Great Day for the Deadly

by Jane Haddam

  Sam took yet another drag, blew yet another stream of smoke into the sodden air, and chucked the burning butt into the tin ashtray he kept on the plant shelf. Charlie Wicklow was babbling on and on, on and on. Sam didn’t want to listen to him. Charlie Wicklow was a Protestant, and like all Protestants he was going to end up giving Sam a headache. This was true even though Sam hadn’t been inside a Catholic Church for over twenty-five years.

  “Charlie,” Sam said, “calm down a minute. Why did that invitation come to you?”

  “Your invitations always come to me,” Charlie said. “At least, they do when they’re from somebody you don’t know.”

  “Right. They come here when they’re from somebody I do know.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s just this, Charlie. I don’t know any of the Sisters of Divine Grace on a first-name basis, to put it both awkwardly and inaccurately, but I do know them. They send a pair to knock on my door twice a year collecting for their missions, and I give to their missions, too, to the tune of four or five hundred dollars a visit—”

  “That must be why you got invited.”

  “Maybe so, Charlie, but the point is, if they want to invite me to this reception, why don’t they just send another pair up to deliver the invitation? They love coming up here. They stand around and sniff and try to figure out what I’m making in the kitchen.”

  “What are you making in the kitchen?”

  “Usually popcorn. Charlie, take a look at that invitation you’ve got and tell me—”

  But for once, Charlie didn’t have to be told. He was rustling papers. He was coughing and heaving and hemming and hawing. Finally, he got back on the line and said,

  “The invitation didn’t actually come from the Sisters of Divine Grace. It’s for a reception at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace, but the invitation itself is from the Cardinal’s office.”

  “Ah.”

  “What do you mean, ‘ah.’”

  “I mean you’ve got to hold on for a second. There’s something I want to do.”

  The something Sam wanted to do was get closer to the screen. He could have done that with the phone in his hand, but then he would have been distracted by Charlie’s nattering. There was movement at the little house down the hill at last. The front door had been flung open and slammed shut. The drive had been possessed by a swirling storm of beige raincoat and wide-legged dark blue pants. She always dressed like that, in pants with legs so wide they might as well have been culottes and tight little shells topped by oversize jackets that flowed almost to her knees. She had straight blond hair blunt cut to her shoulders and across her forehead that reminded Sam of Mary from the folk song group from the sixties. She was five feet four and maybe a hundred and forty-five pounds. Like most American women with the kind of figure Sam liked, she probably thought she was fat.

  She got to her car, dropped her keys, managed to pick them up without ruining her clothes in a mud puddle, and let herself into her car. Seconds later, smoke began to pump out of her exhaust pipe. Sam leaned sideways and grabbed his telescope. He had never done that before—he didn’t spy on her, for God’s sake; that wasn’t what the telescope was for—but today he was worried. The road to the bottom of the hill was narrow and twisting and hardly safe for a vehicle meant to cruise on city streets. He should have gone down and offered her a lift this morning. It would have been a good way to get himself introduced.

  “Forty-two,” he said out loud. “Maybe forty-five.”

  He had been holding the phone again. Charlie said, “What?”

  “Never mind,” Sam said. He thought he’d been saying it all morning. “I just want you to realize, before you go accepting that invitation, that the Sisters may have no idea they’re giving a reception.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Cardinal Archbishops and Princes of the Church. Especially enthusiastic ones, and John O’Bannion certainly is one of those.”

  “Are you saying you won’t go?”

  “No, Charlie, I’m not saying I won’t go. I’m just saying you should let me check this thing out a little. Let me find out what the Sisters really want. I don’t care what John O’Bannion really wants. I don’t have to live with John O’Bannion.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me.”

  The hesitation on the other end of the line was like a physical entity. Charlie didn’t trust him, and Sam didn’t blame him. Sam knew he had never been particularly trustworthy. Finally, though, Charlie sighed, and Sam knew he had won the point, at least for the moment.

  “All right,” Charlie said. “But Sam, this thing has a deadline on it. March 1. Get back to me before then or I’ll accept in your name and stick you with it.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean it, Sam.”

