by Jane Haddam
“I don’t know if that’s good news or bad,” the Cardinal said. “I suppose it means I should never say anything compromising over a cell phone.”
“Excuse me?”
“If I have a recognizable voice.”
“Oh.” Dan blinked. “I’m sorry, Your Eminence. I’m very tired at the moment.”
“Yes, I would expect. I shouldn’t think any of us slept very well last night. Has there been any damage done to your church?”
“Physical damage, you mean? Not a thing. They didn’t even knock over the gate, and they’ve done that a couple of times before.”
“There have been riots a couple of times before?”
“No, no,” Dan said. “Not riots. Just demonstrations. That’s what Roy and his people do. They demonstrate. They picket AIDS funerals.”
“Yes, I’ve heard.”
“We have a fair number of AIDS funerals here,” Dan said. “Although not as many as a few years ago, thank God. Sometimes they picket if they think one of the gay men is acting as reader. Sometimes they picket just because they don’t have anything else to do. I don’t know, your Eminence. They’re a fact of life around here.”
There was the sound of papers shuffling on the other end of the line. Two men had come into the body of the church with rags and spray cans of Pledge and started to polish the pews.
“I wanted you to know,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “that I’ve spoken to Father Healy, and the pray-in for the conversion of homosexuals has been canceled. Under the circumstances, it seemed to be the only responsible course of action. I didn’t want there to be even the possibility that something we did could set off Mr. Phipps and his, uh, parishioners.”
“That’s good,” Dan said. “I’m glad to hear it. Was that what you called about?”
There was the sound of papers shuffling again. Dan wondered if this were nervousness, or if the Cardinal meant for him to get the impression that whatever the object of this call was, it was official enough to require being written down like a script.
“No,” the Cardinal said finally. “If it had been just that, I wouldn’t have bothered you on what I knew to be a very bad day. I’m calling to ask for a meeting.”
“What?”
“I’m calling to ask for a meeting,” the Cardinal said again. “I would like the two of us to sit down and talk. In private. At a time and place comfortable enough for the both of us that we would not be constrained for time.”
“But—why?” Dan said. Then he blushed, even though the Cardinal couldn’t see him. He’d sounded like a ten-year-old, or worse. He’d sounded like an overemoting actress in a soap opera whose plot was headed for a major crisis. “Excuse me, Your Eminence. I’m sorry. It’s just that—”
“It’s just that this is highly irregular. Yes. I realize that. Tell me, there was nobody left dead last night, so I suppose your people are all right on that score, but what about serious injuries. Wasn’t one of your parishioners seriously injured?”
“A couple of them were.”
“And aren’t you going to have a service, a Mass, a memorial, to pray for those who were injured?”
“Well, yes,” Dan said. “We’re doing a couple of things, really. A small one tonight. And then the day after tomorrow, we’re going to do something more formal, invite the families, that kind of thing—”
“Yes, of course. We would do something like that, too, in similar circumstances. That’s what I want to talk about. The larger service you intend to hold. Do you think you could come here for dinner this evening? Is that convenient for you?”
“Dinner,” Dan said.
“We could make it later in the evening,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “or, of course, I could come to you, or we could meet on neutral ground. The problem is that it’s almost impossible for me to travel in privacy. I’ve got too many people watching me. And if we met in a restaurant, half the city of Philadelphia would know within the hour. Of course, if you’d rather not come here, I’d be more than willing—”
“No,” Dan said. The two men who were polishing the pews were nearly obsessive about it. They polished and repolished. They were going to take all night. “No,” Dan said again. “It’s not that, it’s tonight. We’ve got something on tonight. Could it be tomorrow or—”
“I’d rather it be sooner than later. How about four this afternoon?”
There was really no reason why he should not go at four that afternoon. There was only the fact that the very idea of it made him tired.
“Four would be fine,” he heard himself saying.
“Excellent,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “Would you like me to send my car?”
“Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?” Dan said. “Your car isn’t exactly any more anonymous than you are.”
“I could send a different car. Let me do that. You sound ready to drop. Would you like to be picked up at your rectory or your office?”
“The office,” Dan said.
“Wonderful. Thank you very much, Father Burdock. I’m very sorry about that nastiness you were forced to endure last night. Let’s hope that Mr. Phipps is chastened enough by his arrest to lie a little low for the next few weeks.”
“He isn’t.”
“The car will be there promptly at three-forty-five. I’m looking forward to seeing you.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing you, too, Your Eminence,” Dan said, but the phone had gone to dial tone in his hand. There was nobody at the other end of the line. Dan flicked the switch that turned the cell phone off, folded it up, and put it in his pocket. Then he looked at his roll of soft mints, still in his other hand, and put those in his pocket, too.
He couldn’t see the Cardinal Archbishop for dinner because he was leading a service here. He didn’t want to see the Cardinal Archbishop at four o’clock because—why? Because, Dan thought, there had been a tone in that man’s voice as dangerous as any he had ever heard in Roy Phipps’s.
He leaned over the balcony rail, meaning to call down to the two polishers in the pews, and then thought better of it. They were all doing odd, obsessive things today. It wouldn’t hurt the pews to have them polished. He straightened up and headed back to the stairs.
