Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  Norm opened the door and peered down into a corridor, which was thankfully not a closet, but wasn’t much better, either. It was narrow and dank. Its ceiling was lined with thick, badly painted pipes. Its walls were dark green from the floor halfway up the wall and pale green the rest of the way to the ceiling. Norm felt around on the wall beside the door for a switch. He turned on the light and looked inside some more. Surely, if the men’s room was down here, there would be directions? Surely, the men’s room wasn’t down here, because even for a feminist institution this sort of mistreatment would be too much?

  Norm went into the corridor and closed the door behind him. He had no idea if St. Elizabeth’s was a feminist institution or not. He had no clear idea of what a feminist was. Hell, he had no clear idea who Norman Kevic was. He walked down the claustrophobic corridor until he came to a place he had to turn, and hesitated. To his left there was more corridor. To his right there was a heavy fire door. He went to the fire door and opened it up.

  “There,” a woman’s voice said, not so much drifting up to him as flying up, like a rocket. “That ought to be just fine. Now all we have to do is fill the cones with flowers, tie the cones with ribbons, and bring them upstairs.”

  “I don’t know,” another woman’s voice said, soft and tentative. “I have to tell you, Sarabess. I think we should have started with the flowers and wrapped the paper around them. I don’t think we should have made paper cones first.”

  “Well, we did make paper cones first,” the woman Norm took to be Sarabess said. “We’re just going to have to live with them. Get me a big pile of roses, Sister, and then we can get started.”

  There was a breeze coming up from something open down there. Norm went on through the fire door and found himself at the top of a short, shallow flight of stairs. The stairs reached a landing six steps down and then proceeded into the dark. Norm went down to the landing and stopped. Now he could see another door, partially propped open, with light spilling out into the dark under his feet. Every once in a while, the light was obstructed by shadows, which Norm took to be the bodies of women, going back and forth doing whatever they were doing in the room they were in. He advanced a few more steps down, hesitated, and advanced again. It occurred to him that it was a good thing that his quest for the John had been basically on philosophical grounds.

  He got to the bottom of the steps and the half-opened door and looked in. He had expected to see a pair of nuns, but what he saw instead was a single young nun and a woman with greying hair who seemed to be some kind of superannuated hippie. They were both working diligently at a line of the kind of paper cones florists used to put bouquets in, except that instead of being green the paper was baby blue, like everything else in this place. Norm peered harder through the door and saw that although the room beyond was strictly functional, with paint that looked like it belonged in a furnace room and bare wooden tables whose surfaces were as splintered as the surface on a cellar door, a certain amount of effort had been put into decorating here, too. On the far wall right in his line of vision was another one of those posters.

  Norm moved toward the door, raised his hand, and knocked. He would have walked right in, but he had been noticing lately that women no longer took well to that kind of surprise. He’d walked in unannounced on one of the women in the office once last month and she’d very nearly belted him. He didn’t know what had gotten into women these days.

  Nobody inside seemed to have heard him. He raised his hands and knocked again. “Yoo hoo,” he called, and instantly felt ridiculous. “Can I come in?”

  The hippie woman dropped what she was doing and marched over to the door. “Oh,” she said, flustered. “It’s Mr. Kevic. What are you doing here?”

  Since Norm was sure that if he’d met this woman before, he would have remembered it—the grotesque are as memorable as the beautiful—he assumed she knew who he was from his publicity. “I was looking for the—ah—the—”

  “The toilet,” the young nun in the background piped up.

  “Right,” Norm said. “I was looking for that. I seem to have gotten lost.”

  “You’re in the basement of St. Teresa’s House,” the hippie woman said.

  “I’m Sister Catherine Grace,” the young nun told him.

  “I’m Sarabess Coltrane.”

  Norm gave a little thought to it and decided that no, he had never heard of Sarabess Coltrane and there was no reason why he should have. The high administrators of the college were all nuns and there was no way Sarabess Coltrane was one of those. Norm had only met Reverend Mother General once, and that just half an hour or so ago, but he could just imagine what she thought of Sarabess Coltrane’s outfit. Saggy cotton Indian print dress. Plastic barrettes holding back hair that could have used a cut, a conditioner, and a curl. Birkenstock sandals. It was embarrassing.

