True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “How did you find her?” Gregor asked.

  Scholastica sat down again. “She was in my office. I was out this afternoon. I had dinner with friends. And then when I came back I decided to look in my office to see if I had any messages. Because Thomasetta, you know, she’s supposed to make copies and bring them to the convent, but it gets hectic and she doesn’t always remember. And so I went to my office and opened the door and there she was.”

  “You’re sure she was dead?”

  “She was cold as stone, Gregor, and she was—she was blue.” Scholastica looked at her hands. “I didn’t like her, that’s the trouble. I never liked her. She was one of those women, you know, officious and self-righteous and always so politically correct, and I’ve only been here a few weeks, and she was already driving me crazy. I don’t know. Maybe I just feel guilty.”

  “You came back when?”

  “I don’t know. Five-thirty. Maybe six,” Scholastica said.

  “And these offices close when?”

  “Oh, at five, like any other offices. Except that I’m not usually here after four, you know, because of the school day.”

  Gregor looked at the tech men in their white coats, and at the annex. “So the office closed at five, and you showed up half an hour to an hour later, and she was cold. I’d have to ask the medical examiner, but I think that means she must have already been dead at five. Shouldn’t somebody have noticed that she was in your office?”

  “The door was locked,” Scholastica said. “I had to use my key to get in. I don’t know.”

  “And people wouldn’t have found that suspicious?”

  “Well,” Scholastica said, “you can ask Thomasetta, or Peter Rose, but I don’t think so. I think they would just have thought that somebody did it accidentally. Because you can set the door to lock automatically when you go out, and sometimes people jiggle it wrong or they slam too hard when they leave the office and it sets itself. It doesn’t matter, really. There are dozens of keys that could open it. It’s not really a problem.”

  “Do you think it’s odd that nobody would have opened it?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, no. Not really. Everybody knew I was going to be away today. There wouldn’t be any need to make a big fuss about it. They all knew I had a key. Thomasetta would just have put my messages in my mailbox and gone on home.” Scholastica rubbed her eyes. “I acted like an idiot. I started screaming at the top of my lungs. Reverend Mother General is going to be very disappointed in me.”

  “Reverend Mother General will have nothing to reproach you for,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. Then he turned to Gregor and John Jackman. “A little while ago, I went into the church and looked out at the problem in the street. The demonstration seemed to me to have devolved into a full-scale riot. Would you say I was correct to think so?”

  “Yes, Your Eminence,” Jackman said. “I would say you were correct to think so.”

  “And this riot was caused by whom?” the Cardinal Archbishop said.

  John Jackman blinked. “I don’t know how to answer that Riots aren’t caused like that. They’re the result of a chaotic situation—”

  “But the chaotic situation was brought on by the decision of the Reverend Roy Phipps to stage a demonstration in front of St. Stephen’s Church in response to the news that Sister Harriet had been murdered.”

  “Wait,” Gregor said. “Did Roy Phipps stage a demonstration in front of St. Stephen’s because a nun from this church had been murdered on this church’s grounds?”

  “Yes,” John Jackman said.

  “And the violence,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “That was also caused by the Reverend Roy Phipps? And not by, what do they call themselves—”

  “GALA,” Sister Scholastica said helpfully. “It’s short for the Gay and Lesbian Support Advisory. I think they didn’t want to be GALSA.”

  “GALA,” the Cardinal Archbishop repeated.

  John Jackman took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “if you want to get technical, one of the GALA people made what might be termed a pass at one of Roy Phipps’s people, however—”

  “It wasn’t a violent pass?” the Cardinal Archbishop said.

  “Ah, violent, no. Physical, though, yes.” Jackman squirmed.

  “You’d better just tell him,” Scholastica said. “He won’t stop asking until you do.”

  Jackman stared up into the night sky. “This man, Chickie George, his name is—”

  “He worships across the street,” Scholastica said. “He’s a friend of Mary McAllister’s.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jackman said. “He grabbed this other guy’s, uh, private parts.”

  “Hard?” the Cardinal Archbishop asked.

  “How the hell should I know?” Jackman said. “I mean, excuse me, Your Eminence.”

  “You’d know if the other man experienced pain,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “I take it you were an eyewitness to this incident.”

  “So was Mr. Demarkian here,” Jackman said defensively.

  “You must have noticed if the other man doubled over in pain,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “Or if he cried out in agony. Or began to tear up. Or if he was only startled and upset.”

  “Oh.” Jackman nodded. “Just startled and upset. He, uh, he sort of blushed.”

  “Very good.” The Cardinal Archbishop nodded. “So what we had here was this man, Chickie George, delivering the same kind of pass that hundreds of men experience every afternoon on their walk through Penn Station. An imprudent act, perhaps, but not an act of violence. This Chickie George, he was the one Miss McAllister accompanied to the hospital?”

  “That’s right,” Scholastica said. “You remember. She called. Thomasetta came out and told us.”

