Great Day for the Deadly

by Jane Haddam

  [3]

  “The first thing you have to realize,” Reverend Mother General told him, after she had led him away from the crime scene and its craziness, across the courtyard and through a door he hadn’t noticed before. The courtyard was full of doors he hadn’t noticed before, and windows, too, as fully open to the first-floor rooms that lined it as it could have been as long as that floor had walls. That the courtyard was lined mostly with rooms was confirmed by the fact that it was a room Reverend Mother General had shooed him into. Going inside, Gregor had looked back over his shoulder and done a quick count. There were two sets of four doors. One set opened into each of the corners, presumably into halls like the one where they had just been. The other four were near the center of each courtyard wall, and presumably opened into rooms. Reverend Mother General caught Gregor’s distracted stare and said, “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry,” Gregor said. “It was the doors. Do you lock those doors?”

  “We never lock the doors to the courtyard,” Reverend Mother General told him. “There’s no reason to. They go from one part of the convent to the other. They don’t go outside.”

  “They’d make it easier for someone coming in from the outside to get around the convent without being heard,” Gregor said. Then he shook it off. “I’m sorry, Reverend Mother. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  “That’s quite all right, Mr. Demarkian. I was saying that the first thing you have to realize is that the women in this house are not, canonically, nuns. According to canon law, a nun is a woman religious who has taken solemn vows. All true nuns in the Catholic Church are now contemplatives, women who live by and large in cloister and whose apostolate it is to pray rather than to teach or nurse or run consciousness-raising centers in California. The women in this house have taken simple vows and they are, therefore, technically religious Sisters.”

  “Does that mean I should stop calling them nuns?”

  “Not at all. The names business is really the result of a lot of wrangling in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, when the first active orders—that’s what we call an order like ours, Mr. Demarkian, that does work in the world, active or mixed—at any rate, those first orders had their trouble getting permission from Rome to establish themselves, and some of the objections were finally got round by calling the women who joined them ‘religious sisters’ instead of ‘nuns.’ The distinction really doesn’t exist much of anywhere anymore except in official Church documents. People call us nuns and we call ourselves nuns. The distinction, however, does make a difference in how this house is run. Do you know anything about cloistered nuns?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there are variations in that area these days, too,” Reverend Mother General said. They had gone through the small room—which had been empty, but possessed of a blackboard at one end, as if it had once served as a classroom and since been abandoned—and across a narrow hall. Then there had been another that opened onto another hall, a long one this time, with a crucifix at the far end and a door under that. Gregor followed Reverend Mother moving through it. Reverend Mother walked unnaturally close to the wall.

  “Basically,” Reverend Mother said, “a cloistered or contemplative order will have a much stricter constitution than an active or mixed one. Rome keeps a much closer watch on the Holy Rules of orders like those. A Holy Rule is a set of regulations and principles by which a congregation lives. The active and mixed orders have been allowed a great deal of latitude in their constitutions, and they’ve taken advantage of it. We’ve taken advantage of it. We’ve been experimenting. Thirty years ago, no Sister would ever have left convent grounds except in the company of a companion Sister. Now we enforce that rule only in the worst neighborhoods of large cities, and it has nothing to do with religious obedience. It’s purely practical. Then there are restaurants. Thirty years ago, no Sister was allowed to eat in the presence of a secular. That was a rule first established in the Counter-Reformation, in an attempt to stem the tide of abuses in religious orders that had led to scandal. Now Sisters can eat in public all they like and in restaurants, too, if their families pay for it. Their families often do. We have a retired Sister here named Sister Rosita whose granddaughter sends her fifty dollars every month to take herself and the other four retired Sisters to McDonald’s. During Lent they put the money in the poor box with the granddaughter’s blessing. Do you see what I mean?”

  “You mean you don’t have any idea where anybody was last night,” Gregor sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

  “I mean nothing of the sort,” Reverend Mother General said. “What I’m trying to get at is why I think you must be wrong. I don’t think Mr. Don Bollander could have gotten into this convent last night. I don’t think he could have gotten into it until this morning—”

  “Reverend Mother, rigor mortis—”

  “Hear me out,” Reverend Mother General said. They had gotten to the end of the corridor, to a point nearly underneath the crucifix. Reverend Mother General turned to her left, looked through her keys, and fitted one into the lock of the door. When the door opened she put her hand around and flicked a light switch. Gregor saw fluorescents flicker and then beam into a strong glow. Underneath them and over Reverend Mother General’s shoulder he saw what looked like a room full of drafting tables.

  “Come in here,” Reverend Mother General told him. “This is the plans room. I don’t know what it was planned for originally, but a couple of years ago we had to have some rewiring done and it was empty, so I had our blueprints and floor plans set up here. Come and take a look at this one in the middle. It’s the easiest one to read.”

  Gregor stepped into the room and up to the large drafting table set up in its center. He looked down on what seemed to be a gigantic cross with a square shaped hole cut out of its middle where the sections overlapped.

