Great Day for the Deadly (8 page)

The men’s room had a little anteroom, with chairs and sinks and a long, low counter for doing God knew what. There were also mirrors. Gregor sat down in one of the chairs and opened Schatzy’s copy of
People
magazine. There was a picture of the corpse, taken from above, while it was lying on a morgue slab.
People
was the only magazine on earth better than
The National Enquirer
at getting a picture of a dead body. Gregor stared at the face of Brigit Ann Reilly and wished the picture were in color. Black and white blurred too many details.

“Taxine,” Gregor muttered to himself. “Coniine. Lobeline. Some kind of vegetable alkaloid. I wonder where she got it from.”

He looked through the scant text for some sign of an answer, but found none. The story was continued on the next page, so he turned and found nothing there, either. When the case was solved,
People
would run a five- or ten-page extravaganza and explain the whole thing, but at this point in the investigation they were only interested in titillating. Gregor looked over the pictures on this third page and found a couple he recognized: John Cardinal O’Bannion, and a young woman in a not very modified nun’s habit identified as “Sister Mary Scholastica, Mistress of Postulants and Brigit Ann Reilly’s religious superior in the Sisters of Divine Grace.” Gregor had known her as Sister Scholastica Burke. At the time, she had been principal of St. Agnes’s Parish School in Colchester, New York, and Gregor had been in Colchester looking into a little matter for the Cardinal Archbishop. Gregor ran his finger down the column of type and came up with a paragraph that read,

According to Sister Scholastica, Brigit was a model postulant. “Postulants often have trouble with religious obedience, but Brigit never seemed to,” Sister Scholastica said. “She was always very conscientious about everything she did. I don’t know what she could have been doing in that storeroom so late in the day.”

Gregor slapped the magazine shut, rolled it up, and stuffed it in his pocket. That was the kind of thing people always said in the wake of a violent death. From what he had known of Sister Scholastica, he would have expected better. He wondered if Bennis was at home right this moment, reading this copy of
People
and coming to the same conclusions. He didn’t suppose she was. The last he’d seen of Bennis, she’d been six weeks into her new novel, holed up in her apartment the way doughboys in World War I had holed up in foxholes, every piece of furniture covered with Post-It notes about rogue trolls, enchanted castles, singing unicorns, and damsels more distressing than distressed. She hadn’t been out in the air since the middle of January, and she swore she wasn’t coming out until she had a draft. Since Bennis’s drafts generally ran seven or eight hundred pages of elite type, Gregor expected Ararat to be shipping in restaurant meals for some time to come.

Still, what Bennis was doing to him—and he couldn’t help thinking of it like that; as something she was doing to him—was better than what the rest of them had done. That was why he was feeling so abandoned, illogical though it might be. The rest of them had virtually
disappeared.
Father Tibor had gone back to Independence College to teach another course. Lida Arkmajian and Hannah Krekorian had taken Donna Moradanyan and her infant son to Lida’s house in Boca Raton. Even old George Tekamanian was in the Bahamas, floating around on a cruise ship with his grandson Martin, his grandson Martin’s wife, and his three great-grandchildren.

The truth of it was simple: In the year and a half since Gregor had been back on Cavanaugh Street, he had learned to rely on these people as completely as he had ever relied on Elizabeth. When they stepped out of his life even temporarily, he felt as if he’d had the foundation knocked out from under him. It was something he was going to have to do something about someday. He just didn’t want someday to be today. Or ever.

He went over to one of the sinks and washed his hands, just to feel that he had done something practical in the men’s room, instead of just hiding from Dave Herder’s prattle. Then he made his way back into the lobby. There were three restaurants on this level—or accessible from this level—as far as Gregor knew, but the only one Dave and Schatzy would be in was at the back, on the other side of the building from the wall of glass doors. Gregor passed the baggage check and the check-in desk and was making his way along the wall opposite the guest services desk when he heard his name called out.

“Mr. Demarkian?” the high feminine voice said. “Mr. Demarkian, please? If you have a minute?”

