True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said suddenly. “With the doctor, I mean. I don’t understand why you do. It doesn’t help you any. And it’s not natural.”

  “Do what?” Chickie said innocently.

  “Do that flaming-queen act,” Mary said, moving back a little. When she was sure he could stand on his own, she left him, and went around his back to slide the van door shut behind him. “You know by now the effect it has on people. They stop taking you seriously. And it’s not as if it’s natural. You’re not really like that at all.”

  “Not really like what, Mary? Not really gay?”

  “Not really affected.”

  “Some people are like that,” Chickie said. “Some people really can’t help it. They’re like that all the time. Why should people hate them for it?”

  “I didn’t say people should hate them for it. I said it didn’t make any sense for you to behave that way when it wasn’t natural for you. Don’t you want people to like you for yourself?”

  “Yes,” Chickie said. “That’s exactly what I want. Do you understand that?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m gay, Mary. I don’t see why people shouldn’t know it. I don’t see why I shouldn’t act gay.”

  “Aaron is gay. People know it. It has nothing to do with fluttering your hands and sashaying when you walk.”

  “Aaron can pass.”

  “Aaron doesn’t pass, even if he can,” Mary said firmly,

  “and you don’t have to either. Just be yourself. That’s all I’m asking you. Especially with health insurance as bad as yours is. You’re very lucky that that doctor saw the riot on television and really hated Roy Phipps. It saved you a couple of thousand dollars.”

  “It doesn’t look like there was a riot here last night, does it?” Chickie asked. “The street is absolutely clean. I can’t even see lights down there at the hellhole. Do you suppose they’ve moved out?”

  “We’ve none of us got that kind of luck.”

  “No,” Chickie agreed. “We don’t. Do you mind if I lean on your arm a bit? I’m still not feeling good about standing up.”

  Mary let him lean. It seemed to her that she had been letting him lean for a long time now, and that it was one of the few things that she still enjoyed, in this odd tangle of discontent that she had become locked in. The rain made the sidewalk tricky, but they went slowly, around to the side of the church and into the door of the annex—where, Mary suddenly remembered, Scott Boardman had died. Or had started dying. Convulsions and vomiting. She thought of Sister Harriet Garrity and frowned a little, because even though the connections between the deaths were now very clear, there was still something that seemed off about it all. At the door, she left Chickie standing on his own and opened up. The walls of the annex were lined with pictures, just like the walls of the basement over at St. Anselm’s, but here the pictures were simple drawings of the Anglican flag and the symbols of Easter, rather than the productions of Sunday school children trying to express what they felt about the star of Bethlehem.

  “Dan?” Chickie called out.

  “He’s not here,” Aaron called back. A door opened down the hall and Aaron came out, dressed in good slacks and a good sports jacket and a black sweatshirt. “You’re later than we thought you would be. He had to go out. How are you?”

  “Prostrate, my dear, just prostrate. You have no idea—”

  “He has four broken ribs,” Mary said straightforwardly. “And a big Ace bandage around his middle. And he finds it difficult to walk. He’s supposed to take painkillers.”

  “Oh, he must love that,” Aaron said.

  “I’d love a chair,” Chickie said.

  Aaron waved them in the direction of the office he’d come out of, and they followed him there. Mary looked around with a certain amount of curiosity. She had been over here before, but she’d never paid much attention to the place. Offices, after all, were offices. Now it seemed odd to her that the walls were so bare and so clean. In the offices at St. Anselm’s, there was stuff everywhere. There were even books in stacks on the floor.

  “So,” Aaron said, “I thought that as long as I had the afternoon free, I’d try to tidy up Scott’s files, and it’s impossible. None of it makes any sense. You don’t happen to remember somebody named John Strodever, do you?”

  “Of course I do,” Chickie said.

  Mary helped Chickie ease down in the only chair other than the one next to the computer, that Aaron was using. It was not a good chair. It swiveled.

