Precious Blood(5)

The Cardinal had stopped pacing and sat down on a corner of the desk. He was a big man, fat and jowly. Every time he decided to strike this pose, Tom worried the desk was going to collapse beneath him.

“Now,” the Cardinal said, “you tell me. Why is that Demarkian man refusing to come up here?”

“I don’t think he’s refusing to come up here, Your Eminence. If you told him you had to have him up here, he’d probably come. As a favor to Tibor Kasparian, if nothing else.”

“I don’t like to order people around all the time, you know. I’ve given him enough hints.”

“Maybe he isn’t a man who takes hints.”

“He has to be, for Heaven’s sake. He’s a detective.”

Tom looked down at his legal pad. At the top of it he’d written, “catechisms for St. Stanislaw Parish. Twenty-four by Friday.” “Maybe,” he said, “it would help if you knew what you wanted him to do when he got here.”

The Cardinal flushed, got up, and shook out the folds of his cassock. Usually he stuck to straightforward black suits, but it was Ash Wednesday.

“I was watching Father Dowling on television last night,” he told Tom. “There was this whole elaborate plot about a frame. Maybe that’s what we need.”

“Somebody to frame Andy Walsh?”

“You’d think I could get rid of a man who told the Women’s University Club that birth control ought to be a sacrament,” the Cardinal said, “but no. That’s the new Church for you, Father Dolan. In the old days, I could’ve gotten rid of him just because I didn’t like his face.”

Tom considered asking the Cardinal if he’d thought of appealing to Rome, but didn’t. Of course, O’Bannion had thought of it, and, of course, O’Bannion had decided it wouldn’t do any good. For one thing, Colchester Archdiocese was one of the worst hit by the priest shortage. O’Bannion’s predecessor had been a Church liberal of the sort who made the Gospels sound like a prophecy of the New Deal. He’d alienated literally thousands of his archdiocese’s conservative working-class parishioners right into the arms of the burgeoning Fundamentalist movement. He’d aggravated dozens of priests into requests for laicization. He’d interfered with Catholic education to the point where three of the most traditional orders of nuns had pulled their Sisters out of the parochial school system. Then he’d died in his sleep and left the mess to John O’Bannion: too many parishes without priests, too many schools without nuns, and too much debt. Debt was what you got when you tried to run the Catholic Church with laypeople. A nun teacher got room, board, and $10 a week for teaching in a parish school. A lay teacher got $22,000 a year, health insurance, life insurance, workmen’s comp, and half her Social Security bill. O’Bannion couldn’t get rid of Andy Walsh without good, and provable, reason.

For another thing, O’Bannion couldn’t get rid of Andy Walsh unless he could find somebody else willing to take him, which nobody was. Even the few flaming radicals left in the hierarchy didn’t want to be saddled with a nut case like Andy. They had enough trouble with Rome as it was.

“I wish it was the Knights of Columbus he’d talked to about birth control,” the Cardinal said. “Then we might have gotten somewhere.”

“Why?”

“One of the Knights would have been willing to testify in an ecclesiastical court. Lots of them would have. You know the Women’s University Club.”

The Women’s University Club had taken out an ad in the Colchester Tribune, lambasting the Church in general and John Cardinal O’Bannion in particular for their “arrant Ludditism and chauvinistic insensitivity” in condemning “the scientific laboratory study of sexuality.” By that, they had meant the Colman-Brooks clinic, where women were taught to give themselves orgasms with “anatomically correct” vibrators that had waterproofed pigeon feathers attached.

“I keep thinking if I could just get him up here, he could do something for us,” O’Bannion said. “Tibor makes him sound so—intelligently practical. Maybe I just want him to tell us what we’re supposed to do.”

“That isn’t the kind of advice he usually gives, Your Eminence. He specializes in murders.”

“Oh, I know that. But Andy Walsh would never murder anybody. I don’t have that kind of luck.”

Tom Dolan coughed, and the Cardinal stopped pacing. The Cardinal was blushing again. “Do you know what I spend most of my time talking to my confessor about?” he asked. “Fantasies. I have fantasies about getting that fruitcake not just out of the Archdiocese, but out of the entire Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.”