by Jane Haddam
Schatzy had taken the magazine out from under his arm and begun to wave it at them. Gregor caught a full-color cover picture of a cobra with its tongue in the air, with a small black-and-white inset beside it of a teenager with slightly buck teeth. Schatzy waved the magazine again and it all became a blur.
“Got it,” Schatzy said. “You can always count on People to give you what you want. It only happened last Thursday, too.”
“What only happened last Thursday?” Gregor asked.
“The murder,” Schatzy said.
“Oh, God,” Dave said, staring at the ceiling. “Let’s get off this and find a restaurant, can’t we? I’ve spent all morning talking about murder.”
“This is a good one.” Schatzy unrolled the magazine and shook his head. “That’s a cobra they’ve got here and it wasn’t a cobra at all. It was a water moccasin, or ten water moccasins to be precise, and that was weird enough because it was Upstate New York and water moccasins aren’t native to Upstate New York. Copperheads are native to Upstate New York. You in Boy Scouts, Gregor? You learn all that stuff about snakes when you went to camp?”
“I learned all that stuff about snakes at Quantico,” Gregor said. “I took both the poisons courses. And I have never been to camp.”
“I was the first Jewish Eagle Scout in the history of scouting in Dade County, Florida. Can you imagine growing up Jewish in Dade County, Florida, when I grew up in Dade County, Florida? It must have been terrible. I can hardly remember any of it.”
“I grew up WASP in Marblehead, Massachusetts,” Dave said. “I can hardly remember any of it, either. Adolescence is terrible.”
“How is it murder if the girl was bitten by snakes?” Gregor asked. “Did someone deliberately plant them in her bed?”
Schatzy grinned. “She wasn’t in her bed. She was in a storeroom at the public library, nobody knows why. And nobody knows where the snakes came from, either. That’s the best part. Pack of water moccasins all over the body, water moccasins not native to the state, hissing and snapping and the first thing that hits the Medical Examiner when they get them off her is that, of course, she hasn’t died of snake venom—”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “Hibernating. Why weren’t the snakes hibernating?”
“There’d been a thaw,” Schatzy said. “This was in Upstate New York last week, I told you. Haven’t you been listening to the news? They had a thaw up there went to sixty degrees on Valentine’s Day and didn’t cool off for eight or nine days, all the way up near the Seaway, melted everything and caused a lot of flooding—”
“I see,” Gregor said. He did see. He was just glad that Schatzy wanted to talk instead of to listen, because he was a little embarrassed by the fact that he had not seen before. The flooding near the Seaway had been major news, major enough so that Gregor had heard about it. The problem was, he didn’t much like news. He, therefore, rarely read or listened to it. The depth of his ignorance of current events was astonishing.
Schatzy was not in the mood to pursue it. “Right,” he was saying, “well. It was up there. In this town called Maryville. Body discovered with snakes crawling all over it, weirdest thing you ever saw, but like I said, she’s not dead from snake venom. They puff up—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Dave said.
“Well, they do, Dave, they do. And she didn’t. So as soon as they could see her face, they knew that wasn’t what she died from. But there she was, dead. And there were the snakes, they couldn’t let them just slither away and terrorize the local populace—”
“They wouldn’t have terrorized the local populace for long,” Gregor pointed out. “The weather had to have gotten back to normal eventually. They’d have frozen to death.”
“The weather did get back to normal eventually,” Dave said. “It’s back to normal now. They have pictures of it on the TV news. It looks like an ice cube up there.”
Schatzy had paged through the magazine until he came to the story. Like all the major crime stories in People, it was spread across two pages and illustrated with photographs in black and white. The two thin columns of text crammed in on either side of the fold looked feeble and anemic under the black heaviness of the headlines. “MYSTERY,” one of those headlines read, and then, “THE STRANGE STORY OF THE SNAKES AND THE NUN.” Gregor stopped at that word, nun, and looked back at the picture of the girl who had died. Girl was the operative word. She looked barely old enough to vote. She certainly didn’t look like a nun.
