Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  There was a clank of pots and pans from the kitchen and a not-so-muffled curse. Bennis’s language was appalling, and it didn’t help any when she told Gregor it was the result of all those expensive girls’ boarding schools she’d been sent to. The pots stopped clanging and the door to the kitchen swung open, revealing Bennis in her spring and summer uniform of jeans that had seen better days in 1966, T-shirt that had last been clean for Richard Nixon’s first inaugural, and hair that had started out tied into a knot at the top of her head but was now someplace else. Bennis Hannaford was a beautiful woman when she wanted to be, but Gregor had noticed that she very rarely wanted to be.

  “Well,” he said when he saw her, “you don’t look ready to go to a party.”

  She made a face at him. “I don’t have to look ready to go to a party. We don’t have to be there until quarter to one and it’s not even eleven thirty. Oh, by the way. Sister Scholastica called. She wanted to make sure we knew where we were going.”

  “Do we?”

  “I gave a talk at St. Elizabeth’s once. ‘The Woman Writer in Fantasy and Science Fiction.’ I got a lot of people upset. Come into the kitchen. I’ve got to finish this idiotic model today or it won’t be ready on time.”

  Gregor was about to ask finished on time for what—when Bennis made models to help her with her books, they didn’t have any on time to be finished for—but he didn’t. He merely followed Bennis’s slight five-foot-four-inch frame into the kitchen and dusted off a chair to sit down on. Bennis’s apartment was always an unholy mess. The cleaning lady who came in twice a week couldn’t seem to get it straightened out, and neither could the cadres of older women who periodically showed up to “help Bennis out.” Stack Bennis’s belongings neatly away in closets and drawers and they came right back out again, springing into the air as soon as one’s back was turned, as if all the storage spaces in the apartment were inhabited by evil genies with ambitions to be the spirits of jack-in-the-box toys. The same held true for dust. It didn’t matter how diligently one wiped and polished. It didn’t matter how many expensive sprays one used to put a shine on the woodwork. The shine would be gone and the dust would be back in less time than it took to put water on to boil for a celebratory cup of coffee.

  The plaster of paris model Bennis was making seemed to be some kind of pockmarked planetary surface. It looked like the moon, but Gregor couldn’t think of anyone who might want a model of the moon. Bennis put a cup down in front of him and turned on the gas under her kettle. Then she set out a spoon and the sugar bowl and a jar of instant coffee. Bennis’s instant coffee wasn’t bad. It wasn’t Lida Arkmanian’s percolated variety, but it wasn’t bad. It beat what Gregor and Tibor got when they attacked supermarket sacks of specially ground coffee beans and put them in a coffeepot.

  “In case you’re wondering about the plaster of paris,” Bennis said, “it’s a topographical map of Armenia. Or I hope it is. I’m constructing it off a globe so ancient it might as well still show the world as flat, but it was the only one Lida could come up with with the borders of Armenia clearly marked, so here I am. They need it for the school. Tomorrow.”

  “Of course,” Gregor said.

  The school was a parochial school—the first Gregor had ever heard of in an Armenian-American parish—set up to accommodate the children of the immigrants who had come to Cavanaugh Street in the wake of earthquakes and political revolutions. It had also acquired a little group of children of the native-born residents of Cavanaugh Street, whose parents purported to like the idea of their children “growing up to know their heritage.” Since most of these parents wouldn’t touch their heritage with a ten-foot pole—unless they could eat it—Gregor thought that the real draw was the simple localness of it. The school was housed in a four-story brownstone right next to Holy Trinity Church. The children who attended could walk there in the mornings, and quite a few of them could reach the school’s front doors without ever having to cross a street.

  “Anyway,” Bennis said, “I’m practically done except for the painting, and I’m not really going to do the painting per se, if you see what I mean. I’m only going to figure out what color has to go where and then write a code in pencil on the model and then the kids will paint it themselves. Did you used to do things like this when you were in school, Gregor? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me that all this stuff is really work.”

