Good Behavior (3 page)

We want Sister Mary Grace back!

God will show us the way
.

He showed us last night, in the chapel!

We shall not consort with robbers and thieves
.

Our Lord and Savior did!

Get thee behind me, Satan!

It went on like that, the torn-off pieces of notepad piling up on both sides of the desk, until Sister Mary Capable stuck her head in the office door and rested her cheek on her pressed-together hands, eyes closed:
Our guest is still asleep
.

Mother Mary Forcible looked at the old Regulator clock on the wall; nearly seven. The sun was long since up, breakfast finished, Mass attended, floors scrubbed. Shaking her head, she looked at Sister Mary Capable and snapped her fingers forcefully:
Get the lazy lout up
. Sister Mary Capable smiled and nodded and left.

Meantime, Sister Mary Serene had clearly decided on a new tactic. Scrabbling through the scumble of used notes, she smoothed out one of her very first and pushed it across at Mother Mary Forcible:

We want Sister Mary Grace back!

Mother Mary Forcible wrote:
Of course we do. Prayer and contemplation will lead us to the way
.

Instead of writing further, however, Sister Mary Serene merely pushed the first note over again:
We want Sister Mary Grace back!

I never denied that!

We want Sister Mary Grace back!

Please don't be boring, Sister Mary Serene
.

We want Sister Mary Grace back!

Do you wish to encourage crime?

We want Sister Mary Grace back!

You're as bad as I am!

Sister Mary Serene looked so cherubic and round-cheeked when she smiled. Nodding, she pointed yet again at that same unrelenting message. Mother Mary Forcible sat back, bony fingertips absentmindedly patting the surface of her desk, and brooded.

It was true the entire convent, every member of the Silent Sisterhood of St. Filumena, had been praying night and day for guidance and aid with this Sister Mary Grace problem, and it was equally true the convent had never before in its history had a burglar in the chapel rafters; but could the one actually have much to do with the other? Sister Mary Serene, having been the first to discover the fellow and therefore having an understandable feeling of proprietorship toward him, quite naturally argued that here at last was God's instrument, but Mother Mary Forcible remained a skeptic. While certainly many of God's messengers and instrumentalities over the ages had been unlikely sorts, it was even more certain that most crooks were merely crooks, without much of good or God about them.

On the other hand, the customs of a lifetime are hard to resist. Through almost her entire adult life, Mother Mary Forcible had kept her back firmly turned toward the outer world, had limited her temporal existence to this building, this group of women and this rule of silence, which the sisters were permitted to break only for two hours every Thursday. Her attention and desires had been exclusively directed Upward, relying upon the efficacy of prayer and the mercy of the Creator to answer every need. But with a problem as worldly as that posed by Sister Mary Grace, was it possible that a solution equally worldly was the answer?

Movement in the doorway distracted Mother Mary Forcible from her thoughts and, speak of the devil, here was the miscreant himself, left foot swathed in white bandages, Sister Mary Chaste's cane in his left hand and a mug of Sister Mary Lucid's coffee in his right. His hangdog expression was as it had been, and being unshaven had not at all increased the aspect of reliability in his countenance. “I'm supposed to come to the office,” he muttered, exactly like some Peck's bad boy caught smoking in the lavatory.

If Mother Mary Forcible had wanted to teach grammar school, there were plenty of orders she could have joined. With an exasperated look at Sister Mary Serene, who was beaming at the fellow as proudly as though she'd invented him, she gestured briskly for him to sit in the chair to the left of the desk, which he did, putting one dirty-nailed hand on the desktop as he made a kind of Humphrey Bogart twitch around the mouth and said, “I can explain, uh, about last night.”

Mother Mary Forcible was already dashing off her first note, and pushing it across to him:
You're a burglar
.

He looked pained. “Oh, now,” he said, but the second note was already well under way. He smiled back tentatively at Sister Mary Serene, then read note number two:

We didn't turn you in to the police at the other end of the block last night. We could have
.

“Oh,” he said. “Police at the other end of the block, uh huh. You figure I, uh …”

Mother Mary Forcible looked at him.

