Precious Blood(109)

“Let’s not worry about that for the moment,” Demarkian said. “Tell me about yesterday.”

“What about yesterday?”

“About your visit to the convent. What you did. What you said. Who you saw.”

Barry was confused. “I saw Kath Burke—Sister Mary Scholastica. You know that. I showed her the tape you’ve been watching.”

“What time did you get to the convent?”

“It was about twenty after eleven, maybe eleven-thirty. I called at eleven sharp. I heard the Cathedral bells ring. I told her what I wanted to show her and she said to come right over.”

“Wasn’t that strange, on Good Friday, with everything she had to do?”

“I told her it was important. And she knows me. She knows I wouldn’t make a big fuss over nothing. We were—we used to know each other.”

“She said something to that effect,” Demarkian said. Barry instantly wondered: how much. “What happened when you got to the convent?”

“She was alone. The other nuns were still at the school, teaching. They weren’t going to be back until later. We went into the living room and put the tape on. Kath told me all about the woman who had given it, this parishioner who thought the nuns should have a VCR because God might want to call them on it. I think she’s in an institution now.”

“Then what?”

“Then, we watched the tape. We watched the part you’ve been watching, to be specific. Kath didn’t have time to hear the whole thing. Then we watched it again. And we talked about it.”

“Sister Scholastica didn’t have any more idea than you did what Andy Walsh was getting at?”

“No.” Couldn’t they have asked Kath all this? he wondered. Hadn’t they? Who did they think was lying to them?

Demarkian leaned forward and turned off the television set. It had been putting out a steady stream of Christian advertisements, commercials for crosses and commercials for wall hangings, commercials for Bibles and commercials for bumper stickers. Barry had never found it annoying before—it was part of the game—but he found it profoundly annoying now.

“Tell me,” Gregor Demarkian said, “who you saw. Aside from Sister Scholastica.”

“I saw Sister Peter Rose,” Barry told him. “She was coming in as I was going out. Kath introduced us. I saw Sister Benedict Marie. She was my nun in seventh grade and she recognized me. I didn’t recognize her. Those nuns look very different in the new habits.”

“When was this?”

“About five or ten after twelve.”

“No later than that?”

“No. Kath had told me right up front she was only going to be able to see me for a little while. At some point she looked at her watch, said it was noon, and I said I’d go. If I’d stayed much later, I’d have seen all the nuns. They break for lunch at noon.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “You told us that. What about other people?”

“I saw the assistant pastor, Father Declan Boyd. He was coming out of the rectory.”

“Did you see where he went?”

“No.”

“Did you go anywhere in the convent besides the living room?”

“Not even to the bathroom?”

“No. I had to pass through the foyer to get to the living room, but I don’t know if the foyer counts.”

“What about Sister Scholastica herself? Did she take or make any phone calls while you were there?”

“The phone didn’t ring when I was there. Kath met me at the door and we went into the living room and she stayed with me until I left.”

“What about afterward?” Demarkian said. “Did you come back here, to the studio, right away?”

Barry got out of his chair, and walked back to his desk, and stood looking down at the contract lying there. It was a mess of typeovers and additions, strike outs and notations, a product of compromise and negotiation. Mostly his compromise and Mark Candor’s negotiation.

“No,” he told Gregor Demarkian—and John Smith, too. Smith had been so quiet, Barry had nearly forgotten him. “I didn’t come back here. I walked around. I walked around for a long time. Then I went to the Cathedral.”





FIVE


[1]


THE ONE THING GREGOR Demarkian had always liked about the murder mysteries Bennis Hannaford had given him were the scenes at the end, where the detective gathered all the suspects together in a room and made a display of his brilliance in solving the case. There was something about a scene like that that was inherently intriguing. It was so neat, so organized. The haphazard and the messy had been eliminated. In the lives of Hercule Poirot and Ellery Queen, there would be no accidents of arrest, no surprise shoot-outs, no unanswered questions, no loose ends. In Gregor’s experience, murder investigations were always full of loose ends that stayed loose. Arrests were usually clumsy bumblings, less illustrative of the majesty of the law than of the awkwardness of the arresting officers. This was especially true in cases where the murderer was not part of the expected population of murderers, the local doctor instead of the local drug dealer, the local judge instead of the local tramp. Even officers with a dozen years of experience behind them were often uncomfortable and confused about making that kind of an arrest. There was something about the whole process that smelled too strongly of television. It was too bad they couldn’t be handed their murderers in a well-appointed living room somewhere, with the case all laid out for them by a helpful outside source, with all the inconsistencies made consistent and all the faults in the pattern corrected. Then the murderer could be fetched by a faceless constable kept somewhere in the background, a designated hitter for the dirty work of criminal justice.