Great Day for the Deadly (27 page)

“I agree. Unfortunately, I do not as yet know of any reason for that to lead to the death of Brigit Ann Reilly. The second victim was an employee of the bank—”

“Was he?”

“Oh, yes. In fact, someone—I think it was Pete Donovan, the local cop—told me he was Ms. Bailey’s personal assistant. I’ve thought about it, Bennis, I truly have. If Miriam Bailey wanted to kill her own assistant, she had a hundred ways to do it that didn’t involve sticking him in a laundry sink in the local convent—a difficult and risky thing to do, by the way.”

“She might have been trying to direct attention away from herself.”

“Sure,” Gregor said, “but since she runs this bank, we have to assume that she is reasonably intelligent, and if she is reasonably intelligent, she has to realize that the attention would be right back on her in about three minutes, which it was. And that still leaves Brigit Ann Reilly, and the flood.”

“What flood?”

Gregor sighed. “Go back to work, Bennis. You know more about trolls than you do about life. There was a flood up here the day Brigit Ann Reilly was killed, not a huge one, but substantial. There was enough warning for the town to get organized for evacuations and emergency services. If we assume Brigit Ann Reilly was alive either when or shortly before she was found—”

“Wait a minute,” Bennis said. “What did she die from?”

“Coniine,” Gregor told her, “hemlock. She was a small girl, according to my reports, and she wouldn’t have eaten much that morning, so say it took about half an hour to start feeling sick, two hours to pass out and two and a half hours to die, that would mean she would have had to have been fed hemlock somewhere between ten and ten thirty, by which time everyone already knew the flood was coming—”

“Maybe our murderer thought the flood would cover it,” Bennis said. “Maybe he thought the body would be found and everybody would think she’d been drowned.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said, “but I don’t think so. I think Brigit Ann Reilly was killed that day because she had to be killed that day and no later. Don’t ask me why. That’s what it feels like.”

“Mmm,” Bennis said. There was the sound of a match popping into flame, and Gregor realized she was lighting a cigarette. He thought about giving her another lecture about how bad that was for her health and bit his tongue instead. Every time he lectured, she told him, “That argument only works on people who think the most important thing in life is health.”

Gregor heard her take a drag and then blow out a stream of air. She always did that through pursed lips, as if she were trying to whistle. Sometimes she did whistle. It was odd, because she could never whistle when she wanted to.

“Well,” she said, “you’re right about one thing. I do know more about trolls than anything else, at least at the moment. I ought to go back to knowing about trolls, too. This manuscript is already overdue. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” Gregor said.

“I wish everybody would come back from vacation and liven the place up a little. It’s spooky. I’m the only one of us in this building in residence, and I go look out my front window and Lida’s house is all closed up. Can you imagine that? Lida’s house all closed up. I keep expecting Zeus to fall from the Heavens.”

“He won’t,” Gregor said. “Lida has all the windows open in her house down in Florida and by now she knows who in the neighborhood’s having a baby and who’s having an affair and she’s taught Donna’s Tommy at least fifteen new words, half of them in Armenian and—”

“Don’t,” Bennis said. “Just come back soon. I think I’m going to call the rest of them up and tell them to come back soon, too. I’m getting lonely.”

“You can’t ask them to come back and keep you company when you’re still refusing to leave your apartment,” Gregor said reasonably.

“Yes, I can,” Bennis told him. “Stop it with this. Finish up up there and come home. I’ll talk to you later.”

There was a click in his ear, and the phone went to dial tone. Gregor replaced the receiver in the cradle and looked at his bedspread, really an antiquey-looking quilt that was probably made of polyester and sprayed with Scotchgard to prevent stains. It was pretty anyway, but not as pretty as his quilt back home, which Elizabeth had made herself in the year before the year in which she died.

Gregor got up, went to the bathroom, and looked into the stall shower at all the knobs and hoses. He tried a couple of the knobs and found the one that operated the plain shower with no trouble at all. He took off his robe and threw it over the edge of the sink.

