A Great Day for the Deadly(50)

“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.

“Remember what I was telling you about the latitude Rome shows us in our Rules? Well, Mr. Demarkian, we’ve taken less advantage of it than some, but we have taken advantage of it. Before the changes, every nun’s day was regulated almost down to the second. We went to sleep together. We got up together. We went to chapel together. We went to meals together. Well, we gave that up. We still do some things as a group. That’s why I said he could have been gotten in here this morning. We would have been in chapel en masse, for Mass and Divine Office. It’s the only time of day we are together en masse at all anymore. At any other hour, and that includes four in the morning and during Compline, there are always one or two Sisters doing something on their own, taking care of emergencies, just getting extra work done. With the beatification and the Cardinal coming for St. Patrick’s Day and the murder—the first murder—there’s been a lot of extra work to get done. So, Mr. Demarkian, it’s just possible that if Don Bollander entered this house through the front door on his own two feet last night, he could have been careful enough so that we didn’t see him. But trust me, he wasn’t carted around this house dead as a doornail and dumped in the utility room and he didn’t come in through any of the side doors. The alarms would have gone off and whoever was carting him around would have been caught in the act. There were a lot of Sisters awake last night. We were having a Forty Hours Devotion in the chapel.”





Four


[1]


GREGOR DEMARKIAN DIDN’T BELIEVE in locked-room mysteries. He didn’t believe in poisons that leave no trace, identical twins who successfully switch identities, or the silent menace that walks the dark, either. Back on Cavanaugh Street, Bennis Hannaford fed him detective stories the way some mothers feed their children hard candies, as a pacifier. Sometimes she hits a real clinker, a resurrected unknown “classic” of the thirties. Gregor always ended up wondering what those authors had been thinking of. Mothers who didn’t know their own children. Brothers who didn’t know their own sisters. And locked rooms. Always locked rooms. There was a man, John Dickson Carr, who specialized in locked rooms. It made Gregor feel a little better about being called “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” If there was one thing Mrs. Christie had had the good sense never to indulge in, it was locked rooms.

No matter how he felt about it, though, what he seemed to have was a locked room. He went over and over it with Reverend Mother. He established the obvious. Either Don Bollander was dead at the time he arrived at St. Mary of the Hill, which meant he would have to have come in by the outside door in the hall where the utility room was. If he had come in at any other place he and his murderer—or he and his transporter—would most likely have been discovered. Besides, there were dozens of other hiding places for a body on the first floor of the Motherhouse. There were room closets and storage bins, ordinary closets, and half-filled packing crates stuck in out-of-the-way rooms. The only sensible reason for Bollander to have ended up in the laundry sink was that it was convenient, and the only thing it was convenient to—assuming someone was carting around a corpse—was that door.

If Don Bollander had been alive when he came to St. Mary of the Hill, he could have come in almost anywhere, although the two best bets would have been the same (impossible) side door from the first scenario or the front door. Most of the other side doors opened onto staircases that opened onto dormitory floors at least on the second story. The front door had the advantage of having access to a wide variety of corridors all at once. It would still have been risky, creeping through the Motherhouse halls in the dead of night, but as an explanation it was more likely than the one Reverend Mother favored, which was that Bollander, dead or alive, had arrived around six o’clock this morning. Gregor didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe Bollander had been moved to the Motherhouse after his death. He had only been able to examine small stretches of bare skin—it wouldn’t have been polite, or politic, to start ripping away at the man’s clothes—he hadn’t seen the kind of markings he would have needed to believe that. Then, too, both the visible skin and the clothes were too clean. If a corpse had been carried all over hell and gone, there should be something on it that would look out of place if that corpse came back to life and started back working in his office. As for Reverend Mother’s favorite scenario, Gregor knew it was absurd. The body could not have arrived alive at St. Mary of the Hill at six o’clock this morning and been in the state of rigor in which they found it at eleven. It could not have arrived already in rigor and been stuffed in the laundry sink without something breaking. Gregor had watched Pete Donovan’s men pull Bollander out, and they were the ones who’d had to do the breaking. And that meant—