Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “The point I kept missing,” Gregor said, “was that what was important was not only what Cheryl Cass was, but who.”

  By then, John Smith had calmed down. His papers were lying on the table, forgotten. His hands were laced behind his neck.

  “I don’t know what you mean by who.”

  “Do you know what I mean by what?”

  “Of course,” Smith said. “She was the town tramp.”

  “Exactly.” Gregor nodded. “She was, from all reports, a particularly flagrant town tramp. Sister Scholastica told me at one point that Cheryl ‘probably slept with the entire football team.’ It’s not the kind of malicious offhand comment Scholastica is known for.”

  “She’s not known for malicious offhand comments.”

  “My point. She’s not known for malicious comments of any sort. If she handed me that line about the football team, hackneyed as it sounds, then she must have had some basis for it. Cheryl Cass must have been blatantly and publicly promiscuous.”

  “That was the rumor,” Smith said.

  “Some things we know about Cheryl Cass are not rumors. She was poor. Dirt poor. Her father was a drunk and a batterer. Her mother was a prostitute and a thief. Her childhood was an unmitigated horror. She was neither intelligent nor beautiful. Her chances of escaping the kind of life her parents had had were virtually nil.”

  “And that was who she was, rather than what?”

  “Yes. And it was who she was that caused all the trouble, in the beginning and at the end. If she had been a nice middle-class girl gone bad, she wouldn’t have died of nicotine poisoning. And neither would Peg Morrissey Monaghan or Andy Walsh.”

  John Smith closed his eyes. With his hands still laced behind his neck, he looked as if he had gone to sleep, except that his nose was twitching. After a few minutes, his jaw started working, too. It was so quiet in the room, Gregor almost thought he could hear his watch ticking.

  Finally, Smith opened his eyes again. He said, “You’re making a couple of assumptions, here. One of them is about an event that would have taken place twenty years ago. How are we ever going to prove it?”

  Gregor tore the cover off the file in front of him, took out his pen, and wrote the name of a town and state.

  “Have someone look here. The records would have been filed in June of that year or maybe July. Bet on June. It would have happened fast or not at all. Get in touch with a man named Leroy Merrick at Fredericksburg FBI. Tell him I sent you. He’ll help you get started.”

  “Why there?”

  “It was something Scholastica said to me yesterday. It occurred to me much later that adolescence is not an original age.”

  “Then what?”

  “My guess is that there will be other records, if not in the same town, then at least in the same state. But maybe not. You’d better try the usual. Here and everywhere else. They could have been filed within a year after the first. They may never have been filed at all. Instinct tells me they’ll show up at least three years later, or maybe more.”

  “And Leroy Merrick can help me with this, too?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I hope Leroy Merrick is having a slow day.”

  Gregor smiled. Leroy Merrick would make his day slow, if he had to. He was the first black man ever to have been appointed a field station chief in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the only one to have been appointed under the reign of the old Boss. Gregor was not conceited enough to think he’d been solely responsible for getting Leroy where he was. Leroy was good, exceptionally good. In a just universe, he’d already be sitting at J. Edgar’s desk. In the bad old days of Bossman Eddie, as some of Gregor’s colleagues had called him, the Bureau had not been within moon shot distance of a just universe.

  Gregor stood up, shook the wrinkles out of his suit, and picked up the papers John had gotten for him. Through the windows in the opposite wall, he could see the start of yet another snowstorm, that Colchester speciality. Tomorrow was Easter Sunday, for the Roman Catholics and Protestants if not for the Armenians and Orthodox. There wasn’t a sign of spring anywhere.

  “Get moving,” he told Smith. “Take your papers to your bureaucrats and meet me downstairs in the squad room at your desk. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

  “You mean calling the FBI and waiting around while they find out what we want to know?”

  It was a typical local-police slur on the speed and efficiency of the Bureau. Coming from someone connected to Colchester Homicide, it was outrageous. Gregor let it pass anyway.

  “I mean talking to people about the death of Peg Morrissey Monaghan,” he said. “Eventually your DA is going to have to go into a courtroom with this, and when he does there are some things he’s going to have to know. Get moving, John. You know how to hurry. You were doing it when I got here.”

  John Smith knew how to hurry. He did it so well, he was pushing the button for the elevator before Gregor made it out of the conference room.

  FOUR

  [1]

  JUDY EAGAN WAS ALWAYS awake early on Saturday mornings. Saturday, even Holy Saturday, was a big day for children’s parties. She had birthday cakes to check out and party clowns to track down and crepe paper favors to count. She liked to do these things herself, as she always had, even though the clients who bought her services for children’s parties were no longer important to the business. She had had a birthday party once, when she was eight, where the cake had fallen in and the present her mother had ordered for her had failed to arrive. It hadn’t been catered—even middle-class people didn’t have birthday parties catered in those days—but she wouldn’t have understood catering in those days, anyway. She had understood humiliation. She could still see the faces of her friends around the table, their embarrassment and confusion, their surprise and secret glee. Like all children everywhere, they had been amused by other people’s misfortune. Even Kath and Peg.

  Peg.

