True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor’s response to Catholicism might be confused, but his response to the new Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia was not. He had met the man twice. He had detested him both times, and the second time more strongly than the first. Physically, the man was almost a caricature of a Jesuit and a cardinal, written as a villain by Miguel de Cervantes: tall and thin, with features so narrow it almost seemed as if he had tried to iron them flat. Gregor could have gotten past the man’s looks, but he was unable to get past his personality. Ferociously intelligent and just as ferociously well educated, he lacked any of a dozen qualities that might have made him human. Warmth had no place on his face. Humor was something he indulged in only at the expense of other people, and he was able to indulge in it often. It would have been difficult for any man with this man’s gifts not to have made many of the people around him look stupid, but another kind of man might have tried.

  The worse thing, as far as Gregor was concerned, was the fact that the Cardinal saw himself as a man on a mission. He was here to clean up the mess that had been made of the Church in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and most specifically the liberal mess. John Paul II had given in on the matter of altar girls, but other loose practices had to go. In the three years this man had been in office, he had put an end to women distributing Communion, to general absolution at the Good Friday penitential service, and to Bible readings in “inclusive language.” There was a rumor now that he was about to go after the nuns. They would either get back into habit, and into convents, or lose their right to function in the archdiocese. Gregor could sympathize with the view that said Catholics ought to be Catholics, meaning Christians united with the Bishop of Rome, and not just free-floating believers in anything they chose. He couldn’t sympathize with this man’s apparent ruthlessness. He didn’t have much use for the sort of people who described the Catholic hierarchy as devils in Catholics, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that this man was not only vindictive, but someone who enjoyed vindictiveness.

  Up ahead of him, Sister Scholastica’s veil was waving from side to side as she walked. The young priest who was showing them the way to the Cardinal Archbishop’s office had his head bent in her direction, listening. Gregor wished for the third time that he could just find his way on his own. He knew where it was.

  They got to the Cardinal Archbishop’s door, and Sister Scholastica turned. “Here we are. And on time, too. His Eminence doesn’t have a lot of patience.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about patience,” the young priest said. “After all, you’re doing us an extraordinary favor. His Eminence understands that.”

  The young priest opened the door and ushered them inside, where a nun sat behind the secretary’s desk, at work at a computer terminal. Both the nun and the young priest were as tense as strung wires. In the days of the old Cardinal Archbishop, nobody had been tense. The nun looked up and nodded.

  “It’s Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it? His Eminence has been waiting for you. Good morning, Father. Good morning, Sister.”

  Sister Scholastica and the young priest both murmured something unintelligible. The nun called in ahead, then stood up to see them through the inner door.

  “We’re all very glad you came,” she said to Gregor, nodding slightly.

  Inside the office, the Cardinal Archbishop was standing at the large window looking down on the cathedral. Gregor tried to rid himself of the impression that the man had done that deliberately, in order not to be caught having to stand up. The Cardinal Archbishop seemed to him vindictive, not petty. The young priest hurried ahead of them and said,

  “Your Eminence, this is Gregor Demarkian.”

  “Mr. Demarkian and I have met,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “At the awards dinner for the Spirit of ’76 Foundation, the last time, am I right?”

  “Absolutely right,” Gregor said.

  The Cardinal Archbishop turned slightly. “Father Doheny, Sister Marie Claire, if you would please—”

  “Oh,” Father Doheny said, backing quickly toward the door. “Oh, of course. I wouldn’t think of invading your privacy—”

  Sister Marie Claire moved more slowly. Gregor found himself wondering irrelevantly if she minded it much that she had the same name as a notoriously prurient women’s fashion magazine.

  When the two were gone, the Cardinal Archbishop motioned both Gregor and Sister Scholastica to the chairs in front of his desk. “I’m sorry to get you out so early in the morning,” he told Gregor, “but we are about to have what is surely going to be a major crisis here by the middle of this afternoon. Has Sister told you anything about the autopsy report?”

  “Only that Bernadette Kelly died of arsenic poisoning, and that for some reason her husband is not likely to have been the one to have administered it.”

  “Yes. That’s the core. That’s what started the further investigations. I must say I’m impressed with the police department for keeping what’s been going on as quiet as they have. But of course that can’t continue. In this country, the press has extraordinary access to the internal workings of government on every level.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “Do you know of a man named Scott Boardman?”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “Mr. Boardman was a parishioner at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church and a homosexual. St. Stephen’s is directly across the street from St. Anselm’s. Later on the same morning that Martin Kelly brought his wife’s dead body into St. Anselm’s and killed himself, Scott Boardman was buried out of St. Stephen’s.”

  “They thought it was a cocaine overdose,” Sister Scholastica said. “They just assumed it was. Except it wasn’t. It was arsenic, too. I’m sorry, Your Eminence.”

  “Sister is understandably distressed,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “We all are. Of course, the truth about Mr. Boardman’s death would have been known eventually—”

  “I’m surprised it wasn’t known right away,” Gregor said. “There’s a law in this state that requires an autopsy after any suspicious death, and a drug overdose would have been treated as a suspicious death almost by definition”

  “They did do an autopsy,” Scholastica said. “They just—”

  “They allowed the funeral to go ahead even though they didn’t have the results of all their tests,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “Mr. Boardman was well-known to the authorities. His habits were particularly well-known. And he had, apparently, been hospitalized several times for cocaine poisoning.”

