Precious Blood(103)

“I didn’t either. I think he made it more explicit, later. I didn’t get to hear because Father Declan Boyd was shouting in my ear. One of the things I want to do today is to go over to Barry Field’s studio and see if he has a tape of that broadcast.”

“In the meantime—”

“In the meantime,” Gregor said, “you will sit still and listen.”





[3]


In the beginning, of course, John Smith didn’t sit still at all. He fidgeted and jumped, he made faces and turned away to stare at the ceiling. Gregor knew that one of the problems with this case, from the beginning, had been its intricate connections to the past. So much of it was basically background, not clearly relevant to the business at hand: six people who had known each other since early childhood, who had protected themselves from the uncertainties of adolescence by facing them in a tight little knot of belonging, who had thought of themselves as having everything in common, including their worst sins. But they hadn’t had everything in common. They hadn’t been similar people at all, not even in the beginning. Then along had come a seventh person, Cheryl Cass. Like the worm in the apple of the garden of Eden, she had spoiled everything.

“The point I kept missing,” Gregor said, “was that what was important was not only what Cheryl Cass was, but who.”

By then, John Smith had calmed down. His papers were lying on the table, forgotten. His hands were laced behind his neck.

“I don’t know what you mean by who.”

“Do you know what I mean by what?”

“Of course,” Smith said. “She was the town tramp.”

“Exactly.” Gregor nodded. “She was, from all reports, a particularly flagrant town tramp. Sister Scholastica told me at one point that Cheryl ‘probably slept with the entire football team.’ It’s not the kind of malicious offhand comment Scholastica is known for.”

“She’s not known for malicious offhand comments.”

“My point. She’s not known for malicious comments of any sort. If she handed me that line about the football team, hackneyed as it sounds, then she must have had some basis for it. Cheryl Cass must have been blatantly and publicly promiscuous.”

“That was the rumor,” Smith said.

“Some things we know about Cheryl Cass are not rumors. She was poor. Dirt poor. Her father was a drunk and a batterer. Her mother was a prostitute and a thief. Her childhood was an unmitigated horror. She was neither intelligent nor beautiful. Her chances of escaping the kind of life her parents had had were virtually nil.”

“And that was who she was, rather than what?”

“Yes. And it was who she was that caused all the trouble, in the beginning and at the end. If she had been a nice middle-class girl gone bad, she wouldn’t have died of nicotine poisoning. And neither would Peg Morrissey Monaghan or Andy Walsh.”

John Smith closed his eyes. With his hands still laced behind his neck, he looked as if he had gone to sleep, except that his nose was twitching. After a few minutes, his jaw started working, too. It was so quiet in the room, Gregor almost thought he could hear his watch ticking.

Finally, Smith opened his eyes again. He said, “You’re making a couple of assumptions, here. One of them is about an event that would have taken place twenty years ago. How are we ever going to prove it?”

Gregor tore the cover off the file in front of him, took out his pen, and wrote the name of a town and state.

“Have someone look here. The records would have been filed in June of that year or maybe July. Bet on June. It would have happened fast or not at all. Get in touch with a man named Leroy Merrick at Fredericksburg FBI. Tell him I sent you. He’ll help you get started.”

“Why there?”

“It was something Scholastica said to me yesterday. It occurred to me much later that adolescence is not an original age.”

“Then what?”

“My guess is that there will be other records, if not in the same town, then at least in the same state. But maybe not. You’d better try the usual. Here and everywhere else. They could have been filed within a year after the first. They may never have been filed at all. Instinct tells me they’ll show up at least three years later, or maybe more.”

“And Leroy Merrick can help me with this, too?”

“Absolutely.”

“I hope Leroy Merrick is having a slow day.”

Gregor smiled. Leroy Merrick would make his day slow, if he had to. He was the first black man ever to have been appointed a field station chief in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the only one to have been appointed under the reign of the old Boss. Gregor was not conceited enough to think he’d been solely responsible for getting Leroy where he was. Leroy was good, exceptionally good. In a just universe, he’d already be sitting at J. Edgar’s desk. In the bad old days of Bossman Eddie, as some of Gregor’s colleagues had called him, the Bureau had not been within moon shot distance of a just universe.