Great Day for the Deadly (22 page)

Scholastica had come out of the corridor door closest to the utility room and was hurrying across the hall in the direction of Reverend Mother General. Gregor forced his way through a small knot of policemen into the only open space in that hall and shot out his arm to catch her.

Gregor Demarkian and Pete Donovan had been so intent on bodies and sinks and body bags and evidence, they had been oblivious to everything else that was going on around them. Gregor especially had forgotten that he wasn’t in the midst of what he still thought of as the “normal” venue for a homicide, the scene most often chosen by the serial killers he had spent so much of his professional life tracking. He was in a living, breathing, functioning institution, not an abandoned building or a vacant lot. While his mind had been elsewhere, great changes had been taking place around him. The nuns who had crowded the door to the courtyard and the space just beyond it were gone, he didn’t know where. Reverend Mother General was still holding the fort in an unobtrusive corner, watching the naive young men with a frankly contemptuous eye, but she was so silent she could have been invisible. Gregor saw her see him catch Scholastica’s arm and nod, as if she had been expecting something of the sort to happen soon. He was getting that feeling he always got with old-fashioned nuns, that he got with the Cardinal’s secretary: The feeling that wheels upon wheels were turning in a mind much more intelligent and much more disciplined than his own.

“He wants to know how a convent runs,” Scholastica told Reverend Mother General, after she had heard Gregor out and dragged him across the room to her superior. “He says it makes a difference to how the body got into the utility room.”

Reverend Mother considered this. “Tell me you’ve done what I asked you to,” she said to Scholastica. “Spell it out.”

“Yes, Reverend Mother, of course. The postulants are darning socks. Sister Gabriel is with them and she’s enforcing silence. The novices are in chapel with Sister Agnes Bernadine, praying for the repose of Don Bollander’s soul and the quick apprehension of his killer. They aren’t silent, but they won’t be getting a chance to talk about this for at least an hour. Sister Alice Marie has taken over portress duty so she can answer the phones. If parents call up being hysterical, she’ll calm them down. As for the Sisters—”

Reverend Mother General waved away the Sisters. “They’ll be all right,” she said. “I can trust most of them in a real emergency, even Peter Rose.” Then Reverend Mother General turned to Gregor Demarkian and smiled. “I know what you’re getting at,” she said. “You think this man was alive and well when he got here.”

“Not necessarily alive and
well
,” Gregor said cautiously, “but alive. It can take quite a long time for coniine to work, especially on a large man like Don Bollander. He could have swallowed the poison any time up to an hour before he arrived at the convent and still have been moving under his own power.”

“Are you sure it was coniine?” Reverend Mother General wanted to know.

“No,” Gregor admitted. “It will take forensics to tell me that for sure.”

“You think they will tell you that for sure?”

“Don’t you?”

Reverend Mother General smiled, much more broadly this time. “Of course I do. We all do. Every Sister in the house. We’d rather not, but we do. All right, Mr. Demarkian. You want to know how a convent runs, I’ll show you how a convent runs. I’ll show you how this one runs, at any rate. There are a great many variations these days.”

“Is Mr. Donovan going to go with us?” Scholastica asked.

“Mr. Donovan has to stay and supervise his men,” Gregor said.

“You’re not going with us either,” Reverend Mother told Scholastica. “I want you to call the Chancery and make a report. Not to the Cardinal, mind you, and not to one of his assistants, either. I’m not ready to talk to John O’Bannion and I won’t be for several hours.”

“He’ll be ready to talk to you,” Scholastica said drily.

“Yes, he will,” Reverend Mother General said, “and it’ll be the first time in years, too. Alice Marie can talk to him. Alice Marie is so feminine she confuses him, and then he hangs up and has to call back again.”

“Right,” Scholastica said.

Reverend Mother General unhooked her keys from her belt and turned to Gregor Demarkian. “Come along,” she said. “This is a very modern house built to accommodate a lot of very old-fashioned customs. It gets confusing sometimes.”

