by Jane Haddam
“Of course it is,” Donovan said. “It’s easy to help those people. They work their butts off—”
“That’s hardly the point,” Gregor told him. “The point is, Brigit didn’t meet only poor people at St. Andrew’s. She met rich and exotic ones, too. She met Miriam Bailey, for instance, because Miriam and the bank funded a lot of programs and Miriam liked to keep an eye on them. She met Ann-Harriet Severan and Don Bollander, because Miriam Bailey insisted on her employees’ involvement in charitable work. She met Father Michael Doherty, the ultimate sentimental hero, a man who had left a rich family to live with the poor. If Father Doherty hadn’t been so conscientious, Brigit Ann Reilly might never have died. Her first inclination, I think, was to develop a roaring crush on him.”
“Father Doherty would never have put up with that sort of thing,” Donovan said.
“He didn’t. He told me about it earlier this afternoon. Brigit got silly, Father Doherty got stern. As I said, in a way it was too bad, because Brigit didn’t just give up her romantic fantasies, she transferred them. And this time she transferred them to the wrong person.”
“I’d say that was putting it mildly.”
“Mmm, yes. Well. This person had a problem she had not been able to solve. She wanted to steal a great deal of money from the bank and she’d more or less figured out how to do it, but it had a couple of snags. What she wanted was to go into the vault on the day the old-new money transfer occurred and take not the old money—as I told you before, that would be too quickly discovered—but a large chunk of the new money. Not as large a chunk as you might think, by the way. She’d already been stealing the bank blind for close to two years. That money is probably salted away in the Cayman Islands. What she wanted now was about fifty or sixty thousand dollars, enough to get out of the country and lie low until she was sure nobody had discovered the bank accounts. She was going to get that information rather quickly because on the fifth of March, the bank auditors were going to come in. No fewer than three people mentioned that to me over the last two days—including John Cardinal O’Bannion. It went right past me.”
“Why shouldn’t it?” Pete Donovan said. “There’s been that S and L disaster. And there’s been rumbles about something just as bad in banking.”
“Yes, of course,” Gregor told him. “It’s in the atmosphere. Now, the problem was, no matter how well all this had been planned out, a bank audit was going to blow it and bank audits are not announced well in advance. She was lucky to get the month or so she got. In that time she had to get done the rest of what she needed to get done and she had to get out of the country. She didn’t have much time. Brigit Ann Reilly’s romantic infatuation with saving her soul came as a godsend. She had to get down to the vault and move a fair amount of money at a time when dozens of people would be around to see her go in and out. Fine. She wouldn’t go in and out. A nun would go in and out. A little makeup, a little care to keep her face turned away from people—if she’d had to come face-to-face with anyone who knew her, it wouldn’t have worked, but most of the people she ran into were absolute strangers. They saw a nun, generic. People don’t really look at nuns in habit, even modified habits. And of the two people who did know her and saw her in that habit, only one recognized her. The other one—and I’m talking about Don Bollander now—simply saw “a nun” and later convinced himself that he’d seen Brigit Ann Reilly.”
“Don always was a jerk,” Donovan said.
“Maybe so.” Gregor sighed. “What she did was, she told Brigit that she was thinking of devoting herself to the religious life, that she’d thought about it for a long time, that these days there were ways of doing that no matter what your life had been like. At any rate, she told Brigit something to make Brigit think that it would be a good idea to give her a chance to walk around in a habit for a day or two. She needed that habit on the morning of the day the money was exchanged and no later. She got Brigit to steal it for her and bring it down to an abandoned building on Diamond Place to hand it over in private. While Brigit was there, she fed her coniine—in tea or coffee or orange juice. I don’t know, but my guess would be tea. It’s easy to carry around a thermos of tea and it’s easy to distill coniine from hemlock in tea, too, if you know what you’re doing. This was at about ten thirty, by the way, before Sam Harrigan saw Brigit wandering around down there. My guess is that she—our murderer, not Brigit—wanted to be sure the coniine would do its work. The one thing she couldn’t have was Brigit telling Sister Scholastica or Reverend Mother General what she’d done, and there was no way to ensure that except to make Brigit dead. Brigit liked to keep secrets, but she was only capable of keeping them for so long. Anyway, my guess is that our murderer gave Brigit a few extra errands to do in the low-rent district, got her moving around a little. That helped the coniine to work faster—it wouldn’t have taken long with Brigit, but our murderer didn’t necessarily know that—anyway, it got Brigit’s blood moving and the coniine working as fast as possible, and it did something else. It muddied the waters unbelievably, because while Brigit was running around doing errands, our murderer was just running around. That was why you had so many ‘sightings’ after the body was found. That was suspicious on the face of it. Of course, you always get sightings and hysteria in small towns after particularly bizarre violence. The sort of people who report that kind of thing, though, are of a type. Here, you had bank officials, nuns, schoolteachers, doctors—you had everybody. And the only conclusion I was able to draw from that was that people had seen her, or had seen someone they later thought was her, someone in a habit. Because our friend did a little walking around on her own. She went up to Beckner near St. Andrew’s parish church. Father Doherty saw her, well enough to know she wasn’t Brigit but not well enough to know who she was—”
“Is that likely?” Donovan asked. “Father Doherty knows Ann-Harriet very well.”
