Precious Blood(77)

What the Cardinal had said that had startled Gregor so much was, Nobody who was involved in that mess at Black Rock Park would have killed Andy Walsh to keep me from finding out about it.

In and of itself, the sentence was not damning. It was the way it had been delivered that had turned Gregor’s suspicion into conviction set in stone, as Tibor would say. It should have been delivered with an air of dismissal, or even irritation. Instead, the Cardinal had been smiling, full of triumph and amusement, so that he looked like a hundred other men Gregor had known in his other life. It was the look of a serial killer, brought in for questioning, who thinks he has stopped the police in their tracks. Gregor’s most vivid recollection of that look was from his one and only interview with Theodore Robert Bundy, a year and a half before Behavioral Sciences reached that status of a full department of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One of the things that would always make Gregor think of Bundy as an extraordinarily special case was the fact that that conversation—and that look—had happened after Bundy’s second conviction for murder and after his second sentencing. The state of Florida had just made it perfectly clear that they would electrocute the man twice if they had to, but they were going to make sure he was dead.

Of course, the Cardinal was no psychopath, but Gregor had never subscribed to the comforting theory that psychopaths were irredeemable other, alien beings, not human at all like you and me. That glee at putting something over on authority was endemic in the human race, and the Cardinal certainly had it on the subject of Black Rock Park.

Gregor went up the steps and through the revolving glass doors into the headquarters lobby, half thinking about the Cardinal, half-thinking how dangerous it was for police headquarters to occupy a building with revolving glass doors. Then he put the Cardinal firmly aside and concentrated on his coming meeting with Lieutenant John Smith.





SIX


[1]


FOR BARRY FIELD, MORNINGS and evenings were always the busiest times of day. In the evenings he had the Make a Joyful Noise Gospel Music Hour, when he sang baritone in a choir of fifty. Allowing himself to be just one of a crowd of blue-robed figures was good for his image. It made him look humble, not a limelight hugger like Bakker and Swaggart. Besides, he enjoyed it. He had been a member of the choir at St. Agnes’s as well as an altar boy, attending two Masses every Sunday to get them both in. Being part of the crowd relieved him of the shyness he had never been able to overcome on the subject of his singing, although he sang well. And it relaxed him. After Make a Joyful Noise he had to deliver his most widely heard sermon of the day. At nine o’clock, with the dishes out of the way and the children mostly in bed, his viewers were ready to indulge themselves in hellfire and damnation—especially if it was somebody else’s, but made to sound like their own. Barry always had to screw up his courage for that one, and crib his texts. He wasn’t a natural hellfire and damnation anything. Fortunately, he was better educated, if not necessarily smarter, than his competition. He didn’t have to plagiarize Jerry Falwell or look to Oral Roberts for inspiration. When he got stuck, he rewrote the sermons of Jonathan Edwards.

In the mornings, it was worse. At least in the evenings there was only one hour of real pressure. After his sermon he could fade into the background of the circus that was Your Prime-Time Encounter with Jesus—misnamed, because it was really a floating talk show that wound its way through the depths of the night. Prime-Time had singers, dancers, testifyers, witnessers, missionaries, and Fundamentalist Queens for a Day, all going on and off the air in short little spurts. Barry always thought of these as “Commercials for Christ,” and then felt ashamed of himself. The people who came on the show were all painfully sincere and often really hurting. They were ex-alcoholics and ex-juvenile delinquents and ex-wives, with no money and no education and no prospects, slogging their way through personal hells Barry knew he couldn’t have stood himself for one minute. Maybe that was why they didn’t mind as much as he did the casual assumption of outsiders that Fundamentalist Christians were stupid. Maybe they were used to being thought stupid and had come to think that way themselves. Barry didn’t know.

He did know that mornings were one long agony of pressure, starting at seven o’clock when he gave his first sermon of the day, moving through the service and the talk show, going on to the Bible study and the commentary on the news. He had to stay psyched up and alert for four hours in the morning, and then, between eleven and twelve, he had to talk to telephone callers on the air. He didn’t have Pat Robertson’s organization. He couldn’t afford the kind of people who could screen callers the way Wayne Gretzky could make hockey goals. At least once in every program he got a full-fledged loony, and then—