A Great Day for the Deadly(61)

“I take it Lida heard the news on television,” he said. “Would you mind telling me which news?”

“It was some kind of press conference. Cardinal O’Bannion—”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Well, it could have been worse.”

“If you mean she could have seen the reports of a second murder in Maryville, she did,” Bennis said. “So did I. It made the newsbreak at one. Even you don’t manage to get instant publicity, Gregor. It’s very curious. Do you want me to come up?”

“No.”

“Be glad I’m working. If I weren’t, I’d hop in my car and come up anyway.”

She probably would have, too. Gregor threw his tie on the bed, realized it seemed to have unraveled itself into threads, and threw it in the wastebasket. Then he said “just a minute,” put the phone down on the bed, and took off his shirt. As soon as Bennis got off the phone, he wanted to take a shower, to help himself think. Not that there was much to think about—he was fairly sure he had figured out everything he could figure out from what he had so far. The problem was to discover how he could find out the rest of what he needed to know. In the cases he had handled since his retirement, he had always been faced with inverted pyramid investigations, situations in which he knew the people first and only then worked his way down to the hard small core of the murder. This case was more like real police work. Here was the murder. The people, with the exception of Sister Scholastica, were just so many names on a list of possibilities.

He picked up the phone again, kicked off his shoes, wedged the receiver between his ear and his arm, and went to work on his socks.

“It really is very strange,” Bennis was saying again, “about all this publicity. I mean, even when you were up at my mother’s house, investigating a lot of rich people on the Main Line, you didn’t get this kind of play, and I thought the media liked rich people.”

“They like bizarre death even better,” Gregor pointed out. “And these deaths were certainly bizarre. At least, they looked bizarre. All those snakes.”

“That sounds bizarre enough to me,” Bennis said drily.

“I know, but it’s the simplest thing. I figured that out before O’Bannion ever got in touch with me. Standing in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan, looking at Schatzy’s copy of People magazine. Body heat.”

“What?”

“Body heat,” Gregor repeated. “Snakes don’t make their own. In cold weather they hibernate. In warm weather they like to stay in the sun as much as possible. These snakes had been wandering around in a false spring and it was suddenly beginning to get cold again, so they—”

“Wait a minute,” Bennis said. “Are you telling me she was alive? That girl? While the snakes were—crawling on her?”

“When they first crawled on her, yes,” Gregor said. “She would have had to have been, I’d think. Or at least not very long dead, not more than say half an hour or so. I don’t think she was conscious, though.”

“Wonderful.”

“It’s the only way it makes sense.” Gregor had his socks off and his belt unbuckled. He let his pants fall to the floor. Sitting on top of the rest of his clothes in his suitcase was a yellow terry cloth robe Bennis had bought him for his birthday, bringing it all the way from Paris after she’d paid a flying visit to France to—as she put it—“get her head together and drink.” Gregor put this on, admired the thickness of the terry cloth and the textured smoothness of the hand-embroidered initial on the front pocket, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“The problem with pieces of business like the snakes,” he said, “is that they look strange and creative, but they’re really very restrictive. You’re stuck with two possible explanations. Either they were so necessary to whatever the murderer wanted to do, they amounted to the only way the murderer could get it done, and that wouldn’t apply in this case—”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know of any way on earth anyone could have made that happen,” Gregor said. “Maybe there is a way. There’s a man up here who used to be a herpetologist, Sam Harrigan—”

“Sam Harrigan the Fearless Epicure? I know Sam Harrigan the Fearless Epicure.”

“You would. Anyway, I’ll ask him, but I don’t expect any surprises. Nobody could have made that happen. Therefore, it happened by accident and there must be a natural explanation for it. Therefore—”

“Body heat,” Bennis said. She paused. “I see,” she said slowly. “And where the snakes came from isn’t so mysterious either, is it? From what I remember, Sam Harrigan likes to keep snakes and other animals around.”