A Great Day for the Deadly(84)

“Is that likely?” Donovan asked. “Father Doherty knows Ann-Harriet very well.”

Gregor rubbed the leg of his trousers. “If you’re not expecting to see a woman dressed up as a nun, you don’t see a woman dressed up as a nun, you see a nun. If you understand me. At any rate, the two of them went wandering all over the place. Finally, Brigit went up to the library, probably already feeling sick. Our murderer went back to the bank and down to the vault, picked up a few stacks of new bills, stashed them where they would be convenient and then went to fiddle with the computer again. She’s been doing a lot of fiddling with the computer. At any rate, at that point she was fine. All she had to do was spend a couple of days getting her frame in place—because she wanted someone else suspected of that theft, someone she hated—and then she was free to take off. By the time the bank auditors showed up on March fifth, she was going to be long gone. And then things started to go wrong.”

“Explain the snakes,” Donovan said. They were past the houses now and out on the open road. Gregor kept expecting to see airport lights, but he was always foiled by trees and hills. He shifted in his seat and wished that Donovan hadn’t picked up so much speed.

“The snakes,” Gregor told Donovan, “were her first piece of bad luck. The snakes belonged to Sam Harrigan and they’d gotten out of the caves he’d made for them. They were a little mixed up because of the false spring and logy. They ended up at the library, I’d say, purely by accident. Brigit ended up there because that was where she was going, and coming up from Diamond Place the shortest way to get there was from the back. By the time she reached the parking lot and the storeroom door—which was kept unlocked, by the way, because some of the staff used it to get to and from their cars—by the time she got there she was very sick indeed, probably staggering and close to dead. You ought to check through your sightings material to see if any of the people who live on that block made one. They might not have. They might have been at work or glued to the television set for the weather news, but it’s a chance.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Brigit went in through the storeroom door and collapsed,” Gregor said, “and her body was still warm, so the snakes swarmed over it, trying to keep their own body heat up. Then Glinda opened the door, and found the body and the snakes, and with the media already in force in Maryville and the surrounding towns because of the flood, the thing became an instant sensation. That was exactly what she didn’t want. Brigit might still have been alive if Michael Doherty had been a less conscientious man, Don Bollander might still have been alive if there hadn’t been so much publicity about Brigit Ann Reilly’s death. The nuts would have come out of the woodwork no matter how Brigit died. A man like Don Bollander would have needed a solid inducement to get involved.”

“I don’t know,” Donovan said. “Bollander was—you know. He was a whisperer.”

“You mean he liked to pretend he was an insider,” Gregor said. “Yes. People have told me that. But I still say that an executive of a local bank doesn’t get mixed up in police business if he doesn’t absolutely have to. If Brigit had been found in an ordinary way and attracted little or no national press, Don Bollander either wouldn’t have said he saw her at all or wouldn’t have said so to so many people.”

“I still don’t see why Ann-Harriet had to kill him,” Donovan said. “Why not let him go on blithering like everybody else in town?”

“Our murderer couldn’t let him do that,” Gregor said, “because the times were wrong. Don Bollander saw his nun in the back hall at the bank at quarter to one that afternoon. Since he didn’t say otherwise, we have to assume that nun was on her feet and moving normally. Brigit couldn’t have been either at that point. She was unconscious and at least close to dead fifteen minutes later, and three blocks away. Eventually, somebody had to tumble to that. Eventually, I did.”

“So why did he end up in the convent?”

“Sleight of hand,” Gregor said firmly.

“What?”

“Sleight of hand,” Gregor repeated. “A couple of weeks ago, John Cardinal O’Bannion started to get very strange and pointed hate mail, postmarked at Maryville and hinting not so subtly at murder. Reverend Mother General got one, too, on the day we found Don Bollander’s body. She may have gotten more. Our murderer expected those letters to be reported, I think. Given the character of John Cardinal O’Bannion, she at least expected them to be mentioned. She didn’t realize how much of that kind of thing rolls into a Chancery. She didn’t understand that the hierarchy and even the nuns are very used to dealing with it in their own way. At any rate, she wanted attention focused on the convent and not on the bank for as long as possible, and there she was, stuck with Don Bollander, who had ‘bank’ written all over him. She did the only thing it made any sense to do. She fed him coniine at the bank—that was the easiest place to do it; they were both there; she had all her things there—and then she took him up to the Motherhouse and waited for him to die. She probably told him they were doing something for the Sisters. That’s not farfetched. The bank and its employees were always doing something for the Sisters, and the bank held the mortgage on the Motherhouse. There were business and charitable and personal reasons for the two of them to be there. I’ve been wondering if she didn’t tell Don Bollander they were hatching a surprise—a name day party for Reverend Mother General, maybe, or something else that had to be prepared for in secret. Given what I’ve heard of Don Bollander’s character, something like that would have been perfect.”