Great Day for the Deadly (17 page)

“No,” Pete Donovan said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised. Things have been—a little weird around here lately.”

Gregor chucked the box onto the desk. “What about Reverend Mother General?” he said. “Has she gotten any more of these things?”

Pete Donovan shrugged. “As far as I know, no. At least, she hasn’t come to me about them. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t gotten them.”

“You sound as if you think she must have.”

“Maybe I do. Like I said, things have been a little weird around here lately. St. Mary Magdalen’s out in Borum Ridge was vandalized about a month ago. Borum Ridge is on the western end of town. Whoever got in there took the crucifix off the wall behind the altar and hacked it into wood chips with an ax. Then they smashed a lot of windows and defecated on the altar. They must have made a racket fit to wake the dead, but Father Testaverdi was away for the week and there wasn’t anyone to hear them.”

Gregor considered this. “That kind of thing is usually kids, isn’t it? Kids pretending to be Satanists or kids getting drunk or stoned and out of control.”

“Sometimes.” Donovan conceded the point grudgingly. “The problem is,” he went on, “this isn’t your big city or your bedroom suburb. We’ve grown a bit. We even have our own version of a low-rent district, complete with Spanish bodegas and knife fights once or twice a month on Friday nights. But even the low-rent district is
small
.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“What I’m getting at is, we all know each other.” Pete Donovan sighed. “Hell, I know every one of the Spanish kids by face and name except for maybe one or two who moved in in the last week or so. I’m not saying I’d recognize everybody who lives in town. It’s a bigger town than that. But it’s not a much bigger town than that. If someone’s desecrating altars and sending nuns—which one did you say it was?”

“This one.” Gregor picked up the letter with the picture on it and handed it over.

“Wonderful,” Donovan said. He studied the letter for a protracted moment and then leaned over to throw it back down on the desk. He was actually tall enough to do that while keeping one foot bent against the wall. “Now I’ve got someone sending dirty pictures to a nun. This is all I’m going to need. The Cardinal is going to be livid when he hears about this.”

“The Cardinal is fifty miles away in Colchester.”

“The Cardinal might as well be hiding under my bed.”

Donovan pushed himself away from the wall and began to pace, back and forth, between the office door and the window.

“Listen,” he said, “I’ve lived in this place, in Maryville, all my life, except for four years I spent in the army. I even went to college at St. Francis of the Snows just outside town and I commuted there. I
know
this place. I
know
these people. And I know something else. I know that no outside agitator has moved into the area recently. I know there aren’t any strangers lurking in the bushes. The only strangers we get are the ones who immigrate from Central America and none of them is desecrating churches or—did I tell you what happened at Iggy Loy the week before the flood?”

“No,” Gregor said. As usual when he was on an errand for the Cardinal, there seemed to be a lot of things no one had told him. “All I’ve really discussed with anyone is the murder of Brigit Ann Reilly,” he told Donovan now. “The Cardinal has been receiving anonymous letters, yes, and he’s concerned about them, but not so concerned about them as he is about the death.”

“Does he think the two things are connected?”

“You know the Cardinal. He thinks everything is connected.”

“I think everything is connected,” Pete Donovan said. “I didn’t know anything about any anonymous letters so I haven’t had a chance to work them into the theory, but give me time. What happened up at Iggy Loy, that’s—”

“St. Ignatius Loyola Church,” Gregor said. “Sister Scholastica told me.”

“Yeah. Well, Iggy Loy is the closest church. The nuns would be in that parish if they were in any parish, which they aren’t because they’re a Motherhouse. There’s a lot of traffic between here and there. The nuns run the parish school and the CCD program—that’s Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, catechism for children who don’t go to parochial school. So there’s always one nun or the other over there for something.”

“Always nuns?” Gregor asked. “Not nuns and postulants and novices?”

“They send everybody everywhere these days,” Pete Donovan said, shooting Gregor the desperate glance Gregor had come to think of, over the years, as the mark of a sensible man defeated by Vatican II. Gregor thought it was interesting to see it in a man so young. If Pete Donovan was nostalgic for the old Church, it was a Church he had known only as legend. He cleared his throat a little and said, “It doesn’t really matter who they send, for this, because none of the nuns ever saw it because Father Fitzsimmons made sure they didn’t. Do you get the feeling that everybody is protecting everybody else around here and nobody is doing anybody any damn good at all?”

