“Chickie,” Garry Mansfield said.
“Yeah, Chickie. That one, you can tell that he’s gay.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Garry Mansfield said.
Lou brushed it away. “We weren’t thinking about arsenic,” he went on. “We weren’t thinking about murder. Not any of us. What we were thinking about was Roy Phipps. You know about the Reverend Roy Phipps?”
“In detail,” Gregor said.
“Yeah. Well. What we were all worried about was, we figured if we didn’t give them the go-ahead to get the funeral arrangements made and that kind of thing, old Roy would think Boardman died of AIDS, and then we’d be stuck with another demonstration. The asshole has picketed five of the last six funerals at St. Stephen’s. It’s creepy as hell. So we didn’t get completely stupid. We got the whole autopsy done. We just released the body to the undertaker a little ahead of schedule, so the family and the church could, you know, get things in gear.”
“Before the chemical analysis tests came back from the lab, is what he’s trying to say,” Garry Mansfield said.
“One thing at a time,” Gregor said. “The body was released to the family. It was embalmed?”
“Yeah.” Lou looked depressed.
“The family had it embalmed? The mother did, or did the father have a change of heart?” Gregor asked.
“It was the people at the church.” Lou slid down in his chair. “Reverend Burdock and those people. Guy named—Aaron something. He made the arrangements.”
“Aaron Wardrop,” Garry Mansfield said.
“Was that acceptable to the family?” Gregor asked.
Lou straightened up again. “Look,” he said. “You don’t have to tell us that we cut a lot of corners. We cut a lot of corners. And we shouldn’t have. But the thing is, this guy, this Phipps, is not a joke. He’s never pulled anything violent yet, but that doesn’t mean he won’t, and the people who trail around after him are not the most stable eggs in the carton. So we were a little spooked. And the mother—well, the mother couldn’t have taken him home. The father wouldn’t have allowed it. He didn’t even come to the funeral. She doesn’t have any money to speak of. She couldn’t have buried him herself. I mean, what the hell. We were just trying to be decent to everybody involved and head off an incident in the process.”
Gregor nodded. “So you released the body for burial earlier than you should have. And the body was embalmed. And the body was buried? Yes?”
“Yes,” Lou nodded.
“Where?”
“Martyrs Cemetery,” Garry Mansfield said. “The Episcopal diocese owns it. I think Dan Burdock arranged it.”
“If the body was buried, it can be disinterred,” Gregor pointed out.
“Yeah.” Lou got out of his chair. “And isn’t that going to be a can of worms. When Roy gets finished with that, we won’t know what hit us.”
Gregor drummed his fingers on the table. “The autopsy found arsenic, isn’t that right? How did the autopsy find arsenic? Why did the medical examiner go looking for it?”
Lou Emiliani was pacing. “There wasn’t enough cocaine to account for the convulsions, according to him. So it bothered him. So he put all the stuff aside. And then, when the Kelly thing hit, and she was full of arsenic, it hit him that arsenic causes convulsions if you take enough of it. So he ran a few more tests, and—bingo.”
“Enough arsenic to cause convulsions,” Gregor said.
“Yes,” Lou Emiliani said.
“Enough to cause convulsions and death before it caused significant vomiting,” Gregor said.
“Enough to kill a herd of elephants,” Lou said.
Gregor almost got out of his own seat. “In a church office at six o’clock in the evening with other people in the same room?”
“I think they were in the next room over,” Lou said, “but yeah. That’s the idea.”
SEVEN
1
At first, Bennis Hannaford thought the call was going to be just one more annoyance. Usually, when people called from the Inquirer or the Star, it was because some reporter somewhere had come up with one more good idea about how to get her to talk about Anne Marie. They all wanted to see a feature with a headline like “Hannaford: The Famous Novelist Talks About Her Notorious Sister.” Lying on the big double bed in her own bedroom, fully dressed except for the fact that her clogs were lying on the carpet under the window, Bennis didn’t see the point of getting up to answer the phone. She was screening all her calls these days, anyway. She had to. As the execution got closer and closer, more and more people came out of the woodwork, looking for a piece of her. There were editors in New York who wanted nothing more than to have her write a “memoir” of the murders, and agents who wanted it even more badly. There were ghost writers by the legion, apparently of the opinion that even a woman with fifteen best-selling novels to her credit would need a little “help” when it came to writing something like this. But she had no intention of writing something like this. She knew that her books gave the impression of being full of self-revelation. It was an illusion. The reason Bennis had always liked fiction was that it allowed her to hide almost entirely behind the antics of characters she had invented and could control. What was worse, what she wanted to hide was the mess they all now wanted her to reveal: the chaotic terrorism of that big house in Bryn Mawr. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she woke up thinking she was fifteen again, home from boarding school for Christmas vacation. If Gregor was there, she was all right. She felt his body beside her and that woke her up, completely. For some reason, she never imagined that he was one of the countless men she had seen fit to traffic in during the years when she’d been “free.” Sometimes, though, Gregor was not there. He was traveling, or she had worked so late that she hadn’t wanted to go upstairs and disturb him. Then it took her minutes to realize that she wasn’t at home again, and she would lie very still, holding her breath, to hear if her father were prowling in the hallways. That was what Bennis remembered most about being home. Her father never slept, and his wakefulness was always pitilessly, viciously angry. Her mother was the only one who could calm him. Her mother was the only one he would not wake.