Great Day for the Deadly (9 page)

What was fascinating to Gregor about the press accounts of the death of Brigit Ann Reilly—especially the ones in the prestige weeklies—was their tone. From
Time
to the
New Republic,
from
Newsweek
to
The Nation,
the editorial voice seemed to be a cross between the grimly prissy schoolmarm of nineteenth-century fiction and the hell-and-brimstone preacher. Father Tibor back on Cavanaugh Street was always telling Gregor that the American press was hysterically hostile to religion, but Gregor had never listened to him. Tibor was a refugee from Soviet Armenia. He had lived with real-life persecution for so long, he was entitled to one or two conspiracy theories. Now Gregor thought he owed Tibor at least a mental apology. These stories were so bizarre, to call them anti-Catholic was to give them too much credit. The
New Republic
seemed to imply that there was something about “the rigid morality of traditional Catholicism” that led inevitably to violent death.
Time
quoted Charles Curran (briefly) and Richard MacBrien (at length) on the psychological health of women who joined religious orders that still wore close to full habit. The consensus between them seemed to be that these women were not psychologically healthy at all. Then there was
Newsweek,
which presented a perfectly bewildering article that seemed to imply that there was some connection between this murder and the Church’s response to AIDS. At one point, it even managed to imply that the Church’s traditional stand on homosexual practice had
caused
AIDS. What any of this had to do with the matter at hand—the brutal murder of an eighteen-year-old girl in the storeroom of a public library in Upstate New York—Gregor didn’t know, but then the writers of the articles didn’t seem to know either. They didn’t seem to know much of anything, except that they really, really, really didn’t like the Catholic Church.

The buzzer on the nun’s desk rang and stopped and rang again in jerky impatient spurts. The sound started suddenly and continued violently, making Gregor jump. The nun looked at the intercom, blinked, and pushed a lever. The sound was shut off.

“He’ll be right in, Your Eminence,” she said at the box, not bothering to hear what the Cardinal Archbishop might want to say. Then she switched the intercom off and turned to Gregor. “Do you like reading
Time
magazine?” she asked him.

Gregor looked down at his hands. He was still carrying
Time.
He had
Newsweek
stuffed into one of the pockets of his coat. “I don’t read it very often,” he told her. “This week it had an article about the, uh—”

“About the murder in it,” Sister finished for him. “Yes, I see. My order is Primitive Observance, you know. According to our Rule, we aren’t allowed to read secular magazines.”

“Do you want to?”

“To tell the truth; I tried it, when I first came to work for the Cardinal. I had to ask permission of my Superior and go through no end of trouble, and then—well, then I found it very depressing. The only thing I found more depressing was television.” She hesitated. “I have read one or two again over the past week. Since the murder.”

“You’d have got more information eavesdropping at the Cardinal’s keyhole.”

“I don’t have to eavesdrop at the Cardinal’s keyhole,” Sister said, “the Cardinal tells me far more than I want to know already. But I am worried about him, Mr. Demarkian. He’s been very upset. He’s been—brooding about all that, from last year.”

“Do you think that’s surprising, Sister?”

“No. No, I don’t think it’s surprising. I don’t think it’s healthy, either. And then there are those Sisters. The Sisters of Divine Grace.”

“What about the Sisters of Divine Grace?”

The old nun looked uncomfortable. “I really don’t mean to be critical,” she said miserably. “I understand that things have changed since I entered the convent, and besides, an active order is different from a contemplative one. That’s what my order is, contemplative. Under ordinary circumstances, I would never have left the confines of our monastery in Connecticut.”

Gregor grinned. “When I was here last year, what I heard is that the Cardinal insisted.”

“Yes, he did. The Cardinal does have a tendency to insist.” Sister moved things around on her desk, biting her lip. “I know,” she said slowly, “that it takes a very different path of formation to fit a young woman for work in an active order than it would for life in a contemplative one. In an active order, you can’t treat your postulants like hothouse flowers. You’re going to send them off to teach religion in East St. Louis. And if SDG was a really modern order—you know, one of the ones where the Sisters don’t wear habits and do wear makeup and spend their time agitating for female ordination—well, maybe I could have understood it. As things go, I can’t understand it. Mr. Demarkian, what was that girl doing, walking around by herself in the middle of the morning when—”

The buzzer went off again, insanely this time, as if the Cardinal were sitting in his office, pounding on his button with a balled fist. Even Sister jumped this time, a polite little body hop that was nothing at all like Gregor’s large-scale clumsy jerk. Sister got control of herself almost at once, and leaned over to push the lever again.

