Authors: Jane Haddam
True Believers (43 page)
It was the anticlimax that bothered Dan Burdock, the feeling that he had been wound up and raised up and pumped full of excitement, only to have it end at ⦠nothing. For more than a day now, he had been primed and ready, so tense with knowing what was about to happen that he had sometimes found it hard to breathe. For a single short hour out on the street, he had nearly been flying. The cold had meant nothing to him. His feet hadn't seemed to touch the ground. He wondered now what it was that he had expected. Maybe he had thought that the exorcism would be real, that Roy really had the devil harbored in his soul and this rite would bring it out, into the open, complete with horns and tail and pitchfork. That said something he didn't much like about how he really felt about the Roman Catholic Churchâand, for that matter, how he felt about Roy. Aaron would say that he had a secret attraction, but Dan knew it wasn't true. Aaron thought everybody had a secret attraction to everybody else, or at least that all homosexuals did, and that all men were probably homosexuals. Dan knew something about the fascination with disgust. Looking
at Roy was like looking at a body on an autopsy table, or those pictures of the body parts in Jeffrey Dahmer's freezer that had shown up in one of the tabloids the week after Dahmer's trial. Sometimes you had to look at those things and make yourself feel them, just to make yourself believe that they were real.
at Roy was like looking at a body on an autopsy table, or those pictures of the body parts in Jeffrey Dahmer's freezer that had shown up in one of the tabloids the week after Dahmer's trial. Sometimes you had to look at those things and make yourself feel them, just to make yourself believe that they were real.
Now he looked out over the choir balcony onto the body of the church, just as he had on the night before Scott Boardman's funeral, and found himself thinking the same kinds of thoughts. Granite and marble were difficult to maintain, and expensive, but they were worth it. They made this place a house of God in the only way that had ever made sense to him. The high ceilings, the soaring arches, the delicate carved latticework, the stained glassâRoy was wrong, and so were all those low-church Protestants, who thought you could only approach God through poverty of mind and body. Poverty of mind and body was epidemic in this world. If you were going to approach God, you had to approach him through majesty.
Dan looked down at his hands and saw that he was holding one of his tubes of soft mints and rolling it back and forth between his fingers. He put it in his pants pocket without taking one, then went out the door and down the stone steps to the hall beside the church. When he got to the first floor, he stopped and opened the arched door into the church proper. There were a lot of people in there now, because the march and the exorcism had worked them up, and they didn't want to leave. Dan saw Chickie George and Mary McAllister, sitting in a pew in the back and looking over something they had laid down on the seat between them. There had been rumors all day that Mary was going to enter the Order of the Sisters of Divine Grace at the end of the college term. Maybe she had brochures or something to show Chickie. Did convents put out brochures? Dan had no idea. He looked around the church a little longer and found Aaron and Marc, sitting with two men who were unfamiliar to him. Maybe that would be the best man and the man of honor, if that's what they were going to call it, when the wedding finally happened. Dan knew that the wedding would finally happen, even if the bishop had apoplexy and the papers screamed for weeks. That was what he was doing here. That was why he had been sent here, and no matter how hard he had tried to be prudent over the years,
he had always known it. Now he only wanted to make sure that the church would survive no matter what he didâthe church was a small “c,” not the one with the large “C”; St. Stephen's, not the Anglican Communion.
he had always known it. Now he only wanted to make sure that the church would survive no matter what he didâthe church was a small “c,” not the one with the large “C”; St. Stephen's, not the Anglican Communion.
He drew his head out of the doorway and closed the door as quickly as he could against the air lock. He went down the hall and then out the door there to the foyer. The foyer was full of people, too, but they were either people he didn't know well or didn't know at all. He went out the front doors onto the street and found that far less was happening there. The homeless people were coming into St. Anselm's. Mary McAllister would have work to do in a little while. Dan saw an old woman with her brown paper shopping bags on a wheeled rack that she pulled behind her, like one of those luggage carts people had in airports. He wondered how she'd managed to get together the money to get it.