“They won’t have anything I wouldn’t be able to get from the papers,” Schatzy said, “but they’ll have interviews. I love the interviews. I love crime stories in People. They’re like reading Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie.”
“Gregor’s been a crime story in People,” Dave said. “Gregor’s been more than one.”
“Tell me about this business with the nun,” Gregor said. “What do they mean when they say that she was a nun?”
“Oh, that. That’s just an exaggeration.” Schatzy flicked his fingers at the offending word. “She wasn’t a nun, exactly. She was one of those girls who wants to be and goes to a convent to train to be one—”
“A novice?” Gregor tried. “A postulant?”
“A postulant, Gregor, that’s it. This Maryville place has a local convent, one of the kind where girls go to learn to be nuns—”
“A Motherhouse,” Gregor said politely. “Or a provincial house.”
“Yeah. Like that. Anyway, that’s where she was living. In this convent with the Sisters of Divine Grace. I don’t know, Gregor. When I was growing up, nuns had sensible names, like Benedictines or Augustinians or Sisters of Charity. What’s a name like that supposed to mean, Sisters of Divine Grace?”
“I don’t know.”
“Schatzy, look at what you’ve done,” Dave said. “You’ve got him upset. For God’s sake. Just because you spent your career reading financial statements doesn’t mean the rest of us did. The rest of us are tired of this kind of thing, I mean.”
“Are you?” Schatzy asked Gregor. “Tired of this kind of thing?”
“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “Why don’t you let me borrow your magazine for a minute. I want to go to the men’s room. I’ll meet you in the restaurant in a couple of minutes.”
“Talk about something else,” Dave said. “Talk about this girl he’s seeing. Woman. I don’t know what to call her. Young enough to be his daughter, from what I can tell.”
Gregor tucked the magazine into the pocket of his coat. “She is young enough to be my daughter, and I’m not ‘seeing’ her, as you put it. I have a much too well developed sense of self-preservation. I’ll see you two in a couple of minutes, all right?”
“All right,” Schatzy said.
“She has a strange name,” Dave persisted, too brightly. “Dennis or Hennis or Lennis or something.”
“Bennis,” Gregor told him. “Bennis Hannaford. They’ve got her books in the same newsstand where Schatzy probably bought this magazine. I’ll see the two of you later.”
Dave started to babble again, but Gregor had already turned his back and begun making his way toward the interior of the hotel. Behind him, he could hear wind whistle every time one of the glass doors were opened or shut. He passed the reception desk and noted in a distracted way that someone had put out a few forlorn decorations, a leprechaun sitting on a pot of gold and a stand-up cardboard shamrock for St. Patrick’s Day. What was it about some people that they couldn’t let a holiday pass without gearing themselves up to celebrate another one?
What was it about some people that they couldn’t leave well enough alone? Dave Herder meant well—he always meant well—but he couldn’t take a hint. Gregor didn’t mind talking about murder. As long as the murder in question wasn’t a serial one or in some other way the obvious work of a psychopath, it could even be interesting. He did mind talking about Bennis Hannaford, and about everyone else he knew back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia. At least, he minded this weekend.
The men’s room was near a bank of pay phones, in a wide empty space in the lobby paneled in blond wood and carpeted in green. Gregor pushed himself through the swinging door with the copy of People rolled up in his hand as if he were about to swat a fly with it. The problem with talking about Bennis—or Donna Moradanyan, or Father Tibor Kasparian, or George Tekamanian, or Lida Arkmajian, or any of the rest of them—wasn’t that he missed them. He always missed them when he was away from them. The problem was that at the moment he felt that they’d abandoned him.