Gregor rubbed the leg of his trousers. “If you’re not expecting to see a woman dressed up as a nun, you don’t see a woman dressed up as a nun, you see a nun. If you understand me. At any rate, the two of them went wandering all over the place. Finally, Brigit went up to the library, probably already feeling sick. Our murderer went back to the bank and down to the vault, picked up a few stacks of new bills, stashed them where they would be convenient and then went to fiddle with the computer again. She’s been doing a lot of fiddling with the computer. At any rate, at that point she was fine. All she had to do was spend a couple of days getting her frame in place—because she wanted someone else suspected of that theft, someone she hated—and then she was free to take off. By the time the bank auditors showed up on March fifth, she was going to be long gone. And then things started to go wrong.”
“Explain the snakes,” Donovan said. They were past the houses now and out on the open road. Gregor kept expecting to see airport lights, but he was always foiled by trees and hills. He shifted in his seat and wished that Donovan hadn’t picked up so much speed.
“The snakes,” Gregor told Donovan, “were her first piece of bad luck. The snakes belonged to Sam Harrigan and they’d gotten out of the caves he’d made for them. They were a little mixed up because of the false spring and logy. They ended up at the library, I’d say, purely by accident. Brigit ended up there because that was where she was going, and coming up from Diamond Place the shortest way to get there was from the back. By the time she reached the parking lot and the storeroom door—which was kept unlocked, by the way, because some of the staff used it to get to and from their cars—by the time she got there she was very sick indeed, probably staggering and close to dead. You ought to check through your sightings material to see if any of the people who live on that block made one. They might not have. They might have been at work or glued to the television set for the weather news, but it’s a chance.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Brigit went in through the storeroom door and collapsed,” Gregor said, “and her body was still warm, so the snakes swarmed over it, trying
to keep their own body heat up. Then Glinda opened the door, and found the body and the snakes, and with the media already in force in Maryville and the surrounding towns because of the flood, the thing became an instant sensation. That was exactly what she didn’t want. Brigit might still have been alive if Michael Doherty had been a less conscientious man, Don Bollander might still have been alive if there hadn’t been so much publicity about Brigit Ann Reilly’s death. The nuts would have come out of the woodwork no matter how Brigit died. A man like Don Bollander would have needed a solid inducement to get involved.”
“I don’t know,” Donovan said. “Bollander was—you know. He was a whisperer.”
“You mean he liked to pretend he was an insider,” Gregor said. “Yes. People have told me that. But I still say that an executive of a local bank doesn’t get mixed up in police business if he doesn’t absolutely have to. If Brigit had been found in an ordinary way and attracted little or no national press, Don Bollander either wouldn’t have said he saw her at all or wouldn’t have said so to so many people.”
“I still don’t see why Ann-Harriet had to kill him,” Donovan said. “Why not let him go on blithering like everybody else in town?”
“Our murderer couldn’t let him do that,” Gregor said, “because the times were wrong. Don Bollander saw his nun in the back hall at the bank at quarter to one that afternoon. Since he didn’t say otherwise, we have to assume that nun was on her feet and moving normally. Brigit couldn’t have been either at that point. She was unconscious and at least close to dead fifteen minutes later, and three blocks away. Eventually, somebody had to tumble to that. Eventually, I did.”
“So why did he end up in the convent?”
“Sleight of hand,” Gregor said firmly.
“What?”
“Sleight of hand,” Gregor repeated. “A couple of weeks ago, John Cardinal O’Bannion started to get very strange and pointed hate mail, postmarked at Maryville and hinting not so subtly at murder. Reverend Mother General got one, too, on the day we found Don Bollander’s body. She may have gotten more. Our murderer expected those letters to be reported, I think. Given the character of John Cardinal O’Bannion, she at least expected them to be mentioned. She didn’t realize how much of that kind of thing rolls into a Chancery. She didn’t understand that the hierarchy and even the nuns are very used to dealing with it in their own way. At any rate, she wanted attention focused on the convent and not on the bank for as long as possible, and there she was, stuck with Don Bollander, who had ‘bank’ written all over him. She did the only thing it made any sense to do. She fed him coniine at the bank—that was the easiest place to do it; they were both there; she had all her things there—and then she took him up to the Motherhouse and waited for him to die. She probably told him they were doing something for the Sisters. That’s not farfetched. The bank and its employees were always doing something for the Sisters, and the bank held the mortgage on the Motherhouse. There were business and charitable and personal reasons for the two of them to be there. I’ve been wondering if she didn’t tell Don Bollander they were hatching a surprise—a name day party for Reverend Mother General, maybe, or something else that had to be prepared for in secret. Given what I’ve heard of Don Bollander’s character, something like that would have been perfect.”
“Why’d she stuff him in a laundry sink?”
“Because it was there,” Gregor said. “It was convenient. It was probably close to where he collapsed.”
Donovan rubbed the side of his face, thinking it over. “What about this last one?” he said. “Why did she bother to do that? All this planning you’re talking about, this last one was bound to get us onto her. I mean, it couldn’t have helped.”
