by Jane Haddam
“Looking at books,” Judy said promptly. “That was part of what made the discussion so weird. If she’d been fiddling with the wine bottles or hiding something behind the picture of John Paul II, I could understand why he’d have been so upset. But she wasn’t doing any of that, according to Dec. She was just standing in the anteroom, looking at the books on the shelf. He said he’d called the Chancery about it, and I couldn’t believe it. During the Tridium.”
Judy watched Smith and Demarkian trade glances she found impossible to read. Then she stared into her coffee. She could remember that fight with Declan Boyd perfectly. She could remember how frightened she’d been, how irrational he’d been, how crazy the whole day had seemed, as crazy as any day could get. That it had gotten crazier later still numbed her. She looked up and found them both looking at her, and blushed again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling as if she’d been apologizing forever. “I was—drifting.”
“It’s all right,” Smith said, for the third time. He got to his feet and waited by his chair while Gregor Demarkian got to his.
“There’s just one more thing I want to know,” Demarkian said. “When you found out that Peg Morrissey Monaghan had died at St. Agnes’s Convent, instead of someplace else, were you surprised?”
“If you mean did I know she was going to be there,” Judy said, “I didn’t. But I wasn’t surprised. Peg is—was one of those women who do everything for the parish. Sell raffle tickets, run bake sales, decorate the altar. She was over there all the time. And she would have come if Scholastica or Father Boyd asked her to. If they told her she was needed.”
“Do you think that that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Judy said. “If Scholastica had called her, Scholastica would have told me. If Scholastica had needed something done, she’d probably have just asked me to do it. Peg had nine children and she was pregnant. All I had was a business.”
“If somebody did call her and ask her to come to St. Agnes’s, would she have come without any of her children?”
“She would have if she’d been asked not to bring them.”
“All right,” Gregor Demarkian said. Smith was already at the door. Demarkian moved to join him, and Judy watched him go, feeling vaguely that she ought to get up and see him out. It was only polite. When he got to the door, he stopped and said, “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
A minute later, he was gone, and Judy found herself sitting over coffee again, so tired she couldn’t remember half the conversation she’d just had. But she wasn’t sleepy. Oh, no.
She wasn’t sleepy at all.
[2]
There was a second-thoughts clause in Barry Field’s contract with Mark Candor’s All Christian Good News Gospel Network. It was in paragraph thirty-six, and what it said, stripped of its legal jargon, was that either Mark Candor or Barry Field could terminate the contract without prejudice for any reason whatsoever during the month of March of this year. It was Barry’s lawyer who had called it a “second-thoughts clause.” Then, with the bitter little smile he reserved for letting people know how wise he was to the essential nastiness of human nature, even as represented by Fundamentalist preachers, he’d redubbed it “the cold-feet clause.” Barry didn’t know what had made his lawyer decide to be a Christian, but he did know the man wasn’t one in any substantial sense. In the last analysis, his real religion was a finely honed hatred for all creatures that walked on two feet, and for Barry Field most of all. He was the most uncomfortable man Barry had ever met.
On the other hand, he was a very good lawyer. He had explained everything very clearly, in detail, right down to the punctuation and the whereas’s. Barry knew exactly what he could and couldn’t do during the month of March. He also knew he would have done what he was going to do even if the contract hadn’t allowed it. The one thing he had never been was a hypocrite. He had one true pride in his life, as he had one true shame, and that pride was that he had never done anything he didn’t believe in for money. He was gratified to discover that he would not change that in himself, even for Mark Candor’s kind of money. That, of course, left a hole he was going to have to fill. He was an ambitious man, as he had been an ambitious boy. He couldn’t stand the idea of spending the rest of his life in one place, going nowhere. Just where he wanted to go now, though, he wasn’t sure.
He looked up, across his office at the two men sitting in the far corner, watching a tape on his television, Gregor Demarkian and John Smith. They had been here for more than two hours, playing and replaying the tape of the last talk show Andy had made for him. Most of the time, Barry had been here, too. He had a lot to think about, and he couldn’t face his staff. They were good people and they were worried about him and he was about to betray them. He already had.
There was a remote control for the VCR, although not for the television itself. Demarkian pushed the “stop” button, then a couple of more buttons, then a button that started the tape playing again. Andy came on the screen. It was late in the tape. Andy was sitting down, not lolling like a guest host on The Tonight Show, but sitting forward, looking urgent, with his hands on his knees.
“Sin without atonement,” he was saying, “leads you to live a lie. And that’s what so many of us do. We live a lie. And we think nobody else in the world knows our secret.”
That’s what so many of us do. We live a lie. Barry felt his stomach roll over. Where had he been, during that broadcast? What had he been thinking about? He’d been so hyped up over the deal with Mark Candor, so high on the audience, he hadn’t been listening. It wasn’t until the show was over and he was back in this office that he’d begun to think about what Andy had been saying and to realize it was odd. It wasn’t until much, much later that he’d been able to run the tape and check for himself. He should have known something was going on. Andy never sat forward like that, all tense, unless he was up to something serious.
We think nobody else in the world knows our secret.
