True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  He crossed the street to St Stephen’s and stood for a moment at its front gate, resting his hand for a moment on the wrought-iron railing. Two men came out together and looked him over as they passed, but if they recognized him, they didn’t say anything. Roy went up the walk and into the church, which reminded him eerily of the Princeton University chapel—but then, that made sense, because that was “affiliated” with the Episcopal Church, too. He went through the foyer and into the church and saw that, unlike St. Anselm’s, there were no homeless people here—but then, he thought, there wouldn’t be. It was one of the first things he had ever known about religion, and he had known it all the way back in West Virginia, when he was barely old enough to talk. Churches came and went, but the Episcopal Church was now and always would be the Church of the people who had the most money.

  He was just thinking that he ought to go home—he had no idea what he was doing here—when he felt someone at his back and knew, with that same sense that had told him about the murder at St. Anselm’s, who it was. At that moment, he was looking at the gold latticework that framed a picture that had been left on the marble altar, and for a moment he went on looking at it, although he couldn’t make out what the picture was about. Then he straightened his back a little and turned, to see Dan Burdock standing behind him.

  “I never understood where Episcopalians got the money for all that gold,” he said pleasantly. “Even in West Virginia, where I grew up, the Episcopalian church was full of gold. And it wasn’t as if anybody there had anything like money.”

  “Do you want to tell me what you’re doing here?” Dan Burdock asked. “Are you trying to start another riot?”

  “I’m standing in the middle of a church, admiring its altar. I don’t see how that could start a riot. Among normal people.”

  “From what I remember, it wasn’t my thoroughly normal people who started the riot the last time.”

  Roy swung his head back in the direction of the altar. “No,” he said. “That’s true enough, and on camera, so I won’t bother to deny it. On the other hand, the blame for the escalation is entirely on you.”

  “What are you doing here?” Dan Burdock asked again. “What could you possibly hope to accomplish? I’ve got one person dead myself and across the street—”

  “The priest died. Yes, I know. We hear everything down the block, you know. We’re not exactly in Siberia. Tell me, was it the same thing? Was it arsenic?”

  “They’ll have to wait for the autopsy.”

  “They must have a guess,” Roy said. “I sent Fred down to find out, but you’ve met Fred. He isn’t exactly a superspy.”

  “Yes,” Dan said. “They think it’s arsenic. I haven’t actually been over there. I don’t exactly have the nerve for that. Or the bad taste—”

  “Oh, let’s not get started on my bad taste.”

  “Why not? Why not, Roy? You’ve chosen to make a vocation out of it, why not talk about it?”

  “Why don’t you just come out and say it? Why don’t you just tell everybody that you’re gay? Everybody knows it anyway. Your bishop must know it, by now. It’s the cowardice I can’t stand. It was the cowardice I couldn’t stand at Princeton.”

  “I thought it was the prep school you couldn’t stand at Princeton.”

  The pews in this church were made of carved and polished wood, with swirling ridges on the ends of them. Roy sat down on the arm of the one just behind him. He had entered the little Episcopalian church in Millard’s Corner only once or twice, and been suitably impressed, but it had been nothing like this—or, for that matter, like the college chapels at Princeton and Yale and all the other places he had been since. He knew something about the Gothic aesthetic, about the idea that the house of God ought to reflect the glory of God, but he could never get used to it. In his mind, Christianity would always be a religion of the disenfranchised—of what, in his childhood, would have been called the deserving poor.

  “I won’t go away,” he said finally. “Oh, I’ll go away now, in a bit. I’ve got work to do, and it’s getting late. But I’m not going to disappear from down the block, and I’m not going to fall off the face of the earth. I’ll be here as long as you’re here. I’ll move to wherever you decide to go next. As long as you stay in the ministry, I’ll be here.”

  “Would you disappear if I left the priesthood?”

