Murder Superior (32 page)

I
T WAS ONE OF
those moments Gregor always thought of as epiphanous. It wasn’t a surprise—he had known who had killed Sister Joan Esther and caused all the rest of the trouble yesterday—but it made motives clear in a way he wouldn’t have been able to do for himself. He didn’t think he had ever seen a woman with less respect for her husband than Nancy had for Henry Hare. It went beyond disrespect to a kind of visceral hatred that had no starting point and no end. As for Mother Mary Bellarmine, she was what Gregor had always thought she was, one of those people it isn’t good to cross, one of those people with no sense of proportion. She also had a great deal more to lose than Nancy Hare.

“I do not,” she said carefully, drawing herself up to that height only nuns in habit can reach, “know what you’re talking about. I most certainly did not stab you.”

“You most certainly did,” Nancy Hare said. Then she made a face. “Don’t give me this shit. You know perfectly well—”

“I know you’re a woman who wants to be rid of your husband,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said sharply. That’s all I know.”

“You could have had the knife,” one of the nuns said suddenly. As always when a nun spoke unexpectedly, all the others turned in her direction. This nun was older and more sophisticated than the last one, though. She didn’t blush. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m Sister Domenica Anne.”

“And I’m Sister Martha Mary,” a younger nun said.

“Are you the Sister Domenica Anne who’s in charge of the field house project?” Gregor asked her.

Domenica Anne nodded. “Yes, I am. I came over—I came over because I heard you were working on an explanation that depended on—that you thought there was something wrong with the financing of my project—some fraud or something I hadn’t caught but Mother Mary Bellarmine had—but it isn’t true, it really isn’t. There isn’t anything like that at all.”

“I know,” Gregor said.

Sister Domenica Anne looked bewildered. “You know?”

“He can’t know,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “I know. I’ve been over and over those books. I’ve seen them. If he wasn’t a damn fool like all the rest of them he’d be trying to find out who tried to murder me.”

“Nobody tried to murder you,” Gregor said patiently. “Nobody had the chance—or, at least, nobody with any known motive did. The only person who had an opportunity to put fugu in that pâté was you.”

“Horse manure,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “You don’t even know if it was fugu in the chicken liver pâté. Just because Sister’s cousin or whatever he was—”

“I don’t have to worry about Sister’s cousin or Lieutenant Androcetti’s favorite lab technician,” Gregor said. “I have the scapular. Your scapular. The one that was torn yesterday.”

“It was torn,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said, “because this woman tore it.”

“She couldn’t have.” Gregor looked around. “Sister Scholastica? Could you come here for a moment?”

Sister Scholastica came forward. “Is this going to be an occasion of scandal?” she asked dubiously.

“Not if I’m right.”

Scholastica looked as if she were none too certain she wanted to trust in Gregor’s being right, but she stood still anyway. Gregor walked around her once or twice and stopped facing her.

“This habit,” he said, “consists of a black dress topped by a black scapular topped by a black collar that’s what I would call a cape. The collar comes about midway down the upper arms and flutters. All right so far?”

“We all know what our habits are like,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said coldly. “We’ve been wearing them for years.”

Gregor nodded. “Right. Now yesterday, I stood in this foyer and watched Nancy Hare walk up to Mother Mary Bellarmine with a vase of flowers in her hand, dump those flowers over Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head, and generally cause a disturbance. Are we all agreed on that?”

“Of course we are,” Reverend Mother General said. “I wish we weren’t.”

“I’m glad we are,” Gregor said. “My point here is this. In order for Nancy Hare to have torn Mother Mary Bellarmine’s scapular without also tearing the collar, she would have had to reach up under the collar to get at the scapular’s neck hole. I didn’t see her do anything remotely like that. Did any of you?”

“She didn’t go near the collar,” Sister Scholastica said suddenly. “She dumped the roses from up high—I saw her—and then she dropped the vase and stepped away.”

“Why should I have gone near the collar?” Nancy Hare demanded. “I wanted to get her wet, not rip her up.”

“I don’t think it would have mattered if you had gone near the collar,” Gregor said. “I don’t think you could have torn the scapular. Sister?”

“I’m ready,” Sister Scholastica said.