Gregor looked over to the guest services desk and saw a small woman—tiny, really—jumping up and down behind the counter. While he watched, she pushed herself up against the counter with her hands and called again.

“Mr. Demarkian?”

“I’m coming.” He walked across the hall until he came to her, and smiled. She had let herself down from her perch and was looking a little sweaty and flustered.

“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “you don’t know what we’ve been through. We didn’t know where you were, you see.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Gregor said. “Why should you?”

“That’s what I said,” the woman told him in a confidential voice, “but you just can’t get away with saying that kind of thing when you’re talking to the Archdiocese of New York. Oh, I’m sorry. That’s what this is about. We have a message for you from the Archdiocese of New York.”

“A message.”

“Just a minute.” The tiny woman rushed to the back, made her way along a row of severely high-tech-looking pigeonholes, and came up with a large manila envelope. It wasn’t what Gregor would have called a message, but it was from the Archdiocese of New York. The letterhead was big and bold enough to read all the way across at the counter where he was standing.

“Here,” the tiny woman said, thrusting the thing at him. “It came in about two hours ago, and right after it did we got a phone call, and you wouldn’t believe how insistent they were. It’s stamped all over with urgent, too. They must have a crisis on their hands.”

If they did, Gregor didn’t see what it would have to do with him. He didn’t know anybody at the Archdiocese of New York. He opened the envelope and peered inside. Inside there was another envelope, a padded mailer, with a note taped to its side. Gregor pulled the mailer out and read the note.

“This arrived this morning from Cardinal O’Bannion”
the note said.
“He has impressed on us that the matter is urgent.”

“The matter is urgent,” Gregor said out loud.

“What?” the tiny woman asked him.

“Never mind,” Gregor said. “Thank you. I’ll take care of this now.”

“I’d find a phone if I were you,” the woman said. “They really were very, very insistent.”

“I’m sure they were.” Gregor hardly blamed them. Cardinal O’Bannion was a very insistent man. From what he’d heard, Cardinal O’Connor could be a very insistent man, too. If John O’Bannion was really intent on getting in touch with Gregor Demarkian—and the effort involved to track Gregor down at the Hilton suggested he was—the clerks at the Archdiocese had probably been driven absolutely crazy since the message came in.

Right now, though, Gregor was not going to go racing for the phone. He was going to sit down with Dave and Schatzy and have a nice substantial lunch, punctuated by conversation first about murderers and maniacs they had known, and then—as was inevitable during any social contact among Bureau agents above a certain age—about the late, vociferously unlamented J. Edgar. By then, Gregor thought he would have calmed himself down enough not to sound too inappropriately happy on the phone.

There was certainly nothing to be happy about in the death of Brigit Ann Reilly, but Gregor was happy nonetheless. Ever since he’d realized that the murder Schatzy was talking about had taken place on O’Bannion’s turf, he’d been a little surprised that he hadn’t heard from the Cardinal. Gregor knew how John O’Bannion’s mind worked. You found yourself an expert you could trust, and you stuck with him.

Besides, with Bennis working and everybody else away, a little murder case would come as a welcome relief.

It had to be better than hanging around New York City in miserable weather, listening to the worst kind of mentally rigid Bureau administrator blithering on about what a wonderful tool they had in this computer program they hadn’t yet learned how to run.

T
HERE WERE PEOPLE WHO
said that John Cardinal O’Bannion was a Neanderthal, a throwback to the days when Catholics were supposed to “pray, pay, and obey.” Those were the people who concentrated on his politics—1930s liberal; now labeled conservative—and his theology, which was definitely of the Absolute Moral Norms variety. There were other people who said he was a wizard. The Archdiocese of Colchester had been a mess when he had been sent in to take it over. Vocations to the priesthood had dried up. Half a dozen orders of nuns, exasperated at his predecessor’s high-handedness and his death grip on a dollar, had withdrawn from the parochial school system. The vast majority of the laity was in open rebellion, half in an attempt to be more Catholic than Rome, the other half in an attempt to be God knew what. There were rumors of Love Feasts for the Goddess being held in fields of daisies from the banks of the Seaway to Syracuse. Of course the Cardinal had to be a hard-liner on morality and the liturgy, these people said. That was the only way to bring the little people back into the fold. The little people were always so impressed with pomp and circumstance, and so respectful of authority—as long as it behaved like authority. What the little people wanted more than anything else was not to be forced to think.

