Precious Blood(19)

“And you don’t agree with this?”

“Tibor, be serious. If she knew she was going to commit suicide, why would she be worried about the cost of a hotel room? She could simply check in, drink her poison, and let the hotel staff straighten things out in the morning. Which, by the way, is the way she’d have had to do it if she distilled her own poison from cigarettes. She’d have needed boiling water.”

“If she was a very poor woman,” Tibor said, “she might have been afraid of going into a hotel. Especially into a good one. She wouldn’t know what to expect.”

“There are two dozen medium-price hotels within five blocks of where she was found.”

“Do you think she was murdered, Krekor?”

Gregor stood up and went to the window, where he could look at the backs of row houses that were being spruced up for a new generation of yuppie buyers. “When I first heard this story,” he said, “I was sure I knew what happened. One of the people she saw that day, I thought, must have decided to go in for a little impromptu euthanasia. I didn’t see the body, of course, but I’m told it looked terrible. According to O’Bannion, who got it from Father Dolan, Cheryl Cass looked terrible even when she was alive. It made sense to me that one of these people may have decided to put her out of her misery.”

“Two Catholic priests and a nun?”

“Why not? And who’s to say they were the only people she saw? But look at the situation, Tibor. That won’t work, either.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I was going to go in for mercy killing—especially the mercy killing of an old friend—I’d have made damn sure she was comfortable, not lying in an alley somewhere.”

“Maybe she was made comfortable, Krekor. Maybe she was given a hotel room and then, between the time she swallowed the poison and the time she died—”

“She wouldn’t have made it out the hotel room door. Nicotine would have killed her in minutes.”

“Could she have been moved?” Tibor said.

“Could she? Definitely. There are, however, two problems with that. In the first place, I asked the Colchester police to check the hotel registers, which they did. No Cheryl Cass registered anywhere. In the second place, if she was moved into that alley, then whatever happened was not a mercy killing.”

“Ah,” Tibor said.

“You can say ‘ah,’” Gregor said. “Look what I’m dealing with. None of it makes the least amount of sense.”

“What does John O’Bannion say?”

Gregor laughed. “Oh, Tibor. I told you. The Cardinal thinks this is the answer to all his problems.”

“How could it be?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “the Cardinal likes the suicide idea. What he wants is for me to prove that Andy Walsh said something to Cheryl Cass to put the idea into her head. Or to push her over the edge. Or something. Anything, Tibor, really. I’ve tried and tried to tell him we couldn’t prove it even if it were true, but he just won’t listen to me. He won’t listen to anybody. He’s driving me out of my mind.”

“Then why are you going, Krekor?”

Gregor dropped back into his chair. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s just that something happened to Cheryl Cass, and I’d like to know what it was.”





TWO


[1]


THE CITY OF COLCHESTER was incorporated by the British Crown in June of 1776, just in time to turn traitor and join the American Revolution. From that time to this, it has been a city of warring camps. In the nineteenth century, it was divided by geography: the farmers fought the townsmen and the new industrial barons for the strips of land that stretched like points of a star from the old town common. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was divided by religion: the shag end of the Protestant revival fought the new Spiritualists for the hearts and minds of the rural denizens of Upstate New York. By the time Gregor Demarkian first saw it, it was divided by technology. The old industries were dying. The meager veins of coal that had once threaded the hills near the lake were exhausted. The great foundries and tool-and-die plants had lost ground to the Germans and the Japanese. The new industries seemed to have no place in them for the people who had built the city. The jobs they offered paid well and offered unheard of benefits, but there was almost no one in the area equipped to take them. A tool-and-die man couldn’t turn himself into a hardware engineer overnight. A body assembler couldn’t turn himself into a software designer, either. The Colchester Tribune was full of help wanted ads, almost all of them unanswered. The jobs were filled elsewhere—in recruiting offices on college campuses in California and New Jersey, in headhunters’ hospitality suites in the World Trade Center, from black-bordered box ads placed every Friday in The Wall Street Journal and every Sunday in The New York Times. The new people were as different from the natives of Colchester as Martians might have been from Vesuvians. They had too much money, too much credit, and much too little time.