Precious Blood(114)

Gregor got two more cups and saucers together and filled them full of coffee. He passed them to Judy Eagan and Barry Field, who both took them without comment and put them down.

“Cheryl wasn’t easy to talk to at that point,” Dolan said. “She was very high. She kept saying that for the first time in her life, she felt really popular.”

“Oh, dear God,” Scholastica said.

“She was like that,” Tom Dolan said. He took the cup of coffee Gregor handed him and looked into it. “She didn’t understand how things worked, how people worked. She wasn’t very bright and she wanted so much to have hope.”

“Don’t canonize her,” Judy Eagan said. “She had brains enough to know what it meant in those days for a girl to screw around. And she screwed around anyway.”

“She offered to screw around,” Barry Field said. “She asked before I did.”

“She was a tramp,” Judy Eagan said. “A stupid, senseless, gut-instinct tramp.”

Gregor poured a cup of coffee for himself. “I’m going to skip ahead now, not to the day Cheryl Cass was murdered—and she was murdered—but to the day Andy Walsh was. From the moment it happened, I couldn’t get rid of one idea. The murder of Andy Walsh was a very stupid murder. Unlike the murder of Cheryl Cass—which was a very intelligent murder—it couldn’t have been passed off as anything but what it was. It was practically designed to cause a sensation. There were television cameras actually in the church. A sensational murder brings down heat. No sane murderer wants that kind of attention, and there was no person connected to this case who was not at least nominally sane. That left one possible alternative. Andy Walsh must have died as and when and how he died because there was no other possible way, or time, to kill him.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” the Cardinal said. “The man was a parish priest. He was a sitting duck.”

“Yes, Your Eminence,” Gregor said. “Andy Walsh was a sitting duck. But there was a time factor involved here, too. Cheryl Cass had come back to Colchester on Ash Wednesday. She had spent the day visiting the people she thought of as her old friends. She had talked to Andy Walsh twice, once in the morning and once in the evening, once before she saw her murderer for the first time and once after. She did a lot of talking. She even talked to Father Boyd here.”

“Talked my head off,” Boyd agreed. “On and on. None of it made any sense, either. All about love and romance and valentines and I don’t know what.”

“I do,” Gregor said. “I have to make some assumptions, however. The first of these is that Cheryl Cass did not actually tell Andy Walsh about the single event in her life that would eventually get her killed. If she had, this whole thing would have come to a head much sooner, and Andy Walsh would have been dead much sooner. What she did, I think, was to hint. A little suggestion here, a little suggestion there, nothing that Andy picked up on right away. But I think her hints bothered him, nagged at him, and he kept trying to work them out. Then, probably sometime Wednesday of Holy week, he did work them out.”

“It was Wednesday night,” Judy Eagan said. They all turned to stare at her and she blushed again. “I saw him Wednesday night,” she said, “and he—he was onto something. I could tell. He was just flying:”

“Andy Walsh and his flying,” Gregor said. “The result of his working this out was his decision to use the goat at Holy Thursday Mass. Judy Eagan told me that Andy didn’t say anything about it until late Wednesday night, and then he told her to get out of bed at some ungodly hour and pick it up. The goat was going to be the first foray in one of Andy Walsh’s famous campaigns of public twitting. He hadn’t shied away from embarrassing the Governor of New York. Why should he shy away from embarrassing someone he’d known all his life? And he was in better shape than he usually was, because he shared, with everybody here except Father Declan Boyd, a certain set of information, a memory. That includes you, Your Eminence. You were the one who told me about it. It consisted of the contents of a pamphlet called Living with the Saints, given out every year by a teaching Sister named Joseph Bernadette to her second-grade class at St. Agnes Parochial School—”

“But for God’s sake,” Barry Field said, “that pamphlet was nonsense. A lot of superstitions and folk customs from Ireland, without so much as an imprimatur—”

“It didn’t matter if the information in that pamphlet was true, Mr. Field. It only mattered that it was recognizable by a certain group of people. As I said before, that group included the Cardinal himself.”