True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  Roy kept the television on the second floor in a special room that only a few people were allowed access to, and then only when he gave them explicit permission to come in. It was important that they understand how spiritually dangerous television was. This was true not only of the obviously bad channels, like Playboy and HBO, but of the ordinary broadcast ones as well. There was enough heresy on the evening news to send a hundred souls to hell. A hundred souls probably went, too, because they had learned to doubt from Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. Doubt, Roy always told them, was the worst possible thing. Doubt was the worm eating into the apple of your soul, eating out your spiritual eyes, until you couldn’t see the majesty of God standing right in front of you, but thought you were alone. The problem was, they were not only stupid, but opaque. He had no way of knowing how much of what he was saying sank in and was taken to heart, and how much just passed over them like so much wind. He was sure most of them either didn’t have televisions at all, or had those specially sealed sets sold by Home Life that played videotapes but did not get channels. He was sure most of them didn’t have cable. He had to stress, over and over again, that even “Christian” programming wasn’t necessarily Christian. Kenneth Copeland praying for prosperity, or Benny Hinn working up a sweat while he “healed” one poor deluded soul after the other—the devil could heal; the devil could perform miracles; the devil knew what backsliding Christians wanted to hear—all that kind of thing was just as dangerous as watching a sex show or listening to one of those book channels where the author had written another book on how the Bible wasn’t true.

  Sometimes, when things got rocky enough, Roy took them on archeological expeditions in the city: finding the evidence of the flood on the streets of Philadelphia. Most of all, he reminded them of the worst thing, the greatest danger, the vice that was waiting inside each and every one of them, looking for an opportunity to come out. That was another piece of evidence that Roy Phipps wasn’t stupid—although nobody who had ever met him thought he was. Only television reporters, who saw him leading his pickets at AIDS funerals or carrying signs that told the truth about gay men and hell, and who didn’t talk to him, made him out to be an uneducated rube. Roy Phipps was smart enough to understand the television reporters, and to understand the men like Fred Havers, too—the men who understood nothing about themselves, who didn’t know that random sexual arousal was the mark of original sin, that every man felt it, that it didn’t mean anything. As long as Fred Havers and the other men like him thought it did mean something, it would be possible for Roy Phipps to do God’s work on this earth.

  The television was set on a wheeled cart at the front of the room, meant to look tentative and temporary. Metal folding chairs were set up in front of it in rows of four across. The scene was supposed to remind people of a movie theater, or maybe a meeting in a town hall—but most of these people would never have been to such a meeting. Most of them had never voted before they joined Roy Phipps’s church. Roy stood off to the side and watched them file in: Fred himself; Doug Frelinghuysen; Carl Schmidt; Peter Gessen; Nick Holt. All the members of Roy’s inner circle were men. Only men could be lectors in the church, and only men could serve on its administrative board. Women, St. Paul had said, ought to be silent in church. Roy had translated this to mean that they should have no hand in the running of it, although he had been forced to hire a woman as his secretary. It seemed to be impossible to find men who could type. The men of the inner circle were all one of two types. Either they were like Fred, and just a little too heavy, with suits that were always a size too small, or they were like Carl Schmidt, and far too thin, in that painful-to-look-at way that spoke of too many childhood meals missed and too little in the way of basic nutrition even now. They arranged themselves on chairs. throughout the room, not one of them sitting directly next to any other, or directly ahead or behind. They must all have gone to considerable trouble to be here, in the middle of the day, when they all had the kinds of jobs that paid by the hour and expected their warm bodies in place at all times.

  Roy stood at the front of the room next to the television set and watched their faces. Mostly, they were blank. Fred Havers cleared his throat.

  “Three minutes,” he said. “It’s three minutes before they start the press conference. Don’t you think we ought to turn that thing on in case they get started early?”

  The other men moved around in their chairs. There was no way to tell if they were agreeing or disagreeing. They were deliverymen and truck drivers, mechanics and repairmen. They were used to impassivity, and just as used to taking orders. Only Fred wore a suit with any regularity, and that was because he worked for the church.

  “In a minute,” Roy told them. “We won’t miss anything if we miss the first minute. I wanted to ask if anybody had done anything about what we talked about last Sunday.”

  The men moved around in their chairs again. They knew he was referring to their private meeting last Sunday, and not what he had talked about in his sermon or discussed in the Bible class afterward. Most of them looked embarrassed. Then Doug Frelinghuysen raised his hand.

  “Mr. Frelinghuysen,” Roy said.

  Doug looked uncertain of what to do next—stand, perhaps, the way teachers had once made students stand next to their desks to give an answer, in an era far too long ago for Doug to be able to remember it. In the end, he stayed where he was.

  “I went to the meeting of GLAHCOT. On Monday night.”

  “GLAHCOT?”

  “The Gay and Lesbian Ad Hoc Committee on Tolerance. Ad Hoc. That’s what it said on the flyer. It’s run by those people, you know, the Gay and Lesbian Support Advisory.”

  “Very good,” Roy said, biting back the lecture on “ad hoc” that sprang so quickly into his mind. Lectures like that sprang into his mind all the time. If he gave them all, he would never do anything else. “Now,” he said. “Can you tell us what went on there?”

