Baptism in Blood(58)

“I know who he is, of course I do. He’s in the papers all the time.”

“Yes, well. It seems that Mr. Demarkian has accom­modated him more than once, in murder cases that the car­dinal had an interest in—”

“What kind of an interest?”

“Oh, don’t get apocalyptic on me, Henry. It’s nothing like that. It’s just cases priests or nuns have been involved in, or they’ve taken place on the grounds of a church some­where. They’ve mostly been routine things, except for one or two, and you’re not going to get Cardinal O’Bannion on any of them. Anyway, the cardinal seems to pay Mr. Demarkian by contributing to all these Armenian charities, you know, for refugees and things like that. It’s a very interesting arrangement.”

Henry thought it over. You had to be very careful. The Devil was very clever. Even so, he couldn’t see anything really wrong with any of this. There didn’t seem to be anything about Mr. Demarkian that was actively evil.

“Tell me about Zhondra Meyer,” he said. “Is that the person you said you couldn’t get decent answers about?”

“It’s very, very hard to get answers about somebody that rich,” Janet said. “You wouldn’t believe the things you can do to preserve your privacy if you’ve only got enough money. There are some things, though, that are a matter of public record.”

“And?”

“Well,” Janet said, “in the first place, Zhondra Meyer has been estranged from both her parents for years.”

“Because of the lesbianism?”

“Because of the Communism, in the beginning. She joined the Communist Party of the United States when she was in her junior year at Smith. Then she transferred to the University of California at Berkeley and joined a Commu­nist cell there. Her parents were livid.”

“Why did they let her transfer? Why didn’t they pull her out of school?”

“They couldn’t. Zhondra’s got her own money, mil­lions and millions of dollars of it. She came into it when she was eighteen.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Henry said. “Can you imag­ine having a situation like that?”

“No.” Janet was blunt. And uninterested in speculat­ing. Janet liked to think of herself as a strictly pragmatic woman. “The thing is, they have tried to do something about her more than once. To rein her in, so to speak, which means to get control of the money away from her. They haven’t been successful. But what’s interesting to me, Henry, was what they decided to try.”

“And what was it?”

“They tried to have her declared insane.”

Henry sat up even straighter on the bench. “Do you mean her parents tried to have her declared incompetent,” he demanded, “or insane?”

“I mean insane, Henry. I supposed they would have had her declared incompetent, too, when it was all over, but first they tried to have her declared insane. They had her apartment in San Francisco raided and got her locked up in an insane asylum.”

“Good Lord.”

“You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find this infor­mation, Henry. I mean, it’s all a matter of public record, but they’re very good at making sure they don’t get any publicity they don’t want to have. There were stories in the newspapers, but they were just little squibs. Even after it all went wrong and Zhondra got released and threatened to sue them.”

“It should have been the movie of the week,” Henry said. “Are you sure all this happened?”

“Oh, yes, Henry. I’m sure. I checked and double-checked, and I had Deacon Hatcher check, too. He’s better than I am at the computer. You can get all this stuff off the Internet, if you know where to look.”

“So what did they use to have her committed? They couldn’t have had her locked up just because she joined the Communist Party.”

“I don’t know what they used to have her committed. Maybe it was enough that they had all that money.”

“What did she use to get herself out?”

“I don’t know that, either,” Janet said. “I told you the information was sketchy. But I was thinking, you know… I was thinking there might be things we might be able to do with it.”

“Like what?”

“Threaten to make it public, maybe. Just something, you know, something that might make them get out of there. We can’t have them up there for years and years, poisoning the air we breathe.”

“I know that.”

Janet stood up and brushed out her skirt. “I’ve got to get back over to the house. We’re cooking lunch for two dozen people today. All these volunteers. You want me to send the printouts and all that stuff back to you?”