Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries) Read online

  Judy took another sip of coffee and put her cup down carefully in its saucer. A woman had just come into view on the other side of the street. She was small and bent and wrapped in a shapeless car coat, and she shuffled along as if she were wearing slippers instead of the dirty white sneakers that were actually on her feet. Low rent, Judy thought vaguely, and then: That’s somebody I know.

  The woman stopped to look through the windows of a store called Chocolate Moose. Stuart said, “I don’t think Father Walsh is a good person for us to know. I don’t care how modern Catholic he makes us look. The man is—unreliable.”

  “Unreliable,” Judy repeated, in a tone meant to let him know how much she disapproved of the word.

  Stuart blushed and bristled and started in on another tirade. Judy caught the beginning of it—“sometimes I think you’re laughing at me Judy I really do”—but nothing more, because the woman on the other side of the street had turned away from Chocolate Moose. She had gone to the corner and was waiting to cross, giving Judy a clear view of her face.

  She is somebody I know, Judy thought. Then her stomach rolled over and she began to feel sick.

  “Judy?” Stuart said.

  “What?”

  The light changed and the woman crossed, disappearing in the direction of North Carter Street. Judy turned away from the window and looked into her coffee.

  Cheryl Cass, she thought.

  Black Rock Park.

  That was then—

  “Judy,” Stuart said. “You aren’t listening to me.”

  And that was true. She almost never listened to him. There was nothing to listen to. On the other hand, there was a lot to think about.

  She had just seen Cheryl Cass, and for the last twenty years she had been sure that Cheryl Cass was dead.

  [3]

  At first, Father Tom Dolan had not been happy to be assigned to Holy Name Cathedral. He wouldn’t have been happy to be assigned to anything in any part of Upstate New York. His whole reason for entering the seminary, at least in the beginning, had been to get away from all this: Colchester especially, but also the towns in the immediate vicinity, where he was too well known. That was why he had entered the Third Order Regular, instead of taking Diocesan orders, like Andy. The TOR seminary he’d attended had been smack in the middle of Ohio. Tom had been confident of spending his life as a priest at one midwestern university after another. Then, three years ago, John O’Bannion had been named first an Archbishop and then a Cardinal. Even the Third Order Regular didn’t go around telling Cardinals they couldn’t have the priests they wanted as aides.

  Now, Tom Dolan sat in John O’Bannion’s office, feeling scratchy in his Franciscan habit and taking notes on a legal pad. The Cardinal was pacing circles around his desk, holding his hands behind his back and looking more like a priest in a Barry Fitzgerald movie every minute. It had not, Tom thought, been as bad as he had feared it would be. O’Bannion had always liked him, even in his wilder days, and the old man was much too smart to make casual references to the less saintly aspects of Tom’s adolescent career. Besides, being at the Cathedral was almost like being back at the seminary. He wasn’t restricted to the building by regulation, but he might as well have been. The Cardinal kept him busy, the paperwork kept him busy, and he was never given anything to do outside. He hadn’t been able to avoid all contact with the people he’d known then, but he’d come close. Kath he had to talk to now and then—she was a nun and principal at St. Agnes Parochial School—but Barry Field was just a face on television and Peg Morrissey had disappeared into domesticity and Judy Eagan might as well have been on Mars. The only one of the old group he hadn’t been able to keep his distance from had been Andy, and that figured. If he ever ended up in Hell, Hell was going to turn out to be an eternity locked into a small room with Father Andrew Walsh.

  The Cardinal had stopped pacing and sat down on a corner of the desk. He was a big man, fat and jowly. Every time he decided to strike this pose, Tom worried the desk was going to collapse beneath him.

  “Now,” the Cardinal said, “you tell me. Why is that Demarkian man refusing to come up here?”

  “I don’t think he’s refusing to come up here, Your Eminence. If you told him you had to have him up here, he’d probably come. As a favor to Tibor Kasparian, if nothing else.”

  “I don’t like to order people around all the time, you know. I’ve given him enough hints.”

  “Maybe he isn’t a man who takes hints.”

