He was coming out of Martindale’s when he saw the copy of the Inquirer in a vending machine, with Dan Burdock’s picture on the cover, dressed in ceremonial robes and doing something at an altar. Usually, Gregor got the paper either going to or coming from breakfast, but this morning he had been distracted, and he hadn’t even seen it. Now he put his money in the slot and got a paper out to give it a better look. Once he had it unfolded he could see that there was another picture, of the outside of St. Stephen’s Church, where Roy Phipps and his parishioners were picketing. Roy Phipps looked, Gregor thought, entirely unscathed. No police truncheon had come down on his head during the riot, and he had found clothes in his closet that were cleanly and carefully pressed. Gregor scanned the story. It said nothing much he didn’t already know. Dan Burdock and the parishioners of St. Stephen’s were giving a private prayer service for the victims of the riot. A public, more elaborate service was scheduled for later in the week. Roy Phipps and his people were protesting the “normalizing” of “perversion,” and intended to be back when the formal service was in session, “to bring a little sanity to these times in this place.” Sanity seemed to include more parishioners dressed in bedsheets and crowned with angel’s halos, but that wasn’t the kind of thing Gregor thought he could safely go into.
He looked the story over one more time. He folded the paper up and put it under his arm. He went back into Martindale’s foyer and headed for the pay phones. Here was a reason to have a cell phone. You could call anyone anytime from the middle of the sidewalk and not have to waste time at a telephone booth.
Except that there were no telephone booths anymore.
Gregor called Henry Lord, and asked, “You’ve got to go right by St. Stephen’s, don’t you, to get out of the city from where you are? Could you pick me up there?”
Henry had been willing to pick up Gregor on Cavanaugh Street, which was considerably farther out of the way. He would be more than happy to pick up Gregor at St. Stephen’s, even if it meant pulling into the parking lot and searching through the church to find him. Gregor said thank you and took off, turning first left and then right, conscious all the time that neighborhoods changed quickly and—worse, and more annoying—so did the infrastructure. Whoever it was who had decided, sometime in the 1950s, that it made sense to put concrete highway overpasses over ordinary city streets must have been on drugs.
He got to St. Stephen’s without incident, although he found himself counting homeless people along the way. There always seemed to be more of them instead of fewer, even in good economies. There was something he had never been called on to deal with. He had never been that kind of policeman, and he was glad he hadn’t been. Alcohol and mental illness were beyond his understanding. Drug abuse seemed to him so monumentally stupid he couldn’t imagine what it was people were thinking of when they took their first joint or their first shot of heroin. It was like hanging out a twenty-story window screaming: kill me! kill me!
When he got to St. Stephen’s, the street was quiet. The doors to both St. Stephen’s and St. Anselm’s were propped open, but Gregor had the impression that they always were. There was no sign of Roy Phipps or any of his angels, although if Gregor tilted his head the right way he could see the tall white cross on Phipps’s town house’s front door.
Gregor went into the church and looked around. It was empty. He went to the back and out the back door to the courtyard and saw lights on in the annex. He went across the courtyard to the annex and let himself inside. It was warm and light in here. Most of the office doors were open.
“Can I help you?” somebody said.
Gregor turned to see Chickie George sitting behind a desk in the office to his left. He hadn’t recognized the voice, because for some reason Chickie wasn’t putting on the camp this morning. “I’m looking for Father Burdock,” Gregor said. “Is he around somewhere?”
“Up the stairs, first office you get to,” Chickie said. “I’d show you up, but I’m being held together by plaster of Paris.”
“So I heard. I hope it isn’t too painful.”
“It wouldn’t be painful at all if I could use it to sue that son of a bitch up the road. Dan’s in. Just tell Mrs. Reed who you are.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Of course I do,” Chickie said, and suddenly the camp was back. “You’re the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”
Gregor went down the hall—he had only himself to blame for that one; he’d been asking for it—and found the stairs with no difficulty. He went up and around, thinking as he did that he was being routed back toward the church proper, and found a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman in a flowered dress, typing away at a computer on a desk.