Great Day for the Deadly (28 page)

Father Doherty was shaking his head. “Not exactly,” he told Gregor. “Hear me out. St. Andrew’s parish is down near the river. All the really bad parts of town are. On the day of the flood, I got worried early. I started packing us up well before noon. I didn’t want to take any chances. We have a lot of old people in our parish. You know how it is. The young men come here and work until they can bring their parents over and then their brothers and sisters and then their aunts and uncles and then their grandparents. The Irish did it and the Armenians did it and I suppose other people than these will do it in the future. You end up with a lot of old people being supported by fewer younger ones and everybody living in a small space, and the old people aren’t like the people here who live to be old. They’re feeble and they’re sick. That makes them hard to move. So, around about eleven thirty or so, when the rain was coming down in torrents, I made a few phone calls and got ready to evacuate. I got a bunch of the boys together and Sister Gabriel—she’s a nurse. She’s between assignments and the Motherhouse loans her out to me for the clinic—anyway, I got us all together, told Barry Fitzsimmons to get ready for us in the auditorium at Iggy Loy, and sent the boys out to search the apartments in the buildings around us and make sure we didn’t forget anyone. Then I had to wait for a phone call, so I stayed in my office, just sort of standing there, and that was when I saw the nun.”

“Nun?”

Michael Doherty took a deep breath. “Postulant. Whatever. I recognized the dress. She came down Beckner Street, straight at me as if she were headed for the church, and she made me very nervous. I mean, what was she doing down there, in that weather? What could she be doing? So I left my office and went out to intercept her. I got to the front door of the church and she was gone, except that I thought I saw a piece of black cloth disappearing through the door of Number Thirty-seven.”

“I see,” Gregor said slowly. “And you think this figure in black may have been Brigit Ann Reilly.”

“No,” Father Doherty said.

“What?” Gregor asked him.

Doherty took a long draft on his beer and slammed the glass onto the table in front of him. “I’m away on most program nights, visiting the prison. There are half a dozen postulants who volunteer in the programs at St. Andrew’s that I’ve never seen. Brigit Ann Reilly was something else again. Brigit Ann Reilly didn’t volunteer in the literacy program last month. She worked on my liturgical committee. She would have been on my liturgical committee this month, too, because she was good at it, except that she developed a violent crush on me and I had to cool it off. I knew Brigit Ann Reilly very well. And let me tell you, Mr. Demarkian, whoever that postulant was, walking down Beckner Street just after eleven thirty on the morning Brigit Ann Reilly died, it wasn’t Brigit Ann Reilly.”

I
F EDITH HAD BEEN
a different kind of woman, Gregor Demarkian would have gone back to his room by crossing in front of the reception desk and taking the elevator. If he had, he would have been handed the messages waiting for him in his box. One of those messages was from Sister Mary Scholastica. It asked him to come to the convent and gave him a sketch of what the schedule was like there. In spite of the relatively relaxed atmosphere at the Motherhouse in these days following Vatican II, there was a religious schedule there and it did have to be followed. The other messages were mostly from people whose names he wouldn’t have recognized. Since the Cardinal’s press conference—why the Cardinal always had to hold a press conference, no matter what, was beyond Gregor’s power to understand—the full force of Maryville’s fantasies of conspiracy and violence had been turned in his direction. The St. Mary’s Inn was the only decent place to stay in town. If you wanted something else and weren’t interested in drunks or squalor, you had to go out to the Ramada Inn on the other side of the highway. It had taken no time at all for Maryville’s most determined conspiracy theorists to find out where Gregor was staying.

Because Edith was the kind of woman she was and because Gregor couldn’t stand the idea of being screeched at one more time, however, he took the back stairs both going back up and coming back down, avoiding reception altogether. One of the things the Bureau had taught him was to find secondary exits immediately. He had noticed the fire door at the back of the hall on his room floor when he had first been brought upstairs by Edith and the fire door at the end of the hall leading to the downstairs men’s room when he’d been saying good-bye to Father Doherty. Fire doors almost always meant stairs. Gregor was always surprised with what had stayed with him. “Always find a secondary exit” was a rule for a field agent, and he hadn’t been a field agent for ten years before his retirement. “Always organize your complaints on paper” was a rule for administrators, and he had forgotten how to carry out that one on the day he handed in his resignation.