  “He has to be, for Heaven’s sake. He’s a detective.”

  Tom looked down at his legal pad. At the top of it he’d written, “catechisms for St. Stanislaw Parish. Twenty-four by Friday.” “Maybe,” he said, “it would help if you knew what you wanted him to do when he got here.”

  The Cardinal flushed, got up, and shook out the folds of his cassock. Usually he stuck to straightforward black suits, but it was Ash Wednesday.

  “I was watching Father Dowling on television last night,” he told Tom. “There was this whole elaborate plot about a frame. Maybe that’s what we need.”

  “Somebody to frame Andy Walsh?”

  “You’d think I could get rid of a man who told the Women’s University Club that birth control ought to be a sacrament,” the Cardinal said, “but no. That’s the new Church for you, Father Dolan. In the old days, I could’ve gotten rid of him just because I didn’t like his face.”

  Tom considered asking the Cardinal if he’d thought of appealing to Rome, but didn’t. Of course, O’Bannion had thought of it, and, of course, O’Bannion had decided it wouldn’t do any good. For one thing, Colchester Archdiocese was one of the worst hit by the priest shortage. O’Bannion’s predecessor had been a Church liberal of the sort who made the Gospels sound like a prophecy of the New Deal. He’d alienated literally thousands of his archdiocese’s conservative working-class parishioners right into the arms of the burgeoning Fundamentalist movement. He’d aggravated dozens of priests into requests for laicization. He’d interfered with Catholic education to the point where three of the most traditional orders of nuns had pulled their Sisters out of the parochial school system. Then he’d died in his sleep and left the mess to John O’Bannion: too many parishes without priests, too many schools without nuns, and too much debt. Debt was what you got when you tried to run the Catholic Church with laypeople. A nun teacher got room, board, and $10 a week for teaching in a parish school. A lay teacher got $22,000 a year, health insurance, life insurance, workmen’s comp, and half her Social Security bill. O’Bannion couldn’t get rid of Andy Walsh without good, and provable, reason.

  For another thing, O’Bannion couldn’t get rid of Andy Walsh unless he could find somebody else willing to take him, which nobody was. Even the few flaming radicals left in the hierarchy didn’t want to be saddled with a nut case like Andy. They had enough trouble with Rome as it was.

  “I wish it was the Knights of Columbus he’d talked to about birth control,” the Cardinal said. “Then we might have gotten somewhere.”

  “Why?”

  “One of the Knights would have been willing to testify in an ecclesiastical court. Lots of them would have. You know the Women’s University Club.”

  The Women’s University Club had taken out an ad in the Colchester Tribune, lambasting the Church in general and John Cardinal O’Bannion in particular for their “arrant Ludditism and chauvinistic insensitivity” in condemning “the scientific laboratory study of sexuality.” By that, they had meant the Colman-Brooks clinic, where women were taught to give themselves orgasms with “anatomically correct” vibrators that had waterproofed pigeon feathers attached.

  “I keep thinking if I could just get him up here, he could do something for us,” O’Bannion said. “Tibor makes him sound so—intelligently practical. Maybe I just want him to tell us what we’re supposed to do.”

  “That isn’t the kind of advice he usually gives, Your Eminence. He specializes in murders.”

  “Oh, I know that. But An
dy Walsh would never murder anybody. I don’t have that kind of luck.”

  Tom Dolan coughed, and the Cardinal stopped pacing. The Cardinal was blushing again. “Do you know what I spend most of my time talking to my confessor about?” he asked. “Fantasies. I have fantasies about getting that fruitcake not just out of the Archdiocese, but out of the entire Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

  “Just don’t call him in for another conference. Every time you do that, he gives another homily on the Bad Old Men of the Church.”

  “I won’t call him in for another conference. My blood pressure’s too high already.”

  “I’ll get to work on St. Stanislaw’s, Your Eminence. Do you know when you’re going to go down to give ashes?”

  “What? Oh. Noon, I think. Sister has my schedule.”

  “I’ll ask her, then.”