“Well,” he said, and shrugged, and sighed, and thought it over. “Uh, thanks,” he said.

Mother Mary Forcible had the next note all ready; she slid it across the desk.

Possibly you can help us in return
.

He frowned, studied the note, turned it over to read the blank back, shook his head. Then he stared around the office, looking for something, saying, “What, you got a safe you can't open or something?”

Too bad this wasn't Thursday; it took an awfully long time to explain the situation.

5

Andy Kelp let himself into the apartment with a credit card, looked into the living room at Dortmunder and May, and said, “It's just me. Don't get up.” Then he went on to the kitchen and got a beer. A wiry, bright-eyed, sharp-nosed man, he looked around the kitchen with the quick interested manner of a bird landing on a berry bush. An assortment of gourmet crackers were arranged on a plate on the kitchen table. Kelp took one with sesame seeds, washed it down with beer, and went back to the living room, where May was lighting a fresh cigarette from the tiny ember of the previous butt and Dortmunder was sitting with his bandaged foot on the coffee table. “How you doing?” he said.

“Terrific,” Dortmunder told him, but it sounded like irony.

May dropped the sputtering ember in the ashtray and talked through fresh smoke: “I wish you'd ring the doorbell like everybody else, Andy,” she said. “What if we'd been in a tender moment?”

“Huh,” Kelp said. “That didn't even occur to me.”

“Thanks a lot,” Dortmunder said. He didn't seem to be in the best of moods.

Kelp explained to May, “On the phone, John said he hurt his foot, and I didn't know if you were home, so I figured I'd save him walking to the door.” To Dortmunder, he said, “What did happen to your foot?”

“He fell off a roof,” May said.

“Jumped off,” Dortmunder corrected.

“Sorry I couldn't come along last night,” Kelp told him. “Did O'Hara work out?”

“Up to a point.”

“What point?”

“The point where he was arrested.”

“Whoops,” Kelp said. “And he just got out of the slammer, too.”

“Maybe he can get his old room back.”

Kelp drank beer and pondered briefly on the accidents of fate that had led to his place being taken last night by Jim O'Hara. There but for the grace of God, and all that. He said, “Where were you while O'Hara was being arrested?”

“Jumping off the roof.”

“Falling off,” May corrected.

Dortmunder ignored that. “I spent the night in a convent,” he said.

Kelp didn't quite get the joke, but he smiled anyway. “Okay,” he said.

“The nuns bandaged his foot,” May said, “and loaned him a cane.”

“They got this vow of silence,” Dortmunder explained, “so there's no phone, so I couldn't call May and tell her not to worry.”

“So naturally, I worried,” May said.

Kelp said, “Wait a minute. You spent the night in a
convent?
”

“I already told you that,” Dortmunder said.

“Yeah, but—You mean, you
did?
You spent the night in a convent?”

“It was the convent roof he sprained his ankle on,” May said, “when he fell off the other roof.”

“Jumped off.”

“So— I mean—” Kelp, stymied for words, gestured with the beer can, but that didn't fully express his thoughts either. “What I mean is,” he said, “what did you
tell
them? I mean, there you are on their roof.”

“Well, they doped it out,” Dortmunder said. “The other end of the block was all police cars, and there was a burglar alarm going off down there, and all like that. So they kind of put two and two together.”

“These nuns.”

“The nuns, right.”

“Well—” Kelp was still having trouble phrasing himself. “What did they
say?
”

“Nothing. I told you, they have this vow of silence. They wrote a lot of notes, though.”

“Notes,” Kelp said, nodding, catching up. “Fine. What did the
notes
say?”

For some reason, Dortmunder looked uncomfortable. Also for some reason, possibly the same reason, May looked kind of steely and determined and grim around the jaw. Dortmunder said, “They offered me a deal.”

Kelp squinted at his old partner. “A deal?” he asked. “Nuns? What do you mean, a deal?”

“They wanted his help,” May explained. “They have a problem, and they were praying for help, and here comes John, falling onto their roof—”

“Jumping.”

