Great Day for the Deadly

by Jane Haddam

  Whether any of this made any sense, he never knew. The only feel he got from Maryville concerned its commitment to St. Patrick’s Day and its own Irish-American heritage, which was extreme but rather endearing. He passed a cluster of buildings calling themselves St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church and St. Ignatius Loyola Parochial School and marveled at the variety and extent of the decorations scattered through the branches of their trees and across their doors and windows. He passed a hole-in-the-wall store whose narrow plate glass window was so crowded it was impossible to see through it to the room inside. It had gold letters painted across it that said, MARYVILLE CATHOLIC CENTER. RELIGIOUS ARTICLES. It had a hundred tiny green-and-white shamrocks growing like mad vines into every available space. Gregor thought it was all very nice, but he couldn’t see what good it was doing him. Irish pride and bitter cold. It seemed like a strange combination.

  He was just about to give it up, find a phone booth and call a taxi, when the doors of one of the stores he was passing opened and a small man stepped out. The man was elderly but not ancient and very sharp. Gregor picked that up from the man’s eyes behind his thick glasses. He was also wearing nothing to protect himself from the cold, as if he were just coming out to do something that wouldn’t take much time and would be going right back in again. Gregor couldn’t imagine what that would be. He couldn’t imagine how the man was able to stand in the wind like that without shivering, either.

  Gregor was stretching his mouth into a quick perfunctory smile and getting ready to pass by—not only was that the right thing to do but he didn’t like looking at this man; it made him feel as if frostbite might be contagious—when the man stepped forward, rearranged his glasses, touched Gregor on the arm and frowned.

  “Excuse me,” he said, as Gregor stopped dead in his tracks, startled. “Are you that man I saw on TV? The one the Cardinal sent out to find whoever killed Brigit?”

  Gregor had made it a point never to answer questions like this directly, at least when they were put to him by people he’d never seen before who’d accosted him in the street. Today, he forgot all about that. He was that surprised.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”

  “Gregor Demarkian,” the man repeated. “I’m Jack O’Brien.”

  For a second, Gregor thought the name Jack O’Brien was familiar only because it was so common. There had to be thousands of Jack O’Briens across the United States. There had been three in the Federal Bureau of Investigation alone during Gregor’s time there. Then he remembered: Jack O’Brien was one of the names on the Cardinal’s list. He was one of the people who had seen Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died. In fact, he was the first. Gregor took the hand Jack O’Brien was holding out to him and shook it.

  “We could go in the store,” Jack O’Brien said, “if you’ve got a minute.”

  “I’ve got a minute,” Gregor said.

  “Good,” O’Brien said. “It’s getting cold out here.”

  [3]

  The store, as Jack O’Brien called it, turned out to be an old-fashioned shoe store. The left half of it was taken up with displays of solid-looking work boots and excruciatingly stiff wing-tip formals. The right half of it held seats and supplies like laces and removable inner soles. At the back, behind a half-wall with a counter nailed to its top, was where the real money was made: the cobbler’s machine shop with its black oily equipment and uneasy air of being covered with fine leather dust. The equipment looked well used and permanently settled in. It was part of what gave the shop the air of having been here “forever.” The other part of that was the plate glass window at the front. It said O’BRIEN’S in large black letters, but nothing else. If you didn’t already know what this shop did, you weren’t going to learn it on a quick pass through town in your car.

  There was an electric percolator plugged into the wall near what Gregor thought might be the lathe—he really wasn’t very good at machines—and as soon as they came in from the cold, O’Brien headed straight for it.

  “You want some coffee?” he asked, while he was in the midst of pouring a cup.

  Gregor said yes, even though the coffee looked black and muddy and suspiciously like Father Tibor’s. He was cold.

  “I had intended to come down here and talk to you,” Gregor said. “You were one of the people on my list.”

