by Jane Haddam
“You gave me a very interesting morning,” Henry said. “And I thought I was going to lie around the living room being bored on my day off from work. How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“How’s Bennis?”
“Fairly crazy, about this. I suppose that’s to be expected.” Henry closed the front door and motioned for Gregor to follow him down the long hall that seemed to run the entire length of the house. It ended at a small third flight of steps that led to the kitchen, which was large and overequipped and very newly decorated. Copper pans hung from the high ceiling on a grid held by four coiled metal wires. The grid had been lowered so far, and Gregor was so tall, he worried about hitting his head on a swinging paella pan. The kitchen table was round and large enough for a family of eight Henry and Julia’s three sons were grown and off in law schools in Cambridge and Palo Alto. The table had been set, too, with a blue-and-white-checked tablecloth and matching cloth napkins. Henry waved Gregor in the direction of the empty chairs.
“Interesting setup,” Gregor said.
“Julie’s been decorating again,” Henry told him. “She misses the boys. I think she wishes one of them would settle down and give her grandchildren, but I’d just as soon they waited until they were out of law school and had a hope in hell of making partner somewhere. You should see what she did to the master bedroom. You want coffee?”
“Please.”
Henry got two cups and two saucers and laid them out in the middle of the table. Gregor reached for one and realized that the decorative borders were the same color and pattern as the tablecloth and the napkins. He shook his head slightly and reached for the coffeepot Henry was handing to him. Then he thought about Donna Moradanyan Donahue decorating on Cavanaugh Street and wondered if this was something about women he did not yet understand. Would Bennis start decorating his apartment as soon as she hit the right kind of crisis? Would he be required to know something about how to buy paint?
“I seem to be a little distracted,” he said. “Believe it or not, it’s already been a long morning. Were you able to find out what I needed to know?”
“Absolutely. It helps to be a judge, whether you believe it or not. You would have made a great judge.”
“It helps to have a family from the Main Line. What did you find out?”
Henry poured his cup nearly half-full of cream and put the coffee in on top of it. “You do know, don’t you, that there’s no chance of stopping the execution this time? The governor is not going to commute this sentence. At all. No arguments.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I know that. I think even Bennis knows that.”
“She did make an appeal for clemency,” Henry pointed out.
Gregor shrugged. “I think that’s only natural. She would have had to.”
“I suppose. Anyway, with that understood, I’m happy to report that the governor and the prison administration both want to bend over backwards to make sure that Miss Hannaford receives every humanitarian consideration before the execution. To untangle the language, they don’t want to show up on the evening news in a story about how they refused to let a condemned woman see her own family. Tom Ridge has gotten very touchy about the death penalty. You know that group, Seamless Garment?”
“I’ve seen them on the news.”
“Well, between them and the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, the governor is not happy. So Anne Marie will get all the visits she wants right up until the last second, and then they’ve issued invitations—”
“I know,” Gregor said. “Bennis got one. So did Dickie van Damm.”
“Isn’t it interesting, the way everybody always calls him Dickie?” Henry reached for the sugar and used it, liberally. Gregor thought that he must have been making something on the order of a coffee milk shake, only hot. “Anyway, anyway, to get back to the point, the kicker in this is the qualifier. Anne Marie can have all the visits she wants. She has to want them.”
“And she doesn’t?”
“It’s not quite that simple.” Henry took a sip from his cup, made a face, and began to shovel in more sugar. “Have you talked to her at all since she’s been in jail?” he asked. “I don’t mean seen her in court or that kind of thing, but talked to her, face-to-face.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I never did talk to her much, even before she went to jail. Maybe a dozen times over the space of six weeks during the investigation. I did see her at the appeal.”
“That’s what I thought. What about Bennis, has she seen her in the last ten years?”
“No.”
Henry finally had his coffee as sweet as he wanted it to be. He drank a third of the cup in a single gulp, and then placed the cup carefully, and exactly, in the saucer. “I talked to her this morning, briefly. And I talked to her lawyer. Her present lawyer. She goes through lawyers the way other people go through toilet paper. Do you mind, Gregor, if I go on record here as saying that this is a very bad idea?”
“What is?”
“Bennis having an interview, ever, never mind in the next couple of weeks. She’s—what she is, Gregor. She is not a pleasant woman. And she no longer has anything to lose.”
“Does that mean she’s willing to see Bennis?”
Henry sighed. “Nobody listens to a word I say. It’s pitiful, really. That’s why I stay on the bench. At least the lawyers have to pay attention while they’re in the courtroom.”
“Does that mean she’s willing to see Bennis?” Gregor repeated.
Henry sighed again. “Not exactly. Or maybe I should say, possibly, but not right off. Like I said, it isn’t that simple. Right at the moment, she doesn’t want to see Bennis. She wants to see you.”
“What?”
Henry reached under his sweater into the breast pocket of his shirt and brought out a business card, one of his own, its white back scribbled over with the kind of thick black ink that could only have come from a fountain pen.
