Authors: Jane Haddam
True Believers (20 page)
“Unless you say no,” Garry Mansfield said pleasantly.
Gregor leaned forward and turned off the television set. It had gone to a commercial for Pampers, which was the kind of thing he could never watch without getting confused.
Gregor had expected that the precinct that housed the police who covered St. Anselm's and St. Stephen's would be one of the better-kept ones in the city. The neighborhood was one of the more expensive ones, and all the houses Gregor had been able to see when he walked around the two large churches, hoping to get some sense of direction, had been well kept and devoted to the use of a single tenant. He had failed to reckon with the perversity of Philadelphia street life. New York was supposed to be changeable, but next to this, New York was a model of consistency. No wonder so many of the really rich people here had moved out to the comfort of the Main Line. There was this street with the two churches on it, and the row houses with their polished front doors and gleaming windows. Two streets over, the row houses looked as if they were disintegrating into sand and the one vacant lot was full of garbage and people who huddled over a fire they had made in a tin can. Junkies and drunks: even when Gregor was growing up here, fifty years ago, there had been junkies and drunks, but they had called the junkies “hopheads.” In those days, it had all been marijuana and cocaine. If heroin happened, it happened out of sight, and drugs in general were restricted to the musicians who blew through after a week or two in New York
or Detroit. That was one of the great attractions of going to hear jazz on Saturday nights. All the fraternity boys from the University of Pennsylvania tried it. If they were really rebels, they actually bought themselves a joint and smoked it in the alleys in the back before they joined their girlfriends at their round tables and tried to pretend that it didn't matter that they were the only white people in the room. Maybe because Gregor had never been a fraternity boy, or had a hope in hell of becoming one, he
hadn't
tried it. He had been in the Army before he smoked his first marijuana cigarette, and then he hadn't liked it much, and hadn't gone back to try it again.
or Detroit. That was one of the great attractions of going to hear jazz on Saturday nights. All the fraternity boys from the University of Pennsylvania tried it. If they were really rebels, they actually bought themselves a joint and smoked it in the alleys in the back before they joined their girlfriends at their round tables and tried to pretend that it didn't matter that they were the only white people in the room. Maybe because Gregor had never been a fraternity boy, or had a hope in hell of becoming one, he
hadn't
tried it. He had been in the Army before he smoked his first marijuana cigarette, and then he hadn't liked it much, and hadn't gone back to try it again.
Still, he had come into the black neighborhoods of this city to hear music when the only place you could hear real jazz was in the storefront cabarets that were supposed to be “for coloreds only”âexcept that this was Philadelphia, so nobody had been willing to come right out and say it. God only knew, there had been enough in the way of neighborhoods that were “for whites only,” although nobody had been willing to say that, either. And then, as now, the real skids were always the most integrated parts of town. Alcoholism was color-blind. The old men sleeping off the shakes on park benches and heating grates were any color at all, or no color, and they were so far beyond caring that even an official policy of apartheid would not have mattered. Gregor wondered how the South Africans had managed that, or if they had even bothered to try: the community of bums. Could you have a community among people who could barely speak without slurring their words, or who wanted nothing more than another bottle of booze and oblivion?
Garry Mansfield was leading him up the stairs of the precinct house. At the top, standing in the half-opened front doors, was a man who looked like he might have been Black or Hispanic or Asian or all three. He was in an ordinary business suit, but he was all cop. Gregor wondered if they gave them walking lessons the way they gave those to debutantes, except instead of walking with books on their heads they'd be required to walk holding a steel baton stretched out behind their backs, so that they would learn to strut properly.
“What's the matter with him?” the man at the top of the stairs said.
Garry Mansfield looked Gregor over. “He's got the urban
blue. Hey, Lou. We got here as fast as we could. Jackman can talk the ass off a cooked chicken.”
blue. Hey, Lou. We got here as fast as we could. Jackman can talk the ass off a cooked chicken.”
The Black/Hispanic/Asian man must be Lou Emiliani. Maybe it was time for them all to stop trying to pin each other down by ethnicity. It was getting too confusing. Gregor held out his hand.
