Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  “We will do this next Sunday, Krekor, and it will require a party where people play games. Donna and Lida Arkmanian were planning it this morning. During a party where people play games, I would like to be in Florida on vacation.”

  “I don’t blame you. What about the refugees? Don’t they need anything from you that could keep you away?”

  “The refugees will all be invited, Krekor. You know what these women are like. There are no refugees, just people who are probably fifth cousins twice removed if you look back far enough but nobody wants to bother so you let them stay on the living room couch just in case. I wish I had come to Cavanaugh Street when I was first a refugee. It would have saved me a bout of dysentery in Jerusalem.”

  “Considering what else could have happened to you in Jerusalem, I think you got off easy with the dysentery.”

  “I do not think it is natural for someone as young as Donna to be so close to someone as old as Lida. Not like this. Lida is old enough to be the mother. Donna is old enough to be the daughter. They should fight.”

  Linda Melajian had come back with Gregor’s scrambled eggs—three of them, on a big plate that also contained four Jimmy Dean spicy breakfast sausage patties and a pile of hash browns the size of a small dog. None of this was Armenian food, but the Ararat served it anyway because the Melajian women were convinced that if they didn’t, people like Gregor and Father Tibor would never get any breakfast at all. It was Cavanaugh Street’s one complaint about Bennis Hannaford that she seemed never to have cooked breakfast for anybody, even for herself. That was tempered by reports from Lida Arkmanian and Sheila Kashinian about what happened when Bennis did cook.

  Gregor thanked Linda for the plate, grabbed the salt and began to pile it on. He ignored Tibor’s fretted tsking—Tibor ate pastry for breakfast, pastry so sweet it could make Gregor’s teeth curl—and picked up a triangle of toast to add more butter to it. It already had enough butter on it to qualify it as a bona fide outpost of a dairy state.

  “If you keep that up, you will give yourself an illness,” Tibor said.

  Gregor looked up to tell him what a crock that was—this was the man who fried his own chicken in bacon fat—but as he did he caught sight of Ararat’s front door out of the corner of his eye, and turned to see who it was opening to let in. The door had opened and shut again and the young man had been standing near the table nearest the cash register for half a minute before Gregor’s mind was able to put it all in place. It wasn’t the sight of a black man on Cavanaugh Street that was the surprise, or even a black man in the Ararat for breakfast. There was a time when that would have been a shock, but not anymore. Gregor knew every detective in the Philadelphia police force’s homicide division, and a number of them had been to Ararat to eat breakfast with Gregor Demarkian. (The tourists, white or black, weren’t supposed to know about breakfast.) It wasn’t the color of this man’s skin but the arrangement of his features that gave Gregor Demarkian pause. The man looked so damn familiar but Gregor just couldn’t place him.

  The man looked around the restaurant once or twice, found Gregor and Tibor in their booth, squinted in their direction and then looked relieved. He came striding over from the cash register with the air of a man who has finally—finally—reached his destination. He came up to their booth and stopped, his hands deep in the pockets of his short jean jacket. Tibor put down the coffee he was holding and looked polite.

  “Well,” the young man said. “Mr. Demarkian. You don’t know how glad I am to have found you.”

  “Good morning,” Gregor said.

  The young man sighed. “You don’t remember me. I’m not surprised. In all that crap yesterday, you probably wouldn’t remember much of anybody but Jack and we all know how Jack affects the public.”

  “Jack,” Gregor repeated. He was fairly sure the young man meant Jack Androcetti, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The young man confirmed it for him. “lieutenant Androcetti,” he said patiently, “my supposed boss of the moment. My name is Collins. Rob Collins. I’m a sergeant with—”

  “I remember you,” Gregor said. “The intelligent one.”

  “Thanks,” Rob Collins said.

  “Does Jack Androcetti know you’re here?”

  “Of course he doesn’t. I’m looking to get fired. Or something. God. Jack Androcetti doesn’t know his—Never mind. Look, could I talk to you?”

  “Does this mean you want me to leave?” Father Tibor asked.

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “Is he your partner?” Rob Collins asked.