“She wants to see you,” he repeated, “at eleven-thirty in the morning at the prison on Thursday. Her lawyer will pick you up and drive you there. You’d better be ready early. It’s a long drive. Oh, and you’ll like the lawyer. Right up your alley. Temple B.A. Temple Law. Fastest rising associate at Richland, Cooper, Shelby and March.”
“He must walk on water.”
“If I were you, I’d hope he could walk through fire,” Henry said. “I don’t know what it is you think you’re doing, Gregor, but this woman is bad news. I could tell that much in less than five minutes on the telephone. If she gets her nails into Bennis, she’ll do a lot of damage that will last a long time.”
It’s Bennis’s sister we’re talking about here, Gregor almost said—but then he didn’t, because he knew just what it was Henry Lord was trying to say.
He also knew that the one thing he couldn’t do, and keep Bennis Hannaford in his life, was to try to arrange her life for what he thought was her own good.
2
Half an hour later and fifteen blocks away, it occurred to Gregor Demarkian that he ought to do something about Sister Scholastica’s problem. He thought of it as Sister Scholastica’s problem, because if he had thought of it as the Cardinal Archbishop’s problem, he would never have gotten himself started. There really wasn’t much of anything he could do at this point. Until the medical examiner made his public statement, until the police investigation was out in the open, he had nothing to work with but the Cardinal’s paranoia, and that would get him no farther than Father Tibor’s kitchen, frustrated and blocked off from information at every turn. Philadelphia was a Catholic town in many ways, as Pennsylvania was a Catholic state. More orders of nuns had their motherhouses in Pennsylvania than in any other state of the union, and the Catholic Church wielded enormous power in city politics. Even so, there was only so far that you could push that, and Gregor knew it. The medical examiner’s office would hold off on their press conference for a couple of hours. The police would probably hold off on an arrest for a day or two, to give the ar
chdiocese a chance to marshal its troops and prepare for attack. The public prosecutor might even be willing to strike a better deal than he would have been for an ordinary defendant, as long as the crime wasn’t child abuse and as long as he thought he could get away with it. Beyond that, any request for special handling would be ignored, and any demand for it would be met with active hostility. Gregor knew that. What worried him was that the Cardinal Archbishop might not know it. Being a man used to giving orders and having them obeyed, he might give a few, and not react too well when they were ignored. And that—
“Would screw things up,” Gregor said. He looked around to see if he had said it out loud or not. Nobody was paying any attention to him, so he assumed not. There was a little convenience store at the corner. Gregor stepped inside and bought copies of the Inquirer and the Star. The television news might still be full of the deaths of Marty and Bernadette Kelly, but the papers had drifted off to other things, mostly having to do with Al Gore. Gregor tried, for the ten millionth time, to figure out why that man could make his eyes glaze over just by appearing in a newspaper photograph, but got no better answer than he’d ever had and decided to give it up. The counter in front of the cash register was crowded with candy and Slim Jims. As he folded up his papers, the old man standing next to him began laying out money for lottery tickets: instant tickets, daily tickets, the Pennsylvania Big Game, Powerball. There was at least three hundred dollars in cash on the counter. Gregor could see the holes at the tips of the man’s shoes. He got his papers and got out of there. He wasn’t one of those people who wanted to end all state lotteries as a matter of public morality, left-wing or right. He didn’t think gambling was a tool of the devil, and he didn’t think most people didn’t know what their limit should be. On the other hand, there were other people—He buttoned his coat up to his chin and got out of there.
He walked five more blocks, made a turn, walked five more blocks, and made another turn. By then, he knew where he was going. He could see the church spires rising up over the buildings ahead of him, two of them, next to each other. Of course, they weren’t really next to each other, he reminded himself. They faced each other across a street. It was only from a distance that they looked sort of like twins. No, that wasn’t true either. Even from a distance, he could tell that they weren’t made of the same material. One was that grey stone that seemed to scream “Episcopal Church” all across New England and the mid-Atlantic states, as if the Episcopalians had once owned a monopoly on stone quarries. The other was deep red brick. That was a cliché, too, Gregor thought, the red brick of Catholic churches and schools and convents built at the end of World War I. You could probably write a history of society and immigration in Philadelphia based on something like that, although he had no idea where he would start. His own little corner of immigration history was mostly out of sight, lived by a group of people whose numbers had never become large enough to make an impact on the city.
He turned another corner, and then he was on the right street, only a block away. From this close, the two churches looked huge, imposing, and blank. At this time of the day, they both seemed to be deserted. Gregor looked up at their spires to see if they told the time, and found out they did, but different times. It was either quarter to twelve, or five after. He sighed a little and kept walking, wondering if there was anything to this process of soaking up atmosphere and allowing your intuition to flower. He suspected there wasn’t. He just walked around aimlessly and then, when he was tired of that, he got down to work.
He stopped right in front of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, where the glass-framed announcement board hung on a wooden frame at the end of the walk, and looked across the street at St. Anselm’s. That had a glass-framed announcement board hung on a wooden frame, too. He looked at the grey stone walk that led to the church’s grey stone front steps, and then across the street at the ordinary pavement that led to St. Anselm’s brick ones. Both churches had their small patches of front yard framed in wrought iron, though, and both had leaded side windows that came to pointed arches at the top.