  It was this Holy Saturday morning, and nine-thirty, and she was still sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee and barely able to think at all. Part of that was the simple fact that she had been unable to sleep. After she had left Stuart in that bar last night, she had come home to her first empty Friday-night apartment in five years, and looked around, and done—nothing. There had been nothing to do. She had wanted to think about Peg, but that turned out not to be possible. There was nothing to think about Peg. Dying and blood, dying and blood: that was all she could remember. The other two murders had been so very clean. It wasn’t fair that Peg’s had been so messy. Peg had always been such a careful and fastidious person.

  What she thought about, in the end, was Stuart, or her lack of him. She had left him in Chez Where without telling him she was going. When the news was over, she had simply picked up her pocketbook, said she was going to the ladies’ room, and gone home instead. Her coat had still been on the coatrack next to the booth. Her packages had still been on the bench. She had gone out to the taxi stand, caught the first available cab, and locked herself in her apartment.

  She had put on the speaker on her answering machine, and for the next five hours she had listened to his messages: where was she, he had her things, she should call him as soon as she came in, he was getting worried she was kidnapped. But he wasn’t worried she was kidnapped. The only emotions in his voice were anger and impatience and exasperation, the assumption that she had pulled this on him and now he wanted her to stop being childish. Then, at ten o’clock, he had come to her door and knocked, let up the elevator by the doorman he knew well. She had sat on the couch no more than fifty feet from him in absolute silence, blessing the instinct for privacy that had kept her from ever giving him a key. He had gone away after ten minutes—Stuart did not make scenes in hallways, only in bed—and she had written herself a Post-it note, a reminder to tell the doormen that Stuart was no longer welcome. As far as she was concerned, he could keep the bracelet and the other things, no matter what they had cost. He could turn the lot in for c
ash and use the money to take a Las Vegas vacation with the most politically inexpedient floozy imaginable. Unless he found another Judy Eagan, another woman who could tell him how to behave like a human being, his political career was over anyway.

  She took a sip of her coffee, made a face, and put it down. It was stale and muddy and much too strong. She had been throwing new grounds over the old ones all night. She got up, dumped the coffee in the sink, and took the overfull filter out of the coffee machine. First she would make herself a fresh cup of coffee, one that tasted the way she wanted it to. Then she would drink it. Then she would think. She had a lot to think about, starting with whether she intended to go to work. She had called her assistant at eight-fifteen and left instructions. She could stay home all day if she wanted to. If she did, she would have to think about Her Life.

  The cup and saucer and spoon she had been using looked as muddy as the coffee had, filthy. She put them in the dishwasher and got out new ones. Then she opened her refrigerator and stared at the three cartons of Danon strawberry yogurt that were all she had in there.

  She had just made up her mind to go out for breakfast—if she got enough food into her, she might be able to sleep—when the doorman buzzed up. She froze where she was and waited, expecting to hear him say that Stuart was downstairs. She had never known Stuart to be diligent, but she had never known Stuart in this kind of situation. If she had been thinking clearly, she would have remembered she hadn’t talked to the doormen yet. Stuart would have been let right up.

  “Miss Eagan?” the doorman said. He was an old man, and he had his own ideas about feminism. “There’s a Mr. Smith and a Mr. Markian wanting to come up.”

  Mr. Smith and Mr. “Markian.” Gregor Demarkian, of course. Judy put down the coffee cup she was holding and went to the intercom. Stuart would never have the brains to think this up, and the doorman would never have gone along with a ruse. He was old-fashioned but not romantic. She flipped the intercom to talk and said, “Yes?”

  “A Mr. Smith and a Mr. Markian,” the doorman repeated patiently. “Can they come up?”

  “Yes,” Judy said again.

  She flipped the intercom off again and stood back. She could think about Stuart all she wanted to, but nobody cared about Stuart. Even she didn’t. Peg Morrissey Monaghan was dead and all over the six o’clock news and that took precedence over everything. Even though it was much too soon, she went to her door, opened up, and looked out into the empty hall.

  A minute later, they were there, helped by the dearth of traffic on the elevator on a Saturday morning. Smith was as big and bouncy as she remembered him. Demarkian looked tired, as tired as she was. She liked him for that. It angered her to think Smith had gone home to a good night’s sleep, with Peg lying dead.

  When they got to the door, she stood back, motioned them inside, and locked up after them. Then she led the way into the kitchen and opened the cabinet over the sink to get two more coffee cups.

  “It’s about Peg, isn’t it,” she said. “Don’t tell me. I know I’m being stupid. Of course it’s about Peg.”

  “You’re not being stupid,” Gregor Demarkian said. He had a mild voice, gentle. Judy decided she liked him for that, too. “We’re sorry we have to bother you so early on a Saturday.”

  “I was up,” Judy said. “I’m making some more coffee. Why don’t the two of you sit down.”

  The two of them did sit down, but only after eyeing the table dubiously. It was a large round disk of polished glass held up by a cylindrical chrome stand. The chairs were chrome frames with canvas slung between them. The set looked too fragile to hold anyone but a good-size child.