Gregor put his hand up under Sister Scholastica’s collar and hooked his fingers over the tight neck of the scapular. Then he pulled as hard and as violently as he could. Nothing happened.

Gregor flipped the collar up and showed the assembled company the neck of the scapular.

“Not a rip or a tear,” he said with satisfaction, “and I’m far stronger than Mrs. Hare. I’m far stronger than Mother Mary Bellarmine, too.”

“I don’t understand what all this is supposed to mean,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said stiffly. “Obviously, my scapular was torn. Therefore, Mrs. Hare must have torn it. Unless you’re trying to say I tore it before Mrs. Hare attacked me—”

“I didn’t attack you,” Nancy Hare said weakly.

“You couldn’t have torn it before Mrs. Hare doused you with roses, because if you had I would have noticed and so would everyone else. That was a long, dramatic tear. It went right down your chest. What happened to the scapular after you changed out of it?”

“I threw it away,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “It wasn’t of any use to anybody anymore.”

“We recycle cloth,” one of the Sisters in the crowd said. “If one of the groundsmen found cloth in the trash he’d put it in one of the recycling bins.”

“Maybe we should send somebody out to look for it,” Gregor said. “We’d find two things, I think. One is that that tear was not a tear at all, but a cut—”

“With the X-Acto knife,” Sister Domenica said suddenly.

“And the other is that there’s a big green stain all across the front of the habit. I don’t know how that would show up against black—”

“It did show up,” Reverend Mother said. “I remember seeing it I remember thinking that someone had put too much plant food in with the flowers.”

“Someone had,” Gregor said.

Mother Mary Bellarmine was still not having any. She was a proud woman, Gregor thought, proud and furious, like the ancient queens and duchesses who had once run their husbands’ estates when their men had spent too much of their lives drinking. Catherine de Medici. Berenice. Medusa. Her spirit was too mean for the best of those, but she was crazy enough.

“Exactly what was it I was supposed to be after,” she demanded, “in all this nonsense and subterfuge? Why would I want to tear my habit to shreds?”

“So that you could go change it.”

“I did go change it,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said.

“I know you did. You took a long time doing it, too. The little ceremony with the ice sculptures was held up for half an hour. Nobody thought it was particularly odd, however, because everybody knew you had to clean up after Nancy Hare’s attack.”

“And I did.”

“I’m not denying that you did,” Gregor said. “I’m saying you gave yourself time. To get hold of the fugu—”

“Are you trying to tell me I ground up a fugu fish right there on the very afternoon—”

“You did it the day before, I’d guess. You know, this isn’t going to be that hard to put together. Once we know what we’re looking for, we will be able to find people who saw you—near the kitchen downstairs, near the ice sculptures, handing a cracker with chicken liver pâté smeared all over it to Sister Joan Esther—”

The corners of Mother Mary Bellarmine’s mouth twitched upward. Try it,” she said.

“I will,” Gregor told her.

“Try it,” she said again. “Try it all you like, Mr. Demarkian. You’ll never find a single thing.”

At that moment, the front door opened and a little phalanx of nuns came bustling in. One carried a doctor’s big black bag. That one looked at Nancy Hare on the floor and sighed out loud.

“Nancy, Nancy,” she said. “What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into now?”

Nancy Hare had been fading all the while Gregor talked to Mother Mary Bellarmine. Already weak with shock, she was getting weaker with loss of blood. The nun with the black bag—whom Gregor assumed was Sister Mary Joseph—knelt down beside her and began to cut cloth away from her bloody side. Bloody but not bleeding. Sometime when Gregor wasn’t looking, somebody had stanched the flow of blood.

“Nancy went to college here,” a nun Gregor hadn’t seen before told him. “A lot of the Sisters have known her forever.”

Mother Mary Bellarmine had moved. Gregor picked her out of the crowd and saw that she was looking amused, grim and amused, as if she fully expected to lose every battle and still win the war. Gregor wondered if she was right.

She could be right.

It bothered him.

He was still enough of a policeman to hate the idea of guilty people who got away.

I
N THE END, HE
sidled over to Reverend Mother General, tapped her on the shoulder, and whispered in her ear.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said.

And she nodded.