  “He’s my priest,” Gregor told him.

  Rob Collins said, “Right.”

  That was the moment when Linda Melajian came over with a new placemat and a new place setting and pushed Rob Collins toward Tibor’s side of the booth.

  “You want one of Mr. Demarkian’s cholesterol specials or would you prefer something healthy?”

  “Coffee?” Rob Collins suggested.

  “The coffee in this place is not healthy,” Gregor said.

  “I’ll get coffee,” Linda said to the world at large.

  Rob Collins sat down next to Father Tibor Kasparian. “Mr. Demarkian,” he said, “you’ve got to listen to me. We’re in a lot of trouble.”

  2

  THE COFFEE IN ARARAT was very definitely not healthy, and Linda brought a pot of it, on the principle that if Gregor was meeting someone at the restaurant for breakfast, that someone had to be there on business. Gregor knew that Linda had already read through the Inquirer. She had probably decided that this had something to do with that. She would be right if she had, of course, but what Gregor worried about was what something she might have decided this had to do with that. The people on Cavanaugh Street had only the vaguest notions of what went on during a murder investigation, and those came chiefly from television. Even Bennis Hannaford, who had actually been present at more than one such project, tended to romanticize the whole business. Father Tibor was better, but nobody really listened to Father Tibor. They treated him as an unworldly and utterly holy local saint with no practical intelligence whatsoever. Gregor always wanted to point out that a man with no practical intelligence whatsoever could never have made his way from a Siberian prison camp to an East German safe house to Jerusalem to Rome to Paris and then to the United States. The sheer logistics of something like that were paralyzing. The people on Cavanaugh Street apparently thought Tibor had been lifted up by an angel and set down on the doorstep of the nearest Bishop of the Armenian Christian Church. They would probably also think that Gregor had a secret deal going with the police investigating the murder of Sister Joan Esther.

  Rob Collins thought that what he had going was an unqualified disaster, which was usually what he had going when he got stuck with Jack Androcetti.

  “Lot of guys in the department want to say it was racism got Jack his promotion,” Rob said, “but this time I think it was good old-fashioned politics. I mean, they promoted him ahead of two white guys who were ahead of me on the list, if you see what I mean. The name Capeletti mean anything to you?”

  “Sure,” Gregor said. “Philadelphia Democratic machine in the forties and fifties. Some kind of party boss.”

  “Some kind, yeah. Party chairman for Philadelphia and functional kingpin for the entire Main line. Good old ward politics, buy the votes and rig the voting machines. Capeletti was Jack’s grandfather on his mother’s side. You beginning to get the picture?”

  “I take it there are still a lot of Capelettis in politics on the Main line.”

  “A lot.”

  “Does this mean they had to make him a homicide detective?”

  “Homicide was what he wanted.” Rob Collins sighed. “You heard about how he arrested the nun, Sister Agnes Bernadette?”

  “Yes, I did. Everybody did. It was on the news.”

  “Right. Well, it’s a crock. A total crock. Androcetti’s got absolutely no reason to think she killed anybody ex
cept that she was the cook who handled the food, and even that’s crazy because the nun who was helping her handle the food was the nun who died.”

  “Sister Joan Esther.”

  “Right. And the thing is, he knows it’s crap. He knows it. He pulled it out of thin air as soon as he heard the television people were there. I think he was afraid you’d get a jump on the publicity.”

  Gregor speared a piece of sausage and leaned back, contemplating the ceiling fan, contemplating the situation. “Let’s start from the beginning here,” he said. “Do you actually know you have a murder yet? Do you have the lab reports back?”

  “I don’t have the lab reports back, but I talked to the medical people. A guy on our team named Ben Bowman heard you talking to that lady—”

  “Bennis Hannaford?” Tibor suggested helpfully.

  “No, not her. Some nun. About fugu. You know, Japanese puffer fish.”

  “Mother Andrew Loretta,” Gregor said.

