Great Day for the Deadly (33 page)

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ve been sitting here for half an hour now and I still have absolutely nothing.”

Pete Donovan cleared his throat. “Never mind what you have, for the moment,” he said, displaying what Gregor thought was a commendable lack of concern about what Josh Malley had actually meant. “Mr. Demarkian here wants to ask you a few questions. Mr. Demarkian is the man—”

“I know who he is,” Josh said. “I was going to talk to him, but Miriam didn’t want me to. I was going to talk to him about how I saw Brigit down on the levy on the day of the flood.”

“Did you?” Gregor asked him.

“No.” Josh flushed. “I made it up. Because it made Miriam crazy when I said things like that. Miriam always hated publicity. And she was making me crazy lately. Watching me.”

“From what I hear, you could have used watching,” Gregor said.

“You mean because of Ann-Harriet?” Josh shrugged. “It’s the kind of thing Miriam got upset about. I never did understand why. I mean, sex is sex, you get my drift?”

“No,” Pete Donovan said.

“Talk to me about tonight,” Gregor said. “How did you happen to find the body? Somebody said the greenhouse was where you kept your animals. Were you going in to look at them?”

“We only kept the animals in the greenhouse in the winter,” Josh said. “In the summer they had a place outside. The greenhouse got too warm. I wasn’t visiting the animals. I never do that at night.”

“Then why were you there?” Gregor persisted.

“Because I was asked to go,” Josh said. “We were supposed to go out to dinner, Miriam and I, and we came back from town and went puttering around doing our own stuff and then it got to be about four o’clock and I wanted to know what I was supposed to be doing. Maybe it was four thirty—”

“It was close on five,” Donovan said.

“He should know. He wears a watch.” Josh shrugged again. “If I called him at five, it probably was about four thirty. Anyway, I went wandering around, looking for Miriam and the house was empty because it’s Saturday night and the help all has the night off, they always have Saturday nights off, Miriam says in the old days you could get them where they would stay on duty for the weekends but now you can’t. Anyway, I went down to the kitchen and there was a note on the refrigerator saying she was in the greenhouse, if I wanted her I should look for her there.”

“Did she often leave notes for you on the refrigerator?” Gregor asked.

“All the time.”

“Are you sure this note was from Miriam?”

“Absolutely. I’d know her handwriting anywhere. Anyway. I found the note and then I started from the back of the house, and when I got there I found her. Just like that. She was just sort of scrunched up there on that shelf, out of reach, with her ass sticking into the air over my head. I wanted to get her down, but I couldn’t find the ladder we keep in there. It was just plain gone. And then I thought I shouldn’t get her down. She had to be dead, the way she was lying. The fact that she was there at all. She had to be dead and dumped there. I know you’re not supposed to touch anything. So I started to go call Donovan here. And that’s when I smelled it. The smoke.”

“Just smoke?” Gregor asked. “Not kerosene?”

Josh Malley thought about it. “Smoke and kerosene,” he said finally. “I was still in the greenhouse. You know that funny smell greenhouses get. That was all I could smell at first. And then there was the smoke and I went out into the conservatory to see what was going on and I smelled the kerosene. I told him about the kerosene when I called.” Josh jerked his head in Donovan’s direction.

“Did you call immediately?” Gregor asked him. “Right then?”

“Yes,” Josh said.

“It was five oh one exactly,” Donovan said.

“Fine.” Gregor didn’t wear a watch. He grabbed Donovan’s wrist and checked his instead. It was five twenty-two. “She was still here at five oh one,” he said, “that means she’s had twenty-one minutes to get where she wants to go. Is there a local airport?”

“Yes, there is. Shuttle flights to New York City and into Canada.”

“Exactly.” Gregor nodded. “That’s where we’re going to go. Go tell your state police people to put out an all-points for a nun.”

I
T WAS CALLED MARYVILLE
International Airport and it sat on the flats east of town, a meager collection of hangars and lights that never handled anything bigger than a twenty-passenger shuttle. The
international
came from its ties to Canada, which were both numerous and strong. Up here, there was a lot of traffic back and forth. Americans went to Canada for the entertainment. Canadians came to America to buy cigarettes at less than five dollars a pack. Gregor thought it was Canada that changed Pete Donovan’s mind about the urgency of what they were doing. At first, although he had made the calls and contacted the authorities Gregor asked him to, he was inclined to go about his part in this adventure with due deliberation. Waiting around for him to get into the car and get the motor started and stop talking to everybody north of Albany on his two-way radio drove Gregor to distraction. Then the dispatcher said something about how lonely she was this weekend, her son had gone off to spend some time with his girlfriend in Canada, and Pete Donovan said, “Shit.”

