True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “I know who she is,” he said. “I’ve seen her around. I thought she was a Catholic. She’s always going in and out of St. Anselm’s.”

  “She was there on the afternoon the nun died. She was there on the afternoon the priest died, too.”

  “Interesting.”

  “My deacon thinks it’s all of a piece. Devil worship is devil worship. Atheists worship the devil, and so do Roman Catholics.”

  “Atheists don’t worship the devil,” Dan said.

  “And Roman Catholics do?”

  Over at the town house, another woman had come out. It took Dan a moment to place her, because she was wearing a habit and habits tended to make all the women who wore them look alike, but in a moment he saw that she was Sister Scholastica, who had come after Christmas to take over the running of the school. She went to the police car where Edith Lawton was now sitting and leaned through the door to talk to her. A police officer put a hand on her arm, and she shook him off. He didn’t insist.

  “So,” Dan said, “this is it. The murders are solved. Don’t you think so? They seem to be arresting her.”

  “They brought a man out of her house on a stretcher.”

  “They didn’t bring him out in a body bag. He wasn’t dead. What does he have to do with the murders?”

  “I would think he had something more to do with her arrest.”

  Dan swung back, but the nun was standing away from the police car now, and the police car’s door was closed. As he watched, the car started up and pulled away from the curb. It went up the street in the direction of the churches and turned right at the corner when it got to them. The ambulance pulled away from the curb, too, and as it picked up speed on the street it started its siren. Dan flinched.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “I’ve got to get back,” Roy said. “Stay glued to your television set. Maybe you’ll hear the news that the case has been solved.”

  “Maybe I’ll just go over there and ask Demarkian to his face,” Dan said, even though he no longer had any idea where Gregor Demarkian was. He’d gone up the street, and Dan hadn’t seen him come back down. Dan put his hands in his pockets and felt the roll of soft mints sitting there. He took it out and handed it across to Roy.

  “Would you like one?” he asked politely.

  Roy reached for a mint out of the top of the tube without taking the tube out of Dan’s hand and said, “What do you see in these things? They might as well be made of plastic.”

  “‘They’re also very easy to fill with arsenic,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I don’t think I’d eat one if I were you. The experience is not likely to be pleasant.”

  SEVEN

  1

  Gregor would have gone home, if he could have. The next several hours were inevitably ones of excruciating boredom, at least for the police and for the people like him, who had seen men arrested and booked too many times to find the process interesting. Maybe Dan Burdock found the process interesting, but it was difficult to tell. From the first, when Gregor’s hand had come down on his wrist to prevent him from giving Roy Phipps one of his doctored soft mints, he had been carefully and meticulously blank. It was as if he had read far too many of those books where the master criminal manages to escape punishment for the almost-perfect crime by simply keeping his mouth shut. What Dan Burdock expected to do about the fact that he had been caught holding the doctored soft mint in his hand, Gregor didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t realize that that, in itself, was a punishable crime—or rather that trying to hand it to Roy Phipps was. Gregor was sure, though, that the cases brought against him would be more solid than that. There might be no way to charge and convict him for the death of Harriet Garrity, but there would be no problem at all in the death of Scott Boardman, and they only needed one. He really ought to go home, Gregor told himself. He had nothing to do here, and if Garry and Lou wanted the particulars, they could always get them over the phone at a decent hour of the morning. In all the fuss and nonsense, the day was already sliding into night again. There was something about this case that seemed to cause the hour always to be close to dark. If he could go home, he could lie on his couch and plug away at the laptop Bennis let him use when he wanted to get on the Internet without sitting at a desk. Gregor really hated the Internet, but he wanted to hit the newsgroups and see who Tibor was arguing with now.

  Unfortunately, Garry and Lou had no intention of allowing him to go home. They had arrested Dan Burdock on his sayso, and they expected him to stick around long enough to let them know they hadn’t done the wrong thing.

  “All we need is to make a wrong arrest on a priest,” Lou Emiliani said. “Even an Episcopalian priest. And a gay-rights priest. We’d get crucified.”

  Gregor had been able to see his point. He had taken up residence in a small conference room on the precinct’s first floor, doing crossword puzzles, until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Then he had found a phone and tried to call Bennis, who wasn’t home.

  “Her brother is here and they have gone out to a restaurant for dinner,” Tibor said, when Gregor finally got hold of him. Gregor could hear the clicking in the background that said Tibor was on the computer again. Sometimes he wondered if Tibor thought God was on-line. “They have not gone to the Ararat,” Tibor said, “because Bennis wanted to be private. I do not know how she expects to be private, Krekor. Everybody here knows everything. Even Howard Kashinian knows everything, and he is so stupid he has to be told by his wife.”

  Gregor had hung up and gone back to the conference room to wait. At one point he had wandered down the hall to see Dan Burdock booked, but there had been nothing to see, really. A man with a stone face being fingerprinted—surely somebody would come to see him, hire a lawyer for him, give him a shoulder to cry on? Gregor had always had the impression that the parishioners of St. Stephen’s were very tightly knit. Maybe they didn’t know.