  Norm edged into the room and looked around. There were a pair of industrial sinks along one wall that he hadn’t been able to see from outside, and drains here and there in the floor. There was also a freezer whose door had been propped open and that seemed to be filled with flowers. Sarabess Coltrane had even more flowers in her hands. The flowers she had had originally were lying on the long wooden table, badly wrapped in a blue paper cone.

  “Here,” Norm said. “Let me help with that. I’ll probably be faster.”

  “You?” Sarabess Coltrane sounded doubtful.

  Norm took the roses out of her hands and walked over to the table to get a cone. The young nun had been right, of course. They should never have made the cones first. Oh, well. It wasn’t that hard to fix if you knew how to fix it.

  “I used to work for a florist when I was going to college,” Norm said. “That’s how I made my spending money before I found a station that would take me on. I used to wrap flowers all the time. Can I have one of those ribbons?”

  “Of course,” Sister Catherine Grace said.

  “The flowers are for the Mothers Provincial,” Sarabess Coltrane said. “We’re supposed to present them right after lunch.”

  “Right after lunch may be tomorrow,” Sister Catherine Grace said, “because the kitchen is right down the hall from here and we’ve been listening to poor Sister Agnes Bernadette, having one problem with the food after another.”

  “If nobody ever presents a bouquet to Mother Mary Bellarmine, nobody will care,” Sarabess Coltrane said.

  Sister Catherine Grace sighed. “Sarabess had a run-in with Mother Mary Bellarmine the day before yesterday. It was very sticky. We’ve been standing around down here all afternoon plotting—” Sister Catherine Grace flashed a look of agony at Sarabess Coltrane and blushed.

  “Never mind,” Sarabess said. “We haven’t made any secret of it. Anybody who walked by outside could have heard us.” She leaned over Norm’s shoulders and hissed in his ear: “We’ve been plotting murder.”

  Catherine Grace giggled.

  Norm went over to the freezer and contemplated the roses. “How many in a bouquet?” he asked. “Twelve?”

  “Of course twelve,” Sarabess said.

  “Roses are Mary’s flower,” Catherine Grace said.

  “You shouldn’t be plotting murder with Gregor Demarkian upstairs,” Norm told them. “Don’t you know who he is? The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”

  Sarabess drew a stool up to the table and sat down to watch Norm at work. “We know who Mr. Demarkian is,” she said, “but the point we’ve been harping on is that it would be perfect I mean, you could murder anybody you wanted to today—at least from down here—and you’d have to get away with it.”

  “It’s because of the food,” Catherine Grace said.

  “If you go through that door there,” Sarabess told Norm, “you get to the other part of the corridor. This room straddles it. Anyway, down there there’s the kitchen with all the food for the party just lying around, and in here there’s tons of poisonous stuff, lye, gasoline, cleaning fluids, all kinds of things.”

  “And if you didn
’t want to use something from this room,” Catherine Grace said, “you could use something from the boiler room, because it’s between here and the kitchen. There’s kerosene in there.”

  “And it wouldn’t matter how bad the poison smelled, because there would always be some kind of food that smelled worse. Let me get you some more roses. You’re very good at that.”

  “Thank you,” Norm said. He was very good at it. He was always very good at everything. Even when he hadn’t had much practice. Even—almost especially—when he was stewed to the gills. People did not get to where Norman Kevic had gotten to without being able to deliver at that level in that way. He considered the proposition the two women had put before him and found an objection.

  “What about this room?” he asked them. “If anybody who wants to commit murder by putting poison in the food has to pass through this room to get to the food—”

  “But they wouldn’t,” Catherine Grace said. “There’s two more sets of stairs on the other side. One from the first floor and one from the garden—you know, through an outside door.”

  “Nobody ever comes the way you came,” Sarabess said, “except fire marshals when we have a fire drill. How did you ever get into that corridor?”

