“And you were meeting with Drew Harrigan’s lawyers in regard to this deed?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Beata said. “The deed was finalized. The problem was that we wanted to sell the properties, because we had a bank loan—still have it, actually—a very substantial one, that we’d taken on as a balloon payment, and the payment was coming due. And, of course, since this is Carmel, we didn’t have the money. So we wanted to sell the properties. But Sherman Markey’s lawyers had gone into court and had liens placed on them, saying that Mr. Harrigan had only deeded them to us in order to shield them from any judgment that might arise from Mr. Markey’s defamation suit. So I was meeting with Mr. Harrigan’s lawyers to find out what the situation was exactly. I’m a little out of the loop here, if you can believe it.”
“When is the balloon payment due?” Gregor asked.
“It was due and passed,” Beata said. “The bank agreed to roll it over into a conventional second mortgage. We told the Cardinal about it and he had one of his patented ice-cold glaring hissy fits.”
“This was two weeks ago?” Gregor said. “Did you really expect to have the properties sold in two weeks?”
“We had a buyer,” Beata said.
“Who?” Rob Benedetti asked.
“We don’t know,” Beata said.
“How can you not know?” Benedetti asked.
“The offer was made anonymously, about four days after Drew Harrigan deeded the property to us,” Beata said. “We took it seriously, because it was made through the Markwell Ballard Bank.”
“That’s interesting,” Gregor said.
“I thought so, too,” Beata said. “You really do have to take it seriously. There had to be a buyer out there who was both willing and able to buy the property, or Markwell Ballard wouldn’t have handled the negotiations. They don’t need anybody’s business. They’ve thrown clients out for far less than making bogus buy offers. The thing is, they also don’t take in any guy off the street with twenty dollars in his pocket. When I was still in the world—that’s what we call not being in the convent, being in the world—the minimum you needed to open an account at Markwell Ballard was two million dollars. And that just got you an appointment. If they didn’t like your face, that was all there was to it. Drew Harrigan didn’t have an account at Markwell Ballard.”
“You know that for sure?” Gregor asked.
“Yes,” Beata said. “Neil Savage mentioned it. It was so odd of him to have said it that I would have thought he was deliberately throwing me misinformation except for the fact that he was so incredibly, triumphantly satisfied about it.”
“Mr. Savage is Mr. Harrigan’s attorney?” Gregor said.
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Harrigan has an attorney who hates him?” Gregor said.
“Apparently.”
“This is getting odder all the time,” Gregor said. “So you went to see Mr. Savage, and you came back, and you saw Drew Harrigan, where?”
“To be accurate, I saw a man in a red watch cap,” Beata said. “And it was just as I was getting out of the cab with Sister Immaculata. The door was open, the one that leads to the barn, and the men were already lining up to get in to sleep. It was dark, but it wasn’t time for us to open up yet. And I saw a man in the line with a bright red hat, and it was the hat I noticed.”
“Did he look well, or sick, or drugged?” Gregor asked.
“I didn’t get close enough to tell,” Beata said. “I was standing on the sidewalk. He was down near the barn door. It might have been anybody at all in that watch hat. But I saw the watch hat.”
“Did you see him again?” Gregor asked.
“When he was dead,” Beata said. “One of the other men came to me in the night and said that the man in the red hat was dead, and some of the other men were stealing his clothes. They’d already stolen the hat.”
“So when you went to see him the second time, he wasn’t wearing the hat?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Beata said. “And I know what you’re going to say. It could have been somebody else in the hat the first time. Yes, it could have been. But the man who came to see me, he’s called Whizbang Joe—”
“—Is that supposed to mean something?” Gregor asked.
“Probably,” Beata said, “but I don’t really want to know what. Anyway, Joe came in to see me and he seemed to think it was the same person who’d had the cap all along. I know homeless people aren’t the best witnesses, usually, and Joe is as addled as the rest of them, but he was very certain, and very upset because of the theft. So I tend to think he knew what he was talking about. Anyway, I went out with him and looked at the body and made sure it was really dead and not just passed out or in a coma—”