True Believers(145)
“What’s the matter now?” Dan asked.
Roy stuck his hands in his pockets. “Nothing is the matter. I wanted to see your church. I’ve seen your church.”
“Everybody is welcome in this church,” Dan said.
“Something tells me that I wouldn’t be, if the men going back and forth around here realized who I was.”
“They realize who you are.”
Since this was possibly true, Roy let it go. He stretched a little and pivoted, taking in the choir loft, the altar, the tall stained-glass windows that lined both of the long sidewalls. It was a beautiful church. He wouldn’t have expected anything else.
“Well,” he said, “I think that we’ve carried this as far as it can go. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Of course.”
“Of course.”
Roy backed away, then turned around and went as slowly as he could out the doors to the foyer and out the doors there to the walk that led to the street. Men were still coming in and out, and he thought that Dan might be right. They might know who he was, and just be too polite, too circumspect, too God-damned private school to do anything about it. He wondered if they looked at him after he had walked past, but he knew that the one thing he couldn’t do was to turn around to check. He went all the way onto the sidewalk and turned toward home without a backwards glance. He looked at St. Anselm’s and saw that girl who worked with the homeless coming out the front doors and half-running to the corner. If he had had any sex drive at all, he would have wanted something like that girl to take to bed.
What he wanted instead was more coffee, and as he started down the street he began to hurry, just a little, so that he would be closer to getting it.
3
If Mary McAllister had been at the church right after Father Healy’s body was discovered, or even heard about the death anytime in the next two hours, she would have been able to talk to Gregor Demarkian directly. Instead, she had had an evening class and then a quick run to the library. Lately, it seemed as if she never had the materials she needed to do what she needed to do. Then she had been in a hurry, because she was late for the soup kitchen and also for the boxes she was supposed to pick up at St. Anselm’s. If she had listened to an ordinary radio station on the drive over, she would have heard all about it. Instead, she’d tuned in to the station that played chant and medieval motets. She had no idea where they broadcast from, but wherever it was seemed to have no news bureau at all. It wasn’t until she had pulled into the parking lot at St. Anselm’s and seen all the strange lights in the courtyard that she’d realized something was wrong. It wasn’t until she’d found Sister Scholastica, looking as if she’d been drenched and wrung out in her habit, that she’d known what was wrong. Then, for a while, she’d simply behaved like a fool. It wasn’t that she had been inordinately fond of Father Healy. As priests went, he hadn’t been too bad, but he hadn’t inspired her in the way that the Pope did, or made her feel as if she were in the presence of holiness, the way Father Dougan at the soup kitchen did. He was just a nice, ordinary, harmless man who meant well and tried to do good. Maybe that was why his death came as such a shock. She could almost understand somebody killing Sister Harriet Garrity. She had had urges to do that herself. Then, without realizing it, she had been bracketing away the deaths of Bernadette Kelly and Scott Boardman by telling herself they were probably the work of somebody deranged, like a psychopath. But this seemed like such an … ordinary … murder, so sort of matter-of-fact, as if whoever had done it had killed in the same spirit in which he got himself breakfast or decided to change the channel on his television set.
Gregor Demarkian and the two police detectives were already gone by the time Mary got to St. Anselm’s. Mary didn’t really want to talk to the police detectives, because it would seem too much like something official. A deposition. A witness report. Gregor Demarkian seemed safer. Mary had seen enough of him on the news and in the papers to feel as if she almost knew him. His best friend was a priest, that was one thing. The woman he went out with was the one who wrote the fantasy novels about good and evil that one of Mary’s English professors at St. Joe’s had said had “a very Catholic intellectual foundation,” whatever that was supposed to mean. None of it meant anything, except that she would be more comfortable talking to Demarkian than to the police, and she knew where to find Demarkian. She called the soup kitchen and told them she would be late with the boxes. Then she put the boxes in the back of the van as fast as she could and crossed the street to St. Stephen’s. Just as she was coming out St. Anselm’s front door she saw that man—Roy Phipps; for a second she hadn’t been able to remember his name—coming out of St. Stephen’s. He looked at her briefly but didn’t register what he saw, and she looked away. It was Mary McAllister’s personal opinion that Roy Phipps was an agent of the devil himself, determined to make all Christians look like evil fanatics and make sure nobody who wasn’t one would ever want to be one, but this didn’t seem to be the best place or the best time to have it out with him.