  “Maybe.” Rob Collins sipped his coffee and winced. “Anyway, when Ben told me about it I went to the doc and gave it to him as a possibility, and what he said was that it sounded perfect and he’d test for it. The symptoms or whatever, I mean. If it turns out to be fugu, does it mean we don’t have a murder?”

  “It would depend on where she got the fugu. From what I understand, the fugu was supposed to be prepared by a special fugu chef sent especially from Japan at a gazebo in the garden. It wasn’t to be left around for anyone to pick up anytime—which would have been a bad idea because fugu is extremely dangerous if it’s not handled properly. Since I know from talking to Sister Andrew Loretta that no fugu was being served yesterday at all—because the fugu chef was having a temper tantrum—my guess would be that Sister Joan Esther would have had to have been given it deliberately. Did anyone check the ice in the hollow of the ice sculpture’s head?”

  “It melted,” Rob Collins said. “Somebody’s testing the water.”

  “What about the chicken liver pâté in the other ice sculptures? What about the food that was already on the table?”

  “Oh, we got all those. But Mr. Demarkian, couldn’t it have been a mistake? With the fugu, I mean. Couldn’t someone have picked some up by accident and then used it—”

  “—in the chicken liver pâté?” Gregor shook his head. “I’m willing to bet anything that the pâté was made as a single enormous batch, and none of the rest of it was poisoned. I don’t know how the fugu was kept. I asked yesterday, but Mother Andrew Loretta wasn’t clear and I didn’t have the mobility I would have had under other circumstances—”

  “Jack,” Rob groaned.

  “Mmm. I think if you have fugu poisoning here you also have a murder here. I take it if you didn’t have a murder here, you’d be rid of Jack Androcetti.”

  “You got it.”

  “Sorry,” Gregor said.

  Rob Collins shrugged. “It was a long shot in any case. I was pretty much resigned. Now that we do have a murder, though, I’m damned if I believe it was committed by that weepy nun we arrested yesterday. I bet she doesn’t even put out traps for mice.”

  Gregor waved at Linda Melajian. Astoundingly, the pot of coffee was already drained. They needed more. Linda knew from across the room what they wanted and went to get it.

  The two questions that interest me the most,” he told Rob Collins, “are who would have known that fugu was poisonous, and whether or not it was Sister Joan Esther who was supposed to be killed. The first is the kind of question that has no really hard answer.”

  “Yes, it does,” Father Tibor said. “The answer is, ‘everybody in Philadelphia.’ It is on the radio, Krekor, it is on the radio all the time. From a man named Norman Kevic.”

  “Good old Cultural Norm,” Rob Collins said.

  “I’m beginning to wish I’d heard this Norman Kevic. What does he say about fugu?”

  “He just makes a lot of racially offensive jokes about Japanese people dying from it,” Rob said. “If you’re asking does he say what it looks like or what part of it is poisonous, the answer’s no.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. “Well, that leaves things up in the air, which is where I thought they’d be. Let’s get on to question number two. Was it really Joan Esther who was meant to be killed?”

  “She’s the one who’s dead,” Rob pointed out.

  “I know.” Gregor sighed. “I was in law enforcement for twenty years. She’s the one who’s dead, and that should be definitive in most cases. But in this case it bothers me. The pâté was put in the ice sculpture on the assumption that Mother Mary Bellarmine would take the first bite of it on a cracker during a kind of half-ceremony that was supposed to open the buffet Did Jack Androcetti get that much?”

  “He did,” Rob Collins said, “but somebody told us that this Mother Mary Bellarmine had gout and couldn’t eat the chicken liver pâté—”

  “But not everybody knew that, don’t you see? And if you didn’t know that, and if you were intent on killing Mother Mary Bellarmine, you would have had a fairly clear shot—or you would have thought you had. And I can think of half a dozen reasons why someone would want Mother Mary Bellarmine dead. I can’t do the same with Sister Joan Esther.”

  “Well, I can’t find any reason for that. Sister Agnes Bernadette to have killed Sister Joan Esther,” Rob Collins said. “Jack seems to be treating this like a psychotic break. Sister went a little nuts. Sister put some poison in the lunch pâté. Chalk it up to sexual repression.”