After he left Father Doherty, he ran up to his room, grabbed the heavy brown leather jacket Lida Arkmajian had given him for his birthday, and ran down again. Then he left the St. Mary’s Inn and started heading even farther down the slope of Delaney Street. Eventually he wanted to head up and back to the Motherhouse, but not yet. All he needed to do up there was to check his suppositions. Right now he wanted to go to the library, where he might actually find out something new.

It wasn’t a very long walk. In fact, in Gregor’s estimation, the entire stretch from the Motherhouse gate to the library’s main doors was barely twelve full city blocks. It was a short enough distance to travel, and it made the “sightings” a little more forgivable. There was something eerie about a girl disappearing along a walk as short as that and showing up dead. It wasn’t a deserted walk, either. Gregor tried to think of Brigit walking—staggering, really—anywhere on Delaney Street after she had been poisoned, close to the end. He couldn’t do it. Even in the flood, somebody would have been around to see her. Delaney Street was lined with public buildings and small stores with apartments above them. Glinda Daniels had just been closing up the library when she found the body. Surely somebody would have been around on the street in the half hour or so before that, when Brigit must have been on her way to the storeroom, by one means or another. No, either Brigit Ann Reilly walked to her place of dying on a road other than this one, or she was brought there in a vehicle and dumped. Gregor was a little shocked to realize that the problem he was considering now was essentially the same one he had been considering earlier this afternoon, when he had been talking to Pete Donovan about the death of Don Bollander. In each case, he had a body dumped someplace where, on reflection, it couldn’t be. With Bollander, that had been all too obvious. With Brigit Ann Reilly, it hadn’t even been considered, because there had been too much else to think about. The snakes, the flood—Gregor was nearly at the library doors now and he shuddered. Where was the storeroom door? If it was anywhere in sight of these doors he was headed for now, getting Brigit Ann Reilly through it, conscious or unconscious, would have been damn near impossible. If it was around the back—he would have to go around the back.

He stepped up to the main doors and let them slide open in front of him, gliding smoothly in their tracks. He watched with his mind half on something else as the smoked glass gave way to a typical small-town scene, with children sitting in a ring around a reader in the children’s section and two teenagers fumbling with the card catalog and a middle-aged woman with a stack of romance novels checking out at the desk. The Norman Rockwell picture was entrancing, and for a moment it obscured what else was going on in the Maryville Public Library. Gregor Demarkian was not one of those people who believed that Norman Rockwell had painted a false-faced, cotton candy, never-existing world. He had known dozens of Norman Rockwell families and Norman Rockwell towns in his career. This just didn’t happen to be one of either.

The disturbance was being caused by a very small woman with bright red hair. When the main doors had opened for Gregor, she had been momentarily silent. By the time he stepped inside, she was being silent no longer. She was standing at the check-out desk in a bright green toggle-fronted cashmere car coat, pounding her list against the desk’s blond wood. Since every one of her fingers had rings on them, every pound she made gave off metallic echoes.

“I don’t care where she is or what she’s doing,” she was shouting, “I want to talk to that little bitch right now!”

It should have ended right there, because the girl behind the check-out desk was being stubborn. Gregor could see the lines of mulishness in her young, plain face and a secret satisfaction. In some way Gregor couldn’t understand yet, these roles were being reversed. In most encounters between these two, it was the red-haired woman who would be winning. The girl at the desk crossed her arms over her chest and said,

“Miss Daniels is out. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know how to get in touch with her.”

“This is Maryville,” the red-haired woman screeched, “not New York. There aren’t all that many places she could be.”

“Maybe she isn’t even in Maryville.”

“Maybe’s she’s gone off to have hormone injections,” the red-haired woman said. “That’s the only thing I can think of that would turn that desiccated old bitch into a woman.”

“No she’s not,” the girl behind the counter said in a kind of hysterical triumphancy. “No, she’s not, she’s—”

There was an office behind the check-out desk with a window wall in it. Gregor had noticed it when he first walked in. Now he saw a door at the back of it open and a woman come through. She was only five feet four and solidly built, but there was a magnificence about her that caught at Gregor immediately. It caught at the red-haired woman, too. Finally, even the girl at the checkout desk felt it. She turned her back to the red-haired woman and stared.