He got out of his chair and crossed the room. Gregor Demarkian had rewound the tape again and was replaying the “we live a lie” speech. He was pointing at the screen and saying something to Smith in a voice too low for Barry to make out the words. Smith was shaking his head.
Barry put his hand on the back of Gregor Demarkian’s chair and said, “Did you find what you wanted?”
Demarkian shut off the tape and turned around. “I found exactly what I wanted. I take it you found it, too. This is what you wanted to show Sister Scholastica, when you went over to the convent yesterday?”
Sister Scholastica, Barry thought. Kath. He said, “Yes. That’s right. I—I’d been watching it. Running it over and over again. And it was strange.”
“It’s still strange,” Smith said.
Barry shook his head. “I suppose it is. I wish I knew what he’d been getting at. He wouldn’t have been like that if he hadn’t had something specific on his mind. Something he didn’t want to say outright.”
“Had he done things like this before?” Demarkian asked. “Used your show, I mean, to imply things.”
“You mean to send little coded messages?” Barry smiled. “Oh, yes. He did it all the time. It was usually some parishioner of his that was getting on his nerves. He was great at figuring things out from half-hints and inconsistencies, little things nobody else paid attention to. Mistresses. Financial problems. Those kinds of things. If he found out something like that about somebody who was bothering him, he would—”
“Twit,” Gregor said.
“I suppose everybody’s told you that,” Barry said.
“Did Andy Walsh’s parishioners generally watch your program? You’ve been very consistently anti-Catholic over the years, from what I’ve heard.”
There was a metal folding chair standing against the wall, left over from a staff meeting they’d had a week ago. It should have been taken out and put away, but for some reason it hadn’t been. Barry pulled it over, opened it up, and sat down.
“Everybody watched that talk show,” he said, “even the Cardinal himself. I don’t have courtroom proof about the Cardinal, but I know it anyway. He’d sermonize about me when he thought I’d been really awful. But even if Andy’s parishioners weren’t all tuned in, or taping to tune in later, they would all have heard eventually. Andy was my most popular guest. People talked about the things he said, especially when he was being outrageous.”
“Would you call what he was doing on this program being outrageous?” Demarkian asked.
Barry shrugged. “It would depend. On who was watching it. My natural constituency wouldn’t have thought it was outrageous at all. Fundamentalists talk a lot about the Devil. They believe in him. Catholics are supposed to believe in him, too—I think Pope Paul VI wrote a whole encyclical about how the Devil was real—but your ordinary day-today American Catholic doesn’t, not really. We’ve all gotten very middle class, and the Devil so very low rent. I think Andy’s ordinary parishioners would have been shocked.”
“Shocked,” John Smith said. “After everything else that nut did?”
“Andy was a nut, Lieutenant, but he was a liberal nut. They expected him to consecrate oat bran muffins. They didn’t expect him to start ranting and raving about the forces of Hell. I’m not sure Andy actually believed in Hell.”
“What about you?” Smith said. “Do you think Andy Walsh is in Hell now?”
It was one of those questions he was constantly being asked by people who had not been born again. He couldn’t have given Smith what he wanted, which was a foaming mouth and a pair of fanatically mad eyes, so he didn’t answer it. He turned to Gregor Demarkian instead. “I’ve been thinking and thinking about this tape, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve gone over and over everything and everyone I can remember. I don’t know what Andy was getting at. I don’t have the faintest idea.”
“Let’s not worry about that for the moment,” Demarkian said. “Tell me about yesterday.”
“What about yesterday?”
“About your visit to the convent. What you did. What you said. Who you saw.”
Barry was confused. “I saw Kath Burke—Sister Mary Scholastica. You know that. I showed her the tape you’ve been watching.”
“What time did you get to the convent?”
“It was about twenty after eleven, maybe eleven-thirty. I called at eleven sharp. I heard the Cathedral bells ring. I told her what I wanted to show her and she said to come right over.”
“Wasn’t that strange, on Good Friday, with everything she had to do?”
“I told her it was important. And she knows me. She knows I wouldn’t make a big fuss over nothing. We were—we used to know each other.”
“She said something to that effect,” Demarkian said. Barry instantly wondered: how much. “What happened when you got to the convent?”
“She was alone. The other nuns were still at the school, teaching. They weren’t going to be back until later. We went into the living room and put the tape on. Kath told me all about the woman who had given it, this parishioner who thought the nuns should have a VCR because God might want to call them on it. I think she’s in an institution now.”
“Then what?”
“Then, we watched the tape. We watched the part you’ve been watching, to be specific. Kath didn’t have time to hear the whole thing. Then we watched it again. And we talked about it.”
“Sister Scholastica didn’t have any more idea than you did what Andy Walsh was getting at?”
“No.” Couldn’t they have asked Kath all this? he wondered. Hadn’t they? Who did they think was lying to them?
Demarkian leaned forward and turned off the television set. It had been putting out a steady stream of Christian advertisements, commercials for crosses and commercials for wall hangings, commercials for Bibles and commercials for bumper stickers. Barry had never found it annoying before—it was part of the game—but he found it profoundly annoying now.