  Doug Frelinghuysen nodded. “It was a new members meeting. They had a table with food, you know, and stuff to drink. And they went around meeting everybody.”

  “And?”

  Doug Frelinghuysen blushed. “And I had to leave early. That’s what you told us to do. If we were in danger of getting into any trouble.”

  “You were in danger of getting into trouble?”

  “You know.” Doug Frelinghuysen blushed again, this time so red he looked as if he had painted his face with oils and then let them dry against his skin until they cracked. “There was this guy, you know,” he said. “And he was, you know. Getting friendly. He was asking me to go out to a bar with him. There was stuff like that going on all over the room. People hitting on each other. And, uh, people kissing.”

  Some of the men in the room visibly blanched. Roy kept his temper.

  “So,” he said. “While you were there, did you hear anything of interest to us? Any talk of a demonstration, or some news about a public action. Anything of that kind?”

  “They weren’t doing that stuff,” Doug Frelinghuysen said. “They were just, you know. Eating. And kissing. And. Stuff.”

  “Yes,” Roy said. It was harder to keep his temper than ever, but it was important not to lose it too often. He needed his anger for strategic moments, when it would matter. He turned his attention to the rest of the men. “Well?” he said. “Any of you?”

  “I bought the Advocate,” Carl Schmidt said. “I don’t know if it did any good. It was full of personals.”

  It was also full of articles about fundamentalists, including one about this very church. Roy had seen this week’s issue of the Advocate. He counted to ten in his head, the way he had to do so often, and looked over the rest of the small crowd. They were staring at the floor, every one of them. He had sent them on a mission, and they had failed even to start it. If he pressed them, they would take on that pouty resentment they got so often at work. They were in their thirties and forties, but they were still children in the ways that mattered most. They were still people whose deci
sions were made by authority figures who did not believe they were mature enough to run their own lives.

  Roy went over to the television set and turned it on. He had preset it to the right channel, and the first thing they all saw was the bland, blond prettiness of the KPAL anchorwoman, trying to look serious under a hairdo that would have embarrassed a toy poodle.

  “It’s always women on the news shows now,” Carl Schmidt said. “You ever notice that? It used to be only men, and now it’s always women.”

  The other men murmured in what might have been agreement, and might have been noise. Roy turned the volume up and took a seat in the empty front row. The picture wavered, and the next thing on the screen was a bank of microphones on a table with no one behind it. The anchorwoman’s voice in the background was hushed, as if she were calling a tennis match.

  “Listen to me,” Roy said. “If we’re going to carry this off, you’re going to have to do your part. Go out to those meetings. Read the newspapers and magazines, but go out to those meetings. Go down the street and sit through the service at St. Stephen’s. Keep your ears open. Listen. You don’t have to be stealth bombs. You don’t have to tell anybody who you are. Just go. Those meetings are open. Anybody can go to them. Go and come back and tell us what was said.”

  There was a low murmuring throughout the room, but Roy knew there was no way to tell what it meant. He turned his attention to the set, where a heavyset man carrying a large sheaf of papers had appeared behind the microphone, looking grave. That would be the medical examiner. Roy had never seen him before. He wished he’d brought a cup of coffee with him when he’d come upstairs. By now, this man had to know what had really happened to Marty and Bernadette Kelly. He might even know more than that. Roy wasn’t worried.

  The trick was always to stay one step ahead, and he was out in front by light-years.

  SIX

  1

  Gregor Demarkian had made it a point, through all the years of his retirement and “consulting,” always to work with police departments. The reason for that was twofold. First, it was simply easier. Father Tibor sometimes gave him mystery novels to read, but they always ended up making him feel impatient. In the real world, spunky housewives and nosy librarians did not solve crimes, no matter how bright they were. They didn’t have access to the necessary resources. Long before the Bureau had established the Behavioral Sciences Unit, law enforcement had become mostly a matter of technology. Fingerprints, footprints, tire tracks, fiber analysis, the chemical analysis of poisons—all these things were vital for any case that was going to get anywhere in a court, and they had been joined, in recent years, with even more esoteric tools like DNA analysis and voiceprints. No housewife, no matter how spunky, was going to be able to do a DNA scan in her kitchen, and no nosy librarian was going to be able to know Who Done It if she didn’t also know that the voice on the answering machine belonged to the Sweet Sister-in-Law rather than the Vituperative Ex-Wife, who was trying to mask her own voice while incriminating her rival. Of course, in real police cases, the characters in the drama almost never stacked up like that, and the murder was almost never the kind that required this sort of investigation. Instead, some idiot with more alcohol in his system than brains in his head went haywire one late Friday night and shot up his girlfriend, or some other idiot hyped high on cocaine got into a fight outside a bar about the color of his running shoes and stabbed the first person who came to hand, or some yet bigger idiot decided to hold up a convenience store and panicked when the clerk didn’t bow down and worship him at the first opportunity, which resulted in five people dead and three more wounded before a single dime ever came up out of the till. Hill Street Blues was the only thing Gregor had ever seen or heard of that tried to portray crime as it really was, and it only got away with it because it spent most of the time concentrating on the private lives of the cops in the station than it did on the crime. Even Ed McBain, whose realism was close to meticulous, dressed up his books in unusual crimes and unusual circumstances, and the other “realistic” writers Tibor had given him were about as realistic as an Oliver Stone screenplay. Gregor almost preferred the books about little old ladies and their cats. At least they didn’t pretend to be anything but what they were. If “crime novels” had really been about real crime as it really existed, nobody would buy them.

