Great Day for the Deadly

by Jane Haddam

  “Smoking marijuana?” Sam suggested.

  “Mrs. Murchison is sixty-four years old and goes to the funerals of people she doesn’t know. I’m sorry, Sam. I really do have to be getting out of here.”

  “Do you have anyplace in particular to go?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have anyplace in particular to go?”

  Glinda had been bent over at the waist, locking the drawers of the check-out desk. She didn’t usually do this, although according to the rules set down by the Town Governing Board, she was supposed to. She was only doing it now to give Sam Harrigan a graceful way to leave. Except that it seemed he didn’t want a graceful way to leave. She stood up and looked at him.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  Sam Harrigan had stopped shifting on his feet. “The thing is,” he told her, “I know your car’s out of commission—”

  “That’s right, it broke down last night right here in the parking lot. I had to have Earl Forrester come pick it up and give me a ride home. But how did you—”

  “It’s a small town,” Sam said vaguely. He was staring at the ceiling again. “Anyway, if you’ve got someplace to go tonight and someone to see that’s one thing, but if you’re just looking to take the bus up the hill, well, it’s a cold night. And it’s dark. And it’s right on my way. Your house is, I mean.”

  “You know where I live?”

  “I pass you all the time. When you’re shoveling snow in your driveway.” Sam tried looking at the floor. “All I’m trying to say is, it is on my way, it wouldn’t be any trouble for me to give you a lift, and Mack’s Steak House is on the way, too, and it’s almost dinnertime—do you know what I really want to say?”

  “No,” Glinda said, dazed. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Well,” Sam Harrigan told her, staring her straight in the eye, “I’ll tell you. I think it’s a bloody damn shame when a man gets to my age without knowing how to keep his dignity when he’s asking a woman for a date.”

  A date.

  There was a chair pushed up against the check-out desk counter, a tall barstool sort of chair the assistants used on busy days. Glinda leaned against it, feeling weak.

  As far as she was concerned, either Sam Harrigan had lost his mind, or she had.

  [2]

  It was fifteen minutes before eight o’clock, and Miriam Bailey was sitting at the vanity table in her private dressing room in the house on Huntington Avenue, getting dressed for dinner. She wasn’t getting dressed for any ordinary dinner. On the nights when she and Josh stayed home and played at domestic bliss—which was most nights—she wore flowing hostess caftans and wedge-heeled sandals. Even on the nights when she was having one or two people over from the bank, she stuck to good wool slacks and four-ply cashmere sweaters. Tonight she was wearing a high-necked Christian Dior cocktail dress that had belonged to her mother and her best pearls. Josh, who was sitting in the stylized ice cream parlor chair against the wall behind her, was wearing his custom dinner clothes from Brooks Brothers, the first thing she had bought him after she’d brought him back to the States. In her mirror, he looked not only young but perfect, physically flawless, untouched by time. He reminded her of the pictures she had seen, preserved in sepia in the Manhattanville College library, of college dance troupes of the 1900s, except that he was male.

  Miriam Bailey had never been interested in disguising her age. She didn’t make up to conceal, but to acquiesce. It was easier to make an effort to look like everyone else than to fight the battles of eccentricity. To that end she applied a thin film of foundation and reached for the blusher. In her head, Miriam Bailey went on calling blusher “rouge.”

  “What I want you to understand,” she told Josh, ignoring his mutinous cross-armed pose and concentrating on her own face in the mirror, “is that no matter how exciting or amusing it might seem to you, to just about anybody else it’s going to sound suspicious. Of course, I know you well enough to trust you.” She caught the reflection of his startled jerk and smiled to herself, biting her lip so it wouldn’t show. “You do have to realize,” she went on, “that to most of the people in this town you’re an unknown quantity, and they aren’t used to unknown quantities.”

  “I don’t see what was so damn suspicious about it,” Josh said. “I was just walking down by the levy.”

  “At eleven o’clock in the morning on the day of the flood.”

  “Why not? Miriam, I think you’re crazy. People saw her all over town that day. What difference is one more going to make? And besides, she wasn’t killed down by the levy. She was killed in the library.”

  “She also wasn’t seen alive after eleven o’clock.” Miriam put down the rouge. She wasn’t sure if what she’d just said was actually true. She didn’t know when the last time had been that anyone but her killer had seen Brigit Ann Reilly alive. Fortunately, she could be sure Josh didn’t know, either. She picked up her eyebrow pencil and bent over to look more closely into the glass. “I wish you’d give some consideration,” she said, “to the kind of trouble you get into when you go off half-cocked like this. I wish you’d learn to think. Remember all the fuss we had when you came tearing back from Colchester with your glove compartment full of crack—”

  “It wasn’t crack, Miriam. It was first-class cocaine.”

  “It was illegal, whatever it was. And I don’t mind your having it, I’ve told you that. I don’t really care what you do as long as you give me what I want.”

  “I always give you what you want.”

  “Let’s just say that’s another subject. Right now, what I want you to do is promise me you won’t mention this at dinner tonight. I don’t say you have to keep it a secret forever, but at least don’t mention it at dinner tonight.”

