by Jane Haddam
Smith had brought an armload of photocopies up with him from the basement. He threw these on his desk on top of a lot of other papers and sat down, motioning Gregor into the witness’s chair. He seemed to be entirely unaffected by the mess, although his own desk was much neater than most of the desks around it. There were papers scattered over it, yes, but his pens were all primly contained in a cardboard pen holder and none of his drawers bulged. He even had a little plastic tray with compartments for paper clips, rubber bands, Scotch tape, and tacks.
Gregor sat down in the chair Smith had offered him and stretched out his legs. It was after lunchtime and he was hungry, but Smith hadn’t said anything about lunch. He hadn’t even said anything about coffee, which Gregor thought of as the blood of police detectives. Without caffeine, they would all be dead.
Smith waved his hand over the papers he had just thrown down and said, “You see what we’re up against. Nicotine and wine in the body. No nicotine in the pitcher. No nicotine in the wine bottles. There has to be nicotine in the wine in that chalice, and that means we have to test the wine in that chalice.”
“I know.”
“Even if we figure out who did it without testing the wine, even if your idea is correct, even if we have other evidence to hang it up with—”
“I know,” Gregor said. “The jury would go crazy wanting to know why you didn’t test the wine.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad if we could be sure of having a jury full of Catholics,” Smith said, “but we can’t. The court system around here is organized by counties. We’d have half a panel of rural Fundamentalists, and if we tried to explain the Cardinal’s attitude to them, they’d be outraged. They’d think the Cardinal committed the murder himself and was trying to set the defendant up.”
“I don’t think you’d have much better luck with Catholics. A lot of them don’t know what their religion is all about. Some of them know and don’t believe in it anyway.”
“That’s why I could never get behind the Catholic Church,” Smith said. “It’s not that they get people who don’t know what they’re doing or don’t agree with it, it’s that they don’t just chuck those people out. Can you imagine the Fraternal Order of the Hibernians keeping on someone who thought the British belonged in Northern Ireland? And said so? Can you imagine the Jewish Defense League keeping on someone who thought Hitler was right?”
“I think you’re getting a little melodramatic here,” Gregor said mildly.
Smith shrugged. “Maybe. But let me tell you something. I spend a lot of time listening to John Bloody Cardinal O’Bannion. I have to. He damn near owns this city. What I think is, if he meant all those things he says—and he doesn’t keep his trap shut for twenty minutes running—that Andy Walsh wouldn’t have been a priest in the Catholic Church. I don’t blame the Fundamentalists around here. That organization is so screwy, you can’t help thinking there’s something really wrong with it.”
Gregor never ceased to be amazed at how obsessed the people of Colchester were with the Catholic Church and the Cardinal. It reminded him of the way the British were obsessed with the queen. He decided it was time to change the subject.
“Let’s get into a more profitable area of discussion,” he said, and then smiled, because it was such a perfect parody of Bureau-talk, and both he and Smith knew it. “Let’s talk about Cheryl Cass.”
Smith made a face. “I don’t know why you think that’s more profitable. Cass died over six weeks ago. Andy Walsh died yesterday.”
“I know. But we agreed, didn’t we, that there are only two real questions left about Andy Walsh’s death: why it happened and how the nicotine got into the chalice.”
“Maybe the nicotine was in the bottom of the chalice,” Smith said. “That would have been easy.”
“It would have been impossible. You saw those lab reports. When Andy Walsh drank that nicotine, it was close to undiluted.”
“If he poured just a little wine into—”
“I saw him pour the wine, John. He poured a lot of it. And the chalice is large.”
Smith sighed. “All right. But I hate things like this. They make me feel like I’m watching Columbo. And what about the goat?”
“I’m working on the goat,” Gregor said, “but at best it’s corroborating evidence. Let’s get back to Cheryl Cass. As far as I can tell, before she showed up here, there hadn’t been any trouble connected to our people at all, not even connected to the Catholic Church.”
