Great Day for the Deadly

by Jane Haddam

  “Slightly,” Gregor said drily.

  “Yeah,” Pete Donovan said. “Well, what happened over at Iggy Loy was that the choir robes got torn up. And I do mean torn up. Somebody ripped them apart with his bare hands. Somebody or somebodies. The robes are kept in a dressing room up in the choir loft, along with extra hymn books and arrangements sheets for the organ. Father Fitzsimmons went up there to see if he could find the words to ‘Lord of the Dance,’ or something and there it was, shreds of cloth all over the place—”

  “Did you see it?” Gregor asked. “Were you called in?”

  “Oh, yes. The unofficial policy in the Archdiocese is to downplay acts of anti-Catholicism as much as possible. As long as nobody was hurt and nothing drastic happened—desecrating the altar at St. Mary Magdalen was something drastic—anyway, as long as those two conditions are met the incidents usually don’t get reported except to the Cardinal. Sometimes the Cardinal will report them to me, but by that time the scene will have been contaminated—”

  “Or obliterated,” Gregor said. “You sound as if you think this choir robe thing wouldn’t ordinarily have been considered drastic enough to have been reported directly to the police.”

  “It wouldn’t have. Somebody went over to St. Bonaventure’s School in Kataband, broke all the windows and spray painted ‘John Paul Two sucks dick’ on the front doors and the first the police over there heard of it was three days later when the insurance company called. I mean, Mr. Demarkian, I consider myself a good Catholic. I even consider myself a loyal Catholic. I even believe in forbearance and all the rest of it. I still think the Cardinal’s attitude to this is nuts.”

  “What happened at Iggy Loy?” Gregor asked. “Why did Father—Fitzsimmons, was it?—why did Father Fitzsimmons call you in?”

  “Because Father Fitzsimmons thinks the Cardinal’s attitude to this is nuts.” Pete Donovan sighed. “The Cardinal’s got clout, though. Father Fitzsimmons didn’t let me do anything about it except check it out. It didn’t make the news, either. Now that’s something I think is a mistake. If the Cardinal wants to stop this stuff, he should make sure all the incidents get on the news. That turns people against the vandals.”

  It would turn some people against the vandals, Gregor thought. The problem was, it would turn others into vandals. It would be a tough judgment call, but Gregor thought he could see the Cardinal’s point. The sort of bigot who resorted to vandalism was the sort who might eventually resort to violence. The sort of bigot who was attracted by vandalism was even more likely to end up bashing in somebody’s head. Gregor had seen it a million times in cases he’d handled for the Bureau, especially cases involving outbreaks of anti-Semitism. He didn’t know what it was about religion, but it inflamed the passions of a certain kind of malevolent idiot worse than anything else.

  “Tell me why you think it’s all connected,” he said to Pete Donovan. “Tell me what you think is going on.”

  But Pete Donovan was shaking his head. “It would take forever and I’d sound like I was babbling,” he said, “which doesn’t mean I won’t babble but does mean I won’t babble now. The Cardinal sent you down here to look into the death of Brigit Ann Reilly.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  “Well, Mr. Demarkian, I told him he could. In fact, I was ecstatic when I heard the news. I figured I’d finally found my savior. Would you like to know why?”

  Actually, given the tone of Donovan’s voice, Gregor wasn’t sure he would. He said sure anyway and sat back to wait. Donovan stopped his pacing and retreated to the wall again, closer to the window this time, so he could look out. His blond hair was cut very short and very high on his neck. The style made his head look much too short for his body.

  “There was the desecration at St. Mary Magdalen,” Donovan said, “and the business with the choir robes and the death of Brigit Ann Reilly—the murder of Brigit Ann Reilly, because it couldn’t have been anything else. Now there’s these letters that the Cardinal’s been receiving and not telling anybody about and maybe Reverend Mother General, too. All of this connected to something or somebody in Maryville, am I right?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said, “you’re right.”

