Precious Blood(54)

And yet, Gregor thought, I must be losing my mind. I’ve started imagining things. I’m letting a personal antipathy clutter up my judgment, and all that’s going to do is make me look like a fool. Which, in this case, I might very well deserve.

He moved away from the altar. At the back of the church, he could see three Minicams pointed in his direction, although not exactly at him. What the television people were interested in at the moment was the corpse. Father Tom Dolan was standing among them, talking earnestly and gesticulating like a ham actor in an old-time silent movie.

Gregor got to the anteroom door, opened it, and slipped inside.





[3]


Gregor had expected to find Sister Scholastica. He had expected to find Father Declan Boyd—and maybe Father Boyd being sick, since the priest had gone green when he’d had to cross in front of Andy Walsh’s body just twenty minutes before. Gregor had not expected to find Judy Eagan, but it was Judy Eagan he found. She was standing in the middle of the anteroom floor, smoking furiously on the cigarette in her right hand and running her left through her hair. From the vestibule below came the frantic bleatings of the goat.

She looked him up and down as he came into the room, took a deep drag on her cigarette, blew a stream of smoke into the air, and said, “Oh, God. I forgot about you. Sherlock Holmes to the rescue. This is just what we need.”

“I’m not anything at all like Sherlock Holmes,” he said. Then he sent up a little prayer that Judy Eagan would not repeat this description to anyone else, like a reporter. Being an Armenian-American Hercule Poirot was bad enough.

Judy Eagan flicked ash onto the anteroom carpet. “I quit smoking these when I was a junior in college,” she told him. “I was being very virtuous and healthy. Now I wish I’d died.”

“Do you normally keep a pack on you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. These are Peg’s. She keeps a pack on her from her seventh month on. Just in case she goes into labor.”

“I didn’t know women were allowed to smoke in labor.”

“Women are allowed to do practically anything in labor. There isn’t a doctor on earth who wants an hysterical woman delivering on his table. Besides, from what Peg tells me, you do a lot of labor before you ever see a doctor. Were you trying to find out if I’d left the building?”

There was a chair pushed up against the table that still held the bottles of wine. Gregor pulled it out and sat down in it.

“I think I was just making conversation,” he said. “I came in looking for Sister Scholastica, but she isn’t here.”

“She’s out front waiting for the police. Why she wants to wait for them, I don’t know. Kath never made any sense to me. That’s Sister Scholastica. Kath, I mean.”

“I know. The former Kathleen Burke.”

“I forgot you’d been briefed by the Cardinal. Anyway, I didn’t leave the building. I would have, but I can’t figure out how to do it. I’m not allowed to leave without the goat.”

“Ah,” Gregor said, “the goat. Do you have any idea what Father Walsh wanted with the goat?”

“Do you?”

“No. I thought for a while that he might want to wash its feet—”

“So did I,” Judy Eagan said. “That’s exactly what I thought he was going to do with it, in fact. Either that or bring it out for his homily. It was the right kind of homily, too. All that stuff about animals.”

“I didn’t understand much of it.”

“Nobody did. Including Andy. He was always like that. God, but it’s going to be so weird to have him dead.”

That, Gregor thought, was one way of putting it. It might even be an honest way. He wondered what these people had really felt for Andy Walsh. Sometimes, with someone who had been a fixture in your life for many years, it was hard to know.

Gregor looked at the bottles of wine. They did not appear to have been moved since he had seen them before, but that was hard to know, too. He started to sigh and stopped himself. Sighing made him feel like John Cardinal O’Bannion.

Judy had finished her cigarette and was lighting a new one with the butt. “Dec’s left the building,” she said. “He’s gone for a walk in the courtyard. He was feeling sick.”

“He was looking sick, a little while ago.”

“I suppose I don’t blame him. If I’d seen it, I’d be feeling sick too.”

“You didn’t see it?”

Judy shook her head. “I’ve been in here the whole time, looking after the goat. Not that the goat took much looking after, mind you, but there was always a chance it could have got loose. According to Kath.”