by Jane Haddam
“How can you be a lawyer?” the sergeant asked. “You’re a nun.”
“I’m a lawyer because I went to law school and passed the bar before I ever became a nun,” the nun said, “and besides, I’m not a nun, I’m a religious sister. And if you don’t let him out of that room and get those two detectives off him, I’m going to get him to declare me his counsel and I’m going to sue the department back to the Stone Age. You really can’t do this. It doesn’t make any sense, and it isn’t right, and you know it.”
“What’s the difference between a nun and a religious sister?” Gregor asked.
The religious sister wheeled around to look at him. “Excuse me,” she said.
“My name is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.
She hesitated, then brightened. “Gregor Demarkian. The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. Are you here about this? Do you actually think that poor homeless man murdered Sherman Markey? Because if you do, I have to say I don’t think much of—”
“—What’s the difference between a nun and a religious sister?” Gregor asked again.
“A nun takes solemn vows,” the religious sister said. “She’s usually cloistered, in papal enclosure, although there are some exceptions. A religious sister takes simple vows and works in the world. Most of the people you call nuns aren’t really nuns, technically. You know, the teaching sisters and the nursing sisters and that kind of thing. They’re religious sisters.”
“I thought the sisters at Our Lady of Mount Carmel were cloistered,” Gregor said.
“Oh, they are,” the sister said. “Most of them. But I’m not, and Sister Immaculata is not. We’re extern sisters. Cloistered nuns have to have extern sisters to go out into the world and do what needs to be done on a practical level. Like coming here with the hat. And getting involved in all this idiocy with treating that poor man like he’s some kind of criminal, when all he tried to do was the right thing. What do we teach people when we punish them for doing the right thing?”
“Nobody is punishing anybody for anything,” the sergeant behind the counter said. “Not yet. And nobody is arresting your guy.”
“Who knows who’s doing what to him?” the sister demanded. “You’ve had him in that room for half an hour, completely cut off from me or any other possible help, and don’t tell me he waived the right to an attorney. You know as well as I do that he isn’t competent to make a decision like that. Now, you’re going to go and get him, and let me talk to him, and leave him alone, or I’m going to find a judge and make you release him. And if you don’t think I can do that, you don’t begin to understand where I’m coming from.”
“Mr. Demarkian,” the sergeant said, leaning across the counter to hold out his hand, “don’t mind Sister here. We aren’t giving the old guy the third degree. We’re just trying to find out what happened on the night this Sherman Markey guy died.”
“Are we sure it was Sherman Markey in the hat, then?” Gregor said.
“Not officially, no,” the sergeant said, “but Detective Willis told me to tell you that it’s just a matter of time. We know where the body is. They’ve just got to get to the pathologist and make him move it. So much for finger print databases, but that’s just me. Give us a few seconds here and Detective Willis will be right out.”
“Tell Detective Willis that if he isn’t out a lot sooner than that, I’ll have his balls,” the sister said.
The sergeant frowned. “Nuns didn’t talk like that when I was in school.” “You weren’t holding sick old men against their wills when you were in school.”
A woman appeared from one of the doors behind the counter and called, “Is there a Detective Marbury here? There’s a call for you from the District Attorney’s Office.”
“That’ll be confirmation,” Marbury said.
He walked back to where the woman was waiting for him, and Gregor went back to contemplating the religious sister. He had no doubt at all that she would make good on her threat. She had the look of someone who was used to being taken seriously. The sergeant was ignoring her. Gregor didn’t think that would go on for long.
“Sister?” he said.
“Oh, excuse me,” the sister said. “I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation. No, never mind all that. We never use all that except in official documents. In a way, I’m glad you’re here. Maybe you can bring some sanity to these proceedings.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said. “Did you see the man who died? The person we think is Sherman Markey?”
“Not really,” Beata said. “Oh, I saw him in passing. He was waiting at the door for the barn to open when I came back to the monastery from doing some business downtown. And I saw him after he was dead. I can’t give you much information about him.”
“Would any of the other sisters have seen him?”
“Most of the sisters don’t actually leave the enclosure to visit the barn,” Beata said. “They’re not supposed to see outsiders at all, except from behind the grille. It’s only Immaculata and me who go out there while the men are there. The monastery used to keep cows, you know, in the old days. Before the city got so built up. It would be against the law now, I suppose.”
Gregor was about to suppose the same thing, when the door at the back swung open again, and Dane Marbury came out, looking sick.
“Listen,” he said, coming up to them. “We’ve got to get out of here. Mr. Demarkian is wanted at the morgue.”
“They found the body?” Giametti said.
“Sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
Marbury looked at the floor, and the ceiling, and then at his hands. “They found a body,” he said. “But it isn’t Sherman Markey’s body. They’re pretty sure that what they’ve got is the great Drew Harrigan himself.”
PART TWO
Tuesday, February 11
High 4F, Low –9F
Ours is an era of mass-starvation, deportation and the taking of hostages.
—GEORGE STEINER
It seems clear to me that the will must in some way be united to God’s will. But it is in the effects and deeds following afterward that one discerns the true value of prayer….