  “They’re only children,” Gregor said mildly. “And you know how I feel about education. Most of them won’t remember a thing of what they learn two months after they go out into the real world.”

  “Well, don’t say that in front of Lida. She’ll think you’re encouraging the children to drop out.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Right.”

  Bennis got up, got the coffee, and poured him out a cup. She was standing so close to him the plaster of paris in her hair was clearly visible as flakes. Then she moved away and Gregor was left wondering why he’d thought that about the flakes, or felt so compelled to notice just how close she’d been to him. Standing over by the stove, a good ten feet away, she was just Bennis as he always saw Bennis. She was a perpetual thorn in his side. She was the woman Father Tibor Kasparian called “Bennis the Menace.” She was only thirty-six or thirty-seven, while Gregor was twenty years older than that.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee while she was still standing next to the stove, drank it down black—but with enough sugar in it to give diabetes to the Visigoths’ invading hordes; Gregor saw her spooning it out of the sugar sack—and put the cup in the sink.

  “I’d better go wash my hair,” she said. “You know how long it takes to dry and I hate those goddamned little hair dryers. Is there supposed to be anything solemn about this occasion? Can I wear a red dress?”

  “I think you should wear a hair shirt and carry a staff,” Gregor said. “That way the nuns will know you’re serious about atoning for your sins.”

  “The nuns won’t know what sins I’ve got to atone for, and besides I don’t atone. What’s the point? There’s those I forget what you call them in the refrigerator, the meatballs with the bulgur crusts. Lida brought them. You can heat them up in the microwave.”

  “I’ve already eaten. And we’re supposed to go up to St. Elizabeth’s and have lunch.”

  “That never stopped you yet.”

  Gregor was about to say he wasn’t the kind of glutton these women liked to make him out to be, twenty extra pounds or no twenty extra pounds, but Bennis was already gone, her bare feet slapping carelessly against the wooden floor of her foyer, on the way to the privacy of her shower. Gregor wondered suddenly if Bennis felt she needed privacy from him—and then he shoved that away, because it made him feel a little crazy. In fact, everything about his relationship with Bennis made him feel a little crazy lately. It was as if, after years of running along on a track on which they were both comfortable, an invisible hand had thrown a switch that got them both off course. He had even started to dream about her.

  Gregor Demarkian was a man of that generation that came of age just after World War II. He believed in reason and logic, not intuition and dreams. He felt nothing but exasperation for people who were forever exploring their subconscious. He didn’t actually think he had a subconscious.

  To prove that he didn’t—and that the subconscious he didn’t have wasn’t fixated on Bennis Day Hannaford—he got up, topped up his already full enough cup of coffee, and trained all his attention on the plaster of paris topographical map of Armenia, that looked like a vision of Mars at the end of an intergalactic nuclear holocaust.

  3

  EXACTLY FORTY-FOUR MINUTES later, Bennis Hannaford emerged from her bedroom in a rustle of red silk and a tinkling of gold chains, looking like a short, black-haired Catherine Deneuve getting ready to do a perfume commercial. Her relationship to the Bennis Hannaford of the plaster-of-paris-filled kitchen was entirely speculative. Her relationship to half of the really old money on the Philadelphia Main line was e
vident When Bennis was dressed up like this, Gregor always thought of her background—complete with dancing classes, private schools, and a debut that had made the pages of Town and Country—as definitive. When she wasn’t dressed up like this, he didn’t think of her background at all.

  She turned her back to him and pointed at the base of her neck. “There’s a little button there I can’t reach. I’ve never understood the designers of women’s clothes. I mean, do they think I’ve got a husband or a maid?”

  “Both,” Gregor said.

  “Is your friend the Cardinal going to be at this party? I mean, here we are, going off to visit the Catholics, and I haven’t heard a word about him.”

  That’s how you think of this? ‘Going off to visit the Catholics’?”

  “Well, Gregor, they’re not ordinary Catholics, are they? I mean, they’re not Mrs. O’Brien who lived downstairs from me in Boston and went to Fatima Novenas all the time and prayed that Michael would break down and marry me. You remember Michael. It was my great good luck that he never broke down and married me.”

