Great Day for the Deadly (26 page)

“And I’m left here fielding phone calls.”

“Do they want to take their daughters home?”

“Yes, to put it bluntly. Of course, their daughters are eighteen years old and legal adults in New York State, but you know how these things are. I’m not too worried about the novices. Once the girls get into habit, the parents tend to calm down a little. But the postulants—”

“Sheila Cormier and Martha Eggars,” Scholastica said. “They’re both on the brink of leaving anyway. I’m on the brink of throwing Martha out.”

“Martha,” Alice Marie said thoughtfully. “The sexual hysteric?”

“Classic case,” Scholastica agreed.

“I know how it is. You want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt and you end up putting up with much more than you have to. You can ask Martha Eggars to leave. Count yourself lucky to have such a large class of normal ones to go on.”

“I will.”

The phone on Alice Marie’s desk rang. She picked it up, said hello, and stretched her mouth into a placating smile. Then she looked up at Scholastica and shrugged.

“Yes, of course,” she said into the phone. “You’re Sister Beata’s mother and I met you at the memorial Mass for the Vietnam War dead. I remember you very well.”

It wasn’t, Scholastica thought, a pleasant memory. She mouthed “see you later” at the top of Alice Marie’s head and went back into the corridor, heading again for her own office. She tried to remember Sister Beata and couldn’t. A canonical novice, probably. The canonical novices spent a lot of time on their own, practicing silence and trying to get their religious lives into shape. After all, that was supposed to be the point. It wasn’t the teaching or the nursing or the missionary work that you did that mattered. It was your relationship with God.

Scholastica’s office was at the end of the corridor with the door in it. She made a slight bow to the crucifix and turned in at her own door. Her desk was clean of all papers. Her visitor’s chair was placed three-quarters of the way along the front of the desk from the door side of the room. The statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary was at the very center of the top of her filing cabinet and hadn’t been moved at all. To Scholastica, it was painfully obvious that she had spent very little of this day in this room.

She went in, sat down at her desk, and opened up the center drawer. There were pens and pencils in there, good cheap sensible Bics and Eagles. There were paper clips in there, too, and a small squeeze bottle of glue. There was a little stack of holy cards bound together by a rubber band and a small box with three plastic rosaries in it. The plastic rosaries were the kind the parish used to give out to children making their first Holy Communion when she was principal at St. Agnes’s. She closed the drawer again and sighed.

She was being an idiot. Old Sister Jerome had been right. If you’re worried about something you can’t do anything about, you’ve got to go out and find something to take your mind off it. Scholastica didn’t know what. Saturday was always a dead day at the Motherhouse, especially in Lent. There were things to be done for St. Patrick’s Day and the Cardinal’s visit, but she was too distracted to do them. She heard a knock on the frame of her door and looked up.

“Yes?” she said.

A head peeked through, Neila Connelly’s head, looking worried.

“Sister?” she said.

“Come in, Neila. I’m glad to see you. I looked into the sewing room a few minutes ago and you weren’t there. I was worried. I suppose I’m getting hypersensitive with all this business.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Come in.”

Neila finally made up her mind and came in. She looked even more tired than Alice Marie had, and a good deal more worried. Scholastica thought she was still grieving for Brigit and had a right to a few sleepless nights. Now she probably wants to talk it all out, Scholastica thought, and that made sense, too. Scholastica had been expecting Neila to show up at her office door to have it out for days now.

“Sit down,” Scholastica said.

Neila had made it halfway across the office from the door. Now she scurried the rest of the way to the chair and sat. She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them. She crossed her feet at the ankles and hunched her shoulders. She looked thoroughly miserable.

“Sister,” she said, “do you know all that stuff you were telling us the other day, about religious obedience? And how Christ was obedient to God unto death?”

“Yes, Neila, but I think I also said that none of you were likely to be called on to be obedient unto death. This order doesn’t send Sisters into Communist China.”

“I know. What I want to know is, how can you tell if God’s asking you to do something?”