Maybe he could take an hour and sack out in his living room, so that he wouldn’t show up at the chancery so whacked-out he was walking into walls.
FOUR
1
Gregor Demarkian couldn’t decide if he liked fax machines or not. They were one of the few of the new machines he had no real trouble with—although lately, being around Bennis as much as he was, he had become far more relaxed on the computer. They also had the virtue of being able to get him large amounts of material in a very short time without the waste or expense of traveling through the city. Garry Mansfield and Lou Emiliani hadn’t bothered to make him get into a cab, or to make their department pay a messenger. They had both just got on their fax machines and sent him everything they had, reams and reams of it, so that, by late in the morning, he had found himself surrounded by flimsy paper: toxicology reports, search reports, interview transcripts, expert advice. What worried Gregor was that, having supplied him with all this information, Garry and Lou would now expect him to make something of it. It certainly seemed as if there ought to be enough to make something of something. At the very least, he ought to have a clue. Instead, he was just as bewildered as he had ever been, and the information that was now coming in about the death of Sister Harriet Garrity wasn’t making things any clearer. All three victims had eaten arsenic. None of them had eaten anything else in common, at least in the period for which the autopsy would be valid—although that wasn’t as sure as it could be. It didn’t take much arsenic to kill a person. If they had ingested it in something very small, like a gel-cap pill, the elements might not always show up in the autopsy reports. All of them had known the same people, more or less, or at least been in close proximity to them, and all of them had been connected, to one extent or the other, to the archd
iocesan priest-pedophilia scandal. Beyond that, he had nothing. The police had nothing. Maybe there was nothing to be had. He was being asked to come to a logical solution to a series of crimes that amounted to ducks being shot off a conveyer belt at the marksmanship booth at a carnival.
The taxi pulled up in front of St. Anselm’s side gate. Gregor got out, paid the fare, dropped a better tip than he should have in the front seat, and looked around. He couldn’t see the main street from there, but St. Stephen’s looked calm enough, if a little busier than it had the first time he had been there. He went through the gate and around the back of the church to the parking lot and the convent. The offices were still sealed, and would be for three days, in case the police suddenly found they needed to investigate something they hadn’t thought of before. A uniformed policeman was standing on the convent steps, looking cold.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said, when Gregor walked up. “They’re in there. In the front room. The, uh, the parlor.”
“Thank you,” Gregor said.
The patrolman looked uncomfortable. “You figure this is okay?” he asked. “With the Church, I mean. It’s okay to question the nuns?”
“Of course it’s okay to question the nuns,” Gregor said.
“I guess.” The patrolman stepped out of the way so that Gregor could get through to the door.
Gregor didn’t bother to ask if he were Catholic. Of course he was Catholic. Gregor let himself in the front door and headed for the parlor, easily visible a few steps to his left.
Garry and Lou were there, sitting uncomfortably at the edge of a couch. Lou, at least, was also Catholic. Sister Scholastica was there, too, which Gregor had not expected, and as he came in he raised his eyebrows at her.
“It’s the rule of the order,” she said, standing up to take his coat. Garry and Lou practically leaped to their feet. Gregor revised his estimate. Garry Mansfield, too, was probably Catholic. He looked at the other nun, the very young one, and nodded.
“This is Sister Peter Rose,” Scholastica said. “The order says none of us can be alone with a layman or even with a priest, except for Confession or spiritual counseling. And that’s man, not in the generic sense. If you know what I mean. Actually, if the police department insisted, we’d oblige. But they didn’t insist, so …”
“No, no, no,” Lou said. “It’s perfectly all right, Sister. We understand.”
Sister Scholastica put Gregor’s coat on a coat tree and sat down again. Lou Emiliani sat down, too. Garry remained standing. Sister Peter Rose looked up, and said, “We met, you know. In Colchester. When all that happened. I’d just taken tertiary vows. Sister thought I was a flake.”
“I never said you were a flake,” Scholastica said.
“You never said it,” Peter Rose said. Then she turned to Gregor again. “It’s true, you know. I am a flake, at least a little bit. I should have realized she was up to something. Even Thomasetta noticed there was something very odd. It just never occurred to me.”
“Thomasetta?” Gregor said.
“You met her last night,” Garry said. “Older nun. She was on duty in the main office when Sister Harriet first came looking for Sister Scholastica.”
“I remember,” Gregor said.
“The thing is,” Sister Peter Rose said, “it didn’t make sense, not really. I mean, Sister Harriet never came looking for Sister Scholastica. She phoned up and demanded that Sister come visit her. If you know what I mean. She was just so—she thought that we were all terrible for wearing habits, that was one thing. And she wanted everybody to know she had an important position in the parish, as parish coordinator, and that she wasn’t just another parochial-school nun. Although what’s more important in the life of a parish than running the school, I don’t know. Oh. Except for celebrating the Eucharist, of course.”
“Of course,” Gregor said. “And you—you work in the office?”