  “You’d have had to have married him at the same time.”

  “In those days, I didn’t have any backbone.”

  “The Cardinal,” Gregor said, “is the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Colchester, which is in Upstate New York, not here. And he doesn’t call me in unless he has a corpse on his hands.”

  “Would the Cardinal of this Archdiocese call you in if he had a corpse on his hands?”

  “I don’t know if we’re in an Archdiocese,” Gregor said. “Believe it or not, I’m not an expert on the institutional structure of the Catholic Church in America. And since I have never met the occupant of this see—or the see St. Elizabeth’s College is in, if there’s a difference—I can’t understand why he’d call me in if something embarrassing happened to him. But it doesn’t matter, Bennis, because nothing embarrassing has happened to him, in that sense anyway. There are no corpses to discover, and no crimes to ferret out before they cause a nationwide scandal.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive,” Gregor said firmly. “Sister Scholastica would have said. I have your button buttoned. We ought to go.”

  “Aren’t they building a gymnasium or something? Maybe their contractor is a front for the mob—”

  “Bennis.”

  “—or maybe it’s one of the nuns trying to put aside some money so she can make her escape—”

  “Bennis.”

  “—or maybe it’s something really sinister, like a plot to supply girls to the white slave trade in Arabia or a clandestine organization with links to the IRA. or—”

  Bennis had left her pocketbook on the kitchen table while she waited for Gregor to button her. Gregor picked it up and handed it over.

  “These are a lot of nice women we’re going to see, a perfectly respectable order of nuns that does a lot of good work in schools and hospitals. They are not prone to committing crimes or collaborating in vice.”

  “They’ve already had one murder,” Bennis reminded him.

  “Considering how that worked out, it proves my point,” Gregor said.

  “I think of it like an allergy,” Bennis told him. “Some people have a tendency to break out in hives whenever they eat strawberries, and some people have a tendency to break out in murders whenever—well, you know, whenever the situation warrants it.”

  Since Gregor Demarkian couldn’t imagine what sort of situation would warrant any group of people in “breaking out in murders,” he grabbed Bennis Hannaford by the shoulders, spun her around, and marched her straight at her own front door.

  Chapter 2

  1

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD A driver’s license, and on one or two occasions he had even driven a car—but only on one or two occasions, because he was bad at it. He was so bad at it, in fact, that people on Cavanaugh Street did not bet on if he would receive a ticket when he took out a car, they bet on what kind. They did this in spite of the fact that Gregor did everything possible not to get behind a wheel. People magazine had dredged up his driving record from his early days in the Bureau, and a few of the stories his fellow agents had liked to tell about what happened when he was put in charge of a vehicle. That had been all the people of Cavanaugh Street had needed. On the day when Gregor had been forced to drive Lida Arkmanian’s ten-year-old niece Agatha to summer camp—because there was nobody else around with the time to do it—old George Tekemanian had won five hundred and fifty dollars for betting that Gregor would be stopped for turning the wrong way onto a one-way street from a no-left-hand-turn lane. Sheila Kashinian had won fifty dollars for betting he’d be given a Breathalyzer test. It was embarrassing, but there was nothing Gregor could do about it, except to drive as seldom as possible and allow either public transportation or his friends to take him where he wanted to go.

  Bennis Hannaford was a very good driver—she was, in fact, one of the best coordinated people Gregor had ever met—but her idea of time spent not wasted in a car started at approximately one hundred and forty miles an hour. She took the double-nickel speed limit with all the seriousness Carl Sagan took Creation Science. By the time she drove Gregor into the visitors’ parking lot at St. Elizabeth’s College, he was shaking, and they were a good ten minutes early for the start of the reception. Gregor looked at the tall spires and graceful religious statuary that seemed to be everywhere around him and decided that he was no longer in doubt. There quite definitely was a God, and he could prove it by the fact that he was still alive. That there was a Devil he could prove by the fact that they had never been stopped by any agent of the Pennsylvania State Police. It wasn’t as if they would have been difficult to spot. Bennis’s preferred mode of transportation was a Mercedes 230 SL she had had custom painted a phosphorescent tangerine orange.