Oh, no, Scholastica thought. Not this. Not from Neila. Neila was her best hope in the whole postulant class. It wasn’t that Scholastica didn’t think it was a sensible question. It was a much better question than that. It was just that she knew what it usually meant when it was asked by postulants, and that wasn’t sensible at all.

“Neila,” she said carefully, “if you think God has been talking to you—”

Neila’s head shot up. “It’s not me,” she said desperately. “I went to confession and I tried to explain it to Father Fitzsimmons and he just didn’t understand. Nobody understands. It’s not me I’m talking about.”

“Who are you talking about?” Scholastica was bewildered.

“Brigit, of course. Brigit said that it was all right, doing what she did, because she went to God and he told her—I don’t remember how it worked. It was crazy. But she said it was God and I didn’t like to tattle and then she was dead and I didn’t know what—”

“Stop,” Scholastica said. “Go back to the beginning. What did Brigit do?”

Neila stared at her hands. “She stole one of the postulants’ dresses, the extra ones we keep for emergencies—I guess I don’t mean stole it. She took it.”

“But why? If she needed a new dress we’d just—”

“It wasn’t for her,” Neila said. “It was a different size. I don’t know what size but bigger than hers because she was saying she couldn’t use one of her own because it would never fit. And she took it with her the day she died wrapped up under her own clothes and she was supposed to deliver it to somebody down on Diamond Place or Clare Avenue and when I heard that on the news about Sam Harrigan saying he’d seen her there I thought it was right and then I was sure, I really am sure, that that was why she ended up being killed and now there’s been another one and where’s the extra postulant’s dress? Where is it?”

“Calm down,” Scholastica said. “Calm down.”

“I can’t calm down.”

“You have to calm down,” Scholastica told her. “I’m going to call Mr. Demarkian back here and you’re going to tell him everything you told me. Everything.”

As far as Scholastica was concerned, Neila was going to tell Demarkian a good deal more than that. She was going to tell everybody a good deal more than that. It was vital.

For the first time since the day Brigit Ann Reilly died, Scholastica felt she was finally doing something.

“I
CALLED YOU,” BENNIS
Hannaford said, after Gregor had managed to detach himself from the clutches of the woman at the desk, get up to his room, and get through to Cavanaugh Street on AT&T, “because Lida called old George Tekamanian, and old George Tekamanian called Father Tibor, and Father Tibor called me. And even then I would have left you alone, except that Father Tibor said he was going to call me back.”

Gregor’s room was on the second floor and large, a big square wood-paneled space with a fireplace. There was an oversize closet and a bathroom with too much equipment in it. The tub was some kind of a whirlpool and the stall shower had knobs and hoses and spouts for functions Gregor couldn’t begin to imagine. The phone was a Princess, which always made Gregor feel as if he were being asked to talk into a child’s toy version of a boomerang. He shrugged off his jacket and tucked the receiver between his ear and his shirt. Then he went to work on his tie.

“I take it Lida heard the news on television,” he said. “Would you mind telling me which news?”

“It was some kind of press conference. Cardinal O’Bannion—”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Well, it could have been worse.”

“If you mean she could have seen the reports of a second murder in Maryville, she did,” Bennis said. “So did I. It made the newsbreak at one. Even you don’t manage to get instant publicity, Gregor. It’s very curious. Do you want me to come up?”

“No.”

“Be glad I’m working. If I weren’t, I’d hop in my car and come up anyway.”

She probably would have, too. Gregor threw his tie on the bed, realized it seemed to have unraveled itself into threads, and threw it in the wastebasket. Then he said “just a minute,” put the phone down on the bed, and took off his shirt. As soon as Bennis got off the phone, he wanted to take a shower, to help himself think. Not that there was much to think about—he was fairly sure he had figured out everything he could figure out from what he had so far. The problem was to discover how he could find out the rest of what he needed to know. In the cases he had handled since his retirement, he had always been faced with inverted pyramid investigations, situations in which he knew the people first and only then worked his way down to the hard small core of the murder. This case was more like real police work. Here was the murder. The people, with the exception of Sister Scholastica, were just so many names on a list of possibilities.

