Great Day for the Deadly (19 page)

He backed away from the body and looked around the room. There was a shelf about the sink filled with laundry detergents and white plastic bottles of cleaning materials. There were more white plastic bottles on the floor, lined up against the window. Gregor didn’t think Don Bollander could have been brought in through the window. He’d examined every inch of visible skin and he hadn’t come up with a single bruise. It was possible that all the bruising had occurred under Bollander’s clothes, but it wasn’t likely. It was also possible that Bollander had been alive and ambulatory when he arrived at the utility room, but that wasn’t likely, either. Alive wasn’t impossible. Coniine was a tricky poison. Symptoms almost always started within half an hour. Death was more erratic. Depending on a number of factors—how much coniine the victim had eaten; how much other food the victim had eaten immediately before that; state of health; state of mind; height, weight, and age—death could arrive anywhere from half an hour to five hours later. What made coniine particularly nasty was that death was inevitable a long time before that. Coniine was one of those poisons whose antidote had to be delivered next to immediately after the poison was ingested. It was the kind of poison that grew roots.

He backed away from it all and stuck his head into the hall. “You were telling me about Don Bollander,” he said to Scholastica. “You should keep talking. Do you have a notebook?”

Scholastica shoved her hands into one of her pockets and came up with a palm-size notebook and a ballpoint pen. “It’s part of the uniform. Do you want me to write something down?”

“A reminder to the medical examiner. I want to know the location and the temporal origin of any bruises found anywhere on the body, no matter how small.”

“Temporal origin?”

“Whether they were made before or after death.”

“Oh.”

“Tell me about Don Bollander.”

“Well,” Scholastica said. “Well. You know who Miriam Bailey is. We talked about that before. Do you know about Ann-Harriet Severan?”

“No”

“Ann-Harriet works at the bank. As some kind of minor officer. She’s very pretty and very volatile, one of those people who go off their nuts at the first sign of trouble, which is interesting because she’s always in trouble, because Ann-Harriet is having an affair with Josh—you remember Josh?”

“I remember.”

“Miriam must know,” Scholastica said. “The two of them are very clumsy about it all. Anyway, that’s the kind of assistant Don Bollander was. He dealt with whatever had to be dealt with, and if that meant keeping Ann-Harriet in line, then he did it. And that wouldn’t have been easy, either, because Ann-Harriet is a consummate—well, it’s tacky to use a word like this in habit, but there really is only one word and that’s—”

“Bitch.”

“Exactly. The postulants don’t like Miriam Bailey much, but they really detest Ann-Harriet Severan. She’s always saying things, making fun of them, if you know what I mean. But anyway, Don. Don got a little promotion just about the time Miriam decided to come back to town as a rich old lady with a very young husband.”

“So what did Don Bollander have to do with that?”

Scholastica smiled. “I said he was her assistant. What he really was was her flack catcher. He was totally useless as a banker. In all the time since I’ve been connected to Maryville, since I’ve entered the convent, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him doing any banking work at all.”

“What did he do?”

“He ran interference. He took care of things that would waste her time. Miriam has a very definite idea of what is and what isn’t a waste of her time. She thinks she has to do community work, as she puts it. Otherwise the bank doesn’t look good. She funds the literacy program at St. Andrew’s and she makes an appearance there every year. Don does—did the grub work. He looked after the paper. He sent the checks she signed. He ordered books when the program needed books and refreshments when the program was going to have a party. Then Margaret Finney was beatified, and Miriam wanted to start a lay committee for—I don’t remember what she called it. She wanted to support the canonization effort. It’s impossible to explain to people like Miriam that things just aren’t the way they used to be. Canonization isn’t that kind of adversarial process it was before Vatican II—”

“Back up,” Gregor said. He had been listening for sounds in the courtyard or the hall. It seemed to him to be a monstrous amount of time since he had left Pete Donovan and Neila Connelly at the bench, instructing them to get Reverend Mother General and bring her back to him. It shouldn’t be taking this long to find the Motherhouse’s most important and visible nun. He ran his hands through his hair in irritation.