  “You ought to remember him, too,” Mary said. “He was the man who started the lawsuit. You know. Against the archdiocese. Because of the priests who, uh—”

  “We get the picture,” Chickie said quickly. “Mary’s right. He was the first one. Later, there were a whole slew of men coming forward, but Strodever’s the one who started it.”

  “Is he gay?” Aaron asked.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Chickie said. “Why would I know that? How could you possibly expect me to know that?”

  “Look at this.” Aaron tapped the computer screen, and Mary saw Chickie give him a withering look. Of course, Chickie had just sat down. His ribs were broken. He didn’t want to get up again.

  Mary went around the side of the desk herself instead, and looked at Aaron’s computer screen. She seemed to be looking at the photograph of a bill of some kind, rather than an ordinary computer document.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “It’s a memo,” Aaron said. “It’s been scanned into the computer. Look. September 9. You see that?”

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “Now watch this.” Aaron tapped at the keyboard. Mary saw the screen blink and throw up what seemed to be the same scanned memo. “What’s this?” Aaron asked.

  “It’s the same memo,” Mary said.

  “You think so? Watch this. Let’s go back to number one.” He went back to number one. “Now,” he said. “Read the heading. After ‘subject.’”

  “‘Payment schedule in the settlement of the case of John Strodever, et al. vs. the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.’” Mary read.

  “Okay,” Aaron said. “Read the next line.”

  “‘Plaintiffs,’” Mary read. “‘John Thomas Strodever, Michael Charles Wheelan, Stuart Carl Dodd, Stephen Thomas Roderick.’”

  “Okay,” Aaron said. “Now for number two.”

  “‘John Thomas Strodever,’” Mary read obediently. “‘Michael Charles Wheelan, Mark Henry O’Mara’—wait.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Aaron said triumphantly. “Wait.”

  “There’s an extra name,” Mary said. “Is it just the one?”

  “Just the one,” Aaron said. “Why do you think that is?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” Chickie said. “One of the documents was a draft, that’s all, and they left somebody out or put somebody in that they shouldn’t have, so they rewrote it.”

  “If that’s all it was, why would Scott have scanned them into the computer? And where did he get them? How could he get them?” Aaron shook his head. “It isn’t like Scott was part of the lawsuit. And I don’t know any of these names. I don’t think it’s plausible that he was trying to look after somebody he didn’t know.”

  Chickie shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “It’s no problem how he got them, for God’s sake. Scott was a book and publications designer. He worked for all sorts of people. He did year-end reports for companies, and for law firms, too, when they put out those big glossy booklet things they like to to advertise how wonderful they are. Where is the memo from? It’s a law firm, isn’t it?”

  “Brady, Marquis and Holden,” Mary said.

  “A big law firm,” Chickie said with satisfaction.

  “Well, all right,” Aaron said. “Let’s say he was designing something at this law firm and he ran across these documents, that still doesn’t explain why he scanned them. And it must have taken a bit of work, too, because he must have either snuck them out
of the law firm and then snuck them back in, or else he scanned them onto a disk there and then brought them here and loaded them—”

  “Why would he have had to sneak them back in?” Mary asked. “Why not just take them and throw them out?”

  “Why not just take them and keep them, then?” Aaron said. “Why bother to scan them at all? The only point to that is that he couldn’t keep the originals of the documents.”

  “You’re both turning this into James Bond, and there’s no reason to,” Chickie said. “So Scott was nosy. A lot of people are nosy. I’m nosy.”

  “Scott was murdered,” Aaron pointed out.

  Chickie shifted in his chair again. Mary bent down and looked at the document on the screen. It was a perfectly ordinary document. It was dated. It was on letterhead memo paper. She shook her head.

