He opened the door before they had a chance to knock and stepped back to let them in. “Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “And Detective Mansfield. And Detective—Emilio, isn’t it?”
“Emiliani,” Emiliani said.
“Emiliani,. I’m very sorry.” He took the coats they were shrugging off—all but Demarkian; Demarkian seemed determined to keep his coat—and put them over the banister at the bottom of the stairs. There was a closet, but it was full of junk that nobody knew what to do with. He gestured them in the direction of the living room, and they went. Mansfield and Emiliani went directly. Gregor Demarkian stopped at every piece of art.
“It’s really very bad stuff,” Robert found himself saying. “I ought to replace it with prints of decent work. The Church has such a wealth of truly fine art. But I never get around to it.”
“It was here when you came in?” Demarkian said.
“Oh, yes. It was here when my predecessor came in, too. Father Corrigan put it up. Which is funny, actually.”
“Why?”
“Well,” Robert said carefully, “because Father Corrigan was one of the priests who later, uh, well, was caught up in the pedophilia thing. He admitted to … interfering … with two altar boys who were underage at the time of the contacts.”
“How underaged?”
“One of them was eight,” Robert said. “The other was ten. They’re grown men, now, of course. But I’m surprised you don’t know. All this was in the papers for weeks a few years ago. I thought everybody in Philadelphia knew.”
“I knew about the scandal,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I didn’t know a lot of the details. It’s not the kind of thing I follow closely. Do you think it should have been less likely for Father Corrigan to commit child abuse if he liked bad art?”
“What? Oh, no. No, that wasn’t what I meant. It’s devotional art, you see. That’s the Sacred Heart you were looking at it. There are special novenas to the Sacred Heart, and a special devotion called the First Fridays, where you make a point of going to Confession and saying special prayers on the first Friday of the month for nine months running, and receiving Communion . The people who have this kind of art in their houses are the kind who are committed to those sorts of devotions, very traditional, very conservative people, really.”
“And you thought people like that would be less likely to commit child abuse?”
“I don’t know what I thought,” Robert said. “Maybe I was just stunned by the hypocrisy of it. All the sweetness-and-light piety. It’s funny the way it works, isn’t it? When there’s trouble like that, it’s never the holy terrors like the Cardinal Archbishop who commit it. Didn’t you want to have a seat in the living room?”
The detectives already had seats in the living room, on opposite sides of the couch, facing the big, garish painting of the Last Supper. Da Vinci might have painted the original, but whoever had copied it for this print had had the artistic version of a tin ear. Robert sighed slightly and then, because it had become obvious that Gregor Demarkian did not intend to sit down, sat down himself in the wing chair.
“Well,” he said. “You wanted to ask me about Sister Harriet.”
“Not right away,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I wanted to ask you about Bernadette and Marty Kelly. You knew both Bernadette and Marty Kelly, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” Robert said. “Well, I did in a way. With Marty, it was only in passing. But with Bernadette, I knew her rather well. She did a lot of volunteer work at the church. And she was nearly a daily communicant, until the last few months at the end. Diabetes, you know.”
“Yes,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I do know. When you say she volunteered in the church, do you mean she had some semiofficial position? Did she work here on a regular basis?”
“Oh, no,” Robert said. “There was nothing like that. She just pitched in with our projects, with the soup kitchen and the homeless shelter and that kind of thing. She had her own job to go to, after all.”
“Bernadette Kelly didn’t have a job,” Detective Mansfield said confidently. “That’s in the record. She was unemployed.”
“When she died she was, yes,” Robert said, “but that was because of her medical problems. They became so severe those last six months or so, she wasn’t able to work. But she had a job before then, for years. She was a receptionist at Brady, Marquis and Holden.”
“What’s Brady, Marquis and Holden?” Demarkian asked.