dropped out of school that year.”
“What about Andy and Tom?”
“I didn’t see Andy or Tom for years after that. Not till I came back here to St. Agnes’s, if you want to know the truth.”
“Not even to say hello to, or walking around town on the other side of the street?”
“Not to say hello to, no. I may have seen one of them walking on the street. I don’t remember.”
“Did you see the last talk show Andy did for me?”
Kath let out a low, throaty chuckle. It made Barry smile. It reminded him of the way she used to laugh when he asked her how she was doing in Latin.
“I didn’t,” she said, “but everybody else did. Declan Boyd came rushing over here on the very heels of the sign-off signal and gave me what must have been a word-for-word. It took long enough.”
“I don’t think it was a word-for-word.”
“I don’t either, in all honesty. Dec isn’t that well organized. Mentally.”
“I don’t think it was a word-for-word, because if it had been, you’d be thinking the same thing I am.”
“Which is?”
Barry hesitated. He could tell her right out what he was thinking. She would listen to him and she would take him seriously, as she always had. But he didn’t think that was the best way.
“Look,” he said, “do you have some time right about now, so I could come over and show you the tape?”
“Barry, that tape must be an hour long.”
“What I want you to hear of it is about ten minutes. Less, really, except you’ve got to see the context.”
“Barry, it’s Good Friday.”
“I know, I know. Don’t you have a little time, really, because it’s right around lunch? You must get some time for lunch.”
“Of course I get some time for lunch.”
“Please?”
There was more silence on the line. Barry held his breath again, because he thought she was going to turn him down. It was Good Friday. She probably had to get her students to Mass and Confession and Stations of the Cross before she sent them home. The Lord only knew what church they were going to get to all that in, since St. Agnes’s had to be closed.
Kath cleared her throat and said. “All right. For ten or fifteen minutes. But it has to be now, Barry, right now, because—”
“I know all about because. I’m leaving here right away.”
“Come running.”
Kat
h hung up. Barry looked at the receiver for a moment, and then hung up, too. He felt suddenly much lighter than he had before, as if he had been facing a disaster and that disaster had been averted. As a metaphor it made no sense, because he had so obviously been sure of Kath’s agreement all along. He had a tape of the show sitting on his desk next to the El Greco, all cued up and ready to go.
He put it in his pocket and headed on out.
[2]
It was one o’clock, and Judy Eagan was acutely aware that she was not where she ought to be. She was not, to be exact, in the kitchen of the Chesswell Borden House, making sure Mrs. Hamilton Cordell’s lunch for thirty was going just as planned. Judy Eagan knew everything there was to know about building up a successful catering business. Long ago, she had codified this knowledge into a set of inflexible and unbreakable rules. The first of these was that she should always oversee in person any job being done for a Really Important Client. Mrs. Hamilton Cordell was a Really Important Client. She had money, brainlessness, a passionate commitment to sloth, and—most important—a ludicrous and misinformed attachment to social climbing. She gave lunches for thirty, dinners for fifty, and midnight dancing receptions for a thousand and one. (“Just like that Arabian nights, Judy dear, isn’t that clever?”) Next year, her two oldest daughters, twins, would be eighteen. Mrs. Cordell was determined to give them a debutante season, even if she had to invent it herself. That was exactly what she was doing. Her planned parties had begun to stretch into infinity, to get more and more elaborate and more and more expensive. If Judy wanted to keep herself in Tiffany perfume, she ought to be standing over the Duck Genovese, making sure her set-up girls had put baby blue frills on the duck legs instead of the usual pink ones, because Mrs. Hamilton Cordell could not stand pink.
Instead, she was freezing in the middle of the St. Agnes’s courtyard, having a conversation with Declan Boyd that had not made sense when it started, did not make sense now, and was not going to make sense, no matter how long she listened. In one way, it was a blessing. There was definitely a problem with a caterer being involved, no matter how peripherally, in a poisoning. It made people skittish. In every other way, it was an infuriating annoyance. She had only come over to St. Agnes’s to drop off the rest of the Communion wine and say hello to Kath. She had parked her car illegally in front of the church, run into the convent for two minutes of conversation, and run out again. Kath was being Sister Mary Scholastica with a vengeance, maybe because it was Good Friday and a day for being serious about religion. Whatever the reason, neither Judy nor Kath had been in the mood for a long talk, and Judy had come plowing back into the courtyard under the impression that she would soon be in her car and on her way to the furiously trivial pursuit of Mrs. Hamilton Cordell. She had heard Declan Boyd calling to her just as she passed the statue of St. Agnes that stood to the side of the path that led from the convent to the main gate, and now here she was.