  “Maybe,” she said, “we ought to tell the police about this. Or that Mr. Demarkian. I mean, if Scott was murdered because of this—why would he be murdered because of this? Chickie’s right. It could be just two drafts and one draft was wrong so the other one was written. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  Aaron clicked at the keyboard again, and the printer began to whir. “I’m going to make copies of both of them, just in case. Lots of copies. And I’m going to leave them all over the place. Then I’m going to have a good long talk with Dan. We probably should go to the police, but I want to know what we’re going to say before we do it.”

  Mary backed away and went to where Chickie was sitting. He was looking pained and very tired. She thought it might have been a mistake to bring him out here, even though he had wanted very much to come.

  “Maybe you should go someplace and lie down,” she told him. “You look exhausted. And you’re not well, even if you think you are.”

  “No, no,” Chickie said. “I’ll sleep in a pew. I want to be at that service. In case we get picketed.”

  “We won’t get picketed,” Aaron said confidently. “We’ve got an army of police coming down to cordon us off. And he wouldn’t try anything so soon after last night anyway. He’s a smart asshole. He knows when not to push his luck.”

  “I’d like to push his luck,” Chickie said. “I used to think he was gay and in the closet, but I’ve changed my mind. Nobody that foul could ever be gay.”

  “I think I’d better get back to school before I don’t have any time to study at all,” Mary said. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right? Do you want me to come back and get you and take you home?”

  “In the van with the homeless people?” Chickie said.

  “Behave,” Mary told him. Then she kissed him on the top of the head, waved good-bye to Aaron, and left.

  Out in the parking lot, she saw that she had left the van’s passenger side door open. She did the sensible thing of checking through the backseats to make sure she hadn’t picked up a mugger or a rapist, then she climbed in behind the wheel and started up. She wondered if Chickie really did mind being in the van with the homeless people, and then thought that most people would. They smelled, and they could be frightening. She pulled the van out onto the street and headed back across town to St. Joe’s.

  There was a blue crystal rosary hanging from the back of her rearview mirror. It had a Miraculous Medal at the place where the long strand and the short strand were held together, and the Medal glinted every time she passed under another streetlamp. By the time she was four blocks away from St. Stephen’s and St. Anselm’s, there had begun to seem something eerie about that, as if she was receiving messages in a form of Morse code.

  If she was, she thought, they were coming through in a language she didn’t understand, and maybe didn’t want to.

  Then she turned her mind firmly in the direction of Aaron and Scott Boardman’s scanned documents, and thought that she would get in touch with Gregor Demarkian about them as soon as she had a minute to spare.

  3

  At the chancery, Dan Burdock had come and gone, and the tea and coffee things had already been cleared up, when the call from Rome came in. The Cardinal Archbishop had been expecting it for hours—he had, after all, made a call to Rome himself, earlier in the day—but the fact that he hadn’t gotten it hadn’t stopped him from doing what he had just done. He tried to think of what could have stopped him, and decided that the only thing would have been a call from His Holiness himself. Barring, of course, a direct communication from the Almighty. The Cardinal Archbishop did not have direct communications from the Almighty. He had had them, once, very early in his years as a priest, but the lines from heaven had been silent for decades. Some men who experienced that silence became mired in aridity and lost their faith. The Cardinal Archbishop knew that this was just adulthood. When you were young, you heard God talk because you needed it, the way children needed candy, and the Cardinal Archbishop was convinced that children actually needed candy. Once you were grown you were expected to take responsibility for yourself and to worry about your teeth. He was, he thought, almost infinitely tired. It surprised him to remember how exhilarated he had been when he had been told he would be sent here as Archbishop, and made a Cardinal.

  There was a knock on the door. The Cardinal Archbishop called out, and the door opened to let Father Doheny in.

  “It’s Rome,” Father Doheny said. “It’s Ratzinger himself. Not even a secretary.”

  “Well,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “at least they’re still answering my phone calls. How does His Eminence sound?”

  “He sounds the way he always sounds. Like God left something out of his voice. Are you sure you want to do this? You’re not obliged to, you know. Bishops act on their own all the time. They always have. And take the consequences later.”