  “He was a mess,” Sister Scholastica said.

  “There was also some concern,” the Cardinal Archbishop went on, “that if the funeral were delayed, rumors might spread that Mr. Boardman had died of AIDS. Nobody wanted the kind of situation that would cause, not even the medical examiner’s office—”

  “Roy Phipps has his church on the same street,” Scholastica said. “He pickets. You know what I mean—”

  “So they let the family rush the funeral,” Gregor said.

  The Cardinal Archbishop sighed. “It wasn’t the family. The family had disowned him. It was Daniel Burdock, the pastor at St. Stephen’s. The family was Catholic, of course. The newspapers will have a field day with that one.”

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” Gregor looked from the Cardinal Archbishop to Sister Scholastica and back again. “Because if it is, you know, I really can’t help you. I have a good deal of expertise in poisons. And I’m useful in matters of motive and in unraveling certain kinds of complications in a criminal investigation. But I’ve got no influence with the press. I can’t even affect the things they say about me.”

  “The press isn’t what we want you for,” Scholastica said. “I’m sorry, Your Eminence. Twenty-five years of practicing interior and exterior silence, and now I can’t shut up.”

  “I have two worries.” The Cardinal Archbishop ignored Scholastica as thoroughly as he ignored the pen holder on his desk. “One is that the pastor at St. Anselm’
s, Father Robert Healy, is an open opponent of Dan Burdock’s treatment of homosexuals and homosexuality at St. Stephen’s. Dan is an interesting man in many ways, but he is a radical in theology on matters of sex and has made St. Stephen’s a haven for the sort of homosexual man who will be satisfied with nothing but the unqualified blessing of the Christian Church on homosexual conjugal unions. In order to protest that stand, Father Healy has preached several outspoken sermons, and given several uncompromising statements to the press, about the activities across the street from his church. And on one occasion he held a—a—”

  “It’s called a pray-in,” Sister Scholastica said. “It’s sort of like a sit-in, except you kneel and pray instead of sit and sing.”

  “Quite.” The Cardinal Archbishop looked pained.

  “It’s really not anything at all like what Roy Phipps does,” Scholastica said. “It wasn’t even on St. Stephen’s property. It was right in St. Anselm’s Church. Mind you, I think it was a very bad idea, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “You’re still talking about public relations,” Gregor pointed out.

  “No,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, letting out a sigh. “I’m talking about motive. I’m afraid that there’s a very good chance that the arsenic used to kill both Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly came from St. Anselm’s Church. It was bought three days before the two young people died by Father Healy himself, wearing full clerical dress and dealing with a store clerk who happened to be a parishioner and knew him on sight. At four o’clock this afternoon, when the Philadelphia police commissioner holds his press conferences, the entire city is going to know that one of my priests is the prime suspect in two very nasty murders, one of them almost certainly a hate crime. An hour later, when CNN gets done with this, the entire country is going to know as well. I don’t want your expertise for public relations, Mr. Demarkian. I want you to prove that Father Healy isn’t the Jeffrey Dahmer of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.”

  2

  Twenty minutes later, Gregor found himself standing on the pavement outside the cathedral with Sister Scholastica at his side, wondering how he had gotten to where he was without buttoning his coat. It was worse than a cold day. It was raw as a wound, and gusts of wind blew down the street as if it were a tunnel. February was not his favorite month. It needed something like Valentine’s Day, full of bright colors and silliness, to break it up. In this part of the city there was nothing, not even storefront decorations, to break the gray dullness of a morning without visible sun. He stepped back a little and looked up at the cathedral’s great mock-Gothic facade. In Europe, church architecture had gone beyond the spires and pointed arches. You could find cathedrals built with Renaissance magnificence or with all the madness of the baroque. Even in England and Ireland, there was variety, and history, in church art. In the United States, it was as if time had stopped five centuries before the country had even come into existence. Successful cathedrals here—like successful religions—were always deliberate anachronisms.

  “Gregor?” Sister Scholastica said.

  Gregor dragged his mind away from speculating on what the actual building of this place had been like. If the contractor hadn’t been one of those legendary Good Catholic Laymen of that long period before Vatican II, Gregor wouldn’t have been surprised to find that he’d gone mad in the process. Scholastica’s veil was whipping back and forth in the wind. Her face was red with cold.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking what it must have been like actually to build this thing. To be the contractor.”

  “Oh. Yes. Well. I know he’s not a very pleasant man. His Eminence.”

  “He’s a son of a bitch. Sorry.”

  “Thank you for the apology, but I hear worse these days in the fourth grade. And yes, he is that, I know that. But he’s a blessing, Gregor, he really is. He came in here after that awful mess, with the priests and the boys and, oh, all that—”

  “You weren’t here then,” Gregor said.