“Slightly,” Gregor said drily.

“Yeah,” Pete Donovan said. “Well, what happened over at Iggy Loy was that the choir robes got torn up. And I do mean torn up. Somebody ripped them apart with his bare hands. Somebody or somebodies. The robes are kept in a dressing room up in the choir loft, along with extra hymn books and arrangements sheets for the organ. Father Fitzsimmons went up there to see if he could find the words to ‘Lord of the Dance,’ or something and there it was, shreds of cloth all over the place—”

“Did you see it?” Gregor asked. “Were you called in?”

“Oh, yes. The unofficial policy in the Archdiocese is to downplay acts of anti-Catholicism as much as possible. As long as nobody was hurt and nothing drastic happened—desecrating the altar at St. Mary Magdalen was something drastic—anyway, as long as those two conditions are met the incidents usually don’t get reported except to the Cardinal. Sometimes the Cardinal will report them to me, but by that time the scene will have been contaminated—”

“Or obliterated,” Gregor said. “You sound as if you think this choir robe thing wouldn’t ordinarily have been considered drastic enough to have been reported directly to the police.”

“It wouldn’t have. Somebody went over to St. Bonaventure’s School in Kataband, broke all the windows and spray painted ‘John Paul Two sucks dick’ on the front doors and the first the police over there heard of it was three days later when the insurance company called. I mean, Mr. Demarkian, I consider myself a good Catholic. I even consider myself a loyal Catholic. I even believe in forbearance and all the rest of it. I still think the Cardinal’s attitude to this is nuts.”

“What happened at Iggy Loy?” Gregor asked. “Why did Father—Fitzsimmons, was it?—why did Father Fitzsimmons call you in?”

“Because Father Fitzsimmons thinks the Cardinal’s attitude to this is nuts.” Pete Donovan sighed. “The Cardinal’s got clout, though. Father Fitzsimmons didn’t let me do anything about it except check it out. It didn’t make the news, either. Now that’s something I think is a mistake. If the Cardinal wants to stop this stuff, he should make sure all the incidents get on the news. That turns people against the vandals.”

It would turn some people against the vandals, Gregor thought. The problem was, it would turn others into vandals. It would be a tough judgment call, but Gregor thought he could see the Cardinal’s point. The sort of bigot who resorted to vandalism was the sort who might eventually resort to violence. The sort of bigot who was attracted by vandalism was even more likely to end up bashing in somebody’s head. Gregor had seen it a million times in cases he’d handled for the Bureau, especially cases involving outbreaks of anti-Semitism. He didn’t know what it was about religion, but it inflamed the passions of a certain kind of malevolent idiot worse than anything else.

“Tell me why you think it’s all connected,” he said to Pete Donovan. “Tell me what you think is going on.”

But Pete Donovan was shaking his head. “It would take forever and I’d sound like I was babbling,” he said, “which doesn’t mean I won’t babble but does mean I won’t babble now. The Cardinal sent you down here to look into the death of Brigit Ann Reilly.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Well, Mr. Demarkian, I told him he could. In fact, I was ecstatic when I heard the news. I figured I’d finally found my savior. Would you like to know why?”

Actually, given the tone of Donovan’s voice, Gregor wasn’t sure he would. He said sure anyway and sat back to wait. Donovan stopped his pacing and retreated to the wall again, closer to the window this time, so he could look out. His blond hair was cut very short and very high on his neck. The style made his head look much too short for his body.

“There was the desecration at St. Mary Magdalen,” Donovan said, “and the business with the choir robes and the death of Brigit Ann Reilly—the murder of Brigit Ann Reilly, because it couldn’t have been anything else. Now there’s these letters that the Cardinal’s been receiving and not telling anybody about and maybe Reverend Mother General, too. All of this connected to something or somebody in Maryville, am I right?”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “you’re right.”

“Well,” Pete Donovan said, “I know everything and everyone connected to Maryville. Or I think I do, and that’s worse. I can’t investigate this thing. I’m too involved with the people involved with it.”

“You could have called in the state police.”