  “I said right.”

  “You never take me seriously,” Charlie said.

  There was a sharp click in Sam’s ear—sharp enough to make Sam wince—and then the phone went to dial tone. Sam put the receiver back in the cradle and sighed. He had been hanging onto the telescope for the whole of his last series of exchanges with Charlie, but it hadn’t done much good. Between the rain and the bright green budding caused by the thaw that had allowed the rain and the crazy way Maryville went about celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, Sam had been able to keep her car in sight only sporadically. He kept getting fuzzed out by pouring water or blocked by leaves and plastic decorations. He hadn’t trained the telescope on the hill below him before. Now that he had, he seriously wondered if the people of Maryville took drugs in preparation for their celebration of the seventeenth. They seemed to have swarmed up here and stuck plastic shamrocks and little ceramic shillelaghs to every branch.

  At the very bottom of the hill, the bright red Saab shot out of the trees, turned left onto Londonderry Street and raced out of sight. Sam kept the telescope trained on the place where she had disappeared, thinking. He hadn’t realized how good it was, how clearly he could see what was down there. His picture of Londonderry Street and Clare Avenue and Diamond Place was so clear, he could have been watching them on television. He watched a garbage truck rumble down Clare Avenue on its way to the warehouse on the river. He followed a pair of old men moving from store window to store window on this lower end of Londonderry Street. Then he saw a very curious thing. The buildings on Diamond Place were all abandoned. Sometimes in the summer they were claimed by drifters and by bums, but in the winter they were always empty. Up here it didn’t do to try to live without central heat. Since Diamond Place didn’t lead anywhere, it was possible for that short street to go months at a time without any human presence. Now, though, it quite definitely had one. Sam saw her turn off Clare Avenue and head up toward the worst of the abandoned buildings, the ones at the end whose front walls seemed to be coming down. Sam recognized her clothes, too. She was one of those nuns-in-training from the Sisters of Divine Grace, a postulant, with a long black dress and a black thing on her head that wasn’t exactly a veil. She was walking swiftly, as if she knew where she was going, and so intently she seemed not to notice the rain. When she got to the barrier of the dead end, she stopped, looked closely at the buildings on either side of her, and nodded at one. Then she climbed its steps, opened its door, and disappeared.

  I wonder if the other nuns know what she’s doing, Sam thought. They’re crazy if they let her go into a place like that by herself. He had half a mind to pick up the phone again and call someone at the Motherhouse, to let them know what was going on. Then he told himself he was being nosy, and he hated nosy people. Nuns had to be trained to deal with all kinds of places and all kinds of people. They were supposed to help the poor. What he’d just seen could have been some kind of educational exercise.

  He turned the telescope away from Diamond Place and tried to fix it on the library, where She worked. He couldn’t do it. The library was deep into the valley, on one of the lowest plots of land in town. The be
st he could do was catch a flash of the dark green border of its lawn. He folded the telescope up, sat back, and found his cigarette burned to a cylinder of ash in his ashtray.

  Glinda Daniels. That was her name. Glinda Daniels. Sam wondered if her mother had been obsessed with the movie or the book, if she’d been named for the Good Witch of the North or of the South. He refused to believe that her mother had been obsessed with Billie Burke.

  [4]

  FOR FATHER MICHAEL DOHERTY, rain in February was the worst kind of news. It was bad enough for being impossible. It never got warm enough for rain up here in February. Even his most freshly arrived parishioner knew it. Even his old established stalwarts were beginning to revert. Father Michael knew what they were doing every time he turned his back: coming together in groups, speaking not so much in Spanish as in the jungle dialects most of them had been born into, talking about the evil eye. Michael Doherty knew something about the staying power of superstitions that had been given to you in childhood. “Michael,” his mother had always told him, “if you throw the bread away without kissing it, God will see. God will let you starve.” Michael Doherty had a degree in biology from Georgetown, a degree in theology from Notre Dame, and an M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He had been in Korea as a medic and come to the priesthood late, after a disastrous marriage that had ended in the death of his wife by drunk driving. He was a tall, spare, ruthlessly logical man of sixty-five—and he never threw bread away without kissing it first.

