Great Day for the Deadly

by Jane Haddam

  “Did you tell him about the phantom corpses?”

  “I didn’t even think of it,” Scholastica said. “I don’t want to. It makes us sound so strange. I don’t know, Alice Marie, I just talked and talked and talked. About me, about us, about Brigit. I don’t know if I made much of anything like sense.”

  Alice Marie looked suddenly uneasy—worse than uneasy, really, green around the gills—and Scholastica didn’t blame her. A year ago, Alice Marie had been Mistress of Postulants under old Sister Mary Jerome. Then Jerome had had a stroke and Reverend Mother General, who had always said she believed that Alice Marie didn’t have what it took to be a Novice Mistress, had had a change of heart. Now Alice Marie’s first year as Mistress of Novices was barely half over, and everything was going wrong.

  In the old days, Sisters who couldn’t contain their nervousness were taught to fold their arms together within the sleeves of their habits and grab onto their wrists. Alice Marie, having been trained under the old dispensation, did that now.

  “Scholastica,” she said, “when I came down this morning, down to this corridor, it was just going six o’clock. I know because I heard the Angelus bell ring. I’d left my Office down here and I wanted to pick it up.” She shot Scholastica an embarrassed look. “You’re probably modern enough to think I’m silly, but I don’t feel right about not reading my Office, even when I’m praying in community and I can just chant along with the rest of you.”

  “I prefer to read it, too. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Nothing, really. I came down here, I came into the classroom across the hall from this one, I got my book and I came out again. It was when I came out again that I saw it.”

  “Saw what?”

  Alice Marie put her hand in her habit pocket and came out with a small wadded piece of cardboard. “That was stuck in the door at the end of this corridor. Just under the latch. Open it up.”

  Scholastica opened it up. It was a square from the side of a box of generic laundry detergent, and that could mean only one thing. As long as there were postulants at the Motherhouse, only postulants did laundry. They were supervised by old Sister Anthony James, but she would never stick a piece of cardboard in one of the Motherhouse’s side doors. If she wanted to leave the building after it was locked up, she’d ask Reverend Mother General to use the override key. Scholastica handed the cardboard back.

  “Somebody was trying to get out,” she said.

  “Exactly,” Alice Marie said.

  “Do you think they managed?”

  Alice Marie gave a vigorous shake of her head. “They couldn’t have. The security system doesn’t work like that. If whoever it was had managed to get this cardboard stuck in the latch, the open latch would have set off every alarm in the building as soon as Reverend Mother pulled the lock-up switch.”

  “And if that hadn’t done it, opening the door would have,” Scholastica said. “Except I don’t have to worry about an open door. You’re right. The latch would do it. You think the cardboard was put in the door last night?”

  “Yesterday, yes,” Alice Marie said.

  “It was crazy,” Scholastica said. “Whoever had such an idea? It’s knee-deep in snow out there. Nobody could have got out without getting drenched in the process and then she’d have been caught. I mean, even if she’d managed to get her clothes down to the laundry bins as soon as she came back in and before anyone saw her there would be her shoes—”

  Alice Marie seemed about to make some protest about the shoes, but just then there was a knock on the door and the creaking sound of a knob that needed to be oiled turning in its socket. A moment later, a postulant named Leah Brady opened the door and stuck in her head, looking scared out of her mind.

  “Sister?” she said, looking first at Alice Marie and then at Scholastica. She settled on Alice Marie with something like resolution and said “Sister” again. “Sister Josepha said to tell you you’re being buzzed for,” she went on. “She said you’re being buzzed for a lot and it’s Reverend Mother General and it’s probably urgent.”

