Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  All the nuns laughed. Gregor didn’t know what for.

  “Now,” Reverend Mother said, “I know you’re all hungry—”

  A good-humored groan went up from the crowd.

  “And I know Sister Agnes Bernadette is anxious to feed you. She’s got enough food coming up to feed the greater metropolitan area. So let’s get started. If the Mothers Provincial are ready—”

  “Oh, we’re ready,” Mother Mary Deborah said in her thick Australian drawl.

  The crowd laughed again.

  “Mother of God, give us food,” someone in the back prayed, and the crowd laughed again.

  “I’m sure the Mother of God was a very good cook,” Reverend Mother General said. “Mothers, if you will, please.”

  The Mothers Provincial raised their hands in the air. Gregor was fascinated to see that each hand held a cracker. He supposed that each cracker was smeared with chicken liver pâté. This was the oddest spectacle he had ever witnessed. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to think of it.

  “Now,” Reverend Mother General said.

  At the sound of “now” all the Mothers Provincial bit down on their crackers, and the crowd cheered. At that moment more nuns began to come through the double doors from the foyer, a long line of them, with each carrying a heavy silver tray. This was lunch for real coming on. The semimilitary precision of the scene at the tables broke up. Gregor looked at Bennis and found her just as astonished as he was.

  “Wasn’t that strange?” she demanded.

  But Sister Angelus barged in. “It was silly, but we had to do it. Sister Agnes Bernadette was so proud of her sculptures. And it’s not so wonderful being a convent cook, you know. You’re stuck in a kitchen all day. Reverend Mother General just wanted to make Agnes Bernadette feel good.”

  “Well,” Bennis said, “I hope she managed.”

  “That’s a pile of Italian sausages they just put out,” Gregor said. “I’m going to go eat.”

  Of course, everybody else was going to go eat, too, so he had to wait. Norman Kevic’s strategy now seemed to be eminently sensible, since he was the first person in line and supplied with a plate and utensils almost before anyone else had collected himself enough to get started. Gregor took his place behind two giggling novices and in front of a pair of Sisters chattering away in German. The line inched forward slowly and he went with it, catching glimpses now and then of what looked like the world’s most complete collection of food.

  “They’re putting all the really ethnic stuff out in the garden,” one of the novices ahead of him said. “Hello, Mr. Demarkian. You probably don’t remember me. I’m Sister Mary Stephen.”

  “Mr. Demarkian?” the other novice said. “Really? Who came to Maryville and investigated Brigit?”

  “He didn’t investigate Brigit,” Sister Mary Stephen said scornfully. “He investigated the murder.”

  “I was sick that whole week and I never met him,” the other novice said.

  “This is Sister Francesca,” Sister Mary Stephen said. “And I meant what I said about the ethnic food. If you like that kind of thing better you probably wouldn’t have to wait in so long a line. There’s a Japanese table out there with a chef from Japan. And a French one with a Sister who was a graduate of Cordon Bleu before she entered the Order. There are a couple of others out there, too.”

  “Aren’t Italian sausages considered ethnic?” Gregor asked.

  “These at the tables here are Italian-American sausages,” Sister Mary Stephen said.

  Sister Francesca laughed.

  “There’s some Polish-American kielbasa up there, too,” Sister Mary Stephen said, “and being a Polish-American myself you know how I feel about—what’s that?”

  That was disturbance well far up the line, but not as far as it could have been. Gregor tried to get a handle on the position so he could concentrate on the incident and had a hard time doing it. There were so many nuns milling around and there was so much general confusion. Then somebody gasped and somebody else cried, “She’s turning blue!” and Gregor leaped out of the line into the relatively less choked area to the side of it to see what was going on.

  What was going on was a death. He knew it as soon as he saw the woman’s face.

  She was clutching her throat and staring straight ahead. Her eyes were bulged wide and her skin was a color that was halfway between blue and white. It seemed to be made out of glass.

  “Something that affects the nervous system,” Gregor thought automatically.

  Then he stepped forward and let the nun fall straight into his arms.

  It was the one Sister Angelus had pointed out to him as Sister Joan Esther.

  Part 2

  Chapter 1

  1

  THE POLICE TOOK MOTHER Mary Bellarmine in for questioning. Gregor would have been willing to bet they were going to long before they arrived, just as he would have been willing to bet he knew what had poisoned Sister Joan Esther long before anyone had done the tests to confirm that she’d been poisoned at all. Gregor was good at poisons. In the Bureau, everybody had to specialize in something. What else there was to specialize in hadn’t interested him much. Back in the days when he’d joined, the Bureau demanded that each of its agents have a law or an accounting degree. Gregor had opted for accounting and become a CPA just to qualify for agent training. After that, he’d done his best to forget everything he knew about business and finance. Both bored him. He’d been offered a chance to specialize in firearms, but they made him nervous. He had driven his instructors at Quantico positively nuts. In the end, he had opted to become the resident—and only—expert on poisons, acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge of acid and alkali, lethal mushroom, and distilled chemical, that made him an object of curiosity from one end of the Bureau to another. When he was a young agent in the field, his station supervisor in Los Angeles would call him up at all hours of the night to find out if the poison in the latest Perry Mason or Ed McBain would “really work.”

