Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

“In there,” Sister Scholastica said, pointing to the reception room doors.

  “There are ten long tables set up against one wall,” Gregor said. “Sister Joan Esther was standing next to the one third in from this door.”

  “The one without any chicken liver pâté in the statue’s head,” little Sister Angelus offered up.

  “Shh,” one of the other novices said.

  “But I heard them,” Sister Angelus said.

  Jack Androcetti took a deep breath. “Chicken liver pâté. The statue’s head. Sergeant Collins?”

  “Right here.” A young black man in uniform stepped forward. Gregor noticed that he wasn’t young enough. He was older than Jack Androcetti.

  “Sergeant Collins,” Jack Androcetti repeated, “please take a couple of men and go into that room and find the scene if you can manage it—”

  “Well, of course he can manage it,” a nun in the crowd said. “Her body’s still lying right there on the floor.”

  “Fine,” Jack Androcetti said. “Sergeant Collins—”

  “I’m on my way,” Sergeant Collins said.

  Sergeant Collins moved forward, with a small army of men following along behind him, and Gregor began to relax a little. It wasn’t true that there was always one man in every police investigation who knew what he was doing, but if you were lucky it was. This time they were lucky. Sergeant Collins waited politely for Gregor to move his arm and then went on through into the reception room. As he was going past, he winked.

  “All right, ladies,” Gregor heard him say in the next room. “We have to clear this room. Everybody out. I’m going to post an officer at the back door. Leave your name with him.”

  “I say we shouldn’t be doing any of this until we know what Sister died from,” a nun in the crowd said, but everybody ignored her. They were concentrating on Jack Androcetti, who seemed finally to have made up his mind to do something besides cast aspersions on the general character of Gregor Demarkian. He was casting his eyes around the foyer in dissatisfaction.

  “Is there anywhere I could set up an office?” he asked. “A small room with a desk and some chairs?”

  “I could get you a small room with chairs,” Sister Scholastica said. “No desk. This isn’t that kind of building.”

  “I’ll take it,” Jack Androcetti said.

  “It’s through that door at the back to your left,” Sister Scholastica said, going forward to show him the way. “There’s a hallway there with some rooms off of it.”

  Gregor watched Jack Androcetti take in the decorated door, the picture of the Virgin, the blue ribbons. Then he turned around and looked at the door on the right, which was even worse. If Jack Androcetti had been that kind of man, Gregor thought, he would have fainted dead away.

  2

  IF JACK ANDROCETTI HAD been a halfway decent policeman, Gregor wouldn’t have spent the next two hours wandering around the back garden and along the strip of grass that allowed passage from the back garden to the sidewalk at the front. Androcetti knew Gregor had caught the body as it fell. Any policeman worth his service revolver would have taken that and run with it Gregor had never liked the kind of detective story where the police were made to look like absolute idiots. To his mind, they exhibited a particularly obnoxious form of class snobbery and a total disregard for reality. Even the Nero Wolfe books—which he liked because Wolfe was fat and proud of it—annoyed him because of their portrayal of the police. What he was supposed to do with a case where the police really were idiots, he didn’t know. He consoled himself with the knowledge that Sergeant Collins at least seemed to have a brain in his head. How much good that was going to do anyone, Gregor didn’t know.

  Lieutenant Jack Androcetti set himself up in the room Sister Scholastica had found for him and began summoning witnesses. He still didn’t know he had a murder on his hands, but he was determined to proceed as if he did, which was standard policy in most police departments. Nobody wanted to be caught in the middle of an investigation that had been ruined because it had never been properly started, although God only knew it happened all the time. Unfortunately, in his zeal not to have anything to do with Gregor Demarkian at all, Androcetti was calling every nun anyone had seen anywhere in the reception room at the time, and those interrogations were going to take hours. Gregor looked around the foyer and saw that Bennis had disappeared. She was probably out smoking another cigarette somewhere, which was what she always did when she got agitated. He looked for Sister Scholastica, but failed there, too. Scholastica was so tall and that hair of hers was so red, Gregor had thought he might be able to pick her out even in the middle of all these habits. If she was here, he didn’t see her. He looked through the crowd for anyone at all he might know, and found no one. All the habits had begun to blend together and take on the visage of one enormous nun.

