Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “Let me have the list,” Gregor told him. Smith handed it over, and Gregor put it down on the conference table where it was easier to read. That was where he was, again, in the conference room on headquarter’s fifth floor. It had turned out to be the only quiet place in the building.

  “Lavaliere for the Girls’ High senior prom,” Gregor read. “Lavaliere for the Boys’ High senior prom, lavaliere for the Boys’ High Junior Prom, queen’s crown from the Girls’ High Junior Prom—she was actually queen of that prom?”

  “Yep. I thought of it, too. I looked it up in her yearbook. She kept all her yearbooks.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “The lavaliere for the Girls’ High junior prom is missing,” Smith said. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Yes.” Gregor shook his head. “It’s not going to be any use to anybody, to be sure. I just wanted to know. It corroborates a story I heard.”

  “I’ll let it pass,” Smith said blandly. “Like I said, I’m not looking to get myself messed up in a twenty-year-old case from Black Rock Park. Do you want to know what Peg’s sister told me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yesterday was Peg’s regular day out. They each had one,

  Peg and the sister. Fridays, the sister took Peg’s kids. Mondays, Peg took the sister’s. According to the sister, neither of them actually went out much. They mostly just stayed at home and enjoyed the quiet.”

  “I don’t blame them. I’m glad you talked to her, John. It was bothering me, why nobody knew anything about what Peg was doing at St. Agnes’s. With all the people she had around her, if she got a telephone call—”

  “She must have.”

  “I agree. But if she did, on an ordinary day, somebody must have heard about it. She would have had to arrange for baby-sitting if she was going to get over to the church without the children. There should have been a million people who should have known where she was going and why and who had asked her, and there was nobody.”

  “Well,” Smith said, “this explains it. What I don’t get is how our friend knew it was Peg’s day off.”

  “Our friend didn’t. Our friend took a chance.”

  “Our friend takes a lot of chances.”

  “Yes. This time, there was really no choice. Peg was looking for that book. Our friend knew it.”

  “Why did she agree to a meeting?”

  “Because she read the evidence wrong,” Gregor said. “If I hadn’t known who I was looking for evidence against, I would have read it wrong, too. It would have been easy.”

  “I got the book, by the way.” Smith reached into his jacket again and came up with what was really a pamphlet, its paper cover faded and dirty and torn. Through the grime, Gregor could read the tide without difficulty, Living with the Saints. Stamped under it in blurred ink were the words Property of St. Agnes Parochial School. Under the stamp someone had written, so long ago the ink of the fountain pen she had used was now nearly invisible, “Return to Sister Joseph Bernadette, Room Six.”

  “They all had Sister Joseph Bernadette for second grade,” he said, “all seven of them, Peg Morrissey, Barry Field, Tom Dolan, Andy Walsh, Judy Eagan, Kath Burke, and, of course, Cheryl Cass. They had to have had her. The Cardinal told me the school was small in those days. There was only one second grade. He told me about this pamphlet, too. Sister Joseph Bernadette used to, in the Cardinal’s words, ‘make her students memorize it, when it was all a lot of nonsense.’ It all went right by me at the time. I was running around, looking in reference books dug out of the Chancery library, and all I needed was this one pamphlet that there was no question everybody involved in the case had been familiar with it at least at one time.”

  “I looked for a copy in Peg’s things when I went over there,” Smith said. “I didn’t find one.”

  “I didn’t think you would. Declan Boyd saw Peg Monaghan standing in the anteroom after Andy Walsh’s murder, ‘looking at the books in the bookcase.’ He told everybody on earth, as far as I know. Judy Eagan. The Chancery. I think our friend found a little time one day and just went over and took it out of Peg Monaghan’s bookcase. If she was as organized as you said she was, it would have been easy to find.”

  “She had all her old schoolbooks arranged by grade,” Smith said.

  Gregor stood up. Through the windows, he could see the sky had gone dark. His watch said five minutes to six, and he was surprised that this late in the year it would already be dark. He kept forgetting how much farther north he was than he was used to being. He kept forgetting how that affected the weather, physical and emotional.

