“I don’t know,” Mary said. “Somebody in authority, maybe. Somebody official. It doesn’t matter. You call Aaron and tell him what we’re going to do, and he can meet us at Cavanaugh Street or he can not and wait to talk to Mr. Demarkian tomorrow and if his apartment really is full of marijuana, he can flush it down the toilet or give it to the neighbors. I’ll call Mr. Demarkian and tell him we’re coming.”
“Is he listed?’
“On the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, two days ago. There’s a contact number for anybody wanting to reach him with information. Come on. If we hurry, I’ll be able to get this all done in time for me to pick up the homeless people to bring them to the soup kitchen tomorrow morning. Which reminds me. Sometime on this trip, we have to drop off the boxes I’ve got in the back of the van. Go on, go call Aaron, and I’ll call Demarkian.”
“I think you’re insane,” Chickie said.
“I’m not insane.” Mary swept the hair away from her face and wound it into a knot around her hand. She used the other hand to search around in her pockets for an elastic band, found one, and tied her hair back. She was breathless and exhilarated at once, as if she had taken some kind of drug. “Hurry up,” she said. “I’ll go down to Aaron’s office and see if I can find those copies. I’ll be back in a minute. You call Aaron.”
“May I tell him that I think you’re insane?”
“Tell him anything you want. Just make sure he knows what’s going on. And hurry.”
Mary chugged out of the little room and back across to the annex, moving as fast as she ever did when one of the homeless people was losing control. She got to Aaron’s office without coming close to getting out of breath. The copies were stacked up on his desk in a little pile, collated. She took three sets and folded them into a square that would fit into her jeans. Then she took the phone and punched in for a line. She didn’t really have the number they’d printed in the Inquirer for Gregor Demarkian. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to keep it. She was just sure that if there was a number in the newspaper, there would be one listed in the directory. She got Aaron’s phone book from off the bookshelf and looked up Demarkian. The number was there.
It was only later, standing next to Aaron’s desk while the phone rang over and over again in her ear, that it occurred to her that she had told Chickie nothing about thinking that she wanted to go into the convent. She hadn’t changed her mind. If anything, her conviction had grown stronger by the hour, so that now she was sure that her next step would have to be to talk to Sister Scholastica to find out how the wheels could be put in motion. It made her a little uncomfortable, to know that she hadn’t said anything about it. She was closer to Chickie than she had ever been to any of the best girlfriends she had had growing up, or to any of the ones she had met at college. She told him everything. She even told him when she had cramps.
All of a sudden, the phone on the other end of the line was picked up. After so long a ring, Mary expected to hear an answering machine. She heard, instead, the low throaty voice of a woman with the kind of Main Line accent that reminded her a little of Katharine Hepburn.
“Bennis Hannaford,” the voice said.
Mary McAllister forgot all about Chickie, and about wanting to be a nun, and even about herself, and launched into a complicated explanation of what it was she was calling about.
THREE
1
It wasn’t that Gregor Demarkian thought the information brought to him by Mary McAllister and Chickie George was unimportant. It was only that he had anticipated it. From the moment that he had first heard that there had been a “huge” damages case against the archdiocese, he had expected somebody, somewhere, to have been using it to cheat. Bennis would probably call this cynical—although, Lord only knew, she was cynical enough herself—but Gregor didn’t believe it was possible for an opportunity like this to crop up without somebody taking advantage of it in some way. Not only was there a damages case, but the man who had been at the head of the fountain of money was an incompetent fool. Whatever else could be said about the old Cardinal Archbishop, that much was without question, at least when it came to matters of the law. The new Cardinal Archbishop was much better, but he was also in the middle of a whirlwind. Somehow, somewhere, some way, somebody would have figured it all out, but Gregor didn’t think there had been a fairy’s breath of a chance that that would be anytime soon. That was why he sat calmly at the desk in the corner of Garry Mansfield’s office reading witness reports, while Garry and Lou Emiliani jumped around making phone calls, taking faxes, and jumping around with all the abandon of disgruntled employees who’d gotten dead drunk at the office Christmas party.