  Gregor went to the front door, looked out on more crowds of nuns on the sidewalk and a couple of television crews unloading Minicams, and went down the steps in search of Bennis. It wasn’t true that there were nothing but nuns in the tight little groups that dotted the sidewalk like misplaced clusters of decorative shrubbery. Seculars had been invited to this reception, and as soon as Gregor started looking for Bennis, he saw lots of them. He dodged an elderly woman with a handbag that seemed to be made entirely of seashells and a young man in a pink and green tie that clashed outrageously with his electric blue shirt. Both the old woman and the young man were wearing those little pins that said ON MOTHER’S DAY REMEMBER THE MOTHER OF GOD. Gregor had read that message so often lately, he was ready to say a Novena. He pushed through the crowd some more, careful to stay to the building side of the pavement so that he wasn’t too flagrantly exposed to the newspeople.

  He had just decided to try going around to the back when he got held up by a knot of nuns with their heads together, whispering frantically to each other and ignoring everything going on around them. He was about to excuse himself and push past when his gaze lit on a face he was sure he knew. It took him a while to retrieve it, in spite of the fact that he had seen this woman more than once today and recognized her before. That was what looking at thousands of habits could do to the mind’s ability to recognize anything at all. Then the name came to him and he brightened. Sister Mary Alice. That’s who that was. Sister Mary Alice, good friend of Sister Scholastica and Mistress of Novices at the Order’s Motherhouse. Gregor abandoned his attempts to get by the knot of nuns and made his way in the other direction instead.

  Sister Mary Alice was standing by herself, almost all the way down the sidewalk to St. Cecelia’s Hall. Gregor walked up to her and cleared his throat. She seemed a million miles away, and throat clearing didn’t get her attention. He drew up closer to her and said, “Sister?”

  Sister Mary Alice came to with a start “Oh,” she said. “Oh. Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else.”

  “I could tell.”

  “I could hardly believe what a really terrible man he was,” she said. “That policeman, I mean, that Androcetti. And stupid, too, if you want to know what I think. Was Joan Esther murdered?”

  “My guess is yes,” Gregor said carefully. “But it is a guess. They’ll have to do an autopsy.”

  “If she was murdered, I’ll bet she wasn’t murdered on purpose,” Mary Alice said. “No one would murder Joan Esther on purpose. I bet the poison or whatever it was was intended for somebody else.”

  This was interesting, Gregor thought He never got over his surprise at how much nuns were willing to tell him. Maybe he reminded them of a priest. “Intended for whom?” he asked Sister Mary Alice.

  “Intended for Mother Mary Bellarmine.” Sister Mary Alice was prompt. “I know half a dozen people who would like to murder Mother Mary Bellarmine, religious and lay. She’s an equal opportunity annoyance. Anyway, from what I heard, it must have been intended for her. The poison. It was poison?”

  “I think so,” Gregor said carefully.

  “Well, what I got from Scholastica was
that there was poison in the chicken liver pâté—”

  “Not exactly,” Gregor said hastily. “You really mustn’t do that, Sister. We don’t have proof of the sorts of things you’re assuming. That Sister Joan Esther was poisoned. That the poison was in the chicken liver pâté—”

  “Where else could it have been?” Sister Mary Alice demanded.

  “It could have been on something discrete—a canapé, for instance, that someone made up special and handed to Joan Esther in person. In fact, that’s a far better speculative explanation than that the poison was in the chicken liver pâté, because the chicken liver pâté would have been eaten by Mother Mary Bellarmine first, unless of course you’re assuming that Mother Mary Bellarmine is herself—”

  “—no it wouldn’t have—”

  “—Joan Esther’s killer, which would make this a far cruder murder than I think it is. What do you mean, she wouldn’t?”

  “Mother Mary Bellarmine wouldn’t have eaten the chicken liver pâté,” Mary Alice said, “because she has gout. Do you know about gout?”