  “Tell her to get Tibor Kasparian on the phone for me again,” O’Bannion said. “There has to be something I can do. I can’t sit by and watch that lunatic turn every school-child at St. Agnes’s into a practicing pantheist.”

  “Of course not, Your Eminence.”

  O’Bannion had stopped his pacing at the window overlooking the courtyard. Tom Dolan took a last look at him—a back-street Irishman playing Sir Thomas More, making up his mind about the timing of his own beheading—and slipped out of the office into the hall.

  Seconds later, he was walking into the reception room, thinking about St. Stanislaw’s catechisms and getting ready to say hello to Sister Marietta. Sister Marietta was the Cardinal’s ordinary secretary. She was a very traditional Benedictine, with a veil that fell below her waist and a robe that brushed the floor, and she made him nervous as hell. All old nuns did. They reminded him of his childhood.

  He said the minimum necessary—“Here I am again, Sister. I’m going back to my office now”—and picked up speed. He could always get the Cardinal’s schedule from someone else. Dozens of people in the Chancery had to know it. Then, when he was halfway to the safety of the door, Sister Marietta rapped her knuckles against her desk.

  Tom Dolan stopped, and turned, and tried not to sound resigned when he said, “Yes?”

  Sister Marietta was a study in impassivity. “I’m sorry to hold you up, Father, but I took a telephone call for you while you were in with the Cardinal. Your secretary wasn’t at her desk.”

  His secretary was taking the day off, but he wasn’t going to tell Sister Marietta that. His secretary was a nun. In Sister Marietta’s world, nuns didn’t have days off. “Was it anything important?” he said.

  “I don’t know. It was a woman who called, not a name I’d ever heard of. But, of course, I don’t hear of them unless they come to see the Cardinal, and not everybody does.”

  “No,” Tom said, “it just seems like everybody.”

  “The Cardinal is a very busy man, I know. Cardinals always are.” She rummaged through a small stack of papers on her desk and came up with a pink message slip. “This is it. There isn’t much to it, I’m afraid. I couldn’t get her to leave a number. She said she didn’t have one.”

  “That’s unusual.” Tom came back across the floor and took the slip. Sister’s handwriting had been formed by the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart. It was as rounded and precise as the script on an IBM daisy wheel. Tom looked down at it and read: Cheryl Cass called, 8:30. Couldn’t leave number. Will call back.

  “I tried to tell the woman it was Ash Wednesday,” Sister was saying, “and on Ash Wednesday you have a lot of extra work to do, but it didn’t seem to make any difference to her. I don’t know if she’d ever heard of Ash Wednesday.”

  Take a breath take a breath take a breath, Tom thought, take a breath and calm down. He crushed the slip in his fist and dropped it on Sister’s desk.

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Joke?”

  “You’re sure you didn’t recognize the voice on the phone? It wasn’t Sister Scholastica from St. Agnes’s?”

  “Of course it wasn’t. Father—”

  “It wasn’t Father Walsh?”

  “It was a woman’s voice,” Sister said primly. “I don’t know what you’re implying, Father Dolan, but I’m not here to play jokes on you. I’m not even here to take your messages.”

  “No,” Tom said. “Of course you’re not.” He tossed the balled-up message slip into Sister’s wastebasket. Then he turned his back on her and strode out the door.

  Andy Walsh must have put somebody up to this. He must have. The one thing Cheryl Cass would never do was show up here.

  [4]

  “I don’t know,” Reverend Mother General was saying as she dusted snow off the crown of her veil, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a homily like that before.”

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and the Mass for St. Agnes school had just been dismissed from St. Agnes’s Church. Sister Mary Scholastica—once Kathleen Burke—was standing at the top of the church steps next to her Reverend Mother General, watching children file through the church door. The children were dressed neatly in green uniforms and filed with precision. The lines they made could have been formed by old Sister Bonaventure, the one who’d had a spine like a ruler. Really, Scholastica thought, she had nothing to be nervous about. Granted, Reverend Mother General didn’t make flying visits to parish parochial schools. Granted, Andy Walsh’s homily had been one of his patented monologues on Nicaragua and the preferential option for self-actualization. Still, Scholastica thought, I run a good house and a good school. Anybody with eyes in their head can see it.

