“Father Doherty would never have put up with that sort of thing,” Donovan said.
“He didn’t. He told me about it earlier this afternoon. Brigit got silly, Father Doherty got stern. As I said, in a way it was too bad, because Brigit didn’t just give up her romantic fantasies, she transferred them. And this time she transferred them to the wrong person.”
“I’d say that was putting it mildly.”
“Mmm, yes. Well. This person had a problem she had not been able to solve. She wanted to steal a great deal of money from the bank and she’d more or less figured out how to do it, but it had a couple of snags. What she wanted was to go into the vault on the day the old-new money transfer occurred and take not the old money—as I told you before, that would be too quickly discovered—but a large chunk of the new money. Not as large a chunk as you might think, by the way. She’d already been stealing the bank blind for close to two years. That money is probably salted away in the Cayman Islands. What she wanted now was about fifty or sixty thousand dollars, enough to get out of the country and lie low until she was sure nobody had discovered the bank accounts. She was going to get that information rather quickly because on the fifth of March, the bank auditors were going to come in. No fewer than three people mentioned that to me over the last two days—including John Cardinal O’Bannion. It went right past me.”
“Why shouldn’t it?” Pete Donovan said. “There’s been that S and L disaster. And there’s been rumbles about something just as bad in banking.”
“Yes, of course,” Gregor told him. “It’s in the atmosphere. Now, the problem was, no matter how well all this had been planned out, a bank audit was going to blow it and bank audits are not announced well in advance. She was lucky to get the month or so she got. In that time she had to get done the rest of what she needed to get done and she had to get out of the country. She didn’t have much time. Brigit Ann Reilly’s romantic infatuation with saving her soul came as a godsend. She had to get down to the vault and move a fair amount of money at a time when dozens of people would be around to see her go in and out. Fine. She wouldn’t go in and out. A nun would go in and out. A little makeup, a little care to keep her face turned away from people—if she’d had to come face-to-face with anyone who knew her, it wouldn’t have worked, but most of the people she ran into were absolute strangers. They saw a nun, generic. People don’t really look at nuns in habit, even modified habits. And of the two people who did know her and saw her in that habit, only one recognized her. The other one—and I’m talking about Don Bollander now—simply saw “a nun” and later convinced himself that he’d seen Brigit Ann Reilly.”
“Don always was a jerk,” Donovan said.
“Maybe so.” Gregor sighed. “What she did was, she told Brigit that she was thinking of devoting herself to the religious life, that she’d thought about it for a long time, that these days there were ways of doing that no matter what your life had been like. At any rate, she told Brigit something to make Brigit think that it would be a good idea to give her a chance to walk around in a habit for a day or two. She needed that habit on the morning of the day the money was exchanged and no later. She got Brigit to steal it for her and bring it down to an abandoned building on Diamond Place to hand it over in private. While Brigit was there, she fed her coniine—in tea or coffee or orange juice. I don’t know, but my guess would be tea. It’s easy to carry around a thermos of tea and it’s easy to distill coniine from hemlock in tea, too, if you know what you’re doing. This was at about ten thirty, by the way, before Sam Harrigan saw Brigit wandering around down there. My guess is that she—our murderer, not Brigit—wanted to be sure the coniine would do its work. The one thing she couldn’t have was Brigit telling Sister Scholastica or Reverend Mother General what she’d done, and there was no way to ensure that except to make Brigit dead. Brigit liked to keep secrets, but she was only capable of keeping them for so long. Anyway, my guess is that our murderer gave Brigit a few extra errands to do in the low-rent district, got her moving around a little. That helped the coniine to work faster—it wouldn’t have taken long with Brigit, but our murderer didn’t necessarily know that—anyway, it got Brigit’s blood moving and the coniine working as fast as possible, and it did something else. It muddied the waters unbelievably, because while Brigit was running around doing errands, our murderer was just running around. That was why you had so many ‘sightings’ after the body was found. That was suspicious on the face of it. Of course, you always get sightings and hysteria in small towns after particularly bizarre violence. The sort of people who report that kind of thing, though, are of a type. Here, you had bank officials, nuns, schoolteachers, doctors—you had everybody. And the only conclusion I was able to draw from that was that people had seen her, or had seen someone they later thought was her, someone in a habit. Because our friend did a little walking around on her own. She went up to Beckner near St. Andrew’s parish church. Father Doherty saw her, well enough to know she wasn’t Brigit but not well enough to know who she was—”