  The other reason rain in February was such a bad idea was that it caused so much sickness. Michael hadn’t thought of that in advance—whatever for?—but now that it had happened he could see it made sense. St. Andrew’s Parish stretched itself across the dead end of Beckner Street, off Clare Avenue just above Diamond Place. On either side of it, marching back toward town, were four- and five-story tenements. Since Clare Avenue was now entirely commercial and Diamond Place was deserted, the people in the tenements on Beckner made up all of Michael’s parish. There were more of them than Michael would have thought, if he hadn’t lived here. They had a tendency to catch cold. Michael supposed that was perfectly natural. They were used to temperatures that grew very hot instead of very cold, and that changed gradually instead of on the spur of the moment. Their bodies were probably on circuit overload, trying to figure out how to deal with the change of planet.

  It was now eleven thirty on the morning of Thursday, February 21, and the weather showed no signs of returning to normal. If anything, it looked about to get more strange. Michael hadn’t been in Maryville for the flood of 1953, but he’d seen enough flooding in his life. He knew the signs. All morning he had been pacing back and forth in his small office off of St. Andrew’s vestibule, trying to get a glimpse of the river or some sensible weather news on WKPZ. His view was blocked by the disintegrating brownstones on Diamond Place and WKPZ was having a Beach Boys bonanza. Downstairs in the basement, his clinic was open for business, as it was every morning except Sunday. On Sunday, it was open after twelve o’clock Mass, all afternoon.

  There was a knock on his door—unnecessary, because the door was open; very necessary, because, as Michael had learned, these people were passionately polite—and Michael said “come in” to Hernandito Guerrez. Hernandito was the boy Michael was sponsoring for Georgetown, pre-med, in the hopes of seeing him go off to medical school in time. He should have been in school, but Michael had had sense enough not to tell him so today. Leonardo Evangelista, Michael’s prime candidate for the priesthood, was here now, too. They would both stay until they were sure their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors were no longer in any kind of immediate trouble. It was the kind of thing Michael made himself remember in the dark hours of Saturday night, when he had patched up four knife wounds to ship to the county hospital and fielded three calls from the medical examiner’s office, all asking him to do courtesy autopsies on possible drug ODs.

  Hernandito came in, looked around pityingly—the office always looked like an explosion in a paper factory—and said, “I think you better come downstairs now, Father. Señora Diaz is very bad.”

  “You mean Señora Diaz is getting hysterical,” Michael said. “I’ll come down, Hernandito, but you know as well as I do that she’s just scared to death. I can’t do anything about that.”

  “Maybe the baby is coming early.”

  “The baby isn’t due for two months and she isn’t contracting. I know. I checked not more than ten minutes ago. Is Sister with her?”

  Hernandito’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Sister is perhaps not the best choice. Someone who is more competent might be a better idea. Someone like that might give Señora Diaz more confidence.”

  There was a green enameled pen on Michael’s desk with “MY BOSS IS A JEWISH CARPENTER” written down the side of it in gold. Michael picked it up and resisted the urge to bite into it. “Sister” was Sister Mary Gabriel from the Sisters of Divine Grace up the hill, and she was perfectly competent. She was a first-rate obstetrical nurse and a qualified midwife. The problem was that she was also relatively young and very pretty. None of these people believed that young and pretty women could do much of anything besides have sex and tantrums.

  “Look,” Michael said, “forget Señora Diaz for a moment. I’ve made a call into town about the rain.”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “Mostly it was like asking a politician for his position on the budget, but I did manage to get something done. We’re going to move this operation to higher ground for the moment. Up to Iggy Loy.”

  Hernandito looked momentarily confused. Then the connections were made, and he smiled slightly. He would never have called St. Andrew’s “St. Andy’s.” He would have considered it insulting.

  “If we’re going to move the clinic to higher ground, Father, maybe we should move everything. Everybody, I mean. Of course, most of the women are in our basement anyway—”

  “Most of the children are down there, too. What’s left on the street? A few old men?”