“Well,” the red-haired woman said finally. “There she is. Maryville’s answer to Liz Smith.”

“Oh, Miss Daniels,” the girl at the check-out desk said. “I didn’t mean you to overhear. I was just going to send her right out of here.”

Glinda Daniels passed through the office door into the library proper, walked up to the check-out desk, patted the girl there on the shoulder (“That’s all right, Shelley, I’ll take it from here”) and surveyed the room over the red-haired woman’s head. She paused when she came to Gregor and when she came to the older woman standing a few feet from him. She didn’t pause long enough in either case to make Gregor feel he should speak. Then she turned her attention to her assailant and sighed.

“For God’s sake, Ann-Harriet,” she said, “what do you think you’re doing? You know it’s just Miriam getting you all worked up again.”

“Her name is Ann-Harriet Severan,” Glinda Daniels told Gregor twenty minutes later, when she had the library calmed down, Ann-Harriet off the premises and the patrons back to looking through the books. She’d even managed to get Shelley at the desk to calm down and go back to work. That was a good thing, because there was no place in the library for a private talk but that office with the window wall in it and they needed Shelley to run interference. Otherwise, half the people in town were going to want to have their own personal private conversation with Glinda Daniels, just as they had all week. Along with Gregor, Glinda had brought in the old woman Gregor had noticed outside, introducing her as “Mrs. Barbara Keel.” Mrs. Barbara Keel had told Gregor to call her “The Library Lady.”

“Mrs. Keel was with me when I found Brigit’s body,” Glinda explained. “She was supposed to be in the rest home getting over it for at least another week, but here she is.”

“I get bored,” Mrs. Keel said.

“I would too,” Gregor told her.

Glinda had been making coffee in one of those Dripmaster automatic coffee makers. Now she picked up the glass pitcher, poured coffee into a plastic foam cup and two stout mugs, and handed them out. Gregor got the plastic foam cup. Mrs. Keel got the mug with the teddy bear on it. Glinda got the red mug with a picture of a lizard etched in gold on one side and “The Fearless Gourmet” etched in gold on the other. When she put it down on her desk she said, “Sam brought it in for me when I broke my old one last week,” and shook her head in wonder. Mrs. Keel ignored her and put a quarter cup of milk and ten packets of sugar in her coffee.

“Anyway,” Glinda said finally, “as I was saying. Her name is Ann-Harriet Severan and she’s one side of our local triangle. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about this—-”

“I think I have,” Gregor told her. “A woman named Miriam Bailey, who owns the local bank and is in her sixties, married a much younger man named—I can’t remember what he’s named—”

“Joshua Malley,” Mrs. Keel said brightly.

“Thank you. Miss Bailey married Mr. Malley and Mr. Malley proceeded to behave like a normal young man and took up with a young lady. That, I take it, was the young lady.”

“Ann-Harriet Severan,” Glinda repeated. “Right. When the police let it out that Brigit had probably been murdered, a lot of people in town said it was the wrong murder. None of us would have been surprised to wake up one morning and find Miriam dead and Ann-Harriet standing over the body with a knife in her hand. Maybe it will happen yet.”

“Why would Ann-Harriet be the one with the knife in her hand?” Gregor asked. “Wouldn’t it be more to the point if it was Mr. Malley?”

Glinda waved this away. “Josh would never have the stomach for it. I don’t know if you’ve met him—”

“I saw him when I was walking on Delaney Street earlier. He was with a woman I think was Miss Bailey. He was whining.”

“You mean you haven’t met Miriam Bailey yet?” Glinda was surprised. “Maybe she’s more worried about her marriage than I thought. Usually when the Cardinal sends someone into town, she has them stay at her house and chauffeurs them all over town.”

“Maybe I’m not famous.”

“You’re famous enough. Good Lord. The woman must be off her feed.”

“What did you mean when you said she must be more worried about her marriage than you thought?” Gregor asked. “I’d think that if her husband is having an affair with a younger woman, she was bound to be worried.”