To Gregor Demarkian, what John Cardinal O’Bannion was was an original, a big coarse man who had come late to his vocation, an ex-longshoreman who could still talk like a longshoreman, a kind of warrior priest. He was also a passionate Catholic. Many of his contemporaries from the seminary—and hordes of up-and-coming younger men—had replaced their belief in the historical reality of the Resurrection with a vague idea of “spiritual” and “symbolic” rising from the dead, just the way they had replaced their belief in individual sin with a furious opposition to “sinful systems.” O’Bannion was adamantly in favor of the traditional interpretations of both. “The point of Christianity,” he once told the 3,000 assembled members of the Association of Catholic Psychotherapists of New York State, “is not to make us more emotionally stable people, more psychologically aware people, more fulfilled people, more self-actualizing people. It is certainly not to promote our ‘human growth’ or to make us better adjusted and more ‘accepting’ of our natures. The point of Christianity, ladies and gentlemen, is this: that approximately two thousand years ago in Palestine a man who to all intents and purposes had been dead and buried for three days raised Himself up and appeared in His risen body to the people who had loved him and others, and that He did these things
in fact,
and because He did these things
in fact,
we are obligated to listen to what He had to say and to try to follow it, whether what He had to say is what we want to hear or not.”

Gregor could just imagine what the Association of Catholic Psychotherapists of New York State had thought of that. He didn’t have to imagine what certain other people had thought of it. Reactions to that speech had appeared in everything from the
Saturday Evening Post
to the
New Republic.
The more populist press had tended to approve of it, in a vague and uncomprehending way, because they also tended to approve of God in general and to disapprove of psychotherapists. The “intellectual” press had been furious. Gregor was neither a religious man nor a moralist. He had no strong ideas one way or the other about the existence of God or the philosophical advisability of engaging in acts of promiscuous fornication. He thought O’Bannion had simply stated the obvious, the absolute bottom-line core definition of Christianity, without which Christianity would not exist. The irrationality of the literate press’s attacks on O’Bannion had startled him.

The irrationality of the literate press’s reactions to the death of Brigit Ann Reilly had startled him, too. It was now ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, March 1, and Gregor was standing in the anteroom to the Cardinal’s office in the Chancery in Colchester, rocking restlessly back and forth on his feet and smiling nervously every once in a while at the Benedictine nun in full habit who served as the Cardinal’s secretary. The nun was perfectly pleasant and even friendly, but Gregor wasn’t used to nuns. All that black and white and unnatural calm made him nervous. He was also very tired. He had opened the Cardinal’s envelope yesterday afternoon as soon as he’d got back up to his room from lunch. He had read through it carefully, called the Cardinal, agreed to come up to Colchester and go on to Maryville, and then gone out and bought every newspaper, newsmagazine, and tabloid with a story about the murder in it. The reading proved to be irresistible. He had expected to get at least eight hours of solid sleep before he had to go to the train station in the morning. He had gotten less than five, and those sprawled out across crumbled newsprint while still wearing a suit. He had told himself he would doze on the Amtrak trip upstate. Instead, he had reread the report in
Time
and skimmed through the long quasi-editorial in
The Nation,
looking for God only knew what. It wasn’t that any of these pieces contained essential information about the murder itself. Reading them, Gregor wasn’t sure the press had any information beyond what had been given out the day the body was found—and that wasn’t much. If he wanted details, he had the Cardinal’s report to look through. It contained just about anything he could have expected to get, considering the fact that he was attached to no official policing force anywhere in the country. If Gregor Demarkian had formed distinct impressions of the Cardinal Archbishop, the Cardinal Archbishop had formed distinct impressions of him. At least, the Cardinal Archbishop had remembered that Gregor liked his information organized, exhaustive, electic, and typed.