True Believers(135)

“I’d have to create a fuss, and I don’t want to. Go. Call me up later and let me know what happened.”

Gregor got out of the car and looked around. He could, he thought, have gotten a police escort to bring him up here—if he’d called Jackman and asked for one, he would have gotten it—but it hadn’t even occurred to him, and it didn’t matter now. He was at the end of the block on the cross street. At the other end, St. Anselm’s sat on the corner, its side to this street. There was a small knot of people pressing up against the barriers. Most of them seemed to be homeless people, winos and bag ladies, not so much curious as confused.

Gregor pushed through them to the uniformed officer at the gate. The uniformed officer was very young, and he looked scared to death.

“Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “Talk to Detective Mansfield or Detective Emiliani. They called for me.”

“Nobody can pass the barrier,” the uniformed officer said. Gregor thought for a moment of what he could do—go down a few blocks and use a pay phone to get Jackman to get Mansfield to come out and get him—but all the alternatives meant getting this young man in trouble, and that wasn’t what he was here for.

“Look,” he said. “It won’t kill you to get on that walkie-talkie and ask Detective Mansfield and Detective Emiliani if they’re looking for a man named Gregor Demarkian. If the answer is no, you’ll be in no different a position than you are now.”

The young man in the uniform hesitated. Then he nodded a little, said “just a minute,” and turned his back to the crowd. Gregor watched him punch in a code, talk into the receiver, and then hesitate again. He turned around and looked Gregor up and down. He went back to talking into the walkie-talkie. Then he was done. He put the walkie-talkie into a little holster arrangement at his belt and came back to the barrier.

“You do,” he said.

“I do what?” Gregor asked.

“Look like a sort of out-of-shape Harrison Ford. You ought to think about using some weights, Mr. Demarkian. Weight training can change your life.”

Gregor was of the opinion that his life had already been changed as much and as often as he wanted it to be. He slipped through the gap in the barrier that the uniformed officer made for him. The crowd was nonexistent on the other side, and the light was getting to be that way. Sometime, in all the running around, while he hadn’t been noticing, it had started to become night. Why was it, he wondered, that everything that happened on this block seemed to happen in the dark?

When he got up close to the side of St. Anselm’s, there was light again, coming across the parking lot from the courtyard. It was artificial light, but there was a lot of it, training on a building on the far side of the space that Gregor was sure he remembered as the rectory. He tried to get through the wrought-iron gate and couldn’t find a way. He walked all the way to the entrance to the parking lot and went in there. There was another uniformed officer stationed there, but this one seemed to recognize him. He even nodded.

Gregor crossed the parking lot and walked onto the frozen ground of the courtyard without worrying about finding the pathways. The ruts in the ground stabbed against the slick leather of his shoes and hurt his feet. The rectory door was open, propped back by something he couldn’t pick out in the shadows. Policemen were walking in and out. None of them seemed to be carrying anything. No ambulance was parked in the parking lot.

Gregor got to the rectory door and introduced himself to the officer stationed there. The officer nodded slightly and called up the stairs for Mansfield.

“It’s all over but the shouting,” he said apologetically. “They took the body out half an hour ago. Had to. We had hysterical nuns all over the place.”

“We had one hysterical nun all over the place,” Garry Mansfield said as he came down the stairs from the second floor. “Hello, Mr. Demarkian. You should come up and see the scene. Not that it means anything. It’s just like the last one. No telling where he got the stuff or when he ate it, except, you know, that arsenic kicks in pretty soon so he’d have to have eaten it pretty soon. No vomit anywhere but in his bedroom. Lou Emiliani is so frustrated, he’s threatening people with death.”

“Do you know when he died?” Gregor asked.

Garry Mansfield was hurrying back up the rectory’s stairs. Gregor was hurrying behind him, except that he didn’t find it possible any longer to really hurry up stairs. Maybe the uniformed officer had had a point with that business about weight training.

“This one’s fresher than the last one,” Mansfield said. “Sister Peter Rose found him. She said she thought he must have fainted, and then when she touched him he was warm. You can talk to her.”