A Great Day for the Deadly(26)

“That Demarkian person probably wants to talk to me,” Alice Marie said. She still had the cardboard in her hand, flattened out now, big enough to cover her palm. She balled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. “I’ll come along,” she told Leah Brady. “I want to go upstairs for a moment anyway. Tell Sister Josepha I’ll be right out.”

“Yes, Sister.”

Leah Brady retreated. Alice Marie waited until she had closed the door before she said, “Obviously we can’t tell Reverend Mother about this now. We’re going to be in enough trouble over Brigit once it all comes out, and it is going to all come out, sooner or later. The only thing I can say, Sister, is that you have to find out—”

“I’ll find out,” Sister Scholastica said. “You’d better go now. If Reverend Mother really is calling you, she’s going to be impatient.”

“Because Reverend Mother is already impatient?” Alice Marie asked. “I wouldn’t say that. I think Reverend Mother is a Living Rule.”

“Of course she is,” Scholastica said and then stood stock-still while Alice Marie glided out of the room and into the corridor. As soon as the older Sister was well and truly gone, Scholastica cast her eyes to Heaven and uttered a little prayer. Then she promised every saint she could think of to make a novena to the Blessed Mother on the subject of that piece of cardboard as soon as she got the chance.

Sister Scholastica didn’t have to find out who had put that cardboard in the latch.

Sister Scholastica already knew.





[2]


For Father Michael Doherty, the weekend had started at eight P.M. on Friday night, when a boy named Juan Jose Cortez had been knifed five times in the chest on the corner of Clare Avenue and Diamond Place. Juan Jose Cortez was fourteen years old, and from the reports of the boys who had been with him, his attacker wasn’t much older. His attacker was also Anglo, which figured. There wasn’t much violence in Maryville, but what there was always took place on Clare and Diamond and Beckner and always crossed ethnic lines. It might have crossed racial lines, too, except that the local black population was solidly middle class and much too sensible. Father Doherty got called out because of Juan’s mother, who, like most of the mothers in the neighborhood, preferred the ministrations of her priest to the arcane aloofness of the county hospital doctors. Michael had arrived at the hospital to find Juan in miraculously good shape, due to the apparent fact that the Anglo who had stuck him had no strength at all in his arms. He had checked Juan’s wounds personally—so he could tell Juan’s mother he had—and started to go home, when the ambulance brought in another face he knew. That one belonged to Carmen Esposito, and the agony that rippled through it had been caused not by human brutality but by unhuman whim. Carmen Esposito had one of the apartments in the building three doors down from the church on the church’s right hand side, and like all the apartments in that building hers had a defective gas stove. She was trying to light one burner when the one beside it started to leak. It didn’t leak enough to cause an explosion, but it did leak enough to cause a fire. The fire caught at her sleeve and the next thing she knew she was covered with flame. When Michael first saw her in the emergency room, she looked boiled. He’d stayed most of the night with her. For one thing, she was afraid. For another, he was a qualified physician, although not a burn specialist, and he could help her. For a third, his mere presence tended to get his people better and more prompt care than they would have received at any other time. It was as if the doctors at county hospital didn’t think the Hispanic population of Maryville was very important, but believed that their priest had secret ties to John Cardinal O’Bannion’s Chancery.

It was now eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, and Michael was tired. In fact, he was exhausted. After he’d finally seen Carmen settled and as comfortable as she was going to get, he’d gone downstairs to take another stab at going home and run into a traffic accident instead. The traffic accident had been a four-car pileup. His people—Dona and Maritsio Dominguez—had been in the third car to hit the knot. They had been prepared and not badly hurt. The occupants of the other cars, however, were almost all also Catholic, and Michael couldn’t see his way to abandoning them just because they were not his parishioners. Besides, he had taken pains to get himself affiliated with county hospital. When the rest of the staff saw him there in the middle of an emergency, they expected him to help out.

He should have insisted on getting back in time to say the seven o’clock Mass. He should at least have insisted on getting back in time to say the ten. By ten, his clinic was supposed to have been open for four hours. Instead, he had let himself be talked into extra duty after extra duty. The duties had been both medical and clerical. He had finished with them less than fifteen minutes ago. He was now finally stumbling home, and the last thing he needed was this insistent old woman who had camped herself on the church’s steps, holding a brown paper bag full of the Lord only knew what and talking a mile a minute in a Hispanic dialect he couldn’t begin to understand.