  “Because I’d seen Brigit that morning?” O’Brien brought the cups—white plastic foam cups, the kind that imparted to coffee a taste all their own—and handed one to Gregor. “There’s really not much of anything in that,” he said. “I saw Brigit every day except Sunday. That day was no different from any other.”

  Gregor took a sip of his coffee. It was exactly like Father Tibor’s, and undrinkable. He sat down in one of the chairs set out for shoe-buying customers and put the cup on the floor beside his legs.

  “Are you sure?” he said. “I was talking to Sister Scholastica and she mentioned something about Brigit having been—strange, most of that week.”

  “Not strange,” O’Brien said. “Brigit was having one of her het-ups, that was all.”

  “Het-ups?”

  “Brigit got excited about people,” O’Brien explained. “Especially people who were different than she was. I guess she must have grown up in one of those suburbs where everybody is supposed to be alike. I’ve never been to a place like that myself. But I heard her talking about me to that Neila Connelly once and she said, ‘He’s so wonderful. I never knew old people could be so wonderful.’”

  “It must have been nice to be called wonderful.”

  “It would have been nicer not to have been called old,” O’Brien said. “Anyway, it was like that. I could tell. She had somebody new she was excited about.”

  “Did she tell you who?”

  “Nope. I had a feeling it might be Sam Harrigan.”

  “Why Sam Harrigan?”

  Jack O’Brien took an enormous swig of coffee and got up to get some more. Gregor could only admire the strength of his stomach lining.

  “It was a couple of things,” O’Brien said. “First place, it had to be someone she looked up to and not someone her own age. I’d seen her get worked up with both kinds of people and the way she got worked up was different. With people her own age she got happy. With older people she got awed. You get the difference.”

  “I think so.”

  “Only other person I ever saw her that awed about was Reverend Mother General. Even Sister Scholastica came a bad second. Oh, well. Then there was all that stuff about the eye of the needle.”

  “What?”

  “You know,” O’Brien said. Having filled his coffee cup until it was nearly erupting from its plastic foam cell, he came back into the center of the room and sat down. “The camel passing through the eye of the needle. Father Fitzsimmons does that one every time he gets up to speak at the opening of parish fund-raising drives. Not that I’m in Father Fitzsimmons’s parish. He has Iggy Loy right up the street here. I live over on the other side of town.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “About rich people,” O’Brien said patiently. “There’s two ways to read that passage, and one is that it says that if you’re rich you can’t go to Heaven no matter what, and the other is that it’s another example of God’s being able to do what he wants to do. Anyway, lately Brigit was very intense about how the rich could really be noble souls, look at all the aristocratic people who had ended up as saints. I think that means that whoever it was she was in awe of was probably well heeled.”

  “And Sam Harrigan is well heeled?”

  “Sam’s about as rich as you get around these parts,” O’Brien said. “The only person who comes close is Miriam Bailey over at the bank, and maybe Josh. Josh is Miriam’s new husband. He doesn’t have a dime, but Brigit might not have known that. I don’t think Brigit knew much about anything.”

  “There isn’t anybody else?”

  “Who’s rich, you mean?” O’Brien was surprised.
“I guess there’s Father Doherty down at St. Andrew’s. I don’t think he’s rich now, but I know he used to be. Or maybe I should say his people were.”

  “Is he from around here?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” O’Brien said, “but he doesn’t have to be. Doherty Lumber, that’s where the Father’s from. His brother still runs the business. Comes up here once a year around Thanksgiving in a big black car and drives right through the slum down there in it, you know Father Doherty’s parishioners really like him because after the first year nobody has ever broken the brother’s windows. You know about St. Andrew’s?”

  Gregor knew about St. Andrew’s. That had been in the Cardinal’s report, too. The Cardinal could be faulted on some things, but not on the extent and precision of his knowledge of the parishes in his Archdiocese. “St. Andrew’s is the parish where Brigit Ann Reilly went to teach reading to adults,” Gregor said. “Is it a very bad slum? Is this Father Doherty some kind of martyr?”