“I’m neither a masochist nor a damn fool.” Donovan pushed off from the wall decisively this time and headed for the door. “Come on. Let’s go find Reverend Mother General and have a talk about anonymous letters. Then maybe you and I can get together in private and have a talk about Brigit Ann Reilly. Then maybe we can start to get something done.”

Pete Donovan was out in the hall before he’d finished talking, trailing words behind him like a smoker’s mist. Gregor Demarkian hauled himself up and followed.

Donovan’s plan of action wasn’t necessarily the best possible plan of action, but it was the only one. Gregor was relieved that someone had finally handed him one.

Less than three minutes later, walking too quickly across the courtyard with his overcoat still lying on the chair in Reverend Mother General’s office, Gregor started to revise his opinion of Donovan’s plan of action. He started to revise his opinion of Donovan. He was cold and the convent felt deserted. Donovan kept saying something about the Divine Office and regular hours for community prayer. Gregor’s familiarity with the particulars of convent life was minimal—really nonexistent—but the impression he got was that Reverend Mother General and the rest of the nuns were off on nunly business that was going to take a while. Whatever he and Donovan were going to do, it wasn’t going to be talking to Reverend Mother General in the immediate future. In the light of all this, Gregor thought Donovan could have let him go back to get his coat. At least.

They were almost all the way across the courtyard to the far door when that door swung open and a small girl came barreling out, wearing the black dress and strange envelopelike black cap Gregor had learned to identify—even after so short a time with the photographs of Brigit Ann Reilly for company—as the uniform of the postulants in the Sisters of Divine Grace. The girl got two or three feet into the courtyard and stopped. Her eyes got wide. Her mouth dropped open. She looked Pete Donovan straight in the face and said,

“It’s you. Somebody already called you.”

“Somebody called me about what?” Donovan said.

Since Donovan had stopped, Gregor was finally able to catch up with him. He drew up next to the small girl and looked into her plain, sensible, square little face.

“I thought I must have been the first one to find it,” she said simply. “I thought if somebody else had found it, they would have left somebody to guard it, but they didn’t, so I had to be the first one.”

“The first one what?” Donovan asked desperately.

“The first one to find the body,” the small girl said.

Then she looked straight up into Gregor Demarkian’s eyes, smiled one of the sweetest smiles he had ever seen, and passed out.

T
HE BODY HAD ONCE
belonged to a man named Don Bollander, and the girl who had told them about him was a postulant named Neila Connelly. Gregor Demarkian managed to get those two facts established before Pete Donovan’s foot soldiers arrived, carrying the plastic bags and cosmetic brushes that served them instead of a mobile crime unit. In the hurrying urgency of their search after Neila Connelly had been revived—Pete Donovan scooping snow off the top of the trellis and rubbing it in her face—Gregor had been on automatic pilot. He had been so thoroughly involved in doing what he was trained to do, he had forgotten to pay attention to the particulars of his circumstances. It was almost an hour later before it struck him: just how small a town Maryville was. No mobile crime unit, no municipal lab, a force of less than a dozen men: Gregor had worked in places that small before, but usually with the Bureau, and therefore, usually with the Bureau to fall back on. The only case he’d ever handled on his own in a place where he couldn’t count on accurate, nearly instantaneous lab work had been last Halloween at a small college in Pennsylvania. He wasn’t sure he had enjoyed the experience. In the Bureau, he had been famous for “thinking” instead of “investigating.” In a large organization where everybody needed something to distinguish them, that hadn’t been a bad distinction to have. The “investigating” types had been all around him, after all. He had only had to ask to get something done. He had never been fool enough to think he didn’t need the techies.

When Pete Donovan got Neila Connelly revived, she sat up, rubbed at the sides of her face and started to cry. Donovan knew her name the way he knew the names of most of the postulants, because they volunteered in the literacy program down in St. Andrew’s Parish and the police department did a lot of drug education down there at the same time. He kept calling her name, over and over again, first as if that ought to be enough to wake her up and then as if it ought to be enough to calm her down. Neila, in the meantime, was sore. In the movies, people who faint collapse in graceful heaps. In real life, they either go over like boards or smash into the floor like rag dolls stuffed with glass. Neila had been a rag-doll type. Donovan had caught her before she hit the slate paving of the courtyard, but she was bruised and hurt and bewildered and scared to death. Gregor and Pete got her propped up on a bench and moved away for a consultation.