  “But I want to mention it at dinner tonight. I mean, for God’s sake, Miriam, I’ve got to have something to talk about. Those people look right through me.”

  “Those people don’t know what to think about the fact that you married me,” Miriam said. “They’re very nice people, Josh, really. You can talk to them about religion, or art, or—”

  “Why don’t I talk to them about sex, Miriam? At least that’s something I know something about.”

  Miriam threw her eyebrow pencil down on the table and turned around in her seat. Looked at straightforwardly and more or less up close, Josh wasn’t really that perfect. It wouldn’t be too long before gravity began to tug at the corners of his eyes. Miriam Bailey didn’t care what anybody said. She didn’t find older men “distinguished,” merely older. She wanted no part of them. For the moment, however, Josh was young and necessary to her. She crossed her arms over the back of her chair, rested her chin on them and said, “Josh, try to make sense, please. You were with me when I listened to the news tonight. You must have heard what was said about the Cardinal sending that man Demarkian.”

  “So what?”

  “So he’s a famous expert on murder. He’s been called in to consult on cases all over the country. The Cardinal’s sending him here can only mean one thing.”

  “What?” Josh asked suspiciously.

  “That the Cardinal wants this thing settled his way,” Miriam said definitely. “Trust me, Josh. I’ve known the man for many years. I know what he’s like. The last thing O’Bannion wants is for someone who’s respected in one of his parishes, or some little old lady, or whatever, anyway, the last thing he wants is a solution that can tie the Church to this mess. Now here you are, saying you were walking on the levy at eleven o’clock on the morning of the flood—it must have been pouring rain by then, for goodness sake—and you saw Brigit Ann Reilly walking around with a box in her hand—”

  “It wasn’t a box. It was a paper grocery bag.”

  “Whatever it was. Add all that to the fact that I knew her—”

  “You did?”

  “Of course I did,” Miriam said, “she volunteered in the literacy program. I didn’t know her well, but I knew her to speak to. I know all t
he volunteers. They’ll say you knew her, too, you know, and you won’t be able to prove otherwise. You’re setting yourself up to be the perfect suspect. The Cardinal couldn’t have done better if he’d invented you himself.”

  Josh raised his hands to his face and rubbed distractedly, a sure sign that he was thinking. Miriam didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one. Josh thinking was always a loose cannon. She turned back to the mirror and picked up her small bottle of what she thought of as “that white stuff you put on under your eyes and pretend it makes the wrinkles go away.” Behind her, Josh had risen out of his chair and begun to pace.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “I’ve got to be worried about this Demarkian man, not because I actually did anything, but because I’m a stranger in town, and also because I was taking a walk and also because—because what, Miriam? Why would I have wanted to kill some little nun?”

  “Maybe you didn’t have a reason,” Miriam said. “That’s what Demarkian did, years ago, for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He tracked serial killers. You know the sort of person I mean.”

  “Yes,” Josh said. “I know.”

  “You’d be a perfect candidate for that, too,” Miriam said. “Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. You’d be very easy to pin something on. Especially once they found out—”

  “Once they found out what?”

  If makeup was supposed to do something for your face—instead of just sitting on it—then Miriam didn’t see any reason to go on putting more on hers. Nothing short of plastic surgery could do any more for her than had already been done. She wondered why she had never gone in for plastic surgery and then dismissed the idea. It wasn’t her kind of thing. Even knowing half the women who would be at dinner tonight had had a tuck here and a lift there didn’t matter. That conventional she just didn’t want to get. Maybe that was because, unlike most of the other women she knew, she had never relied on her “attractiveness” for much of anything.

  She got up out of her chair and shook out her dress, watching its folds shimmer and shake in the mirror. Then she walked over to where Josh was standing and put her hand on his jacket. As soon as she touched him, he stiffened, in every place but the right one. She had her leg pressed against his groin, so she knew. It had been a long time since he’d been able to work up any enthusiasm for his side of this particular bargain. It had been a long time since she really cared. Maybe the nuns who had taught her in school had been right. Maybe there was something about sex no woman really wanted to know on the morning after.

  Josh had stepped back, closer to the wall. He caught her looking at him and flushed, embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that we don’t have time.”

  “Of course we don’t,” Miriam said.

  “I’d have to get dressed all over again,” Josh said. “I’d never get downstairs for cocktails. You wouldn’t either. I’d ruin your hair.”

  “You would do that, yes.”

  “You don’t have to be like this,” Josh said. “You don’t have to go all sour on me just because it’s practically eight o’clock and you’re having a party. I don’t see why you always have to blame it all on me. It’s your committee to—committee to—”

  “Committee to advance the cause of the canonization of Margaret Finney,” Miriam recited dutifully.

  “Well, then,” Josh said.

  Well, then, Miriam thought. And then she drifted away from him, out of the dressing room and into the bedroom proper, to the big bow window overlooking the back lawns. The back lawns were covered with snow and ice, white and daunting, as frozen as the rest of the town since the waters had receded and the temperature dropped. She really couldn’t see anything down there, not in a way that let her recognize it. The gazebo was a huddle of wrought iron near the snow-piled fountain. The menagerie was a single ball of light.