  “Maybe we ought to get out of here,” he said. “I’m tired of sitting around. This,” he tapped the fabric over his inside jacket pocket, where he always kept his wallet and where he was now keeping Leroy Merrick’s faxed document, “is really all we need. The motive, pure and simple.”

  “We’re not due at the Chancery until six-thirty,” Smith said.

  “I don’t care.” Gregor got his coat from the chair he had dumped it on. “We’ll be early. I can’t sit around here any more.”

  [2]

  They were early by the clock, but they were not early for the company. By the time Gregor and Smith got to the Chancery, the rest of the principles were already there, arranged around the Cardinal’s office like so many cats shut up inside when they would have preferred to be outdoors and free. Judy Eagan had come in slacks and a sweater with her hair pinned to the top of her head. She sat close to Sister Scholastica and looked at her shoes. Tom Dolan was wearing his Franciscan habit again, properly cowled this time. He seemed to be trying to keep as much space as possible between himself and Barry Field. Maybe, Gregor thought, it was Barry Field who was trying to keep his distance. He was standing near nobody else, next to the Cardinal’s window, looking out to the city instead of in to the gathering to which he had probably been dragged, protesting and mulish, only by a personal call from John O’Bannion himself. Gregor had made a point of giving the Cardinal advice on the best way to get Barry Field into this room. He turned his attention to Declan Boyd, and saw that the young priest was unhappy and resentful, no longer excited by his participation in a murder case. Well, Gregor thought, that had to come. That kind of man finds violence intense and interesting in the beginning, and only disappointing in the end. He lacks both intelligence and empathy, and he thinks imagination is a sin.

  The Cardinal was sitting at his desk, smoking one of his customary cigars, dressed in the Roman-collared blackness he had affected every time Gregor had seen him during the Tridium. He had apparently been sitting there for some time and paying more attention to that cigar than he usually did. There was a wreath of smoke around his head that was threatening to become a cloud. Gregor and Smith had been led in by the Cardinal’s private secretary, the Sister who would not be allowed to speak until after the vigil Mass to be held at midnight tonight. She had knocked twice and then opened the door to let them enter, entering directly behind them as if to make sure they went directly to the Cardinal. They would have done that anyway. The Cardinal was staring at them.

  Gregor went up to the desk, held out his hand, and said, “Your Eminence. I was afraid we were going to be early.”

  “Everybody was early,” the Cardinal said. “Barry got here at five o’clock. I got so antsy myself, I almost sent a car to the police department.”

  “Police headquarters,” Smith corrected automatically.

  The Cardinal ignored him. “We’ve all had so much coffee in the last half hour, we’re ready to go off like rockets. Do get on with it.”

  Gregor nodded. He was perfectly willing to get on with it, he just wasn’t sure where to start. It had finally hit him what the scene in this room looked like, and that had made him a little self-conscious. Obviously, the rest of them had not been oblivious to the literary references he had forgotten. They expected him to pull a Hercule Poirot, or a Lord Peter Whimsey, or something. Because he hadn’t come intending to do that, he didn’t
know how to begin.

  Actually, coffee was a good place, but he couldn’t see any. There wasn’t so much as a cup in use anywhere in the room. “Were you drinking coffee here?” he asked the Cardinal. “Where are the coffee things?”

  “What does it matter where the coffee things are?” the Cardinal asked, furious. “Sister cleaned up the coffee things. Sister always cleans up immediately. It’s the kind of discipline her order is—”

  The Cardinal was going on, but Gregor had turned away from him. He looked at Sister and said, “Could you bring some coffee into the room? You don’t have to pour out and bring a lot of filled cups on a tray. Just the pot and some crockery would be sufficient. Don’t put yourself to any trouble.”

  Sister stood very still, looking at him curiously, her sharp old eyes alive with intelligence. Gregor looked around and was gratified to see that the idea that had occurred to her—and, of course, to him—had occurred to nobody else. She nodded gravely to him and glided, silent in voice and body, out of the room.