  Judy put coffee cups down in front of them and said, “I hate modern furniture. It’s supposed to look elegant, but all it is is unimaginative.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “I’ve been thinking about it all morning,” Judy said, realizing it was true. “I’m going to throw it all out and redecorate with Victorian.”

  She looked at the pitcher full of coffee and blushed. What an odd thing to say, she thought, what an odd thing to think, now. She grabbed for the pitcher and said, “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” John Smith said.

  Judy filled all three cups with coffee, put the pitcher on the table, and went back to the cupboard for sugar. She had neither cream nor milk. She didn’t keep them. They were fattening.

  “Maybe you ought to tell me what you want to know,” she said. “I don’t seem to be too well organized this morning.”

  “It’s all right,” John Smith said again.

  “It’s just a few questions about yesterday afternoon,” Gregor Demarkian said. “When you were at St. Agnes’s.”

  Judy came back to the table and sat down. “At one o’clock and just before. Yes. I was there.”

  “Sister Scholastica told us,” Demarkian said. “What were you there for?”

  Judy blinked. If Scholastica had told them she was there, why wouldn’t she also have told them why she was there? Judy shook her head. She was getting tangled in pronouns. Maybe, as in childhood, she was getting tangled in personalities.

  “It was because of the wine,” she said carefully. “The Chancery was supposed to deliver the sacramental wine, you see, on Wednesday of Holy Week. Wednesday night. But when I got to the church Holy Thursday morning—”

  “That was because of the goat?” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “I got the goat first,” Judy said, “but I would have gone to the church anyway before breakfast. To check things out. That’s part of what I do. It’s supposed to be done by the parish secretary, but she’s got six children and she’s not very reliable. But I went there, with the goat as it turned out, and the wine wasn’t there. So I called Distribution, and I got the runaround. They might be able to get it there by one. They might be able to get it there by five. It was impossible. So I went and got it myself. I put it in the trunk of my car.”

  “And?”

  It was Demarkian again. Judy was puzzled. “You must remember. You saw me. I brought four bottles in for the Mass. The Mass when—when Andy was killed.”

  “Why only four bottles?” Gregor said. “Didn’t you have all of it in your car?”

  “Oh, yes. I had two cases. But two cases is a lot to carry, and we were in a hurry. And then Andy was killed, and it just—”

  “Slipped your mind?” John Smith smiled.

  “Yes, it did,” Judy said. “I remembered it later, but the church was sealed anyway. Then yesterday morning, I realized I was going to have to use my trunk tomorrow.”

  “Why?” Smith said.

  This time, Judy smiled herself. “I’m a caterer, Lieutenant. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. I’ve got two dozen eggs, three Easter Bunny costumes, and one hundred and forty-four chocolate rabbits to cart over to a party in Oak Hill Ridge. Big money, big society family, big fuss. I could have put most of that in my backseat, but the backseat is already earmarked for fifty-six live baby chicks.”

  “Some party,” Smith said.

  “Never mind the party,” Gregor Demarkian said. “You brought the wine to St. Agnes’s Church. Then what?”

  “I couldn’t put it in the church office, where it belongs. There were still policemen there and the altar was being guarded and the anteroom and the back hall were cordoned off. So I brought it over to the convent.”

  “This was at twelve thirty?” Demarkian asked.

  “A little after. I thought I would just leave the boxes in the foyer and go, you see, because it was Good Friday and I didn’t think anybody would be there. But they all were. It was lunchtime.”

  “By all, you mean the nuns,” Smith said.

  “That’s right. Kath—Scholastica—was looking, I don’t know. Terrible. She invited me back to talk to her and I went. I had an extra bottle of wine. The man at Distribution had given it to me as a kind of bribe. I think he was hoping if he was nice to me, I wouldn’t say anything about his messing up to the Cardinal. So
I had this extra bottle of wine and I gave it to K—to Scholastica for the sisters. For medicinal purposes, if you know what I mean.”

  “I have, on occasion, used wine for medicinal purposes myself,” Demarkian said. “What happened after that?”

  “Scholastica and I talked for a little while. Then I got up to leave, and when I got into the courtyard I ran into Father Boyd.”

  “You didn’t see anyone else?” Demarkian again.

  “I didn’t see Peg,” Judy said. “Scholastica said Barry Field had been there, but I didn’t see him, either. Just Declan Boyd. He—wanted to talk to me.”

  “About what?” Smith asked.

  Judy grimaced. “You ought to ask him. He was being very cloak and dagger about it all. W hat he said was he’d seen someone in the anteroom after Andy died, someone he wouldn’t name. I thought about it later and realized it must have been Peg, but then—”

  Gregor leaned across the table. “Why do you assume he was talking about Peg? Why couldn’t he have been talking about any parishioner, any woman?”

  “It was the way he was talking about it. He kept saying I could convince her to go to the police. I could make her talk about what she was doing there. That could only mean Peg or Scholastica. And it couldn’t have been Scholastica, because there was no mystery about her being in the anteroom after Andy died. The Cardinal sent her there.”

  “All right,” Demarkian said, “we’ll assume it was Peg Morrissey Monaghan. What did Father Boyd say she was doing there?”