“Gregor Demarkian,” he said.
“Lou Emiliani,” Lou Emiliani said. He stood back and propped the door a little farther open, so that they could pass by him and into the precinct house itself. It was, Gregor saw, filthy in the way these places got. He was sure it was cleaned often enough. It was probably washed down in Lysol twice a day by a cleaning staff that had nothing else to do but try to make the place as antiseptic as possible. The problem was that some kinds of dirt did not come out, not ever, not even if you destroyed the building and reduced it all to dust.
In the big front room, an old woman in a coat that didn't quite come down to her knees was standing at the big front desk, tapping her hands against the surface as she tried to explain something to the desk sergeant. On the other side of that counter, three men were handcuffed together and sitting against the wall in wooden chairs. Gregor had no idea what had caused the police to handcuff them in the first place, but at the moment they were closer to sleep than to violence. Bigcity police departments like this were usually unbearably noisy, full of confusion, full of complaints. This one was almost eerily quiet. The only sound Gregor could hear was the old woman talking, her voice rising and falling almost as if in song.
“Cambodian,” Lou Emiliani said helpfully, seeing that Gregor was puzzled. “We've got a lot of them in this precinct. They're decent enough, but they just don't learn the language.”
“Well, for Christ's sake,” Garry Mansfield said. “I mean, what do you want? They're old ladies. They watched their families get shot up by machine guns in the old country and they come here, they're starting over, they're supposed to be grandmothers, instead they're cleaning toilets in some building downtown. I mean, Jesus.”
“I don't think you call Cambodia the old country,” Lou Emiliani said.
“I don't think you bug some old lady when she's lost her
old family and she's in a new country and she's only trying to catch a break.”
old family and she's in a new country and she's only trying to catch a break.”
“I don't bug the old ladies,” Lou Emiliani said.
They had gone through the big front room and into a narrow corridor. They were stopped in front of a steel door with a fire window in it. Gregor pushed the door open and looked inside, at a bare-bones imitation of a conference room. This was where arrested prisoners would be brought to have a private word or two with their Legal Aid attorneys.
“Gentlemen?” Gregor said.
The two men both looked at him. Neither one of them could be much more than thirty. They had forgotten he was even there.
“Oh,” Garry Mansfield said.
Lou Emiliani pushed into the room and looked around. “Just a minute,” he said. “Marsha was supposed to bring in the file.”
He disappeared down the corridor, and Garry and Gregor went inside to sit down. Gregor tried to remember if he had ever been in the precinct house in an unadulteratedly rich neighborhood, and supposed he must have. He had once worked kidnapping detail for the FBI, and in general it was rich people whose family members were kidnapped. He couldn't remember those precinct houses being much different from this one. Even the suburban police stations, if the suburb was large enough, weren't much different. The differences began to show in rural districts, where crime was almost nonexistent and the police sometimes felt as if they had only been hired for show.
Lou Emiliani came back in, carrying a thick manila folder, and shut the door behind him. “Here it is,” he said. “Marsha got held up by a shoplifting. What is it, these days, with the hookers? Is business bad or something? Why are they all shoplifting?”
“They aren't all shoplifting,” Garry Mansfield said patiently.
Lou Emiliani ignored him. He flipped open the manila folder and stared down at its first page, although Gregor knew that there couldn't be much of anything there that would make any difference to what he had to say. Gregor had looked through a lot of manila folders in his time. Unless they had
been especially arranged for a press conference or a meeting, they were generally incomprehensible.
been especially arranged for a press conference or a meeting, they were generally incomprehensible.
Lou Emiliani pushed the folder away. “Look,” he said. “I'm glad you're here, okay? I don't know what Garry thinks, but I'm glad Jackman's bringing you in. Somebody has to deal with the son of a bitch.”
“I thought we were going to stop calling him that,” Garry Mansfield said. “Jackman said that if we kept it up we were going to slip one day and do it on the air, so you saidâ”
Lou ignored him. “It's not that I'm against the Catholics. You have to understand this. All right? I've been a Catholic all my life. And I know what they were thinking, those guys in Rome, when they sent him here, after all the trouble. So. It's not that. It's just that I can't deal with him. I can't deal with him.”
