Authors: Jane Haddam
True Believers (19 page)
Gregor Demarkian had made it a point, through all the years of his retirement and “consulting,” always to work with police departments. The reason for that was twofold. First, it was simply easier. Father Tibor sometimes gave him mystery novels to read, but they always ended up making him feel impatient. In the real world, spunky housewives and nosy librarians did not solve crimes, no matter how bright they were. They didn't have access to the necessary resources. Long before the Bureau had established the Behavioral Sciences Unit, law enforcement had become mostly a matter of technology. Fingerprints, footprints, tire tracks, fiber analysis, the chemical analysis of poisonsâall these things were vital for any case that was going to get anywhere in a court, and they had been joined, in recent years, with even more esoteric tools like DNA analysis and voiceprints. No housewife, no matter how spunky, was going to be able to do a DNA scan in her kitchen, and no nosy librarian was going to be able to know Who Done It if she didn't also know that the voice on the answering machine belonged to the Sweet Sister-in-Law rather than the Vituperative Ex-Wife, who was trying to mask her own voice while incriminating her rival. Of course, in real police cases, the characters in the drama almost never stacked up like that, and the murder was almost never the kind that required this sort of investigation. Instead, some idiot with more alcohol in his system than brains in his head went haywire one late Friday night and shot up his girlfriend, or some other idiot hyped high on cocaine got into a fight outside a bar about the color of his running shoes and stabbed the first person who came to
hand, or some yet bigger idiot decided to hold up a convenience store and panicked when the clerk didn't bow down and worship him at the first opportunity, which resulted in five people dead and three more wounded before a single dime ever came up out of the till.
Hill Street Blues
was the only thing Gregor had ever seen or heard of that tried to portray crime as it really was, and it only got away with it because it spent most of the time concentrating on the private lives of the cops in the station than it did on the crime. Even Ed McBain, whose realism was close to meticulous, dressed up his books in unusual crimes and unusual circumstances, and the other “realistic” writers Tibor had given him were about as realistic as an Oliver Stone screenplay. Gregor almost preferred the books about little old ladies and their cats. At least they didn't pretend to be anything but what they were. If “crime novels” had really been about real crime as it really existed, nobody would buy them.
hand, or some yet bigger idiot decided to hold up a convenience store and panicked when the clerk didn't bow down and worship him at the first opportunity, which resulted in five people dead and three more wounded before a single dime ever came up out of the till.
Hill Street Blues
was the only thing Gregor had ever seen or heard of that tried to portray crime as it really was, and it only got away with it because it spent most of the time concentrating on the private lives of the cops in the station than it did on the crime. Even Ed McBain, whose realism was close to meticulous, dressed up his books in unusual crimes and unusual circumstances, and the other “realistic” writers Tibor had given him were about as realistic as an Oliver Stone screenplay. Gregor almost preferred the books about little old ladies and their cats. At least they didn't pretend to be anything but what they were. If “crime novels” had really been about real crime as it really existed, nobody would buy them.
The other reason Gregor liked to work with police departments was that it kept him out of trouble. Here was something else that was unrealistic about crime novels. In real life, an amateur who tried to investigate on his own would end up in court on an obstruction charge. If he did anything that might even conceivably compromise the police investigation, he might even find himself in jail. Cops did not take kindly to interference from outside, even when that interference was well within the law. They didn't want the Federal Bureau of Investigation “helping” except when they asked it to. They didn't want the cops of some other jurisdiction getting in their way. They didn't want anything but to be left alone unless they asked not to be, and they were likely to treat an interloper the way antibodies treated a virus. First they would isolate him. Then they would try to kill him off. Gregor preferred to be asked in. That was why he called himself a “consultant” for police departments, and why he had always steadfastly refused to get his private investigator's license. He didn't want to be Philip Marlowe. He didn't even want to be Raymond Chandler. He only wanted to have interesting work to do that didn't take up so much of his time that he no longer had a life. Having waited until middle age to chuck workaholism for living, he did not intend to backslide into an obsession about procedures.