  Gregor turned back to the Cardinal. “I know you’re all anxious,” he said, “but there’s no way to hurry this. It’s a very long story—”

  “If you’re talking about Black Rock Park again,” the Cardinal said, “forget it. I told you—”

  “I’m not talking about Black Rock Park again,” Gregor said sharply. “I know all about Black Rock Park. So do you. So, I think, does everybody else in this room.” Barry Field started, turned quickly away from the window, and stared. Gregor went on. “This story is a much longer one that that. This goes back, not twenty years, but thirty or thirty-five.”

  “Most of us are only thirty-six,” Judy Eagan said, “what could we possibly have done when we were infants?”

  “It’s not what you did,” Gregor told her, “it’s what you were. What each and every one of you were. You know, when I talked to all of you, at various times and various places, the impression you always gave was that there was a harmony, a natural affinity of family and background, among the six of you. At least, that’s what you said when you were thinking about it, the way you all explained what was wrong with Cheryl Cass. She was the town tramp, not only because she was personally promiscuous, but because her family background made her an outcast. In a way your own family backgrounds had not made you.”

  “I told you that,” Scholastica said, “but it wasn’t—we weren’t—there was nothing unusual—”

  “In the way you regarded Cheryl Cass?” Gregor said. “No, there wasn’t anything unusual in that. Children behave that way. What was unusual was the way four of you regarded two of the others, because those two had family backgrounds not much different from Cheryl Cass’s. Tom Dolan’s was poor. His father was abusive. He told me that himself, to let me know that he was grateful to the Church—for saving him, as he put it. Father Dolan has had a remarkable and exemplary climb. Then there was Judy Eagan. Judy Eagan’s parents were poor. The Cardinal told me that Judy had had to borrow a dress from Scholastica for the junior prom at Cathedral Girls’ High—”

  “We weren’t poor because we were shiftless,” Judy said sharply. “My father didn’t go busting up the church on Sunday mornings. We were poor because there were so many children—”

  “Grade-school children don’t have much use for mitigating circumstances,” Gregor said gently. “You were unable to afford to do the things they were allowed to do without question. That should have been enough. As I said, it’s remarkable that it wasn’t. Judy Eagan and Peg Morrissey and Kath Burke, Andy Walsh and Tom Dolan and Barry Field, were inseparable from at least the time they started school together until the day of Black Rock Park.”

  “What difference does it make?” Barry Field said. “We were nicer than we should have been, or maybe smarter. What’s wrong with that?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, Mr. Field, but there is something wrong in the assumption that it wouldn’t make a difference. It had to in one important instance, and that was in each of your personal reactions to Cheryl Cass. From all reports, you, and Father Andy Walsh, treated her, to put it bluntly, like a piece of meat. Father Dolan here refused to do so—”

  “I felt sorry for her,” Dolan said suddenly. “I knew—I knew everything. And I couldn’t help thinking it was wrong, she had so much against her without our help, it was wrong to—”

  “To use her?” Gregor asked. “Yes, Father Dolan, it was wrong. It was very wrong. But Barry Field and Andy Walsh did it anyway. And the girls, I’d like to know one thing. Whose idea was it, never to speak to Cheryl Cass?”

  Judy Eagan blushed. “It was mine.”

  “Of course it was,” Scholastica said, “Andy was your boyfriend and she’d taken him away from you. Or he made it look like that. You couldn’t—”

  “That wasn’t the reason,” Judy said. “The reason was I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to look at her. I kept thinking, if my father died or my mother got sick or something really expensive happened to one of us, one of those diseases they were always having commercials on television about back then, polio or palsy or something, I kept thinking it wouldn’t take much, with us, we were so on the edge and—oh, God.”

  Scholastica was stunned. “I just thought she was immoral. Peg and I did. We didn’t want to be seen with someone everybody knew slept around.”

