by Jane Haddam
“Yes, Krekor, I see. And he had to hide his motive for killing the other one. But there is one thing I don’t understand. From what you say of him, this last murder, the mother and the child, that is not like him. That is too—”
“Brutal?” Gregor said. “I know. It bothers me, too. But he did kill her. Them. He confessed to it. She called him about the pamphlet, you see. She hadn’t got hold of it yet—she told him she was going to the convent to look for it, even though she didn’t tell Kath. He’d heard from Declan Boyd that she was “staring” at the books in the anteroom, and he knew those books were mainly about the saints—and he’d gone over there and taken the thing. But Peg Morrissey Monaghan never stopped thinking about it, and what she remembered was a reference to St. Barrfoin, an Irishman who was sometimes shown driving a goat away as a symbol of banishing sexual impurity. She knew Barry Field had been at the Mass because she’d seen him. She thought Andy had probably asked him there and then intended to use the goat to embarrass him.”
“And that Barry Field killed Andy Walsh?”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “She called Sister Scholastica looking for the pamphlet, and then she called the Chancery. She wanted to talk to the Cardinal, but it was Good Friday morning and the Cardinal was busy. She talked to Tom Dolan instead. He told her he had to go over to St. Agnes’s about two, and she should meet him there. They’d look at the pamphlet together if Sister Scholastica had found it, and then they could all get together and decide what to do.”
“And instead he killed her,” Tibor said. “He killed them both.”
“There was plant poison in the convent kitchen. He got Peg to the convent when he thought all the nuns would be gone, pretended to look around for Scholastica because he’d told Peg he’d asked her to meet them there, then went into the kitchen and made coffee. One of the cups was full of nicotine. As soon as Peg started drinking it, he walked out and went back to the Chancery. The funny thing was, all the nuns weren’t gone. Scholastica herself was sitting in the dining room the whole time. If she’d suddenly decided to take a walk over to the school, she would have caught him.”
“But she didn’t, Krekor. He was lucky.”
“Was he?” Gregor sighed. “He’s had a breakdown, you know, and it isn’t fake. He’s gone right over the edge. He’s seeing things, mainly large worms crawling out of his pores. He’s hearing things, mainly prophecies of his own term in Hell. I talked to the Cardinal last week. There’s no chance Dolan will ever stand trial. There’s very little chance he’ll ever be sane again. He’s doing more to himself now than the state of New York ever could have.”
The two cats Tibor was holding were beginning to climb down his leg on their way to the floor. Tibor got them back and put them down the front of Gregor’s shirt instead, clucking a little at the state of Gregor’s tie. It had been brand new that morning, and now it was a ruin.
“You know,” he said, “we are told in the Bible that there is no such thing as an unforgivable sin. God forgives all things if we repent. But I’ll tell you what I think. I think there are some things, like the murder of this mother and her child, that are so terrible that God arranges that they not be repented for. Repentance is an act of the will, Krekor. You cannot repent if you are insane.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said. “But maybe it’s something else. The Cardinal was telling me about something called the temporal punishment of sin.”
“Yes, yes,” Tibor said. “Sins are forgiven but they do not go unpunished. Even after you have been absolved, you must suffer for your sins at least a short time, as part of your atonement.”
“Well, maybe Father Dolan did repent of his sins. And this is the suffering that is part of his atonement.”
“Maybe,” Tibor Kasparian said. “But I would take you more seriously, Krekor, if I thought you actually believed in God.”
[2]
Moments later, the bus pulled up to the curb at the corner of Cavanaugh and Durant. Gregor and Tibor got off. Gregor was still keeping the cats in his shirt. When he started moving, they became very still, four small mounds of warmth at the top of his belly. Gregor buttoned his coat over them to be sure they’d be warm.
From the curb, it was only three blocks to Gregor’s apartment and five to Holy Trinity Church. Tibor peered up the street and said, “Look, Krekor. They’re there. Bennis Hannaford and Donna Moradanyan, sitting on the stoop of your building. They must be waiting for us. I wonder what has happened now.”
“I know what’s happened,” Gregor said. “Bennis has thought of another hundred and one arguments to prove I was a complete and utter fool not to have brought her up to Colchester and involved her in that case. Or she’s got some more to say on how awful it was of me to solve the thing so quickly, so she didn’t have time to get up there by herself without my permission.”
“No, Krekor,” Tibor said. “For that she would not have brought a pregnant Donna out into the cold.”
On this, Gregor knew, Tibor Kasparian was wrong. It was the old people on Cavanaugh Street who thought of Donna’s pregnancy as a “delicate condition,” to be treated with caution and coddled in overheated apartments. Donna liked her fresh air and Bennis thought she needed it. The only thing the two of them sitting on the stoop in the cold really meant was that Lida Arkmanian was not around to nag them back inside.
Bennis and Donna had been leaning together, talking to each other. Now Bennis looked up, saw Gregor and Tibor, and nudged Donna in the side. Then Donna turned to look, too, and Bennis stood up.
It was a blustery day, not just a cold one, and the wind blew through Bennis’s wild black cloud of hair. Even in jeans and oversize sweater and chunky down parka open to the cold, she was a beautiful woman, with the kind of face that made people look not twice, but half a dozen times. It was a face like no other, uncompromising and high-cheek-boned and strong. Gregor often thought that if he could have had a child and fashioned her himself, she would have been what Bennis Hannaford was: intelligent as well as beautiful and with the character never to allow her looks to become the reason for her existence. But then, he thought, he tended to idealize Bennis when he had been away from her for a while, even only a few hours. He forgot about her stubbornness and her willfulness and her unbreakable enthusiasms in the misty pleasures of his contemplation of her virtues.
They were only half a block away from them now, and Gregor called out,
“What are you two doing there? Why aren’t you inside?”
“We were looking for you,” Bennis called back. Then she waited until they walked the last few steps to her, gave Gregor a strange and wonderous look, and said, “There was a phone call while you were out. A woman who said she was Sister Mary Scholastica from Colchester, New York.”
“Was there?” Gregor said. “Maybe I ought to go in and call her back.”
Donna Moradanyan broke into a fit of giggles, and Bennis smiled. “Call her back tonight. She’s got to get some work done this afternoon. I mean, after all, spending two hours on the phone would wreck just about anybody’s schedule.”
“Two hours?” Gregor said. “What did you find to talk about to Sister Mary Scholastica for two hours.”
“It was both of us,” Donna said. She’d gone from giggling to laughing hard enough to double herself over. “I got on the extension in the kitchen.”
Gregor turned to Bennis and raised a single eyebrow. She had her arms folded across her chest and she was grinning at him in triumph.
“What do you think we talked about for two hours?” she said. “Orgasms.”
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Copyright © 1991 by Orania Papazoglou
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