A Great Day for the Deadly(51)

Gregor didn’t know what that meant. He supposed that—barring some real absurdity like a secret plot being carried out by an employee of the company that had installed the security locks—it meant he was stuck with a locked-room murder whether he liked it or not. It made his head reel. It put him in a particularly bad mood. Murderers were logical, he’d told Pete Donovan earlier. Well, Gregor Demarkian was logical, too. He didn’t like Alice in Wonderland cases. He didn’t like to be confused. Most of all, he didn’t like to feel as if he were missing something very blatant and very simple—which was exactly what he did feel like.

In the end, he looked Reverend Mother over once or twice—she was launched on a discourse on the depredations of religious superiors in the United States since the close of Vatican II—and made up his mind to strike out on his own. It might be hours before Pete Donovan and his men were finished, or minutes, but Gregor didn’t care. He wanted to get out in the air and think for himself. When Sister Scholastica passed the plans room for the fourth or fifth time, he stopped her and asked for his coat. When she brought his coat he thanked her, shrugged it on and said, “Well, Reverend Mother, it’s been very interesting talking with you. I have to thank you for your cooperation.”

“I wasn’t cooperating,” Reverend Mother said. “I was monopolizing the discussion.”

Actually, she hadn’t been. Gregor had asked too many questions for that. He smiled at her anyway, thanked her again, and asked to be directed to the front door.





[2]


It was a clear day but a frigid one, a deceptive day offering sunshine but no warmth. Gregor set out through the propped-open leaves of the Motherhouse’s wrought-iron gate with half a purpose in mind. The Cardinal had shown him a map of Maryville that seemed to indicate that the street that dead-ended at the Motherhouse gate on this end dead-ended at the library on the other. In between was practically everything of importance in town, except Sam Harrigan’s house and the town’s minuscule barrio. This was the walk Brigit Ann Reilly had taken on the day she died and on every day before that for two months, excepting Sundays. Gregor wanted to walk it himself, at least as far as his hotel, which so far he hadn’t seen. After leaving Gregor off at the Motherhouse gate, the Cardinal’s driver had been deputed to drop his luggage at the St. Mary’s Inn. According to the Cardinal, the inn was on the corner of Delaney and Londonderry streets, “right across from the bank.” Whether that made its location a good one or a bad one, Gregor didn’t know. He had his mind on other things. What he definitely did not have it on was locked-room mysteries, but before he left the Motherhouse he checked out the front door lock anyway. It was just as Reverend Mother General said it was. There were a series of dead bolts that seemed to have nothing with which they could be closed. There was a conventional lock under the doorknob and a much smaller one higher up. Gregor recognized the brand name etched into its polished brass front and was impressed. The security company had given the Sisters a top-of-the-line job. He wondered whose doing that was, the Cardinal’s or the bank’s. He supposed it might have been both.

Whosever it was, contemplation of it was definitely not good for Gregor’s mood. That lock was just one more argument in favor of a locked-room puzzle and against Gregor’s most fervently held conviction, which was that the whole thing was going to turn out to have been a mistake, or gross stupidity on his part. He got himself away from it by moving as quickly as possible into town. He wanted to get a feel for Maryville. He wanted to feel what Brigit Ann Reilly had felt. He could get to Don Bollander later.

Whether any of this made any sense, he never knew. The only feel he got from Maryville concerned its commitment to St. Patrick’s Day and its own Irish-American heritage, which was extreme but rather endearing. He passed a cluster of buildings calling themselves St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church and St. Ignatius Loyola Parochial School and marveled at the variety and extent of the decorations scattered through the branches of their trees and across their doors and windows. He passed a hole-in-the-wall store whose narrow plate glass window was so crowded it was impossible to see through it to the room inside. It had gold letters painted across it that said, MARYVILLE CATHOLIC CENTER. RELIGIOUS ARTICLES. It had a hundred tiny green-and-white shamrocks growing like mad vines into every available space. Gregor thought it was all very nice, but he couldn’t see what good it was doing him. Irish pride and bitter cold. It seemed like a strange combination.

He was just about to give it up, find a phone booth and call a taxi, when the doors of one of the stores he was passing opened and a small man stepped out. The man was elderly but not ancient and very sharp. Gregor picked that up from the man’s eyes behind his thick glasses. He was also wearing nothing to protect himself from the cold, as if he were just coming out to do something that wouldn’t take much time and would be going right back in again. Gregor couldn’t imagine what that would be. He couldn’t imagine how the man was able to stand in the wind like that without shivering, either.