—ST. TERESA OF AVILA
And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: “Psst!”
—TERRY PRATCHETT
ONE
1
In dreams the people who should be present are absent, and the people who should be absent…something. The words wouldn’t come. Gregor Demarkian thought that might be because he didn’t have any words. He had a big bag full of something, but it all seemed to be marshmallow Peeps, in every possible color, including purple. He looked out over the vast audience in front of them and realized they were all cynocephali, men with dogs’ heads. He wouldn’t have known what to call them if he hadn’t been talking about it to Tibor just a day or two ago. Maybe some of them were women with dogs’ heads. He didn’t know how to tell, since they all seemed to be wearing identical sky blue jumpsuits. They were all carrying parachutes, too. He knew he couldn’t stop talking, because if he did, one of them would stand up to speak, and assuming he could translate the barks—did cynocephali bark? Tibor hadn’t said anything about that—all he would hear would be another lecture about politics, and it wouldn’t matter whose side the cynocephali were on. Maybe one of them was running for something, mayor, president, dogcatcher. Maybe they had an ideology that told them that if the other side got into office, the world as we know it would be destroyed, all good would be defiled and outlawed, all evil would be installed and mandated. Maybe they were awaiting the end of civilization and the rise of a fascist state, where dogs would be forced to wear collars and jailed if they were caught without them, where they would have no freedom of religion to refuse vaccinations, where they would be required to live with a master or be marked for judicial death.
It was cold in the room, so cold Gregor thought his hands were turning into icicles. He wanted to
touch his hair to make sure it was in place. Maybe if he did that he would be able to remember the words. Maybe he had never had the words. He didn’t want to give a speech. He didn’t want to talk to cynocephali, either. He didn’t think he had a lot in common with them. He didn’t think he had much to say even to people he did have a lot in common with.
It was cold because the window was partially open. He could see the crack at the base of the sill. There was a bit of paper stuck there, waving in the wind that was coming through. He tried to sit up and realized he was lying flat on his face. A moment later, he saw that his face was on his pillow, the window that was open was in his own bedroom, and the cynocephali were nowhere but in his imagination, planted there by Tibor discussing the travel narratives that had circulated throughout Europe in the twelfth century, in the wake of the Crusades.
Gregor turned over on his back, sat up, and looked around. The room was ridiculously dark, in spite of the fact that there was a streetlight right outside his window, which usually made it unnecessary for him to turn on a light when he wanted to go to the bathroom in the night. He switched on the lamp on the night table on what he had come to think of as “his” side of the bed. Then he looked over to the other side and wondered how he’d managed to sleep for as long as he had—he had no idea how long that was—without disturbing it. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he had gone to sleep without turning down the covers, getting himself undressed, or in any way preparing himself for what was supposed to be a long period of quiet. He had a feeling he had had no quiet at all, and it wasn’t just the cynocephali.
He hadn’t taken his shoes off, either. They were still on his feet, hard-edged penny loafers Bennis thought would look better on him than his old wingtips. He got himself upright and his legs off the side of the bed. He kicked his shoes off and then bent over to take off his socks. The clock on the bedside table said 4:46. He presumed that was a.m. Surely, if he’d slept through breakfast at the Ararat and then missed his ten o’clock appointment with John Jackman, somebody would have come looking for him. It really was cold in here. It was freezing. Could he have turned the heat off in a daze when he’d wandered in a couple of hours ago?
He got up, shrugged off his jacket, but didn’t bother to undress any farther. He went out of the bedroom and down the dark hall to the thermostat. The thermostat said sixty-eight degrees, but it didn’t feel like sixty-eight degrees. He jacked it up to seventy-eight, because he could always turn the heat down again if he needed to. Then he went the rest of the way down the hall to the bathroom. If he’d told Bennis about feeling cold like this, she’d say he was coming down with something, and maybe he was. He’d just spent several hours standing around in a morgue refrigerated to a point where even somebody who’d spent days exposed to this February chill would think somebody was overdoing it, and in the end he had gotten absolutely nowhere on any front he considered important.
He hesitated in the bathroom doorway, realized what he’d forgotten, and went back to the bedroom. He got boxer shorts, an undershirt, a robe, and a pair of sweatpants out of his drawers and went back to the bathroom again. He wasn’t operating on all eight cylinders, as Tommy Moradanyan Donahue would say, and yet he’d be willing to bet that Tommy had no idea what “all eight cylinders” meant, having never encountered a car with more than six. Or maybe he had.
I’m losing my mind, Gregor thought. He shut the bathroom door, turned on the shower as hot as he could make it without scalding himself, and then began to strip off his clothes and throw them in the various hampers Bennis had set out to contain them: whites here, darks there, dry cleaning in a third place. He was sure he’d had a sweater when he’d gone to see John first thing yesterday morning, but he had no sweater now, and he had no idea what had happened to it. Steam was rising out of the shower stall in great white billows. He opened the stall door and stepped in under the water, instantly warmed. He was tired, that was all that was the matter with him. He hadn’t come in until one thirty, and then he’d fallen asleep in his clothes, and now it was not very many hours later, and he knew he wasn’t going back to sleep. He didn’t think he’d be able to go back to sleep even if the mayor hadn’t come down to the morgue and virtually threatened him with death.
