Great Day for the Deadly

by Jane Haddam

  “Yes,” Gregor said, “I thought you were.”

  “Yeah,” Pete Donovan said. “Well, Ann-Harriet killed Miriam, stuffed her up there on that shelf by carrying her up a ladder and dumping her in a heap, doused the conservatory in kerosene and lit a match.”

  “Why the conservatory?”

  “Closest thing that would light. It’s got wood floors. The greenhouse has tile floors. Maybe she doused the body, too, to be safe. It’s a good plan, Demarkian, much better than I would have expected from Ann-Harriet. It has all the elements. If Josh hadn’t panicked and called us, the place would have burned down and the body would have been reduced to ash before we ever saw it. We’d never have been able to prove that Miriam hadn’t burned to death.”

  “Hmm,” Gregor said for the third time. Then he left Donovan’s side at the edge of the wall and advanced across the lawn in the direction of the fire. He supposed it was just possible that it had happened the way Donovan said it had, that she had killed and then transported the body up a high stepladder to that shelf. In fact, it must have. Gregor had worked the whole thing out over the last few hours, the who, what, when, where, how, and why. He knew he couldn’t be wrong, because there was no other possible explanation that fit all the facts. Even this fact—this body left in an inaccessible place to be destroyed—could be accounted for in no other way. Still, he was even more impressed with her than he had been. It couldn’t have been easy. She had more determination than any other murderer he had ever met.

  He got as close to the fire as he could, right up to the point where the heat began to make his face feel ready to blister. He was held back at that point by a frightened looking boy in a yellow slicker. The slicker had a shield with “Maryville Volunteer Fire Department” written into its borders.

  “Can’t go past here,” the boy said. “It’s dangerous.”

  “I won’t go past,” Gregor told him. “I was looking for someone who might have seen the body. Someone might be able to answer a few questions.”

  “I saw the body,” the boy said. His face went green and he turned away, to look at the flames. “Only for a minute, though. I threw up.”

  “Was it that bad?”

  The boy heaved. “It was the back of her legs,” he said. “She was all curled up there on her side with her legs sticking out into the room and they had bubbles on them. You could just see the bubbles. It was—”

  “Never mind,” Gregor said. “I know what it was. Do you know someone named Josh Malley?”

  “Oh. Oh, yes. I do.”

  “Is he around here somewhere?”

  “He’d be a good person to ask about the body,” the boy said. “He saw it before it was—before the heat got to it. I heard Pete Donovan tell my chief. I heard Pete Donovan tell my chief Miss Bailey was murdered, too.”

  “Does that make it worse,” Gregor asked him, “that she was murdered?”

  “Just so long as she was dead before the heat got to her.” The boy turned and looked around, into the arch lights, into the flame light. The lawn was becoming more and more of a mess by the minute. The hose trucks and the hooks and ladders were parked around to the other side. It had been easier to get them there, with no star-gazing wall to get in their way. The activity on this side was heavy even without them. The boy peered at one face after the other and shook his head.

  “I don’t see him,” he said. “He was talking to Pete Donovan for a while, though. And then he was talking to Harry Demos from the state police. He’ll be around here somewhere. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t mind anything as long as she was dead when the heat got to her,” the boy said again. “That’s all I could think of when I saw her, with those shoes with the high spiky heels and the heels were starting to melt it was so hot in there and then the skin—”

  “She was dead long before the heat got to her,” Gregor said.

  “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  There was what felt like a gust of hot wind but was instead a puff of heated air breaking through a window. Shouts went up from the other side of the house, followed by banging that must have been axes against wood. Gregor looked up to see that the conservatory had lost the integrity of its shape. There was nothing left of it now but charred broken rafters and fire. The rafters were black and growing smaller by the minute. The fire was triumphant and swelling. Gregor couldn’t see any stars in the sky at all anymore. Instead, even the puffs of breath that hung in the air every time he exhaled were tinged with red.