  “That Demarkian person probably wants to talk to me,” Alice Marie said. She still had the cardboard in her hand, flattened out now, big enough to cover her palm. She balled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. “I’ll come along,” she told Leah Brady. “I want to go upstairs for a moment anyway. Tell Sister Josepha I’ll be right out.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  Leah Brady retreated. Alice Marie waited until she had closed the door before she said, “Obviously we can’t tell Reverend Mother about this now. We’re going to be in enough trouble over Brigit once it all comes out, and it is going to all come out, sooner or later. The only thing I can say, Sister, is that you have to find out—”

  “I’ll find out,” Sister Scholastica said. “You’d better go now. If Reverend Mother really is calling you, she’s going to be impatient.”

  “Because Reverend Mother is already impatient?” Alice Marie asked. “I wouldn’t say that. I think Reverend Mother is a Living Rule.”

  “Of course she is,” Scholastica said and then stood stock-still while Alice Marie glided out of the room and into the corridor. As soon as the older Sister was well and truly gone, Scholastica cast her eyes to Heaven and uttered a little prayer. Then she promised every saint she could think of to make a novena to the Blessed Mother on the subject of that piece of cardboard as soon as she got the chance.

  Sister Scholastica didn’t have to find out who had put that cardboard in the latch.

  Sister Scholastica already knew.

  [2]

  For Father Michael Doherty, the weekend had started at eight P.M. on Friday night, when a boy named Juan Jose Cortez had been knifed five times in the chest on the corner of Clare Avenue and Diamond Place. Juan Jose Cortez was fourteen years old, and from the reports of the boys who had been with him, his attacker wasn’t much older. His attacker was also Anglo, which figured. There wasn’t much violence in Maryville, but what there was always took place on Clare and Diamond and Beckner and always crossed ethnic lines. It might have crossed racial lines, too, except that the local black population was solidly middle class and much too sensible. Father Doherty got called out because of Juan’s mother, who, like most of the mothers in the neighborhood, preferred the ministrations of her priest to the arcane aloofness of the county hospital doctors. Michael had arrived at the hospital to find Juan in miraculously good shape, due to the apparent fact that the Anglo who had stuck him had no strength at all in his arms. He had checked Juan’s wounds personally—so he could tell Juan’s mother he had—and started to go home, when the ambulance brought in another face he knew. That one belonged to Carmen Esposito, and the agony that rippled through it had been caused not by human brutality but by unhuman whim. Carmen Esposito had one of the apartments in the building three doors down from the church on the church’s right hand side, and like all the apartments in that building hers had a defective gas stove. She was trying to light one burner when the one beside it started to leak. It didn’t leak enough to cause an explosion, but it did leak enough to cause a fire. The fire caught at her sleeve and the next thing she knew she was covered with flame. When Michael first saw her in the emergency room, she looked boiled. He’d stayed most of the night with her. For one thing, she was afraid. For another, he was a qualified physician, although not a burn specialist, and he could help her. For a third, his mere presence tended to get his people better and more prompt care than they would have received at any other time. It was as if the doctors at county hospital didn’t think the Hispanic population of Maryville was very important, but believed that their priest had secret ties to John Cardinal O’Bannion’s Chancery.

  It was now eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, and Michael was tired. In fact, he was exhausted. After he’d finally seen Carmen settled and as comfortable as she was going to get, he’d gone downstairs to take another stab at going home and run into a traffic accident instead. The traffic accident had
been a four-car pileup. His people—Dona and Maritsio Dominguez—had been in the third car to hit the knot. They had been prepared and not badly hurt. The occupants of the other cars, however, were almost all also Catholic, and Michael couldn’t see his way to abandoning them just because they were not his parishioners. Besides, he had taken pains to get himself affiliated with county hospital. When the rest of the staff saw him there in the middle of an emergency, they expected him to help out.

  He should have insisted on getting back in time to say the seven o’clock Mass. He should at least have insisted on getting back in time to say the ten. By ten, his clinic was supposed to have been open for four hours. Instead, he had let himself be talked into extra duty after extra duty. The duties had been both medical and clerical. He had finished with them less than fifteen minutes ago. He was now finally stumbling home, and the last thing he needed was this insistent old woman who had camped herself on the church’s steps, holding a brown paper bag full of the Lord only knew what and talking a mile a minute in a Hispanic dialect he couldn’t begin to understand.