  Reverend Mother pointed to the short end—the head—and said, “That’s the front door. It faces the front gate and Delaney Street.” She pointed to the short arm to its right. “That’s where we are now, or near enough. The crucifix we were just looking at is at this end, and as you undoubtedly noticed, the door is underneath it. That is a door to the outside. There is one in a similar position in the other arm and the foot.”

  “Are they kept locked?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Reverend Mother said. “They’re plugged into an automatic security system, too. That’s why we had the house rewired. If you try to open one of those doors, or even to unlock it, without neutralizing the security system first, you will set off the alarms.”

  “Is the security system ever off?” Gregor asked her. “Are those doors ever unlocked?”

  “During the daytime, yes, Mr. Demarkian. But we lock up here at six o’clock. Before six o’clock, this house is a very busy place indeed. Do you really think Mr. Bollander could have come in through one of these four doors and wandered around for I don’t know how long—or even just walked down one of these corridors. These are the main arteries of the house. Before six o’clock they would have been full of people.”

  “This one isn’t full of people,” Gregor pointed out. “Not now.”

  Reverend Mother General made a short jabbing gesture with her hand, impatient. “That’s because I’ve got everybody up front, trying to keep them busy enough so they don’t brood. On a normal day the room across the hall from this one would have had Raphael and John Damascene in it, packaging catechisms to be sent out to our outreach missions. And three doors down you would have had Sister Clare, answering letters about the beatification and sending out brochures to girls who have expressed interest in joining the order.”

  “What about the other doors?” Gregor asked. “There was a door off that hall that led outside.”

  “Yes, there was. And there are four of them, too, in the corners on the outside perimeter of the center of the cross. And yes, they’re unlocked and not connected to the alarms in the daytime. But it is the daytime, Mr. Demarkian. And those door
s are locked just like everything else at six. They’re on a central switch. That switch is in my office.”

  “Someone could have gotten into your office.”

  “True,” Reverend Mother General said. “They could have walked in any time they liked. That is never locked. They couldn’t have tampered with the switch, however, because to work it you have to have the key, and the only key there is in this house is right here on my key ring. It was there when I locked up last night. It was there when I unlocked this morning. It was hanging on my belt in my cell all last night and I know that perfectly well because I am a very light sleeper. Of course, there is an override.”

  “An override?”

  “On the front door there is a special lock that takes a special key that overrides the system, for emergencies. That key is also on my key ring. It has not left it.”

  “What about other people,” Gregor asked desperately. “You can’t have the only emergency—”

  “I don’t. The bank made us put the system in. We had some very bad vandalism in our chapel about three years ago and it played havoc with our insurance. They have a key. The security company has a key. That’s in case everybody loses theirs. Do you really think Mr. Bollander was killed by an employee of the security company—”

  “No,” Gregor said. This recital had been depressing, although not for the reasons Reverend Mother General had thought it was. She didn’t seem to realize that if nobody could have gotten in from the outside, suspicion would have to fall on one of her nuns. Especially because the first death had been one of her postulants. But Reverend Mother General was plowing remorselessly on, getting grim satisfaction out of every word.

  “Remember what I was telling you about the latitude Rome shows us in our Rules? Well, Mr. Demarkian, we’ve taken less advantage of it than some, but we have taken advantage of it. Before the changes, every nun’s day was regulated almost down to the second. We went to sleep together. We got up together. We went to chapel together. We went to meals together. Well, we gave that up. We still do some things as a group. That’s why I said he could have been gotten in here this morning. We would have been in chapel en masse, for Mass and Divine Office. It’s the only time of day we are together en masse at all anymore. At any other hour, and that includes four in the morning and during Compline, there are always one or two Sisters doing something on their own, taking care of emergencies, just getting extra work done. With the beatification and the Cardinal coming for St. Patrick’s Day and the murder—the first murder—there’s been a lot of extra work to get done. So, Mr. Demarkian, it’s just possible that if Don Bollander entered this house through the front door on his own two feet last night, he could have been careful enough so that we didn’t see him. But trust me, he wasn’t carted around this house dead as a doornail and dumped in the utility room and he didn’t come in through any of the side doors. The alarms would have gone off and whoever was carting him around would have been caught in the act. There were a lot of Sisters awake last night. We were having a Forty Hours Devotion in the chapel.”

  Four

  [1]

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN DIDN’T BELIEVE in locked-room mysteries. He didn’t believe in poisons that leave no trace, identical twins who successfully switch identities, or the silent menace that walks the dark, either. Back on Cavanaugh Street, Bennis Hannaford fed him detective stories the way some mothers feed their children hard candies, as a pacifier. Sometimes she hits a real clinker, a resurrected unknown “classic” of the thirties. Gregor always ended up wondering what those authors had been thinking of. Mothers who didn’t know their own children. Brothers who didn’t know their own sisters. And locked rooms. Always locked rooms. There was a man, John Dickson Carr, who specialized in locked rooms. It made Gregor feel a little better about being called “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” If there was one thing Mrs. Christie had had the good sense never to indulge in, it was locked rooms.

