Great Day for the Deadly (23 page)

“Remember what I was telling you about the latitude Rome shows us in our Rules? Well, Mr. Demarkian, we’ve taken less advantage of it than some, but we have taken advantage of it. Before the changes, every nun’s day was regulated almost down to the second. We went to sleep together. We got up together. We went to chapel together. We went to meals together. Well, we gave that up. We still do some things as a group. That’s why I said he could have been gotten in here this morning. We would have been in chapel en masse, for Mass and Divine Office. It’s the only time of day we are together en masse at all anymore. At any other hour, and that includes four in the morning and during Compline, there are always one or two Sisters doing something on their own, taking care of emergencies, just getting extra work done. With the beatification and the Cardinal coming for St. Patrick’s Day and the murder—the first murder—there’s been a lot of extra work to get done. So, Mr. Demarkian, it’s just possible that if Don Bollander entered this house through the front door on his own two feet last night, he could have been careful enough so that we didn’t see him. But trust me, he wasn’t carted around this house dead as a doornail and dumped in the utility room and he didn’t come in through any of the side doors. The alarms would have gone off and whoever was carting him around would have been caught in the act. There were a lot of Sisters awake last night. We were having a Forty Hours Devotion in the chapel.”

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN DIDN’T BELIEVE
in locked-room mysteries. He didn’t believe in poisons that leave no trace, identical twins who successfully switch identities, or the silent menace that walks the dark, either. Back on Cavanaugh Street, Bennis Hannaford fed him detective stories the way some mothers feed their children hard candies, as a pacifier. Sometimes she hits a real clinker, a resurrected unknown “classic” of the thirties. Gregor always ended up wondering what those authors had been thinking of. Mothers who didn’t know their own children. Brothers who didn’t know their own sisters. And locked rooms. Always locked rooms. There was a man, John Dickson Carr, who specialized in locked rooms. It made Gregor feel a little better about being called “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” If there was one thing Mrs. Christie had had the good sense never to indulge in, it was locked rooms.

No matter how he felt about it, though, what he seemed to have was a locked room. He went over and over it with Reverend Mother. He established the obvious. Either Don Bollander was dead at the time he arrived at St. Mary of the Hill, which meant he would have to have come in by the outside door in the hall where the utility room was. If he had come in at any other place he and his murderer—or he and his transporter—would most likely have been discovered. Besides, there were dozens of other hiding places for a body on the first floor of the Motherhouse. There were room closets and storage bins, ordinary closets, and half-filled packing crates stuck in out-of-the-way rooms. The only sensible reason for Bollander to have ended up in the laundry sink was that it was convenient, and the only thing it was convenient to—assuming someone was carting around a corpse—was that door.

If Don Bollander had been alive when he came to St. Mary of the Hill, he could have come in almost anywhere, although the two best bets would have been the same (impossible) side door from the first scenario or the front door. Most of the other side doors opened onto staircases that opened onto dormitory floors at least on the second story. The front door had the advantage of having access to a wide variety of corridors all at once. It would still have been risky, creeping through the Motherhouse halls in the dead of night, but as an explanation it was more likely than the one Reverend Mother favored, which was that Bollander, dead or alive, had arrived around six o’clock this morning. Gregor didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe Bollander had been moved to the Motherhouse after his death. He had only been able to examine small stretches of bare skin—it wouldn’t have been polite, or politic, to start ripping away at the man’s clothes—he hadn’t seen the kind of markings he would have needed to believe that. Then, too, both the visible skin and the clothes were too clean. If a corpse had been carried all over hell and gone, there should be something on it that would look out of place if that corpse came back to life and started back working in his office. As for Reverend Mother’s favorite scenario, Gregor knew it was absurd. The body could not have arrived alive at St. Mary of the Hill at six o’clock this morning and been in the state of rigor in which they found it at eleven. It could not have arrived already in rigor and been stuffed in the laundry sink without something breaking. Gregor had watched Pete Donovan’s men pull Bollander out, and they were the ones who’d had to do the breaking. And that meant—

Gregor didn’t know what that meant. He supposed that—barring some real absurdity like a secret plot being carried out by an employee of the company that had installed the security locks—it meant he was stuck with a locked-room murder whether he liked it or not. It made his head reel. It put him in a particularly bad mood. Murderers were logical, he’d told Pete Donovan earlier. Well, Gregor Demarkian was logical, too. He didn’t like Alice in Wonderland cases. He didn’t like to be confused. Most of all, he didn’t like to feel as if he were missing something very blatant and very simple—which was exactly what he did feel like.