  “From Number Thirty-seven,” the old woman said, on one of her rare excursions into English. “This is who I am. From Number Thirty-seven.”

  “From Number Thirty-seven,” Michael said. “Yes, mother, I understand. But I must go into the church now. I am late.”

  Hernandito was standing on the top of the church steps, waiting for him. Hernandito’s arms were folded across his chest and his mouth was set into a line. “I’m glad you decided to come back,” he said. “We all thought you’d taken off for Miami.”

  “I took off for the hospital,” Michael said. “It was Friday night.”

  “It is Saturday morning.”

  “From Number Thirty-seven,” the old woman said again. “From the first floor above the street. From the back.”

  Michael Doherty was a naturally courteous man. He made it a point to be even more courteous with his parishioners, who came from a culture of civility and who were touchy about their honor. He didn’t want to put this old woman off or to offend her, but he didn’t know what to do with her. It was obvious that she wasn’t in any of the usual kinds of trouble. She was stiff with age but not ailing. Her back was strong and her skin was a good healthy color, in spite of the fact that she was forty pounds overweight and probably fried everything she ate. Her eyes were clear and without cataracts. None of her bones was broken and none of her muscles had snapped. When Michael got to the top of the church steps and the door, she was right behind him. She was as quick as a girl of sixteen, if not as nimble. He held the door open for her and motioned her in ahead of him, even though he knew it wasn’t expected of him. She would have thought it perfectly proper for her priest to precede her. When she had disappeared into the vestibule, Michael turned to Hernandito and asked, “Do you know her? Is she from the neighborhood? I can’t understand her Spanish—”

  “That’s Señora Gretz from Two-D in Thirty-seven,” Hernandito said. “You don’t have time to talk to her now. The clinic—”

  “Is in full swing and is barely being held together by Sister Mary Gabriel.”

  “It’s Sister Marietta this time. There will also be Mass? The women are disturbed—”

  “There will be Mass at twelve o’clock,” Michael told him. “I’ll apologize in my homily. Isn’t Gretz an unusual name for someone from Central America?”

  “There are many people with names like that in Central America. You do not have time—”

  “I’m going to have to make time, Hernandito. The woman obviously wants something. She’s not going to go away until she gets it.”

  The woman was standing on the other side of the vestibule, staring at them both. Michael got the uncomfortable feeling that she understood more English than she spoke. He covered his embarrassment and his exhaustion both by shooing her in the direction of the small side hall that led to his office. To get there they had to pass the stairs that led to the basement. Michael could hear the familiar sounds of the clinic: the crying of babies, the squabbling of children, the firm high voice of a nun saying, “Yes, Mrs. Gomez, I understand that you usually get a prescription for your piles, but I’m trying to tell you it will be much simpler and much cheaper to use—” Today, the nun was saying all that in Spanish. Michael was impressed.

  He let them all into his office, threw a stack of papers off a chair, and offered the chair to Señora Gretz. She sat down with the brown paper bag still clutched firmly to her bosom. If he hadn’t just been told differently by both Señora Gretz and Hernandito, he would have wondered if she were a bag lady.

  Inspiration struck him, and Michael said, “Excuse me, mother, but you have not been evicted from your apartment? You have not been forced out of your home?”

  Michael Doherty’s Spanish was Spanish-from-Spain and ferociously formal. He had learned it out of a book and never spoke it except here—and here only rarely. He had no talent for languages. Now he found himself repeating the thought every way he could, just to make sure she understood, but she was shaking her head vigorously.

  “I am Señora Gretz,” she said, “from Number Thirty-seven. From the back.”

  “Yes,” Michael said, “you told me so.”

  Señora Gretz looked at him long and hard. Then she turned to Hernandito and let out a stream of virulent Spanish that made the boy blush.