“The first thing you have to realize,” Reverend Mother General told him, after she had led him away from the crime scene and its craziness, across the courtyard and through a door he hadn’t noticed before. The courtyard was full of doors he hadn’t noticed before, and windows, too, as fully open to the first-floor rooms that lined it as it could have been as long as that floor had walls. That the courtyard was lined mostly with rooms was confirmed by the fact that it was a room Reverend Mother General had shooed him into. Going inside, Gregor had looked back over his shoulder and done a quick count. There were two sets of four doors. One set opened into each of the corners, presumably into halls like the one where they had just been. The other four were near the center of each courtyard wall, and presumably opened into rooms. Reverend Mother General caught Gregor’s distracted stare and said, “Yes?”

“I’m sorry,” Gregor said. “It was the doors. Do you lock those doors?”

“We never lock the doors to the courtyard,” Reverend Mother General told him. “There’s no reason to. They go from one part of the convent to the other. They don’t go outside.”

“They’d make it easier for someone coming in from the outside to get around the convent without being heard,” Gregor said. Then he shook it off. “I’m sorry, Reverend Mother. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

“That’s quite all right, Mr. Demarkian. I was saying that the first thing you have to realize is that the women in this house are not, canonically, nuns. According to canon law, a nun is a woman religious who has taken solemn vows. All true nuns in the Catholic Church are now contemplatives, women who live by and large in cloister and whose apostolate it is to pray rather than to teach or nurse or run consciousness-raising centers in California. The women in this house have taken simple vows and they are, therefore, technically religious Sisters.”

“Does that mean I should stop calling them nuns?”

“Not at all. The names business is really the result of a lot of wrangling in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, when the first active orders—that’s what we call an order like ours, Mr. Demarkian, that does work in the world, active or mixed—at any rate, those first orders had their trouble getting permission from Rome to establish themselves, and some of the objections were finally got round by calling the women who joined them ‘religious sisters’ instead of ‘nuns.’ The distinction really doesn’t exist much of anywhere anymore except in official Church documents. People call us nuns and we call ourselves nuns. The distinction, however, does make a difference in how this house is run. Do you know anything about cloistered nuns?”

“No.”

“Well, there are variations in that area these days, too,” Reverend Mother General said. They had gone through the small room—which had been empty, but possessed of a blackboard at one end, as if it had once served as a classroom and since been abandoned—and across a narrow hall. Then there had been another that opened onto another hall, a long one this time, with a crucifix at the far end and a door under that. Gregor followed Reverend Mother moving through it. Reverend Mother walked unnaturally close to the wall.

“Basically,” Reverend Mother said, “a cloistered or contemplative order will have a much stricter constitution than an active or mixed one. Rome keeps a much closer watch on the Holy Rules of orders like those. A Holy Rule is a set of regulations and principles by which a congregation lives. The active and mixed orders have been allowed a great deal of latitude in their constitutions, and they’ve taken advantage of it. We’ve taken advantage of it. We’ve been experimenting. Thirty years ago, no Sister would ever have left convent grounds except in the company of a companion Sister. Now we enforce that rule only in the worst neighborhoods of large cities, and it has nothing to do with religious obedience. It’s purely practical. Then there are restaurants. Thirty years ago, no Sister was allowed to eat in the presence of a secular. That was a rule first established in the Counter-Reformation, in an attempt to stem the tide of abuses in religious orders that had led to scandal. Now Sisters can eat in public all they like and in restaurants, too, if their families pay for it. Their families often do. We have a retired Sister here named Sister Rosita whose granddaughter sends her fifty dollars every month to take herself and the other four retired Sisters to McDonald’s. During Lent they put the money in the poor box with the granddaughter’s blessing. Do you see what I mean?”