“I wish I knew what was keeping them,” he said. “This is insane. We ought to have forensic people up here.”

Sister Scholastica shrugged. “The bell had rung for chapel. It’s just midmorning prayer—what I suppose used to be called Terce, since they suppressed Prime—anyway, it’s a minor hour, but it’s still an hour. If Pete and Neila caught them at just the wrong moment, they might not have been able to get Reverend Mother General’s attention.”

“They should have stood up in the middle of the room and shouted and howled until they did.”

“You were going to ask me something else?” Scholastica said.

Gregor turned his mind back to the problem at hand. “You said something about the literacy program at St. Andrew’s. Don Bollander did the grub work for the literacy program at St. Andrew’s.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t I read in the Cardinal’s report somewhere that Brigit Ann Reilly worked in the literacy program at St. Andrew’s?”

Scholastica nodded. “Yes, she did. We make a point of requiring our postulants and novices to do all three kinds of work: intellectual, charitable, and practical. Brigit’s practical work was going back and forth to the library every day, among other things. Her charitable work was to teach reading to adults at St. Andrew’s.”

“Does that mean Don Bollander and Brigit Ann Reilly knew each other?” Gregor asked.

Scholastica considered this. “In a way,” she said, “I suppose it does. He would have known her by sight, certainly, even if he didn’t know her by name. He spent a fair amount of time on site. I don’t think he would have known her well. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t.”

“Why?”

Scholastica snorted. “Don Bollander was the kind of person who dramatized himself,” she said. “He was the kind of person who liked to be near excitement. If he’d known Brigit Ann Reilly well, he’d have told everyone in town about it after she died, just to have an association with the thrill of it. Instead, he was wandering around town telling everybody how he was engaged in a hush-hush project that would ensure the canonization of Margaret Finney and turn Maryville into the new and improved Lourdes.”

“New and improved Lourdes,” Gregor murmured, and then he straightened up. Now there was noise coming at him, much more noise than he’d thought it possible for nuns to make. First the noise was in the courtyard, a low hum like too many bees near a flower and the stomp of feet on stone. Then the courtyard door opened and Reverend Mother General came in. Behind her, Gregor could see nothing but a sea of black and white head coverings and Pete Donovan’s blond thatch. Beside him, Scholastica stood up.

“Reverend Mother,” Scholastica said.

“Is there a man dead in here?” Reverend Mother demanded. “In the laundry sink?”

There was more commotion at Reverend Mother’s back. Pete Donovan was pushing himself forward, excusing himself to nuns at every turn. He got to the doorway and gave Reverend Mother General a gentle and apologetic nudge to make enough room to get himself inside.

“If there’s a body in here, I want to see the body in here,” he said, and then he pushed Gregor out of the utility room doorway and walked inside. Going in, he was caught in the same cheerful and skeptical mood he had been in talking to Neila outside. No sooner had he got all the way inside than that changed.

“Jesus screaming Christ,” he said, in a voice loud enough to carry to every nun in the vicinity—and making them all wince. “She was telling the truth,” he bellowed. “There really is a dead man in here.”

Gregor already knew there was a dead man in there. That wasn’t what he wanted to think about for the moment.

What he wanted to think about was how strangely similar Scholastica’s descriptions of the characters of Don Bollander and Brigit Ann Reilly had been.

U
NLIKE PETE DONOVAN, MIRIAM
Bailey had never been able to say she knew most of the people in town, by sight or any other way. Her father had been much too strict about the distinctions of class to allow her a latitude like that. To be precise, he had been much too strict about the distinctions of class
for women.
Men were supposed to be able to hold their own in rough company. Miriam’s father had divided the world in a great many ways, always marking those divisions by gender. Later, when Miriam went to college and discovered that no one shared his rules and regulations for proper conduct in women and men, she had wondered if he had invented them just for her. Rules for a wayward daughter, she had told herself at the time, and then almost immediately dismissed the thought. There was nothing wayward at all about her at the age of eighteen, at least on the surface—and her father was no mind reader. If he suspected her of subversion, he was experiencing a form of clinical paranoia. Miriam at eighteen was plain and awkward and shy and badly dressed, in spite of a clothes allowance the size of one of her father’s bank clerks’ salaries. Miriam at eighteen was also polite, courteous, modest, retiring, and deferential to men.