  He backed up away from the boy, and looked around. Pete Donovan was in the middle of a cluster of policemen, state and local, talking earnestly to a tall man in a Smokey the Bear hat and riding boots. Gregor had never understood why state police everywhere went in for riding boots. He walked over to the group and pulled at Donovan’s sleeve.

  “There’s one more thing I have to check out and then I think we’d better hurry,” he said. “I know this is the middle of nowhere, but I can’t believe we’ll have much time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Time to pick her up.”

  “What are you talking about?” Donovan demanded. “She isn’t going anyplace. Why would she bother? She thinks she’s got it made. Miriam dead, Josh ripe for the plucking, a ton of money in Bailey bank accounts or whatever it is that Josh inherits.”

  “We don’t know that he inherits anything,” Gregor said irritably. “And not one of these three people was killed because Ann-Harriet Severan wanted Miriam Bailey’s money.”

  “They weren’t.” Pete Donovan was stupefied. “Well tell me,” he exploded, “why were they killed? Why else could they have been killed? Do you think I’ve got two or three murderers running around town? Why kill Miriam Bailey at all if you aren’t after her money?”

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “Why kill Miriam Bailey at all? Brigit Ann Reilly was killed because she stole a postulant’s habit and brought it to a building down on Diamond Place to be picked up by someone she liked and trusted. She was killed on the day she was killed because that was the day the bank packaged up the old money to be sent to the Federal Reserve for new bills—”

  “You mean Ann-Harriet stole the old bills?”

  “If she had, Maryville would have been invaded by federal marshals long before now,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t old bills that were stolen. It was new ones. If you check the bank’s computer system I think you’ll find evidence of a fraud, a very small and confusing fraud, going back some months. That’s what would have been used to cover the missing cash, at least temporarily. It would have to be very temporarily.”

  “You’ve gotten yourself into the bank’s computer?” Donovan demanded. “How?”

  “I didn’t get myself into anything, Mr. Donovan. I’m extrapolating. You’ll find that fraud because it has to be there. Go looking for it. Don Bollander was killed because he saw what he thought was Brigit Ann Reilly wandering around in the bank a quarter of an hour before Brigit was found dead.”

  “Right,” Donovan said.

  “It’s a good thing we’re dealing with such monumental arrogance,” Gregor said. “If we weren’t, she’d have had time to get all the way out of the state by now. She might have had time to get out of the country. Do you know where Josh Malley is?”

  “Yes”

  “Good,” Gregor said, “let’s go talk to him. Just in case there’s even the slightest chance I might be wrong, let’s make absolutely sure.”

  Donovan looked like he was about to make a protest, stopped himself and turned. Then he marched into the crowd with no attempt whatsoever to make sure

  Gregor could keep up with him.

  [3]

  They found Josh Malley sitting by himself, alone and ignored and dressed only in a heavy sweater, against the end of the stone wall closest to the house. There was a lot of activity going on around him. Men and women walked in and out through the gap, carrying equipment and notebooks and talking to each other in loud voices
meant to carry through the shouts of firefighters still battling away at the house. They ignored Josh and Josh ignored them. Gregor thought he had never seen a more thoroughly dejected man, or a more ineffectual one. Josh at this meeting was just as Josh had been this afternoon outside the bank. Most of the boys who sold themselves for money—to men and women both—were psychopaths. They had neither scruples nor emotions and weren’t interested in acquiring either. Josh was just a floater, a perfectly harmless type but lacking in organization and purpose and especially in intelligence. He went from one thing to another without knowing why or where or what it all meant. If it turned out badly he was upset. If it turned out well, he was surprised. Gregor almost felt sorry for him.

  When Gregor and Donovan reached him, Josh looked up, blinked, and tried a smile. Then he slumped down again and shrugged.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’ve been sitting here for half an hour now and I still have absolutely nothing.”

  Pete Donovan cleared his throat. “Never mind what you have, for the moment,” he said, displaying what Gregor thought was a commendable lack of concern about what Josh Malley had actually meant. “Mr. Demarkian here wants to ask you a few questions. Mr. Demarkian is the man—”

  “I know who he is,” Josh said. “I was going to talk to him, but Miriam didn’t want me to. I was going to talk to him about how I saw Brigit down on the levy on the day of the flood.”