“It will only be a moment, Your Eminence,” she said. “Mr. Demarkian is just on his way in.”

She released the lever and looked up at Gregor in embarrassment. “You’d better go in,” she told him. “Maybe we can talk again on your way out. His Eminence really has been very upset lately.”

“Maybe I can calm him down,” Gregor said.

Sister shot him a look of such pure skepticism, it could only have been managed by a nun.

“On the day someone calms the Cardinal Archbishop down,” Sister said, “the Pope will fire every member of the Curia and restaff the Vatican with Lutherans. Go talk to the man before he has an attack of apoplexy and I get stuck being the one to get him to the hospital.”

Sister wasn’t the first person who had told Gregor about the Cardinal’s long continued problems with “all that happened here last year.” Gregor had heard the same from several people, including from Father Tibor, who had had lunch with O’Bannion in Philadelphia only three months before.

“The man looks as if he is in the middle of a breakdown, Krekor,” Tibor had said. “I am very worried. You have met John. You know he is not a man likely to have breakdowns.”

Gregor did know exactly that. He found it hard even to imagine John Cardinal O’Bannion in the middle of a breakdown. That big man with his bass voice, his thick body, his air of being able to charge right into the middle of any situation and fix it, by sheer energy. How does somebody like that break down? The answer presented itself as soon as Gregor walked into the Cardinal’s office. John O’Bannion was sitting in the swivel chair behind his massive oak desk, smoking a cigar and trying to read a piece of paper through the fumes. It was a characteristic pose and should have had a characteristic effect. Instead of being impressed—and on the verge of overwhelmed—Gregor found himself feeling suddenly, desperately sorry for the man. The ruddy, broken-veined complexion of a man who enjoyed himself too completely and too often was gone, replaced by skin as dry as paper and the color of new ash. The bright blue eyes seemed to be dulled and drowning beneath a wash of yellow film. For the first time in the four or five years since Gregor had become aware of him, the Cardinal looked old.

Gregor shut the office door behind him, walked over to the chair at the side of O’Bannion’s desk and sat down. “Stop pretending to work, Your Eminence. You can’t see anything through all that smoke anyway. Tibor’s worried about you.”

“Tibor’s worried about everybody.” O’Bannion put the paper down. “Tibor’s a saint. Hello, Gregor. I hope you don’t mind my saying that I was praying never to have to see your face again.”

“Let’s just say I’m willing to take it in the spirit in which it is intended.”

“Good,” O’Bannion said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t have the energy to be socially politic these days.”

“Did you ever?”

“No,” O’Bannion said, “but I did make an effort when I was living in Rome. Do you want some coffee? Sister’s not modern. She keeps telling me she’d be happy to make me some.”

“That’s all right, I drank too much coffee on the train.” Gregor shifted in his seat and tapped his fingers against the Cardinal’s desk. O’Bannion looked so ill, Gregor was having a hard time looking directly at him. “Your Eminence,” he said, after a while, “I know you don’t take well to advice, but—”

“But I should get away somewhere and get some rest?” O’Bannion raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Everybody’s always telling me I should get away and get some rest. What they really mean is that I should go see a shrink and get over feeling guilty about all that last year. I went up there, you know. Checked in. Maybe satisfied my curiosity.”

“And?” Gregor sat very still.

“And,” the Cardinal said, “our friend is catatonic. Absolutely not home. And likely to stay that way. Whether that’s a fitting punishment for murdering three people, I don’t know.”

“In this case, I think we could let it go.”

