A Great Day for the Deadly(73)

“Well,” Glinda said, with a determined gleam in her eye, “I said I’d come home and let you do something for me.”

“Dear sweet Jesus Christ,” Sam said. “You’re making me blush. You’re even making Demarkian blush.”

But Demarkian wasn’t blushing. He was looking at the two of them as if they were extraordinarily bright two-year-olds he was too fond of to spank. Sam wanted to bury his own head in the sand.

“Two more questions,” Demarkian said. “In the first place, Mr. Harrigan, do you think Josh Malley was telling you the truth? Had one of his snakes gone missing? Or was that just an excuse he had for coming up to your place?”

“Oh, one of his snakes was missing, all right,” Sam said. “Josh is no mental giant. He barely qualifies as a mental midget. He’s no actor, either. He just kept repeating it. He used to have six and now he has five.”

“Fine,” Demarkian said, “that’s perfect. Now. Miss Daniels. Brigit Ann Reilly came to the library every weekday and Saturday just after ten o’clock, correct?”

“Correct,” Glinda said. Sam was all ready to jump to her rescue, but she didn’t seem to need rescuing.

“Wonderful,” Demarkian said again. “Now, a number of the people I’ve talked to have said that in that last week before she died, Brigit Ann Reilly had developed an odd sort of crush on someone—”

“And you want to know if I know who it was?” Glinda said. She shook her head. “It had been going on longer than a week, though. Brigit was always doing that kind of thing. Falling in love with people’s souls. Or what she wanted to think were people’s souls. My personal opinion is that most people’s souls are sewers. At any rate, all I can tell you for sure is that whoever it was was connected to the work she did at St. Andrew’s.”

“You’re positive?”

“Oh, yes. She actually said so one day—that someone she’d met at St. Andrew’s had changed her entire perspective on life. Except that she didn’t say perspective. I don’t remember what she did say. Perspective is what she meant.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. She said her whole idea of what a vocation was and how it happened and when it happened and who it happened to had been turned right around and transformed—and transformed was the word she used. Then she asked me if I didn’t think it would be noble work, helping people who were confused about it realize that they’d been called by God.” Glinda sighed. “Brigit was always saying things like that. What’s worse, Brigit was always believing it.”

“She gave you no indication at all who it might be?”

“I asked Glinda the same question,” Sam said. “I had exactly the same idea. We worked on it for hours.”

“We got nowhere,” Glinda said. She made a futile gesture in the air. “Brigit was always keeping secrets, always hinting around, always so full of—I don’t know. If she hadn’t been so basically sane and viscerally optimistic, she would probably have gone in for conspiracy theories. And she was so reflexively nice about people. Even about Ann-Harriet.”

“Ann-Harriet.” Sam swore to himself he could see Demarkian’s antennae go up.

“Ann-Harriet was a perfect little bitch to all the postulants,” Glinda said, “as if the only reason anyone would decide to become a nun was if she were stone ugly and rock stupid and didn’t have any other prospects at all. Ann-Harriet would needle them. She reduced that little Neila Connelly to tears right in this library one day. But Brigit was always saying there had to be a reason, or something. I’m sorry. I didn’t always listen to her.”

“Redemption,” Gregor Demarkian said. Then he buttoned up the rest of his coat. “I’ve got to go up to the Motherhouse now,” he told them. “If anyone’s looking for me, tell them they can find me there for the next half hour or so.”

“Of course,” Glinda said.

“Is that all?” Sam asked him.

“What else could there be?”

Demarkian turned on his heel and walked out the office door, with Glinda and Sam staring after him. Sam especially felt disoriented and—yes, and let down. He hardly wanted to admit it, but he had been half looking forward to the third degree. He’d heard so much about it from hard-boiled mystery fiction.

It was too embarrassing an emotion to admit. Sam turned to Glinda, who was looking thoughtful but hardly raked over the coals, and said, “You are off duty. And we have seen Demarkian. And it is getting dark. Let’s go up the hill and have a deeply meaningful discussion about the nature and purpose of life.”