[2]
Of course, in reality, Gregor Demarkian had not been abandoned at all. When he was being sensible, he knew this. What he was feeling was a mass and mix of things. Before Elizabeth had died, he had been what he now had to admit was a pretty popular Bureau type: The man so dedicated to his work he hadn’t known anything else existed. In his case, he had known Elizabeth existed, but she had taken care of everything else for them. She had kept in touch with their families. She had arranged for his mother’s funeral and for his nieces’ birthday presents and for the anniversary liturgies to be sung for the repose of his father’s soul. There were Bureau agents who had no emotional lives at all. Gregor had one, but the one he had was Elizabeth—and until she was gone he hadn’t realized how important it all was to him. It had been strange, waking up on the morning after he buried her, staring the end of his leave of absence in the face and knowing he didn’t want to go back. It had been even stranger, weeks later, with his resignation accepted and his life at loose ends, realizing he was going to have to pull himself together and give himself a reason for existing.
He had gone back to Cavanaugh Street on a whim, as a self-consciously deliberate first step in the direction of getting himself reoriented to normal life. He had been born and brought up on Cavanaugh Street in the days when it had been little more than Philadelphia’s Armenian-American immigrant ghetto. With everything that had gone on in the central cities in the years since he’d left, he’d expected to return to nothing at all, to rubble and crack houses, to dirt and prostitution. Instead, he’d found a refurbished street full of people he’d known all his life, the tenements bought up and remodeled as floor-through condominiums or single-family town houses, the church decked out with every conceivable embellishment that would be allowed by an Armenian bishop. It had been a revelation, and he had bought an apartment almost without thinking about it. He’d settled in without knowing what he was going to do. Fortunately for the kind of man he had let himself become, he had not had to do much. Like Elizabeth, they had given him the life he wasn’t able to put together for himself.
The men’s room had a little anteroom, with chairs and sinks and a long, low counter for doing God knew what. There were also mirrors. Gregor sat down in one of the chairs and opened Schatzy’s copy of People magazine. There was a picture of the corpse, taken from above, while it was lying on a morgue slab. People was the only magazine on earth better than The National Enquirer at getting a picture of a dead body. Gregor stared at the face of Brigit Ann Reilly and wished the picture were in color. Black and white blurred too many details.
“Taxine,” Gregor muttered to himself. “Coniine. Lobeline. Some kind of vegetable alkaloid. I wonder where she got it from.”
He looked through the scant text for some sign of an answer, but found none. The story was continued on the next page, so he turned and found nothing there, either. When the case was solved, People would run a five- or ten-page extravaganza and explain the whole thing, but at this point in the investigation they were only interested in titillating. Gregor looked over the pictures on this third page and found a couple he recognized: John Cardinal O’Bannion, and a young woman in a not very modified nun’s habit identified as “Sister Mary Scholastica, Mistress of Postulants and Brigit Ann Reilly’s religious superior in the Sisters of Divine Grace.” Gregor had known her as Sister Scholastica Burke. At the time, she had been principal of St. Agnes’s Parish School in Colchester, New York, and Gregor had been in Colchester looking into a little matter for the Cardinal Archbishop. Gregor ran his finger down the column of type and came up with a paragraph that read,
According to Sister Scholastica, Brigit was a model postulant. “Postulants often have trouble with religious obedience, but Brigit never seemed to,” Sister Scholastica said. “She was always very conscientious about everything she did. I don’t know what she could have been doing in that storeroom so late in the day.”
Gregor slapped the magazine shut, rolled it up, and stuffed it in his pocket. That was the kind of thing people always said in the wake of a violent death. From what he had known of Sister Scholastica, he would have expected better. He wondered if Bennis was at home right this moment, reading this copy of People and coming to the same conclusions. He didn’t suppose she was. The last he’d seen of Bennis, she’d been six weeks into her new novel, holed up in her apartment the way doughboys in World War I had holed up in foxholes, every piece of furniture covered with Post-It notes about rogue trolls, enchanted castles, singing unicorns, and damsels more distressing than distressed. She hadn’t been out in the air since the middle of January, and she swore she wasn’t coming out until she had a draft. Since Bennis’s drafts generally ran seven or eight hundred pages of elite type, Gregor expected Ararat to be shipping in restaurant meals for some time to come.
