Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

Gregor Demarkian sighed. Every nun in the area knew where he was. They were looking straight at him. Jack Androcetti was staring up into the branches of the tree that spread out above his head. It could have been a metaphor for the man’s entire career.

  Gregor decided to give him a break of sorts.

  “I’m right here,” he said, as he walked down the front steps of St. Cecelia’s Hall and started down the sidewalk to the patrol car. “I’m coming.”

  It was one of those mistakes you can make only once or twice in a lifetime. It was one of those mistakes that can kill you.

  Jack Androcetti was not interested in conversation, or in solving the case, or in finding out what was really going on here. Jack Androcetti wasn’t interested in anything but solving problems the way he’d always been able to solve them before.

  As soon as Gregor Demarkian got into range, Jack Androcetti pulled back his fist and let loose with a right-upper cut.

  3

  ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO, three potato, four.

  Gregor felt the impact on his jaw and that was what he thought.

  One potato, two potato, three potato, four.

  It was crazy.

  Jack Androcetti had a big fist. His aim was terrible and his technique was nonexistent, but that didn’t matter. He was huge and he was fierce and he connected. Gregor’s ears rang and rang, like a car alarm going off in the night. On the other side of the little crowd of people now gathered around them, Gregor saw Norman Kevic begin to fade carefully out of the group, headed for safety, headed for open space.

  “Wait,” he said, through what seemed to be blood filling his mouth. What if he’d lost a tooth? “Wait,” he said again. “Stop—”

  “For Christ’s sake,” somebody said. Gregor took a minute to recognize the man as Rob Collins. “What are you doing? You’ve made him bleed.”

  “That son of a bitch has no business in this case,” Jack Androcetti said.

  “He’s not in the case,” Rob Collins said. “He’s at the college. And he’s got a perfect right to be here.”

  Norman Kevic was still sliding away, sliding away. It seemed to be taking place in slow motion.

  “Wait,” Gregor said again, this time wondering if he was making any sense at all. A Sister he didn’t know planted herself in front of him and handed him a glass of ice water. He took it and rinsed out his mouth. “Wait,” he said for the fourth time, when the blood was mostly gone. The problem was, the blood came back again. Gregor shook his head.

  “That son of a bitch,” Jack Androcetti said again. “I told him to stay out of it I meant for him to stay out of it. He’s going to stay out of it.”

  “Stay out of what?” Sister Scholastica demanded, barreling out of nowhere. Nowhere was really a gaggle of nuns. What did you call groups of nuns? Gaggles were for geese. Pods were for whales. Schools were for fish. It was maddening. “I think you’re a jerk and a bully,” Scholastica said, “and if I were you I’d get off this campus now, before you get thrown off. I don’t care if you are the police. This is private property and Church property and all the rest of it. I have half a mind to kick you in the shin.”

  “Sister,” the Archbishop said, sounding alarmed.

  “Sister is exaggerating,” Reverend Mother General said. “But I know how she feels.”

  “You can get suspended for hitting a civilian,” Rob Collins said. “You can get canned.”

  The pain was so bad, Gregor couldn’t stand up. He kept gulping down ice water, but it didn’t seem to help. He got down on his haunches and put his head between his knees. He was down there with his eyes closed when whatever happened happened.

  That’s how he thought of it later. When whatever happened happened.

  He caught only the result of it.

  He felt some of his pain ebbing away.

  He stood up.

  He looked blindly through the crowd at nothing in particular and focused when he detected movement.

  The movement was the collapse of Nancy Hare, fatting forward onto Norman Kevic and grabbing his tie in the process, so that Norman looked choked.

  Nancy had a shiny thin X-Acto knife sticking out of her side.

  Chapter 8

  1

  NANCY HARE WAS NOT, of course, dead. Of course she wasn’t dead. She’d keeled over from shock, that was all, and Gregor Demarkian knew it as soon as he saw the X-Acto knife sticking out of her side. X-Acto knives were what agents in the Bureau called “secondary weapons,” meaning they could work, but only in aid of something else. The one case he knew of where an X-Acto knife had been the instrument, its blade had been smeared with cyanide. There would have been no chance to smear this blade with cyanide. This was a spur of the moment thing. This was an attempt to distract attention. Gregor didn’t know if it would ever go further than that. Maybe, given enough time, their murderer would home in on Nancy Hare for real—find some more fugu and slip it in Nancy’s breakfast eggs, find a real knife and stick it in Nancy’s back. If Gregor had been this murderer, he would have found it necessary. What’s the point of killing if you can’t get away with it? How can you get away with it if somebody knows what you did? He watched Norman Kevic wriggling around on the floor, half pinned under Nancy Hare’s limp body and being helped very little by the ministrations of Sister Scholastica and Henry Hare. It was hard to tell what Sister Scholastica and Henry Hare were actually trying to do. Maybe they weren’t trying to do the same things. Gregor looked up and across the room and found Sister Agnes Bernadette with her back pressed to a far wall, looking terrified. Then he found Jack Androcetti and smiled. Androcetti was looking from Agnes Bernadette to Nancy Hare and back again, appalled and furious. Even he could figure out what all this meant.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait a minute now.”

  “I’ve taken the knife out,” Sister Scholastica said. “Is that what I should have done, Mr. Demarkian?”

  “I don’t want anyone asking questions of Gregor Demarkian,” Jack Androcetti said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Rob Collins said.

  “Don’t swear in a convent,” the other uniformed officer said.

  “This isn’t a convent,” Scholastica said automatically.

