Free Great Day for the Deadly by Jane Haddam Page A

than Philadelphia’s Armenian-American immigrant ghetto. With everything that had gone on in the central cities in the years since he’d left, he’d expected to return to nothing at all, to rubble and crack houses, to dirt and prostitution. Instead, he’d found a refurbished street full of people he’d known all his life, the tenements bought up and remodeled as floor-through condominiums or single-family town houses, the church decked out with every conceivable embellishment that would be allowed by an Armenian bishop. It had been a revelation, and he had bought an apartment almost without thinking about it. He’d settled in without knowing what he was going to do. Fortunately for the kind of man he had let himself become, he had not had to do much. Like Elizabeth, they had given him the life he wasn’t able to put together for himself.
    The men’s room had a little anteroom, with chairs and sinks and a long, low counter for doing God knew what. There were also mirrors. Gregor sat down in one of the chairs and opened Schatzy’s copy of People magazine. There was a picture of the corpse, taken from above, while it was lying on a morgue slab. People was the only magazine on earth better than The National Enquirer at getting a picture of a dead body. Gregor stared at the face of Brigit Ann Reilly and wished the picture were in color. Black and white blurred too many details.
    “Taxine,” Gregor muttered to himself. “Coniine. Lobeline. Some kind of vegetable alkaloid. I wonder where she got it from.”
    He looked through the scant text for some sign of an answer, but found none. The story was continued on the next page, so he turned and found nothing there, either. When the case was solved, People would run a five- or ten-page extravaganza and explain the whole thing, but at this point in the investigation they were only interested in titillating. Gregor looked over the pictures on this third page and found a couple he recognized: John Cardinal O’Bannion, and a young woman in a not very modified nun’s habit identified as “Sister Mary Scholastica, Mistress of Postulants and Brigit Ann Reilly’s religious superior in the Sisters of Divine Grace.” Gregor had known her as Sister Scholastica Burke. At the time, she had been principal of St. Agnes’s Parish School in Colchester, New York, and Gregor had been in Colchester looking into a little matter for the Cardinal Archbishop. Gregor ran his finger down the column of type and came up with a paragraph that read,
According to Sister Scholastica, Brigit was a model postulant. “Postulants often have trouble with religious obedience, but Brigit never seemed to,” Sister Scholastica said. “She was always very conscientious about everything she did. I don’t know what she could have been doing in that storeroom so late in the day.”
    Gregor slapped the magazine shut, rolled it up, and stuffed it in his pocket. That was the kind of thing people always said in the wake of a violent death. From what he had known of Sister Scholastica, he would have expected better. He wondered if Bennis was at home right this moment, reading this copy of People and coming to the same conclusions. He didn’t suppose she was. The last he’d seen of Bennis, she’d been six weeks into her new novel, holed up in her apartment the way doughboys in World War I had holed up in foxholes, every piece of furniture covered with Post-It notes about rogue trolls, enchanted castles, singing unicorns, and damsels more distressing than distressed. She hadn’t been out in the air since the middle of January, and she swore she wasn’t coming out until she had a draft. Since Bennis’s drafts generally ran seven or eight hundred pages of elite type, Gregor expected Ararat to be shipping in restaurant meals for some time to come.
    Still, what Bennis was doing to him—and he couldn’t help thinking of it like that; as something she was doing to him—was better than what the rest of them had