  Gregor cleared his throat. “The point,” he said, “was that you were not all alike, and you did not all feel the same about Cheryl Cass. Andy, Barry, Peg, and Kath all held her in contempt, not very vigorous contempt. She was just one of those people they were too important to talk to. Tom Dolan felt sorry for her. Judy Eagan hated her. None of it would have made any difference if it wasn’t for two things. First, Andy Walsh saw a way to punish Judy Eagan for refusing him sex and lose his virginity at the same time, and Andy Walsh managed to get hold of some LSD for a little outing he decided to have in Black Rock Park.”

  “But,” Barry Field said.

  “Shut up,” Scholastica said. “I told him. I told him yesterday.”

  “I told the Cardinal years ago,” Tom Dolan said quietly. “Before I ever went into the seminary.”

  The door to the Cardinal’s office opened again, and Sister came back inside. She was pushing a tray with cups and a coffee pot on it, and she looked from one to the other of the people in the room with a wrinkled, impassive face that said nothing, implied nothing, accused nothing. Then she wheeled the cart to Gregor and stepped back.

  “Thank you,” Gregor said, half-wondering if he was talking to air. Sister was so perfectly silent, she might have been deaf as well as voluntarily dumb. He put a cup and saucer together, filled the cup with coffee, and passed it to the Cardinal.

  “I don’t want any,” the Cardinal said.

  Gregor put the cup on the Cardinal’s desk. “What happened in Black Rock Park,” he went on, “was to an extent a result of drugs, but it was also a result of habit. Judy and Kath and Peg had also taken those drugs, but they didn’t stay around for the slaughter of the animals—”

  “It was Andy’s idea,” Barry Field said desperately, “it was always Andy’s idea, and that tramp, that tramp always did whatever he wanted her to, she—”

  “She had no place else to go,” Gregor said. “I know. You and Andy Walsh were the only two people who had ever shown her affection of any sort, even counterfeit affection. Hear me out. Peg and Judy and Sister Scholastica left while you, Mr. Field, and Andy Walsh, had sex with Cheryl Cass. Are you all beginning to notice something missing here?”

  “I was sitting behind a tree smoking a cigarette,” Tom Dolan said. “I was—I didn’t know what to do. I thought they were going to kill her, the way they were going at her, over and over again, not just once, I didn’t even know that could be done, but they were doing it, and—”

  “The point,” Gregor said, “is that you stayed. You stayed even after the sex was over, when Andy decided to give his Black Mass a little verisimilitude and go after a few stray animals. Di
d you stay for the killing?”

  “I did and I didn’t. I knew it was going on. Andy and Barry were just wild. I got hold of Cheryl and made her sit down and talk to me.”

  Gregor got two more cups and saucers together and filled them full of coffee. He passed them to Judy Eagan and Barry Field, who both took them without comment and put them down.

  “Cheryl wasn’t easy to talk to at that point,” Dolan said. “She was very high. She kept saying that for the first time in her life, she felt really popular.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Scholastica said.

  “She was like that,” Tom Dolan said. He took the cup of coffee Gregor handed him and looked into it. “She didn’t understand how things worked, how people worked. She wasn’t very bright and she wanted so much to have hope.”

  “Don’t canonize her,” Judy Eagan said. “She had brains enough to know what it meant in those days for a girl to screw around. And she screwed around anyway.”

  “She offered to screw around,” Barry Field said. “She asked before I did.”

  “She was a tramp,” Judy Eagan said. “A stupid, senseless, gut-instinct tramp.”

  Gregor poured a cup of coffee for himself. “I’m going to skip ahead now, not to the day Cheryl Cass was murdered—and she was murdered—but to the day Andy Walsh was. From the moment it happened, I couldn’t get rid of one idea. The murder of Andy Walsh was a very stupid murder. Unlike the murder of Cheryl Cass—which was a very intelligent murder—it couldn’t have been passed off as anything but what it was. It was practically designed to cause a sensation. There were television cameras actually in the church. A sensational murder brings down heat. No sane murderer wants that kind of attention, and there was no person connected to this case who was not at least nominally sane. That left one possible alternative. Andy Walsh must have died as and when and how he died because there was no other possible way, or time, to kill him.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” the Cardinal said. “The man was a parish priest. He was a sitting duck.”