“They did it on purpose,” somebody said in his ear.
Gregor turned and found himself faced with the most elegantly good-looking young man he had ever seen, tall, slender, almost perfectly made. For a split second, he thought he was looking at a statue. Then the man’s demeanor changed—Gregor could have sworn it wavered and reconstituted itself in front of his eyes—and suddenly he was all swish and mannerisms, exaggerations and camp. Gregor blinked.
“They did it on purpose,” the man said, his voice now several notches higher than it had been. “The Catholics, I mean. In 1918. This used to be one of the most socially prominent Episcopalian churches in the city, so of course they took the lot over there as soon as they could get it, and just went hogwild. They’re incredible climbers, Catholics are, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
The man held out his hand. “I’m Chickie George. You’re Gregor Demarkian. I’ve seen your picture in the papers.”
Swish. Not swish. Camp. Not camp. It was like watching television while somebody flipped channels. Gregor took the man’s hand and shook it.
“Are you the pastor here? Or do I say priest?”
“Well, Dan’s a priest, technically, yes. I’m just a parishioner, and I do some work on church business when we need a hand, which we usually do. We don’t ever seem to have any money, and whatever we do have we must spend on the building. I mean, nothing else explains it. Most of the time I’m a freelance art director. I do food.”
“You do food?”
“Well, yes,” Chickie George said. “There’s a reason why the food in magazines all looks like it could hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and when you make the same recipe at home it doesn’t. I do presentations. Then the photographer comes in and ruins the whole thing with execrable lighting, but there’s nothing I can do about that but take a Prozac and get over it. Have we had a murder here? That’s what you do, isn’t it? You investigate murders.”
“Sometimes,” Gregor agreed.
Chickie looked up the street. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that somebody had finally decided to ice Rapid Roy, isn’t it? My hope has always been that one of his lunatic church members would just lose it one day, and there would be Roy, all over the ground in pieces. Probably be the best he ever looked in his life. Sort of like Jackson Pollock.”
“I’d heard he had a church on this street,” Gregor said. “But I don’t see a church.”
“That’s because there isn’t one. They’ve got a row house down there. Actually, it’s two row houses knocked together. Beautiful spaces, really, you could do something with them. But they haven’t.”
“How do you know? Have you been inside?”
Chickie George snorted. “If I’m going to commit suicide, I’m going to have some fun doing it. Give me sex, drugs, and rock and roll any day.”
“So how do you know they haven’t done something you might approve of with the interiors?”
“Because I can look in the windows and see the art. Christ dying on the cross, badly painted and as bloody as the victim in a slasher movie. Blood and death, that’s all they think about. And I used to think the worst of that kind of thing was those awful pins that said ‘My Boss Is a Jewish Carpenter.’”
“Do they wear pins?”
“If they did, they’d say ‘All Fags Burn in Hell.’ Do you know the Richard Pryor routine about the word ‘nigger’?”
“What?”
The swish was gone again, as gone as if it had never existed in the first place. Gregor found himself standing in front of a very serious young man, with as much force of personality as the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, and maybe as much determination.
“Richard Pryor,” Chickie George said, “went to Africa. And when he came back, he worked this thing into his routine. You can hear it on the Live on the Sunset Strip video. About the word ‘nigger’ and the way blac
k people use it among themselves and think they’ve reclaimed it. That when they use it it doesn’t mean what it means when white people use it. Except it does, you see, and when they use it they’re really perpetuating it. So Pryor was trying to get people to stop using it, for black people not to call each other ‘nigger’ among themselves. If you see what I mean.”
“I think it’s pretty clear.”
“Yes. Well. I think we ought to do the same thing. The ‘Gay Community.’ Excuse me if I can’t say that with a straight face. I don’t mind ‘gay,’ but ‘community’ drives me bananas. Anyway, I’m beginning to think that we should stop using them. ‘Fag’ and ‘queer’ and all of that. That we’re never going to get rid of Rapid Roy and his friends until we do.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“It’s too bad somebody hasn’t murdered him, really. Death is what turns him on. Sometimes I think death is the only thing that turns him on.”
“I’ve never seen him.”
“Stand on the street long enough and you will. Especially if you stand here. He’ll throw up pickets before you know what’s happened to you. It’s cold out here. If you want to come inside, I could give you a cup of coffee. We always have excellent coffee, and French pastry. We don’t settle for cheese Danish from the supermarket at St. Stephen’s.”
“Thank you. I’m supposed to be meeting someone for lunch. I just wanted to get a look at the neighborhood.”
“Because of that mess that happened across the street, I suppose. Well, have a good time with it. And if you see our boy Roy, shoot first and ask questions afterward.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
Chickie George turned away and began walking up the stone path to the church’s front doors. Gregor watched him go, not sure which Chickie he was seeing now, the swish one or the real one. What an odd young man, Gregor thought.
Then he turned away himself and crossed the street to St. Anselm’s.