  “Did you?” Gregor asked him.

  “No.” Josh flushed. “I made it up. Because it made Miriam crazy when I said things like that. Miriam always hated publicity. And she was making me crazy lately. Watching me.”

  “From what I hear, you could have used watching,” Gregor said.

  “You mean because of Ann-Harriet?” Josh shrugged. “It’s the kind of thing Miriam got upset about. I never did understand why. I mean, sex is sex, you get my drift?”

  “No,” Pete Donovan said.

  “Talk to me about tonight,” Gregor said. “How did you happen to find the body? Somebody said the greenhouse was where you kept your animals. Were you going in to look at them?”

  “We only kept the animals in the greenhouse in the winter,” Josh said. “In the summer they had a place outside. The greenhouse got too warm. I wasn’t visiting the animals. I never do that at night.”

  “Then why were you there?” Gregor persisted.

  “Because I was asked to go,” Josh said. “We were supposed to go out to dinner, Miriam and I, and we came back from town and went puttering around doing our own stuff and then it got to be about four o’clock and I wanted to know what I was supposed to be doing. Maybe it was four thirty—”

  “It was close on five,” Donovan said.

  “He should know. He wears a watch.” Josh shrugged again. “If I called him at five, it probably was about four thirty. Anyway, I went wandering around, looking for Miriam and the house was empty because it’s Saturday night and the help all has the night off, they always have Saturday nights off, Miriam says in the old days you could get them where they would stay on duty for the weekends but now you can’t. Anyway, I went down to the kitchen and there was a note on the refrigerator saying she was in the greenhouse, if I wanted her I should look for her there.”

  “Did she often leave notes for you on the refrigerator?” Gregor asked.

  “All the time.”

  “Are you sure this note was from Miriam?”

  “Absolutely. I’d know her handwriting anywhere. Anyway. I found the note and then I started from the back of the house, and when I got there I found her. Just like that. She was just sort of scrunched up there on that shelf, out of reach, with her ass sticking into the air over my head. I wanted to get her down, but I couldn’t find the ladder we keep in there. It was just plain gone. And then I thought I shouldn’t get her down. She had to be dead, the way she was lying. The fact that she was there at all. She had to be dead and dumped there. I know you’re not supposed to touch anything. So I started to go call Donovan here. And that’s when I smelled it. The smoke.”

  “Just smoke?” Gregor asked. “Not kerosene?”

  Josh Malley thought about it. “Smoke and kerosene,” he said finally. “I was still in the greenhouse. You know that funny smell greenhouses get. That was all I could smell at first. And then there was the smoke and I went out into the conservatory to see what was going on and I smelled the kerosene. I told him about the kerosene when I called.” Josh jerked his head in Donovan’s direction.

  “Did you call immediately?” Gregor asked him. “Right then?”

  “Yes,” Josh said.

  “It was five oh one exactly,” Donovan said.

  “Fine.” Gregor didn’t wear a watch. He grabbed Donovan’s wrist and checked his instead. It was five twenty-two. “She was still here at five oh one,” he said, “that means she’s had twenty-one minutes to get where she wants to go. Is there a local airport?”

  “Yes, there is. Shuttle flights to New York City and into Canada.”

  “Exactly.” Gregor nodded. “That’s where we’re going to go. Go tell your state police people to put out an all-points for a nun.”

  Four

  [1]

  IT WAS CALLED MARYVILLE International Airport and it sat on the flats east of town, a meager collection of hangars and lights that never handled anything bigger than a twenty-passenger shuttle. The international came from its ties to Canada, which were both numerous and strong. Up here, there was a lot of traffic back and forth. Americans went to Canada for the entertainment. Canadians came to America to buy cigarettes at less than five dollars a pack. Gregor thought it was Canada that changed Pete Donovan’s mind about the urgency of what they were doing. At first, although he had made the calls and contacted the authorities Gregor asked him to, he was inclined to go about his part in this adventure with due deliberation. Waiting around for him to get into the car and get the motor started and stop talking to everybody north of Albany on his two-way radio drove Gregor to distraction. Then the dispatcher said something about how lonely she was this weekend, her son had gone off to spend some time with his girlfriend in Canada, and Pete Donovan said, “Shit.”

