True Believers(170)

“What?”

“You ought to get out more, Dan. You don’t know anything about anything.”

It was true. He really didn’t know anything about anything. He looked at the town house again and saw that a man was being taken out on a stretcher and put into the back of the ambulance, but no sirens went on, and for some reason he couldn’t pinpoint, he didn’t think the man was seriously hurt.

“I wonder if that’s the husband or the lawyer,” Roy said. “Did I mention that? She sleeps with her lawyer, but she’s also got a husband.”

“Are they separated?”

“Not that I’ve noticed. But maybe I’m a little out-of-date. These days, the family comes in all kinds of new and interesting forms. Maybe the three of them felt they were all married to each other.”

“Maybe.”

“It would be convenient to think that they were coming to arrest Edith Lawton for the murders, wouldn’t it? It would be convenient if they’d arrest somebody for those murders. This whole thing is getting entirely too complicated. What did you expect me to do during that farce you engineered this afternoon? Fall on my knees and embrace the Church of Rome?”

“I didn’t engineer it. It was the Cardinal Archbishop’s idea. If it hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have come.”

“True enough.”

“I expected you to lose your temper,” Dan said.

Roy laughed. “I never lose my temper. I haven’t lost my temper in thirty years. I’m a block of ice. Take a look. They’re bringing her out.”

Dan looked. A woman was coming out the front door with her arms in handcuffs. She was a prettyish but obviously middle-aged woman, and she had tears streaming down her face. Maybe she was sobbing. There was just enough noise so that Dan couldn’t tell. Dan saw Gregor Demarkian come out the front door, talk to the woman for a moment, and then start down the street in the direction of the churches again. Dan watched him go for a little while and then turned his attention back to the woman.

“I know who she is,” he said. “I’ve seen her around. I thought she was a Catholic. She’s always going in and out of St. Anselm’s.”

“She was there on the afternoon the nun died. She was there on the afternoon the priest died, too.”

“Interesting.”

“My deacon thinks it’s all of a piece. Devil worship is devil worship. Atheists worship the devil, and so do Roman Catholics.”

“Atheists don’t worship the devil,” Dan said.

“And Roman Catholics do?”

Over at the town house, another woman had come out. It took Dan a moment to place her, because she was wearing a habit and habits tended to make all the women who wore them look alike, but in a moment he saw that she was Sister Scholastica, who had come after Christmas to take over the running of the school. She went to the police car where Edith Lawton was now sitting and leaned through the door to talk to her. A police officer put a hand on her arm, and she shook him off. He didn’t insist.

“So,” Dan said, “this is it. The murders are solved. Don’t you think so? They seem to be arresting her.”

“They brought a man out of her house on a stretcher.”

“They didn’t bring him out in a body bag. He wasn’t dead. What does he have to do with the murders?”

“I would think he had something more to do with her arrest.”

Dan swung back, but the nun was standing away from the police car now, and the police car’s door was closed. As he watched, the car started up and pulled away from the curb. It went up the street in the direction of the churches and turned right at the corner when it got to them. The ambulance pulled away from the curb, too, and as it picked up speed on the street it started its siren. Dan flinched.

“Damn,” he said.

“I’ve got to get back,” Roy said. “Stay glued to your television set. Maybe you’ll hear the news that the case has been solved.”

“Maybe I’ll just go over there and ask Demarkian to his face,” Dan said, even though he no longer had any idea where Gregor Demarkian was. He’d gone up the street, and Dan hadn’t seen him come back down. Dan put his hands in his pockets and felt the roll of soft mints sitting there. He took it out and handed it across to Roy.

“Would you like one?” he asked politely.

Roy reached for a mint out of the top of the tube without taking the tube out of Dan’s hand and said, “What do you see in these things? They might as well be made of plastic.”

“‘They’re also very easy to fill with arsenic,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I don’t think I’d eat one if I were you. The experience is not likely to be pleasant.”