“And she doesn’t?”
“It’s not quite that simple.” Henry took a sip from his cup, made a face, and began to shovel in more sugar. “Have you talked to her at all since she’s been in jail?” he asked. “I don’t mean seen her in court or that kind of thing, but talked to her, face-to-face.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I never did talk to her much, even before she went to jail. Maybe a dozen times over the space of six weeks during the investigation. I did see her at the appeal.”
“That’s what I thought. What about Bennis, has she seen her in the last ten years?”
“No.”
Henry finally had his coffee as sweet as he wanted it to be. He drank a third of the cup in a single gulp, and then placed the cup carefully, and exactly, in the saucer. “I talked to her this morning, briefly. And I talked to her lawyer. Her present lawyer. She goes through lawyers the way other people go through toilet paper. Do you mind, Gregor, if I go on record here as saying that this is a very bad idea?”
“What is?”
“Bennis having an interview, ever, never mind in the next couple of weeks. She’s—what she is, Gregor. She is not a pleasant woman. And she no longer has anything to lose.”
“Does that mean she’s willing to see Bennis?”
Henry sighed. “Nobody listens to a word I say. It’s pitiful, really. That’s why I stay on the bench. At least the lawyers have to pay attention while they’re in the courtroom.”
“Does that mean she’s willing to see Bennis?” Gregor repeated.
Henry sighed again. “Not exactly. Or maybe I should say, possibly, but not right off. Like I said, it isn’t that simple. Right at the moment, she doesn’t want to see Bennis. She wants to see you.”
“What?”
Henry reached under his sweater into the breast pocket of his shirt and brought out a business card, one of his own, its white back scribbled over with the kind of thick black ink that could only have come from a fountain pen.
“She wants to see you,” he repeated, “at eleven-thirty in the morning at the prison on Thursday. Her lawyer will pick you up and drive you there. You’d better be ready early. It’s a long drive. Oh, and you’ll like the lawyer. Right up your alley. Temple B.A. Temple Law. Fastest rising associate at Richland, Cooper, Shelby and March.”
“He must walk on water.”
“If I were you, I’d hope he could walk through fire,” Henry said. “I don’t know what it is you think you’re doing, Gregor, but this woman is bad news. I could tell that much in less than five minutes on the telephone. If she gets her nails into Bennis, she’ll do a lot of damage that will last a long time.”
It’s Bennis’s sister we’re talking about here, Gregor almost said—but then he didn’t, because he knew just what it was Henry Lord was trying to say.
He also knew that the one thing he couldn’t do, and keep Bennis Hannaford in his life, was to try to arrange her life for what he thought was her own good.
2
Half an hour later and fifteen blocks away, it occurred to Gregor Demarkian that he ought to do something about Sister Scholastica’s problem. He thought of it as Sister Scholastica’s problem, because if he had thought of it as the Cardinal Archbishop’s problem, he would never have gotten himself started. There really wasn’t much of anything he could do at this point. Until the medical examiner made his public statement, until the police investigation was out in the open, he had nothing to work with but the Cardinal’s paranoia, and that would get him no farther than Father Tibor’s kitchen, frustrated and blocked off from information at every turn. Philadelphia was a Catholic town in many ways, as Pennsylvania was a Catholic state. More orders of nuns had their motherhouses in Pennsylvania than in any other state of the union , and the Catholic Church wielded enormous power in city politics. Even so, there was only so far that you could push that, and Gregor knew it. The medical examiner’s office would hold off on their press conference for a couple of hours. The police would probably hold off on an arrest for a day or two, to give the archdiocese a chance to marshal its troops and prepare for attack. The public prosecutor might even be willing to strike a better deal than he would have been for an ordinary defendant, as long as the crime wasn’t child abuse and as long as he thought he could get away with it. Beyond that, any request for special handling would be ignored, and any demand for it would be met with active hostility. Gregor knew that. What worried him was that the Cardinal Archbishop might not know it. Being a man used to giving orders and having them obeyed, he might give a few, and not react too well when they were ignored. And that—