Great Day for the Deadly (12 page)

He looked around the “station” and saw what he always saw, a large open room with a waist-high swinging rail used to divide it into two parts. On his side of the rail were the six desks of the six men, including himself, who made up the police force. On the other side of the rail there were chairs and benches and a desk and radio set for their secretary-dispatcher, Linda Erthe. Linda came in at six and stayed the night, since in the experience of the town of Maryville it was at night when she was really necessary.

Linda was sitting with her back to him, working on a crossword puzzle. The radio was silent but unlikely to stay that way. Pete had just sent Davie Burnham down to St. Andrew’s to check on Father Doherty and his clinic, and that always brought in trouble in the long run. Pete cleared his throat and said, “Linda?”

“If you’re going to have another nervous breakdown about those calls you’ve been getting, I don’t want to hear about it,” Linda said. “It’s just mass hysteria. It’ll go away by itself in a day or two.”

“Yesterday, you were telling me the sightings were mass hysteria,” Pete said. “You know, the people who said they’d seen Brigit wandering around town the day she died. All fifty-six of them or however many there were.”

“Well, that was mass hysteria.”

“So this is mass hysteria, too? Do you know how many bodies I went looking for today that weren’t there? Six. Six, Linda, it was crazy. I had three of those little postulants in this morning swearing they’d seen a corpse in the hedge outside the library.”

“Postulants,” Linda frowned. “Well, religious types aren’t too stable, if you know what I mean.”

Pete thought she was a brave woman to say that in Maryville, where the Cardinal had spies. “Mark Yasborough always seemed stable enough to me,” he said. “Good farmer. Nice farm. He said he saw one at the side of Eight eighty-six, frozen stiff in the snow.”

“Cabin fever,” Linda dismissed it. “He’s under a lot of strain anyway. That wife of his has just about had it with Maryville, New York. I heard her talking down to the Camelot the other night. She wants to go back to New York City and I don’t blame her a bit.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “I see what you mean. Marrying a woman from New York City and bringing her back here isn’t too stable.”

“It’s nuts,” Linda said, “and if you ask me, marrying a woman from here and expecting her to stay here is just as nuts. Did I tell you about that? Frank and I had a fight.”

“You’re always having fights.”

“This was our final fight. I promise you. Our absolute last. I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to college for. The last thing I want to do is to stick around here after I graduate.”

“What’re you going to do instead?”

“Go to the city. They’ve got lots of jobs for social workers in the city.”

“Mmm,” Pete said. He couldn’t imagine Linda Erthe as a social worker. Her life was a bigger mess than the lives of most bag ladies, and the bag ladies had excuses Linda didn’t have. Pete Donovan had always thought he’d feel better about Linda if she just took drugs.

He swiveled his chair around to look at the papers on his desk, decided there was nothing there he really had to be concerned about, and swiveled back to Linda again. He wished Davie or Hal or Willie or one of the other boys was in, but there it was. That was why his mother kept telling him he ought to get married. Your buddies were never around when you needed them. Pete cleared his throat and said, “Still. There’s a difference. I’ve been thinking about it all day. A difference in tone, sort of.”

“I haven’t the least idea what you’re getting at.”

“The two kinds of reports,” Pete insisted. “These today have been just crazy. And, of course, last week I was thinking the same thing about the people who were saying they’d seen Brigit wandering around on her own in town. But those other reports didn’t feel the same.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Linda asked. “You’ve changed your mind? You think those reports were real?”

“I don’t know. Let’s just say I’m glad I didn’t leave them out of my report to the Cardinal.”

“You left them in?” Linda was shocked. “You’re going to get crucified. You’re going to be the laughingstock of the St. Lawrence Seaway.”

“No, I’m not,” Pete said. “We’re not that far north. And besides—”

“Besides what?”

Pete didn’t want to tell her besides. Linda Erthe was nobody to go confiding in. She was certainly no one to tell about his nervousness on the subject of the Great Demarkian, Master Detective. Ever since the Cardinal had called to say that Demarkian was coming down, Pete had been in a sweat.

Now he swiveled in his chair again and pushed his papers around again and listened to the phone ring. He watched Linda pick up, speak into the receiver for a while and grimace.

