“We're a little early in this case to have gone in for audits,” Detective Emiliani said.
Robert leaned forward. “If you want to know about us, I can tell you right now that there are no irregularities in our books. If there had been, Sister Thomasetta would have noticed. And she would have told me. Or she would have told Sister Scholastica, and Sister Scholastica would have told me. Sister Scholastica is her superior. But Sister Thomasetta did a complete internal audit when she was appointed comptroller back in September. And she's a very competent woman.”
“I'm sure she is,” Demarkian said. “Let's try one more thing. What about the settlement that was made with the men who sued the church in the pedophilia scandal? Is the parish part of that settlement? Do you make a monthly payment into a fund, or to the archdiocese, for the restitution payments or the legal fees?”
Robert thought about it. It was shameful, but there were whole segments of parish life he knew very little about. Parish priests were supposed to be hands-on administrators, in charge of every aspect of running their parishes, but he had known from the beginning that his talents in some areas were slight. One of those areas was budgets and finance.
“I'm not entirely certain,” he said, “but I believe that we were assessed a single payment several years ago, and that we now pay a portion of that to the archdiocese every month. We don't deal directly with the litigants in that case or with their attorneys or with the court. The suit was against the archdiocese principally and only peripherally against the parishes. I think they referred to the suits against us having ânuisance value.'”
Demarkian shook his head. “It doesn't make any sense,” he said. “It really doesn't make any sense. Does it make sense to
you, Father, that somebody would kill Bernadette Kelly and Harriet Garrity?”
“Bernadette is a puzzle,” Robert said drily, “but there was probably a waiting list for Sister Harriet. I'm sorry. I don't see any reason to disguise the fact that she and I were not exactly friends. No matter what His Eminence says.”
“Forget His Eminence,” Detective Mansfield said. “We've already had an earful about how people felt about Sister Harriet. Not exactly a world champion at winning friends and influencing people.”
“No,” Robert agreed.
“I think we can leave you to your life for the moment,” Gregor Demarkian said. “You've probably got work to do. So do we. Would you mind doing me just one favor?”
“What favor is that?”
“Do you mind telling me the last time you saw Sister Harriet alive?”
“Oh,” Robert said. “That's easy. It was at Mass that morning. Seven o'clock Mass. She was there, and then afterward she was downstairs for coffee and doughnuts. We do that after weekday morning Mass so that the people who come on their way to work and want to receive Communion can get something to eat. You're not supposed to eat for an hour before you receive Communion.”
“And was Sister Harriet her usual self? You didn't notice anything different about her? She wasn't particularly upset?”
“Well, Mr. Demarkian, she was particularly upset, but that wasn't much of a surprise. We'd just told herâI'd told her, on instructions from His Eminence, that I concurred with entirelyâshe' d been told that she would have to adopt some sort of distinctive habit if she wanted to go on working in this parish. I don't mean the long dress and that sort of thing that the Sisters of Divine Grace wear, but something, you know, that would make it clear she was a Sister. The Holy Father has been explicit about this. Members of religious orders are supposed to wear simple but distinctive garb. They aren't supposed to be running around in sweatpants and blue serge suits.”
“I see,” Demarkian said. “And Sister Harriet didn't want to adopt a habit?”
“She would rather have eaten cow dung.”
Demarkian shook his head. “That doesn't get us anywhere, either, does it?” he said. “Thank you, Father. We really will let you get on with your life now.”
Robert nodded politely, and stood while the two detectives got up and made their way to the foyer and their coats. He felt suddenly very light-headed, as if he had just jumped from a tall building and the bungee cord hadn't taken hold until the last second. He was so exhilarated, he thought he was going to be sick.
“Well,” he said. “Well. I'm glad to have been of help. Really. More than glad.”
It was true, too. He was glad to have been of help, especially since it had cost him so little, and meant so little, to himself or to them. He didn't even mind the stiff cold wind that came in the door at him as he watched the three men walk away across the courtyard to the church. Cold was good. Cold would keep him awakeâat least until he made it upstairs to his bedroom to lie down.
For the first time in hours, Father Robert Healy thought he could sleep.
By the time Mary McAllister got Chickie George back to St. Stephen's, she was exhausted, and she still had at least an hour of studying ahead of her if she hoped to pass her weekly quiz in Systematic Theology. She was also sliding into one of those irritated moods that had been plaguing her for almost a month. It was four o'clock in the afternoon and already dark, although not so dark as it would have been before New Year's. When she got out of the van and came around to help Chickie down, she could feel the sting of freezing rain against her cheeks. They were gearing up for an ice storm, the worst kind of weather possible. Too many of the homeless people she looked after were too mentally ill, or too damaged from alcohol, to have sense to come in from the cold.
Chickie had an Ace bandage around his ribs. Four of them were broken, and neither he nor she had been happy to hear the doctor say there wasn't much that could be done about it but to feed him painkillers and wait.