  “But you won’t leave the priesthood,” Roy said. “You know that, and I know that. And your bishop won’t throw you out. Oh, you’d be a little safer if you were in Newark with Spong, but not a great deal safer. You’re safe enough. So you won’t leave, and I won’t leave, and I won’t be quiet about what I see going on here. With the men. With you. Even if you’re more discreet about it than most.”

  “Roy, you could have taped every second of my sex life for the last twenty years, and it would be suitable viewing on Sesame Street.”

  “Really? How very intelligent of you. But then, you were always very intelligent. Not as intelligent as some other people, but very intelligent.” Roy got up off the pew’s arm. “I came to look around, because I hadn’t been in here before. I don’t know why not. I should have come in and watched you on Sunday one week, but I never did. Have you ever come to watch me?”

  “You know I haven’t.”

  “But you must have seen me, once or twice, at least in clips. I think they’ve broadcast me giving sermons a million times by now. They don’t broadcast the whole sermon, and they’re always trying to find the three seconds out of two hours when I look like I might be sweating, but they do broadcast me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Dan said.

  Roy stood up and brushed lint off his jacket. It was probably true. Dan probably didn’t understand what he was getting at. On the other hand, as much as he would like to be understood, he had what he had come here to get, and there was no reason for him not to leave. He brushed lint off the arm of his jacket and wondered what it meant, that Dan was wearing a clerical collar and he was not. Really, it was worse than that. Dan was wearing one of those agonizingly tacky black polyester shirts meant to take a clerical collar, the kind you bought out of a catalogue of clergy supplies, and Roy was wearing his best Brooks Brothers camel hair. Roy thought suddenly of D. James Kennedy, with his Coral Ridge Ministries, always dressed in academic robes to preach. Maybe it was just a kind of social anxiety. When you were not to the manner born, you had to rely on costumes.

  “What’s the matter now?” Dan asked.

  Roy stuck his hands in his pockets. “Nothing is the matter. I wanted to see your church. I’ve seen your church.”

  “Everybody is welcome in this church,” Dan said.

  “Something tells me that I wouldn’t be, if the men going back and forth around here realized who I was.”

  “They realize who you are.”

  Since this was possibly true, Roy let it go. He stretched a little and pivoted, taking in the choir loft, the altar, the tall stained-glass windows that lined both of the long sidewalls. It was a beautiful church. He wouldn’t have expected anything else.

  “Well,” he said, “I think that we’ve carried this as far as it can go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Roy backed away, then turned around and went as slowly as he could out the doors to the foyer and out the doors there to the walk that led to the street. Men were still coming in and out, and he thought that Dan might be right. They might know who he was, and just be too polite, too circumspect, too God-damned private school to do anything about it. He wondered if they looked at him after he had walked past, but he knew that the one thing he couldn’t do was to turn around to check. He went all the way onto the sidewalk and turned toward home without a backwards glance. He looked at St. Anselm’s and saw that girl who worked with the homeless coming out the front doors and half-running to the corner. If he had had any sex drive at all, he would have wanted something like that girl to take to
bed.

  What he wanted instead was more coffee, and as he started down the street he began to hurry, just a little, so that he would be closer to getting it.