“There usually isn’t much trouble connected to the Catholic Church, not criminal trouble, not here. Except for that mess in Black Rock Park.”
“Yes, well. We’ll get back to Black Rock Park. Is one of those papers you brought up the autopsy report on Cass?”
“Yeah.” Smith rifled through them, squinted at a couple, discarded a couple, and came up with the one Gregor wanted. He handed it over. “You can see what my problem was, at the time. That lobster.”
One of the coroner’s findings had been that Cheryl Cass’s last meal had consisted of lobster, shrimp, mushrooms, butter, and wine. Gregor could understand why that had bothered John Smith. He couldn’t understand why it hadn’t bothered anyone else.
“I’m surprised the lobster didn’t blow the suicide theory from the beginning,” he said. “It’s impossible.”
“I know. Maveronski’s reasoning, if Maveronski can be said to reason, was that she’d seen a lot of people that day and one of them had fed her lobster and so what?”
“And never came forward?”
“I think I indicated that Maveronski could not exactly be said to think.”
Gregor waved it away. “Where’s the list of things found on her?”
Smith dug into his papers again. “Here it is. It’s a short list.”
“I know it is.” Gregor looked at it, paying as much attention to it as he had when he had first seen it downstairs. A plastic comb. A plastic brush with plastic bristles. Two packs of Virginia Slims cigarettes. A twenty-four carat plain gold wedding band, taken from the fourth finger of her left hand. A tote bag, made of quilted synthetic fabric and well worn. The report might as well have come out and said “cheap.” Gregor handed the list back to John Smith.
“That wedding band,” he said. “Was it her own?”
“We’ve got no way of knowing if it was her own,” Smith said, “but we do know she’d been wearing it for a long time. It’s in the autopsy report, if you can read through the jargon. The skin on the finger under it was worn smooth, and the right size and shape to have been worn down by the ring.”
“All right. Then the first question is, why didn’t she hock it?”
“I know.” Smith nodded. “All I could come up with was maybe her husband wouldn’t have liked that.”
“Then where’s her husband?”
“She left him back at wherever she came from?” Smith knew this was weak. “She was wearing the ring on her wedding finger. We have to at least consider the possibility that she was still married.”
“Yes, of course. We also have to consider the possibility that she was divorced but didn’t want to be. Or that she was never married but wanted to make people think she was.”
“I can’t see her keeping the ring just to make people think she was married,” Smith protested, “not in the condition she was in. You should really study that autopsy report. She might have got hold of some good seafood for a last meal, but she was malnourished and she was dying of cancer. She had real need for money. And I showed you the ring. It must be worth more than a thousand dollars at today’s prices.”
Gregor stopped himself just in time from saying “very good.” Smith was not one of his junior agents. Smith wasn’t a junior anything. “I was just trying to point something out,” he said, “and that was that that ring must have meant a great deal to her. She preferred to have it rather than the money it would bring, even when she was so hard up she could barely feed herself. Somewhere out there, there’s a man she cared for more than she cared
for herself. Maybe he still cares for her.”
“What would that get us?”
“A little background, maybe. Have you thought of putting this out on the national wire?”
“You mean going to the FBI and asking them to circulate her description?”
“Why not? They’ll do more than circulate her description. If you can get to a fax machine, they’ll circulate her picture. If you tell them it’s part of a murder investigation, they might even make a fuss about it.”
This attempt to back into the giving of advice had only partially worked. Smith wasn’t offended, but he wasn’t fooled, either. He was looking at Gregor with an air of skeptical amusement.
“You thought of anything else we might not have?”
Gregor flushed. “Well,” he said, “I’ve thought of a possibility.”
“What is it?”
“It may not be real. Do you remember the date of Ash Wednesday?”