He picked up the phone again, kicked off his shoes, wedged the receiver between his ear and his arm, and went to work on his socks.

“It really is very strange,” Bennis was saying again, “about all this publicity. I mean, even when you were up at my mother’s house, investigating a lot of rich people on the Main Line, you didn’t get this kind of play, and I thought the media liked rich people.”

“They like bizarre death even better,” Gregor pointed out. “And these deaths were certainly bizarre. At least, they looked bizarre. All those snakes.”

“That sounds bizarre enough to me,” Bennis said drily.

“I know, but it’s the simplest thing. I figured that out before O’Bannion ever got in touch with me. Standing in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan, looking at Schatzy’s copy of
People
magazine. Body heat.”

“What?”

“Body heat,” Gregor repeated. “Snakes don’t make their own. In cold weather they hibernate. In warm weather they like to stay in the sun as much as possible. These snakes had been wandering around in a false spring and it was suddenly beginning to get cold again, so they—”

“Wait a minute,” Bennis said. “Are you telling me she was
alive
? That girl? While the snakes were—crawling on her?”

“When they first crawled on her, yes,” Gregor said. “She would have had to have been, I’d think. Or at least not very long dead, not more than say half an hour or so. I don’t think she was conscious, though.”

“Wonderful.”

“It’s the only way it makes sense.” Gregor had his socks off and his belt unbuckled. He let his pants fall to the floor. Sitting on top of the rest of his clothes in his suitcase was a yellow terry cloth robe Bennis had bought him for his birthday, bringing it all the way from Paris after she’d paid a flying visit to France to—as she put it—“get her head together and drink.” Gregor put this on, admired the thickness of the terry cloth and the textured smoothness of the hand-embroidered initial on the front pocket, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“The problem with pieces of business like the snakes,” he said, “is that they look strange and creative, but they’re really very restrictive. You’re stuck with two possible explanations. Either they were so necessary to whatever the murderer wanted to do, they amounted to the
only
way the murderer could get it done, and that wouldn’t apply in this case—”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know of any way on earth anyone could have made that happen,” Gregor said. “Maybe there is a way. There’s a man up here who used to be a herpetologist, Sam Harrigan—”

“Sam Harrigan the Fearless Epicure? I
know
Sam Harrigan the Fearless Epicure.”

“You would. Anyway, I’ll ask him, but I don’t expect any surprises. Nobody could have made that happen. Therefore, it happened by accident and there must be a natural explanation for it. Therefore—”

“Body heat,” Bennis said. She paused. “I see,” she said slowly. “And where the snakes came from isn’t so mysterious either, is it? From what I remember, Sam Harrigan likes to keep snakes and other animals around.”

“He isn’t the only one. The snakes, by the way, had been depoisoned or whatever you do to them to make them harmless without taking out their fangs. So. According to the Cardinal, Mr. Harrigan keeps snakes. And according to Sister Scholastica, a woman named Miriam Bailey who owns the local bank also owns a very young husband, and one of the toys she’s bought him is a menagerie. Sister Scholastica has never seen it, but I think I can reasonably suppose that some of the animals it might contain might be snakes. I’m putting that badly, but you see what I mean.”

“I see what you mean. How old is this Miriam Bailey to make you sound so much like a Puritan when you mention her husband? How old is her husband? What are they like?”

When are you going to get your mind off sex? Gregor wondered. He said, “Miriam Bailey is in her sixties, I think. Her husband is twenty-five. At least three people have told me that. I don’t know what either one of them is like. I haven’t met them.”

“You haven’t met them?”

“I haven’t met anybody.” Gregor sighed. “I got here. I went up to the Motherhouse—before even checking into this hotel, mind you; the Cardinal’s driver did that for me—and there was another body on my doorstep. I feel like I’m doing one of those mystery jigsaw puzzles where they don’t give you a picture of what the puzzle is supposed to end up looking like.”

“Well, if I were you, I’d put this Miriam Bailey at the top of your suspect list, even if you haven’t met her.” Bennis laughed. “Old woman. Young man. Small local bank. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing that gives Federal regulators attacks of apoplexy.”