“I’m glad Rob isn’t interested in letting him off,” Giametti said. “I’m sick of these guys who piss and moan about everybody else, who want the police to act like the Spanish Inquisition, then they get into some trouble and they expect to walk right out of it. We ought to stick more of these guys in jail sometime. That would do more than anything else I can think of to improve the level of public discourse.”
“Mike reads heavy magazines,” Marbury said solemnly.
Then they both got out onto the street and opened up for Gregor at once. The two open doors created a wind tunnel that sent cold air slamming against Gregor’s face as if he’d just stepped up to a working fan.
“Damn,” he said, and got out himself.
3
Gregor Demarkian saw the nun as soon as he walked through the precinct house door, because she was a vision from another time and another place: a nun in a habit, a real habit, that went all the way down to the floor, that completely covered her head. The only difference in the picture he was imagining was on the forehead. She had no white band of cloth on the forehead. Instead, her black veil was draped over a white headdress that ended at her hairline. Black veil, white wimple, brown habit. Gregor wasn’t sure he’d ever met a Carmelite before. Then he looked down at her feet and realized she was wearing only socks and sandals, not real shoes.
She was up near the counter, pacing up and down in front of the sergeant on duty as if nothing on the planet could convince her to stay still. She was very young, and very pretty, tall and slender and erect. Except for Audrey Hepburn, she was the only person Gregor had ever seen who looked too thin in a traditional nun’s habit. He wondered what it was about the shoes.
“You just can’t keep questioning him over and over again,” she was saying. “He’s not well. He doesn’t have any answers. What do you think you’re doing?”
“If he wants a lawyer, he can ask for one.”
“I am a lawyer,” the nun said. “If you want my credentials, I’ll call the monastery and have Sister Immaculata bring them in for me. He’s a tired, sick old man and his only crime was to find that hat and bring it to my attention. I should never have told you who he was. This is completely ridiculous.”
Gregor, Giametti, and Marbury had reached the counter, and the young nun turned to look at the three of them. She seemed surprised to see them there—which said something, Gregor thought, about the level of traffic this precinct had had here so far today.
“How can you be a lawyer?” the sergeant asked. “You’re a nun.”
“I’m a lawyer because I went to law school and passed the bar before I ever became a nun,” the nun said, “and besides, I’m not a nun, I’m a religious sister. And if you don’t let him out of that room and get those two detectives off him, I’m going to get him to declare me his counsel and I’m going to sue the department back to the Stone Age. You really can’t do this. It doesn’t make any sense, and it isn’t right, and you know it.”
“What’s the difference between a nun and a religious sister?” Gregor asked.
The religious sister wheeled around to look at him. “Excuse me,” she said.
“My name is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.
She hesitated, then brightened. “Gregor Demarkian. The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. Are you here about this? Do you actually think that poor homeless man murdered Sherman Markey? Because if you do, I have to say I don’t think much of—”
“—What’s the difference between a nun and a religious sister?” Gregor asked again.
“A nun takes solemn vows,” the religious sister said. “She’s usually cloistered, in papal enclosure, although there are some exceptions. A religious sister takes simple vows and works in the world. Most of the people you call nuns aren’t really nuns, technically. You know, the teaching sisters and the nursing sisters and that kind of thing. They’re religious sisters.”
“I thought the sisters at Our Lady of Mount Carmel were cloistered,” Gregor said.
“Oh, they are,” the sister said. “Most of them. But I’m not, and Sister Immaculata is not. We’re extern sisters. Cloistered nuns have to have extern sisters to go out into the world and do what needs to be done on a practical level. Like coming here with the hat. And getting involved in all this idiocy with treating that poor man like he’s some kind of criminal, when all he tried to do was the right thing. What do we teach people when we punish them for doing the right thing?”