Great Day for the Deadly (34 page)

“Is that likely?” Donovan asked. “Father Doherty knows Ann-Harriet very well.”

Gregor rubbed the leg of his trousers. “If you’re not expecting to see a woman dressed up as a nun, you don’t see a woman dressed up as a nun, you see a nun. If you understand me. At any rate, the two of them went wandering all over the place. Finally, Brigit went up to the library, probably already feeling sick. Our murderer went back to the bank and down to the vault, picked up a few stacks of new bills, stashed them where they would be convenient and then went to fiddle with the computer again. She’s been doing a lot of fiddling with the computer. At any rate, at that point she was fine. All she had to do was spend a couple of days getting her frame in place—because she wanted someone else suspected of that theft, someone she hated—and then she was free to take off. By the time the bank auditors showed up on March fifth, she was going to be long gone. And then things started to go wrong.”

“Explain the snakes,” Donovan said. They were past the houses now and out on the open road. Gregor kept expecting to see airport lights, but he was always foiled by trees and hills. He shifted in his seat and wished that Donovan hadn’t picked up so much speed.

“The snakes,” Gregor told Donovan, “were her first piece of bad luck. The snakes belonged to Sam Harrigan and they’d gotten out of the caves he’d made for them. They were a little mixed up because of the false spring and logy. They ended up at the library, I’d say, purely by accident. Brigit ended up there because that was where she was going, and coming up from Diamond Place the shortest way to get there was from the back. By the time she reached the parking lot and the storeroom door—which was kept unlocked, by the way, because some of the staff used it to get to and from their cars—by the time she got there she was very sick indeed, probably staggering and close to dead. You ought to check through your sightings material to see if any of the people who live on that block made one. They might not have. They might have been at work or glued to the television set for the weather news, but it’s a chance.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Brigit went in through the storeroom door and collapsed,” Gregor said, “and her body was still warm, so the snakes swarmed over it, trying to keep their own body heat up. Then Glinda opened the door, and found the body and the snakes, and with the media already in force in Maryville and the surrounding towns because of the flood, the thing became an instant sensation. That was exactly what she didn’t want. Brigit might still have been alive if Michael Doherty had been a less conscientious man, Don Bollander might still have been alive if there hadn’t been so much publicity about Brigit Ann Reilly’s death. The nuts would have come out of the woodwork no matter how Brigit died. A man like Don Bollander would have needed a solid inducement to get involved.”

“I don’t know,” Donovan said. “Bollander was—you know. He was a whisperer.”

“You mean he liked to pretend he was an insider,” Gregor said. “Yes. People have told me that. But I still say that an executive of a local bank doesn’t get mixed up in police business if he doesn’t absolutely have to. If Brigit had been found in an ordinary way and attracted little or no national press, Don Bollander either wouldn’t have said he saw her at all or wouldn’t have said so to so many people.”

“I still don’t see why Ann-Harriet had to kill him,” Donovan said. “Why not let him go on blithering like everybody else in town?”

“Our murderer couldn’t let him do that,” Gregor said, “because the times were wrong. Don Bollander saw his nun in the back hall at the bank at quarter to one that afternoon. Since he didn’t say otherwise, we have to assume that nun was on her feet and moving normally. Brigit couldn’t have been either at that point. She was unconscious and at least close to dead fifteen minutes later, and three blocks away. Eventually, somebody had to tumble to that. Eventually, I did.”

“So why did he end up in the convent?”

“Sleight of hand,” Gregor said firmly.

“What?”

