Great Day for the Deadly (18 page)

“Do you know this name she keeps saying?” Gregor asked. “Don Bollander? Does that make any sense to you?”

“If you’re asking if I know who it is, I know who it is,” Donovan answered. “If you’re asking if it makes any sense, that’s something else again.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Mr. Donovan?” Neila Connelly said.

Both Gregor and Donovan turned around at once. In the few seconds since they’d left her, Neila Connelly had begun to return to life. Her eyes had grown brighter, although not exactly bright. Her back was straighter. Even the fabric of her black postulant’s dress seemed to have more spring in it. She was still scared out of her mind, but she was functioning.

Gregor and Donovan looked at each other, nodded to each other, and went back to the bench where Neila was still sitting.

“We were just giving you time to get your act together,” Donovan said. “This is Gregor Demarkian. He—”

“I know who he is,” Neila said. “I saw him on television last night, at the Cardinal’s press conference. Reverend Mother General made us watch.”

Gregor noted with some amusement that Neila Connelly thought it was perfectly natural that the Cardinal’s press conference was something she would have to be “made” to watch. Then he wondered why Reverend Mother General had made them watch it. To assure them that something serious was being done about the death of Brigit Ann Reilly? To frighten those of them who might have information into giving it up? Gregor had been in Reverend Mother General’s presence for less than a quarter of an hour, but he had taken his impressions. That was one formidable—and ferociously well organized—old lady.

On the bench, Neila Connelly was squirming and shifting. “I went to the infirmary to get an aspirin,” she told them. “I’ve been feeling terrible all day, hot and tired. Not bad enough to skip work but—bad. So I thought I’d get an aspirin and it would make me feel better.”

“Is that where you think you found this—where you think you found Don?” Pete Donovan asked.

Neila Connelly made a sharp impatient gesture in the air, so much like one of Father Tibor’s that Gregor was startled. Maybe it was a form of all-purpose ethnic sign language. Maybe Neila had picked it up from her cousins in Ireland or the oldest woman on her street.

“I don’t think I found Don Bollander,” she was saying, “and I don’t think I found a body, either. I know it was Don Bollander because I saw his face, and I know it was a body because I—I touched it.”

“In the infirmary?” Pete Donovan insisted.

Neila shook her head. “I didn’t do anything in the infirmary, really. Sister Hilga was already gone. I really am feeling bad today. Out of synch. The bell for chapel must have rung and I didn’t notice it. When I got to the infirmary it was empty and Sister Hilga was gone and we’re not allowed to take medication without permission, not even an aspirin. So I decided to come downstairs.”

“To go to chapel,” Gregor said, trying to get this strange sequence worked out. “If you were late for chapel than it stands to reason that once you realized it you must have gone to chapel.”

“That’s right.” Staring up at him, Neila’s eyes were large and round and green, beautiful eyes in a face that had nothing else beautiful in it. “They make a royal fuss around here when you’re late for things, especially prayers, because prayers are supposed to be the point. And I’m never late, so when I saw nobody at the infirmary desk and then I looked out into the hall and there was nobody on the corridor—I suppose I should have noticed that before but I just—”

“You were feeling bad,” Pete Donovan said.

“Exactly. Anyway, I started downstairs. Sister Scholastica is always telling us not to cross the courtyard without our capes in this weather, but the courtyard is a shortcut and I was in a hurry. You’re not supposed to be in a hurry, either, not ever. And now I’m sitting out here and I’m not even cold. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Tell me where this infirmary is,” Gregor said. He was hoping that in getting Neila to talk about the geography of the Motherhouse, he might also get her to talk about the location of the body. He couldn’t understand why Pete Donovan wasn’t more anxious to establish that fact. What worried Gregor was what he thought should be obvious to everybody, Neila Connelly included. Neila was not a doctor, a nurse, or a paramedic. In spite of her protestations, if there was a body, that body was not necessarily dead.

Neila had left her bench and advanced into the courtyard. She pointed upward and said, “Those windows there, next to the long thin ones that go to the staircase. That’s the infirmary.”

“And the staircase is just beside it,” Gregor said.