In many places, simply having an invitation from the local Catholic Archbishop would be enough to get him an invitation from the police department involved. That would have been true in Philadelphia only fifteen or twenty years ago. Now things were stickier. There weren't as many Catholics as there had been, and, more importantly, not as many of them were cops. Then there was what Gregor was rapidly beginning to think of as the Personality Problem. The first thing he had discovered, making a few phone calls to set up this meeting, was that the Philadelphia police didn't like the new Cardinal Archbishop any more than he did.
He checked his watch. He was cutting this very close. He shouldn't have spent so much time at St. Anselm's, or walked from there halfway to here. He watched a couple of uniformed officers come out the front doors and head away from him on the sidewalks, both wearing thick coats that were designed to look as much like their uniforms as possible. Then he went through the front doors himself and presented himself to the officer at the desk.
“Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I'm here to see John Jackmanâ”
“Right here.”
Gregor looked up and saw Jackman coming toward him, dressed in a suit so well made and so conservative he could have been a banker. What he was, instead, was the deputy commissioner of police of the city of Philadelphia, an appointment he had held now for exactly six months. Gregor had first met him when he was a detective lieutenant in Bryn Mawr. Since then, Jackman had gone from township to township and from township to city, moving carefully and without hesitation toward the only thing that mattered to him. It didn't hurt that he was Black, and very photogenic, and Catholic into the bargain. Gregor hardly thought he could have done better if he had been allowed to put in specifications with God. At the very least, if they ever decided to make a movie of his life, they would have to get Will Smith to play the part.
The uniformed officer at the desk was a woman. Jackman said good morning to her and took Gregor firmly by the elbow.
“Third floor,” he said, and he pulled them both toward the elevators. “I've got somebody waiting for us up there. How are you? How is Bennis?”
“I'm fine. Bennis is Bennis. The execution is set for the end of the month.”
“Shit.”
“That won't get you the commissioner's job before you're fifty.”
“I've revised my plans and made it fifty-five.” They were at the elevators, but they didn't have to wait. Jackman pushed the button, and the doors opened, automatically, as if he had been able to hold the car until he wanted it. He tugged Gregor inside and pushed the button for the third floor. “What were you doing over at Henry Lord's? Trying to find a way to get a stay?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Not that. We think a stay is probably impossible this time. Bennis wants to talk to her. She doesn't want to talk to Bennis. I was trying to see if I could arrange something.”
“Shit,” Jackman said again.
The car stopped, and the door slid open. The third floor was slightly less utilitarian than the first, but there was still an air of basic practicality about it. Build solid and build cheap. It was the best of the three possible ways to build a municipal building. The worst was to build cheap, period. The iffy one was to build expensive, with marble and fountains and the kind of thick pile carpet most people only dreamed of having in their bedrooms. On the one hand, you built a monument. On the other, you ended up on the evening news in a story about the waste of the taxpayer's money.
Gregor glanced up at the large round clock that was the only decoration on the wall behind the receptionist's desk. “We're going to be late,” he said.
“It doesn't matter. I've got the press release. And a full ME's report. My office is this way.”
Jackman's office was down a hall, then down another hall, and in a corner. Gregor was sure it was not as large or as well appointed as the corner office given to the commissioner himself, but he knew Jackman well enough to know that the man could wait. There was a man sitting on a chair near a low round coffee table, watching a television set that had been wheeled in from somewhere else. When Gregor and Jackman came in, the man looked up, looked back at the set, then stood.
“How's it going?” Jackman asked.
“All hell's breaking loose.” The man was white, and not quite young, in spite of the fact that his pasty face was still pocked with acne. He turned to Gregor Demarkian and held out his hand. “Garry Mansfield,” he said.
“Garry's a homicide detective,” Jackman said drily.
Garry had his eyes trained on the television set again. “This is not going to be good,” he said. “People have been way too bored in this city for way too long.”