In the end, he looked Reverend Mother over once or twice—she was launched on a discourse on the depredations of religious superiors in the United States since the close of Vatican II—and made up his mind to strike out on his own. It might be hours before Pete Donovan and his men were finished, or minutes, but Gregor didn’t care. He wanted to get out in the air and think for himself. When Sister Scholastica passed the plans room for the fourth or fifth time, he stopped her and asked for his coat. When she brought his coat he thanked her, shrugged it on and said, “Well, Reverend Mother, it’s been very interesting talking with you. I have to thank you for your cooperation.”

“I wasn’t cooperating,” Reverend Mother said. “I was monopolizing the discussion.”

Actually, she hadn’t been. Gregor had asked too many questions for that. He smiled at her anyway, thanked her again, and asked to be directed to the front door.

It was a clear day but a frigid one, a deceptive day offering sunshine but no warmth. Gregor set out through the propped-open leaves of the Motherhouse’s wrought-iron gate with half a purpose in mind. The Cardinal had shown him a map of Maryville that seemed to indicate that the street that dead-ended at the Motherhouse gate on this end dead-ended at the library on the other. In between was practically everything of importance in town, except Sam Harrigan’s house and the town’s minuscule barrio. This was the walk Brigit Ann Reilly had taken on the day she died and on every day before that for two months, excepting Sundays. Gregor wanted to walk it himself, at least as far as his hotel, which so far he hadn’t seen. After leaving Gregor off at the Motherhouse gate, the Cardinal’s driver had been deputed to drop his luggage at the St. Mary’s Inn. According to the Cardinal, the inn was on the corner of Delaney and Londonderry streets, “right across from the bank.” Whether that made its location a good one or a bad one, Gregor didn’t know. He had his mind on other things. What he definitely did not have it on was locked-room mysteries, but before he left the Motherhouse he checked out the front door lock anyway. It was just as Reverend Mother General said it was. There were a series of dead bolts that seemed to have nothing with which they could be closed. There was a conventional lock under the doorknob and a much smaller one higher up. Gregor recognized the brand name etched into its polished brass front and was impressed. The security company had given the Sisters a top-of-the-line job. He wondered whose doing that was, the Cardinal’s or the bank’s. He supposed it might have been both.

Whosever it was, contemplation of it was definitely not good for Gregor’s mood. That lock was just one more argument in favor of a locked-room puzzle and against Gregor’s most fervently held conviction, which was that the whole thing was going to turn out to have been a mistake, or gross stupidity on his part. He got himself away from it by moving as quickly as possible into town. He wanted to get a feel for Maryville. He wanted to feel what Brigit Ann Reilly had felt. He could get to Don Bollander later.

Whether any of this made any sense, he never knew. The only feel he got from Maryville concerned its commitment to St. Patrick’s Day and its own Irish-American heritage, which was extreme but rather endearing. He passed a cluster of buildings calling themselves St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church and St. Ignatius Loyola Parochial School and marveled at the variety and extent of the decorations scattered through the branches of their trees and across their doors and windows. He passed a hole-in-the-wall store whose narrow plate glass window was so crowded it was impossible to see through it to the room inside. It had gold letters painted across it that said,
MARYVILLE CATHOLIC CENTER. RELIGIOUS ARTICLES.
It had a hundred tiny green-and-white shamrocks growing like mad vines into every available space. Gregor thought it was all very nice, but he couldn’t see what good it was doing him. Irish pride and bitter cold. It seemed like a strange combination.