“Tell me,” Gregor Demarkian said, “who you saw. Aside from Sister Scholastica.”
“I saw Sister Peter Rose,” Barry told him. “She was coming in as I was going out. Kath introduced us. I saw Sister Benedict Marie. She was my nun in seventh grade and she recognized me. I didn’t recognize her. Those nuns look very different in the new habits.”
“When was this?”
“About five or ten after twelve.”
“No later than that?”
“No. Kath had told me right up front she was only going to be able to see me for a little while. At some point she looked at her watch, said it was noon, and I said I’d go. If I’d stayed much later, I’d have seen all the nuns. They break for lunch at noon.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “You told us that. What about other people?”
“I saw the assistant pastor, Father Declan Boyd. He was coming out of the rectory.”
“Did you see where he went?”
“No.”
“Did you go anywhere in the convent besides the living room?”
“Not even to the bathroom?”
“No. I had to pass through the foyer to get to the living room, but I don’t know if the foyer counts.”
“What about Sister Scholastica herself? Did she take or make any phone calls while you were there?”
“The phone didn’t ring when I was there. Kath met me at the door and we went into the living room and she stayed with me until I left.”
“What about afterward?” Demarkian said. “Did you come back here, to the studio, right away?”
Barry got out of his chair, and walked back to his desk, and stood looking down at the contract lying there. It was a mess of typeovers and additions, strike outs and notations, a product of compromise and negotiation. Mostly his compromise and Mark Candor’s negotiation.
“No,” he told Gregor Demarkian—and John Smith, too. Smith had been so quiet, Barry had nearly forgotten him. “I didn’t come back here. I walked around. I walked around for a long time. Then I went to the Cathedral.”
FIVE
[1]
THE ONE THING GREGOR Demarkian had always liked about the murder mysteries Bennis Hannaford had given him were the scenes at the end, where the detective gathered all the suspects together in a room and made a display of his brilliance in solving the case. There was something about a scene like that that was inherently intriguing. It was so neat, so organized. The haphazard and the messy had been eliminated. In the lives of Hercule Poirot and Ellery Queen, there would be no accidents of arrest, no surprise shoot-outs, no unanswered questions, no loose ends. In Gregor’s experience, murder investigations were always full of loose ends that stayed loose. Arrests were usually clumsy bumblings, less illustrative of the majesty of the law than of the awkwardness of the arresting officers. This was especially true in cases where the murderer was not part of the expected population of murderers, the local doctor instead of the local drug dealer, the local judge instead of the local tramp. Even officers with a dozen years of experience behind them were often uncomfortable and confused about making that kind of an arrest. There was something about the whole process that smelled too strongly of television. It was too bad they couldn’t be handed their murderers in a well-appointed living room somewhere, with the case all laid out for them by a helpful outside source, with all the inconsistencies made consistent and all the faults in the pattern corrected. Then the murderer could be fetched by a faceless constable kept somewhere in the background, a designated hitter for the dirty work of criminal justice.
That a living-room exposure scene with all the suspects present was exactly what he had set up did not occur to Gregor until he walked into it—maybe because he didn’t intend to use it as a stage on which to rehash his investigation of the case. He simply wanted to prove a point with as many witnesses present as possible. He had called the Cardinal and asked him to gather Judy Eagan, Declan Boyd, Barry Field, Tom Dolan, and Sister Mary Scholastica for reasons so mundane as to be embarrassing: it was Saturday, these were
the people intimately involved with the case, and he didn’t see why he should interfere with the weekend plans of innocent bystanders. It was after noon when he finally called the Cardinal, after six when he wanted the meeting held. He was in a hurry to get the mess cleared up and the murderer put away. He was not, he knew, dealing with a psychopath, but he was dealing with a volatile human being who might still be dangerous to the people around him. God only knew what might happen in the next week or two to set off another murderous attack.
In the hours between his call to the Cardinal and the time when he would have to leave for the Chancery, Gregor was kept busy at Colchester Homicide. Leroy Merrick had had not only a slow day to work in, but a lucky one. The records of the town Gregor had asked him to check had been computerized almost five years before. Leroy had been able to ascertain the existence of the document in question, drive up, get it, and fax it to Colchester in almost no time at all. Gregor had read the facsimile through more than once and then folded it into his wallet. He wanted to bring it with him to the Chancery.
John Smith had also been having a good day. There were only a few things Gregor needed to know after talking to Judy Eagan and Barry Field, and all of them concerned Peg Morrissey Monaghan. There was a good chance they were unobtainable on the day after her death. Smith, however, had managed to convince Joe Monaghan to let him look through Peg’s high-school yearbooks, and found Peg’s sister taking care of the children when he got to Peg’s house. It was, as he told Gregor later, as if for once there really was a God, and that God was on his side.
“She kept all her souvenirs in an old quilted Whitman’s Sampler box,” he said, taking the list Gregor had asked him to make out of his pocket. “You wouldn’t have believed this stuff. That woman kept everything. And organized. If I could get the clerical staff around here to be that organized, we’d solve everything left open for the last century.”