  No matter how he felt about it, though, what he seemed to have was a locked room. He went over and over it with Reverend Mother. He established the obvious. Either Don Bollander was dead at the time he arrived at St. Mary of the Hill, which meant he would have to have come in by the outside door in the hall where the utility room was. If he had come in at any other place he and his murderer—or he and his transporter—would most likely have been discovered. Besides, there were dozens of other hiding places for a body on the first floor of the Motherhouse. There were room closets and storage bins, ordinary closets, and half-filled packing crates stuck in out-of-the-way rooms. The only sensible reason for Bollander to have ended up in the laundry sink was that it was convenient, and the only thing it was convenient to—assuming someone was carting around a corpse—was that door.

  If Don Bollander had been alive when he came to St. Mary of the Hill, he could have come in almost anywhere, although the two best bets would have been the same (impossible) side door from the first scenario or the front door. Most of the other side doors opened onto staircases that opened onto dormitory floors at least on the second story. The front door had the advantage of having access to a wide variety of corridors all at once. It would still have been risky, creeping through the Motherhouse halls in the dead of night, but as an explanation it was more likely than the one Reverend Mother favored, which was that Bollander, dead or alive, had arrived around six o’clock this morning. Gregor didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe Bollander had been moved to the Motherhouse after his death. He had only been able to examine small stretches of bare skin—it wouldn’t have been polite, or politic, to start ripping away at the man’s clothes—he hadn’t seen the kind of markings he would have needed to believe that. Then, too, both the visible skin and the clothes were too clean. If a corpse had been carried all over hell and gone, there should be something on it that would look out of place if that corpse came back to life and started back working in his office. As for Reverend Mother’s favorite scenario, Gregor knew it was absurd. The body could not have arrived alive at St. Mary of the Hill at six o’clock this morning and been in the state of rigor in which they found it at eleven. It could not have arrived already in rigor and been stuffed in the laundry sink without something breaking. Gregor had watched Pete Donovan’s men pull Bollander out, and they were the ones who’d had to do the breaking. And that meant—

  Gregor didn’t know what that meant. He supposed that—barring some real absurdity like a secret plot being carried out by an employee of the company that had installed the security locks—it meant he was stuck with a locked-room murder whether he liked it or not. It made his head reel. It put him in a particularly bad mood. Murderers were logical, he’d told Pete Donovan earlier. Well, Gregor Demarkian was logical, too. He didn’t like Alice in Wonderland cases. He didn’t like to be confused. Most of all, he didn’t like to feel as if he were missing something very blatant and very simple—which was exactly what he did feel like.

  In the end, he looked Reverend Mother over once or twice—she was launched on a discourse on the depredations of religious superiors in the United States since the close of Vatican II—and made up his mind to strike out on his own. It might be hours before Pete Donovan and his men were finished, or minutes, but Gregor didn’t care. He wanted to get out in the air and think for himself. When Sister Scholastica passed the plans room for the fourth or fifth time, he stopped her and asked for his coat. When she brought his coat he thanked her, shrugged it on and said, “Well, Reverend Mother, it’s been very interesting talking with you. I have to thank you for your cooperation.”

  “I wasn’t cooperating,” Reverend Mother said. “I was monopolizing the discussion.”

  Actually, she hadn’t been. Gregor had asked too many questions for that. He smiled at her anyway, thanked her again, and asked to be directed to the front door.

  [2]

  It was a clear day but a frigid one, a deceptive day offering sunshine but no warmth. Gregor set out through the propped-open leaves of the Motherhouse’s wrought-iron gate
with half a purpose in mind. The Cardinal had shown him a map of Maryville that seemed to indicate that the street that dead-ended at the Motherhouse gate on this end dead-ended at the library on the other. In between was practically everything of importance in town, except Sam Harrigan’s house and the town’s minuscule barrio. This was the walk Brigit Ann Reilly had taken on the day she died and on every day before that for two months, excepting Sundays. Gregor wanted to walk it himself, at least as far as his hotel, which so far he hadn’t seen. After leaving Gregor off at the Motherhouse gate, the Cardinal’s driver had been deputed to drop his luggage at the St. Mary’s Inn. According to the Cardinal, the inn was on the corner of Delaney and Londonderry streets, “right across from the bank.” Whether that made its location a good one or a bad one, Gregor didn’t know. He had his mind on other things. What he definitely did not have it on was locked-room mysteries, but before he left the Motherhouse he checked out the front door lock anyway. It was just as Reverend Mother General said it was. There were a series of dead bolts that seemed to have nothing with which they could be closed. There was a conventional lock under the doorknob and a much smaller one higher up. Gregor recognized the brand name etched into its polished brass front and was impressed. The security company had given the Sisters a top-of-the-line job. He wondered whose doing that was, the Cardinal’s or the bank’s. He supposed it might have been both.

  Whosever it was, contemplation of it was definitely not good for Gregor’s mood. That lock was just one more argument in favor of a locked-room puzzle and against Gregor’s most fervently held conviction, which was that the whole thing was going to turn out to have been a mistake, or gross stupidity on his part. He got himself away from it by moving as quickly as possible into town. He wanted to get a feel for Maryville. He wanted to feel what Brigit Ann Reilly had felt. He could get to Don Bollander later.