He was just about to give it up, find a phone booth and call a taxi, when the doors of one of the stores he was passing opened and a small man stepped out. The man was elderly but not ancient and very sharp. Gregor picked that up from the man’s eyes behind his thick glasses. He was also wearing nothing to protect himself from the cold, as if he were just coming out to do something that wouldn’t take much time and would be going right back in again. Gregor couldn’t imagine what that would be. He couldn’t imagine how the man was able to stand in the wind like that without shivering, either.

Gregor was stretching his mouth into a quick perfunctory smile and getting ready to pass by—not only was that the right thing to do but he didn’t like looking at this man; it made him feel as if frostbite might be contagious—when the man stepped forward, rearranged his glasses, touched Gregor on the arm and frowned.

“Excuse me,” he said, as Gregor stopped dead in his tracks, startled. “Are you that man I saw on TV? The one the Cardinal sent out to find whoever killed Brigit?”

Gregor had made it a point never to answer questions like this directly, at least when they were put to him by people he’d never seen before who’d accosted him in the street. Today, he forgot all about that. He was that surprised.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”

“Gregor Demarkian,” the man repeated. “I’m Jack O’Brien.”

For a second, Gregor thought the name Jack O’Brien was familiar only because it was so common. There had to be thousands of Jack O’Briens across the United States. There had been three in the Federal Bureau of Investigation alone during Gregor’s time there. Then he remembered: Jack O’Brien was one of the names on the Cardinal’s list. He was one of the people who had seen Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died. In fact, he was the first. Gregor took the hand Jack O’Brien was holding out to him and shook it.

“We could go in the store,” Jack O’Brien said, “if you’ve got a minute.”

“I’ve got a minute,” Gregor said.

“Good,” O’Brien said. “It’s getting cold out here.”

The store, as Jack O’Brien called it, turned out to be an old-fashioned shoe store. The left half of it was taken up with displays of solid-looking work boots and excruciatingly stiff wing-tip formals. The right half of it held seats and supplies like laces and removable inner soles. At the back, behind a half-wall with a counter nailed to its top, was where the real money was made: the cobbler’s machine shop with its black oily equipment and uneasy air of being covered with fine leather dust. The equipment looked well used and permanently settled in. It was part of what gave the shop the air of having been here “forever.” The other part of that was the plate glass window at the front. It said O’BRIEN’S in large black letters, but nothing else. If you didn’t already know what this shop did, you weren’t going to learn it on a quick pass through town in your car.

There was an electric percolator plugged into the wall near what Gregor thought might be the lathe—he really wasn’t very good at machines—and as soon as they came in from the cold, O’Brien headed straight for it.

“You want some coffee?” he asked, while he was in the midst of pouring a cup.

Gregor said yes, even though the coffee looked black and muddy and suspiciously like Father Tibor’s. He was cold.

“I had intended to come down here and talk to you,” Gregor said. “You were one of the people on my list.”

“Because I’d seen Brigit that morning?” O’Brien brought the cups—white plastic foam cups, the kind that imparted to coffee a taste all their own—and handed one to Gregor. “There’s really not much of anything in that,” he said. “I saw Brigit every day except Sunday. That day was no different from any other.”

Gregor took a sip of his coffee. It was exactly like Father Tibor’s, and undrinkable. He sat down in one of the chairs set out for shoe-buying customers and put the cup on the floor beside his legs.

“Are you sure?” he said. “I was talking to Sister Scholastica and she mentioned something about Brigit having been—strange, most of that week.”

“Not strange,” O’Brien said. “Brigit was having one of her het-ups, that was all.”

“Het-ups?”

“Brigit got excited about people,” O’Brien explained. “Especially people who were different than she was. I guess she must have grown up in one of those suburbs where everybody is supposed to be alike. I’ve never been to a place like that myself. But I heard her talking about me to that Neila Connelly once and she said, ‘He’s so wonderful. I never knew old people could be so wonderful.’”

“It must have been nice to be called wonderful.”

“It would have been nicer not to have been called old,” O’Brien said. “Anyway, it was like that. I could tell. She had somebody new she was excited about.”