  He had gone through both the Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today, as well as three cups of coffee, when Lou and Garry finally came in to see him. They looked even more exhausted than they had right after the arrest, but they also looked a little calmer, and that made Gregor feel a little better.

  “Not as bad as you expected?” he asked them, as they came in.

  “If you’re talking about the media, it’s worse,” Garry said. “There’s a circus out there. The only good thing is that they can’t get back here.”

  “We’re going to be on the news at eleven,” Lou said. “I don’t think the portrait is going to be flattering.”

  “But,” Gregor said.

  “But the lab got back with a preliminary,” Garry said. “There’s arsenic in three of the mints Burdock tried to give to Roy Phipps. Which is really good to hear, because I didn’t know how we were going to justify this if there wasn’t. I mean, do you actually have any idea what went on here, or were you just guessing?”

  “Mostly, I was being an idiot,” Gregor said. “I was thinking like Agatha Christie. I kept looking for things like chocolates left in a box, or pastries left on a table, and not finding them. Which makes sense, if you think about it, because that would be a ridiculous way to commit a murder. You could never know if the person you wanted dead would be the person who ate the tainted food. You could never be sure that nine other people wouldn’t eat it instead. I used to read those books when Tibor gave them to me and wonder what the woman was thinking. Agatha Christie, I mean. The one scenario was so unrealistic.”

  “Right,” Lou Emiliani said. “Good. Okay. So—”

  “So,” Gregor said, “I finally asked myself the only sensible question. Who would have been able to give arsenic to each of the victims and know that the victims would actually be the victims? And over and over again, I came back to Dan Burdock and those damned mints. He always had those damned mints. He offered one to me, once.”

  “Do you figure it was poisoned?” Garry asked.

  “No.” Gregor shifted in his chair. He hated the chairs they used in precinct conference rooms.
They were always made of metal and hard as rock. “None of the other, more usual questions did me any good,” he said. “Access to the poison was out as a filter, because Father Healy had bought the stuff and strewed it all over the basement at St. Anselm’s. Anybody could have gotten hold of it. Motive was out, too, because although it was perfectly clear what kind of motive there could be, half a dozen people had the same one—”

  “What motive?” Lou demanded. “Why do you figure Dan Burdock killed four people?”

  “Money, of course,” Gregor said. “It’s always money. Did you really think it was going to be religion?”

  “I was sort of hoping it was going to be Roy Phipps,” Lou said.

  Gregor shook his head. “A murder may occur in Roy Phipps’s vicinity, or even at his instigation, but it won’t be this kind of murder. It will be somebody bashing somebody else on the head in one of those riots he orchestrates so well. And the Reverend Phipps won’t be the one doing the bashing. No, listen, it was always money, all that money from the settlement of the pedophilia suit, which was wandering around the landscape with very weak controls, even nonexistent controls, on where it went. That’s what I kept hearing when I first came here, that the old Archbishop, the one before this one, was hopeless when it came to practical matters of this kind. He committed the archdiocese to make payments so high that they threatened to bankrupt the institution. He signed off on papers and deals he didn’t even read. Nothing about that deal was ever set up properly, and that meant it was ripe for being ripped off. As Tommy Moradanyan Donahue would say.”

  “Who’s Tommy Moradanyan Donahue?” Garry asked.

  “He’s five,” Gregor said.

  Lou cleared his throat. “So the settlement funds were ripe for being ripped off, and they were ripped off. But I don’t see how you can say they were ripped off by Dan Burdock. I mean, he didn’t have access to the funds. Now Ian Holden—”

  “Had tons of access and did a lot of ripping off,” Gregor said. “Yes, I know. You can take that up with him. But he didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Why not?” Garry demanded. “Bernadette Kelly was a receptionist in his own office. She could have found out all kinds of things—”

  “She could have, and she might have, but that has nothing to do with this,” Gregor said. “Dan Burdock wasn’t ripping off the archdiocese. He was ripping off Scott Boardman.”

  “What?” Lou shook his head.

  “He was ripping off Scott Boardman,” Gregor repeated. “And, I think, if you look through the church’s books, you’ll find he’s been ripping off a few of the others. It’s only a guess, but it makes sense. Tibor would get an enormous kick out of this. We’d have known all along, somebody would have suspected from the first, except that we’ve none of us managed to free ourselves from stereotypes.”

  “You’re sounding like the department’s diversity handbook,” Garry said.

  “Somebody ought to,” Lou told him.

  Gregor got up and stretched. He more than hated those chairs. They were going to kill them. “St. Stephen’s had a ton of money. Everything about it was beautiful. It was well kept up, even in ways that are demonstrably expensive. It costs money to clean stained glass and marble so that they look the way they look there. And yet, you know, the Episcopalian Church is steadily losing membership. That much is regularly reported in the press. And St. Stephen’s doesn’t have that large a membership—less than two hundred and fifty, I think, is what Dan Burdock told me.”

  “Well, yeah,” Garry said. “But—”

  “But what?” Gregor shook his head vigorously. “But gay men have no dependents, so they have more money to give to their churches than straight men do? But gay men care more about appearances than straight men do? But gay men want exquisitely beautiful things around them and are more willing to pay for them than straight men are? That’s what I mean by stereotypes. If St. Stephen’s had been an ordinary church without a reputation for being a ‘gay’ one, we’d have seen the anomalies immediately. We’d have wondered where all the money was coming from. Instead, we looked at all the expensive, elaborate accoutrements and dismissed them as being just what we’d expect of a ‘gay’ church.”

