Great Day for the Deadly by Jane Haddam Page B

hell-and-brimstone preacher. Father Tibor back on Cavanaugh Street was always telling Gregor that the American press was hysterically hostile to religion, but Gregor had never listened to him. Tibor was a refugee from Soviet Armenia. He had lived with real-life persecution for so long, he was entitled to one or two conspiracy theories. Now Gregor thought he owed Tibor at least a mental apology. These stories were so bizarre, to call them anti-Catholic was to give them too much credit. The New Republic seemed to imply that there was something about “the rigid morality of traditional Catholicism” that led inevitably to violent death. Time quoted Charles Curran (briefly) and Richard MacBrien (at length) on the psychological health of women who joined religious orders that still wore close to full habit. The consensus between them seemed to be that these women were not psychologically healthy at all. Then there was Newsweek, which presented a perfectly bewildering article that seemed to imply that there was some connection between this murder and the Church’s response to AIDS. At one point, it even managed to imply that the Church’s traditional stand on homosexual practice had caused AIDS. What any of this had to do with the matter at hand—the brutal murder of an eighteen-year-old girl in the storeroom of a public library in Upstate New York—Gregor didn’t know, but then the writers of the articles didn’t seem to know either. They didn’t seem to know much of anything, except that they really, really, really didn’t like the Catholic Church.
    The buzzer on the nun’s desk rang and stopped and rang again in jerky impatient spurts. The sound started suddenly and continued violently, making Gregor jump. The nun looked at the intercom, blinked, and pushed a lever. The sound was shut off.
    “He’ll be right in, Your Eminence,” she said at the box, not bothering to hear what the Cardinal Archbishop might want to say. Then she switched the intercom off and turned to Gregor. “Do you like reading Time magazine?” she asked him.
    Gregor looked down at his hands. He was still carrying Time. He had Newsweek stuffed into one of the pockets of his coat. “I don’t read it very often,” he told her. “This week it had an article about the, uh—”
    “About the murder in it,” Sister finished for him. “Yes, I see. My order is Primitive Observance, you know. According to our Rule, we aren’t allowed to read secular magazines.”
    “Do you want to?”
    “To tell the truth; I tried it, when I first came to work for the Cardinal. I had to ask permission of my Superior and go through no end of trouble, and then—well, then I found it very depressing. The only thing I found more depressing was television.” She hesitated. “I have read one or two again over the past week. Since the murder.”
    “You’d have got more information eavesdropping at the Cardinal’s keyhole.”
    “I don’t have to eavesdrop at the Cardinal’s keyhole,” Sister said, “the Cardinal tells me far more than I want to know already. But I am worried about him, Mr. Demarkian. He’s been very upset. He’s been—brooding about all that, from last year.”
    “Do you think that’s surprising, Sister?”
    “No. No, I don’t think it’s surprising. I don’t think it’s healthy, either. And then there are those Sisters. The Sisters of Divine Grace.”
    “What about the Sisters of Divine Grace?”
    The old nun looked uncomfortable. “I really don’t mean to be critical,” she said miserably. “I understand that things have changed since I entered the convent, and besides, an active order is different from a contemplative one. That’s what my order is, contemplative. Under ordinary circumstances, I would never have left the confines of our monastery in Connecticut.”
    Gregor grinned. “When I was here last year, what I heard is that the Cardinal insisted.”
    “Yes, he did. The Cardinal does have a tendency to insist.”