  “Only what I’ve read in eighteenth-century novels,” Gregor said.

  “Well, I don’t know much about it either,” Mary Alice said, “but I do know it’s very painful and Mother Mary Bellarmine has it in her foot. And the thing about gout is, if you’ve got it you can’t eat organ meats. They make it worse.”

  “You can’t eat organ meats at all? Not even a bite from a cracker just to take part in a celebration?”

  “Well, Mr. Demarkian, if it was anybody but Mother Mary Bellarmine we were talking about, I’d say you were right. She’d have taken a bite just to be polite to Agnes Bernadette. But this is Mother Mary Bellarmine we’re talking about here. She doesn’t bend for anybody.”

  Gregor considered the possibilities. “Who else knows about this?” he asked.

  “If you mean about the gout,” Sister Mary Alice said, “the answer is practically everybody. She complained about it very loudly and very clearly whenever it flared up. I’d say anybody who’s been around her for any time at all—say on and off for a couple of months—would have heard about it. About her not being able to eat organ meats, though, that’s a different thing.”

  “You don’t think many people knew about that,” Gregor said.

  “The only reason I knew about that is because one of my novices told me. Her father’s got gout in his legs. And I told her not to tell anyone in case it got back to Sister Agnes Bernadette, because Aggie had gone through so much trouble to set all this statue thing up. I don’t think it’s general knowledge.”

  “I don’t think it’s general knowledge either.”

  Mary Alice was warming up. “It really would make much more sense if somebody had been trying to kill Mother Mary Bellarmine and the plan had just gone wrong. I mean, why would anybody want to kill Joan Esther? Even Mother Mary Bellarmine wouldn’t want to kill Joan Esther, just put her in the stocks and humiliate her because of going to Alaska. I mean, you don’t kill somebody just because they didn’t like working for you and went to Alaska. But Mother Mary Bellarmine… Even if there wasn’t anything else, there would be all that about the money.”

  “All that about what money?”

  “The money for the field house,” Sister Mary Alice said. “Mother Mary Bellarmine has been going over the plans and the books and all the rest of it for days. There’s at least a million dollars involved, if not more. Somebody could be stealing and Mother Mary Bellarmine could have found out about it. Or there are a million other things. Goodness only knows what she did to get Nancy Hare so upset—”

  “Nancy Hare,” Gregor said. “Did you see Nancy Hare in the reception room when the sculptures were being brought in?”

  “Then? No, of course I didn’t. She’d gone home by then. Hadn’t she?”

  “It was just something somebody said,” Gregor told her. “Go on with what you were saying.”

  “Well, there isn’t much more to say. It just seems so rational. If I’d wanted to kill Mother Mary Bellarmine, I’d have done it that way. The pâté would have been there and she would have taken the first bite and that would have been that. Don’t you think so?”

  “Maybe,” Gregor said.

  “Well, I like it,” Mary Alice told him. “It makes a lot more sense than what we have now. How can you deal with things like this all the time? I barely survived after Brigit.”

  “This still may turn out not to be a ‘thing like this’ at all,” Gregor reminded her. “We’re still only speculating.”

  “I think I was right and we should have called the Chancery,” Mary Alice said. “I think this is going to be one big mess.” She peered around in the crowd and sighed. “That’s a television reporter heading our way, Mr. Demarkian. Unless you’re looking for publicity, you’d better get out of here.”

  “I’d better get out of here,” Gregor said.

  “Hey!” A young woman called out from behind a Minicam. “Isn’t that Gregor Demarkian?”

  The only avenue of escape was the strip of lawn leading to the back garden. Gregor took it, all too aware that in a sea of nuns, he must be as clearly identifiable as the bull’s-eye on a target

  3

  “HEY,” BENNIS HANNAFORD SAID three minutes later, when Gregor had finally made his way out the back gate and into the field and discovered her sitting on a low stone wall. “You look positively frazzled. Is that lieutenant still giving you a hard time?”

