Dear Old Dead(23)

Gregor had been taking this phone call in his kitchen, sitting in the chair at the kitchen table closest to the wall phone, picking at a plate of yaprak sarma Lida Arkmanian had left him just that morning. Now he stood up and began to pace.

“Is that really relevant, Your Eminence? That Michael Pride is a homosexual?”

“No,” the Cardinal said. “In and of itself, it’s not relevant at all. In spite of all the fuss we’ve had out here with the St. Patrick’s Day parade and ACT-UP and all the rest of that nonsense, the church is likely to leave matters of sexual orientation or sexual preference or whatever you want to call it strictly alone, unless she’s pushed. You know, before 1985, I don’t think I ever heard a discussion of homosexuality in any Catholic facility anywhere, except for three days in the seminary when it was covered under sexual morality and the moral law. As I remember it, the word was used in a long list of words meant to detail practices considered to be contrary to full fruitfulness. I came away with the distinct impression that practice of homosexual sex and the use of a diaphragm were more or less on a par where sin was concerned. I definitely got the impression that knowingly receiving communion   on less than four hours fast was worse than both. I suppose that was a more innocent age.”

“Maybe.”

“The problem with Michael isn’t that he’s a homosexual. The problem with Michael is that he’s a homosexual the way he is everything else. Michael Pride is a man who doesn’t know how not to go to extremes.”

“Do you mean that he’s effeminate?” Gregor ventured. He was mystified.

“No, I don’t mean that he’s effeminate. He’s anything but. I mean that he’s outrageous. Of course, that’s not an entirely negative trait, is it, Mr. Demarkian? A project like the Sojourner Truth Health Center would never get started, and would never go on running, if there wasn’t someone behind it who was willing to do anything, no matter how insane, no matter how bizarre, to make it real. Do you know how the Archdiocese first came to be involved with the center?”

“No.”

“Michael ran out of money about year three of the operation. He couldn’t go to the state. One of the avowed purposes of that center is to keep its clients out of the clutches of social workers, and I don’t blame either the center or the clients. He didn’t have enough money to run a mail-order fund-raising campaign, either. When I say they were broke, I mean they were broke. So Michael looked around for someone who might have some cash, and he found us. He tried the usual way to get money out of us at first, and he didn’t get any. For obvious reasons. So he decided he had to talk to the Cardinal himself. This is old Cardinal Hessart we’re talking about here. It was the last three years of the Cardinal’s life. Do you know what Michael did when Hessart wouldn’t see him?”

“No,” Gregor said again.

“He set himself up on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and held a tag sale of all his worldly goods. And I do mean all of them. He had his medical degree from Harvard in a nice frame priced at one ninety-five. He had his underwear in little piles. I was assigned to the chancery here that year, and I went down to see it. It was incredible. I suppose these days we wouldn’t think anything of it, but then—good heavens. The fuss it made. And Cardinal Hessart met with him, of course. And they worked out an arrangement. And the arrangement is still in force.”

“Dr. Pride sounds like an interesting man.”

“Oh, Michael’s interesting enough, all right, but he isn’t sane. He isn’t sane at all. That’s what we really want you to help us out with.”

“I don’t think I could do anything about a man’s sanity, Your Eminence. I don’t have much expertise at anything except solving murders.”

“If you solve this murder, you’ll do a great deal for my sanity, Mr. Demarkian. You’ll do a great deal for Michael’s sanity, too. Of course, the police think he did it.”

“Because the body was found in his office,” Gregor said.

“No, not because of that. If that was all there was, I wouldn’t be worried. I’ll see you up here on the first of June, Mr. Demarkian?”

No, Gregor thought now, stuffing clippings back into the leather pockets of the briefcase’s interior, as the landscape whizzed by, he most certainly did not like the present Cardinal Archbishop of New York. He didn’t like him at all. If it hadn’t been that the case itself was so interesting—and that Tibor was so insistent—he might have turned this project down on personal antipathy alone.