He was just coming out of St. Stephen's front gate and onto the public sidewalk itself when the police cars began arriving farther down the street, and the ambulance came around the corner and stopped there, too. He hesitated for a moment, thinking that the traffic must be for Roy or one of Roy's people, before he realized that the vehicles were much too close. It wasn't Roy's church they were stopping at, but one of the ordinary town houses on the street. They weren't making all that much fuss, either. None of them had sirens blaring, and except for the fact that one of the police cars was pulsing its red-and-blue top lights, they might have been ordinary cars arriving for an ordinary party. Then an ordinary car did arrive, and Dan recognized Gregor Demarkian being helped out of it. He walked down the block until he was directly across the street from the action. The police had left the town house's front door open, but looking inside it, Dan couldn't see anything but a coat tree and a small framed picture whose content he was too far away to make out.
People went in and out, in and out. Dan looked up the street and saw that the door to Roy's church was open and that Roy himself had come out, alone, to check out the situation. Dan didn't think he'd ever seen Roy alone anywhere near the town house. The “church” seemed to have something going on every minute of every day and night. Dan walked up the sidewalk
until he was standing directly across the street from Roy, and waved.
until he was standing directly across the street from Roy, and waved.
“The view is better from over here,” he said, loudly enough so that he knew he had been heard.
Roy looked at him for a moment, and then at the police cars and the ambulance. Then he crossed the road in the middle of the block. If this were an ironic movie, something Swedish or Italian, a car would have come out of nowhere and run him down.
“Do you know what's going on?” Roy asked, when he was safely on the sidewalk.
“I don't even know whose house it is,” Dan said. “There doesn't seem to be much in the way of an emergency, though. No sirens. No hurry. Gregor Demarkian is here.”
“Is he? That's Edith Lawton's house. Edith Lawton the atheist.”
“You mean like John Paul, the Pope? I didn't know atheist was a job description.”
“In her case it is. She writes for atheist magazines.”
“Royâ”
“Give me some credit, for God's sake. I mean atheist magazines, magazines about atheism. She writes for them. She also sleeps with her lawyer.”
“What?”
“You ought to get out more, Dan. You don't know anything about anything.”
It was true. He really didn't know anything about anything. He looked at the town house again and saw that a man was being taken out on a stretcher and put into the back of the ambulance, but no sirens went on, and for some reason he couldn't pinpoint, he didn't think the man was seriously hurt.
“I wonder if that's the husband or the lawyer,” Roy said. “Did I mention that? She sleeps with her lawyer, but she's also got a husband.”
“Are they separated?”
“Not that I've noticed. But maybe I'm a little out-of-date. These days, the family comes in all kinds of new and interesting forms. Maybe the three of them felt they were all married to each other.”
“Maybe.”
“It would be convenient to think that they were coming to
arrest Edith Lawton for the murders, wouldn't it? It would be convenient if they'd arrest somebody for those murders. This whole thing is getting entirely too complicated. What did you expect me to do during that farce you engineered this afternoon? Fall on my knees and embrace the Church of Rome?”
arrest Edith Lawton for the murders, wouldn't it? It would be convenient if they'd arrest somebody for those murders. This whole thing is getting entirely too complicated. What did you expect me to do during that farce you engineered this afternoon? Fall on my knees and embrace the Church of Rome?”
“I didn't engineer it. It was the Cardinal Archbishop's idea. If it hadn't been, he wouldn't have come.”
“True enough.”
“I expected you to lose your temper,” Dan said.
Roy laughed. “I never lose my temper. I haven't lost my temper in thirty years. I'm a block of ice. Take a look. They're bringing her out.”
Dan looked. A woman was coming out the front door with her arms in handcuffs. She was a prettyish but obviously middle-aged woman, and she had tears streaming down her face. Maybe she was sobbing. There was just enough noise so that Dan couldn't tell. Dan saw Gregor Demarkian come out the front door, talk to the woman for a moment, and then start down the street in the direction of the churches again. Dan watched him go for a little while and then turned his attention back to the woman.
“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.”
“âThey'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.”
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 crimeâor 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.
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 fingerprintedâsurely 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.
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.”
“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. Soâ”
“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 oneâ”
“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 Holdenâ”
“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 thingsâ”
“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.”
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 membershipâless than two hundred and fifty, I think, is what Dan Burdock told me.”
“Well, yeah,” Garry said. “Butâ”
“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 âgay' 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 âgay' 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 programsâa health-insurance pool, a check-cashing
service, a short-term loan service. There's money going in and out all the time.”
service, a short-term loan service. There's money going in and out all the time.”
“And Scott Boardman found out what he was doingâ” 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 alsoâsympathetic, 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 choicesâeither 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 arsenicâ”
“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. Theâ”
“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.”
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 basementâor 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.”
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