  “Did he really say this thing?” Tibor asked.

  “Jack chalks everything up to sexual repression,” Rob Collins said. “But you know, Mr. Demarkian, it’s odd what you said, about Mother Mary Bellarmine. Before Jack pulled his stunt with the arrest, I was doing a lot of hard looking at Mother Mary Bellarmine.”

  “Why?”

  Rob Collins picked his jean jacket up from where he had dropped it on the bench between Tibor and himself and rummaged around in the pockets. He came up with a small stenographer’s notebook and began to flip through it.

  “Sister Joan Esther,” he said slowly, coming to rest on a page full of what looked like the tracings of chicken entrails, “was a nun in the Provincial House in southern California that Mother Mary Bellarmine is the head of. I’m making a hash of the hierarchy, I know, but bear with me. Nuns get assigned to houses and work out of those houses under religious superiors. Mother Mary Bellarmine was Sister Joan Esther’s religious superior in this place, that was up until about a year ago. Anyway, at about that time Sister Joan Esther requested a transfer, and when a posting came up in Alaska she took it. The posting in Alaska was the only one that came up, and the first one, but if she had waited a month or two she could probably have gotten something else—”

  “Possibly she was interested in going to Alaska,” Gregor suggested.

  “Not according to my sources,” Rob Collins said. “According to my sources, she was interested in getting away from Mother Mary Bellarmine, pure and simple. She—Joan Esther—was at this Provincial House for about a year and a half, and in all that time she and Mother Mary Bellarmine did nothing but fight.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything, as far as I was able to tell. The way a habit should look. How to teach a class in English as a second language. If it was a nice day.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “This sounds classic.”

  “It got even more classic. One day, Sister Joan Esther writes to Reverend Mother General at this main house they’ve got in Maryville, New York—”

  “Motherhouse,” Gregor said.

  “—and she makes it a very long letter, and the next thing anybody knows, this Reverend Mother General goes out to California to pay Mother Mary Bellarmine a visit and apparently to give her a dressing down. According to one of the women I talked to—not a nun, a secretary at the college—anyway, according to her, the rumor is that this Reverend Mother General threatened to start proceedings to have Mother Mary Bellarmine removed from he
r post if Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t start to behave, and Mother Mary Bellarmine responded to this by blowing up at Sister Joan Esther. Then Sister Joan Esther went to Alaska, and everything calmed down until they met again last week. At which point, my secretary claims, it became perfectly obvious that Mother Mary Bellarmine hated Sister Joan Esther with a passion. Which leaves me with a couple of very interesting questions.

  “The first one being, why was Sister Joan Esther the one to carry the ice sculpture to Mother Mary Bellarmine’s table when Mother Mary Bellarmine hated her so much? You know what the simple answer to that is, don’t you? It was sheer coincidence.

  “I was wondering if it could be a backfire,” Rob Collins said. “I was wondering if Sister Joan Esther could have been trying to murder Mother Mary Bellarmine, and then when Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t die maybe she thought she’d done it wrong and not poisoned the pâté at all, and then she took a taste and—wham.”

  “Would you have taken a taste?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Rob Collins said.

  “Good,” Tibor put in. “I know the criminal is supposed to be quite stupid, Krekor, but that would be too much.”

  “The other possibility,” Gregor said, “is that Sister Joan Esther did it on purpose, to annoy Mother Mary Bellarmine. But you see, we always come down to this one point. The poison—fugu or whatever—was in that particular pâté. I can’t see it there waiting to knock off Sister Joan Esther. There was no way the murderer could know that Sister Joan Esther would be the one standing next to that particular ice sculpture. The question is, was there any way for anyone to know that Mother Mary Bellarmine would be standing next to that particular statue?”

  “I don’t know,” Rob Collins said.

  That’s another thing that would be nice to find out,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah.” Rob Collins shook his head. “Except maybe we won’t ever find anything out, because Jack’s already made his arrest. The prosecutors are furious, by the way. They know they’ve been handed a really bum case. Hell, even the newspapers know it’s a really bum case.”