A Great Day for the Deadly(3)

“There’d been a thaw,” Schatzy said. “This was in Upstate New York last week, I told you. Haven’t you been listening to the news? They had a thaw up there went to sixty degrees on Valentine’s Day and didn’t cool off for eight or nine days, all the way up near the Seaway, melted everything and caused a lot of flooding—”

“I see,” Gregor said. He did see. He was just glad that Schatzy wanted to talk instead of to listen, because he was a little embarrassed by the fact that he had not seen before. The flooding near the Seaway had been major news, major enough so that Gregor had heard about it. The problem was, he didn’t much like news. He, therefore, rarely read or listened to it. The depth of his ignorance of current events was astonishing.

Schatzy was not in the mood to pursue it. “Right,” he was saying, “well. It was up there. In this town called Maryville. Body discovered with snakes crawling all over it, weirdest thing you ever saw, but like I said, she’s not dead from snake venom. They puff up—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Dave said.

“Well, they do, Dave, they do. And she didn’t. So as soon as they could see her face, they knew that wasn’t what she died from. But there she was, dead. And there were the snakes, they couldn’t let them just slither away and terrorize the local populace—”

“They wouldn’t have terrorized the local populace for long,” Gregor pointed out. “The weather had to have gotten back to normal eventually. They’d have frozen to death.”

“The weather did get back to normal eventually,” Dave said. “It’s back to normal now. They have pictures of it on the TV news. It looks like an ice cube up there.”

Schatzy had paged through the magazine until he came to the story. Like all the major crime stories in People, it was spread across two pages and illustrated with photographs in black and white. The two thin columns of text crammed in on either side of the fold looked feeble and anemic under the black heaviness of the headlines. “MYSTERY,” one of those headlines read, and then, “THE STRANGE STORY OF THE SNAKES AND THE NUN.” Gregor stopped at that word, nun, and looked back at the picture of the girl who had died. Girl was the operative word. She looked barely old enough to vote. She certainly didn’t look like a nun.

“They won’t have anything I wouldn’t be able to get from the papers,” Schatzy said, “but they’ll have interviews. I love the interviews. I love crime stories in People. They’re like reading Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie.”

“Gregor’s been a crime story in People,” Dave said. “Gregor’s been more than one.”

“Tell me about this business with the nun,” Gregor said. “What do they mean when they say that she was a nun?”

“Oh, that. That’s just an exaggeration.” Schatzy flicked his fingers at the offending word. “She wasn’t a nun, exactly. She was one of those girls who wants to be and goes to a convent to train to be one—”

“A novice?” Gregor tried. “A postulant?”

“A postulant, Gregor, that’s it. This Maryville place has a local convent, one of the kind where girls go to learn to be nuns—”

“A Motherhouse,” Gregor said politely. “Or a provincial house.”

“Yeah. Like that. Anyway, that’s where she was living. In this convent with the Sisters of Divine Grace. I don’t know, Gregor. When I was growing up, nuns had sensible names, like Benedictines or Augustinians or Sisters of Charity. What’s a name like that supposed to mean, Sisters of Divine Grace?”

“I don’t know.”

“Schatzy, look at what you’ve done,” Dave said. “You’ve got him upset. For God’s sake. Just because you spent your career reading financial statements doesn’t mean the rest of us did. The rest of us are tired of this kind of thing, I mean.”

“Are you?” Schatzy asked Gregor. “Tired of this kind of thing?”

“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “Why don’t you let me borrow your magazine for a minute. I want to go to the men’s room. I’ll meet you in the restaurant in a couple of minutes.”

“Talk about something else,” Dave said. “Talk about this girl he’s seeing. Woman. I don’t know what to call her. Young enough to be his daughter, from what I can tell.”

Gregor tucked the magazine into the pocket of his coat. “She is young enough to be my daughter, and I’m not ‘seeing’ her, as you put it. I have a much too well developed sense of self-preservation. I’ll see you two in a couple of minutes, all right?”