Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “Sex.”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly a secret, was it? A dozen people have probably told you the same thing. We’ve all turned into such stuffy, conventional citizens, you probably think we were little goody two-shoes in school, but we weren’t. We were very wild in those days. Especially the boys.”

  “Especially Tom Dolan?”

  “No. Especially Andy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know where it came from—Andy’s parents are the sweetest, most unimaginative people you’d ever want to meet—they live in Florida—but Andy was a raving lunatic. I don’t know if he ever got over it. Anyway, it was Andy who started it with Cheryl Cass, at the beginning of our junior year. He was going out with Judy then. I was going out with Barry Field. It doesn’t really matter. We were inseparable then, except when we were in class. The Cathedral Schools are segregated by sex.” Scholastica laughed. “At one point, Barry and I decided we were so much in love—you know the kind of love; it’s sex, you don’t know each other—we were going to elope together to Maryland. You could do that in those days, go to Maryland and be married at sixteen without a waiting period. And then we decided we just couldn’t do it, because it would break up the group.”

  “You were probably glad you didn’t go, later.”

  “Sometimes we were, and sometimes we weren’t. That was just after our sophomore year. Andy was going out with Judy and they had a fight, a really big bust up. Peg and Judy and I were wild about some things, like beer and marijuana, but we were very cautious about others, especially sex. I think Andy tried one of those ‘put out or walk’ deals and Judy decided to walk. Andy revved up his car and went cruising around and ended up at Lake Diantha. And there was Cheryl. What he told Barry later was that she let him sleep with her right off the bat.”

  “Do you think he was telling the truth?”

  “I have no way of knowing. I do know she was letting him sleep with her no more than a month later. Tom caught them in the act in the coat closet behind the gymnasium during some dance or other. I don’t know what Tom was doing there. He was supposed to be suspended from all extracurricular activities until he got his grades up. His grades were terrible.”

  “Strange, isn’t it? Considering how scholarly he turned out.”

  “He is scholarly,” Scholastica said. “It’s not just the way he comes off. When he got to the seminary he must really have gotten himself together. Or the Cardinal put him together, though Tom went all the way out to the Midwest somewhere, so I can’t see how that would be true. For most of high school he was the Cardinal’s despair. He messed up so badly, he didn’t even graduate with the rest of us.”

  “When did he graduate?”

  “A year late, I think. I was in the convent by then. I went in the fall after my high school graduation. We all did things we wouldn’t have expected ourselves to, after what happened in Black Rock Park. Barry left the Church. Judy got feminism the way some people get religion. And Peg—if you’d asked me back in high school who was the least likely person to turn into a Good Catholic Housewife, I’d have said Peg. In those days, she wanted to be a dancer and go to live in Paris.”

  “Go back to Black Rock Park,” Gregor said.

  “Yes. I will. You have to understand, you probably do understand, Andy was never satisfied to create an ordinary fuss. It would have been bad enough if he slept with Cheryl and just told the rest of us about it. He wouldn’t let it rest there. He started to—bring her to things. Not school functions, you understand. That would have been too public, even for Andy. He started to bring her to our private parties, to the beach, to the places where we used to go only with each other.”

  “How did Miss Cass feel about that?”

  “She was overjoyed.” Scholastica looked pained. “I think she thought it was finally happening for her. She was going to have friends, and they were going to be the very best friends. The people who ran everything.”

  “Nobody thought to—try to change her mind?”

  “We did everything we could to change her mind. We still didn’t speak to her. At some of those parties, we didn’t speak to Andy, either. She just didn’t get it. She wasn’t very bright.”

  “Maybe she got it but didn’t want to let it show.”

  “Maybe. That’s worse, isn’t it? Oh, Lord. Well. Andy finally got tired of the whole thing and was about to give it up. That would have been that, except that at same time Barry and I broke up. I’ll be honest. I broke up with Barry. Tom was showing more than his usual interest and I thought Tom was better looking and I was sixteen. Barry was very hurt, so he started going out with Cheryl. It was the same game all over again, different actors. In fact, it was the start of a ping-pong match. First Barry would have her. Then Andy would have her. Then Barry would have her. Back and forth. Back and forth.”

