A Great Day for the Deadly(71)

Glinda Daniels had managed to get Sam Harrigan separated from his tormentor. Now she brought him to the office door, shoved him inside, came in after him and closed the door behind her.

“Thank Heavens,” she said. “That woman is some kind of vampire.”

Sam Harrigan had his hand stuck out and a smile on his face. “Gregor Demarkian, I presume,” he said, in a thick Scots burr that seemed to be getting thicker with every word.

Gregor decided the man was ill at ease and tried to change that. “I hear we have a mutual friend,” he said. “Bennis Day Hannaford.”

It worked. The smile on Sam Harrigan’s face changed its character. His eyes lit up.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” he said. “You know Bennis the Menace!”





Two


[1]


TO SAM HARRIGAN, ANYTHING that came between him and Glinda Daniels was a bad idea. Gregor Demarkian wasn’t exactly coming between them, but he was there, a big tall bulk of a man standing in the middle of Glinda’s office and reading the titles on the spines of the books she kept on the shelf behind her desk. When Sam had first walked into the library and seen him standing there, he had been a little alarmed. There was no way to determine anyone’s size on television, not really. Sam had met Mr. T once and been disappointed. In the case of Gregor Demarkian, he had merely expected to be. Next to him, Glinda looked so damned small. Caught out there by Millie Verminck’s chatter, Sam had been ready to rip up the carpet to protect her. Then she had come out of the office and rescued him. Now they were all back inside and Sam didn’t know what to think.

Glinda was drinking down a cup of coffee as if it were a glass of orange juice and she had just run the Boston marathon. She had very bad habits like that with coffee and Sam intended to do something about them. Gregor Demarkian was leaning with one crooked arm against Glinda’s filing cabinet, staring at The Library Lady with a very odd look on his face. Sam had heard that a lot of people dismissed him as stodgy or stupid or not very sophisticated. Sam was not about to make the same mistake. Sam had spent too much of his life with media people. Publicly funded media people were the worst. Then there was Mrs. Barbara Keel, also known as The Library Lady and one of the banes of Sam’s existence. He kept tripping over her, and she never made any sense. Now she was huddled in a chair, looking lumpy and inert. From the look on Demarkian’s face, she had just told him something either important or intrinsically fascinating. From the look on her own, it was impossible to guess what.

Sam decided he was having stage fright and he had to do something about it. He had laughed too hard and boomed too loud at the mention of Bennis Hannaford’s name. Now he looked sideways at Glinda. She looked all right, but he had no way of knowing what Demarkian had been doing to her while he had been away, running down to the store for a minute to get her a pack of cough drops. He would have felt much better if they had advanced on Demarkian on their own initiative, but he couldn’t see what they could have done beyond what they had done. They’d called the St. Mary’s Inn and asked Edith if Demarkian was around. Edith being Edith, she would know.

Of course, they had also spent half an hour in the parking lot in the backseat of his Jeep Wagoneer, necking like a pair of sixteen-year-olds, but there was only so much Sam Harrigan intended to feel guilty about not giving up in the pursuit of scientific solutions to local murders. He grabbed one of Glinda’s small metal chairs, dragged it across the carpet to Gregor, and sat down on it backwards, with his chin resting on the vinyl-covered curve of its back.

“Well,” he said.

“Well,” Demarkian answered pleasantly.

This was not what Sam was looking for. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said again, “has Glinda already told you about her talk with Don Bollander? We were going to come right over and tell you about it this afternoon, but when we called the inn, you were gone.”

“You could have been anyplace you wanted to be,” Mrs. Barbara Keel said blandly. “They were too busy making whoopie in the backseat of a car.”

“Barbara,” Glinda said.

“You ought to be glad you aren’t in high school any more and old Father Corrigan is dead,” Mrs. Keel said. “Oh, the lectures he used to give when he caught the teenagers in their cars, in this day and age it’s hard to believe.”

“You make me sound a hundred and four,” Glinda protested.

“Oh, no I don’t,” Mrs. Keel said. “I make you sound hardly old enough to know better.”

Gregor Demarkian bit his lip.

It was time to put a stop to this. Sam snaked out an arm to grab Glinda by the wrist and cleared his throat again.