“Excuse me,” Gregor asked him.

They were still sitting in the driveway of Miriam Bailey’s Huntington Avenue house. The great arc of the drive was still clogged with police cars and fire engines. The drive behind Pete’s car was blessedly still clear, but not by much. The state police had sent for a mobile crime unit and it was pulled up half onto the drive’s center lawn. Pete Donovan gunned his engine, slammed his gears into reverse and hit the gas pedal—much harder, this time, than he had back on the road when he had been bringing Gregor in. The car kicked. The car skidded. The car steadied itself on the gravel of the drive and shot off onto the street. Moments later they were barreling into the center of town again, running red lights and causing havoc. Gregor closed his eyes and asked himself what he could have been thinking of, wishing for a chance to take part in a high-speed car chase. He didn’t know what they were chasing but they were certainly going at high speed. He didn’t like it a bit. Pete Donovan seemed to like it just fine, and after a while he did what Gregor had expected him to do at the beginning: he turned on his siren. Gregor had never been in a police car with the siren going before. The Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t have police cars with sirens, and the local police who sometimes called them in on serial murder and kidnapping cases didn’t invite them to go tearing over the countryside in black-and-whites with the whoopy whistle blasting. Gregor had had no idea that the damn things were so loud.

“Can’t you turn that thing off?” he asked Pete Donovan.

“Soon as we get out of town,” Donovan said. “Don’t want to cause a traffic accident.”

“Why not? You’ve already caused three heart attacks.”

“I want you to tell me the whole story from the beginning,” Donovan said. “Then I’m going to read you chapter and verse about what I’m going to do to you if you’re wrong.”

“I can’t tell you anything with that noise going on over my head.”

“That’s Delaney Street coming up,” Donovan said.

That was, indeed, Delaney Street coming up. They jumped the red light and bolted into it, turned right up the hill toward the Motherhouse, and turned off to the right again onto a gentle fork. Commercial buildings began to shade into two-story hybrids and then into small houses with small yards, but the St. Patrick’s Day decorations didn’t shade into anything. Gregor saw all the same leprechauns, pots of gold, and shamrocks he had on Delaney and at the St. Mary’s Inn. Out here, some of the houses even had their lawns and porches decorated in a way that was more usual for Christmas. There were green and white lights and big fat leprechauns sitting on pots of gold and lit up from inside. Pete Donovan saw Gregor staring at it all and said, “They import ’em from the city. You can get anything from New York City.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Tell me a story,” Donovan said.

Gregor pointed to the roof.

Donovan leaned over to the dashboard and shut the siren off.

“So,” Gregor said a couple of minutes later, while they were winding their way through small and narrow roads that inevitably slowed them down. They weren’t as slowed as Gregor would have liked to be, but it wasn’t much use talking to Donovan about his driving. He wouldn’t listen. “So,” Gregor said again, “if you’re going to go back to the day the first of the murders happened—”

“I like that day,” Donovan said.

“Yes. Well. If you’re going to start there, you’ve got this. Brigit Ann Reilly was a girl who may or may not have had a vocation as a nun, but who very definitely had an avocation as a conspirator. She also had a strong sentimental streak. She was the kind of girl who liked stories about lost puppies saved from drowning and who imagined herself in the starring role in all the most affecting stories of the ancient saints. She had also been very sheltered, so that she knew very little of people who were not like herself. When the Sisters sent her down to work at St. Andrew’s, she had her eyes opened—but not just to poverty, the way the Sisters wanted her to be. St. Andrew’s is Maryville’s favorite local charity—”

“Of course it is,” Donovan said. “It’s easy to help those people. They work their butts off—”

“That’s hardly the point,” Gregor told him. “The point is, Brigit didn’t meet only poor people at St. Andrew’s. She met rich and exotic ones, too. She met Miriam Bailey, for instance, because Miriam and the bank funded a lot of programs and Miriam liked to keep an eye on them. She met Ann-Harriet Severan and Don Bollander, because Miriam Bailey insisted on her employees’ involvement in charitable work. She met Father Michael Doherty, the ultimate sentimental hero, a man who had left a rich family to live with the poor. If Father Doherty hadn’t been so conscientious, Brigit Ann Reilly might never have died. Her first inclination, I think, was to develop a roaring crush on
him.”

