“The reports you got were from the Cardinal, weren’t they?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, the Cardinal’s a good man and a thorough one, but he knows us out here all too well. He’s made up his mind about what kind of people we are. He knows who he trusts and who he doesn’t.”
“And?”
Jack O’Brien finished off his second cup of coffee. “And he judges and he sifts and he brings in only the wheat, except this time he might have been mistaken about something. I don’t know that he was. I haven’t seen your reports. I just think that he might be. He tell you anything about a woman named Mrs. Barbara Keel?”
“Yes,” Gregor said slowly. “She was with Glinda Daniels when Glinda Daniels found the body.”
Jack O’Brien smiled. “And the Cardinal basically told you Barbara Keel was a nut, right?”
“No,” Gregor said, glad he could be truthful about this. “Not exactly. Why? Did she see something when the body was found that might be important?”
“Not when the body was found,” Jack O’Brien said, “earlier. At the Immigrants National Bank. You know the Immigrants National Bank?”
“By reputation.”
“Yeah, well, I know Barbara Keel. She’s a snoop and a gossip and more than a little of an airhead and she’s always been all three, but she doesn’t make things up. She was in the bank before she went to the library—she volunteers at the library, puts away books—and it was a crazy day, the day before they ship the old money out to the Federal Reserve, you know about that?”
“Yes. They exchange old and damaged bills for new ones and the old ones are sent somewhere to be burned.”
“Well,” Jack said, “from what Barbara says they were in the middle of getting ready for the transfer and they were setting up their decorations for St. Pat’s at the same time and she just happened to wander down a hall where she didn’t belong and knew she didn’t belong, but being dithery and old and a woman goes a long way. If she’d got caught, she’d just have said she was lost.”
“She didn’t get caught?”
“No, she didn’t. She did see something, though. Something I think you ought to know about.”
“And you won’t tell me?”
“I don’t think I should,” Jack O’Brien said. “It’s not my story and I might get some of it wrong. I’d definitely miss parts. Barbara’s got a right to tell it, do you know what I mean?”
“You mean Barbara’s a very lonely woman.”
“That, too.”
Jack O’Brien got out of his chair and went to the electric percolator for the third time. Gregor saw and Gregor marveled. The man had to have something better than a stomach made of cast iron. He had to have a stomach that produced death rays that acted only on coffee.
“You want to find Barbara Keel,” Jack O’Brien told him, “what you do is, you go talk to Glinda Daniels at the library.”
Jack O’Brien said this quite seriously, as if Glinda Daniels were the last person Gregor was likely to see.
[4]
Half an hour later, having been drawn into an extended discussion of last year’s case in Colchester and the Cardinal Archbishop’s chances of being elected Pope, Gregor walked swiftly down the short stretch of Delaney Street that led to the intersection with Londonderry and stopped for the Don’t Walk light. On his right was the bank, an imposing building whose second-floor window boxes did indeed seem to be filled with hemlock. The dwarf plants were sharply green against the snow. Right in front of him, on the other side of the street, was a somewhat less imposing building with a discreet sign on its Londonderry side door that said, “St. Mary’s Inn.” It looked very much like a bed and breakfast he and Elizabeth had once stayed in while on vacation in Scotland. Gregor was in the midst of allowing himself to sink into that memory when a door on the side of the bank flew open and a woman came out, followed closely by a young man in Ralph Lauren jeans and four hundred dollars worth of blue cashmere sweater.
“I don’t see what you’re so upset about,” the young man was saying, “you didn’t die. You didn’t even get sick.”
“I could have died,” the woman told him. “I could have been a good deal more than sick. It was right there in my box of tea bags.”
“It didn’t even look like a tea bag. You wouldn’t have been fooled.”
“I might not have been looking.”
“You’re not upset about this at all,” the young man said. “You’re not even upset about Don and for God’s sake, Miriam, the man’s dead. You’re just upset because I let Ann-Harriet drive the car.”