  “Well,” Pete Donovan said, “I know everything and everyone connected to Maryville. Or I think I do, and that’s worse. I can’t investigate this thing. I’m too involved with the people involved with it.”

  “You could have called in the state police.”

  “I’m neither a masochist nor a damn fool.” Donovan pushed off from the wall decisively this time and headed for the door. “Come on. Let’s go find Reverend Mother General and have a talk about anonymous letters. Then maybe you and I can get together in private and have a talk about Brigit Ann Reilly. Then maybe we can start to get something done.”

  Pete Donovan was out in the hall before he’d finished talking, trailing words behind him like a smoker’s mist. Gregor Demarkian hauled himself up and followed.

  Donovan’s plan of action wasn’t necessarily the best possible plan of action, but it was the only one. Gregor was relieved that someone had finally handed him one.

  [3]

  Less than three minutes later, walking too quickly across the courtyard with his overcoat still lying on the chair in Reverend Mother General’s office, Gregor started to revise his opinion of Donovan’s plan of action. He started to revise his opinion of Donovan. He was cold and the convent felt deserted. Donovan kept saying something about the Divine Office and regular hours for community prayer. Gregor’s familiarity with the particulars of convent life was minimal—really nonexistent—but the impression he got was that Reverend Mother General and the rest of the nuns were off on nunly business that was going to take a while. Whatever he and Donovan were going to do, it wasn’t going to be talking to Reverend Mother General in the immediate future. In the light of all this, Gregor thought Donovan could have let him go back to get his coat. At least.

  They were almost all the way across the courtyard to the far door when that door swung open and a small girl came barreling out, wearing the black dress and strange envelopelike black cap Gregor had learned to identify—even after so short a time with the photographs of Brigit Ann Reilly for company—as the uniform of the postulants in the Sisters of Divine Grace. The girl got two or three feet into the courtyard and stopped. Her eyes got wide. Her mouth dropped open. She looked Pete Donovan straight in the face and said,

  “It’s you. Somebody already called you.”

  “Somebody called me about what?” Donovan said.

  Since Donovan had stopped, Gregor was finally able to catch up with him. He drew up next to the small girl and looked into her plain, sensible, square little face.

  “I thought I must have been the first one to find it,” she said simply. “I thought if somebody else had found it, they would have left somebody to guard it, but they didn’t, so I had to be the first one.”

  “The first one what?” Donovan asked desperately.

  “The first one to find the body,” the small girl said.

  Then she looked straight up into Gregor Demarkian’s eyes, smiled one of the sweetest smiles he had ever seen, and passed out.

  Part Two

  One

  [1]

  THE BODY HAD ONCE belonged to a man named Don Bollander, and the girl who had told them about him was a postulant named Neila Connelly. Gregor Demarkian managed to get those two facts established before Pete Donovan’s foot soldiers arrived, carrying the plastic bags and cosmetic brushes that served them instead of a mobile crime unit. In the hurrying urgency of their search after Neila Connelly had been revived—Pete Donovan scooping snow off the top of the trellis and rubbing it in her face—Gregor had been on automatic pilot. He had been so thoroughly involved in doing what he was trained to do, he had forgotten to pay attention to the particulars of his circumstances. It was almost an hour later before it struck him: just how small a town Maryville was. No mobile crime unit, no municipal lab, a force of less t
han a dozen men: Gregor had worked in places that small before, but usually with the Bureau, and therefore, usually with the Bureau to fall back on. The only case he’d ever handled on his own in a place where he couldn’t count on accurate, nearly instantaneous lab work had been last Halloween at a small college in Pennsylvania. He wasn’t sure he had enjoyed the experience. In the Bureau, he had been famous for “thinking” instead of “investigating.” In a large organization where everybody needed something to distinguish them, that hadn’t been a bad distinction to have. The “investigating” types had been all around him, after all. He had only had to ask to get something done. He had never been fool enough to think he didn’t need the techies.