“The doors are side by side, except that the staircase door is a fire door that swings, instead of the kind with a knob in it. There’s another one, another fire door, at the bottom. It’s right across from that one I came out of. It goes to the front lawn.”

“All right,” Gregor said, “so you came through that door. Was it open?”

“It’s never open. We’re not even allowed to prop it open. It’s supposed to serve as a firebreak.”

“Fine. So. You went through it and down the stairs—”

“And when I was halfway down, when I got to the turn and the landing, I saw the door to the utility room standing open. There’s a room on the first floor right at the bottom of those stairs with a big industrial sink in it and mops and pails and things for cleaning. Anyway, that’s not left open, either. Sister Alice Marie says if you leave that door open, the kittens get in there and eat the cleaning fluids and kill themselves. And there are always kittens around here. There are like five cats and they’re always getting pregnant.”

Pete Donovan cleared his throat. “Neila,” he said, “if you could just—not that I’m trying to hurry you or anything—”

Neila shot him an exasperated look. “You think I’m lying,” she said. “You think I’m like Bernadette and Amanda and whoever else went tromping down to your office this week, getting the vapors and making up stories that didn’t have anything to do with anything.”

“I don’t think—”

Neila turned back to Gregor. “When I saw the utility room door open, I thought I was in luck. I’d thought I’d been wrong about missing the bell. The corridor being empty wasn’t so unusual, really. There’s a lot of work to do around here. It was Sister Hilga being gone that really made up my mind. So when I saw the door open, I thought Sister Hilga had just gone down to wash something up or to fetch a broom or a mop or something. And I could have my aspirin and I wouldn’t be in trouble.”

“What others who went tramping down to Mr. Donovan’s office?” Gregor asked her.

But Neila ignored him, as Donovan ignored him. “I got to the bottom of the stairs,” Neila said, “and it was then it hit me that the light in the utility room was off. Sister Hilga wouldn’t be standing around in there in the dark. Somebody must have gone in and then forgotten to close up. I was going to leave it and run to chapel the way I had been, but then I decided I couldn’t. I mean, I really do like kittens. If one of them had died it would have been my fault and I would have felt guilty for a week. So I thought it only made sense to close up before I came out.”

“Right,” Gregor said. “So you—”

“I went in and turned on the light,” Neila told him, “to make sure one of the kittens wasn’t already in there. I didn’t want to trap one.”

“Of course not,” Donovan said soothingly.

Neila went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “The light switch is right inside the door, and when I got it on I was looking at the floor. That’s where the kittens would be likely to be. On the floor. They’re very small, the six we have now. So I was staring around at the linoleum for I don’t know how long before I saw it.”

“Saw what?” Gregor asked.

“Saw the leg,” Neila told him. “It was sticking straight up out of the sink. It was like a flag. It
is
like a flag. And then I went to the sink and looked down into it and there he was, Don Bollander from the bank, with his leg as stiff as a maypole and his face—his face—”

Neila blanched and looked away, at the snow-covered stones that paved the courtyard, at the bench she was sitting on.

“I’m very cold,” she said tearfully. “Suddenly I’m very cold. I want to go inside.”

“Of course, you can go inside,” Pete Donovan told her.

“I don’t want you,” Neila said. “I want somebody I can trust. I want somebody who isn’t making fun of me.”

“Christ on a crutch,” Pete Donovan said.

Gregor kneeled down against the bench next to where Neila was sitting and took her chin gently in his hand. The fainting episode had been shock, phase one, the immediate response. This was shock, phase two, the delayed one. He knew the signs all too well, the sudden pallor, the opaqueness of the eyes. The girl needed either the traditional sweet brandy or something more to the point, like a large glass of orange juice or a chocolate malt.

“Listen to me,” Gregor said. “I’m going to go look now at your utility room—you did say it was just inside that door you came out of?”

“Yes,” Neila said. “Yes, it is.”

“Fine. What I want you to do is to go and find Reverend Mother General. Go and find her right away. You can take Mr. Donovan with you.”

“I don’t want Mr. Donovan with me.”

