Great Day for the Deadly by Jane Haddam Page A

better adjusted and more ‘accepting’ of our natures. The point of Christianity, ladies and gentlemen, is this: that approximately two thousand years ago in Palestine a man who to all intents and purposes had been dead and buried for three days raised Himself up and appeared in His risen body to the people who had loved him and others, and that He did these things in fact, and because He did these things in fact, we are obligated to listen to what He had to say and to try to follow it, whether what He had to say is what we want to hear or not.”
    Gregor could just imagine what the Association of Catholic Psychotherapists of New York State had thought of that. He didn’t have to imagine what certain other people had thought of it. Reactions to that speech had appeared in everything from the Saturday Evening Post to the New Republic. The more populist press had tended to approve of it, in a vague and uncomprehending way, because they also tended to approve of God in general and to disapprove of psychotherapists. The “intellectual” press had been furious. Gregor was neither a religious man nor a moralist. He had no strong ideas one way or the other about the existence of God or the philosophical advisability of engaging in acts of promiscuous fornication. He thought O’Bannion had simply stated the obvious, the absolute bottom-line core definition of Christianity, without which Christianity would not exist. The irrationality of the literate press’s attacks on O’Bannion had startled him.
    The irrationality of the literate press’s reactions to the death of Brigit Ann Reilly had startled him, too. It was now ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, March 1, and Gregor was standing in the anteroom to the Cardinal’s office in the Chancery in Colchester, rocking restlessly back and forth on his feet and smiling nervously every once in a while at the Benedictine nun in full habit who served as the Cardinal’s secretary. The nun was perfectly pleasant and even friendly, but Gregor wasn’t used to nuns. All that black and white and unnatural calm made him nervous. He was also very tired. He had opened the Cardinal’s envelope yesterday afternoon as soon as he’d got back up to his room from lunch. He had read through it carefully, called the Cardinal, agreed to come up to Colchester and go on to Maryville, and then gone out and bought every newspaper, newsmagazine, and tabloid with a story about the murder in it. The reading proved to be irresistible. He had expected to get at least eight hours of solid sleep before he had to go to the train station in the morning. He had gotten less than five, and those sprawled out across crumbled newsprint while still wearing a suit. He had told himself he would doze on the Amtrak trip upstate. Instead, he had reread the report in Time and skimmed through the long quasi-editorial in The Nation, looking for God only knew what. It wasn’t that any of these pieces contained essential information about the murder itself. Reading them, Gregor wasn’t sure the press had any information beyond what had been given out the day the body was found—and that wasn’t much. If he wanted details, he had the Cardinal’s report to look through. It contained just about anything he could have expected to get, considering the fact that he was attached to no official policing force anywhere in the country. If Gregor Demarkian had formed distinct impressions of the Cardinal Archbishop, the Cardinal Archbishop had formed distinct impressions of him. At least, the Cardinal Archbishop had remembered that Gregor liked his information organized, exhaustive, electic, and typed.
    What was fascinating to Gregor about the press accounts of the death of Brigit Ann Reilly—especially the ones in the prestige weeklies—was their tone. From Time to the New Republic, from Newsweek to The Nation, the editorial voice seemed to be a cross between the grimly prissy schoolmarm of nineteenth-century fiction and the