“Right,” Lou Emiliani said. “Good. Okay. So—”
“So,” Gregor said, “I finally asked myself the only sensible question. Who would have been able to give arsenic to each of the victims and know that the victims would actually be the victims? And over and over again, I came back to Dan Burdock and those damned mints. He always had those damned mints. He offered one to me, once.”
“Do you figure it was poisoned?” Garry asked.
“No.” Gregor shifted in his chair. He hated the chairs they used in precinct conference rooms. They were always made of metal and hard as rock. “None of the other, more usual questions did me any good,” he said. “Access to the poison was out as a filter, because Father Healy had bought the stuff and strewed it all over the basement at St. Anselm’s. Anybody could have gotten hold of it. Motive was out, too, because although it was perfectly clear what kind of motive there could be, half a dozen people had the same one—”
“What motive?” Lou demanded. “Why do you figure Dan Burdock killed four people?”
“Money, of course,” Gregor said. “It’s always money. Did you really think it was going to be religion?”
“I was sort of hoping it was going to be Roy Phipps,” Lou said.
Gregor shook his head. “A murder may occur in Roy Phipps’s vicinity, or even at his instigation, but it won’t be this kind of murder. It will be somebody bashing somebody else on the head in one of those riots he orchestrates so well. And the Reverend Phipps won’t be the one doing the bashing. No, listen, it was always money, all that money from the settlement of the pedophilia suit, which was wandering around the landscape with very weak controls, even nonexistent controls, on where it went. That’s what I kept hearing when I first came here, that the old Archbishop, the one before this one, was hopeless when it came to practical matters of this kind. He committed the archdiocese to make payments so high that they threatened to bankrupt the institution. He signed off on papers and deals he didn’t even read. Nothing about that deal was ever set up properly, and that meant it was ripe for being ripped off. As Tommy Moradanyan Donahue would say.”
“Who’s Tommy Moradanyan Donahue?” Garry asked.
“He’s five,” Gregor said.
Lou cleared his throat. “So the settlement funds were ripe for being ripped off, and they were ripped off. But I don’t see how you can say they were ripped off by Dan Burdock. I mean, he didn’t have access to the funds. Now Ian Holden—”
“Had tons of access and did a lot of ripping off,” Gregor said. “Yes, I know. You can take that up with him. But he didn’t kill anybody.”
“Why not?” Garry demanded. “Bernadette Kelly was a receptionist in his own office. She could have found out all kinds of things—”
“She could have, and she might have, but that has nothing to do with this,” Gregor said. “Dan Burdock wasn’t ripping off the archdiocese. He was ripping off Scott Boardman.”
“What?” Lou shook his head.
“He was ripping off Scott Boardman,” Gregor repeated. “And, I think, if you look through the church’s books, you’ll find he’s been ripping off a few of the others. It’s only a guess, but it makes sense. Tibor would get an enormous kick out of this. We’d have known all along, somebody would have suspected from the first, except that we’ve none of us managed to free ourselves from stereotypes.”
“You’re sounding like the department’s diversity handbook,” Garry said.
“Somebody ought to,” Lou told him.
Gregor got up and stretched. He more than hated those chairs. They were going to kill them. “St. Stephen’s had a ton of money. Everything about it was beautiful. It was well kept up, even in ways that are demonstrably expensive. It costs money to clean stained glass and marble so that they look the way they look there. And yet, you know, the Episcopalian Church is steadily losing membership. That much is regularly reported in the press. And St. Stephen’s doesn’t have that large a membership—less than two hundred and fifty, I think, is what Dan Burdock told me.”
“Well, yeah,” Garry said. “But—”
“But what?” Gregor shook his head vigorously. “But gay men have no dependents, so they have more money to give to their churches than straight men do? But gay men care more about appearances than straight men do? But gay men want exquisitely beautiful things around them and are more willing to pay for them than straight men are? That’s what I mean by stereotypes. If St. Stephen’s had been an ordinary church without a reputation for being a ‘gay’ one, we’d have seen the anomalies immediately. We’d have wondered where all the money was coming from. Instead, we looked at all the expensive, elaborate accoutrements and dismissed them as being just what we’d expect of a ‘gay’ church.”