“—and they decided he was sent by God.”

Kelp stopped squinting. Instead, he looked very round-eyed at his old partner, saying, “
You?
Sent by
God?
”

“It wasn't my idea,” Dortmunder said, sounding sulky. “They dreamed it up themselves.”

“Explain it to Andy,” May suggested. “Maybe he'll have some good ideas.”

“I already have a good idea,” Dortmunder said, but then he shrugged and said, “All right. This is the story. It's this bunch of cloistered nuns way downtown with this vow of silence, and last year they got this new nun joined up, the first new one they had in five, six years.”

“That I can believe,” Kelp said.

“Well, this girl, this new one, she has a very rich father, and he tracks her down, finds out she's in this convent being a nun, and he kidnaps her.”

Kelp was astonished at this turn in the story. “Right out of the convent?”

“Right out of the convent.”

“How old is this girl?”

“Twenty-three.”

Kelp shrugged. “So she's a grown-up, she can do what she wants.”

Dortmunder said, “Except her father's treating her like one of those kids goes off with the cults, you know, the Moonies and like that. He's got her locked up, and he's got this deprogrammer in there, doing his number on her.”

Kelp said, “He's deprogramming her out of the Catholic Church?”

“That's the idea. She writes all these letters to the convent, they showed me some, and this guy's just steady deprogramming, day after day. And what she wants, what she says in the letters is, she wants to go back to the convent.”

“And her old man's got her
locked up?
He can't do that, not if she's twenty-three.”

“Well, he's doing it,” Dortmunder said. “So the nuns went to a lawyer to see what can you do, and the lawyer came back and said this guy is very very rich, he has deep pockets like you wouldn't believe, and if they try anything legal he'll just tie them up in court until the girl's
seventy
-three.”

“So she's stuck,” Kelp said.

“So that was why they figured I was from God, being a burglar and all,” Dortmunder explained. “They figured I could sneak into the rich guy's place and bust her out.”

“What kind of place?” Kelp asked.

“Penthouse suite on top of a building up in midtown. Armed guards all over. Access limited to one elevator, where you got to use a key. The guy owns the whole building.”

Kelp said, “No way you're going to get into that penthouse.”

“Don't I know it,” Dortmunder said.

“And if you did get in,” Kelp went on, “no way you're going to carry any twenty-three-year-old girl
out
.”

“When you're right, you're right,” Dortmunder told him, and sighed.

“So what did you do? Sign something?”

“No. We shook hands on it.”

Kelp didn't get it. “So what have they got on you? A confession?”

“No.”

“Your name? Home address?”

“Nothing. Just that I made the deal, I said I'd do it.”

“Well, you
can't
do it,” Kelp said, and grinned, saying, “But that's okay, because you don't have to do it. You're home free.”

“Well, maybe not,” Dortmunder said.

“I don't see the problem,” Kelp told him. “You're away and clean, and they can't find you.”

“Ahem,” said May.

Kelp glanced over at May, and right now she looked like one of the statues on the Washington Square arch; unblinking, determined and made of stone. “Ah,” said Kelp.

“Now you see the problem,” Dortmunder said.

6

Hendrickson opened the door, then promptly stepped back and reclosed it, and the plate smashed itself to pieces against the other side. Opening the door again, entering the large, neat, plainly furnished living-cum-dining room, stepping over the burritos and the china shards, Hendrickson said, “Well, Elaine. Still at it, eh?”

The furious girl on the other side of the refectory table held up the sign she'd printed her third day here, on the back of a shirt cardboard, in angry red ink:
Sister Mary Grace
.

Hendrickson nodded pleasantly. “Yes, Elaine, I know. But your father would rather I called you by the name he chose for you, when you were born.”

She made an elaborate pantomime of throwing up, suggesting that mere mention of her father made her sick, while Hendrickson crossed to the highbacked wooden chair over by the windows, noticing that the Bible on the side table was closed today. Good. He should probably take the damn book out of here, but that would be too obvious an admission of defeat.