  When Pete Donovan got Neila Connelly revived, she sat up, rubbed at the sides of her face and started to cry. Donovan knew her name the way he knew the names of most of the postulants, because they volunteered in the literacy program down in St. Andrew’s Parish and the police department did a lot of drug education down there at the same time. He kept calling her name, over and over again, first as if that ought to be enough to wake her up and then as if it ought to be enough to calm her down. Neila, in the meantime, was sore. In the movies, people who faint collapse in graceful heaps. In real life, they either go over like boards or smash into the floor like rag dolls stuffed with glass. Neila had been a rag-doll type. Donovan had caught her before she hit the slate paving of the courtyard, but she was bruised and hurt and bewildered and scared to death. Gregor and Pete got her propped up on a bench and moved away for a consultation.

  “Do you know this name she keeps saying?” Gregor asked. “Don Bollander? Does that make any sense to you?”

  “If you’re asking if I know who it is, I know who it is,” Donovan answered. “If you’re asking if it makes any sense, that’s something else again.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Mr. Donovan?” Neila Connelly said.

  Both Gregor and Donovan turned around at once. In the few seconds since they’d left her, Neila Connelly had begun to return to life. Her eyes had grown brighter, although not exactly bright. Her back was straighter. Even the fabric of her black postulant’s dress seemed to have more spring in it. She was still scared out of her mind, but she was functioning.

  Gregor and Donovan looked at each other, nodded to each other, and went back to the bench where Neila was still sitting.

  “We were just giving you time to get your act together,” Donovan said. “This is Gregor Demarkian. He—”

  “I know who he is,” Neila said. “I saw him on television last night, at the Cardinal’s press conference. Reverend Mother General made us watch.”

  Gregor noted with some amusement that Neila Connelly thought it was perfectly natural that the Cardinal’s press conference was something she would have to be “made” to watch. Then he wondered why Reverend Mother General had made them watch it. To assure them that something serious was being done about the death of Brigit Ann Reilly? To frighten those of them who might have information into giving it up? Gregor had been in Reverend Mother General’s presence for less than a quarter of an hour, but he had taken his impressions. That was one formidable—and ferociously well organized—old lady.

  On the bench, Neila Connelly was squirming and shifting. “I went to the infirmary to get an aspirin,” she told them. “I’ve been feeling terrible all day, hot and tired. Not bad enough to skip work but—bad. So I thought I’d get an aspirin and it would make me feel better.”

  “Is that where you think you found this—where you think you found Don?” Pete Donovan asked.

  Neila Connelly made a sharp impatient gesture in the air, so much like one of Father Tibor’s that Gregor was startled. Maybe it was a form of all-purpose ethnic sign language. Maybe Neila had picked it up from her cousins in Ireland or the oldest woman on her street.

  “I don’t think I found Don Bollander,” she was saying, “and I don’t think I found a body, either. I know it was Don Bollander because I saw his face, and I know it was a body because I—I touched it.”

  “In the infirmary?” Pete Donovan insisted.

  Neila shook her head. “I didn’t do anything in the infirmary, really. Sister Hilga was already gone. I really am feeling bad today. Out of synch. The bell for chapel must have rung and I didn’t notice it. When I got to the infirmary it was empty and Sister Hilga was gone and we’re not allowed to take medication without permission, not even an aspirin. So I decided to come downstairs.”

  “To go to chapel,” Gregor said, trying to get this strange sequence worked out. “If you were late for chapel than it stands to reason that once you realized it you must have gone to chapel.”

  “That’s right.” Staring up at him, Neila’s eyes were large and round and green, beautiful eyes in a face that had nothing else beautiful in it. “They make a royal fuss around here when you’re late for things, especially prayers, because prayers are supposed to be the point. And I’m never late, so when I saw nobody at the infirmary desk and then I looked out into the hall and there was nobody on the corridor—I suppose I should have noticed that before but I just—”

  “You were feeling bad,” Pete Donovan said.