  “I know, but I heard about it. The order runs six elementary schools and a high school in Philadelphia. We have a lot of interest in the place. And it was bad, Gregor. You must have seen what it was like in the press, but it wasn’t just that.” Scholastica flapped her hands in the air, seemed to realize what she was doing, and blushed. Her hands and arms went back into the folds of her cape.

  “So,” Gregor said. “He was good about straightening out the scandal.”

  “You know, I look at it all, and it’s not fair, really. I mean, yes, those men did those things, and they shouldn’t be forgiven. But it was 1962. The way the Church responded wasn’t underhanded or devious or even cavalier. We didn’t know about child sexual abuse in those days. Churches and schools, Catholic or not, they all did the same thing. They brushed it under the rug, they transferred the adult, and half the time they blamed the child. And they kept it secret, too, but not to save the adult. It was all considered so much the child’s fault that nobody wanted him branded—branded with that kind of misbehavior. I can remember it happening to a girl in the elementary school I went to. She was about eleven, and she was caught with her uncle doing, you know, things. And forever afterward, we all thought she was a slut.”

  Actually, Gregor remembered the same kind of thing, from his own childhood. Especially if the victim was a girl, even a very young girl, the assumption seemed to be that she had gone looking for it.

  “So,” he said, “he was good for the scandal. And I’m glad. But I don’t have to like him.”

  “No,” Scholastica agreed. “You don’t have to like him. I’m just trying to let you know he has his points. The archdiocese settled the lawsuit, and part of the settlement was that a lot of the people involved were either removed from active apostolate or transferred out of the chancery. Not only the priests who did the, uh, the deeds, you know, they went to therapy, and at least one of them went to jail. But other people. People whose only real fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time and having known what was going on. Secretaries. Schedulers. Of course, the man who was archbishop at the time was long dead. But the old archbishop, the one who came before this one, really couldn’t cope. We thought for a while that the archdiocese was going to collapse, or have to go into some form of bankruptcy. Everything just fell apart. And then he died. And I hate to say it, but it was good for the Church in Philadelphia that he did.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “I’m really not arguing with you. I just find this man cold, and condescending. And I don’t like being condescended to.”

  “Nobody does. Will you help us out in spite of that?”

  “I’ve promised to.”

  “Yes, I know. I was hoping you weren’t just being polite. Father Healy is—well, he’s very young and he’s very conservative and he’s very stiff, but he couldn’t have done anything like this. Believe me.”

  “You don’t hold to the theory that any one of us could be a murderer under the right circumstances?”

  “The right circumstances in this case would be a fit of rage and a handy mallet. He wouldn’t buy rat poison and plan for days.” Scholastica cocked her head. “Do you believe it? That all of us could be murderers if we met the right circumstances?”

  “The fit of rage and mallet kind of murderers, yes,” Gregor said. “The other kind, no. It takes a peculiar kind of personality to plan a death, or several.”

  “I think calling it ‘peculiar’ would be something of an understatement.” Scholastica looked around. “I really do have to get back to school. I’ve left Peter Rose in my place, and she’ll be all right for a while, but she’s still very flighty in some ways. She was on my teaching staff in Colchester when, you know, when we met. She was just out of the novitiate. She drove me to distraction.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “It surely has. Do you want to share a cab? In the old days, nuns were expected to take public transportation, but His Eminence must have considered this a special occasion. He gave me money for
a cab.”

  “Then you use it,” Gregor said. “I want to walk around for a while and think.”

  Scholastica looked dubiously up and down the street, at the neighborhood, at the weather. “Well, if you want to,” she said.

  There was a cab coming just then, and Gregor waved it down. “It will be fine,” he said. “I’ll help out. I’ll go see Father Healy this afternoon. Don’t worry so much about everything. It doesn’t matter what I think about the Cardinal Archbishop.”

  “He’s one of those people,” Scholastica said, settling on the cab’s backseat. “You always want to give him his full title.”

  He was one of those people who seemed to have been born with their full titles, Gregor thought, but he didn’t say it, and a moment later the cab had pulled away from the curb and Scholastica was gone. Gregor turned around and around on the sidewalk, as if, by spinning very slowly, he could confuse his own mind about what he had known he was going to do from the moment he had first entered this neighborhood. Then, when that didn’t work, he crossed the street at the light and made his way to the cathedral’s front steps.

  Once, about a year ago, Bennis had taken him to Sacre Coeur in Paris. The Church of the Sacred Heart. It sat high on the top of a hill above Montmartre, as white as powdered sugar, as if it had been bleached. To get to it, you had to climb the hill and then a steep flight of wide white steps, to go up and up, up and up, until even athletes in perfect shape began to find it hard to breathe. Gregor had thought at the time that there was something to this. If God was supposed to be up there, somewhere, then it made sense to make people climb to get to him. Bennis had only wanted to buy a small crystal rosary in the gift shop, where they had special ones made and blessed at that church. She had climbed without thinking about it, and without being affected by the atmosphere of the place, one way or the other. Where Gregor was caught by moods and mysteries, Bennis was a blank. When she had discovered, later, that there was an alternate route around the back that required no climbing at all, she had been furious.