  “Father Doherty is a doctor,” O’Brien said, “and for a slum it’s not too bad. Some drugs, some violence—but if you ask me, the drugs and the violence aren’t always the fault of the people who live there, if you know what I mean. Good, hardworking Catholic people from South America, most of them are. Half the time, there’s trouble down there, it’s the spoiled brats from the better parts of town who’re causing it.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. To his mind, Father Doherty fit O’Brien’s description of the kind of person Brigit would be in awe of—and Sister Scholastica’s, too—far better than Sam Harrigan. Father Doherty, after all, had Given It All Up to work with the poor. Gregor reached down, picked up his cup, and absentmindedly took another sip of Jack O’Brien’s coffee. The shock to his system was enough to keep him from ever doing anything absentmindedly again.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s all very interesting. It’s very hard to investigate these things when you haven’t known the victim. And you almost never have.”

  “Around here you would have,” Jack O’Brien said. “But that wasn’t what I called you in here to talk about. It was about something else, something you might have missed.”

  “What?” Gregor knew himself capable of missing a great deal, but he didn’t believe the Cardinal was capable of it. “The reports I got were very complete. I know they won’t be perfect until I’ve had a chance to look around for myself, but I still—”

  “The reports you got were from the Cardinal, weren’t they?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, the Cardinal’s a good man and a thorough one, but he knows us out here all too well. He’s made up his mind about what kind of people we are. He knows who he trusts and who he doesn’t.”

  “And?”

  Jack O’Brien finished off his second cup of coffee. “And he judges and he sifts and he brings in only the wheat, except this time he might have been mistaken about something. I don’t know that he was. I haven’t seen your reports. I just think that he might be. He tell you anything about a woman named Mrs. Barbara Keel?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said slowly. “She was with Glinda Daniels when Glinda Daniels found the body.”

  Jack O’Brien smiled. “And the Cardinal basically told you Barbara Keel was a nut, right?”

  “No,” Gregor said, glad he could be truthful about this. “Not exactly. Why? Did she see something when the body was found that might be important?”

  “Not when the body was found,” Jack O’Brien said, “earlier. At the Immigrants National Bank. You know the Immigrants National Bank?”

  “By reputation.”

  “Yeah, well, I know Barbara Keel. She’s a snoop and a gossip and more than a little of an airhead and she’s always been all three, but she doesn’t make things up. She was in the bank before she went to the library—she volunteers at the library, puts away books—and it was a crazy day, the day before they ship the old money out to the Federal Reserve, you know about that?”

  “Yes. They exchange old and damaged bills for new ones and the old ones are sent somewhere to be burned.”

  “Well,” Jack said, “from what Barbara says they were in the middle of getting ready for the transfer and they were setting up their decorations for St. Pat’s at the same time and she just happened to wander down a hall where she didn’t belong and knew she didn’t belong, but being dithery and old and a woman goes a long way. If she’d got caught, she’d just have said she was lost.”

  “She didn’t get caught?”

  “No, she didn’t. She did see something, though. Something I think you ought to know about.”

  “And you won’t tell me?”

  “I don’t think I should,” Jack O’Brien said. “It’s not my story and I might get some of it wrong. I’d definitely miss parts. Barbara’s got a right to tell it, do you know what I mean?”

  “You mean Barbara’s a very lonely woman.”

  “That, too.”

  Jack O’Brien got out of his chair and went to the electric percolator for the third time. Gregor saw and Gregor marveled. The man had to have something better than a stomach made of cast iron. He had to have a stomach that produced death rays that acted only on coffee.

  “You want to find Barbara Keel,” Jack O’Brien told him, “what you do is, you go talk to Glinda Daniels at the library.”

  Jack O’Brien said this quite seriously, as if Glinda Daniels were the last person Gregor was likely to see.