  The last of the children came through the church doors, followed by Sister Peter Rose. Peter Rose nodded a silent question to Scholastica and gave Reverend Mother General a deferential little smile. Then she hurried away after Timmy Moore, who was in the process of stealing a Hostess Twinkie from Janie O’Brien’s back pocket. Scholastica sighed. Easter was supposed to be a spring holiday. Lent was supposed to be a gradually thawing slide into warmer weather. But Lent and Easter were both early this year. It was Ash Wednesday, but it was February instead of March. It had been snowing steadily since ten o’clock the night before, when Reverend Mother General got in. From the look of it, it was going to go on snowing for a week.

  “Sometimes,” Scholastica told Reverend Mother General as they started down the steps, “I wish we’d never given up full habit. Oh, I know the wimple used to cut—”

  “It used to do more than cut,” Reverend Mother General said. “It gave me a scrape down the side of my face that took a year to go away after we gave it up.”

  “It gave me, a notch in my chin. Still. Maybe what we should have done was had the wimples made out of soft material, without starch, like the Benedictines. Full habit looked better. And at least it kept you warm in the snow.”

  “I don’t know if you realize it, Sister, but we modified the habit even before you came to us. Back in the fifties, we wore five sets of underwear.”

  “I could use five sets of underwear in this cold,” Scholastica said. She led Reverend Mother General along the sidewalk, opened the wrought-iron gate that led to the path that led across the courtyard to the school, then stepped back to let Reverend Mother General pass. It was a good thing she liked Reverend Mother General, she thought. It was a better thing that she respected her. It would have been terrible to have been made to feel this uncomfortable, and awkward—Reverend Mother General was so tiny and Scholastica herself was so tall—by someone who didn’t also make her feel in awe.

  Scholastica closed the gate and latched it. Then she said, “I’m sorry about Father Walsh, Reverend Mother. He has—enthusiasms.”

  “I’ve heard about Father Walsh’s enthusiasms.” Reverend Mother smiled. “Did he really consecrate bran muffins at a mass for the CYO?”

  “Oat bran muffins,” Scholastica said. “The Cardinal Archbishop was wild.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Personally, I think O’Bannion should have been grateful it wasn’t alfalfa sprouts. That’
s the kind of thing Andy would do.”

  “Have you known Father Walsh long?”

  “All my life. We grew up next door to each other on Garrison Street. I’ve known Cardinal O’Bannion forever, too. He was schools’ chaplain when I was at Cathedral Girls’ High.”

  “Do you mind being back here in Colchester, Sister? Would it have been better for you if we’d sent you somewhere—exotic?”

  “There wasn’t anywhere exotic you could have sent me, Reverend Mother. Where would I have gone? Maine?”

  “We do run a high school in New York City.”

  “No, thank you. I’d be afraid of getting mugged.”

  “What about back to the Motherhouse?”

  “Excuse me?”

  They were only steps from the door to the school, standing with their feet ankle deep in snow on the asphalt path—and standing still, Scholastica realized. Reverend Mother had stopped, and without thinking about it Scholastica had stopped, too. What confused Scholastica was that Reverend Mother didn’t seem to want to move, even though the wind was blowing stiff and hard and she had to be freezing to death. God only knew, Scholastica was freezing to death herself.

  “Don’t you want to go inside, Reverend Mother?” she said. “I could make us some tea and we could thaw out.”

  “No.” Reverend Mother shook her head emphatically. “In case you haven’t guessed, Sister, there’s something I want to talk to you about. I don’t want to be—overheard by secretaries.”

  “By secretaries?”

  “By nuns, then. It won’t kill us to get a little fresh air.”

  “This particular fresh air is likely to give us pneumonia, Reverend Mother.”

  “Nonsense.” Reverend Mother General shooed this away. Then she bit her lip and looked toward the classroom windows on the first floor. The windows were covered with construction paper crosses and Eucharistic symbols for the start of Lent. “I have a little bad news for you,” she said. “Sister Mary Jerome had a stroke last week.”