A Great Day for the Deadly(10)
“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.”
“What are those?”
“Round seven trillion, eight billion, six million nine hundred eighty thousand three hundred sixty-six in a war game called Reformation and Counter-Reformation. You’d think people would get tired of this sort of anti-Catholic posturing, but they never do. It’s like an addiction. Have you heard about the beatification of Margaret Finney?”
“I’m not even sure I know what a beatification is,” Gregor said.
The Cardinal waved this away. “I could go into a lot of technical detail, but what it really amounts to is that beatification is the first official step on the road to official canonization in the Catholic Church. Margaret Finney was the foundress of the Sisters of Divine Grace—”
“I see,” Gregor said. “So this is good for them. That their foundress would be on the way to being canonized.”
“Well, yes, Gregor,” the Cardinal said, “but it didn’t fall on them out of the air. It almost never does. Somebody usually has to bring a case for the person to be beatified—to bring a case to Rome. Some religious orders mount entire campaigns, and even with the campaigns it can take decades, sometimes even centuries, before anything official happens. The Sisters up in Maryville had been working on this for a long time, since before the present Reverend Mother General was a postulant. And the Sisters founded that town, by the way. The first thing in it was their Motherhouse. All of Maryville has been very, very involved in this effort to have Margaret Finney canonized—which, by the way, if it happens, will make her the first Irish immigrant ever to be made a saint. And Maryville to this day is very, very Irish.”