Actually, literally, what the mayor had threatened him with was jail.
The water was too hot. If he was fully conscious, he would be worried about being burned. Now he wasn’t. He let the water fall over his head in cascading sheets and found himself happy for the warmth of it. He wanted everything in his life to be warm. He wanted to move to someplace like Orlando, or Palm Springs, where it was never cold at all unless you walked into a meat locker, and then you had a temperature gauge to play with if you wanted that to change.
What he really wanted was to know where Bennis was, and what she wanted from him. Here was why he didn’t like to go without sleep, and why he didn’t like to spend much time in this apartment by himself. When he did either, he found himself thinking obsessively about Bennis’s mood the last time they had really talked, and all the times since then, when conversation had seemed impossible. He tried to remember if he had ever had the experience of a love affair gone wrong, or come apart, and he didn’t think he had. The only woman he had ever loved before Bennis had been his wife. He had loved her and married her and then stayed by her while she died, but there had never been any suggestion, even during the worst of his days on kidnapping detail, that there could be a divorce. Of course, Bennis hadn’t suggested anything like divorce, either, and couldn’t, since they weren’t married. There had to be a word for what happened when a relationship broke in the absence of matrimony. If there wasn’t, somebody should invent one.
He didn’t really know if the relationship was broken. It wasn’t from his side, or he didn’t think it was. It might be from hers, but if it was he didn’t know why it was, and she wouldn’t tell him. Sometimes he understood the people who wanted desperately to return to the fifties, when rules were more rigid than they were now and there were fewer choices to make and fewer confusions to get lost in. When he got saner, he realized that that had to be an illusion. It could not have been so wonderful in the middle of Red Scares, McCarthy witch-hunts, and illegal abortions staged in back alley “clinics” where the “doctor” drank nonstop and nobody ever cleaned the floors.
He’d sounded like Bennis just then. It was the kind of thing she’d say. He’d tell her she was simplifying, and she was. It would all be good-natured, except that nothing had been good-natured those last few weeks before she’d left. The tension had been so thick it had been as if the air between them in the room had turned into mayonnaise. And he still had no idea why.
Right now, he just wanted her to come home. What bothered him— what had been bothering him for days—was the possibility that she wouldn’t, or at least not really. She’d call from Seattle and say she’d decided to move out West. She’d ask Donna Moradanyan to box up her things and send them up. She’d come back only to pack a suitcase for a four-month trip to India and the Far East. She’d call one night and talk to him, but it would be as if what had been between them had never happened. She’d talk to him the way she talked to Donna, or Tibor—or, worse, to the people she didn’t know very well, the ones she was friendly with because not to be friendly would be to be rude, but to whom she never revealed anything important.
Of course, Gregor thought, you could say she had never revealed anything important even to him, because she was like that. There was always something about Bennis that was just one step away, inviolate. Men were supposed to like that in women. He didn’t know if he liked that in her. Men were supposed to have women figured out by the time they were thirty. He didn’t have this one figured out at all, and to prove it he could stand here under this streaming hot water and not know whether she was angry at him or not, in love with him or not, missing him or not. He didn’t even know where she was on this book tour.
What he did know was that the water in the
shower seemed to be getting hotter, and if he didn’t get out from under it he was going to look as red as Dilbert in that episode from the television show. He had no idea what had made him remember the Dilbert television show, but there it was.
He had no idea what had made him fall in love with Bennis, either, or whether he still was in love with her.
He not only didn’t have women figured out by the time he was thirty, he hadn’t done a very good job on himself.
2
Forty-five minutes later, Gregor was standing on Fr. Tibor Kasparian’s doorstep, ringing the bell and stamping one foot and then the other the way he’d seen people do in old movies when they were supposed to be cold. He really was cold. No matter how bad the apartment had felt, it had been as nothing compared to the real weather on the outside, and he found himself again wishing he’d bought a hat, or earmuffs, or something. Then he thought he couldn’t imagine himself with earmuffs, and Bennis probably couldn’t, either, since she’d never bought him a pair. On the other side of the door, Tibor was fumbling with locks and other things. Gregor thought he heard something fall over. The door shuddered on its frame and then pulled inward. Tibor was standing there in good slacks and two sweaters, but no shoes.
From behind him, there was a small cascade of pattering, and the dark brown puppy poked her nose into the outside air. She didn’t like it, and retreated immediately in the direction of the living room. Gregor saw what had fallen. It was a stack of Tibor’s books, one of the paperback stacks he kept against the walls all over the house. This stack included Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, Karin Slaugher’s A Faint Cold Fear, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. At least there was nothing in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or Assyrian. Father Tibor was the only person Gregor knew who had gone to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and not needed to read the subtitles to know what the actors were saying.
