Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  On “twenty-two” she had a little luck. It didn’t belong to WXVE, but it wasn’t deserted, either. It belonged to a magazine called Greek World, and they must have been meeting a printer’s deadline for an issue. Sarabess knew all about printer’s deadlines. She had worked for an underground newspaper in college, and what she had come away from it with was the conviction that some members of the working class were worse than the capitalist class, and among those members were all printers. It was disgusting. If you went so much as a half hour over deadline they charged you all kinds of penalties, and then they made you pay time and a half on top of it. Sarabess was sure that every printer drove a Cadillac and smoked thick cigars, conspicuously consuming the environment.

  Greek World had a logo that looked like a whirling dervish dancing on the top of the Parthenon. It was tacked to the back wall of their foyer in the form of an enormous oakboard poster painted in acrylic primary-colored paints. When the elevator doors opened, a young man was running by with a huge stack of mechanicals badly balanced in his arms. Sarabess hated to stop him. She knew the look on his face. It said he’d lost any control he’d ever had over his panic hours ago.

  She had to stop him. She had no choice. She stepped out of the elevator, grabbed at the sleeve of his shirt and said, “Excuse me?”

  The man with the mechanicals stopped. He looked around the foyer as if he had never seen it before. He looked at Sarabess as if he had never seen her before. In the second instance, he was right.

  “Excuse me,” Sarabess said again. “I seem to be lost. I’m supposed to be going to WXVE—”

  “That’s downstairs,” the young man said promptly.

  “Downstairs where?”

  “Depends what part of them you want Reception’s downstairs on ‘twelve.’ ”

  “Good. I’ll go to reception.”

  “Except nobody’s there. Only nine to five. Broadcast is on ten.”

  “Fine,” Sara said desperately, “I’ll go—”

  “They’ll never let you in there,” the young man said. “You don’t have one of those passes on your shirt.”

  “But—” Sarabess said.

  “You’d better go to ‘nine,’ ” the young man said. “Nobody knows that’s part of WXVE at all. The elevator opens on a little dinky foyer and the foyer leads to all the office warrens and nobody ever wants to go there if they don’t have business. Try ‘nine.’ ”

  “Yes.” Sarabess stepped back into the elevator.

  “Greeks are crazy,” the young man told her. “I thought I knew that because my mother is Greek, but I never really knew that until I got here.”

  “Yes,” Sarabess said again.

  The doors to the elevator closed again. Sarabess checked to make sure she had pressed the button for ‘nine’—it was lit up, in all that crazy talk she couldn’t remember doing it—and sank back against the wall. Her stomach felt full of glass. Her heart felt hollow. Now she was supposed to wander around through a warren of private offices, looking as if she belonged somewhere in them, which she didn’t, and trying to get—where? Were there internal staircases? Was Norman Kevic wandering around himself? In all this time she had wasted, he might have finished up and gone home. They’d said on the radio it was a special appearance just to talk about the murder. Sarabess didn’t know if you called time on the radio an “appearance.”

  The elevator doors opened on ‘nine.’ The foyer really was dinky. It was also unmarked. Sarabess stepped into it and looked around. Nobody seemed to be in the offices beyond the foyer, if what they were were indeed offices. Sarabess couldn’t hear the sound of a single conversation or a hollowly buzzing phone.

  There were three openings off the foyer, not doors but archways of a sort, badly made, like the ones in cheap tract houses. Sarabess went through the middle one and looked around. She was on a long corridor lined with cubicles. It was the kind of place she had always been afraid she’d get stuck working. She went on through as quickly as she could without feeling as if she were running, which was not very quickly. When you’re frightened, you always feel as if you were moving faster than you are.

  The corridor of cubicles came to an end at a kind of intersection, with new corridors going to the left and to the right. Sarabess peered in each direction and thought she saw a light to the left of her. It was all so dark and sterile here and so hollow. She was suddenly reminded of the story Norman Kevic had told that afternoon of his search for a men’s room. The parallels were unmistakable and she started to laugh.