  “But not for proms,” Gregor said.

  “No. The six of us went to both proms, Cathedral Boys’ and Cathedral Girls’, together that year. As always.”

  “Was it your lavaliere that was found at Black Rock Park?”

  “My lavaliere is at my mother’s house. She remarried after my father died and moved down to Westchester.”

  “Never mind,” Gregor said. “I’m sorry. I thought I saw where this was going.”

  “You do see where this is going.” Scholastica reached into the cigarette pack and extracted another, lit it, and dropped her spent match in the ashtray. Smoke curled up around her head like a halo. “We were the ones at Black Rock Park. Barry and Tom and Andy, Judy and Peg and I. And Cheryl Cass. Andy brought Cheryl Cass. It was his turn at the ping-pong table that time.”

  “Sister, excuse me for saying this, but I can’t imagine you slitting the throat of a cat. Or letting it be slit.”

  “I didn’t do either. We weren’t there when that happened—I mean Judy and Peg and I weren’t. It was late and almost dark by then, and we’d gone home.”

  “Because it was late and almost dark?”

  “No. Because Andy and Barry were gang-banging Cheryl Cass on Black Rock itself, right in full view of everybody.”

  “Not Tom Dolan?”

  “Not that I saw. He might have got his later. I don’t know. But don’t think it was rape. It wasn’t. Cheryl offered.”

  “In so many words?”

  “Yes.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Gregor said, as mildly as he could. “None of this behavior sounds much like any of you. It doesn’t even sound like what I’ve heard you were like at the time.”

  “Well, we’d had a little help. Tom had brought some beer. His father started drinking so early in the morning, he was always passed out by early afternoon. And he could never remember how much he’d had in the house. Tom would wait until he conked and then steal half of whatever was in the refrigerator. So we’d been drinking. Barry had paid for some marijuana—Andy got it, because Andy was the only one of us who knew how to get drugs, but Barry had more money so he paid for it. And then, God help us, there was the LSD.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said. “Finally.”

  “Yes, finally. Andy got that, too. He got a lot of it. It was just little dots of moisture on these little cardboard squares, and we didn’t know anything about it. It didn’t look like much. We each ate two.”

  “You could have killed yourselves.”

  “Well, we didn’t. We just went nuts. Andy had come to the park from altar practice—they were all altar boys. The Cardinal insisted on it; he was trying to get the three of them into the seminary even then. Andy had practice for a Baptismal Mass and when he got to the park he still had his missal on him. He wanted to read the Mass backward, in Latin—”

  “A traditional Black Mass,” Gregor said. “But there’s more to a Black Mass than that, you know. Just reading the words backward wouldn’t have done it.”

  Scholastica shook her head. “Done what? Called up the Devil. If he can be called up, we did it that day. We ate those pieces of cardboard and then we read the Mass backward and th
en Cheryl started giggling and said she wanted to—to, you know. She stripped down to her skin and danced around the rock. She kept saying, ‘keep the baby company, keep the baby company—’”

  “Wait,” Gregor said.

  “I won’t wait. She was pregnant. I’m sure of it. She kept saying ‘keep the baby company’ and dancing and then she leapt onto the rock and grabbed Andy by the wrist and pulled him up to her. It was like watching a porno movie. It was terrible. Peg threw up and Judy started screaming and I grabbed both of them and got us out of there.”

  “And?”

  “There was no and.” Scholastica’s eyes were wet again. She sat down in front of the ashtray and rubbed at them with the palms of her hands. “We never really got together after that until—I don’t know when until. John O’Bannion was named Cardinal Archbishop and he brought Tom out here. I guess we’ve never really got back together with Tom. We see him in the course of business, but that’s about it. Andy got himself assigned to St. Agnes’s, mostly by politicking like crazy. I got assigned here because my order had nobody else to send at the time. Judy and Peg never left the parish. The four of us saw each other fairly often. It got—easier, after a while, to be friends again more or less and let the other thing slide.”

