True Believers(158)

Delmark Marquis was a small, round, neat man in the kind of suit that would have looked better on somebody who was tall and thin. It was so expensive, though, that it didn’t look ugly even on him. He raced back and forth in front of the television set, clapping his hands together in front of his face like a kindergarten teacher calling her class to order.

“This is extraordinary,” he kept saying. “Extraordinary. What does this man think he’s doing? What can he possibly imagine is the advantage of this sort of behavior? I know it’s the fashion these days to deplore the inadequacies of the old archbishop, but at least that man had a sense of decorum. A sense of dignity. He would never have gone in for—something like this.”

Lou Emiliani had gone out as soon as he had heard about what was happening on Baldwin Place. Now he came back in, looking relieved. “I called the precinct,” he said. “There’s no problem. No fights. No vandalism. They’re all just out there praying.’

“Which means, of course, we won’t be able to say anything about it.” Delmark Marquis made a face. “You can’t complain about a Cardinal Archbishop wanting to pray, now can you? Not even if it’s right out loud and right in public. That man has been nothing but a problem since he came to the city of Philadelphia. Nothing. What the Vatican was thinking is beyond my comprehension.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said politely, “we could go back to these records for a moment. I’d like to get some sense of what happened here, and how much money was involved—”

“I thought I told you.” Delmark Marquis stiffened. “We can’t possibly know the answers to those questions until we’ve done a thorough investigation. And it’s going to take weeks. You can’t expect us to simply jump in and make speculations about a client’s affairs without—”

“The client has given his permission,” Gregor said.

Delmark Marquis made another face. “Ah, yes. Right off the cuff. Just like that. The man has gone off his head. He thinks it’s Christmas morning, and this is Jerusalem. I detest dealing with religious people. I really do. They have no sense. They’re always abandoning prudence for purity, and all purity ever gets them is trouble.”

“There they go,” Garry Mansfield said. “They’re marching back down the street. Look, there’s Roy Phipps. He looks like he ate a lemon.”

“Quite,” Delmark Marquis said.

Gregor looked down at the papers on the table in front of him. They were only his notes, not official documents, but they contained as much information as he needed for his purposes, if he could only get Marquis to answer questions instead of having fits. It was going to take weeks to get hold of the official documents, even with the Cardinal Archbishop authorizing their release, but Gregor thought he could manage to get enough of what he needed for his purposes, if only he could keep Delmark Marquis on topic.

“Mr. Marquis,” he said. “Try to concentrate. We have four people dead, that we know of—”

“That you know of? What in the name of God do you think you’re dealing with? This is beginning to sound like a slasher movie.”

“We have four people dead that we know of,” Gregor repeated. “The one solid motive we have in any of this is the payments being made by the archdiocese to this office, so that this office may disburse those payments to the litigants in the civil suit in which several priests of this archdiocese were accused of sexually molesting several young boys in the 1960s—”

“I know what the case was about, Mr. Demarkian.” Delmark Marquis sniffed. “I’ve been at this firm for thirty years. I was one of the founding partners.”

“I just wanted to make sure we were clear.”

“Of course we’re clear. We’ve been clear since you got here. I am trying to be cooperative, Mr. Demarkian, but as far as I’m concerned you’re barking up the wrong tree. Ian Holden may be a thief—I suppose it’s hard not to think of him as anything else, under the circumstances—but if the same person killed all four of those people, then Ian Holden isn’t a murderer, and that takes care of that.”

“That’s assuming you’re right,” Garry Mansfield put in quickly. “You don’t know that he was in court the entire day Harriet Garrity died. He could have said he was but—”

“Tut, tut, tut,” Delmark Marquis said. “It has nothing to do with what he said. It was the Bellwether Corporation bankruptcy. He’s the head of the legal team in the Bellwether Corporation bankruptcy. For God’s sake, man, there were clips of him marching around looking like he had egg on his face on the network news. Although why he took on Bellwether to begin with, when anybody with any brains in his head at all could see that they had to be a pyramid scheme, I don’t—”