Smith didn’t, but he did have a calendar on his desk from Colchester Archdiocese, as did every other detective in the room. The Archdiocese seemed to have sent them to the police department in batches. Smith flipped his back to February and said, “The thirteenth of last month. That was Ash Wednesday.”
“Good. That would have made the seventeenth, let’s see, the following Sunday.”
“That’s right. That’s the day we found Cheryl Cass’s body.”
“It’s also the day a hotel near the Cathedral, called the Maverick, closed for renovations. They’ve got signs up to that affect all over town.”
“I know,” Smith said, “but we checked the Maverick. We really did.”
“How did you check it?”
Smith thought. “Well, by the time we got to it, it had closed. That was Monday the eighteenth, I’m almost sure. We got hold of the manager and asked him a few questions he didn’t have the answers to. Managers at places like the Maverick don’t spend a lot of time at the front desk. And we checked the register.”
“That’s what I thought,” Gregor said. “Relax, John. I’m not accusing you of negligence. That’s what I would have done myself, initially, and you didn’t have much chance after that, with your entire department committed to the suicide theory. But think about it. How do we know this woman’s name was Cheryl Cass?”
“Mrs. Monaghan told us,” Smith said promptly.
“True. And Mrs. Monaghan is someone who knew Cheryl Cass in high school and had not been in touch with her since. Cass was Cheryl Cass’s maiden name.”
“Oh, good grief,” Smith said. “And with that wedding ring—”
“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she was using her married name,” Gregor finished.
“At least I know she wasn’t using ‘Cheryl,’” Smith said, “and she wasn’t using the initial C. There weren’t any Cheryls and I checked out all the initial C’s.”
“From what I’ve learned about Cheryl Cass, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was being very traditional about the whole thing, calling herself Mrs. Earl Jones or Mrs. Harold Doe. With the hotels that were still open, did you ask the staff who’d been on duty at the time if they’d seen her? Did you show them a picture?”
“Of course.”
“I thought you probably had,” Gregor said. “What about the Maverick?”
“Yes, yes we did. And it wasn’t easy, either.”
“She probably didn’t register for herself. It didn’t make much sense that she would have, not if the hotel she was staying in right before she died was the Maverick or a place like it. Looking like that, they probably wouldn’t have taken her. And she herself might have been afraid to ask. What we need to do now is to check the addresses as well as the names on the registers. Then I think we’d better check with the staffs again, show them pictures of everybody involved in the Andy Walsh murder—”
“Everybody? Even the Cardinal?”
“Even the Cardinal.”
John Smith grinned. It was the grin of a man whose deepest, most secret, most impossible wish has finally been granted, in spades.
“Oh, I like this,” he said. “I like it a lot. I’m going to go from one end of this city to another, carrying the Cardinal’s picture and saying, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but this is a murder investigation and we want to know if you saw this man in or around—’”
“John,” Gregor warned.
“Don’t spoil it,” John said. “I love working with you. This is wonderful. Is there anything else you want?”
“Yes, there is. I want the background file on Cheryl Cass.”
“I’ve got it right here,” Smith said. He opened the center drawer of his desk, took out a file so thin it might have been empty, and dumped it in Gregor’s lap. Then he said, “You read it. I’m going to go across the street and get us some Chinese.”
[2]
Gregor didn’t know if Chinese was what he wanted, but he had to admit it had at least one virtue. It was bound to be full of things that weren’t allowed on his Lenten fast. He watched Smith leave the squad room, connecting with half a dozen people on the way, and then bent over the background file and told himself to concentrate. It was hard to do. His breakfast had consisted of a cup of coffee. His dinner last night had been another mess of beans. His stomach felt as wide and deep and empty as a landlocked Marianas trench.
The Cass file was wide and deep and empty, too—not incomplete, but devoid of both happiness and surprise, like one of those depressing auteur movies they showed late at night on public television. Gregor didn’t believe in marked men, or women. He didn’t think childhood and environment were the unbreakable determinants of any person’s life. He did think Cheryl Cass would have had to be a very different person to escape the ordinary effects of hers. To put it bluntly, everything about her life, from the day she was born, had been a horrific mess.