“You should have someone. You really aren’t feeling well. It’s obvious. I don’t want you to get lost and faint again.”

“I won’t faint,” Neila Connelly said. “I never faint.”

“Mr. Donovan will make sure you don’t faint,” Gregor said. Then he stood up and turned to Pete Donovan, hovering over him like Thor in a temper.

“You can’t just go barging around the convent on your own,” Donovan said. “And you don’t understand—”

“I understand how to get to this utility room, unless she’s left out a book of map information. Go take her to Reverend Mother General.”

“But for Christ’s sake—”

Gregor didn’t even pretend to be listening any more. He turned his back to Donovan and Neila Connelly and went striding toward the door Neila had come out of, a twin of the door they had so recently come out of themselves when they ran into her. It’s not so complicated, Gregor thought. It just seems that way when you’re inside and being led around from one corridor to another. It’s basically just a square. If there really was a body—a corpse and not a sick man; a corpse and not a fantasy—he would have to get Reverend Mother General to give him a floor plan.

He plunged through the outer door into inner darkness, paused to catch his breath, caught the light and stopped breathing. The light was coming through an open door in the opposite wall, streaming into the corridor in a sharp-edged shaft. That didn’t surprise him. The door was where Neila had said the utility room door would be. The light could have been the one she said she’d turned on. She hadn’t said anything about turning it off.

The surprising thing was the person, standing at the edge of the door with her arms folded across her chest and a look of incredulity on her face.

Sister Mary Scholastica.

“His name was Don Bollander and he was Miriam Bailey’s assistant at the bank,” Sister Scholastica said later, when Gregor had her sitting down on the floor outside the utility room. It was less than five minutes since he had found her, but it felt as if it had been forever. He had made her sit down just in case. She had been in mild shock when he first saw her. He didn’t want to take any chances. Still, she was no Neila Connelly. She was older, better trained, and more experienced. She had seen a man die in front of her eyes last year in Colchester, New York. Even without all that she would have held up better. She simply had more backbone than Neila Connelly ever would.

Gregor was leaning over the sink, trying to find out everything he could without touching anything. The sink was not really a sink at all but a laundry tub, which explained how a body had gotten into it. Listening to Neila Connelly out in the courtyard, Gregor had imagined a stuffing and folding operation it would have taken a trash compactor to complete. He didn’t have to worry that their blithering conversation in the cold had cost this man his life, either. Gregor had thought at the time that Neila’s description sounded like rigor mortis. It would take a doctor and a good forensic laboratory to be sure, but Gregor’s guess was that Don Bollander had been dead for at least half a day.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance it isn’t murder,” Scholastica said. “Not with him stuffed into the laundry sink that way.”

“It’s hard to tell much of anything with him this way,” Gregor said. “Would there have been any reason for him to have been in this room?”

“Good heavens no. I don’t know if you realize it or not, but you’re in a restricted area of the Motherhouse. There aren’t supposed to be any seculars in this part.”

“Is that religious?” Gregor asked. “Have I just done something on the order of desecrating an altar—”

“No, no. Of course not. It would have been a more serious transgression before Vatican Two, but sometimes I think everything was a more serious transgression before Vatican Two. No, my point is, he wouldn’t have been anywhere near here unless he’d had a good reason, and I can’t think of a reason he might have had.”

“He could have been meeting somebody.”

“He would have met her in one of the reception rooms. If you mean he could have been having a clandestine meeting, it would have been safer to hold it off Motherhouse grounds. He had the perfect setup. I did tell you he was Don Bollander from the bank.”

“You did. You just didn’t tell me what that meant.”

Gregor was leaning far over the laundry sink now, the only position from which he could stare Don Bollander straight in the face. He had told Scholastica that it was hard to tell anything about this death under these circumstances, but that wasn’t quite true. Coniine killed by paralyzing the lungs. There was a blue tinge to the face, faint but unmistakable. Of course, it might have been one of a number of other vegetable alkaloids. Their effects were often quite similar. Because there was already one person dead from coniine, though, Gregor thought he was justified in guessing death by coniine here. In his experience, amateur murderers picked a method they found comfortable and stuck to it.