Precious Blood(113)

“What difference does it make?” Barry Field said. “We were nicer than we should have been, or maybe smarter. What’s wrong with that?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that, Mr. Field, but there is something wrong in the assumption that it wouldn’t make a difference. It had to in one important instance, and that was in each of your personal reactions to Cheryl Cass. From all reports, you, and Father Andy Walsh, treated her, to put it bluntly, like a piece of meat. Father Dolan here refused to do so—”

“I felt sorry for her,” Dolan said suddenly. “I knew—I knew everything. And I couldn’t help thinking it was wrong, she had so much against her without our help, it was wrong to—”

“To use her?” Gregor asked. “Yes, Father Dolan, it was wrong. It was very wrong. But Barry Field and Andy Walsh did it anyway. And the girls, I’d like to know one thing. Whose idea was it, never to speak to Cheryl Cass?”

Judy Eagan blushed. “It was mine.”

“Of course it was,” Scholastica said, “Andy was your boyfriend and she’d taken him away from you. Or he made it look like that. You couldn’t—”

“That wasn’t the reason,” Judy said. “The reason was I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to look at her. I kept thinking, if my father died or my mother got sick or something really expensive happened to one of us, one of those diseases they were always having commercials on television about back then, polio or palsy or something, I kept thinking it wouldn’t take much, with us, we were so on the edge and—oh, God.”

Scholastica was stunned. “I just thought she was immoral. Peg and I did. We didn’t want to be seen with someone everybody knew slept around.”

Gregor cleared his throat. “The point,” he said, “was that you were not all alike, and you did not all feel the same about Cheryl Cass. Andy, Barry, Peg, and Kath all held her in contempt, not very vigorous contempt. She was just one of those people they were too important to talk to. Tom Dolan felt sorry for her. Judy Eagan hated her. None of it would have made any difference if it wasn’t for two things. First, Andy Walsh saw a way to punish Judy Eagan for refusing him sex and lose his virginity at the same time, and Andy Walsh managed to get hold of some LSD for a little outing he decided to have in Black Rock Park.”

“But,” Barry Field said.

“Shut up,” Scholastica said. “I told him. I told him yesterday.”

“I told the Cardinal years ago,” Tom Dolan said quietly. “Before I ever went into the seminary.”

The door to the Cardinal’s office opened again, and Sister came back inside. She was pushing a tray with cups and a coffee pot on it, and she looked from one to the other of the people in the room with a wrinkled, impassive face that said nothing, implied nothing, accused nothing. Then she wheeled the cart to Gregor and stepped back.

“Thank you,” Gregor said, half-wondering if he was talking to air. Sister was so perfectly silent, she might have been deaf as well as voluntarily dumb. He put a cup and saucer together, filled the cup with coffee, and passed it to the Cardinal.

“I don’t want any,” the Cardinal said.

Gregor put the cup on the Cardinal’s desk. “What happened in Black Rock Park,” he went on, “was to an extent a result of drugs, but it was also a result of habit. Judy and Kath and Peg had also taken those drugs, but they didn’t stay around for the slaughter of the animals—”

“It was Andy’s idea,” Barry Field said desperately, “it was always Andy’s idea, and that tramp, that tramp always did whatever he wanted her to, she—”

“She had no place else to go,” Gregor said. “I know. You and Andy Walsh were the only two people who had ever shown her affection of any sort, even counterfeit affection. Hear me out. Peg and Judy and Sister Scholastica left while you, Mr. Field, and Andy Walsh, had sex with Cheryl Cass. Are you all beginning to notice something missing here?”

“I was sitting behind a tree smoking a cigarette,” Tom Dolan said. “I was—I didn’t know what to do. I thought they were going to kill her, the way they were going at her, over and over again, not just once, I didn’t even know that could be done, but they were doing it, and—”

“The point,” Gregor said, “is that you stayed. You stayed even after the sex was over, when Andy decided to give his Black Mass a little verisimilitude and go after a few stray animals. Did you stay for the killing?”

“I did and I didn’t. I knew it was going on. Andy and Barry were just wild. I got hold of Cheryl and made her sit down and talk to me.”