  [4]

  Half an hour later, having been drawn into an extended discussion of last year’s case in Colchester and the Cardinal Archbishop’s chances of being elected Pope, Gregor walked swiftly down the short stretch of Delaney Street that led to the intersection with Londonderry and stopped for the Don’t Walk light. On his right was the bank, an imposing building whose second-floor window boxes did indeed seem to be filled with hemlock. The dwarf plants were sharply green against the snow. Right in front of him, on the other side of the street, was a somewhat less imposing building with a discreet sign on its Londonderry side door that said, “St. Mary’s Inn.” It looked very much like a bed and breakfast he and Elizabeth had once stayed in while on vacation in Scotland. Gregor was in the midst of allowing himself to sink into that memory when a door on the side of the bank flew open and a woman came out, followed closely by a young man in Ralph Lauren jeans and four hundred dollars worth of blue cashmere sweater.

  “I don’t see what you’re so upset about,” the young man was saying, “you didn’t die. You didn’t even get sick.”

  “I could have died,” the woman told him. “I could have been a good deal more than sick. It was right there in my box of tea bags.”

  “It didn’t even look like a tea bag. You wouldn’t have been fooled.”

  “I might not have been looking.”

  “You’re not upset about this at all,” the young man said. “You’re not even upset about Don and for God’s sake, Miriam, the man’s dead. You’re just upset because I let Ann-Harriet drive the car.”

  “I’m never upset about Ann-Harriet,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t waste my time.”

  The Don’t Walk light had turned to Walk, but Gregor wasn’t paying any attention to it. The names he had just heard seemed to be still floating in the air. Ann-Harriet. Don. Miriam. The woman and the young man were heading up Londonderry Street away from him. As he watched, they turned to jaywalk across the middle of the block. He caught a better look at the woman then. She was tall and spare and old—in her sixties and looking it. So this was the famous Miriam Bailey, and that was her famous Josh. They weren’t the way Gregor had expected them, somehow. Maybe it was just that Gregor had known a number of old women who married much younger men, and those women had always been desperate, striving, insecure types. Miriam Bailey had been angry, not desperate, and she had been secure enough to be wearing her own face. Then there had been the last of the things she’d said—“I’m never upset about Ann-Harriet. I wouldn’t waste my time.” Ann-Harriet, Gregor assumed, was Josh M
alley’s fancy piece, as Scholastica had put it. If Miriam Bailey knew her name, she probably at least suspected the woman’s connection to her husband. And yet, hearing the words he’d heard, Gregor had believed them absolutely. Miriam Bailey was never upset about Ann-Harriet. She wouldn’t waste her time.

  Queer, Gregor thought. Almost as queer as what they were actually talking about, which had sounded very much like an attempt on Miriam Bailey’s life. This time, when the light changed to Walk, Gregor obeyed. He crossed the street with his hands in the pockets of his coat and his head bent against the wind, working it out. The wind in Maryville was pernicious. It seemed to come at you from every direction.

  The St. Mary’s Inn had a revolving glass door framed in bronze. Gregor pushed his way through it, walked up to the ornately carved antique registration desk and rang the hand bell positioned to the left of the lined guest book. Then he told himself that he would go upstairs, unpack, and lie down for a while. He’d even leave instructions that he was not to be disturbed. It would be time enough to get back to Pete Donovan when he’d had a little chance to rest.

  Rest, however, was something he was not destined to get. He rang the bell a second time because no one had appeared to help him. As soon as he had, a door behind the registration desk opened and a small plump woman with a head of frizzy gray hair hurried out. She headed toward him with the determined hostility of someone who was about to deliver a lecture on the evils of impatience, stopped halfway to him, and let her jaw drop open. A second later, she was squealing in a high, sharp wail that was exactly like a pig’s.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she was saying. “Oh, my goodness. Heavens to Betsy. I can’t believe this. It’s Gregor Demarkian himself.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said, alarmed. “It is—”

  “And I just hung up on her. I just can’t believe it.”

  “You just hung up on who?”