  “What Sister Thomasetta came out and told us,” the Cardinal Archbishop said—and then, just then, Gregor realized that the man was furious. Worse than furious. Angry to the point of explosion. “What Sister told us,” the Cardinal Archbishop repeated, “was that as a result of this perhaps stupid but wholly symbolic act, Mr. George is now in the hospital with multiple contusions and several broken ribs. And in the wake of what was done to Mr. George, another man, also a member of GALA, was set on fire.”

  “It’s already on television,” Sister Scholastica said apologetically. “Thomasetta came out and told us about that, too.”

  “I think,” John Jackman said cautiously, “that I’d really like to know what the point is here. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “The point,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “is who started the violence, and it was not the counterprotestors from GALA. If nobody wants me for anything here at the moment, I am going to go back to my residence. The archdiocese will issue a statement about this matter sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Marvelous,” John Jackman said.

  “Your Eminence?” Scholastica said.

  The Cardinal Archbishop bowed slightly in the direction of all of them at once or none of them at all, turned on his heel, and walked off in the direction of the church. John Jackman threw himself down on the bench and dropped his head into his hands.

  “This is incredible,” he said. “This is worse by the minute. They’re going to have to fire the whole department and start from scratch.”

  In the annex, the tech men were beginning to bring out more than they were bringing in, and a couple of them were just standing around waiting. Gregor tugged at Jackman’s sleeve.

  “Let’s go in there and do what we came to do,” he said. “Then we can work out the future of the Philadelphia Police Department.”

  TWO

  1

  Usually, it was Bennis who fell asleep on the couch, and Gregor who went looking for her when he didn’t find her in bed. This morning, Gregor woke to find himself staring at his own living-room window and, across the street, at the lit window of Lida Arkmanian’s second-story reception room. Something was going on down there that involved red crepe paper and silver balls, but he wasn’t sure what. Since
the room was lit up but completely uninhabited, he didn’t think he was going to find out anytime soon. He sat up and looked around him. He was still wearing the clothes he had had on the night before, including his jacket and tie, and his tie had a note pinned to it. “Didn’t want to disturb you. Going off to read,” the note said. Gregor unpinned it—Bennis had to be crazy, pinning something to him with a straight pin—and put it down on the coffee table on top of the notes he had been making about the death of Sister Harriet Garrity. He hated to admit it, but he was much happier to be looking into a murder that had just happened, almost right in front of his nose, than he had been at the thought of looking into two like the deaths of Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly. Cold trails were always bad news, of course, but it was worse than that. Over time, people edited their own memories. They took out what shamed them and put in what they wished they had done. Cold trails almost always involved hot lies and even hotter self-delusions, and there was no reasonable way to untangle them. Even if you solved the case, and built enough into the foundation so that a decent prosecutor could get a conviction, you always ended up with a picture of what had happened that was more than a little false.

  He went down the hall to his bedroom and looked inside. Bennis was asleep under both his blankets and all three of his quilts. The blankets were Hudson Bay Point king-size at three hundred and fifty dollars a pop. The quilts were down-filled from L. L. Bean and cost more than Gregor wanted to think about. Bennis had bought them all when she’d realized that he liked to sleep under nothing but a top sheet, “as if,” as she put it, “you didn’t have anything on yourself at all.” Then she’d gone out and bought eight thick, hard foam pillows to go with them.

  At the moment, Bennis was not only sleeping under his blankets and his quilts, she was sleeping in his pajama tops as well. His pajama bottoms were draped over the back of the chair in front of the computer. Gregor got a clean set of clothes out of the wardrobe, considered putting on his robe, and decided against it. If Bennis woke up, she would want the robe. He had never met another woman who so disliked wearing her own clothes, and so much insisted on wearing his. Of course, his experience with women was somewhat restricted. There had been a few girls in college and the Army, and then he had married Elizabeth and stayed married to her for almost thirty years. Maybe it was a generational thing. Maybe women of Bennis’s generation always wore their lovers’ clothes. He rolled the word around in his mouth a couple of times—lover, lovers, love—and wished it didn’t feel so out of place. Then he decided that it might have been worse. He was so big and Bennis was so small, there was only so much she could get away with borrowing. If she’d been a larger woman, he might not have had any clothes left at all.

  He took a shower, came out, and shaved. In the mirror he looked tired, but he always looked tired. He had one of those Armenian faces that looked as if it had seen everything on earth, twice. It was Tibor who ought to look like that. He got into slacks and a shirt and a sweater, but he was very careful not to put on a tie. Bennis’s nagging was finally getting to him. He had become embarrassed about wearing a suit when he was only going down the street to have breakfast at the Ararat. He came out of the bathroom and walked back down the hall to his bedroom. Bennis was still asleep, and now that he gave the room more attention he could see that she would probably stay that way for some time. There was a stack of new paper next to the computer. Either she was working on a book, or she had some other project that required her to work late into the night. Bennis being Bennis, even if she had nothing to do, she would find something that required her to stay up most of the night. Gregor put on socks and shoes and thought about leaving her a note. He walked out of the bedroom without doing it because he couldn’t think of a thing to say. It was too bad he hadn’t been willing to let Bennis buy him that leather jacket she saw at Brooks Brothers. His long coat felt much too formal. The leather jacket, though, had cost almost as much as a small car. He had no idea how people could buy things like that without feeling guilty.