She had been born to a pair of drunks and brought home from the hospital to a rented apartment just inside the boundaries of St. Agnes Parish. The apartment had been over a bar, and the bar’s owner seemed to have spent most of his time during the first six years of Cheryl’s life calling the police on Cheryl’s father. The list of officers’ reports and complaints filed was appallingly long. Cheryl’s father had been not only a drunk, but a mean one. He shouted, he stamped, he hit, and he broke things. Once he put a sofa through the apartment’s living room window. It fell the full story to the street and smashed up two of the cars parked at the curb. Twice he broke Cheryl’s mother’s jaw and three times her left arm, so that next to the notation to the officers’ reports there was a reference to the injury hospital file. Even in those days of relative nonchalance about battered wives, the Colchester police had had no use whatsoever for Richard Cass.
Then, when Cheryl was ten, Richard Cass disappeared. Whether he’d taken off or died, Gregor found it impossible to tell from the information Smith had given him. For whatever reason, he was no longer there and Cheryl and her mother were no longer in the apartment over the bar. They had moved to a rented house described as “around the corner from the church.”
Things should have gotten just a little better, but they didn’t, not really. Myrna Cass was a drunk, too. Instead of taking her addiction out in violence, she liked men. During the year Cheryl was ten, Myrna was arrested for prostitution three times. During the year Cheryl was twelve, Myrna was arrested for prostitution eight times. During the year Cheryl was sixteen, Myrna wasn’t arrested for prostitution at all, but she was arrested for shoplifting. Repeatedly. So repeatedly, in fact, that Gregor wondered if she’d ever got away with it.
Sixteen, Gregor thought, was the crucial year. During that year, Cheryl would have been a junior in high school. At the end of it, there would have been the incident in Black Rock Park. Gregor thought he understood how it must have been: Myrna disintegrating, past help or redemption, past hope—and Cheryl, too, past hope, clutching the only kind of love that had ever been offered to her, in the backseats of cars and on the cold ground under the bleachers on footb
all fields. The town tramp, daughter of the town drunk, good enough for a quick in-and-out but not good enough for a prom. Gregor paged to the end of the report.
The end, he found, was much less satisfactory than the beginning, although one thing stood out. He had been told repeatedly, by more than one person, that Cheryl Cass had “dropped out of school” after her junior year. According to the report, that wasn’t quite true. At the end of her junior year, three weeks before the incident at Black Rock Park, Cheryl had signed up for a senior year at Cathedral Girls’ High. She had a scholarship—a mercy scholarship, Gregor decided, considering the vague reference to her grades—and she had told her nun principal, Sister Andrea Joan, that she intended to pick it up again. Then, when the school term opened in September, she didn’t. She didn’t notify anyone, or talk to anyone, or try to provide an explanation. If she had, it would have been in the file. The file was complete enough otherwise for Gregor to be sure of that. Somewhere between the incident at Black Rock Park and September 11 of the same year, Cheryl Cass disappeared.
Gregor checked back, again. Yes, there it was. Cheryl had been picked up for causing a disturbance on the beach at Lake Diantha on June 9. The incident at Black Rock Park was officially assumed to have taken place on June 12, since the animal carcasses had been found the next day fairly fresh. Gregor checked the reference number next to the line about the June 9 disturbance, borrowed a pen from John Smith’s penholder and a piece of paper from his notepad, and wrote it down. It wasn’t unusual for someone to be picked up for causing a disturbance all on her own, but he wanted to read the full report anyway. From things Judy Eagan, Sister Scholastica, and Peg Morrissey Monaghan had said, he had the impression that this was the period when Tom, Barry, and Andy had been giving Cheryl a sexual rush. If that was true, Cheryl might not have been alone at Lake Diantha.