“Nobody can deal with him,” Garry said.
“I take it we're back on the Cardinal Archbishop,” Gregor said.
Lou Emiliani stuck his fingers under his collar and came out with a silver chain with a crucifix and a Miraculous Medal hanging on it. Entwined around the metal were the brown cloth strands of the scapular of St. Simon Stock. Lou tucked it all back out of sight.
“I think the best thing you could do,” he said, “is to be our point person with the archdiocese. You deal with him.”
“Why don't we talk about this young man,” Gregor said. “This Mr.â”
“Boardman,” Garry Mansfield said.
Lou brought the manila folder back to him and closed it. “It was my fault, more than anybody else's. It didn't occur to me that he died from anything but bad cocaine, or too much cocaine. It looked like that kind of death. And you know what autopsies are. They can't test for everything. They only find what they go looking for.”
“Back up a little,” Gregor said. “This Mr. Boardman was how old?”
“Scott,” Garry Mansfield said.
“He was twenty-eight,” Lou Emiliani said. “Gay. Out, but not very comfortable with it. Not camp, not even a little. If you hadn't known he was gay, you would never have guessed it.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Garry Mansfield said. “Here we go again. What was he supposed to look like so you could guess it? What, you think the gay guys paint their hair green?”
Gregor ignored him. “If he wasn't comfortable being out and he wasn't distinctively gay, why was he out at all?”
“He had to be,” Lou said. “He was one of the plaintiffs in the sex-abuse scandal. The way those things work, the defense attorneys made his life an open book. And it wasn't a secret. He got caught in the garage doing it with another kid in high school. So his father kicked him out. His mother was still in touch, though.”
“And he came to St. Stephen's?” Gregor asked.
“I think it took longer than that,” Lou said. “He was in art college when he got kicked out. He must have finished. Anyway, by the time he died he was a graphic artist, got a lot of work on coffee-table books and book-cover stuff in general. Got a lot of work from New York. Some of the men at St. Stephen's said he was thinking of moving there.”
Gregor nodded. “All right. Eventually he came to St. Stephen's. Was he in a relationship?”
“No,” Garry Mansfield said.
“He screwed around,” Lou said. “He'd get stoked up on coke and hit the bars. In the beginning it was just sort of off and on. He'd coke up on the weekends and be clean the rest of the week, or he'd at least be clean enough. But the last six months or so, that changed.”
“He was zonked all the time,” Garry said. “We all saw him. He was all over the neighborhood. Half the uniforms in this precinct must have rolled him into the emergency room at least once, or rolled him home.”
“Nobody arrested him?” Gregor said.
“What for?” Garry Mansfield said. “He wasn't dealing. Hell, if he got a significant stash, he'd just hole up until he did it all himself. He was a mess. He didn't need to go to jail. He needed a hospital. There just aren't any hospitals.”
“Let's not debate the drug war,” Lou Emiliani said. Then he sighed. “I know it's wrong to jump to conclusions. We shouldn't have assumed anything. But it wasn't just us. It was Jackman and the commissioner both. Here's this guy, he's been stoking himself to the gills on coke for six months, it was only a matter of time before he killed himself. Now he
goes into convulsions in a church office and kicksâwhat would you think it was?”
goes into convulsions in a church office and kicksâwhat would you think it was?”
“Back up again,” Gregor said. “This was, when? That Scott Boardman died?”
“January 30,” Lou said. “Just about six o'clock in the evening.”
“And he wasn't alone? Somebody saw the convulsions?”
“A whole mass of people saw the convulsions,” Lou said. “Reverend Burdock, for one. Oh, and that guy, what's his name. George.”
“Chickie,” Garry Mansfield said.
“Yeah, Chickie. That one, you can tell that he's gay.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Garry Mansfield said.
Lou brushed it away. “We weren't thinking about arsenic,” he went on. “We weren't thinking about murder. Not any of us. What we were thinking about was Roy Phipps. You know about the Reverend Roy Phipps?”
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