Jackman waved Gregor in the direction of the chair on the other side of the coffee table and pulled his own chair out from behind his desk to sit down. Gregor was watching the set carefully, but the scene was too confused to evaluate. Obviously, the press-release part of the program was over, because now the reporters were asking questions. They all seemed to be talking into air instead of microphones. Gregor would hear half a question, and then the voice would disappear.
“Maybe we'd better turn this off,” Jackman said after a while. “This isn't getting us anywhere. Were there any surprises?”
“You mean with the press release?” Garry shook his head. “He read it verbatim. And he's trying not to speculate. But you know how it is. Everybody will be speculating in a minute or two. The evening news shows are going to be ridiculous.”
“Are you the detective in charge of this case?” Gregor asked.
It was the kind of thing Jackman should have told him in the elevator, or when they first came into the room. Instead, they seemed to have been talking in code. But Garry Mansfield was nodding.
“It depends on which case you're talking about,” he said. “I'm in charge of the Marty and Bernadette Kelly case. The Scott Boardman case belongs to Lou Emiliani.”
Gregor raised his eyebrows. “There's the first thing. I knew this mess was going to be full of inaccuracies. The Cardinal gave me to understand that there weren't two cases, but only one connected one.”
“There probably will be in a day or two,” Garry Mansfield said. “But Boardman died first, at least as far as we knewâ”
“We'll get to the times later,” Jackman said. “That's driving everybody up the wall.”
“Yeah, well, whatever,” Garry said. “Boardman was the first case. He died over at that church, St. Stephen's, in some office they have over there. You'd have to ask Lou. But nobody thought much of anything about it. I mean, the man practically breathed coke, morning, noon, and night. Somebody like that has a few convulsions and dies, you figure it's cocaine poisoning. You don't get all worked up about it.”
“When I talked to the cardinal, he said that there had been an exception made to allow the family to prepare the body for burial before the final autopsy reports were in.”
“Ask Lou,” Garry said again. “From what I understand, it was more complicated than that. Anyway, Boardman came first that we knew about, and that got assigned a detective, and then Marty did his little jig in St. Anselm's, and I got assigned to it, so it's still two separate cases. But it won't be for long. You read the press release?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“I'll give you a copy. It's very cagey. The Boardman thing is just a line on page three, but it's not like nobody's going to notice.”
“I'm surprised there's anything about the Boardman âthing' at all,” Gregor said. “And, for that matter, I'm surprised about the press release. Why take so much trouble to attract publicity? Doesn't the medical examiner's office usually play it more closely than that?”
Jackman stood up. “He's covering his ass, that's what the problem is,” he said, starting to pace. “He screwed up on the Boardman thing, and now he's covering his ass. Don't get me started, Gregor, I'm serious.”
“You should have heard the language he used,” Garry said.
“At this rate, he won't make commissioner before he's sixty,” Gregor said.
Jackman sat down again. “You remember the sex-abuse thing, a couple of years ago, with the old Archbishop and all that jazz?”
“Trobriand Islanders remember the sex-abuse thing,” Gregor said.
“Yeah, well. The commissioner,” Jackman stared at the door, as if he expected the commissioner to burst in at any moment. “The commissioner,” he repeated, “seems to think we look like we're picking on the archdiocese. And he doesn't
want to look like we're picking on the archdiocese. And that's especially true because Boardman was one of the plaintiffs in the sex-abuse case. So, the bottom line is, the commissioner wants to hire you.”
want to look like we're picking on the archdiocese. And that's especially true because Boardman was one of the plaintiffs in the sex-abuse case. So, the bottom line is, the commissioner wants to hire you.”
“I think I've already been hired by the archdiocese.”
“Did they pay you any money?”
“Of course they didn't pay me any money.”
“Well, then,” Jackman said, “you weren't really hired. So go over to the precinct with Garry here, and listen to Lou Emiliani, and come on board. You'd rather work for us than for that son of a bitch anyway. And we won't tie your hands.”
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