  “Exactly. Anyway, I started downstairs. Sister Scholastica is always telling us not to cross the courtyard without our capes in this weather, but the courtyard is a shortcut and I was in a hurry. You’re not supposed to be in a hurry, either, not ever. And now I’m sitting out here and I’m not even cold. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Tell me where this infirmary is,” Gregor said. He was hoping that in getting Neila to talk about the geography of the Motherhouse, he might also get her to talk about the location of the body. He couldn’t understand why Pete Donovan wasn’t more anxious to establish that fact. What worried Gregor was what he thought should be obvious to everybody, Neila Connelly included. Neila was not a doctor, a nurse, or a paramedic. In spite of her protestations, if there was a body, that body was not necessarily dead.

  Neila had left her bench and advanced into the courtyard. She pointed upward and said, “Those windows there, next to the long thin ones that go to the staircase. That’s the infirmary.”

  “And the staircase is just beside it,” Gregor said.

  “The doors are side by side, except that the staircase door is a fire door that swings, instead of the kind with a knob in it. There’s another one, another fire door, at the bottom. It’s right across from that one I came out of. It goes to the front lawn.”

  “All right,” Gregor said, “so you came through that door. Was it open?”

  “It’s never open. We’re not even allowed to prop it open. It’s supposed to serve as a firebreak.”

  “Fine. So. You went through it and down the stairs—”

  “And when I was halfway down, when I got to the turn and the landing, I saw the door to the utility room standing open. There’s a room on the first floor right at the bottom of those stairs with a big industrial sink in it and mops and pails and things for cleaning. Anyway, that’s not left open, either. Sister Alice Marie says if you leave that door open, the kittens get in there and eat the cleaning fluids and kill themselves. And there are always kittens around here. There are like five cats and they’re always getting pregnant.”

  Pete Donovan cleared his throat. “Neila,” he said, “if you could just—not that I’m trying to hurry you or anything—”

  Neila shot him an exasperated look. “You think I’m lying,” she said. “You think I’m like Bernadette and Amanda and whoever else went tromping down to your office this week, getting the vapors and making up stories that didn’t have anything to do with anything.”

  “I don’t think—”

  Neila turned back to Gregor. “When I saw the utility room door open, I thought I was in luck. I’d thought I’d been wrong about missing the bell. The corridor being empty wasn’t so unusual, really. There’s a lot of work to do around here. It was Sister Hilga being gone that really made up my
mind. So when I saw the door open, I thought Sister Hilga had just gone down to wash something up or to fetch a broom or a mop or something. And I could have my aspirin and I wouldn’t be in trouble.”

  “What others who went tramping down to Mr. Donovan’s office?” Gregor asked her.

  But Neila ignored him, as Donovan ignored him. “I got to the bottom of the stairs,” Neila said, “and it was then it hit me that the light in the utility room was off. Sister Hilga wouldn’t be standing around in there in the dark. Somebody must have gone in and then forgotten to close up. I was going to leave it and run to chapel the way I had been, but then I decided I couldn’t. I mean, I really do like kittens. If one of them had died it would have been my fault and I would have felt guilty for a week. So I thought it only made sense to close up before I came out.”

  “Right,” Gregor said. “So you—”

  “I went in and turned on the light,” Neila told him, “to make sure one of the kittens wasn’t already in there. I didn’t want to trap one.”

  “Of course not,” Donovan said soothingly.

  Neila went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “The light switch is right inside the door, and when I got it on I was looking at the floor. That’s where the kittens would be likely to be. On the floor. They’re very small, the six we have now. So I was staring around at the linoleum for I don’t know how long before I saw it.”

  “Saw what?” Gregor asked.

  “Saw the leg,” Neila told him. “It was sticking straight up out of the sink. It was like a flag. It is like a flag. And then I went to the sink and looked down into it and there he was, Don Bollander from the bank, with his leg as stiff as a maypole and his face—his face—”