  “Maybe I didn’t want to take the consequences later. No, never mind, Father. I’m only very tired. And yes, I’m sure I want to do this. I suppose I want to give them a chance to forbid me. Just to see if they would do it.”

  “They won’t do it. They can’t do it. You know that.”

  “Yes, I do know that. All right, Father, why don’t you transfer the call in here, and I’ll talk with His Eminence the Director of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. I think it had more of a ring to it when we were calling it the Holy and Roman Inqusition.”

  “People kept getting it confused with the Spanish Inquisition. They thought we burned heretics at the stake in caverns in the Vatican. Or something.”

  The Cardinal Archbishop thought it was more likely to be “something,” but he took Father Doheny’s point. People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half. Father Doheny left the room and closed the door behind him. The Cardinal Archbishop got up and went around to his desk. It was odd the way things worked out. He had been a defender of the faith all his life. He believed in a Catholic Church united to Rome, and speaking in one voice with Rome. He was an almost infamous purveyor of all things religiously conservative: the ban on birth control; the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman; the idea that abortion was always and everywhere murder. He could be counted on to approve the Tridentine Mass in any parish that wanted one. He could be found at the head of any pro-life rally put together by a Catholic organization in the city of Philadelphia. And yet, here he was—and no matter how hard and long he thought about it, he really couldn’t see how he could be anywhere else.

  The phone on his desk beeped mildly. You couldn’t say it rang. The Cardinal Archbishop stared at it for a moment, and while he did it beeped again. When he tried to imagine Ratzinger, what he saw was a tall, thin, ascetic-looking man with an emotional temperature far too low. He was aware that that was exactly how most people imagined him. The phone beeped a third time, and the Cardinal Archbishop leaned forward to pick it up.

  Cardinal Ratzinger spoke English, but the Cardinal Archbishop didn’t want to conduct this conversation in English. For one thing, he didn’t want to be overheard. For another, he didn’t want to be misunderstood.

&
nbsp; “Guten abend, mein Herr,” he said, and then he heard Ratzinger’s voice, cool and deep, begin to stream out in its native German.

  At the last moment, he began to wonder if he should have told Ratzinger’s secretary that his mind was made up beyond the possibility of changing, but then he decided that it would have been beside the point.

  SIX

  1

  Gregor Demarkian had never wanted to be a private detective. Even being a consultant had, at the beginning, seemed like more of a commitment than he would be able to handle. These days, he didn’t know what to call himself. He still wasn’t set up the way a business should be, even though what he did was certainly a kind of business. Bennis had tried to show him how to use Quicken to keep books and prepare bills to be sent when his work was finished. He had listened politely to everything she had had to say and then gone back to playing Free Cell as soon as she was out of the room. Even Tibor was better at this sort of thing than he was. Bennis had shown him how to keep books for the church, and he had followed directions and kept them. Gregor hated to admit it, but he would rather not be paid at all than go through the complicated procedure of sending bills and keeping records for tax purposes. He reminded himself, often, that he had more than enough money for his needs and no desires that could be called particularly expensive. He would have liked to have bought a coffee machine, but the fact that he hadn’t had nothing to do with what one cost. It was more a matter of not being able to understand the choices, and being afraid that if he bought the wrong one, he’d be condemned to drinking cappuccino forever.

  Today it was the day before Valentine’s Day, and he had a list of things to do. At the top of it was buying a card and a big, gaudy box of chocolates for Bennis. Bennis liked boxes with ribbons and bows on them, as ridiculously ostentatious as possible. Bennis was out. If he got going fairly soon, he ought to be able to do some shopping without her knowing about it and without Garry Mansfield and Lou Emiliani jumping down his throat, hot on the heels of a new theory. Bennis was always nudging him to get a cell phone, but Gregor knew better. A cell phone meant he would never be left in peace.