  “I took a door in the foyer and kept on going,” Norm said. “But wait a minute. What about your victim? If you poison the food you can’t possibly know who’ll eat what you poison. Unless you take a very little of it and put it on a cracker and hand it right over, and then somebody might see you and there you’d be. Behind bars.”

  “We could kill any of the Mothers Provincial,” Catherine Grace said.

  “Like Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Sarabess elaborated. “Because of the ice sculptures.”

  “What?”

  “Sister Agnes Bernadette has ice sculptures made in the shape of nuns, one for each of the Mothers, and there’s going to be chicken liver pâté in each one and when they come out each of the Mothers Provincial and Reverend Mother General too, of course, are supposed to eat first from their particular sculpture. It’s going to be a big fuss. So you see, all you have to do is poison the right chicken liver pâté—”

  “And the sculptures are all going to be marked,” Catherine Grace said.

  “—and use something that acts quickly so nobody else takes a bite,” Sarabess concluded.

  “And there you’ll be!” Catherine Grace was triumphant “It’s really absolutely perfect, Mr. Kevic. It’s like something out of Agatha Christie.”

  In Norman Kevic’s mind, it was something out of Edgar Allan Poe, but he wasn’t going to say so.

  It just confirmed the feeling he’d had all along that nuns were dangerous, and added to it the conviction that their friends were dangerous, too.

  Chapter 4

  1

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS NOT a religious man. He had been brought up in the Armenian Christian Church—which he described to people as “like the Greek Orthodox, but not really,” because it was too complicated to go into the history of millennial Church politics and heresies that might not have been heresies depending on whose side you were on, and he didn’t know it all anyway—but once he had become an adult he had given it up. While he had been married to Elizabeth, he had done all the obligatory things. Weddings and funerals, christenings with the infant in antique lace and the godmother in tears: Elizabeth had determined which of those they were obliged to go to, what present they were obliged to bring, and what did or did not constitute an acceptable excuse on Gregor’s part. According to Elizabeth’s system, Gregor had been forgivably absent from his niece Hedya’s christening because he was on kidnapping detail in Los Angeles. His niece Hedya had been christened in Boston, where Elizabeth’s older sister lived with her husband, and Gregor couldn’t be two places at once. With his niece Maria’s christening, though, he had been in trouble. That had taken place in Washington, where he and Elizabeth were living at the time. It had been Elizabeth’s opinion that he could have found a way to make time on a Sunday morning, no matter what had him tied up in Quantico and the District of Columbia. As it turned out later, what had him tied up was the beginnings of what would become both the definitive case against Theodore Robert Bundy and the establishment of the Behavioral Sciences Department, but Elizabeth didn’t care. Work was never as important as family, even if “work” meant saving the world. The world had been in need of saving for several thousand years. Missing a niece’s christening wasn’t going to help him save it.

  Mostly, Gregor Demarkian thought of churches as cultural institutions, like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. He didn’t know enough about faith to comment on it one way or another, but he could see the way Holy Trinity operated on Cavanaugh Street, the way it made it easy for everybody around it to organize their lives, and he understood the need for something like that. He didn’t know if Catholics felt the same way about the Catholic Church. He expected it was a bit more complicated, since ex-Catholics were often so obsessional about what had made them leave. He had noticed, however, that comparing the Catholic Church with the Boy Scouts was ludicrous. The Pentagon, that you could compare it with. Or the State Services Apparatus of the Soviet Union before the fall. Malachi Martin’s International Conspiracy of Everything would be good, too. Gregor meant no disrespect for the Catholic Church. On an organizational level, he thought it was a marvel. It was just that he didn’t understand how a bureaucracy that big managed to stay in operation for as long as this one had without strangling itself.

  One of the ways it had done that was by making sure its coordinate parts were as supremely efficient as the central government was reputed to be confused. Gregor Demarkian had heard monologues without end on just how chaotic the Vatican was. Father Tiber’s friend Father Ryan couldn’t make himself stop once he got started. “Just try to get a request processed through Rome,” Father Ryan would say, his eyes beginning to gleam. “Just try it. If it isn’t an ordinary annulment appeal or a request for six copies of an encyclical from the publications office, do you know what you get? Forms! That’s what you get. Forms!”