  “You saw all that,” Gregor said.

  “I saw enough of it. Is that man as stupid as he appears to be?”

  “Stupider.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “I don’t know if afraid is what I am,” Gregor said. “Obviously, I’m not going to be called in as a consultant on this case.”

  “Do you think not? Not even by the Order or the Church or whoever?”

  “Androcetti had a point in there. I am not a lawyer. I have no official standing. If I am asked to consult by the Order or the Church, what will I do? My effectiveness depends on the police. I’ve always had their cooperation. I don’t think I’d get much of anywhere without it.”

  “So what do you think will happen?”

  “I don’t know.” Gregor sighed. “I suppose Androcetti will do something dramatic, especially now that the television cameras are here. I even have a suspicion I know what the stupid something will be.”

  “What?” Bennis asked.

  “Arrest Mother Mary Bellarmine.”

  “What?”

  The low stone wall was very close to the gate to the garden of St. Teresa’s House. The gate’s opening was stuffed full of nuns, much as every other inch of ground in this place seemed to be stuffed full of nuns, but with less room to move. Now one of the nuns closest to them turned around and peered into his face. She was not a nun Gregor knew, but from the way she was looking at him he surmised that she knew him at least by reputation. She had the wrinkled, very soft skin of old women who have never worn much makeup.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” she ventured.

  “That’s right,” Gregor said. “This is Bennis Day Hannaford.”

  “I’m Sister Mary Celestine. I hope you don’t mind. I overheard what you said. About that policeman arresting Mother Mary Bellarmine.”

  “It was just a speculation,” Gregor said quickly. “It hasn’t actually happened.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Sister Mary Celestine said. “I know that. There would have been much more fuss if someone had been arrested. But if it does happen it will be wrong. I hope you realize that. Especially if it happened the way everybody says it happened. Because poison was put in the pâté.”

  “I think I just had this identical conversation with Sister Mary Alice,” Gregor said.

  “I don’t think so,” Sister Mary Celestine told him. “You see, I was standing right next to her. To Sister Joan Esther, I mean. When she died. I was standing right up against that table the whole time the sculptures were being brought in and Rev
erend Mother General was making her speech and—well, everything. Do you see?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  “I think I do,” Bennis jumped in. “I think Sister saw something.”

  “Well, I didn’t see anything sinister.” Sister Mary Celestine shook her head. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I mean, I’m assigned to St. Elizabeth’s. I live and work here. I’ve met Norman Kevic a dozen times.”

  “What has Norman Kevic got to do with it?” Gregor asked.

  “He picked up the ice sculpture,” Sister Mary Celestine said promptly. “I saw him do it. He was weaving in and out among the tables, trying to get something to eat. You know how he is. And he’s good at that, at insinuating himself in places where he’s not supposed to be. Not that anyone was paying any attention to him. I mean, Norman is Norman. And there was such a crowd.”

  “But he picked up the statue,” Gregor prompted.

  “That’s right.”

  “When?”

  “While Reverend Mother was making her speech. All the sculptures had been put down on the tables, and he was at the table closest to the door. When Reverend Mother started talking he picked that statue up there—I forget who that belongs to—and then he started working his way down the line of tables. He’d just got to Mother Mary Bellarmine’s table when Reverend Mother started to wind up her remarks, and he stopped.”

  “But he picked up the statue.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “By the head?” Gregor asked. “By the feet? How?”

  “Oh, by the feet,” Sister Mary Celestine said. “It was most definitely by the feet and by the shoulders, if you know what I mean. He picked it up the way you’d pick up any statue and turned it over in his hands.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then he put it down again,” Mother Mary Celestine said. “Oh, dear. This all sounds so trivial. And it probably was trivial. Norman was probably just being Norman. He’s like that.”

  Gregor considered everything she had told him. He didn’t like it. It was too complicated, and it seemed to rest too much on chance. Granted, there was a huge crowd. If Norman Kevic had been intent on poisoning the pâté and killing someone, he couldn’t have counted on going unseen. He had been, after all, a man in a crowd of nuns.