“No?”
“If you did, you’d have sent Sister Scholastica to check on Father Walsh’s pulse. First thing.”
The Cardinal permitted himself a smile. “Ah, yes. Well, Tibor Kasparian said you were good. You are, aren’t you?”
“I think so.”
“I hope you’re very, very good. I have a feeling that I’m standing in the middle of a situation that is already out of hand. Do you think he died of nicotine poisoning?”
Gregor looked at the body again. It was visible, yes, but not visible in the way he needed it to be. Andy Walsh’s body was stretched out on the floor, the head tilted against the back wall. Unfortunately, Walsh’s face was turned away from the lecturn, and there wasn’t enough other skin showing to take a reading on its color. Not at this distance.
“I’d say he died of some kind of poisoning,” Gregor said slowly. “From what I saw, that seems inevitable. What kind is not that easy to determine without a close examination.”
“But it could have been nicotine? Just like that woman, Cheryl Cass?”
“Oh, yes. It couldn’t have been arsenic, because there would have been vomiting and the vomiting would have gone on for a reasonably long time. You can almost always do something for victims of arsenic if you get them within half an hour after they’ve ingested the poison. But it couldn’t have been cyanide, either. It took too long.”
“It took too long?”
“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “Assuming the poison was in the wine, nicotine would be just about right. He had two or three minutes after he drank before he fell. With cyanide, he’d have been dead instantaneously, or the next thing to. He’d never have had time to put the chalice back on the altar.”
O’Bannion lowered his head and frowned. “Does it have to have been in the wine? Couldn’t it have been in something he ate?”
“It could have been on the Communion wafer, yes, Your Eminence, but then we’re not dealing with nicotine. If you’re implying it might have been in something he ate before Mass, then we’re dealing with that great detective story invention, the slow-acting poison.”
“You mean there are no slow-acting poisons?”
“It depends on what you mean by slow. According to what I heard when I got here, Father Walsh was in the church building somewhere, dressing before Mass. There are one or two poisons that might have taken that long to work, especially if he’d just eaten a large meal. But they would have had some effect almost immediately.”
“He would have felt ill, you mean.”
“Or odd,” Gregor said. “Certain of the diathalmides take almost an hour to kill, but they cause a great deal of muscle pain in the meantime. He would have found it difficult to move. With any significant dose, he would have found it impossible to genuflect at the altar the way he did.”
“He wouldn’t have eaten a large meal right before Mass,” the Cardinal said. “He didn’t eat large meals under any circumstances. Andy was always careful about his weight. But before Mass he would have been taking care about the fast.”
“I thought Father Walsh wasn’t—meticulous about that sort of thing.”
“He wasn’t. But this is, after all, Holy Thursday. Didn’t you notice he was doing his best not to get me angry?”
“You mean because there were no altar girls and no women ready to distribute Communion ,” Gregor said.
“That’s right. He wouldn’t have sat down to bacon and eggs—or maybe it was alfalfa sprouts and tofu—anytime I could have heard about it.”
“What about the goat?”
“I have my suspicions about the goat,” the Cardinal said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever have them confirmed, now.” He sighed again and smoothed his long scarlet robes and adjusted his gold cross. “I don’t know if you realize it, Mr. Demarkian, but we’re going to have a bigger problem here than we seem to have.”
Gregor Demarkian blinked. He wanted to ask how much bigger the problem could get. That was the obvious question. Andy Walsh was dead in his own church in front of six hundred witnesses and three television cameras. The case was going to make the cover of People faster than Mike Tyson had knocked out Michael Spinks. And Colchester, that very Catholic city, was surrounded by a rural fastness of anti-Catholic Fundamentalism.
“I think,” he said, “this problem is as big as a problem could possibly get, short of global war.”
“You think so?” The Cardinal smiled again. He had his back to the congregation. In this gerrymandered privacy, he could let the mask of his authority collapse. Beneath the grim humor, there was a tired, aging, very worried man. “You say the poison was probably in the wine,” he said.