Great Day for the Deadly by Jane Haddam

From what he’d heard, Cardinal O’Connor could be a very insistent man, too. If John O’Bannion was really intent on getting in touch with Gregor Demarkian—and the effort involved to track Gregor down at the Hilton suggested he was—the clerks at the Archdiocese had probably been driven absolutely crazy since the message came in.
    Right now, though, Gregor was not going to go racing for the phone. He was going to sit down with Dave and Schatzy and have a nice substantial lunch, punctuated by conversation first about murderers and maniacs they had known, and then—as was inevitable during any social contact among Bureau agents above a certain age—about the late, vociferously unlamented J. Edgar. By then, Gregor thought he would have calmed himself down enough not to sound too inappropriately happy on the phone.
    There was certainly nothing to be happy about in the death of Brigit Ann Reilly, but Gregor was happy nonetheless. Ever since he’d realized that the murder Schatzy was talking about had taken place on O’Bannion’s turf, he’d been a little surprised that he hadn’t heard from the Cardinal. Gregor knew how John O’Bannion’s mind worked. You found yourself an expert you could trust, and you stuck with him.
    Besides, with Bennis working and everybody else away, a little murder case would come as a welcome relief.
    It had to be better than hanging around New York City in miserable weather, listening to the worst kind of mentally rigid Bureau administrator blithering on about what a wonderful tool they had in this computer program they hadn’t yet learned how to run.

Two
[1]
    T HERE WERE PEOPLE WHO said that John Cardinal O’Bannion was a Neanderthal, a throwback to the days when Catholics were supposed to “pray, pay, and obey.” Those were the people who concentrated on his politics—1930s liberal; now labeled conservative—and his theology, which was definitely of the Absolute Moral Norms variety. There were other people who said he was a wizard. The Archdiocese of Colchester had been a mess when he had been sent in to take it over. Vocations to the priesthood had dried up. Half a dozen orders of nuns, exasperated at his predecessor’s high-handedness and his death grip on a dollar, had withdrawn from the parochial school system. The vast majority of the laity was in open rebellion, half in an attempt to be more Catholic than Rome, the other half in an attempt to be God knew what. There were rumors of Love Feasts for the Goddess being held in fields of daisies from the banks of the Seaway to Syracuse. Of course the Cardinal had to be a hard-liner on morality and the liturgy, these people said. That was the only way to bring the little people back into the fold. The little people were always so impressed with pomp and circumstance, and so respectful of authority—as long as it behaved like authority. What the little people wanted more than anything else was not to be forced to think.
    To Gregor Demarkian, what John Cardinal O’Bannion was was an original, a big coarse man who had come late to his vocation, an ex-longshoreman who could still talk like a longshoreman, a kind of warrior priest. He was also a passionate Catholic. Many of his contemporaries from the seminary—and hordes of up-and-coming younger men—had replaced their belief in the historical reality of the Resurrection with a vague idea of “spiritual” and “symbolic” rising from the dead, just the way they had replaced their belief in individual sin with a furious opposition to “sinful systems.” O’Bannion was adamantly in favor of the traditional interpretations of both. “The point of Christianity,” he once told the 3,000 assembled members of the Association of Catholic Psychotherapists of New York State, “is not to make us more emotionally stable people, more psychologically aware people, more fulfilled people, more self-actualizing people. It is certainly not to promote our ‘human growth’ or to make us