  There was somebody down there in a cubicle, light on and all. Whoever it was—female, Sarabess thought—called out “Who is it?” in a voice twice as scared as Sarabess thought she could manage on her own.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarabess called back. “I’m lost I’m supposed to find a man named Norman Kevic.”

  “Oh, Norman. Good old Cultural Norm. Norm isn’t here this time of night.”

  “Yes he is. He was a witness to the murder—”

  “What murder?”

  “There was a murder at a reception at St. Elizabeth’s College this afternoon. Really. I’m not a nut. You can check it out.”

  “Norm was a witness?”

  “Well, he was there. You know. He’s doing some kind of special broadcast right now all about it.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Sarabess listened to a set of beeps and wonks that she supposed was a phone, then to a murmuring voice whose words were unintelligible but whose tone rose by the minute. Then there was a sharp click and the cubicle voice called out: “What’s your name?”

  “Sarabess Coltrane.”

  More murmuring. There was another sharp click.

  “That was Norm,” the cubicle voice said. “He said I was supposed to take you right up. Just a minute and I’ll be ready to go. You must have really made an impression.”

  “What do you mean?”

  An actual person emerged from the single lighted cubicle, a woman so young Sarabess could barely believe she was out of high school, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of hot pink plastic flip-flops that slapped against the soles of her feet.

  “You must really have made an impression,” the young woman repeated. “I’ve never heard Norm talk like that about a woman. You don’t look like I expected you to.”

  “Oh,” Sarabess said.

  “Usually Norm is such a smarm,” the young woman said. “I take it you haven’t been to bed with him.”

  “What?” Sarabess said.

  “Never mind,” the young woman said. “Of course you haven’t been to bed with him. If you had, he’d have made you sound like a taxi dancer. Never mind. Let’s go.”

  The young woman started down the corridor away from the intersection and Sarabess followed, feeling more confused than ever and wondering what she was supposed to make of it all. Apparently, Norman Kevic had rather liked her, or something. What was that supposed to mean?

  At the moment, it was supposed to mean that he would let her in to talk to him, which was vitally important. Sarabess had to do something about that conversation she’d had with Sister Catherine Grace.

  For the moment, she thought it would be just as well to get that done and see what came next.

  If anything did.

  3

  IT WAS QUARTER TO twelve, and at St. Elizabeth’s Convent, almost everything was quiet. Compline had been sung. Final prayers had been said. A rosary had been started for the succor of Sister Joan Esther’s soul. If the habits had been longer and the Office sung in Latin, Sister Scholastica might have thought she had been transported to 1953—or 1553. That was part of what she loved best about being a Catholic and being a nun. She liked to think of all the women before her who would find her life utterly familiar and be able to live it themselves without hardly any adjustment at all. Even having a murder in the house might not have been too much of an adjustment Religious life in the Middle Ages and the High Renaissance was not the placid and well-regulated thing it became later.
Sister Scholastica sometimes wondered if she would have found it more interesting than what she had now.

  She went down the back hall of the visitors’ wing—visiting Sisters only, here; secular visitors got rooms in St. Francis of Assisi Hall—and let herself down through the door at the back there and then through the back door of the chapel. The light inside was very dim, but she could see Sister Agnes Bernadette nonetheless, kneeling close to the front with her back hunched over as if she’d acquired a bad case of osteoporosis in a matter of hours. Scholastica dipped her fingers in holy water, made the sign of the cross and went inside. When she reached the center aisle she genuflected in the general direction of the tabernacle and then hurried up to the front. If Sister Agnes Bernadette had been praying, Scholastica wouldn’t have interrupted her. Sister Agnes Bernadette wasn’t praying. Sister Agnes Bernadette was in tears.

  Scholastica sat down on the pew and put an arm around Sister Agnes Bernadette’s broad shoulders.