  She felt Josh come up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder, tentatively, as an act of propitiation. She shrugged him off and started to laugh.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I wonder how many people in this town realize that what you’ve got down there is some kind of God-forsaken zoo.”

  [3]

  Pete Donovan had always considered himself a good police officer. He was young and he was raw. He wasn’t as educated as cops got these days in cities like New York and Chicago. He didn’t have the kind of experience he would have needed to cope with a major suburb like Greenwich or Bryn Mawr. Still, for Maryville, he was a good police officer. He knew the town. He knew its people. Most of all, he knew how to use his common sense. That was how you got through the day in a place like Maryville, as a police officer or anything else. You remembered that Mrs. Cander’s son Jimmy always did like to steal chickens and that Stevie Hall went in for starting fights and that the old ladies down at the Lutheran Benevolent Society were still seeing Communists under their beds, and you took it from there.

  It was now nine thirty on the worst Friday night Pete Donovan had ever had to live through—worse even than that Friday night two years ago when Father Doherty had decided to bust head down by the river and clean up the gangs there once and for all—and all Pete could think of was that he really shouldn’t go home. No matter how tired he was, no matter how crazy the day had been, he had an obligation to stay at the station and see the night through. Just why he felt this way, he couldn’t say. He had gone home on the night Brigit Ann Reilly died. He’d even gone to sleep. Today, nothing much of anything had happened except—craziness.

  He looked around the “station” and saw what he always saw, a large open room with a waist-high swinging rail used to divide it into two parts. On his side of the rail were the six desks of the six men, including himself, who made up the police force. On the other side of the rail there were chairs and benches and a desk and radio set for their secretary-dispatcher, Linda Erthe. Linda came in at six and stayed the night, since in the experience of the town of Maryville it was at night when she was really necessary.

  Linda was sitting with her back to him, working on a crossword puzzle. The radio was silent but unlikely to stay that way. Pete had just sent Davie Burnham down to St. Andrew’s to check on Father Doherty and his clinic, and that always brought in trouble in the long run. Pete cleared his throat and said, “Linda?”

  “If you’re going to have another nervous breakdown about those calls you’ve been getting, I don’t want to hear about it,” Linda said. “It’s just mass hysteria. It’ll go away by itself in a day or two.”

  “Yesterday, you were telling me the sightings were mass hysteria,” Pete said. “You know, the people who said they’d seen Brigit wandering around town the day she died. All fifty-six of them or however many there were.”

  “Well, that was mass hysteria.”

  “So this is mass hysteria, too? Do you know how many bodies I went looking for today that weren’t there? Six. Six, Linda, it was crazy. I had three of those little postulants in this morning swearing they’d seen a corpse in the hedge outside the library.”

  “Postulants,” Linda frowned. “Well, religious types aren’t too stable, if you know what I mean.”

  Pete thought she was a brave woman to say that in Maryville, where the Cardinal had spies. “Mark Yasborough always seemed stable enough to me,” he said. “Good farmer. Nice farm. He said he saw one at the side of Eight eighty-six, frozen stiff in the snow.”

  “Cabin fever,” Linda dismissed it. “He’s under a lot of strain anyway. That wife of his has just about had it with Maryville, New York. I heard her talking down to the Camelot the other night. She wants to go back to New York City and I don’t blame her a bit.”

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “I see what you mean. Marrying a woman from New York City and bringing her back here isn’t too stable.”

  “It’s nuts,” Linda said, “and if you ask me, marrying a woman from here and expecting her to stay here is just as nuts. Did I tell you about that? Frank and I had a fight.”

  �
��You’re always having fights.”

  “This was our final fight. I promise you. Our absolute last. I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to college for. The last thing I want to do is to stick around here after I graduate.”

  “What’re you going to do instead?”

  “Go to the city. They’ve got lots of jobs for social workers in the city.”

  “Mmm,” Pete said. He couldn’t imagine Linda Erthe as a social worker. Her life was a bigger mess than the lives of most bag ladies, and the bag ladies had excuses Linda didn’t have. Pete Donovan had always thought he’d feel better about Linda if she just took drugs.

  He swiveled his chair around to look at the papers on his desk, decided there was nothing there he really had to be concerned about, and swiveled back to Linda again. He wished Davie or Hal or Willie or one of the other boys was in, but there it was. That was why his mother kept telling him he ought to get married. Your buddies were never around when you needed them. Pete cleared his throat and said, “Still. There’s a difference. I’ve been thinking about it all day. A difference in tone, sort of.”

  “I haven’t the least idea what you’re getting at.”

  “The two kinds of reports,” Pete insisted. “These today have been just crazy. And, of course, last week I was thinking the same thing about the people who were saying they’d seen Brigit wandering around on her own in town. But those other reports didn’t feel the same.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Linda asked. “You’ve changed your mind? You think those reports were real?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s just say I’m glad I didn’t leave them out of my report to the Cardinal.”

  “You left them in?” Linda was shocked. “You’re going to get crucified. You’re going to be the laughingstock of the St. Lawrence Seaway.”