“I've always tried very hard to stay away from drugs of all kinds, even the legal variety,” Chickie had said, in that highcamp squeal he affected around people he didn't know. Later, when they were alone together, he dropped most of the act, and said, “It's a very sensible policy, Mary. You know what happens to so many of us over at St. Steve's. I've got to stay off.”
In the end, Mary had convinced him to take at least a half dose of the painkillers they had given himâDemerol and Percodan; they weren't fooling aroundâand now she could see it was a good thing she had. The van was not the smoothest ride in the world. They had been bumping over potholes for miles. Chickie's face was a mask of pain, which meant, of course, that it was a mask of pretense. Mary held out her arms to him and felt his weight against her shoulders.
“I wish you wouldn't do that,” she said suddenly. “With the doctor, I mean. I don't understand why you do. It doesn't help you any. And it's not natural.”
“Do what?” Chickie said innocently.
“Do that flaming-queen act,” Mary said, moving back a little. When she was sure he could stand on his own, she left him, and went around his back to slide the van door shut behind him. “You know by now the effect it has on people. They stop taking you seriously. And it's not as if it's natural. You're not really like that at all.”
“Not really like what, Mary? Not really gay?”
“Not really affected.”
“Some people are like that,” Chickie said. “Some people really can't help it. They're like that all the time. Why should people hate them for it?”
“I didn't say people should hate them for it. I said it didn't make any sense for you to behave that way when it wasn't natural for you. Don't you want people to like you for yourself?”
“Yes,” Chickie said. “That's exactly what I want. Do you understand that?”
“I think so.”
“I'm gay, Mary. I don't see why people shouldn't know it. I don't see why I shouldn't act gay.”
“Aaron is gay. People know it. It has nothing to do with fluttering your hands and sashaying when you walk.”
“Aaron can pass.”
“Aaron doesn't pass, even if he can,” Mary said firmly,
“and you don't have to either. Just be yourself. That's all I'm asking you. Especially with health insurance as bad as yours is. You're very lucky that that doctor saw the riot on television and really hated Roy Phipps. It saved you a couple of thousand dollars.”
“It doesn't look like there was a riot here last night, does it?” Chickie asked. “The street is absolutely clean. I can't even see lights down there at the hellhole. Do you suppose they've moved out?”
“We've none of us got that kind of luck.”
“No,” Chickie agreed. “We don't. Do you mind if I lean on your arm a bit? I'm still not feeling good about standing up.”
Mary let him lean. It seemed to her that she had been letting him lean for a long time now, and that it was one of the few things that she still enjoyed, in this odd tangle of discontent that she had become locked in. The rain made the sidewalk tricky, but they went slowly, around to the side of the church and into the door of the annexâwhere, Mary suddenly remembered, Scott Boardman had died. Or had started dying. Convulsions and vomiting. She thought of Sister Harriet Garrity and frowned a little, because even though the connections between the deaths were now very clear, there was still something that seemed off about it all. At the door, she left Chickie standing on his own and opened up. The walls of the annex were lined with pictures, just like the walls of the basement over at St. Anselm's, but here the pictures were simple drawings of the Anglican flag and the symbols of Easter, rather than the productions of Sunday school children trying to express what they felt about the star of Bethlehem.
“Dan?” Chickie called out.
“He's not here,” Aaron called back. A door opened down the hall and Aaron came out, dressed in good slacks and a good sports jacket and a black sweatshirt. “You're later than we thought you would be. He had to go out. How are you?”
“Prostrate, my dear, just prostrate. You have no ideaâ”
“He has four broken ribs,” Mary said straightforwardly. “And a big Ace bandage around his middle. And he finds it difficult to walk. He's supposed to take painkillers.”
“Oh, he must love that,” Aaron said.
“I'd love a chair,” Chickie said.
Aaron waved them in the direction of the office he'd come out of, and they followed him there. Mary looked around with a certain amount of curiosity. She had been over here before, but she'd never paid much attention to the place. Offices, after all, were offices. Now it seemed odd to her that the walls were so bare and so clean. In the offices at St. Anselm's, there was stuff everywhere. There were even books in stacks on the floor.
“So,” Aaron said, “I thought that as long as I had the afternoon free, I'd try to tidy up Scott's files, and it's impossible. None of it makes any sense. You don't happen to remember somebody named John Strodever, do you?”
“Of course I do,” Chickie said.
Mary helped Chickie ease down in the only chair other than the one next to the computer, that Aaron was using. It was not a good chair. It swiveled.
“You ought to remember him, too,” Mary said. “He was the man who started the lawsuit. You know. Against the archdiocese. Because of the priests who, uhâ”
“We get the picture,” Chickie said quickly. “Mary's right. He was the first one. Later, there were a whole slew of men coming forward, but Strodever's the one who started it.”
“Is he gay?” Aaron asked.
“I haven't the faintest idea,” Chickie said. “Why would I know that? How could you possibly expect me to know that?”
“Look at this.” Aaron tapped the computer screen, and Mary saw Chickie give him a withering look. Of course, Chickie had just sat down. His ribs were broken. He didn't want to get up again.
