“I’m going to be able to do anything I want to. I’m going to be able to investigate this one right. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Wonderful, Gregor thought, was not the word for it. Appalling was the word for it. He’d been hornswaggled again, as his favorite niece would say. Not into the case, of course. He wanted to be into that. It was getting into the newspapers again he wasn’t going to be able to stand.
So he took a little revenge.
He didn’t tell John Smith what the Cardinal had said about the consecrated wine.
And he didn’t tell John Smith about the goat.
THREE
[1]
WHAT JUDY EAGAN HAD told Gregor Demarkian about Andy Walsh was It’s going to be so weird to have him dead. More than six hours later, standing in front of the glass-and-chrome cabinet bar in the living room of her apartment, it suddenly occurred to her that she had spoken the exact truth. It was weird to have Andy dead. What it wasn’t was any of the things it was supposed to be, like painful. She kept thinking she ought to feel something, like grief or revulsion, that would rock her. It would only be natural. She had known Andy Walsh all her life. He was a part of her, even if they had never been close. Or close on any realistic level, at any rate. She seemed to remember that she, like Peg and Kath, had necked and petted and not-quite-gone-all-the-way with Andy, just as she had necked and petted and not-quite-gone-all-the-way with Barry and Tom. That was the kind of thing people did in those days, especially if they were Popular, which Judy Eagan definitely had been. She had been the second most popular girl at Cathedral Girls’ High, after Kath. It always surprised her to think that Kath had grown up to be Sister Scholastica.
In those days, you picked boyfriends for their status, not their personalities. Andy and Barry and Tom had been at the very head of the most popular clique at Cathedral Boys’ High, so she and Peg and Kath had gone out with them. People said it was because they had all grown up together, but that wasn’t true. For one thing, the rest of them hadn’t “grown up” with Tom the way they had with each other. His family had been more like Cheryl Cass’s than their own, and all through grammar school their mothers had told them to stay away from him. Tom’s mother drank and his father sent one child or the other to the hospital with a broken something every month. They lived in a rented apartment that was never clean. Andy’s mother especially always disliked Tom. When they had all started smoking dope—and parents always knew, no matter how careful children were to hide it—she was sure it was Tom who had gotten them the weed.
For another thing, there were a lot of boys Judy had grown up with whom she wouldn’t speak to in high school. A nerd was a nerd. She was much too smart not to realize you didn’t risk your reputation as the second most popular girl in the entire city of Colchester for the sake of mere sentiment. She’d been on shaky ground to begin with. Her family had been almost as poor as Tom’s, if more respectable.
She reached out, clicked the glass doors of the bar cabinet open, and stared at the bottle of Scotch she had come to pour a drink from. Two drinks. Stuart was in the television room, watching the six o’clock news on WLTL. Maybe she was feeling all those things she thought she ought to be. Maybe she was in too much shock to recognize them. She was having such a very hard time trying to think. Instead of contemplating ways and means—how to turn this perfectly awful situation into something that wouldn’t ruin all the work and planning she’d done for the past two years—she kept coming back to Andy and Tom and Barry, Peg and Judy and Kath. She almost wished she hadn’t thrown out all those things Peg had kept, like her yearbooks.
It was Andy who’d gotten them the weed, every time they’d ever had it. It was Andy who’d brought the LSD that day to Black Rock Park, too, and who’d brought Cheryl Cass, and who’d had the idea for the rest of it—or the beginning of the rest of it. Judy had never been able to believe that the way it turned out was the way it had been planned. She’d only wondered if she ought to feel guilty, because they had left poor Cheryl Cass alone with the boys.
She got the Scotch off the bottom shelf, two glasses off the top shelf, and two ice cubes out of the automatic ice maker in the cabinet’s side. Her head hurt. The television was blaring. Stuart had the volume turned all the way up, the way he always did, as if he were deaf. On a shelf next to the bar cabinet was a big prepackaged Easter basket, wrapped in amber cellophane and dominated by a grinning chocolate bunny wearing sugar-candy harlequin glasses. It was Stuart’s Easter gift to her. It was supposed to be an inside joke.