“Oh, it might have,” Gregor said, “if we hadn’t worked all of this out. Even if it couldn’t have helped under any circumstances, though, I think she would have done it anyway. It was her worst mistake. Hate is always a mistake. She had the frame all set up. She should have left it there.”
“Left it where?” Donovan asked.
“There’s something going on up ahead of us,” Gregor said. “I think that’s a state police officer.”
It was a state police officer. The road they were traveling on had given up its bends and curves over the last five miles or so. It now proclaimed itself to be Route 896 and lay flat and straight in a line to the arc lights of the airport. The state police car had been traveling just ahead of them on the two-lane blacktop, doing a leisurely pace. Gregor had noticed Pete Donovan growing frustrated and his fingers itching to get to the siren switch. Then the state police car had bucked, jumped, and taken off, its own siren screaming. Pete Donovan stared after it in amazement for a moment or two and hit the gas.
“Turn on the radio,” he said to Gregor, and they shot down the road. “I turned it off so I could hear the great detective give his explanation.”
“If you weren’t already chief of police, you could get fired for that,” Gregor shouted back.
He turned the radio on and heard the voice of Pete Donovan’s dispatcher, putting out a stream of letters and numbers that even Gregor found easy to translate, in spite of the fact that he had never been part of an investigation in Maryville before.
“They’ve got her,” he said.
“Either that or they’ve got some poor nun on her way to visit her sister in Akron, and there’s going to be hell to pay from the Cardinal.”
Actually, Gregor had never had any trouble of that kind from the Cardinal. There were a lot of things O’Bannion did and didn’t like—and a lot of areas where even Father Tibor Kasparian would have to admit that the Cardinal’s personality could stand improvement—but he was better than fair about the glitches that occurred whenever people tried to do a good job. Gregor pulled his seat belt a little tighter around his waist and wished for an airbag that came out of the glove compartment. Pete Donovan pushed his car up to eighty and then to eighty-five, and didn’t come close to catching up to the statey.
“There’s the gate,” he said, “here we go.”
It was a small airport. There was the one small parking lot and the three small runways. There was the one small waiting building with its one small baggage carousel. Gregor could see a pair of men in overalls pushing baggage through a flap in the wall of the building. He was paying no attention at all to the state police cars crowded together in a knot just beside him, or to the state police officers in their Smokey the Bear hats, or to the nun in abbreviated habit in the middle of them. Pete Donovan braked and cut his engine and jumped out, and Gregor jumped out after him. This was an interview he did not want to miss.
It was not, of course, an interview with Ann-Harriet Severan. Ann-Harriet Severan was not the woman with her hands in her pockets and her feet placed wide apart, looking like she was ready to bolt and make a foot-race run to the Canadian border.
Miriam Bailey was.
Five
[1]
TWENTY-FIVE MILES AWAY, back in the middle of Maryville, Father Michael Doherty was standing on the front steps of St. Mary of the Hill, ringing the doorbell and feeling inexpressibly tired. It was Saturday night and still early, but he had already been out to the county hospital twice. His head was full of the screaming of a woman whose child had just died from drinking a bottle of ammonia. The bottle of ammonia had been left under the main hall staircase by the janitor that served that woman’s apartment building and four others. The janitor drank and Michael Doherty had been trying to get him fired for the last four months. Sometimes it seemed to him that nothing was worth anything, that nothing he did ever did any good. Sometimes he felt he spent his time patching holes in a beach ball that sprung six more leaks every time he got one fixed. The analogy reminded him of the seminary, where it had been used to warn him about what would now be called “parish burnout.” For once in his life, Michael Doherty didn’t care if he was being trite. There were footsteps behind the door and then the sound of the elaborate ritual the Sisters had to go t
hrough to get the door opened from the inside without setting off the alarm. Michael sometimes joked to Reverend Mother that she ought to give him the security key, because it was a hundred times easier. The door opened and Sister Gabriel was standing there, smiling. She had checked him out in the peephole.
“I just came to use the chapel,” Michael Doherty said, stepping inside. “I’ll only be about half an hour. I need to get out of the fray for a little while.”
Sister Gabriel smiled and nodded. Michael Doherty did this every once in a while. They were used to him. He was used to them, too, and wouldn’t try to make them talk when he knew they weren’t supposed to. He followed Sister Gabriel down the hall to the center section and bid her good night as she turned to the right to go to her cell. He turned to the left and made his way to the chapel.
Usually, when Michael Doherty went to this chapel, he sat front and center so that he could look at the wall-size stained-glass window that had been given to the order by a benefactor in 1987. It was one of the most powerful depictions of the resurrection he had ever seen—not good art so much as effective art—and it always made him feel lifted up. Tonight, he moved instead to the side, where a large picture of the Blessed Margaret Finney had been set up under a small crucifix. He sat down in a pew at the front and rubbed at the little finger of his right hand. He had cut it trying to do something to save the child, grabbing for something on a tray, he couldn’t remember what. The cut was long and thin and hurt like Hell. He stretched out his legs and looked the Blessed Margaret Finney straight in the eye.