  3

  If Mary McAllister had been at the church right after Father Healy’s body was discovered, or even heard about the death anytime in the next two hours, she would have been able to talk to Gregor Demarkian directly. Instead, she had had an evening class and then a quick run to the library. Lately, it seemed as if she never had the materials she needed to do what she needed to do. Then she had been in a hurry, because she was late for the soup kitchen and also for the boxes she was supposed to pick up at St. Anselm’s. If she had listened to an ordinary radio station on the drive over, she would have heard all about it. Instead, she’d tuned in to the station that played chant and medieval motets. She had no idea where they broadcast from, but wherever it was seemed to have no news bureau at all. It wasn’t until she had pulled into the parking lot at St. Anselm’s and seen all the strange lights in the courtyard that she’d realized something was wrong. It wasn’t until she’d found Sister Scholastica, looking as if she’d been drenched and wrung out in her habit, that she’d known what was wrong. Then, for a while, she’d simply behaved like a fool. It wasn’t that she had been inordinately fond of Father Healy. As priests went, he hadn’t been too bad, but he hadn’t inspired her in the way that the Pope did, or made her feel as if she were in the presence of holiness, the way Father Dougan at the soup kitchen did. He was just a nice, ordinary, harmless man who meant well and tried to do good. Maybe that was why his death came as such a shock. She could almost understand somebody killing Sister Harriet Garrity. She had had urges to do that herself. Then, without realizing it, she had been bracketing away the deaths of Bernadette Kelly and Scott Boardman by telling herself they were probably the work of somebody deranged, like a psychopath. But this seemed like such an … ordinary … murder, so sort of matter-of-fact, as if whoever had done it had killed in the same spirit in which he got himself breakfast or decided to change the channel on his television set.

  Gregor Demarkian and the two police detectives were already gone by the time Mary got to St. Anselm’s. Mary didn’t really want to talk to the police detectives, because it would seem too much like something official. A deposition. A witness report. Gregor Demarkian seemed safer. Mary had seen enough of him on the news and in the papers to feel as if she almost knew him. His best friend was a priest, that was one thing. The woman he went out with was the one who wrote the fantasy novels about good and evil that one of Mary’s English professors at St. Joe’s had said had “a very Catholic intellectual foundation,” whatever that was supposed to mean. None of it meant anything, except that she would be more comfortable talking to Demarkian than to the police, and she knew where to find Demarkian. She called the soup kitchen and told them she would be late with the boxes. Then she put the boxes in the back of the van as fast as she could and crossed the street to St. Stephen’s. Just as she was coming out St. Anselm’s front door she saw that man—Roy Phipps; for a second she hadn’t been able to remember his name—coming out of St. Stephen’s. He looked at her briefly but didn’t register what he saw, and she looked away. It was Mary McAllister’s personal opinion that Roy Phipps was an agent of the devil himself, determined to make all Christians look like evil fanatics and make sure nobody who wasn’t one would ever want to be one, but this didn’t seem to be the best place or the best time to have it out with him.

  She went into St. Stephen’s front door and looked around. Nobody was there that she knew. She went around to the back and into the annex. Most of the office doors were open, but the offices were empty. She went around to the back of the church again and looked into the small reading room behind the sacristy, and there he was, sitting with his legs propped up on an ottoman, reading David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes.

  “There you are,” she said. “I was afraid you’d left without me.”

  “I can’t leave without you.” Chickie put his book down in his lap. “You’re the only one who can get me in and out of a car. I’m in no shape to take a taxi by myself.”

  “Where’s Aaron?”

  “Marc’s play opened tonight. It ought to be just about over by now. There’s going to be a party to wait for the notices. We’re invited, if you want to go.” Chickie’s head shot up. “I don’t think I meant that the way it sounded.”

  “I know the way you meant it,” Mary said. “Oh, rats. We really need Aaron.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we have to talk to Mr. Demarkian, that’s why. And Aaron is the one who figured it out. He’ll be able to explain it better than we will.”

  Chickie fingered the back of his book. “Don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions here? Gregor Demarkian is a professional. The police are professionals. If they really need us, they’ll come and find us.”

  Mary marched over to Chickie’s chair and put her hands on its arms. She was leaning all the way over him, with her face only inches from his, and she was breathing hard.

  “Look,” she said. “I know it’s an act. The swish thing you do. And I know you’ve got good reason to do it, even if you haven’t told me what it is, but I believe you, and mostly I’m okay with it, but I’m not now. Okay, Chickie? I can’t handle it now. Do you know Father Healy is dead?”

  “Yes,” Chickie said. “Everybody in Philadelphia knows Father Healy is dead.”

