Precious Blood(107)

Judy watched Smith and Demarkian trade glances she found impossible to read. Then she stared into her coffee. She could remember that fight with Declan Boyd perfectly. She could remember how frightened she’d been, how irrational he’d been, how crazy the whole day had seemed, as crazy as any day could get. That it had gotten crazier later still numbed her. She looked up and found them both looking at her, and blushed again.

“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling as if she’d been apologizing forever. “I was—drifting.”

“It’s all right,” Smith said, for the third time. He got to his feet and waited by his chair while Gregor Demarkian got to his.

“There’s just one more thing I want to know,” Demarkian said. “When you found out that Peg Morrissey Monaghan had died at St. Agnes’s Convent, instead of someplace else, were you surprised?”

“If you mean did I know she was going to be there,” Judy said, “I didn’t. But I wasn’t surprised. Peg is—was one of those women who do everything for the parish. Sell raffle tickets, run bake sales, decorate the altar. She was over there all the time. And she would have come if Scholastica or Father Boyd asked her to. If they told her she was needed.”

“Do you think that that’s what happened?”

“I don’t know,” Judy said. “If Scholastica had called her, Scholastica would have told me. If Scholastica had needed something done, she’d probably have just asked me to do it. Peg had nine children and she was pregnant. All I had was a business.”

“If somebody did call her and ask her to come to St. Agnes’s, would she have come without any of her children?”

“She would have if she’d been asked not to bring them.”

“All right,” Gregor Demarkian said. Smith was already at the door. Demarkian moved to join him, and Judy watched him go, feeling vaguely that she ought to get up and see him out. It was only polite. When he got to the door, he stopped and said, “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

A minute later, he was gone, and Judy found herself sitting over coffee again, so tired she couldn’t remember half the conversation she’d just had. But she wasn’t sleepy. Oh, no.

She wasn’t sleepy at all.





[2]


There was a second-thoughts clause in Barry Field’s contract with Mark Candor’s All Christian Good News Gospel Network. It was in paragraph thirty-six, and what it said, stripped of its legal jargon, was that either Mark Candor or Barry Field could terminate the contract without prejudice for any reason whatsoever during the month of March of this year. It was Barry’s lawyer who had called it a “second-thoughts clause.” Then, with the bitter little smile he reserved for letting people know how wise he was to the essential nastiness of human nature, even as represented by Fundamentalist preachers, he’d redubbed it “the cold-feet clause.” Barry didn’t know what had made his lawyer decide to be a Christian, but he did know the man wasn’t one in any substantial sense. In the last analysis, his real religion was a finely honed hatred for all creatures that walked on two feet, and for Barry Field most of all. He was the most uncomfortable man Barry had ever met.

On the other hand, he was a very good lawyer. He had explained everything very clearly, in detail, right down to the punctuation and the whereas’s. Barry knew exactly what he could and couldn’t do during the month of March. He also knew he would have done what he was going to do even if the contract hadn’t allowed it. The one thing he had never been was a hypocrite. He had one true pride in his life, as he had one true shame, and that pride was that he had never done anything he didn’t believe in for money. He was gratified to discover that he would not change that in himself, even for Mark Candor’s kind of money. That, of course, left a hole he was going to have to fill. He was an ambitious man, as he had been an ambitious boy. He couldn’t stand the idea of spending the rest of his life in one place, going nowhere. Just where he wanted to go now, though, he wasn’t sure.

He looked up, across his office at the two men sitting in the far corner, watching a tape on his television, Gregor Demarkian and John Smith. They had been here for more than two hours, playing and replaying the tape of the last talk show Andy had made for him. Most of the time, Barry had been here, too. He had a lot to think about, and he couldn’t face his staff. They were good people and they were worried about him and he was about to betray them. He already had.

There was a remote control for the VCR, although not for the television itself. Demarkian pushed the “stop” button, then a couple of more buttons, then a button that started the tape playing again. Andy came on the screen. It was late in the tape. Andy was sitting down, not lolling like a guest host on The Tonight Show, but sitting forward, looking urgent, with his hands on his knees.