  Just by looking at her, Gregor knew that Sister Joan Esther had died from something that affected the central nervous system. The signs were obvious, from the paralysis of the lungs to the twitching of the extremities. He knew what something because of the conversation he’d been having with the two young Sisters just before Joan Esther keeled over. That conversation stuck in his mind so strongly, he could barely wait to get his chance to check it out. Wait, however, he had to, because he had hold of Joan Esther’s head. The big reception room was brightly lit, but like all large rooms overfilled with people, it had many shadows. One of those shadows seemed to have fallen across Joan Esther’s face, making her look oddly quasi-decapitated. It was not a comfortable sight. Gregor had caught her around the tops of her shoulders. Now he lowered her gently to the floor. The circle of people around them had gotten bigger and bigger. Nobody wanted to get too close. Gregor heard one woman say “she’s fainted” and another protest that no, no, she was dead. The protesting woman had a high tight voice just this side of hysterical. Gregor checked the pulse in Joan Esther’s wrist and then in the side of her neck. He had known it was going to be futile before he started, but its futility still depressed him. He stepped back away from her and stood up.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” Reverend Mother General said.

  Trust the nuns, Gregor thought. They might not understand procedures. They might think they need a course to tell them what to do in cases of sudden death. They at least don’t disappear. He couldn’t count the number of disappearing friends, relatives, and colleagues he had had to put up with in the aftermaths of various suspicious deaths.

  Gregor’s hands felt dusty. He brushed them absently against the panels of his suit jacket and said, “She’s dead, Reverend Mother. She was dead before she keeled over.”

  “I don’t suppose this could be some kind of heart attack,” Reverend Mother General said. Her face was very pale.

  “I doubt it. You should check, of course.”

  “Of course. What do you thin
k it is?”

  Gregor looked up at the doors leading out to the garden. “Something that affects the central nervous system,” he said. “Reverend Mother, you’d better go call the police.”

  “I sent Scholastica to call the police before you put Sister Joan Esther on the ground. They were very close friends, you know, Scholastica and Joan Esther. Scholastica is distraught.” Reverend Mother General paused. “In the old days,” she said, “Sisters were forbidden by the Holy Rule from forming what were called particular friendships. In the sixties, that rule was labeled homophobic, as if the founder of this Order were worried that her charges would all turn into lesbians if they were allowed the least bit of latitude. It wasn’t that, of course. It was things like this that worried the founders of orders of women religious. I don’t think Scholastica is going to be of any use to anybody for the next week.”

  “Mmmm,” Gregor said.

  “You should tell us what’s happening,” a woman’s voice demanded from the crowd, and this time it wasn’t on the right side of hysteria. “You should tell us what’s going on!”

  Reverend Mother General had never had the least tolerance for hysteria, in herself or anyone else. Gregor watched in admiration as she rose to her full height—which she managed to make look much taller than the four feet eleven or so she actually was—and took control of the Sisters of her Order with more assurance, and to better effect, than Montgomery had had control of his forces on the march to liberate Paris.

  “Sisters,” she said, “there has been a death. Sister Joan Esther has died. We need a priest in here right away, if one of you near the door might look into the garden and find one willing to come in. Other than that, we need calm. I want this room cleared of all Sisters and I want it cleared now. There’s the back garden to go into. Do not wander off. The police have been called—”

  A little ripple of shivers went through the crowd.

  “—and since we don’t yet know why or how Sister died, the police will probably want to ask questions. You have nothing to worry about. All you need to do is tell the truth. You will be happy to know that our own expert on matters of sudden death and police contact, Gregor Demarkian, is with us now, and has agreed to be of help.”

  Gregor hadn’t agreed to anything, of course. For all Reverend Mother General knew, he was due in Tahiti in an hour.

  “Now,” she went on, “I want people to move and I want them to move right away. That includes the Mothers Provincial, if they wouldn’t mind—”

  “Of course we wouldn’t mind,” Mother Mary Deborah said.

  “Where’s Agnes Bernadette?” someone in the crowd asked.

  “She’s down in the kitchen,” Mother Mary Deborah said. “I saw her go. Oh, dear. I suppose somebody should tell her what’s happened here, and tell everybody else in the kitchen, too—”

  “I’ll go,” Scholastica said, arriving at the scene looking red-eyed and breathless. “The police have been called, Reverend Mother. They’ll be here in a minute. I’d just as soon talk to Aggie, if you don’t mind.”

  “I think it’s a very good idea,” Reverend Mother General said, “unless for some reason Mr. Demarkian—”

  “It’s fine with me,” Gregor said.

  “Fine,” Reverend Mother said. “Go.”

  Scholastica went.

  Reverend Mother looked around. The room had already begun to empty out. Religious obedience might not be what it used to be, but Gregor thought it was good enough, at least in this Order with this woman at its head. He looked through the thinning crowd and spotted a few familiar faces. Norman Kevic had retreated from the food—although Gregor didn’t know if “retreated” was the word he wanted. After all, Norm had been at the head of the line. He had probably had a good deal to eat before the fuss started. Gregor made a note to find out just what it was Norm had eaten. He couldn’t imagine that he was wrong about what had killed Joan Esther and how it had been administered, but it was always good to cross-check. Sister Mary Alice was standing next to the doors leading out to the garden, shepherding shaken-looking novices into the garden. One of those novices was Sister Mary Angelus. He swung around to let his gaze make a circuit of the room. He found neither Nancy Hare nor Mother Mary Bellarmine.

