“GALA,” the Cardinal Archbishop repeated.
John Jackman took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “if you want to get technical, one of the GALA people made what might be termed a pass at one of Roy Phipps’s people, however—”
“It wasn’t a violent pass?” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“Ah, violent, no. Physical, though, yes.” Jackman squirmed.
“You’d better just tell him,” Scholastica said. “He won’t stop asking until you do.”
Jackman stared up into the night sky. “This man, Chickie George, his name is—”
“He worships across the street,” Scholastica said. “He’s a friend of Mary McAllister’s.”
“Yeah, well,” Jackman said. “He grabbed this other guy’s, uh, private parts.”
“Hard?” the Cardinal Archbishop asked.
“How the hell should I know?” Jackman said. “I mean, excuse me, Your Eminence.”
“You’d know if the other man experienced pain,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “I take it you were an eyewitness to this incident.”
“So was Mr. Demarkian here,” Jackman said defensively.
“You must have noticed if the other man doubled over in pain,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “Or if he cried out in agony. Or began to tear up. Or if he was only startled and upset.”
“Oh.” Jackman nodded. “Just startled and upset. He, uh, he sort of blushed.”
“Very good.” The Cardinal Archbishop nodded. “So what we had here was this man, Chickie George, delivering the same kind of pass that hundreds of men experience every afternoon on their walk through Penn Station. An imprudent act, perhaps, but not an act of violence. This Chickie George, he was the one Miss McAllister accompanied to the hospital?”
“That’s right,” Scholastica said. “You remember. She called. Thomasetta came out and told us.”
“What Sister Thomasetta came out and told us,” the Cardinal Archbishop said—and then, just then, Gregor realized that the man was furious. Worse than furious. Angry to the point of explosion. “What Sister told us,” the Cardinal Archbishop repeated, “was that as a result of this perhaps stupid but wholly symbolic act, Mr. George is now in the hospital with multiple contusions and several broken ribs. And in the wake of what was done to Mr. George, another man, also a member of GALA, was set on fire.”
“It’s already on television,” Sister Scholastica said apologetically. “Thomasetta came out and told us about that, too.”
“I think,” John Jackman said cautiously, “that I’d really like to know what the point is here. If you wouldn’t mind.”
“The point,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “is who started the violence, and it was not the counterprotestors from GALA. If nobody wants me for anything here at the moment, I am going to go back to my residence. The archdiocese will issue a statement about this matter sometime tomorrow afternoon.”
“Marvelous,” John Jackman said.
“Your Eminence?” Scholastica said.
The Cardinal Archbishop bowed slightly in the direction of all of them at once or none of them at all, turned on his heel, and walked off in the direction of the church. John Jackman threw himself down on the bench and dropped his head into his hands.
“This is incredible,” he said. “This is worse by the minute. They’re going to have to fire the whole department and start from scratch.”
In the annex, the tech men were beginning to bring out more than they were bringing in, and a couple of them were just standing around waiting. Gregor tugged at Jackman’s sleeve.
“Let’s go in there and do what we came to do,” he said. “Then we can work out the future of the Philadelphia Police Department.”
TWO
1
Usually, it was Bennis who fell asleep on the couch, and Gregor who went looking for her when he didn’t find her in bed. This morning, Gregor woke to find himself staring at his own living-room window and, across the street, at the lit window of Lida Arkmanian’s second-story reception room. Something was going on down there that involved red crepe paper and silver balls, but he wasn’t sure what. Since the room was lit up but completely uninhabited, he didn’t think he was going to find out anytime soon. He sat up and looked around him. He was still wearing the clothes he had had on the night before, including his jacket and tie, and his tie had a note pinned to it. “Didn’t want to disturb you. Going off to read,” the note said. Gregor unpinned it—Bennis had to be crazy, pinning something to him with a straight pin—and put it down on the coffee table on top of the notes he had been making about the death of Sister Harriet Garrity. He hated to admit it, but he was much happier to be looking into a murder that had just happened, almost right in front of his nose, than he had been at the thought of looking into two like the deaths of Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly. Cold trails were always bad news, of course, but it was worse than that. Over time, people edited their own memories. They took out what shamed them and put in what they wished they had done. Cold trails almost always involved hot lies and even hotter self-delusions, and there was no reasonable way to untangle them. Even if you solved the case, and built enough into the foundation so that a decent prosecutor could get a conviction, you always ended up with a picture of what had happened that was more than a little false.