Precious Blood(12)

“She lives in the South. Or lived. I don’t think she’s living anywhere now.”

“She came all the way up here from down South just to see you?”

“Cheryl was never very bright, Barry. Now she’s not only stupid, she’s fuzzed. Medication.”

“For what?”

“Cancer.”

Barry winced. “That’s too bad. It really is. She wasn’t really a bad girl. She always—meant well.”

“She always meant a guaranteed screw, and you know it. Never mind. I suppose she wasn’t really bad in the moral sense, just not too well glued together. God. When I realized who I had on the phone, I thought I was going to faint.”

“Why?”

Andy was surprised. “Are you joking? I may not sound like it sometimes but I like being a Catholic priest. I like being a parish priest especially. I’d like to stay both.”

“What does Cheryl Cass have to do with all that?”

“Dear God,” Andy said, “sometimes I think you’re as stupid as she is. As you might have noticed, our esteemed Cardinal Archbishop does not like me.”

“Well, Andy, you did call him a pile of petrified wood running to fat. On the air.”

“I know I did. I’ve done a few other things, too, just to wake people up a little. Catholics need to be woken up. Most of them are still living in the days of Pius XII. O’Bannion would very much like to get rid of me.”

“Why doesn’t he?”

“Because it’s a new world, Barry dear. He can’t just throw me out on my ass because he feels like it or even because I act up a little. He has to have a good excuse. Cheryl, you know, could give him a very good one. He’d just love to know I was one of the people responsible for what happened in Black Rock Park.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Barry said. “That was—that was twenty years ago.”

“It was a cause célèbre at the time. And they rake it up again every year or two in the Tribune, when they’ve got nothing else to do.”

“I can’t imagine O’Bannion would care one way or the other. After all this time.”

Andy cocked his head. “Tell me,” he said, “do you think your Mark Candor would care? If he found out the same thing about you?”

Barry Field froze. “Oh, no,” he said. “Candor is—”

“Very nervous about who he lets on his network these days? I shouldn’t wonder. He’s one of the few of those jerks with a decent reputation. He probably wants to keep it.”

“I had to go through a security check,” Barry said. “And Candor had me investigated even before that. He said I was the first clean candidate he’d seen in years.”

“Except you aren’t.”

“I might as well be,” Barry said. “You aren’t going to tell anybody about it. I’m not going to go confess it to Candor. And the rest of them—”

“All have good reasons for keeping their mouths shut? I agree with you. With one exception. Cheryl Cass.”

“But why would she want to? Is she trying to blackmail you? Does she want money?”

“No, Barry, she doesn’t want to blackmail me. She just doesn’t think about Black Rock Park the way we do.”

“What other way is there to think about it? The whole thing was—grotesque.”

“According to Cheryl, it was the second best day of her life.”

“What?”

Andy stood up. “Barry, Barry, Barry. Cheryl Cass is stupid and she was never really pretty and her parents were a pair of drunks and she never had any friends until we came along. And we weren’t really friends, but she never had sense enough to know that.”

“I always felt guilty about the way we treated her,” Barry said miserably.

“You always felt guilty about everything. The problem is, she’s here, and she’s dying, and she’s wandering around town talking to people. She says it makes her happy to talk about old times.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Exactly,” Andy said.

“But what are we going to do?” It was such a useless question. When he felt like this, he was incapable of doing anything. He stared at Andy, so sleek and perfect, so much the way he had been in high school. Andy had always had the knack of looking good. Even when he was doing evil. “Andy,” Barry said, “what can we do?”

Andy threw himself down in the club chair again. “Think,” he said. “What we can do is—think.”





[7]


It was seven o’clock, and Cheryl Cass was sitting on the big double bed in her room on the third floor of one of Colchester’s most expensive hotels. Whether it was also “exclusive”—which was the way she wanted to think of it—she didn’t know. She did know it was the nicest room she had ever been allowed to sleep in. The carpet on the floor was a thick mauve pile. The bathroom had a shower stall and a bathtub with a whirlpool and was almost the size of her living room in the apartment back in Maryland. The lamps were made of brass and topped with pleated mauve shades. Best of all, there was room service. She would have been much too frightened to order from it herself, just as she would have been much too frightened to check into a room here, even if she’d had the money, in cash, in her pocket. Now all that had been done for her and the food sent up, with tip already paid. It was all so wonderful, she felt a little stunned. She couldn’t begin to guess at what it must have cost.