  The other reason Gregor liked to work with police departments was that it kept him out of trouble. Here was something else that was unrealistic about crime novels. In real life, an amateur who tried to investigate on his own would end up in court on an obstruction charge. If he did anything that might even conceivably compromise the police investigation, he might even find himself in jail. Cops did not take kindly to interference from outside, even when that interference was well within the law. They didn’t want the Federal Bureau of Investigation “helping” except when they asked it to. They didn’t want the cops of some other jurisdiction getting in their way. They didn’t want anything but to be left alone unless they asked not to be, and they were likely to treat an interloper the way antibodies treated a virus. First they would isolate him. Then they would try to kill him off. Gregor preferred to be asked in. That was why he called himself a “consultant” for police departments, and why he had always steadfastly refused to get his private investigator’s license. He didn’t want to be Philip Marlowe. He didn’t even want to be Raymond Chandler. He only wanted to have interesting work to do that didn’t take up so much of his time that he no longer had a life. Having waited until middle age to chuck workaholism for living, he did not intend to backslide into an obsession about procedures.

  In many places, simply having an invitation from the local Catholic Archbishop would be enough to get him an invitation from the police department involved. That would have been true in Philadelphia only fifteen or twenty years ago. Now things were stickier. There weren’t as many Catholics as there had been, and, more importantly, not as many of them were cops. Then there was what Gregor was rapidly beginning to think of as the Personality Problem. The first thing he had discovered, making a few phone calls to set up this meeting, was that the Philadelphia police didn’t like the new Cardinal Archbishop any more than he did.

  He checked his watch. He was cutting this very close. He shouldn’t have spent so much time at St. Anselm’s, or walked from there halfway to here. He watched a couple of uniformed officers come out the front doors and head away from him on the sidewalks, both wearing thick coats that were designed to look as much like their uniforms as possible. Then he went through the front doors himself and presented himself to the officer at the desk.

  “Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I’m here to see John Jackman—”

  “Right here.”

  Gregor looked up and saw Jackman coming toward him, dressed in a suit so well made and so conservative he could have been a banker. What he was, instead, was the deputy commissioner of police of the city of Philadelphia, an appointment he had held now for exactly six months. Gregor had first met him when he was a detective lieutenant in Bryn Mawr. Since then, Jackman had gone from township to township and from township to city, moving carefully and without hesitation toward the only thing that mattered to him. It didn’t hurt that he was Black, and very photogenic, and Catholic into the bargain. Gregor hardly thought he could have done better if he had been allowed to put in specifications with God. At the very least, if they ever decided to make a movie of his life, they would have to get Will Smith to play the part.

  The uniformed officer at the desk was a woman. Jackman said good morning to her and took Gregor firmly by the elbow.

  “Third floor,” he said, and he pulled them both toward the elevators. “I’ve got somebody waiting for us up there. How are you? How is Bennis?”

  “I’m fine. Bennis is Bennis. The execution is set for the end of the month.”

  “Shit.”

  “That won’t get you the commissioner’s job before you’re fifty.”

  “I’ve revised my plans
and made it fifty-five.” They were at the elevators, but they didn’t have to wait. Jackman pushed the button, and the doors opened, automatically, as if he had been able to hold the car until he wanted it. He tugged Gregor inside and pushed the button for the third floor. “What were you doing over at Henry Lord’s? Trying to find a way to get a stay?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Not that. We think a stay is probably impossible this time. Bennis wants to talk to her. She doesn’t want to talk to Bennis. I was trying to see if I could arrange something.”

  “Shit,” Jackman said again.

  The car stopped, and the door slid open. The third floor was slightly less utilitarian than the first, but there was still an air of basic practicality about it. Build solid and build cheap. It was the best of the three possible ways to build a municipal building. The worst was to build cheap, period. The iffy one was to build expensive, with marble and fountains and the kind of thick pile carpet most people only dreamed of having in their bedrooms. On the one hand, you built a monument. On the other, you ended up on the evening news in a story about the waste of the taxpayer’s money.

  Gregor glanced up at the large round clock that was the only decoration on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk. “We’re going to be late,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got the press release. And a full ME’s report. My office is this way.”

  Jackman’s office was down a hall, then down another hall, and in a corner. Gregor was sure it was not as large or as well appointed as the corner office given to the commissioner himself, but he knew Jackman well enough to know that the man could wait. There was a man sitting on a chair near a low round coffee table, watching a television set that had been wheeled in from somewhere else. When Gregor and Jackman came in, the man looked up, looked back at the set, then stood.