Still, what Bennis was doing to him—and he couldn’t help thinking of it like that; as something she was doing to him—was better than what the rest of them had done. That was why he was feeling so abandoned, illogical though it might be. The rest of them had virtually disappeared. Father Tibor had gone back to Independence College to teach another course. Lida Arkmajian and Hannah Krekorian had taken Donna Moradanyan and her infant son to Lida’s house in Boca Raton. Even old George Tekamanian was in the Bahamas, floating around on a cruise ship with his grandson Martin, his grandson Martin’s wife, and his three great-grandchildren.
The truth of it was simple: In the year and a half since Gregor had been back on Cavanaugh Street, he had learned to rely on these people as completely as he had ever relied on Elizabeth. When they stepped out of his life even temporarily, he felt as if he’d had the foundation knocked out from under him. It was something he was going to have to do something about someday. He just didn’t want someday to be today. Or ever.
He went over to one of the sinks and washed his hands, just to feel that he had done something practical in the men’s room, instead of just hiding from Dave Herder’s prattle. Then he made his way back into the lobby. There were three restaurants on this level—or accessible from this level—as far as Gregor knew, but the only one Dave and Schatzy would be in was at the back, on the other side of the building from the wall of glass doors. Gregor passed the baggage check and the check-in desk and was making his way along the wall opposite the guest services desk when he heard his name called out.
“Mr. Demarkian?” the high feminine voice said. “Mr. Demarkian, please? If you have a minute?”
Gregor looked over to the guest services desk and saw a small woman—tiny, really—jumping up and down behind the counter. While he watched, she pushed herself up against the counter with her hands and called again.
“Mr. Demarkian?”
“I’m coming.” He walked across the hall until he came to her, and smiled. She had let herself down from her perch and was looking a little sweaty and flustered.
“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “you don’t know what we’ve been through. We didn’t know where you were, you see.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Gregor said. “Why should you?”
“That’s what I said,” the woman told him in a confidential voice, “but you just can’t get away with saying that kind of thing when you’re talking to the Archdiocese of New York. Oh, I’m sorry. That’s what this is about. We have a message for you from the Archdiocese of New York.”
“A message.”
“Just a minute.” The tiny woman rushed to the back, made her way along a r
ow of severely high-tech-looking pigeonholes, and came up with a large manila envelope. It wasn’t what Gregor would have called a message, but it was from the Archdiocese of New York. The letterhead was big and bold enough to read all the way across at the counter where he was standing.
“Here,” the tiny woman said, thrusting the thing at him. “It came in about two hours ago, and right after it did we got a phone call, and you wouldn’t believe how insistent they were. It’s stamped all over with urgent, too. They must have a crisis on their hands.”
If they did, Gregor didn’t see what it would have to do with him. He didn’t know anybody at the Archdiocese of New York. He opened the envelope and peered inside. Inside there was another envelope, a padded mailer, with a note taped to its side. Gregor pulled the mailer out and read the note.
“This arrived this morning from Cardinal O’Bannion” the note said. “He has impressed on us that the matter is urgent.”
“The matter is urgent,” Gregor said out loud.
“What?” the tiny woman asked him.
“Never mind,” Gregor said. “Thank you. I’ll take care of this now.”
“I’d find a phone if I were you,” the woman said. “They really were very, very insistent.”
“I’m sure they were.” Gregor hardly blamed them. Cardinal O’Bannion was a very insistent man. From what he’d heard, Cardinal O’Connor could be a very insistent man, too. If John O’Bannion was really intent on getting in touch with Gregor Demarkian—and the effort involved to track Gregor down at the Hilton suggested he was—the clerks at the Archdiocese had probably been driven absolutely crazy since the message came in.
