He went through the mass of press clippings, came to the one he wanted, and pulled it out. This was the one that worried him. He looked down at a grainy black-and-white picture of a tall, thin man in hospital whites, surrounded by a sea of faces so ethnically diverse they could have served as a public relations poster for multiculturalism in New York City. Underneath the picture, a caption in thick italic lettering read,
Dr. Michael Pride, standing on the steps of the Sojourner Truth Health Center, the morning after Charles van
Gregor picked the picture up and put it down again. He looked into the face of the tall, thin man and discovered nothing. He looked into the faces of one or two of the others and found only that they hadn’t been looking at the camera. It was impossible to find out anything serious from a photograph, except for the kinds of photographs taken by security systems in banks.
The reason this clipping worried him had less to do with the clipping itself than with something the Cardinal Archbishop of New York had said to him on the phone, the first and only time they had talked. Gregor hadn’t liked the Cardinal Archbishop’s voice. It wasn’t like O’Bannion’s voice, or like this Cardinal Archbishop’s predecessor’s. There was something smooth and hard about it that reminded Gregor of political appointees in the Department of Justice. Besides, the Cardinal Archbishop was in no way a New Yorker. The Cardinal Archbishop had been trained in Catholic seminaries and canonical universities from Los Angeles, California, to Rome, but he still had the Mississippi drawl in his voice. It was faint but unmistakable, like a fashionable woman’s mist of perfume.
“What do you know about Dr. Michael Pride?” the voice had asked him—and Gregor hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that he was being asked to rat to the Inquisition, in spite of the fact that he’d never met Michael Pride in his life. “I suppose they’ve heard of Michael even out there in Philadelphia,” the Archbishop had said.
They had certainly heard of Michael Pride in Philadelphia. They had heard of him in Calcutta and Madrid and São Paulo, too. The question was ingenuous. Gregor thought the Cardinal was trying to ask something else but was not willing to put that something else into words. Did it matter who had heard of Michael Pride? All the same people had heard of Charles van Straadt.
“Of course I’ve heard of Dr. Pride,” Gregor said. “It would be difficult not to.”
“I suppose that’s true. Have you been aware of any… news about him lately?”
“I’ve been aware of his connection with this murder, Your Eminence. I could hardly have avoided it. This is a national story.”
“Yes. Yes, I know. You may not be aware of it, Mr. Demarkian, but Michael Pride has a long association with this Archdiocese. A very long association. The Sojourner Truth Health Center was a special project of my immediate predecessor’s. He was very fond of Michael. And very involved in the center’s activities. Much more involved than simply signing off on the money the Archdiocese donated to help with the center’s operations. And then, of course, there are the nuns.”
“I remember reading somewhere that there were nuns who work at the center, Your Eminence.”
“Yes. Yes, there are several. Not a single order, you understand. The center isn’t the project of any single order, the way Covenant House is with the Franciscans. But there are a number of nuns who do nursing and social work there.”
“They probably work cheap,” Gregor suggested.
“They probably do. I will admit something to you, Mr. Demarkian. If it had been up to me, if I hadn’t arrived on the scene here to find that the bonds of connection between the center and this Archdiocese were so firmly established, I do not think I would have allowed such bonds to grow up. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have allowed the Archdiocese to come to the aid of the center. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t have allowed the association to become so strong and so close.”
“I take it there are things going on at the center that you don’t like.”
“A number of things, Mr. Demarkian. The fact that part of the facility dispenses family-planning information, including abortion information, and that the gynecological department performs abortions through the second trimester. This is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. I do have a stand my people in Rome expect me to take. Even the most liberal of the bishops in this country don’t use church money to fund abortion clinics.”
“No, Your Eminence. I can see that.”
“Did you know that Michael Pride was a homosexual?”