Precious Blood(102)

“Actually,” Gregor said, “the statements aren’t what I’m interested in, right this minute.”

“No?”

The elevator had reached the fifth floor. The doors slid open. Smith and Gregor both stepped out. They had obviously reached the upper levels of status and convenience, as well as of architecture. Unlike the hallway that led from the elevators to the homicide squad room downstairs, this one was carpeted with thick cream-colored pile. The walls around them had been recently painted and hung with antique prints, pen-and-ink sketches of nineteenth-century policemen in high hats and stiff collars. Gregor could tell that no ordinary suspects would ever be allowed to come up here.

Smith scuffed the carpet, said, “this is the sort of place, if you’ve got dirt on your shoes you’re not supposed to be here,” and took them down a side corridor that ended in a pair of molded double doors. He took out his keys, opened up, and let Gregor go inside.

“Not exactly the boardroom at the Morgan Bank,” he said, “but not bad. For Colchester.”

It wasn’t bad for anywhere. A long, heavy, antique cherrywood conference table took up most of the space in the room, surrounded by matching chairs. A wall of windows looked out on Colchester in the direction of the Cathedral. Gregor could see the spire rising into the air above a nest of lower buildings. Black-and-white photographs framed in walnut and covered with glass were everywhere, showing one Chief of Police with President Kennedy, another Chief of Police with Vice President Nixon, a third Chief of Police with Jimmy Carter. Gregor caught a picture of good old J. Edgar Hoover and winced.

“Sit down,” he told Smith, sitting down himself, “we have to talk.”

“I know we do.” Smith sat, but on the edge of a chair. He was ready to get up and move as soon as the polite preliminaries were over. “We can talk all day. I’ve just got to bring this stuff down to Records. And you’ve got enough to do to occupy you for ten or fifteen minutes. You can mess around with the chalice.”

Smith handed over the oblong box. Gregor took it, opened it, and looked at the large gold cup inside. Smith must have made a major impression on the patrolman, or picked one of unusual (for Colchester) intelligence and efficiency. What was in the box was not only a chalice, but one of exactly the right size and kind.

“I told him to ask for a duplicate of the ones they use for the Archdiocese,” Smith said. “The Archdiocese doesn’t buy its religious equipment in supply stores. None of the parishes are allowed to now that that Cardinal is the Cardinal, if you know what I mean. It’s all centralized. The Chancery buys this stuff in quantity, and the parishes buy it from the Chancery. Unless someone gives them a special gift, of course.”

“I wonder if they’re like that about everything,” Gregor said. “Linens for the rectories, say. Dishwashing detergent.”

“Plant poisons?” Smith laughed. “Yeah, they are. I checked that as far back as the investigation into the death of Cheryl Cass. The Chancery runs a kind of co-op for the parishes. The only thing they don’t do is food.”

“Wine?”

“Sacramental wine, that they do.”

It was the wine Gregor had been thinking about, not the plant poisons. Although the plant poisons made sense. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out the two pieces of paper he had been looking at that morning, Scholastica’s list of Confirmation names and his own of the use of the goat as a symbol for Catholic saints.

“Look at these,” he told Smith. “Look at them hard. Tell me what you see.”

“Look, Mr. Demarkian—”

“No,” Gregor demanded.

Smith bent over the lists, read them once, read them twice, read them three times. Then he looked up and shook his head.

“Maybe I’m a little distracted,” he said, “because I do have to get these papers downstairs. The only way I get away with the stuff I pull around here is by never ruffling the bureaucrats, and the bureaucrats get very ruffled when their paper isn’t treated with reverence.”

“I know. John, the bureaucrats are going to have to wait. I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“A story,” Gregor said, “a story about a priest named Father Andy Walsh, who went on a popular morning television program and said, ‘It’s not just the sin you have to think about, it’s what the sin engenders. It’s what the sin spawns. If you look at the sin you see an incident. If you look at the life that follows the sin, you see a catastrophe.’”

“I don’t get it,” Smith said.