  “I don’t see how he could have gotten enough money out of Scott Boardman’s settlement to do all the things he was doing,” Lou said.

  “He didn’t. His parishioners really do contribute more than the parishioners of St. Anselm’s, because it really does matter that they don’t have families to support. They’re just not Bill Gates. If you check his books, I think you’ll find that he’s been stealing from all six of the men at St. Stephen’s who are part of the pedophilia settlement, and probably from a few of the others. Remember how he’s got that place set up over there. What did he call it? A mutual-aid society. They run a ton of programs—a health-insurance pool, a check-cashing service, a short-term loan service. There’s money going in and out all the time.”

  “And Scott Boardman found out what he was doing—” Lou started.

  But Gregor shook his head. “No. My guess is that what Scott Boardman found out was that the amount of money he was receiving in his account every month was smaller than the amount he should have been receiving by about a couple of thousand dollars. He found it out from Bernadette Kelly.”

  “How?” Garry asked.

  “Bernadette Kelly worked at Brady, Marquis and Holden. She was also—sympathetic, I think the word is. She and Scott Boardman talked about his troubles, and his big trouble toward the end of his life was financial. And so I think Scott told her how much he was getting, and she didn’t think that was right, so she checked herself. And at that point, Dan Burdock had two choices—either let his scheme blow up in his face or take care of Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly both. If he’d killed only Scott, he’d have had Bernadette suspicious and dangerous right across the street.”

  “Okay,” Garry said. “So he gave them mints laced with arsenic—”

  “That he’d gotten by picking it up off the floor in the basement at St. Anselm’s, which he could do because there was nothing strange about his being in St. Anselm’s. Even though he and Father Healy didn’t really get along, they cooperated on a practical level on a number of projects.”

  “What about Sister Harriet?” Garry asked.

  “Oh,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t Sister Harriet per se. It could have been anybody. He could have quit after Scott and Bernadette if Marty hadn’t gone off his head and pulled that stunt in St. Anselm’s. Then all of a sudden, everything was out in the open and very highly visible, and people started asking questions. Especially Harriet Garrity. Think of all those organizations she belonged to. The Seamless Garment Network. The Alliance for Reproductive Rights. The—”

  “Gay and Lesbian Support Advisory,” Lou said. Then he blushed. “It didn’t even occur to me.”

  “Well, we’re not going to be able to nail him for Sister Harriet,” Gregor said. “I know what happened. She nosed around long enough to figure out something about the way Scott Boardman died. But we’ll never prove it. We will be able to prove the Boardman murder against him. That ought to be enough.”

  “What about Father Healy?”

  Gregor thought about it. “It depends,” he said. “I’d bet my life that Father Healy died because he saw Dan Burdock take some arsenic from St. Anselm’s basement—or saw Burdock take something and later figured out it was arsenic. That time frame fits. Burdock would have had to get more poison to kill Sister Harriet with. He wasn’t expecting to need any. He wouldn’t have kept it.”

  “I hate things like this,” Lou said. “I hate knowing more than I can use. It ends up feeling so damned … incomplete.”

  “I still want to know how you knew it was Dan Burdock and not that sleazeball lawyer we’re not even going to be able to arrest until next week,” Garry said. “I mean, look at this. Dan Burdock was stealing small change, even if everything you suspect is true. Ian Holden stole at least a couple of million dollars—” />
  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “Why murder four people? If you’re going to murder anybody at all, murder the first two because they’ve put you in a bind and then just take off. The man had money. He had resources. He didn’t need to stick around here. Dan Burdock did. He didn’t have anyplace else to go.”

  “Maybe he’ll confess,” Lou said. “That would make everything a lot simpler than it is now. Why is it they never confess when you need them to?”

  Gregor sat down in his chair again and stretched his legs. The reason they never confessed when you needed them to was that you only needed them to when you didn’t have enough to be sure you could convict them. And then they thought they might be able to get off.

  2

  Half an hour later, having given Garry and Lou enough to go on with, Gregor Demarkian finally got his coat and got ready to leave for Cavanaugh Street. He checked his pockets to make sure that he had all the things Bennis was always accusing him of losing—the scarf she had bought him for Christmas one year; the leather gloves with the cashmere lining she had bought him for his birthday in another—and then headed out toward the front doors and the street. He would, he thought, have to walk several blocks to get a cab. There would be none cruising through the dismal neighborhood around the precinct house at this hour of the night. He went down the steps and stood just under the round precinct light. There was another one, on the other side, and he found himself wondering why police stations everywhere had settled on this kind of architecture.

  He was just turning left to walk toward Baldwin Place and St. Stephen’s and St. Anselm’s when he saw a figure in the shadows, waiting, too, and because he knew who it was, he slowed his steps to allow this man to catch up with him. A moment later, the light from the precinct lamps glowed down over Roy Phipps’s face, and Roy smiled a little.