“F
OOD POISONING,” BENNIS HANNAFORD
was saying, waving the Sunday
Inquirer
in the air like a tattered flag. “
Food
poisoning? Gregor, for God’s sake. What’s going on here?”

It was now Sunday, the eighteenth of May, and from what Gregor could see, what was going on here was a surprise party that wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone less physically challenged than a blind and deaf mole the way things were going. He was standing at the long windows that took up most of the Cavanaugh Street side of his living room. From there he could look across the street and down one flight into Lida Arkmanian’s party room, and what did the woman think she was doing? Gregor and Lida had been in grammar school together. Lida had been a friend of Gregor’s late wife. Gregor had been the first to warn Lida that Johnny Arkmanian was too much of a wild man to make a good husband. As it turned out, Lida liked wild men and Johnny was very, very, very good at business. Now that he was dead, Lida was bored and had a huge town house and a lot of money to make mischief with. What
seemed
to be going on down in that party room was a Mexican hat dance performed by four girls in Armenian peasant costumes, but that couldn’t be right.

The doorbell rang. Bennis dropped the paper, said “Just a minute,” and went to answer it. Gregor heard Donna Moradanyan’s voice in the hall saying, “Lida said to stuff these in your refrigerator but you weren’t home so either you have to go downstairs with me or we’ll have to put them in Gregor’s, but I put the honey cakes in Gregor’s for the Halloween party and he ate them so maybe—”

“He won’t eat them today,” Bennis said. “He won’t have time. I have to get him into this bow tie.”

Donna Moradanyan’s son Tommy came scooting into the living room and up to Gregor’s side. He was just a little over two years old and very serious in the way two-year-olds are. “Strychnine,” he said to Gregor, as soon as he saw him.

“Absolutely,” Gregor said. “Except in this case, it was a fugu fish.”

Tommy Moradanyan considered this and shook his head. “Strychnine,” he said again.

Gregor nodded. “I’m with you. It’s a much better word.”

Donna stuck her head through the living room door. “Tommy, honey, we’ve got to go. Auntie Lida has a big red party hat for you to put on. Hello, Gregor. I read all about you in the paper this morning. It’s too bad it didn’t work out.”

“Right,” Gregor said, and let it go at that. For one thing, he didn’t want to get tangled in explanations with Donna Moradanyan, which was a little like trying to play cat’s cradle with a string that had been dipped in honey. For another, he didn’t want to unravel the sentiment. What was too bad? That bodies hadn’t dropped like flies from one end of Radnor to the other? That the cause of death hadn’t been blatant enough to win him another cover story in
People
magazine? Gregor had been the cover story in
People
magazine three times now, and he had had enough. True crime was to
People
what the centerfold was to
Playboy
. Be the photographic subject of either one, and your life was ruined.

Tommy Moradanyan said “Strychnine!” one more time, nodded solemnly, and ran off to join his mother. Bennis started murmuring all the things she always murmured when she was showing people out, some of which seemed to have to do with apologizing for his “gruffness.” It was at times like these that Gregor thought Tibor and Lida and old George Tekemanian were wrong. He didn’t have to marry Bennis. On some astral plane, he had
already
married Bennis.

Bennis came back into the living room. “The front of the building still looks like a gift box,” she said, “and so does the front of Hannah’s, but we’ve just been saying Donna wants them that way, they took so much work she just wants to look at them a little longer. What do you think?”

“I think Hannah is over in her kitchen right this minute humming ‘I’m Going to a Surprise Party’ under her breath.”

“You’re such an optimist.”

“I’m such a realist. Not more than ten minutes ago, Mary Ohanian went marching down the middle of Cavanaugh Street carrying a pile of wrapped packages the size of the Christmas window display in Saks and holding four ribbon bows in her teeth. What do
you
think Hannah thinks is going on?”

“Well, Gregor, she might think there’s a party, but that’s no reason she’d think it was for her.”

“No? There’s a huge party she hasn’t been invited to but everybody else has—”

“Maybe we hurt her feelings,” Bennis said.

“Maybe you tipped your hand. What bow tie? I don’t wear bow ties.”

“Well, you have to wear some kind of tie, Gregor. Old George Tekemanian is coming in his tuxedo. It’s that kind of party.”