A Great Day for the Deadly(53)

“Why Sam Harrigan?”

Jack O’Brien took an enormous swig of coffee and got up to get some more. Gregor could only admire the strength of his stomach lining.

“It was a couple of things,” O’Brien said. “First place, it had to be someone she looked up to and not someone her own age. I’d seen her get worked up with both kinds of people and the way she got worked up was different. With people her own age she got happy. With older people she got awed. You get the difference.”

“I think so.”

“Only other person I ever saw her that awed about was Reverend Mother General. Even Sister Scholastica came a bad second. Oh, well. Then there was all that stuff about the eye of the needle.”

“What?”

“You know,” O’Brien said. Having filled his coffee cup until it was nearly erupting from its plastic foam cell, he came back into the center of the room and sat down. “The camel passing through the eye of the needle. Father Fitzsimmons does that one every time he gets up to speak at the opening of parish fund-raising drives. Not that I’m in Father Fitzsimmons’s parish. He has Iggy Loy right up the street here. I live over on the other side of town.”

“I still don’t see—”

“About rich people,” O’Brien said patiently. “There’s two ways to read that passage, and one is that it says that if you’re rich you can’t go to Heaven no matter what, and the other is that it’s another example of God’s being able to do what he wants to do. Anyway, lately Brigit was very intense about how the rich could really be noble souls, look at all the aristocratic people who had ended up as saints. I think that means that whoever it was she was in awe of was probably well heeled.”

“And Sam Harrigan is well heeled?”

“Sam’s about as rich as you get around these parts,” O’Brien said. “The only person who comes close is Miriam Bailey over at the bank, and maybe Josh. Josh is Miriam’s new husband. He doesn’t have a dime, but Brigit might not have known that. I don’t think Brigit knew much about anything.”

“There isn’t anybody else?”

“Who’s rich, you mean?” O’Brien was surprised. “I guess there’s Father Doherty down at St. Andrew’s. I don’t think he’s rich now, but I know he used to be. Or maybe I should say his people were.”

“Is he from around here?” Gregor asked.

“No,” O’Brien said, “but he doesn’t have to be. Doherty Lumber, that’s where the Father’s from. His brother still runs the business. Comes up here once a year around Thanksgiving in a big black car and drives right through the slum down there in it, you know Father Doherty’s parishioners really like him because after the first year nobody has ever broken the brother’s windows. You know about St. Andrew’s?”

Gregor knew about St. Andrew’s. That had been in the Cardinal’s report, too. The Cardinal could be faulted on some things, but not on the extent and precision of his knowledge of the parishes in his Archdiocese. “St. Andrew’s is the parish where Brigit Ann Reilly went to teach reading to adults,” Gregor said. “Is it a very bad slum? Is this Father Doherty some kind of martyr?”

“Father Doherty is a doctor,” O’Brien said, “and for a slum it’s not too bad. Some drugs, some violence—but if you ask me, the drugs and the violence aren’t always the fault of the people who live there, if you know what I mean. Good, hardworking Catholic people from South America, most of them are. Half the time, there’s trouble down there, it’s the spoiled brats from the better parts of town who’re causing it.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said. To his mind, Father Doherty fit O’Brien’s description of the kind of person Brigit would be in awe of—and Sister Scholastica’s, too—far better than Sam Harrigan. Father Doherty, after all, had Given It All Up to work with the poor. Gregor reached down, picked up his cup, and absentmindedly took another sip of Jack O’Brien’s coffee. The shock to his system was enough to keep him from ever doing anything absentmindedly again.

“Well,” he said. “That’s all very interesting. It’s very hard to investigate these things when you haven’t known the victim. And you almost never have.”

“Around here you would have,” Jack O’Brien said. “But that wasn’t what I called you in here to talk about. It was about something else, something you might have missed.”

“What?” Gregor knew himself capable of missing a great deal, but he didn’t believe the Cardinal was capable of it. “The reports I got were very complete. I know they won’t be perfect until I’ve had a chance to look around for myself, but I still—”