“Sleight of hand,” Gregor repeated. “A couple of weeks ago, John Cardinal O’Bannion started to get very strange and pointed hate mail, postmarked at Maryville and hinting not so subtly at murder. Reverend Mother General got one, too, on the day we found Don Bollander’s body. She may have gotten more. Our murderer expected those letters to be reported, I think. Given the character of John Cardinal O’Bannion, she at least expected them to be mentioned. She didn’t realize how much of that kind of thing rolls into a Chancery. She didn’t understand that the hierarchy and even the nuns are very used to dealing with it in their own way. At any rate, she wanted attention focused on the convent and not on the bank for as long as possible, and there she was, stuck with Don Bollander, who had ‘bank’ written all over him. She did the only thing it made any sense to do. She fed him coniine at the bank—that was the easiest place to do it; they were both there; she had all her things there—and then she took him up to the Motherhouse and waited for him to die. She probably told him they were doing something for the Sisters. That’s not farfetched. The bank and its employees were always doing something for the Sisters, and the bank held the mortgage on the Motherhouse. There were business and charitable and personal reasons for the two of them to be there. I’ve been wondering if she didn’t tell Don Bollander they were hatching a surprise—a name day party for Reverend Mother General, maybe, or something else that had to be prepared for in secret. Given what I’ve heard of Don Bollander’s character, something like that would have been perfect.”

“Why’d she stuff him in a laundry sink?”

“Because it was there,” Gregor said. “It was convenient. It was probably close to where he collapsed.”

Donovan rubbed the side of his face, thinking it over. “What about this last one?” he said. “Why did she bother to do that? All this planning you’re talking about, this last one was bound to get us onto her. I mean, it couldn’t have helped.”

“Oh, it might have,” Gregor said, “if we hadn’t worked all of this out. Even if it couldn’t have helped under any circumstances, though, I think she would have done it anyway. It was her worst mistake. Hate is always a mistake. She had the frame all set up. She should have left it there.”

“Left it where?” Donovan asked.

“There’s something going on up ahead of us,” Gregor said. “I think that’s a state police officer.”

It was a state police officer. The road they were traveling on had given up its bends and curves over the last five miles or so. It now proclaimed itself to be Route 896 and lay flat and straight in a line to the arc lights of the airport. The state police car had been traveling just ahead of them on the two-lane blacktop, doing a leisurely pace. Gregor had noticed Pete Donovan growing frustrated and his fingers itching to get to the siren switch. Then the state police car had bucked, jumped, and taken off, its own siren screaming. Pete Donovan stared after it in amazement for a moment or two and hit the gas.

“Turn on the radio,” he said to Gregor, and they shot down the road. “I turned it off so I could hear the great detective give his explanation.”

“If you weren’t already chief of police, you could get fired for that,” Gregor shouted back.

He turned the radio on and heard the voice of Pete Donovan’s dispatcher, putting out a stream of letters and numbers that even Gregor found easy to translate, in spite of the fact that he had never been part of an investigation in Maryville before.

“They’ve got her,” he said.

“Either that or they’ve got some poor nun on her way to visit her sister in Akron, and there’s going to be hell to pay from the Cardinal.”

Actually, Gregor had never had any trouble of that kind from the Cardinal. There were a lot of things O’Bannion did and didn’t like—and a lot of areas where even Father Tibor Kasparian would have to admit that the Cardinal’s personality could stand improvement—but he was better than fair about the glitches that occurred whenever people tried to do a good job. Gregor pulled his seat belt a little tighter around his waist and wished for an airbag that came out of the glove compartment. Pete Donovan pushed his car up to eighty and then to eighty-five, and didn’t come close to catching up to the statey.

“There’s the gate,” he said, “here we go.”

It was a small airport. There was the one small parking lot and the three small runways. There was the one small waiting building with its one small baggage carousel. Gregor could see a pair of men in overalls pushing baggage through a flap in the wall of the building. He was paying no attention at all to the state police cars crowded together in a knot just beside him, or to the state police officers in their Smokey the Bear hats, or to the nun in abbreviated habit in the middle of them. Pete Donovan braked and cut his engine and jumped out, and Gregor jumped out after him. This was an interview he did not want to miss.

It was not, of course, an interview with Ann-Harriet Severan. Ann-Harriet Severan was not the woman with her hands in her pockets and her feet placed wide apart, looking like she was ready to bolt and make a foot-race run to the Canadian border.

Miriam Bailey was.