  “What about Barry Field?”

  “Barry? Barry’s been busy being a professional anti-Catholic. I hadn’t talked to him in years until after Andy was murdered.”

  “What about Cheryl Cass?” Gregor said.

  Scholastica was crying again, freely. She put the heels of her hands against her eyes and shook her head. “Cheryl Cass disappeared. I never saw her after Black Rock Park except this past Ash Wednesday, when she showed up at the convent door wanting to talk. She wanted to talk about Black Rock Park. She said it had been the second happiest day of her life.”

  “Sister—”

  “No,” Scholastica said. “I—”

  “I’ve got the go ahead,” John Smith said. Gregor and Scholastica looked up, and found him standing in the doorway to the hall, triumphant and amused. His body was so big, he looked like a large picture badly stuffed into a small frame. “The bitch is done. One baby dead and one alive and on its way to the hospital. We are being graciously permitted to return to our murder investigation.”

  If he noticed Scholastica’s tears, or Gregor’s violent irritation, he gave no sign of it.

  TWO

  [1]

  JUDY EAGAN HAD NEVER believed in putting off the inevitable. When she tried it, she got anxious and distracted, and couldn’t get anything else done. The inevitable, now that Peg Morrissey Monaghan was dead, was a trip out to Peg’s house to talk to Joe and see about the children. She had known that since just after four o’clock, when Tom Dolan had come up to her in the wide marble vestibule of the Cathedral after Stations of the Cross and told her she had a phone call in the Cathedral office. The phone call had been from Kath, Sister Mary Scholastica, telling her that Peg was dead. When they had finished talking, Judy had hung up and sat at the desk, staring at the phone, feeling guilty. When she’d first seen Tom coming for her, she’d been tempted to run away. She’d thought he’d noticed she was leaving without Confession and wanted to lecture her about it. She had no idea why he’d want to lecture her about anything. He’d barely given her a moment’s thought since he came back to Colchester. He hadn’t even spoken to her until after Cheryl Cass was dead. She went on staring at the phone and told herself it was silly. If she had run away from Tom, if she had never received Kath’s call, Peg would still be dead.

  Instead of running out to Peg’s house, or even calling, she had gone shopping in town. Now it was six o’clock, and she was sitting in the bar of a pretentiously overdecorated restaurant called Chez Where. The bar was made of mahogany and glass, but not simple mahogany and glass. Every inch of wood was carved into curlicues and masks. Every inch of mirror was etched with swirling patterns in a vaguely Turkish mode. The bar would have looked like the sort of semiprivate London club where English gentlemen took their mistresses, except for two things: an enormous wide-projection TV hung from the ceiling midpoint at the bar, and an almost-as-enormous chocolate Easter bunny, encased in blue and red and yellow tin, that sat on the curved end of the bar’s counter.

  Judy was sitting in a booth at the center of the paneled wall opposite the bar. On the leather-padded bench beside her were the things she had bought, without consideration or attention, in the single hour she had spent with her credit cards out: a $22,000 bracelet from the local branch of Tiffany’s; a $6,000 vase from the local branch of Steuben Glass; a $14,000 commemorative plate, made for the country’s centennial, from an antique store called Precious Heritage. There were other things, too, things she could barely remember buying. Four pounds of Cadbury cream eggs. Two Timex watches, one analogue and one digital. Six pairs of fluffy rayon ear muffs, one each in green, lavender, coriander, fuscia, aquamarine, and puce. She didn’t eat candy, didn’t like Timex watches, and hated wearing anything on her head. Having things on her head made her feel marked out to be decapitated.

  On the other side of the booth, Stuart was sitting sideways, giving himself a good look at the television screen. The six o’clock news was on, and the lead story, of course, was about Peg. Judy had been staring into her drink since the news started, just in case they showed a scene she didn’t want to see. A scene with blood in it.