Maybe, he thought, he should have told Bennis about the locked-room problem, even though he didn’t think it was going to turn out to be a locked-room problem, in the long run. Bennis was good at things like that. He often picked her brains when he was having trouble with his cases, in spite of the fact that he worked overtime to keep her physically out of the cases themselves. As Father Tibor Kasparian was always saying, nobody with any brains wanted to put Bennis near any real danger. She’d open her arms and embrace it. She had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. On the other hand—

He was just taking off his watch and laying it on the little glass shelf above the toilet when the phone rang again. He grabbed for his robe—he was of a generation that had been taught to be modest even in private—and headed back for the main room, where the Princess phone sat looking ridiculous on an oversize mahogany bedside table. He picked up and said, “Yes?”—causing himself to be immediately subjected to a high excited voice delivering a monologue that was half message and half stream-of-consciousness narrative. He knew that voice and that monologue very well, even though he had heard it for the first time less than half an hour ago. They belonged to Mrs. Edith—Gregor couldn’t remember Mrs. Edith what. He didn’t know if he’d ever known it. He only knew that for the next few days, she was his landlady. He’d never had a better reason to finish a case and finish it fast.

“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” Edith was screeching. “I’m so glad I found you, you have no idea, I get so nervous being handed these important responsibilities but, of course, that doesn’t matter, I want to do the best I can for the Cardinal, the Cardinal only has to ask and now there’s a visitor for you down in the lobby and I need to know if you’re supposed to see him at all although, of course, I’d think you are, since it’s Father Doherty and Father Doherty—”

Gregor didn’t wait to find out if Father Doherty was a saint or a sinner, the Cardinal’s right-hand man or the local leader of the forces of the Antichrist. It would have taken too much time. He interrupted Edith, told her to ask Father Doherty to wait downstairs for ten or fifteen minutes, and hung up. Then he headed back for the shower.

For some reason, Gregor had not expected Father Michael Doherty—it was Michael; Edith had managed to get that in at the end—to be a serious man. Maybe he had heard too much the last couple of days about false reports and Brigit sightings, about the localized panic and hysteria that ripples through any small town in the wake of a violent death. Maybe he was still too much a creature of Washington and cities like it, caught in the (false) assumption that real heavyweights do not “bury” themselves in the backwaters. As soon as he saw Michael Doherty, Gregor knew he had a heavyweight. It was all over the man’s face, and especially his eyes. Here was a man who had not only “seen something of the world”—any damn fool could do that for the price of a plane ticket—but who had seen into it. Here was a man Father Tibor Kasparian would like.

Michael Doherty was sitting under an amber- and yellow-shaded, mock-Tiffany reading lamp in an equally mock-leather armchair across from the reception desk, reading a copy of
Time.
When the elevator doors opened to let Gregor out, he looked up and smiled. Then his smile grew wider, and Gregor understood why at once. Father Michael Doherty was dressed in a pair of twill pants, a button-down shirt left open at the neck to reveal a Roman collar and a good wool sweater. Except for the Roman collar, Gregor was dressed in exactly the same way. It was a style of dress adopted universally by a certain class of American middle-aged male, what Bennis always called “the Harrison Ford look.” They both seemed to have declared themselves members of that class with a vengeance.

Gregor walked out of the elevator and across the reception room floor. Michael Doherty stood up and held out his hand.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Father Michael Doherty.”

“You call yourself Father,” Gregor said.

“I’ve never really understood the men who don’t,” Doherty answered. “You do all that work to get through the seminary, all that work to get ordained. Well, maybe that’s because I came to it late. I think we’d better go into the lounge, if you don’t mind. I could use a beer and we could both use a place where Edith can’t eavesdrop.”

“Is there such a place?”

“Several. But don’t count on the rooms. I think they’re bugged.” Doherty walked toward the reception desk, toward the left of which was a frosted glass door. “It’s right through here,” he said. “It’s very nice, really, and I almost never get a chance for a beer and a talk away from work anymore. Come along with me.”