T
WENTY-FIVE MILES AWAY,
back in the middle of Maryville, Father Michael Doherty was standing on the front steps of St. Mary of the Hill, ringing the doorbell and feeling inexpressibly tired. It was Saturday night and still early, but he had already been out to the county hospital twice. His head was full of the screaming of a woman whose child had just died from drinking a bottle of ammonia. The bottle of ammonia had been left under the main hall staircase by the janitor that served that woman’s apartment building and four others. The janitor drank and Michael Doherty had been trying to get him fired for the last four months. Sometimes it seemed to him that nothing was worth anything, that nothing he did ever did any good. Sometimes he felt he spent his time patching holes in a beach ball that sprung six more leaks every time he got one fixed. The analogy reminded him of the seminary, where it had been used to warn him about what would now be called “parish burnout.” For once in his life, Michael Doherty didn’t care if he was being trite. There were footsteps behind the door and then the sound of the elaborate ritual the Sisters had to go through to get the door opened from the inside without setting off the alarm. Michael sometimes joked to Reverend Mother that she ought to give him the security key, because it was a hundred times easier. The door opened and Sister Gabriel was standing there, smiling. She had checked him out in the peephole.

“I just came to use the chapel,” Michael Doherty said, stepping inside. “I’ll only be about half an hour. I need to get out of the fray for a little while.”

Sister Gabriel smiled and nodded. Michael Doherty did this every once in a while. They were used to him. He was used to them, too, and wouldn’t try to make them talk when he knew they weren’t supposed to. He followed Sister Gabriel down the hall to the center section and bid her good night as she turned to the right to go to her cell. He turned to the left and made his way to the chapel.

Usually, when Michael Doherty went to this chapel, he sat front and center so that he could look at the wall-size stained-glass window that had been given to the order by a benefactor in 1987. It was one of the most powerful depictions of the resurrection he had ever seen—not good art so much as effective art—and it always made him feel lifted up. Tonight, he moved instead to the side, where a large picture of the Blessed Margaret Finney had been set up under a small crucifix. He sat down in a pew at the front and rubbed at the little finger of his right hand. He had cut it trying to do something to save the child, grabbing for something on a tray, he couldn’t remember what. The cut was long and thin and hurt like Hell. He stretched out his legs and looked the Blessed Margaret Finney straight in the eye.

“Margaret,” he said, “sometimes I wish I wasn’t so educated. Sometimes I wish I could be like that woman who came to my office this morning and believe in physical miracles. Sometimes I just wish I didn’t have to spend nights like tonight.”

He closed his eyes and put back his head and thought about it all, the way he had thought about it when he first decided to enter the seminary, the things that had convinced him. The lame will walk and the blind will see, he thought, and it was true. It just wasn’t true the way they wanted it to be, the skeptics and believers both. Nothing went
poof.
No instant cures rained down from the sky or blossomed out of pairs of praying hands. The blind will see and the lame will walk and they did—because in every place Christian civilization had touched, the progress of medical technology had been startling. It was nice to say that medical science had done it only in rebellion against Christianity, as a friend of his had told him when he’d tried to explain all this, but the fact was that a hundred years ago, most of the world had been made up of societies hostile to science. Why had it all happened here? It was a weak argument and he knew it. It didn’t begin to answer the questions he asked on nights like tonight. It was still the only argument he had and he held to it, because it was the only way he could explain the emotional part. The emotional part was solid. It harbored no doubts at all.

It was cold in the chapel and he was feeling sleepy. He had a parish to look out for and a few dozen parishioners who were going to need his help. He had only so much time to spend hiding from the world like this. He opened his eyes and said, “Well, Margaret, I’m going to go back to work. That’s why I’m so in favor of having you declared a saint. You were always going back to work.”

He grabbed ahold of the kneeler rail in front of him and started to stand up, and that was when he noticed it. Actually, that was when he didn’t notice it, the pain in the little finger of his right hand. The pain had been there, a sharp stabbing thing, since he knew the fight for the child was lost. It had probably been there before that, but unnoticed. He looked down at his hand and blinked.

There was nothing there.

No line of red.