True Believers(108)

“And he lays her body down in front of the Communion   rail. According to the report, that would be almost exactly in the middle, in front of the middle aisle. Then what did he do?”

“He shot himself,” Garry said.

“Just like that?” Gregor asked him. “He laid her down, he stood up, he took a gun out of his pocket, and he blasted away?”

“Oh,” Garry said. “Well, yeah, pretty much. He didn’t talk to anybody, if that’s what you mean. He put her down. Then, according to one of the Sisters who were here, he sort of looked around. Then he took something out of his coat and shot himself in the head.”

Gregor rubbed his eyes. It was incredible, how little feeling he had for this man or his wife—well, no. That wasn’t what he meant. He had so little feeling of them, was more like it, he couldn’t imagine what they had felt or hoped or wanted. What was worse, he had the impression that Garry Mansfield was just as clueless as he was. He shook his head.

“He brought her here,” he said, “because she was very religious, and he wanted her to be where she would have wanted to be herself. He shot himself—why? Because he was despondent at her death? Because he felt responsible for her death?”

“We interviewed his mother,” Garry said drily. “She’s a barfly from way back. Totally pickled. The only thing she was completely clear about was how much she hated her daughter-in-law’s guts. But don’t get your hopes up. She couldn’t have managed something as elaborate as an arsenic poisoning if her life had depended on it.”

“This was out in the trailer park? The same trailer park?”

“Right,” Garry said. “Out in Wilmot Township. Which is one hell of a long drive from here, even in the middle of the night with practically no traffic. And don’t ask me why they lived in the same place his mother did, because I don’t know. She seemed to think they were persecuting her.”

“Maybe they were trying to get her off booze,” Lou said.

Garry snorted.

Gregor sat down in a pew. He always felt strange, sitting in pews very close to the altar in a church. It was as if he thought that if he were going to be so near what mattered, he ought to be standing, or kneeling. But he never knelt, even when he came to liturgy at Holy Trinity on Cavanaugh Street, to please Father Tibor.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s straighten this out. Bernadette and Marty Kelly were poor. True enough?”

“True as it gets,” Garry said.

“What about Scott Boardman?” Gregor asked Lou.

“Middle class,” Lou said. “Not poor, not rich. Had a decent enough profession. Got a lot of work. From a working-class family. Nothing significant in the bank. But, you know, there was the settlement money. From the pedophilia suit. I don’t think any of the men got a lot, but it came in every month.”

“What about Harriet Garrity?”

“She was a nun,” Garry said. “I thought nuns weren’t allowed to own any property.”

“She could have a family that owns property,” Lou said. “Rich people become nuns.”

“I’ll check it out,” Garry said. “But I don’t see it, do you? She dressed like a bag lady.”

“She didn’t dress like a bag lady,” Lou said. “She was just being modest.”

“She dressed in sacks,” Garry said.

Gregor waved them quiet. “Love and money,” he said. “That’s what we’ve got to concentrate on. Love and money. And none of them had access to any money, as far as we know.”

Garry frowned. “That’s not exactly true,” he said. “Sister Harriet was the parish coordinator. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but she might have had access to the parish budget. And I’d bet the budget around here isn’t small.”

“What about Scott Boardman?” Gregor asked.

“He didn’t officially have access,” Lou said, “but he might have been able to get it unofficially. He volunteered a lot over there. He did office work. If you know how to tap into the computer files, you could do anything. And St. Stephen’s was the administrator for Scott Boardman’s reparations payments. Him and about five other guys, I think. That probably came to something.”

“All right. That leaves us with Bernadette Kelly. And there, I take it, we come up blank.”

Garry and Lou looked at each other and shrugged.

Gregor stood up. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we’ve got three bodies, each one of them murdered almost identically, as far as we can figure out. We’ve got no connections. Do you realize that? We don’t have a single thing to hold these three people together except that they attended the two churches located on this corner. And last I heard, that was not a credible motive for murder.”