A Great Day for the Deadly(32)

“Wonderful,” Donovan said. He studied the letter for a protracted moment and then leaned over to throw it back down on the desk. He was actually tall enough to do that while keeping one foot bent against the wall. “Now I’ve got someone sending dirty pictures to a nun. This is all I’m going to need. The Cardinal is going to be livid when he hears about this.”

“The Cardinal is fifty miles away in Colchester.”

“The Cardinal might as well be hiding under my bed.”

Donovan pushed himself away from the wall and began to pace, back and forth, between the office door and the window.

“Listen,” he said, “I’ve lived in this place, in Maryville, all my life, except for four years I spent in the army. I even went to college at St. Francis of the Snows just outside town and I commuted there. I know this place. I know these people. And I know something else. I know that no outside agitator has moved into the area recently. I know there aren’t any strangers lurking in the bushes. The only strangers we get are the ones who immigrate from Central America and none of them is desecrating churches or—did I tell you what happened at Iggy Loy the week before the flood?”

“No,” Gregor said. As usual when he was on an errand for the Cardinal, there seemed to be a lot of things no one had told him. “All I’ve really discussed with anyone is the murder of Brigit Ann Reilly,” he told Donovan now. “The Cardinal has been receiving anonymous letters, yes, and he’s concerned about them, but not so concerned about them as he is about the death.”

“Does he think the two things are connected?”

“You know the Cardinal. He thinks everything is connected.”

“I think everything is connected,” Pete Donovan said. “I didn’t know anything about any anonymous letters so I haven’t had a chance to work them into the theory, but give me time. What happened up at Iggy Loy, that’s—”

“St. Ignatius Loyola Church,” Gregor said. “Sister Scholastica told me.”

“Yeah. Well, Iggy Loy is the closest church. The nuns would be in that parish if they were in any parish, which they aren’t because they’re a Motherhouse. There’s a lot of traffic between here and there. The nuns run the parish school and the CCD program—that’s Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, catechism for children who don’t go to parochial school. So there’s always one nun or the other over there for something.”

“Always nuns?” Gregor asked. “Not nuns and postulants and novices?”

“They send everybody everywhere these days,” Pete Donovan said, shooting Gregor the desperate glance Gregor had come to think of, over the years, as the mark of a sensible man defeated by Vatican II. Gregor thought it was interesting to see it in a man so young. If Pete Donovan was nostalgic for the old Church, it was a Church he had known only as legend. He cleared his throat a little and said, “It doesn’t really matter who they send, for this, because none of the nuns ever saw it because Father Fitzsimmons made sure they didn’t. Do you get the feeling that everybody is protecting everybody else around here and nobody is doing anybody any damn good at all?”

“Slightly,” Gregor said drily.

“Yeah,” Pete Donovan said. “Well, what happened over at Iggy Loy was that the choir robes got torn up. And I do mean torn up. Somebody ripped them apart with his bare hands. Somebody or somebodies. The robes are kept in a dressing room up in the choir loft, along with extra hymn books and arrangements sheets for the organ. Father Fitzsimmons went up there to see if he could find the words to ‘Lord of the Dance,’ or something and there it was, shreds of cloth all over the place—”

“Did you see it?” Gregor asked. “Were you called in?”

“Oh, yes. The unofficial policy in the Archdiocese is to downplay acts of anti-Catholicism as much as possible. As long as nobody was hurt and nothing drastic happened—desecrating the altar at St. Mary Magdalen was something drastic—anyway, as long as those two conditions are met the incidents usually don’t get reported except to the Cardinal. Sometimes the Cardinal will report them to me, but by that time the scene will have been contaminated—”

“Or obliterated,” Gregor said. “You sound as if you think this choir robe thing wouldn’t ordinarily have been considered drastic enough to have been reported directly to the police.”

“It wouldn’t have. Somebody went over to St. Bonaventure’s School in Kataband, broke all the windows and spray painted ‘John Paul Two sucks dick’ on the front doors and the first the police over there heard of it was three days later when the insurance company called. I mean, Mr. Demarkian, I consider myself a good Catholic. I even consider myself a loyal Catholic. I even believe in forbearance and all the rest of it. I still think the Cardinal’s attitude to this is nuts.”