  “This is amazing,” Stuart kept saying. “I can’t believe they did it. One of the babies came out alive.”

  “I think it’s terrible they only got one,” Judy said. “I think it’s more terrible they didn’t save Peg.”

  Stuart flapped his hands at her. “You’re upset. You’re not thinking straight. With this nicotine poisoning they’re talking about, I don’t think they could have saved Peg. And what you don’t realize yet is, this is a tremendous break for us.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a tremendous break for us,” Stuart insisted. The news had gone to commercial. He turned to face her. “All the pressure’s off, don’t you see? Father Walsh’s murder was spectacular, but not as spectacular as this. And this has much more human interest. The dedicated medical staff. The innocent infant saved in the nick of time. It’s going to take all the media attention away from the other thing. Especially since they never got any really good pictures of the other thing.”

  Judy stared at Stuart’s vapidly earnest, incorrigably supercilious face and thought: I can’t think of a thing to say. I wouldn’t know where to start. I wouldn’t know what words to use that he could understand.

  Stuart made it worse, by being so very solemn when he spoke. “We’ve been worried all along about your being publicly connected to Andy Walsh’s death,” he said, oblivious to the fact that she hadn’t been worried at all, “now we don’t have to worry. Nobody’s going to want to interview you in connection with this. You were nowhere near it. Were you?”

  “I don’t know,” Judy said coldly. “I don’t know when it happened. Under the circumstances, Kath and I didn’t quite get around to discussing it.”

  Stuart waved this away. “You were at work all day. You were in the Cathedral for Stations of the Cross in front of God only knows how many people.”

  “I was in the middle of the St. Agnes courtyard, having a screaming fight with Declan Boyd at one o’clock this afternoon.”

  “So what? She couldn’t have been killed at one o’clock. The news said the medics were called at half past two. Be logical, Judy. If she had been dead for an hour and a half, the babies would have been dead, too.”

  “One of them was.”

  “I just wish you hadn’t talked to the police, or that Demarkian person. Without a lawyer present, I mean. It would have been so much better if you hadn’t talked to either of them.”

  “I didn’t talk to them much,” Judy said. And it was true. She’d run into them both on her way out of the Cathedral. They’d been looking for the Cardinal, and she’d been on her way to what turned out to be
her shopping spree. They’d asked her a few questions, all easy. She’d given them a few answers, all easy. And that had been that.

  She rummaged around in the big shopping bag the Tiffany people had given her to carry all her things in and came up with some cigarettes. She’d bought them, too, a whole carton, on her march down Bellewether Street. She opened the pack, extracted a cigarette, and lit up with a match from the “personalized” book in the ashtray. Stuart frowned at her and said,

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke. You didn’t when I first met you. And it annoys people.”

  “I know. There seem to be a lot of people who’ve taken up antismoking as a substitute for religion.”

  “I’m just saying that the people who smoke won’t care if you don’t, but the people who don’t will care if you do.”

  Judy took a deep drag and sighed. Out there, she thought, are a million different people with a million different obsessions. Stamp out smoking. Stamp out high-cholesterol foods. Stamp out everybody’s definition of “feminism” or “racism” or “sexual morality” or “gross obscenity” except my own. Peg had told her once that having a real religion made sense. It balanced you, and you needed it, like one of the four basic food groups. Try to do without, and you found yourself replacing it with something else: politics or ambition, self-righteous intolerance of one land or another. It was the kind of thing Judy had listened to without paying attention. She had never had much respect for Peg as a philosopher. Now she thought she might have been wrong.

  She took a sip of her drink, a drag on her cigarette, and looked through the haze of smoke she’d created around Stuart. He was still being vapid, and earnest, and encouraging. He still thought he was going to convince her that all this was a blessing in disguise.

  “Do you know what was strange?” she said. “What Gregor Demarkian asked me. That was strange.”

  “What did he ask you?”

  “He wanted to know about my sophomore year in high school. Except the way he put it was, ‘the year before that incident happened in Black Rock Park.’”