“Father Doherty would never have put up with that sort of thing,” Donovan said.

“He didn’t. He told me about it earlier this afternoon. Brigit got silly, Father Doherty got stern. As I said, in a way it was too bad, because Brigit didn’t just give up her romantic fantasies, she transferred them. And this time she transferred them to the wrong person.”

“I’d say that was putting it mildly.”

“Mmm, yes. Well. This person had a problem she had not been able to solve. She wanted to steal a great deal of money from the bank and she’d more or less figured out how to do it, but it had a couple of snags. What she wanted was to go into the vault on the day the old-new money transfer occurred and take not the old money—as I told you before, that would be too quickly discovered—but a large chunk of the new money. Not as large a chunk as you might think, by the way. She’d already been stealing the bank blind for close to two years.
That
money is probably salted away in the Cayman Islands. What she wanted now was about fifty or sixty thousand dollars, enough to get out of the country and lie low until she was sure nobody had discovered the bank accounts. She was going to get that information rather quickly because on the fifth of March, the bank auditors were going to come in. No fewer than three people mentioned that to me over the last two days—including John Cardinal O’Bannion. It went right past me.”

“Why shouldn’t it?” Pete Donovan said. “There’s been that S and L disaster. And there’s been rumbles about something just as bad in banking.”

“Yes, of course,” Gregor told him. “It’s in the atmosphere. Now, the problem was, no matter how well all this had been planned out, a bank audit was going to blow it and bank audits are not announced well in advance. She was lucky to get the month or so she got. In that time she had to get done the rest of what she needed to get done and she had to get out of the country. She didn’t have much time. Brigit Ann Reilly’s romantic infatuation with saving her soul came as a godsend. She had to get down to the vault and move a fair amount of money at a time when dozens of people would be around to see her go in and out. Fine. She wouldn’t go in and out. A nun would go in and out. A little makeup, a little care to keep her face turned away from people—if she’d had to come face-to-face with anyone who knew her, it wouldn’t have worked, but most of the people she ran into were absolute strangers. They saw a nun, generic. People don’t really look at nuns in habit, even modified habits. And of the two people who did know her and saw her in that habit, only one recognized her. The other one—and I’m talking about Don Bollander now—simply saw “a nun” and later convinced himself that he’d seen Brigit Ann Reilly.”

“Don always was a jerk,” Donovan said.

“Maybe so.” Gregor sighed. “What she did was, she told Brigit that she was thinking of devoting herself to the religious life, that she’d thought about it for a long time, that these days there were ways of doing that no matter what your life had been like. At any rate, she told Brigit something to make Brigit think that it would be a good idea to give her a chance to walk around in a habit for a day or two. She needed that habit on the morning of the day the money was exchanged and no later. She got Brigit to steal it for her and bring it down to an abandoned building on Diamond Place to hand it over in private. While Brigit was there, she fed her coniine—in tea or coffee or orange juice. I don’t know, but my guess would be tea. It’s easy to carry around a thermos of tea and it’s easy to distill coniine from hemlock in tea, too, if you know what you’re doing. This was at about ten thirty, by the way, before Sam Harrigan saw Brigit wandering around down there. My guess is that she—our murderer, not Brigit—wanted to be sure the coniine would do its work. The one thing she couldn’t have was Brigit telling Sister Scholastica or Reverend Mother General what she’d done, and there was no way to ensure that except to make Brigit dead. Brigit liked to keep secrets, but she was only capable of keeping them for so long. Anyway, my guess is that our murderer gave Brigit a few extra errands to do in the low-rent district, got her moving around a little. That helped the coniine to work faster—it wouldn’t have taken long with Brigit, but our murderer didn’t necessarily know that—anyway, it got Brigit’s blood moving and the coniine working as fast as possible, and it did something else. It muddied the waters unbelievably, because while Brigit was running around doing errands, our murderer was just running around. That was why you had so many ‘sightings’ after the body was found. That was suspicious on the face of it. Of course, you always get sightings and hysteria in small towns after particularly bizarre violence. The sort of people who report that kind of thing, though, are of a type. Here, you had bank officials, nuns, schoolteachers, doctors—you had everybody. And the only conclusion I was able to draw from that was that people had seen her, or had seen someone they later thought was her, someone in a habit. Because our friend did a little walking around on her own. She went up to Beckner near St. Andrew’s parish church. Father Doherty saw her, well enough to know she wasn’t Brigit but not well enough to know who she was—”