“You can take this call if you want,” she said, punching in the hold button on her set. “It’s Mrs. MacBrae out near the flats. She said she found a body in the hay and now it’s gone, but you can—”

“Never mind,” Pete said. “Just tell her I’m out on a call.”

F
OR GREGOR DEMARKIAN, ARRIVING
at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace was something of a revelation. He didn’t know what he’d expected a Motherhouse to look like—college Gothic, maybe, with spires and turrets—but it wasn’t this redbrick, sensible structure that reminded him so strongly of a public elementary school. Nor, in his imaginings, had it been so profusely decorated. The Motherhouse occupied the highest piece of ground in town and its gate used Delaney Street like an extended private drive. That gate was covered with shamrocks made of silk and as big as wedding cakes. What’s more, the shamrocks must have been dusted. There was no snow on them at all, in spite of the fact that the rest of the landscape was crusted and hard and sparkling white in the sun. Then there was the drive that led from the gate to the Motherhouse door. Gregor was fairly sure it had to be deep Lent. It was that time in the Orthodox calendar, and the two calendars did overlap. John Cardinal O’Bannion hated secular decorations during Easter and Lent. He had a passionate repugnance to fluffy pink bunnies, fuzzy yellow chicks, and representations of smiling buttercups in chocolate and icing. Maybe he felt differently about secular decorations that happened to be Irish. The drive was lined with them. There were tiny leprechauns nestled around the glass balls of the lamps, large gilt harps on lawn stakes pounded into the frozen ground, pots of gold made out of cardboard, and Styrofoam balls attached to decorative bricks along the drive’s edge.

Like the town of Maryville below it, the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace seemed to be in the grips of a St. Patrick’s Day mania—or at least the outside of it did. Gregor had breezed up to the Motherhouse’s front door in the car John Cardinal O’Bannion had provided for the purpose. Like all the cars O’Bannion provided, it was nondescript and in questionable working order, but it came with a driver. This was a good thing, because although Gregor had a license he couldn’t really drive. Being driven had the advantage of keeping him out of trouble—Bennis Hannaford once said that putting Gregor behind the wheel of a car was like making a solemn vow to God Almighty that you would do everything possible to get a ticket—but it had an added advantage as well, and that was that he could pay attention to his surroundings. In a way, his impressions of Maryville, driving through, had been as startled as his first impressions of the Motherhouse. He had expected a much smaller town, and a much less diverse one. For some reason, he’d thought Maryville was a farming community in the process of metamorphosis into a suburb. He’d got the suburban part without trouble. The route coming in had passed through acres of neat midsize colonial houses on neat midsize one-acre lots. By now he was sure Maryville had never been a farming community. On the other side of town from the neat midsized colonial houses there was a river and along that river there were buildings that bore the unmistakable stamp of warehouses, abandoned and otherwise. Of course, Maryville was very close to the St. Lawrence Seaway, even if it wasn’t on the St. Lawrence River itself. Gregor didn’t know why that information had failed to penetrate, but it had. And yet—

And
yet.

If Gregor had had to put a name to his malady, it would have been information overload. When the Cardinal commissioned a report, he commissioned a
report,
not the usual police officialese outline that might or might not tell you what you wanted to know. With the Cardinal’s reports, if someone had seen something or heard something or just thought something, it was there. If there was some bit of background you might need, it was there, too. Last night, Gregor had plowed his way through “a few extra things” the Cardinal had handed him at the Chancery, and those included a history of the local Immigrants National Bank, complete with a biography of its present owner-president and the Cardinal’s personal opinion of every part of the operation.
(“Miriam runs a good business. Much better than her father did. Holds the mortgage on the Motherhouse and all the other Church property in town when we need them to be mortgaged and she’s always been good about them, too. Surprised she didn’t invite you to stay at her house. Usually does that with visiting celebrities and she knows you’re coming, I told her myself. Let me tell you, though, I’m counting on Miriam. All this mess the banks have got into. Miriam was telling me just the other day that they’re starting to do spot audits, the Feds are, and the Immigrants is due March the fifth. Miriam says she’s going to show these WASP nellies how to run a
bank.
Of course, there is the little problem of her husband
...”) Then there had been chapter and verse on Margaret Finney, the Maryville Public Library.
(“Miriam gave the money for the new building. Glinda Daniels has been librarian forever.”)
And the Maryville Volunteer Fire Department
(hopeless).
By the time he finished reading them all, Gregor felt as if he’d lived in town forever, but always underground. He knew about everything conceptually, but nothing in terms of personality.

