Precious Blood(104)

Gregor stood up, shook the wrinkles out of his suit, and picked up the papers John had gotten for him. Through the windows in the opposite wall, he could see the start of yet another snowstorm, that Colchester speciality. Tomorrow was Easter Sunday, for the Roman Catholics and Protestants if not for the Armenians and Orthodox. There wasn’t a sign of spring anywhere.

“Get moving,” he told Smith. “Take your papers to your bureaucrats and meet me downstairs in the squad room at your desk. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

“You mean calling the FBI and waiting around while they find out what we want to know?”

It was a typical local-police slur on the speed and efficiency of the Bureau. Coming from someone connected to Colchester Homicide, it was outrageous. Gregor let it pass anyway.

“I mean talking to people about the death of Peg Morrissey Monaghan,” he said. “Eventually your DA is going to have to go into a courtroom with this, and when he does there are some things he’s going to have to know. Get moving, John. You know how to hurry. You were doing it when I got here.”

John Smith knew how to hurry. He did it so well, he was pushing the button for the elevator before Gregor made it out of the conference room.





FOUR


[1]


JUDY EAGAN WAS ALWAYS awake early on Saturday mornings. Saturday, even Holy Saturday, was a big day for children’s parties. She had birthday cakes to check out and party clowns to track down and crepe paper favors to count. She liked to do these things herself, as she always had, even though the clients who bought her services for children’s parties were no longer important to the business. She had had a birthday party once, when she was eight, where the cake had fallen in and the present her mother had ordered for her had failed to arrive. It hadn’t been catered—even middle-class people didn’t have birthday parties catered in those days—but she wouldn’t have understood catering in those days, anyway. She had understood humiliation. She could still see the faces of her friends around the table, their embarrassment and confusion, their surprise and secret glee. Like all children everywhere, they had been amused by other people’s misfortune. Even Kath and Peg.

Peg.

It was this Holy Saturday morning, and nine-thirty, and she was still sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee and barely able to think at all. Part of that was the simple fact that she had been unable to sleep. After she had left Stuart in that bar last night, she had come home to her first empty Friday-night apartment in five years, and looked around, and done—nothing. There had been nothing to do. She had wanted to think about Peg, but that turned out not to be possible. There was nothing to think about Peg. Dying and blood, dying and blood: that was all she could remember. The other two murders had been so very clean. It wasn’t fair that Peg’s had been so messy. Peg had always been such a careful and fastidious person.

What she thought about, in the end, was Stuart, or her lack of him. She had left him in Chez Where without telling him she was going. When the news was over, she had simply picked up her pocketbook, said she was going to the ladies’ room, and gone home instead. Her coat had still been on the coatrack next to the booth. Her packages had still been on the bench. She had gone out to the taxi stand, caught the first available cab, and locked herself in her apartment.

She had put on the speaker on her answering machine, and for the next five hours she had listened to his messages: where was she, he had her things, she should call him as soon as she came in, he was getting worried she was kidnapped. But he wasn’t worried she was kidnapped. The only emotions in his voice were anger and impatience and exasperation, the assumption that she had pulled this on him and now he wanted her to stop being childish. Then, at ten o’clock, he had come to her door and knocked, let up the elevator by the doorman he knew well. She had sat on the couch no more than fifty feet from him in absolute silence, blessing the instinct for privacy that had kept her from ever giving him a key. He had gone away after ten minutes—Stuart did not make scenes in hallways, only in bed—and she had written herself a Post-it note, a reminder to tell the doormen that Stuart was no longer welcome. As far as she was concerned, he could keep the bracelet and the other things, no matter what they had cost. He could turn the lot in for cash and use the money to take a Las Vegas vacation with the most politically inexpedient floozy imaginable. Unless he found another Judy Eagan, another woman who could tell him how to behave like a human being, his political career was over anyway.

She took a sip of her coffee, made a face, and put it down. It was stale and muddy and much too strong. She had been throwing new grounds over the old ones all night. She got up, dumped the coffee in the sink, and took the overfull filter out of the coffee machine. First she would make herself a fresh cup of coffee, one that tasted the way she wanted it to. Then she would drink it. Then she would think. She had a lot to think about, starting with whether she intended to go to work. She had called her assistant at eight-fifteen and left instructions. She could stay home all day if she wanted to. If she did, she would have to think about Her Life.