  “I thought this is where you’d be. I checked your cell to see that you were in bed, and you weren’t.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Whatever you’re going to do, you can do it a lot better if you’ve had some rest.”

  “But it’s all so impossible.” Sister Agnes Bernadette raised her teary face to Scholastica. “I didn’t kill Joan Esther. I didn’t kill anyone. I don’t even think I killed them by accident, Sister, because then a lot of people would have died, wouldn’t they? Mother Mary Deborah ate almost all her chicken liver pâté by herself and there was nothing wrong with that.”

  “I know,” Scholastica said.

  Sister Agnes Bernadette sat up a little straighter. “I don’t think that poisonous man cares what’s true or not,” she said. “That Lieutenant Androcetti. I think all he cares about is getting on the television news.”

  “Well, I’ll agree to that.”

  “I don’t think he thinks I killed her either. I heard that man, that Gregor Demarkian, say that they weren’t absolutely a hundred percent sure there had been a murder. There had to be lab tests and an autopsy—oh, dear—an autopsy on Sister Joan Esther—”

  “Now, Sister—”

  “But you must understand what I’m saying,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “Nothing matters to that man except making an arrest and making news because as long as there’s a trial he’ll look good. I was thinking all this out while I was sitting in jail. As long as there’s a trial he’ll be fine, because when the trial comes out not guilty it’s just the prosecutor who will look bad. Not him. Sister, I—”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I keep trying to offer it up,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I keep telling myself there’s no help for it, I’ve been arrested and things will go along from here and there will be a trial, and because I’m not guilty of course I won’t be convicted, but in the meantime it will all be so awful, so awful, and so I keep trying to offer it up—”

  Offer it up, Sister Scholastica thought. This was terrible. She hadn’t heard of anyone “offering it up” for years. Schoolchildren “offered up” the pains of scraped knees or the humiliation of not being chosen for the baseball team in a childish attempt to identify with the sufferings of Christ. Grown women were not supposed to “offer up” totally unfounded murder accusations and full-blown media-hype trials. At least, Scholastica didn’t think they were. Scholastica’s God was a good deal more sensible than the One worshiped by so many other people.

  “Don’t you worry,” she told Sister Agnes Bernadette. “We’ll take care of it. We’ll get Gregor Demarkian to take care of it.”

  “But Gregor Demarkian said he wouldn’t take care of it,” Sister Agnes Bernadette pointed out. “He said that because the police didn’t want him there as part of the investigation—”

  “I know what he said.”

  “But how are you going to make him change his mind?”

  “I’m not going to make him change his mind.”

  “But—”

  Sister Scholastica stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Get some sleep. We’ll have Mr. Gregor Demarkian on our side in the morning. I promise.”

  “Sister—”

  Scholastica held up a finger. “First I’m going to wake up Reverend Mother General.” She held up another finger. “Then Reverend Mother General is going to wake up John Cardinal O’Bannion.”

  “John O’Bannion?”

  “Then,” Scholastica held up her third and last finger, “Cardinal O’Bannion is going to wake up Gregor Demarkian. Trust me. It will work.”

  “But what about our Cardinal?” Sister Agnes Bernadette asked wildly. “What about the Archbishop of Philadelphia?”

  Sister Scholastica shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about him. I think Reverend Mother General can take care of him.”

  And since that was true, Sister Agnes Bernadette meekly agreed to be escorted to bed.