Mary went around the side of the desk herself instead, and looked at Aaron's computer screen. She seemed to be looking at the photograph of a bill of some kind, rather than an ordinary computer document.
“What is that?” she asked.
“It's a memo,” Aaron said. “It's been scanned into the computer. Look. September 9. You see that?”
“Yes,” Mary said.
“Now watch this.” Aaron tapped at the keyboard. Mary saw
the screen blink and throw up what seemed to be the same scanned memo. “What's this?” Aaron asked.
“It's the same memo,” Mary said.
“You think so? Watch this. Let's go back to number one.” He went back to number one. “Now,” he said. “Read the heading. After âsubject.'”
“âPayment schedule in the settlement of the case of John Strodever, et al. vs. the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.'” Mary read.
“Okay,” Aaron said. “Read the next line.”
“âPlaintiffs,'” Mary read. “âJohn Thomas Strodever, Michael Charles Wheelan, Stuart Carl Dodd, Stephen Thomas Roderick.'”
“Okay,” Aaron said. “Now for number two.”
“âJohn Thomas Strodever,'” Mary read obediently. “âMichael Charles Wheelan, Mark Henry O'Mara'âwait.”
“Yes, exactly,” Aaron said triumphantly. “Wait.”
“There's an extra name,” Mary said. “Is it just the one?”
“Just the one,” Aaron said. “Why do you think that is?”
“It's probably nothing,” Chickie said. “One of the documents was a draft, that's all, and they left somebody out or put somebody in that they shouldn't have, so they rewrote it.”
“If that's all it was, why would Scott have scanned them into the computer? And where did he get them? How could he get them?” Aaron shook his head. “It isn't like Scott was part of the lawsuit. And I don't know any of these names. I don't think it's plausible that he was trying to look after somebody he didn't know.”
Chickie shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “It's no problem how he got them, for God's sake. Scott was a book and publications designer. He worked for all sorts of people. He did year-end reports for companies, and for law firms, too, when they put out those big glossy booklet things they like to to advertise how wonderful they are. Where is the memo from? It's a law firm, isn't it?”
“Brady, Marquis and Holden,” Mary said.
“A big law firm,” Chickie said with satisfaction.
“Well, all right,” Aaron said. “Let's say he was designing something at this law firm and he ran across these documents, that still doesn't explain why he scanned them. And it must have taken a bit of work, too, because he must have either
snuck them out of the law firm and then snuck them back in, or else he scanned them onto a disk there and then brought them here and loaded themâ”
“Why would he have had to sneak them back in?” Mary asked. “Why not just take them and throw them out?”
“Why not just take them and keep them, then?” Aaron said. “Why bother to scan them at all? The only point to that is that he couldn't keep the originals of the documents.”
“You're both turning this into James Bond, and there's no reason to,” Chickie said. “So Scott was nosy. A lot of people are nosy. I'm nosy.”
“Scott was murdered,” Aaron pointed out.
Chickie shifted in his chair again. Mary bent down and looked at the document on the screen. It was a perfectly ordinary document. It was dated. It was on letterhead memo paper. She shook her head.
“Maybe,” she said, “we ought to tell the police about this. Or that Mr. Demarkian. I mean, if Scott was murdered because of thisâwhy would he be murdered because of this? Chickie's right. It could be just two drafts and one draft was wrong so the other one was written. It just doesn't make any sense.”
Aaron clicked at the keyboard again, and the printer began to whir. “I'm going to make copies of both of them, just in case. Lots of copies. And I'm going to leave them all over the place. Then I'm going to have a good long talk with Dan. We probably should go to the police, but I want to know what we're going to say before we do it.”
Mary backed away and went to where Chickie was sitting. He was looking pained and very tired. She thought it might have been a mistake to bring him out here, even though he had wanted very much to come.
“Maybe you should go someplace and lie down,” she told him. “You look exhausted. And you're not well, even if you think you are.”
“No, no,” Chickie said. “I'll sleep in a pew. I want to be at that service. In case we get picketed.”
“We won't get picketed,” Aaron said confidently. “We've got an army of police coming down to cordon us off. And he wouldn't try anything so soon after last night anyway. He's a smart asshole. He knows when not to push his luck.”
“I'd like to push his luck,” Chickie said. “I used to think
he was gay and in the closet, but I've changed my mind. Nobody that foul could ever be gay.”
“I think I'd better get back to school before I don't have any time to study at all,” Mary said. “Are you sure you're going to be all right? Do you want me to come back and get you and take you home?”
“In the van with the homeless people?” Chickie said.
“Behave,” Mary told him. Then she kissed him on the top of the head, waved good-bye to Aaron, and left.
Out in the parking lot, she saw that she had left the van's passenger side door open. She did the sensible thing of checking through the backseats to make sure she hadn't picked up a mugger or a rapist, then she climbed in behind the wheel and started up. She wondered if Chickie really did mind being in the van with the homeless people, and then thought that most people would. They smelled, and they could be frightening. She pulled the van out onto the street and headed back across town to St. Joe's.