  He didn’t see Bennis Hannaford, either, but he wasn’t really worried about that. There had been a sudden death. Bennis Hannaford would show up. He turned back to Reverend Mother General.

  “What I want to do,” he said, “is to secure the table next to which Sister Joan Esther was standing when she died. I believe that was the table where the ice sculpture for Mother Mary Bellarmine was set up.”

  “Probably,” Reverend Mother General said. “What do you mean, you want to secure it?”

  “I mean I want to stand somebody next to it to make sure that nothing on the table is touched.”

  “You can’t imagine that the Sisters are going to want to eat after all this,” Reverend Mother General said. “Maybe they will want to eat at that, but you can’t think they’d want to eat from any of the tables in here, under the circumstances—”

  “Under what circumstances?” Gregor asked. “You and I both saw Joan Esther fall. So did a couple of dozen other people. That group suspects food poisoning or just plain poisoning. Nobody else has the least idea what is going on. For all they know, Sister Joan Esther died of natural causes.”

  “Oh,” Reverend Mother General said.

  “Besides,” Gregor went on, “I’m not really worrying about your Sisters eating what’s on that table. I’m much more worried that something on that table will simply disappear.”

  “Disappear?” Reverend Mother General looked blank.

  “If this is what I think it is, there’s something on that table somebody is going to want to get rid of very quickly.”

  “Oh,” Reverend Mother General said again. She blanched, but the loss of color in her face was not reflected in her voice or posture. She said, “Now you understand what I was telling you earlier, Mr. Demarkian, we really are appallingly uneducated in matters of this kind.” Then she marched them both in the direction of the table where Joan Esther had set the statue in honor of Mother Mary Bellarmine. There wasn’t much on it but the statue even now, and that was melting.

  Bennis Hannaford was talking to two nuns and edging toward the tables. Gregor caught her eye and waved. She waved back and seemed to use the wave to settle some kind of argument. A moment later she was at their side, puffing on a cigarette as if her life depended on it. Gregor periodically attempted to convince her that her life depended on not, but it never did any good.

  “I know we’re all supposed to go out in the garden,” she said apologetically to Reverend Mother General, “but I wanted to talk to Gregor for just a minute before—”

  “That’s quite all right,” Reverend Mother General said. “My instructions weren’t aimed at you.”

  “I don’t want you to go out into the garden anyway,” Gregor said. “I want you to do me a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stand by this table over here and make sure nobody touches anything.”

  “This table over here?” Bennis looked at the table curiously and then walked up to it. She looked at the melting ice sculpture and the tablecloth and the single basket of rolls that had made it here on the first wave of food service. She looked at the candle, still lit, and at the small picture of the Virgin framed in ruffled blue ribbon near the candle’s base. Then she walked around to the other side of the table and looked some more.

  “Gregor?” she asked. “What is it I’m supposed to be guarding?”

  “Everything,” Gregor said.

  “Every what?” Bennis insisted. “I mean, what have I got here? A picture framed in a ribbon. A lot of rolls I don’t think have been touched. At least, they’re still wrapped up in a napkin and the napkin is all tucked in. A candle. And an oddly shaped ice cube.”

  “The oddly shaped ice cube has chicken liver pâté in it,” Gregor said.
>
  “No it doesn’t.”

  Bennis lifted up the ice sculpture and held it out for Gregor to see.

  And she was right, of course.

  There was a deep hollow in the back of the ice sculpture’s head, but there was no chicken liver pâté in it.

  There wasn’t anything in it.

  The hollow was so clean, it was hard to believe there had ever been anything in it ever.

  2

  HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN prepared for it, of course. If he’d been out to commit a murder under the circumstances under which this one had been committed—assuming one had been committed here at all—his window of opportunity to cover his tracks would have come while Joan Esther was keeling over, or in the long minutes immediately following, when everybody would be so intent on looking after the dying nun that a bull elephant could sweep through on roller skates without anyone noticing a thing.

  Of course, Gregor thought, he did know a murder had been committed here. A murder had to have been. He didn’t know a single poison that could have produced the effects he’d seen in Sister Joan Esther that could also be mistaken for something benign. He didn’t know a single form of natural death that could mimic those effects, either. He supposed there had to be something out there. A rare tropical disease. A highly unusual genetic abnormality. There was always something. He preferred to go for the commonplace. The commonplace was so often the truth.

  Bennis leaned back against a wall with her arms crossed over her chest. Reverend Mother General stood at the end of the table, looking strained. Gregor paced back and forth in front of the ice sculpture, wondering what he was supposed to do next. Finally, Reverend Mother General said, “Mr. Demarkian, I don’t want to intrude on your thoughts, but this doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would anyone want to take the chicken liver pâté out of the sculpture’s head?”