“You mean you don’t have any idea where anybody was last night,” Gregor sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

“I mean nothing of the sort,” Reverend Mother General said. “What I’m trying to get at is why I think you must be wrong. I don’t think Mr. Don Bollander could have gotten into this convent last night. I don’t think he could have gotten into it until this morning—”

“Reverend Mother, rigor mortis—”

“Hear me out,” Reverend Mother General said. They had gotten to the end of the corridor, to a point nearly underneath the crucifix. Reverend Mother General turned to her left, looked through her keys, and fitted one into the lock of the door. When the door opened she put her hand around and flicked a light switch. Gregor saw fluorescents flicker and then beam into a strong glow. Underneath them and over Reverend Mother General’s shoulder he saw what looked like a room full of drafting tables.

“Come in here,” Reverend Mother General told him. “This is the plans room. I don’t know what it was planned for originally, but a couple of years ago we had to have some rewiring done and it was empty, so I had our blueprints and floor plans set up here. Come and take a look at this one in the middle. It’s the easiest one to read.”

Gregor stepped into the room and up to the large drafting table set up in its center. He looked down on what seemed to be a gigantic cross with a square shaped hole cut out of its middle where the sections overlapped.

Reverend Mother pointed to the short end—the head—and said, “That’s the front door. It faces the front gate and Delaney Street.” She pointed to the short arm to its right. “That’s where we are now, or near enough. The crucifix we were just looking at is at this end, and as you undoubtedly noticed, the door is underneath it. That is a door to the outside. There is one in a similar position in the other arm and the foot.”

“Are they kept locked?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, yes,” Reverend Mother said. “They’re plugged into an automatic security system, too. That’s why we had the house rewired. If you try to open one of those doors, or even to unlock it, without neutralizing the security system first, you will set off the alarms.”

“Is the security system ever off?” Gregor asked her. “Are those doors ever unlocked?”

“During the daytime, yes, Mr. Demarkian. But we lock up here at six o’clock. Before six o’clock, this house is a very busy place indeed. Do you really think Mr. Bollander could have come in through one of these four doors and wandered around for I don’t know how long—or even just walked down one of these corridors. These are the main arteries of the house. Before six o’clock they would have been full of people.”

“This one isn’t full of people,” Gregor pointed out. “Not now.”

Reverend Mother General made a short jabbing gesture with her hand, impatient. “That’s because I’ve got everybody up front, trying to keep them busy enough so they don’t brood. On a normal day the room across the hall from this one would have had Raphael and John Damascene in it, packaging catechisms to be sent out to our outreach missions. And three doors down you would have had Sister Clare, answering letters about the beatification and sending out brochures to girls who have expressed interest in joining the order.”

“What about the other doors?” Gregor asked. “There was a door off that hall that led outside.”

“Yes, there was. And there are four of them, too, in the corners on the outside perimeter of the center of the cross. And yes, they’re unlocked and not connected to the alarms in the daytime. But it is the daytime, Mr. Demarkian. And those doors are locked just like everything else at six. They’re on a central switch. That switch is in my office.”

“Someone could have gotten into your office.”

“True,” Reverend Mother General said. “They could have walked in any time they liked.
That
is never locked. They couldn’t have tampered with the switch, however, because to work it you have to have the key, and the only key there is in this house is right here on my key ring. It was there when I locked up last night. It was there when I unlocked this morning. It was hanging on my belt in my cell all last night and I know that perfectly well because I am a very light sleeper. Of course, there is an override.”

“An override?”

“On the front door there is a special lock that takes a special key that overrides the system, for emergencies. That key is also on my key ring. It has not left it.”

“What about other people,” Gregor asked desperately. “You can’t have the only emergency—”

“I don’t. The bank made us put the system in. We had some very bad vandalism in our chapel about three years ago and it played havoc with our insurance. They have a key. The security company has a key. That’s in case everybody loses theirs. Do you really think Mr. Bollander was killed by an employee of the security company—”

“No,” Gregor said. This recital had been depressing, although not for the reasons Reverend Mother General had thought it was. She didn’t seem to realize that if nobody could have gotten in from the outside, suspicion would have to fall on one of her nuns. Especially because the first death had been one of her postulants. But Reverend Mother General was plowing remorselessly on, getting grim satisfaction out of every word.