  Going downstairs, he stopped on the first floor at old George Tekemanian’s apartment and knocked, but there was no answer. Old George was probably already down at the Ararat. Gregor went out onto the stoop and looked around. His own building was just about decorated, but Donna’s town house was wrapped solidly in red and white crepe paper and hearts. The lights were on in front of the church. Tibor wouldn’t turn them off until he got back from breakfast. If Tibor wasn’t back from breakfast, Gregor couldn’t be too late.

  Gregor went down the block to the Ararat. There was a newspaper dispenser on the street next to Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Foods. He stopped there and got a copy of the Inquirer , which had managed to get a picture of last night’s riot into print, although not the one of the man burning up. He winced a little and folded the paper under his arm. Ohanian’s was open, to the extent that Mary Ohanian was running the cash register in case anybody needed to pick up gum or lottery tickets on the way to work. Gregor sometimes thought Armenians were bigger gamblers than anybody in the world except the Hong Kong Chinese, but that might just have been his skewed perception from living on the street. He went past Ohanian’s to the Ararat and inside. Old George Tekemanian and Tibor were sitting together in the long booth built into the wall next to the window, doing something with sock balls.

  Gregor waved to Linda Melajian and went to sit down. “What’s that?” he asked them. “Is that new? You had another machine for making sock balls, didn’t you?”

  “This is new, yes,” old George Tekemanian said. “From my nephew Martin. I had another one he gave me, but this one is digital.”

  “A digital machine for making sock balls?”

  “You can decide which direction to ball them in,” Tibor said, “and you can do more than one kind of ball. And you can secure them with a plastic thing.”

  “Why would you want to?” Gregor asked.

  Old George Tekemanian shook his head. “Krekor, Krekor. If the people who made these things asked themselves that question, they would never make anything. I like this one because when you make the sock ball you can shoot it out. Like this.”

  Old George Tekemanian flicked a switch. A sock ball came roaring out of the end of the little machine and hit Linda Melajian in the leg, making her jump. Coffee flew up out of the coffeepot and landed on her shoes.

  “You do that again, I’m going to pour coffee on your head,” she said when she got to the table. “That’s the third time he’s got me today. You want some actual breakfast, Gregor, or do you just want to stick with coffee?”

  “Two eggs sunny-side up. Side of sausage. Side of hash browns. Toast.”

  “You sure you don’t want the fruit plate?” Linda said.

  “Yes,” Gregor told her, “I’m sure. And I’m equally sure I don’t want you writing Bennis a note with the calorie and cholesterol counts for my breakfast. What’s with the two of you, anyway? I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “We’re just trying to stop you from having a heart attack before your time.” Linda turned one of the coffee cups over and poured it full. “Never mind us,” she said. “You know what women are like. We were put here by God to spoil every man’s fun.”

  “I take it you broke up with what’s-his-name,” Gregor said.

  Linda made a face. “I don’t break up with men anymore. I just spend the first date figuring out how they’re going to screw me up. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She marched off. Tibor shook his head. “I don’t like it when they get that way,” he said. “You know, with the men thing. They’re never in a very good mood.”

  Gregor pushed a little pile of sock balls down the table to old George and opened his paper. He should have turned on the news or logged on to the Internet. Their information would be much more recent, and probably much more complete. It was all well and good to say that we should do everything we can to preserve our daily newspapers, but the fact remained that “news” was what was new, and the faster you coul
d get it to the public, the more successful you would be. The television stations were faster, that was all. In a few years, the Internet would be faster still. Gregor looked through the first four paragraphs of the story, decided that there was nothing egregiously wrong in any of them, and pushed the paper away.

  Tibor picked it up. “I saw it on the television last night, Krekor,” he said. “They interrupted the Rosie O’Donnell Show to have the bulletin. It was a disgraceful thing, don’t you think? And you were there.”

  “I was there to see a dead body that had nothing to do with the riot,” Gregor said, “except that it did, except that I could never figure out what. Do you know this man, this Roy Phipps?”

  “I’ve met him,” Tibor said cautiously.

  “And?”

  Tibor shrugged. “He’s not popular with the clergy in Philadelphia, Krekor. They see him as an interloper, coming here from out of state with—what’s the word?—with attitudes that do not fit here. But he’s not what the papers and the television stations make him out to be. He’s not stupid.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I’d heard he wasn’t.”

  “But he’s a very bad thing,” Tibor said. “He gives all of religion a bad name. He gives all of Christianity a bad name. There are people out there who know nothing but what they see on television. What are they going to think when they see a man like that?”

  Gregor took a long sip of coffee. It was so hot it nearly scalded his throat. “According to John Jackman, Phipps and his people decided to demonstrate last night after word got out that there had been another murder by arsenic in the neighborhood. The woman who was murdered was Sister Harriet Garrity. Was that on the news last night, too?”

  “Yes,” Tibor and old George Tekemanian said at once.

  Old George Tekemanian’s nephew Martin had a wife who had made it a rule that old George was not allowed to watch anything on television that was too “exciting.” Old George was not paying any attention to her unless she was in the room with him and able to get hold of the remote. Gregor let it pass.