Gregor came along with him, a little apprehensive that what he was going to find behind the frosted glass was a hoked-up replica of an Irish saloon or a New York City Irish neighborhood bar. He found instead a plain place with a large fireplace in it, too many scarred wooden tables, and a scattering of the same St. Patrick’s Day decorations that had infested the rest of Maryville. Gregor was getting so used to those, he hardly noticed them. There was a candle in the shape of a leprechaun on their table and a tiny basket full of silk shamrocks. Gregor pushed them out of the way as soon as he sat down and asked the waitress who seemed to be hovering just over his head for a glass of red wine. Father Doherty asked not simply for a beer, but for a St. Pauli Girl. Gregor thought about what Jack O’Brien had said, about Father Doherty and Doherty Lumber.

The waitress brought their drinks, smiled at Gregor and told Michael Doherty to have a good day, and disappeared in haste. Doherty watched her go and said, “It’s one of the great advantages of being a Catholic priest in a town like this. The service is always outstanding. Of course, if you don’t watch yourself, you could end up thinking you were one step better than God.”

Gregor shook his head. “According to the Cardinal, that’s not really true. According to the Cardinal, there’s been more than a little trouble on the religious front up here in the last few years.”

“If you mean garden-variety anti-Catholicism, there’s been some,” Doherty admitted, “but not in town. You get that mostly from the region around us, the small farming communities with heavy enrollments in scattershot fundamentalist sects. And I do mean scattershot. This is not the Southern Baptist Convention we’re talking about here. This is single churches with no connections to any organized denomination, run by pastors who’ve ordained themselves because that’s the best way they can think of to make a little bit better living than they could have doing factory work in Colchester. Their parishioners are poor and scared and undereducated and probably on the whole not very bright, and they have been known to get both nasty and violent—but on the whole I don’t worry about them. Quite frankly, on the whole I think they’re sad but harmless.”

Gregor took a sip of wine. “Tell me,” he said thoughtfully, “do you think the rest of the Catholics in Maryville would agree with you? What about the rest of the priests? What about Father—is it Fitzsimmons?”

“Barry Fitzsimmons at Iggy Loy?” Doherty grinned. “Let’s just say if he held any other opinion on this one, I would have heard about it. Everybody would have heard about it. That’s what Barry’s like.”

“And the rest?”

Doherty took a long draft of beer and poured some more from the bottle into his glass. “There are two more,” he said, “and we all see each other fairly regularly. I haven’t heard anything about any anti-Catholic activity of any kind, serious or not, from any of them. Why? Did you have a reason for thinking there would be?”

Gregor thought of the letters the Cardinal had received and the letter—as well as the snake—that had been delivered to Reverend Mother this morning. He said, “There’s a young girl dead and she was training to join a religious order. There’s a man dead, too, and he was found in that religious order’s utility room. Those two things seem to me to be enough reason to at least consider the possibility that what we have here is some kind of antireligious mania.”

“I suppose they are,” Doherty said. “All I can tell you is, I haven’t seen anything of the kind. To tell you the truth, it’s been quiet on every front I can think of over the last few months. I work down in a parish called St. Andrew’s—”

“I know about St. Andrew’s,” Gregor told him. “Sister Scholastica was explaining it to me. Poor parish, mostly Hispanic immigrant population. Lots of programs, literacy classes, and a clinic.”

“That’s right. Also citizenship classes and, believe it or not, a parish school. Don’t ask me how we keep it running, because I don’t know. Bless those nuns. From time to time we get some know-nothing activity, anti-immigrant, antiforeigner stuff, but not recently. Recently, even the dope sales have been down.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said.

Doherty shifted a little in his chair. The lights in the lounge were so dim, and the windows so carefully tinted, it felt like the middle of the night instead of the middle of the afternoon. Doherty coughed into the side of his fist and said, “Mr. Demarkian, I came here because—no, let me put it another way. I know, because I read my local newspaper and because I spend a good deal of my time talking to Glinda Daniels, who’s been a friend of mine for years, anyway, I know all about the people who have come forward to say they saw Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died. I know that most of them are fantasizing. I know that, from your perspective, reports of that kind are probably less than worthless, but I really did have to come—”

“You mean you saw Brigit Ann Reilly too?” Gregor wanted to add that if Father Doherty said he’d seen her, Gregor would believe he’d seen her. Father Doherty was a believable man.