  “Also the Estevan family that owns the market.”

  “All right. You could get some of the boys together and go door to door. We’ve got the van—bless Sam Harrigan—and we can get another one from St. Mary’s. I’ve talked to Reverend Mother General.”

  “Reverend Mother General is a competent woman,” Hernandito said.

  Reverend Mother General was seventy-eight years old and a cross between Queen Elizabeth I and Medusa. Michael had no idea what she looked like, because he’d never dared look her in the face. Like everybody else, he was afraid of her on principle.

  “I got hold of somebody else,” he said. “Glinda.”

  “Ah,” Hernandito said.

  “It’s a good thing I did get hold of her. She’d overslept her alarm clock. Anyway, she has to go in to work, but she’ll meet us at Iggy Loy around three o’clock with blankets and food and a few other things. Sometimes I think I ought to get her together with Sam Harrigan and see what comes of it.”

  Hernandito was offended. “Sam Harrigan is a television star,” he protested. “He would not want something so old as Miss Daniels.”

  “No? Well, Hernandito, you’re very young.”

  “I’m old enough,” Hernandito said. “You’re a priest, Father. There are things you don’t understand.”

  “Trust me, Hernandito, they don’t let you enter the priesthood if you don’t understand that.” Michael stretched his legs and back, looked out the window again, shook his head. “It gets worse by the minute. I can’t understand it. Are you ready to brave the land of the green and the home of the shamrock up there?”

  “Of course I am,” Hernandito said. “I like St. Patrick’s Day. I march with the Fife and Drum Corps.”

  “That’s right, you do. I’d forgotten.”

  “We’ve all made a decision about this, Father. All of us here. There were two ways we could go. We could ignore them all up there, or we could join the party. J
oining the party had certain advantages.”

  “Green beer?”

  “A future. Someday there will be enough of us here, we will have a celebration for St. Rose of Lima. Since we have always helped them, they will have to help us. No?”

  “It’s beyond me. All right, Hernandito, go find some friends and get going, door to door, don’t miss one. Father Fitzsimmons up at Iggy Loy doesn’t think there’s going to be a real problem, but we shouldn’t take any chances. The last thing we want to do is come back here in a day or two to find out some little old lady has drowned.”

  “I know every little old lady on the block.”

  “Keep a list,” Michael said. “Oh, and when you get downstairs, send Sister Gabriel up. Old Señora Sanchez is going to need an insulin shot and she sure as hell isn’t going to give it to herself.”

  “Should a priest say hell, Father?”

  “It depends on where he is, who he’s with, and what he intends to accomplish. Go, Hernandito.”

  “I’m going.”

  He was, too. The next thing Michael saw was his retreating back, making the sharp turn that led down the rickety stairs to the basement. Michael looked down at the papers on his desk, decided that most of them were useless, incomprehensible and out of date, and ignored them. He sat down instead, swiveling so that he could stare out at the rain.

  Years ago, during those long dark months just before he turned forty, when he had first begun to think he might be called to be a priest, he had imagined himself as a kind of clone of the priests he had known when he was growing up. Big men with big voices, they had ruled over little fiefdoms of good Catholic families. Irish-American and working class themselves, they had preached the Word of God in a world where Irish-American and working class was all there seemed to be. There were people now who said that parishes like that had disappeared, but Michael knew it wasn’t true. Iggy Loy was just like that, and Father Fitzsimmons, fifteen years Michael’s junior, always seemed to Michael to be an older man out of an unquiet past. Michael wondered sometimes if he was suppressing a wish to be posted to a place like that. In some ways he thought it would be nice: a place where he wouldn’t have to run a clinic every day, or, God help him, do autopsies as a “courtesy” to his people and the ME’s office; a place where violence would come down to bare fists after too much beer; a place where men would work too much and women would clean too much and everybody would eat too much until the day when a combination of bad habits and the genetic bad luck of the Irish produced the expected heart attacks. Oh, yes, there was something very pleasant in the thought of all that kind of thing, and in the thought of saying Mass for people who spoke his language and had lived his past: On the other hand, there was also something inestimably boring.