  Mary retreated to a standing position. “I didn’t know he was dead. I was in class and in the library, and then I was listening to that station that makes you so crazy. But you must see it, don’t you? What Aaron found out, about the extra name, that Scott knew about. I’m not crazy, you know, I’m really not. It must have something to do with all this.”

  “But even if it does, Mary, what are we supposed to do about it? Even Aaron isn’t sure he knows what it means, and I don’t understand it any better than I understand Swahili. In fact, considering some of the situations I’ve gotten myself into over the years, I probably understand Swahili better.”

  “Don’t get started on that sort of thing, either. I get nightmares that you’re going to pick up AIDS.”

  “I do try to be somewhat more careful than that. My point, however, stands. We don’t have anything to say to Gregor Demarkian. Or to the police. We don’t know what we’re talking about.”

  “Did Aaron make copies of those sheets?”

  “Dozens of them. They’re all over the place. According to Aaron, you can’t be killed for what you know if everybody else knows it, too.”

  “Good,” Mary said. “What we’ll do is get some of the copies and take them out to that place Demarkian lives. Cavanaugh Street. I can find it on a map. And then we’ll just tell him the truth. About Aaron finding the stuff on Scott’s computer. And like that.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know what. That’s what Mr. Demarkian is supposed to know.”

  “Has it occurred to you that Aaron might not be overjoyed to be turned in to the police? I don’t know what his life is like at the moment, but he may have issues—”

  “Like what?”

  “Like an apartment full of marijuana.”

  “Oh.” Mary always forgot that people like Aaron and Chickie lived lives very different from hers. They seemed—Chickie, especially, seemed—so close to her on the emotional level, she was never prepared to hear that they did things that horrified her even to think about. The sex, she didn’t think about. It was easier that way.

  “I know,” she said. “Aaron has a cell phone, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you must have the number, or Father Burdock must—”

  “Dan isn’t here. We had a visit from Reverend Hell Incarnate down the road.”

  “I know. I saw him leave. Why does that mean that Father Burdock isn’t here?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. He was upset. He came through here and said he’d be out for a while.
Why do you want Dan?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary said. “Somebody in authority, maybe. Somebody official. It doesn’t matter. You call Aaron and tell him what we’re going to do, and he can meet us at Cavanaugh Street or he can not and wait to talk to Mr. Demarkian tomorrow and if his apartment really is full of marijuana, he can flush it down the toilet or give it to the neighbors. I’ll call Mr. Demarkian and tell him we’re coming.”

  “Is he listed?’

  “On the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, two days ago. There’s a contact number for anybody wanting to reach him with information. Come on. If we hurry, I’ll be able to get this all done in time for me to pick up the homeless people to bring them to the soup kitchen tomorrow morning. Which reminds me. Sometime on this trip, we have to drop off the boxes I’ve got in the back of the van. Go on, go call Aaron, and I’ll call Demarkian.”

  “I think you’re insane,” Chickie said.

  “I’m not insane.” Mary swept the hair away from her face and wound it into a knot around her hand. She used the other hand to search around in her pockets for an elastic band, found one, and tied her hair back. She was breathless and exhilarated at once, as if she had taken some kind of drug. “Hurry up,” she said. “I’ll go down to Aaron’s office and see if I can find those copies. I’ll be back in a minute. You call Aaron.”

  “May I tell him that I think you’re insane?”

  “Tell him anything you want. Just make sure he knows what’s going on. And hurry.”

  Mary chugged out of the little room and back across to the annex, moving as fast as she ever did when one of the homeless people was losing control. She got to Aaron’s office without coming close to getting out of breath. The copies were stacked up on his desk in a little pile, collated. She took three sets and folded them into a square that would fit into her jeans. Then she took the phone and punched in for a line. She didn’t really have the number they’d printed in the Inquirer for Gregor Demarkian. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to keep it. She was just sure that if there was a number in the newspaper, there would be one listed in the directory. She got Aaron’s phone book from off the bookshelf and looked up Demarkian. The number was there.