Miriam at sixty-odd was in something of a bind. She might not know everyone in town, but the people she did know were far too numerous. It was just a little after noon. Over the last hour, sitting alone in the house on Huntington Avenue, she had taken at least eleven phone calls on the subject of Don Bollander—or maybe she should think of it as “Don Bollander’s demise.” Whatever it was, she had heard much more of it than she wanted to. Sheila McRae over at Bell Epoque—Bell Epoque was a house; the cuteness of its name was apparently what passed for wit in Sheila’s Smith College graduating class—had wanted to know what Miriam was going to do about it, with Don lying all bloody in the convent well. Deborah Martin had been more sensible. She’d at least known that Don wasn’t found bloody or in the convent well. Her speciality had been sympathy, sticky and sweet. After a while, Miriam had thought she could see Deborah’s voice, sliding down the wire like molasses down a string. The phone rang and rang, rang and rang. Every time Miriam picked it up, she thought it would be the police, but it never was.

“I’m sure they wouldn’t call me if they needed information about a funeral,” she had said to Katherine Hale, who had set out to be the sensible one. Of course, there was nothing very sensible about nattering away on the subject of Don’s funeral when he’d just been found murdered somewhere in town. If that really was what happened, it might be weeks before the police were ready to release his body to anyone at all. That was just like Katherine Hale. Katherine had been with Miriam at Manhattanville—and if it hadn’t been well before the age of competitive admissions, she wouldn’t have been at Manhattanville at all. Katherine Hale couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag.

It had been just after Katherine called that Miriam had made her decision. She had no doubt that Don was dead—too many people had agreed on that point to make it anything else but true—but she didn’t want to think about it for the moment. She didn’t want to be questioned by the police about it, either. There would come a time when she could avoid neither of these things. That time would arrive very soon, accompanied by unspoken demands on her to produce the appropriate emotion. Miriam hadn’t the faintest idea what that emotion could be. For the moment, she simply wanted to disappear.

If she’d had a normal marriage, or even a normal May—December arrangement, she would have relied on Josh to get her away from it all. He could have put her into that car she’d bought him and taken her for a ride; Because she didn’t have a normal anything, Josh was not around. He had gotten into that car very early this morning and taken off on his own. Since he couldn’t be with Ann-Harriet Severan—Miriam had taken care of that for the weekend by giving Ann-Harriet a great deal of last-minute, must-rush extra work—Miriam hadn’t any idea at all where he had gone.

If you want to find a banker on the weekend, the last place you look for him is at the bank. Miriam’s father had taught her that. That was why, as the sound of church bells died away in the air over her head, she was standing at the bank’s back door, fishing keys out of her purse. It was very cold and very bright, the kind of day that looks warm when you’re standing inside. Outside, the wind was high and stiff and rigid and threatening to get worse. Miriam got the key turned and the door open and pressed herself inside.

The back hall was where the rest rooms were, and the storage closets, and the stairs to the basement. Miriam passed through it, listening to the sound of her heels on the hardwood floor and feeling a little foolish. Back at home, she had tried to convince herself that getting dressed to go into the bank on a day it wasn’t open was silly. Anyone else who had come in to do some extra work would be lounging around the office floor in jeans. She hadn’t been able to convince herself. She’d never come in to the bank on a weekend before. If she had extra work to do, she took it home. Before coming out, she had struggled into yet another Chanel suit and another layer of makeup—and then she had wasted time resenting it all.

She made absolutely sure the back hall was empty—she even checked the ladies’ room, although not the men’s; she didn’t have the courage to check the men’s—and then started up the stairs to the office floor. From up there, the sound of a soft voice talking drifted down at her. It was only one voice, so Miriam assumed it was talking into a phone. She reached the landing, paused to listen, then went up the rest of the flight. She reached the second floor and paused to listen again. The voice was low and hummingbird sweet, but strong. It was the voice of a girl of twenty-two.