“Oh, no, not usually,” Sister Peter Rose said. “I teach second grade. And I serve as vice principal, you know, which means I’m supposed to mete out the discipline when it’s necessary, but I’m not very good at that—”
“She’s a marshmallow,” Sister Scholastica said.
Sister Peter Rose blushed. “I’m a marshmallow. It’s true. And most of the kids who get sent to me are just boys who have too much energy, and they’re bored. It’s terrible what we do to boys, trying to make them sit still in a classroom for six hours a day.”
“But you were in the office yesterday,” Gregor said.
“Yes,” Peter Rose agreed. “I was. It’s First Communion, you see. They’re all going to make their First Communions right after Easter. And they had practice—”
“Practice?” Gregor said.
“How to walk in lines and how to kneel the right way and that kind of thing,” Peter Rose said. “And, you know, singing. Only, Mrs. Giametti was doing the practice. She’s the head of our CCD—”
“CCD?” Gregor asked.
“Confraternity of Christian Doctrine,” Scholastica said. “A fancy name for catechism for children in public schools.”
“The public-school children and the St. Anselm’s children are all going to make their First Holy Communions together,” Peter Rose said, “and Angelina—Mrs. Giametti—wanted to drill our children so that she was sure they’d all be in sync when the time came. So I sent them over to the church with her, and I came over to my office to get some paperwork done. Did I tell you that the vice principal has an office?”
“I think he would have expected that,” Scholastica said.
“Yes, well.” Peter Rose blushed. “Anyway, I was there. When she came in. And she was looking for Scholastica.”
“She told you she was looking for Scholastica?” Gregor asked.
“No, she didn’t tell me anything at all. I don’t think she ever saw me. She went right past my door without saying hello.”
“Then how do you know she was looking for Scholastica?”
“She asked Thomasetta,” Sister Peter Rose said. “Thomasetta didn’t like her much. And she didn’t like Thomasetta much. You know how it is. But she asked Thomasetta, and Thomasetta told her that Scholastica was out.”
“This was when?” Gregor asked.
“About ten-thirty.”
“What did she do then?” Gregor asked. “Did she leave? Did she ask questions?”
“Thomasetta said something about where Scholastica was and where she had been, and then Sister Harriet walked down the hall and passed me again. And then she must have gone into Scholastica’s office—”
“Must have?” Gregor shook his head. “You mean you didn’t see her?”
“No,” Peter Rose admitted, “but I didn’t really have to see her. There are only two places to be down on that end of the hall. Either she went into Scholastica’s office, or she went out the fire door and down the stairs.”
“Why are you so sure she didn’t go out the fire door?”
“Because it screams like a banshee,” Scholastica said. “We have it oiled and oiled, but nothing seems to work. The hinge probably ought to be replaced.”
“So, the hinge didn’t scream,” Gregor said. “How do you know she didn’t just stand in the hall for a while?”
“I don’t,” Peter Rose said. “But it doesn’t make any sense, does it? Why would she just stand there, not even moving. And besides—”
“Besides?” Gregor cocked his head.
“She was in there fifteen minutes later,” Peter Rose said. “She must have been. Nobody came in from that end, because I would have heard the hinge. And nobody came in and down the hall from the other end, because they would have had to pass me. But Mary McAllister came in at just about quarter of, and she wanted to put some things on Scholastica’s desk, and when she went down to the office, the door was locked.”
“I never lock my door,” Scholastica said. “None of us do, except sometimes by accident, because there’s no point to it.”
“There are duplicate keys all ove
r the place,” Peter Rose said. “And don’t say it’s possible that Scholastica locked the door herself by accident, because it was open when I came back that morning and it was open not five minutes before the first time I saw Harriet in the hall. I saw it coming back from the bathroom.”
“But you’re sure it was locked from the inside?” Gregor said.
Scholastica shook her head. “Inside, outside, it doesn’t matter. The keys work regardless.”
“Why didn’t somebody use the key to get in so that—”
“Mary McAllister,” Lou Emiliani said.
“Mary McAllister,” Gregor repeated. “Why didn’t somebody use a duplicate key to get in when Mary McAllister wanted to leave the things on Scholastica’s desk? What things, by the way?”
“Some papers about the food drive. Mary works with a homeless shelter downtown, and she does food distribution here. Our parochial-school kids collect canned goods and nonperishables. Sometimes, there’s a special call—for peanut butter, for kidney beans, for cranberry sauce. Things that are especially needed or that somebody wants. Mary had the special-needs schedules for next month.”
“And she took them away with her?” Gregor asked.
“She just went down to the main office and put them in Scholastica’s box,” Peter Rose said. “She didn’t want to take the time for Thomasetta to go find the key and open up. Except, you know, that she was bothered by it. The locked room. She was, and I wasn’t. And she didn’t really have any reason to think there was something wrong. I should have known right then that Harriet must have been inside. It just didn’t occur to me.”
Gregor stood up and began to pace, but very slowly. It was hard to move, because the room was small and too full of furniture. “So what you’re saying,” he said finally, “is that Sister Harriet Garrity went into Sister Scholastica’s office at ten-thirty yesterday morning and locked the door behind her. Why?”