“In this case, I don’t want to let it go. Never mind, Gregor. In spite of all the fussing people are doing over me these days, my present condition is not the result of torturing myself with guilt over what happened last year. In the first place, I have jaundice—”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain in the office, Gregor. It upsets Sister. And before you go off half-cocked, the jaundice is a side effect of gallstones and I am having both the jaundice and the gallstones seen to. I’m not a complete idiot. I will admit, however, that I haven’t been getting much sleep.”

“You never did get much,” Gregor said. “Is the insomnia of the moment caused by the death of Brigit Ann Reilly?”

The Cardinal hesitated. “Partially. I have, of course, had the Reillys here quite a bit over the past week. That was necessary, under the circumstances. But it’s not so much the murder, Gregor, as it is what’s going on around the murder. You read the material I sent you?”

“Twice. The girl died from coniine poisoning, that was obvious. I was wondering if you’d had any trouble with the police, over whether you could legitimately call it murder.”

“I never have any trouble with the police,” the Cardinal said blandly, “especially when the chief is named Pete Donovan. But no, on the question of murder, suicide, or accident, there was never any doubt. The dose she took was massive. She would have to have taken it within half an hour or forty-five minutes before she died, unless we’re going to assume she stood on the lawn of the library munching decorative border leaves for Heaven only knows how long—there’s hemlock in the library border; that might not be in the report—anyway, unless we’re going to assume that, we’re going to be stuck with the fact that someone must have fed it to her. Deliberately.”

“What about accident?” Gregor asked. “Somewhere in that report you sent me there was mention of a man named Sam Harrigan—”

“The Fearless Epicure?” John O’Bannion grinned. “I know Sam. He’s been The Fearless Epicure for a long time now. He wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t been able to recognize hemlock and had sense enough not to eat it.”

“True,” Gregor said, “but he’s probably some kind of local celebrity. There are probably a few dozen houses in town with copies of his cookbooks in them. Somebody might have—no, that won’t work, will it? If somebody had cooked up hemlock greens and fed them to Brigit Ann Reilly innocently, there would be somebody else either dead or very sick.”

“Exactly.”

“I wonder if that means the murder was premeditated,” Gregor said. He shook his head. “It’s impossible to tell from this vantage point. You’d think making a decoction from hemlock would take planning, assuming that was how the coniine was obtained, but once you think about it you realize it wouldn’t, necessarily. You said there was a hemlock border around the library’s lawn. Somebody could have simply grabbed a handful and made some tea—”

“It’s not just around the library,” the Cardinal said. “It’s everywhere. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since Brigit Ann Reilly died, it’s that hemlock is an extremely common plant in this part of the United States. There’s hemlock in the window boxes outside the second floor offices of the local bank. There’s hemlock in Mrs. Ramirez’s flower garden down in the Hispanic section of town. There’s even hemlock at the convent, growing wild and being treated as a weed at the edge of their property where it fronts the road. Before this death, I’d always thought of hemlock as something native only to ancient Greece.”

“So that leaves only the snakes,” Gregor said, “where they came from, what they were doing on the body. I put a call in to a friend of mine last night. I’m supposed to call him back when I get to Maryville. He knows something about snakes.”

“Does he really? Does he know that these had had the poison glands, sacs, whatever they are—at any rate, they’d been rendered harmless.”

“Had they?”

“Oh, yes,” the Cardinal said. “That’s one of the things we managed to keep out of the papers—we did really well on this one. We managed to keep almost everything out of the papers. I don’t know how long that will last. But you realize, once you know that the snakes were harmless, you must know—”

“Somebody’s pets,” Gregor sighed.

“Exactly,” the Cardinal said again. Then he got to his feet and began to make his way across his office, to the far side of the room where he kept his two personal filing cabinets. Gregor had always wondered what he actually kept in those cabinets. He had seen the Cardinal retrieve files from them, but the drawers always looked half empty. Now the Cardinal retrieved a pair of files from the top drawer of the cabinet on the right, and that drawer looked as empty as the others Gregor had seen the year before.

“As to the snakes,” the Cardinal said as he lumbered his way back to the desk and sat down again, “I suggest that when you get to Maryville, you ask Sam Harrigan about those. I’m not saying they belonged to him, but he did start his career as a herpetologist, and he is somewhat whacked. You’ll see. Right now, let me tell you about these.”