Still, if the overwhelming amount of local information had been difficult to take, the witness reports that skirted the murder of Brigit Ann Reilly had been worse. Just getting the times right had been enough to give Gregor a headache. Pete Donovan had included the statement of anyone anywhere who claimed to have seen Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died, and there were a lot of them. Gregor had managed to whittle this list down to a very short one that he was sure he could trust:

10:00 Brigit leaves Motherhouse

10:06 Brigit talks to Jack O’Brien on Delaney Street

11:15 Brigit spotted near river by Sam Harrigan using telescope

  1:00 Brigit found under snakes by Glinda Daniels in library storeroom

Reading carefully, Gregor thought those were the reports he could trust absolutely. The problem was, he couldn’t really dismiss the others. He hated to admit it, but they just didn’t sound crazy enough. They also tended to take place during that crucial two hours between the time Sam Harrigan had seen Brigit walking and the time Glinda Daniels had found her body, or in the hour between the time Jack O’Brien had talked to her and the time Sam had seen her. There were such great big spaces of time. She could have been doing anything or been anywhere. Maybe Mrs. Moira Monohan had seen her walking up Londonderry Street at 12:17. Maybe Mr. Thomas Reeve had seen her on the levee at just about 11:00. Their reports got a little shot of credibility from the fact that they, like the others, failed to see her anywhere at all between 10:30 and 10:55. For that half hour at least, mass hypnosis had ceased to exist in Maryville.

Half an hour, between ten thirty and eleven. Half an hour. It nagged at him. It was just the kind of thing he was supposed to be good at—working through timetables, seeing the hidden patterns in random occurrences. He didn’t believe that that half hour was insignificant. It stood out too baldly to be that. He just couldn’t figure out what it meant.

That was the kind of thing that was driving him crazy, keeping him awake, burning him out. Last night, when it had finally begun to get to him, he had reached for the phone to call Bennis and stopped. Bennis was in the middle of her draft, or near the end of it, or something. She wasn’t talking to anyone who couldn’t qualify for the Distressed Damsels Union. She had her phone off the hook. He had put his own phone back into its cradle with what felt like desolation. He wasn’t used to being cut off from Bennis like this. He didn’t like it. God only knew what was going to happen to him if she up and married somebody.

Now it was ten o’clock on the morning of Saturday, March 2, and Gregor was standing in the Motherhouse’s front foyer, out of the cold and away from the relentless Irish mania that accompanied what was apparently Maryville’s favorite holiday. The Motherhouse foyer was bare of decoration of any kind, except for a large crucifix that hung on the wall facing the front door and a square oversize portrait in oils of a gentle-faced woman with thick eyebrows and fierce black eyes. This, Gregor thought, was probably the Blessed Margaret Finney, and she looked like a woman and a half. He looked around some more. The floor at his feet was black and white checkerboard marble and very clean. The walls around him and the ceiling above him were both plain, sane white. It was a relief to be away from all that green madness—and from his nattering wondering about why there was so much of it. Everybody in town couldn’t be Irish or of Irish descent. Those people he had seen down near the warehouses had definitely been Hispanic of some kind—and they had been decorated, too, right to the point of wearing shamrocks on the lapels of their coats. It was enough to make him think he’d swallowed something he shouldn’t.

At his side, Sister Mary Scholastica—née Kathleen Burke and a familiar face from Gregor’s stay in Colchester—was just shutting the front door and shaking the cold out of her habit. She was an extraordinarily tall woman with bright red hair that kept escaping from her veil, and Gregor thought she was not behaving naturally. He could think of a hundred conversations they should have been having at just this time. There was the one about everything that had happened in Colchester—months ago, the people who had died and the person who had killed them, and how she felt about that now and how she was coping. There was the one about Brigit Ann Reilly, a girl who had been in her charge, and how she felt about
that.
Gregor found himself wondering if nuns weren’t allowed to talk about their emotions to laypeople—or even to show them. He could think of nothing else that would explain her manner, efficient and automatic and as cold as ice.