  Chapter 4

  1

  IT WAS DONNA MORADANYAN’S idea to build a maypole in the middle of Cavanaugh Street, but there were objections—the two young men who occupied the local cop car, for instance, felt it would have a deleterious effect on the logical nature of traffic—so in the end she put it up in the window of the Ararat restaurant. Gregor Demarkian saw it for the first time on the morning of Monday, May 12, when he went to meet Father Tibor Kasparian for breakfast. He saw a few other things, too, but he was in so foul a mood they almost didn’t matter. The maypole was a good six feet tall and wrapped around with ribbons of every possible color. May might be Mary’s month and blue might be Mary’s color, but if the symbolism held, Mary was only one of a number of aspects of spring being celebrated here. Gregor tried to remember what a maypole was for and couldn’t. He had vague memories of Elizabethan England and royal picnics and customs stretching back to a pagan mist, but that might have been some movie he saw with Glenda Jackson in it. He stopped on the street and looked the maypole up and down anyway. Then he said the Armenian-American equivalent of “bah, humbug” and bought a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer from the metal pull dispenser at the curb. The front page of the Inquirer was full of the murder of Sister Joan Esther but not, Gregor was happy to see, full of him. There was a picture of the front of St. Teresa’s House with the hundreds of nuns milling around it and another of a tensely smiling Jack Androcetti. Gregor looked long and hard at Androcetti’s picture and just restrained himself from sticking his tongue out at it. The ribbons of the maypole rippled and winked, blown about by a breeze inside the restaurant. Gregor folded his paper under his arm and went to look for Father Tibor.

  Tibor was inside, sitting in a wide booth in the back, with the remains of five or six strong Armenian coffees spread out across the table and an ashtray full of the butts of the dark brown Egyptian cigarettes he smoked. He was looking at the paper, too, but opened to an inside page, and as Gregor slid into the other side of the booth he looked up and shook his head. Gregor was in the kind of mood when he gave lectures about how calling Turkish coffee Armenian coffee because you couldn’t say the word Turkish in an Armenian neighborhood for any reason except to start a riot was taking it all too far, but just as he was about to get started Linda Melajian came up with coffee and a bowl of fried dough. Gregor was embarrassed that he couldn’t remember the Armenian name for the kind of fried dough this was. Linda Melajian was very young and very polite to older people, the way the very young are very polite to creatures they consider only recently landed here from Mars.

  “Good morning, Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “I read all about you in the paper this morning. You want your usual scrambled eggs?”

  “I want my usual scrambled eggs,” Gregor said, “thank you, Linda. Tibor? What was there to read about me in the paper this morning?”

  Tibor looked up, shrugged, and turned the paper around so that it was right side up for Gregor and Gregor could read it. His little bald head gleamed in the light, and his
shoulder seemed less hunched than usual. Tibor was younger than Gregor by almost ten years, but he looked older. A couple of years in Siberia and a half dozen more in one Soviet prison or another could do that to you. Tibor was a cheerful man, but he often looked physically tired. This morning, he looked less so.

  Gregor looked down at the two-page spread of paper Tibor had turned for his inspection, caught his own picture—standing next to Bennis, looking hot and disheveled while Bennis looked as close to perfect as Bennis usually did—let his eye travel up to the headline and winced. The Inquirer had done it to him again. It never failed. It was a kind of vendetta. The main headline read: DEMARKIAN OUT. The subhead sounded less like baseball news: NO ROOM FOR PHILADELPHIA’S OWN ARMENIAN-AMERICAN HERCULE POIROT, ACCORDING TO POLICE LIEUTENANT. Gregor turned the paper around so it was right side up for Tibor and sighed.

  “Has Bennis seen that yet?” he asked.

  Tibor shook his head. “Bennis is not awake, Krekor, you should know that. She is never awake until very nearly noon. Are you very upset about this police lieutenant?”

  “I’m getting very interested in just how bad a reputation he’s got. Look at that subhead. ‘According to Police Lieutenant’ Newspapers never say it like that. They say ‘According to Police.’ ”

  “It is Donna Moradanyan you have to watch out for,” Tibor said. “She is very worked up this morning. She has decided we have to hold Mother’s Day again.”

  “What do you mean, hold it again?”

  “Hannah Krekorian’s children and grandchildren could not come, Krekor, and Hannah was disconsolate, and there was no one to cheer her up because everyone was having Mother’s Day but Hannah was not, so now Donna Moradanyan thinks we should hold it again. Mother’s Day. For Hannah. To make her feel as if she’s had one.”