  “Excuse me,” Gregor asked him.

  They were still sitting in the driveway of Miriam Bailey’s Huntington Avenue house. The great arc of the drive was still clogged with police cars and fire engines. The drive behind Pete’s car was blessedly still clear, but not by much. The state police had sent for a mobile crime unit and it was pulled up half onto the drive’s center lawn. Pete Donovan gunned his engine, slammed his gears into reverse and hit the gas pedal—much harder, this time, than he had back on the road when he had been bringing Gregor in. The car kicked. The car skidded. The car steadied itself on the gravel of the drive and shot off onto the street. Moments later they were barreling into the center of town again, running red lights and causing havoc. Gregor closed his eyes and asked himself what he could have been thinking of, wishing for a chance to take part in a high-speed car chase. He didn’t know what they were chasing but they were certainly going at high speed. He didn’t like it a bit. Pete Donovan seemed to like it just fine, and after a while he did what Gregor had expected him to do at the beginning: he turned on his siren. Gregor had never been in a police car with the siren going before. The Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t have police cars with sirens, and the local police who sometimes called them in on serial murder and kidnapping cases didn’t invite them to go tearing over the countryside in black-and-whites with the whoopy whistle blasting. Gregor had had no idea that the damn things were so loud.

  “Can’t you turn that thing off?” he asked Pete Donovan.

  “Soon as we get out of town,” Donovan said. “Don’t want to cause a traffic accident.”

  “Why not? You’ve already caused three heart attacks.”

  “I want you to tell me the whole story from the beginning,” Donovan said. “Then I’m going to read you chapter and verse about what I’m going to do to you if you’re wro
ng.”

  “I can’t tell you anything with that noise going on over my head.”

  “That’s Delaney Street coming up,” Donovan said.

  That was, indeed, Delaney Street coming up. They jumped the red light and bolted into it, turned right up the hill toward the Motherhouse, and turned off to the right again onto a gentle fork. Commercial buildings began to shade into two-story hybrids and then into small houses with small yards, but the St. Patrick’s Day decorations didn’t shade into anything. Gregor saw all the same leprechauns, pots of gold, and shamrocks he had on Delaney and at the St. Mary’s Inn. Out here, some of the houses even had their lawns and porches decorated in a way that was more usual for Christmas. There were green and white lights and big fat leprechauns sitting on pots of gold and lit up from inside. Pete Donovan saw Gregor staring at it all and said, “They import ’em from the city. You can get anything from New York City.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  “Tell me a story,” Donovan said.

  Gregor pointed to the roof.

  Donovan leaned over to the dashboard and shut the siren off.

  [2]

  “So,” Gregor said a couple of minutes later, while they were winding their way through small and narrow roads that inevitably slowed them down. They weren’t as slowed as Gregor would have liked to be, but it wasn’t much use talking to Donovan about his driving. He wouldn’t listen. “So,” Gregor said again, “if you’re going to go back to the day the first of the murders happened—”

  “I like that day,” Donovan said.

  “Yes. Well. If you’re going to start there, you’ve got this. Brigit Ann Reilly was a girl who may or may not have had a vocation as a nun, but who very definitely had an avocation as a conspirator. She also had a strong sentimental streak. She was the kind of girl who liked stories about lost puppies saved from drowning and who imagined herself in the starring role in all the most affecting stories of the ancient saints. She had also been very sheltered, so that she knew very little of people who were not like herself. When the Sisters sent her down to work at St. Andrew’s, she had her eyes opened—but not just to poverty, the way the Sisters wanted her to be. St. Andrew’s is Maryville’s favorite local charity—”