  “She is committing blasphemy left, right, and center,” Hernandito said, when she gave him a chance to say anything. “She wants me to tell you she doesn’t believe in God. And that she is a Communist. And that she will not be—” Hernandito groped for the English word and failed to find it. He tried a few in formal Spanish instead.

  “Evangelized,” Michael said finally. “I see. She doesn’t want to be evangelized. Tell her it is my personal opinion that the entire world is an act of evangelization.”

  Hernandito looked skeptical. “You want to argue theology with this one? I know this one. She’s crazy. On the day of the flood, she kept saying she was going to go to the roof instead of being evacuated. To protect her property.”

  “Her property? I thought she was a Communist.”

  “With Señora Gretz, all she means by Communist is that she hates the Pope.”

  Senora Gretz was getting restless in her chair. Now she pounded on the arm of it and let loose with another stream of Spanish.

  “She says that on the day of the flood she was brought not to the parish on the hill—she means Iggy Loy, Father—not there but to the house of the nuns,” Hernandito said. “She says she was put in a large room where the nuns play games. I think she means the gymnasium. She says that while she was there she was having much trouble with her arthritis.”

  “Where does she have arthritis?” Michael asked.

  Hernandito asked and the old woman flexed her hands—but her hands weren’t gnarled or stiff. They showed no signs of arthritis at all. Michael pointed this out.

  “I told you she was crazy,” Hernandito said.

  “Ask her again,” Michael told him. “Maybe she misunderstood you. Ask her where she has her arthritis. For Heaven’s sake, Hernandito, maybe we can get her in to the clinic and give her a little relief.”

  Hernandito hesitated, turned back to the woman, and asked the question again. Then he turned back to Michael. Michael wouldn’t have thought that so simple a question would have taken so long to answer, but Señora Gretz had responded with one of her monologues. He was stuck with it.

  At least, he thought he was going to be stuck with it. Hernandito was opening his mouth to speak, taking in a big reservoir of air. Michael was resigning himself to another secondhand lecture on the virtues of anti-Papism. Suddenly, Hernandito looked at the ceiling, looked at the floor, wiped his mouth against the back of his hand and coughed.

  “Father Michael,” he said, “this is very strange.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Father Michael,” he said, “she says that while she was there she went walking around, becau
se she will not let the Sisters tell her where she must go or not go, and she went into what she says is a church. It much have been the chapel. And when she went in there she saw near the front a nun—”

  “Well, of course she saw a nun,” Michael said in exasperation. The telephone on his desk rang and he picked it up automatically. He was still concentrating on what Hernandito was saying. Nine times out of ten, even on weekends, a ringing phone meant nothing in particular. People in the neighborhood wanted to know what times he was hearing confessions on Saturday, what times he would be available to give instructions to godparents on Thursday, when the church would be free for weddings in June. This time, though, he not only had an emergency, he had just the emergency he wanted.

  “This is Sister Marietta,” the phone said in his ear, “there’s a woman down here named Señora Diaz who’s in the middle of delivering what I think is a seventh-month infant. I think you’d better—”

  “Call the ambulance,” Michael said. “I’ll be there right away. Are you a midwife?”

  “Sister Gabriel is a midwife. I’m just an ordinary nurse. Will you hurry?”

  “Yes.” Michael hung up the phone and started to get his things together to go out again. He was going to miss saying Mass again at twelve o’clock, but he knew Señora Diaz. If he didn’t at least go to the hospital with her she would transcend hysteria and enter the realm of the psychotic break.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he told Hernandito. “Hold the fort while I’m gone. Tell—what’s she doing now?”

  Michael didn’t know if he’d forgotten about the woman in his office because he didn’t consider her important or because he didn’t want to have to deal with her. In a way, it didn’t matter. He had forgotten her, as soon as he had the chance. Now, turning toward the door and in a hurry to get out, she was blocking his path. If she had been simply sitting in her seat, the way she had been when he’d picked up the phone, he might have gone right past her, blindly. Instead, she was standing up, waving her hands in the air.