“I thought we were going to stop calling him that,” Garry Mansfield said. “Jackman said that if we kept it up we were going to slip one day and do it on the air, so you said—”
Lou ignored him. “It’s not that I’m against the Catholics. You have to understand this. All right? I’ve been a Catholic all my life. And I know what they were thinking, those guys in Rome, when they sent him here, after all the trouble. So. It’s not that. It’s just that I can’t deal with him. I can’t deal with him.”
“Nobody can deal with him,” Garry said.
“I take it we’re back on the Cardinal Archbishop,” Gregor said.
Lou Emiliani stuck his fingers under his collar and came out with a silver chain with a crucifix and a Miraculous Medal hanging on it. Entwined around the metal were the brown cloth strands of the scapular of St. Simon Stock. Lou tucked it all back out of sight.
“I think the best thing you could do,” he said, “is to be our point person with the archdiocese. You deal with him.”
“Why don’t we talk about this young man,” Gregor said. “This Mr.—”
“Boardman,” Garry Mansfield said.
Lou brought the manila folder back to him and closed it. “It was my fault, more than anybody else’s. It didn’t occur to me that he died from anything but bad cocaine, or too much cocaine. It looked like that kind of death. And you know what autopsies are. They can’t test for everything. They only find what they go looking for.”
“Back up a little,” Gregor said. “This Mr. Boardman was how old?”
“Scott,” Garry Mansfield said.
“He was twenty-eight,” Lou Emiliani said. “Gay. Out, but not very comfortable with it. Not camp, not even a little. If you hadn’t known he was gay, you would never have guessed it.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Garry Mansfield said. “Here we go again. What was he supposed to look like so you could guess it? What, you think the gay guys paint their hair green?”
Gregor ignored him. “If he wasn’t comfortable being out and he wasn’t distinctively gay, why was he out at all?”
“He had to be,” Lou said. “He was one of the plaintiffs in the sex-abuse scandal. The way those things work, the defense attorneys made his life an open book. And it wasn’t a secret. He got caught in the garage doing it with another kid in high school. So his father kicked him out. His mother was still in touch, though.”
“And he came to St. Stephen’s?” Gregor asked.
“I think it took longer than that,” Lou said. “He was in art college when he got kicked out. He must have finished. Anyway, by the time he died he was a graphic artist, got a lot of work on coffee-table books and book-cover stuff in general. Got a lot of work from New York. Some of the men at St. Stephen’s said he was thinking of moving there.”
Gregor nodded. “All right. Eventually he came to St. Stephen’s. Was he in a relationship?”
“No,” Garry Mansfield said.
“He screwed around,” Lou said. “He’d get stoked up on coke and hit the bars. In the beginning it was just sort of off and on. He’d coke up on the weekends and be clean the rest of the week, or he’d at least be clean enough. But the last six months or so, that changed.”
“He was zonked all the time,” Garry said. “We all saw him. He was all over the neighborhood. Half the uniforms in this precinct must have rolled him into the emergency room at least once, or rolled him home.”
“Nobody arrested him?” Gregor said.
“What for?” Garry Mansfield said. “He wasn’t dealing. Hell, if he got a significant stash, he’d just hole up until he did it all himself. He was a mess. He didn’t need to go to jail. He needed a hospital. There just aren’t any hospitals.”
“Let’s not debate the drug war,” Lou Emiliani said. Then he sighed. “I know it’s wrong to jump to conclusions. We shouldn’t have assumed anything. But it wasn’t just us. It was Jackman and the commissioner both. Here’s this guy, he’s been stoking himself to the gills on coke for six months, it was only a matter of time before he killed himself. Now he goes into convulsions in a church office and kicks—what would you think it was?”
“Back up again,” Gregor said. “This was, when? That Scott Boardman died?”
“January 30,” Lou said. “Just about six o’clock in the evening.”
“And he wasn’t alone? Somebody saw the convulsions?”
“A whole mass of people saw the convulsions,” Lou said. “Reverend Burdock, for one. Oh, and that guy, what’s his name. George.”