  According to the map Sister Scholastica had sent them, the visitors’ parking lot was directly next door to St. Cecelia’s Hall, which was directly next door to St. Teresa’s House. St. Teresa’s House was the place where the reception and then the lunch were to be held, and therefore the place to which they were headed. Bennis pulled her keys out of the ignition and looked around. From here, as far as Gregor could tell, it was an ordinary enough suburban college campus. The statues of women in long veils marked it as Catholic. The marble arches of its college Gothic buildings marked it as both oldish and expensive. Other than that, it could have been any college at all. Gregor looked around for some sign that 5,264 nuns were now in residence, but couldn’t find any. He’d thought the grounds would have been carpeted with women in habits. The grounds weren’t carpeted with anyone. From what he could see of the lawns and pathways, they were deserted.

  “You’d think there would at least be other people arriving for the party. I’m beginning to wonder if we have the wrong date.”

  “We don’t,” Bennis told him. “There was one of those plastic letterboards at the gate when we came in. ‘Opening Reception, Convocation of the Order of the Sisters of Divine Grace, May 11, 12:45.’ And I’m quoting. I just think everybody else knows something we don’t know about the really good places to park. And there’s someone else in this lot, anyway. Over there.”

  “That pudgy man getting out of the red wreck?”

  “The red wreck is a vintage Jaguar. And the pudgy man is Norman Kevic. The one who’s on the radio, you know.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you ought to. He’s got a talk show in the mornings from six to ten. He’s very controversial and he’s supposed to be very influential. Anyway, I know he’s here for the reception because he’s been talking about it for a week. When he isn’t bashing the Japanese.”

  “What do you mean, bashing the Japanese?”

  “He tells really gross, really racist jokes about the Japanese.” Bennis shrugged. “I didn’t say he was a nice man. I just said he was famous. Get out of the car, Gregor. We really ought to go find out where we’re supposed to be. Once we’ve
got that down, we can do what we want.”

  Since this was eminently sensible advice—and since Bennis so rarely gave eminently sensible advice—Gregor decided to follow it. He opened the door at his side and unfolded his legs from the small car. Since he was six feet four, he always seemed to be unfolding his legs from one place to another. Once he was standing up, he nodded to Bennis, and she used her automatic door lock. Then she got her cigarettes out of her pocket and lit up. It was impossible to tell anymore where cigarette smoking would be allowed and where it wouldn’t be. Since Bennis’s habit was deeply ingrained and passionately defended, she was forever smoking precautionary cigarettes before entering parties, dinners, speeches, and television studios. Gregor was used to it. He leaned against the side of the car and waited.

  “I don’t understand why you do this,” he said. “We could go over to St. Teresa’s House first. That was what you said we ought to do. You could always nip out later and light up. And instead—”

  “Here comes somebody else,” Bennis said.

  The somebody else was driving up in an ordinary maroon Lincoln Town Car, a dowdy second cousin to Bennis’s Mercedes and Norman Kevic’s Jaguar. Gregor watched idly as it maneuvered almost silently into a narrow parking space and hissed to a stop. Since the windows were tinted, he couldn’t see inside, and he wondered why not. What made people want to be anonymous, when they were unlikely to be famous enough for anonymity to be in question? Then the driver’s side door popped open and a man got out, and Gregor began to revise his opinion. The man wasn’t famous. He wasn’t anyone that Gregor recognized. Gregor was willing to bet, however, that he was richer than both Bennis Hannaford and Norman Kevic combined. The man walked around the back of the car and up the side to the front passenger door and opened it. He held out his arm, but the woman who emerged beside him did not bother to take it. She was a thin woman with overtight skin and the frantic air of the psychologically desperate. Gregor disliked her on sight.