  Gregor was sure Father Ryan got a lot of forms, but he never had to deal with the Vatican. The Catholic officials he did deal with were priests, bishops, and women religious. They not only did not pass out forms, they took to the field like generals promoted from the ranks who didn’t know how to conduct a war without the smell of gunpowder in their noses. It was into this operational mode Gregor saw Reverend Mother General and her Sisters go, after Nancy Hare upended the vase of roses on Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head. They went into it instantaneously, and with a precision Gregor would have been surprised to see in a cadre of veteran Bureau agents who had been working together for years. Gregor had seen SWAT teams that worked this well together, once or twice. He had seen an elite unit of the Israeli Army that could do it every time. That these women could do it when they hadn’t seen each other for months and only handled a crisis of this sort once every two or three years, astounded him.

  “It’s because religious obedience is absolute,” Reverend Mother General had told him, the one time before this he’d seen such an operation.

  Sister Scholastica had demurred. “It’s because not one of us wants to mess up and have Reverend Mother mad at us. Not even for one single minute.”

  In the long moment after Nancy Hare proclaimed Mother Mary Bellarmine a bitch, Reverend Mother General did not look angry. She did not look surprised, either. She simply stepped into the middle of the receiving line, raised her hand, nodded her head, and watched her Sisters go into action.

  The Sister who grabbed Nancy Hare was not one Gregor knew. She was tall and broad and athletic in a way that reminded Gregor of girls’ high-school gym teachers, and she got Nancy by the shoulders and out of the way in no time at all. Nancy ended up looking more confused than alarmed at being manhandled. She had still been holding the vase when Sister pushed her against the far wall. The movement made her addled and she lost her grip on it. Stoneware isn’t china, but if it
hits marble from a sufficient height it will shatter. The Sister dived for it and caught it in mid-flight in one hand, keeping Nancy immobile with the other. On the other side of the room, a nun Gregor did know—Sister Mary Alice, Mistress of Novices, whom he’d met in Maryville—was fussing around Mother Mary Bellarmine in that brisk and determined way elementary-school teachers use to calm small boys. Sister Mary Alice didn’t look like she much liked doing it, but she did seem to be good at it. Mother Mary Bellarmine’s veil was soaked through, and there were trickles of green-tinged water running down her face. The veil had prevented much damage to the rest of her habit. Gregor edged closer in the crowd to get a better look. The modified habit of the Sisters of Divine Grace consisted of the veil—it went over the ears and fastened at the back of the neck—and a long black dress that covered the calf but didn’t reach the floor, and a long garment called a scapular. The scapular was a long piece of black cloth with a hole in the middle for the head to go through, that hung front and back from the shoulders to the hem of the habit’s dress. There was some religious significance to the scapular. It had something to do with Saint Simon Stock and the Carmelite Order and the Blessed Virgin Mary, the way practically everything in the Catholic Church had to do with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Scholastica had told Gregor about it during the long days they had spent at the Maryville Police Department, doing their parts to straighten out the mess that results in the aftermath of any murder, no matter how successfully solved. Gregor couldn’t remember the explanation, but he did remember most of the rest of that conversation, and that had been about just how important the scapular was as part of the habit.

  “There were Sisters who wanted to go to really short dresses, knee-length, but they wouldn’t have looked right with a scapular,” Scholastica had told him, “and if there’s one thing the old women in this Order want to express, it’s how vital they think it is for Sisters to wear a scapular.”

  The point now was that Mother Mary Bellarmine’s scapular was torn, ripped from the neck hole down the front in one long gash. Gregor couldn’t imagine how it had happened. Of course, he hadn’t been very close when the incident had happened. It wouldn’t have taken long to tear the scapular. It could have been done when his attention was momentarily elsewhere. It still didn’t make sense. Nancy Hare had called Mother Mary Bellarmine a bitch. Then she had emptied the vase of roses on Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head. Then she had stepped back. She had not taken time to rip Mother Mary Bellarmine’s scapular. Gregor was sure of it.