  Gregor pushed himself through the crowd to Nancy Hare’s side and knelt down. He could smell liquor on her breath, but it was faint. She’d probably had a cocktail to work up her courage to come down here, but that was all. He moved her body gently and saw that she was bleeding badly, but didn’t seem to be having any other trouble of any kind.

  “Somebody ought to call a doctor, just in case,” he said. “There seems to be a little tear. She may need stitches.”

  At the mention of a doctor, Archbishop Kenneally seemed to come to life out of a long sleep. He snapped to attention and looked fierce, fiercest of all in the direction of Jack Androcetti, whom he apparently didn’t like. That was no surprise, as far as Gregor was concerned. Nobody liked Jack Androcetti. He was too big an idiot.

  “Doctor,” Archbishop Kenneally said. “We’ve got a Catholic hospital right here in Radnor—”

  “We’ve got a Catholic doctor right across the lawn in St. Catherine of Siena Hall,” Reverend Mother General said, stepping in. “Sister Mary Joseph took her medical degree at Yale and she practices in Harlem, so I’m sure she knows something about knife wounds.”

  “This is hardly a knife wound of that sort,” Sister Scholastica said.

  “Why doesn’t she get up?” one of the other nuns asked. “If she’s all right, why is she just lying there?”

  “I’m not going to have any nun doctor in here looking at this victim,” Jack Androcetti said. “It’s a conflict of interest. She’ll try to cover something up. Maybe she’ll off the patient right when I’m looking—”

  “Oh, Jesus H. Christ,” Rob Collins said.

  “Shh,” the other uniformed man said. “Rob. You gotta stop that. These are nuns.”

  Gregor thought it was about time to put a stop to all this nonsense, but
he never got a chance. Reverend Mother General had reached the end of her rope. He had seen it happen before. Once you caught that glint in the Reverend Mother’s eye, you got out of the way, fast. She had been kneeling on the other side of Nancy Hare from Gregor. Now she stood up and advanced on Jack Androcetti. Androcetti was an Italian name. Most Italians are Catholic. Maybe there was something deep in the recesses of Jack’s memory that told him he was about to be in a lot of trouble. He stepped back as Reverend Mother General marched in his direction, and stepped back again, and stepped back again. In the end, the lieutenant had his back to the foyer wall and a semicircle of very censorious nuns around him. That was when Reverend Mother General reached up and grabbed his lapel.

  “Young man,” she said, “I don’t know what mental defective in the Radnor Police Department approved your promotion to detective, but that person ought to be taken out and shot. You are rude, overbearing, irresponsible, immature. But most of all, you are stupid. You haven’t done a single bit of good for anybody since the moment you arrived at St. Elizabeth’s and you have done a great deal to make matters worse. I no longer care whether you are supposed to be here in some official capacity. I no longer care about the laws of Radnor, Pennsylvania. If I have to, I will ask His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop here to demand your reassignment. I want you out of my life.”

  “I’m the investigating officer in charge of this case!”

  “Nobody calls me the Cardinal Archbishop,” David Kenneally said into Gregor’s ear. “Not even the Pope.”

  Gregor was willing to bet Jack Androcetti would never again call David Kenneally anything else. Androcetti was looking around the room wildly, from one implacable nun face to another. His eyes came to light on Sister Agnes Bernadette and he flushed. Agnes Bernadette hadn’t moved from her place on the far wall.

  “She’s got an accomplice,” Jack Androcetti said, sputtering a little. “She’s got some other nun in this place helping her out.”

  “Why?” Sister Scholastica demanded.

  “I thought your explanation for what had happened here was insanity,” Reverend Mother General said coldly. “I thought your entire rationale was that Sister Agnes Bernadette went off her head and tried to poison everybody at the reception.”

  “And it isn’t true,” Sister Mary Alice said, “because there wasn’t any poison in any of the food except the scraps they took from the statue that went on Mother Mary Bellarmine’s table. I know because Sister Mary Sebastian has a cousin in the police lab and she called him up and asked.”

  “I’ll get him fired,” Androcetti said.

  “You won’t have a chance,” Reverend Mother General said.

  “She was over here when it happened,” Jack Androcetti said. “I saw her. She was standing right next to this woman—”

  “Nancy Hare,” Henry Hare said sharply. “Mrs. Henry Hare.”

  “—and she moved back after she stuck the knife. I saw her.” Androcetti looked triumphant “I saw her,” he repeated.

  Gregor Demarkian sighed. He had been kneeling down next to Nancy Hare—who seemed to be peacefully asleep, which wasn’t necessarily such a good sign—and keeping an eye on Norman Kevic. He could have dispensed with keeping an eye on Norman Kevic because Norm no longer seemed interested in leaving. Norm had a curious, speculative look on his face, as if he’d seen something he should have been ready to tell the police, but wasn’t Gregor supposed he had. That was the way he read Norman Kevic. He wouldn’t have put it past Norm to have seen the murderer put the fugu in the chicken liver pâté and just not reported it. God only knew what people like that did with that kind of information.

  Gregor stood up and brushed off his pants. “You didn’t see Sister Agnes Bernadette put a knife into Nancy Hare’s side,” he said, “because I saw her standing right there against that wall in the moment Nancy Hare fell. She wouldn’t have had time to make the circuit.”

  “You’re imagining things,” Jack Androcetti said tightly. “Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.”

  “I am not your ordinary eyewitness,” Gregor pointed out. “I spent twenty years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you did or not,” a young nun piped up. They all turned to look at her and she blushed. “I was standing right next to Aggie the whole time. I really was.”

  “You were distracted,” Jack Androcetti said.

  On the floor at Gregor’s feet, Nancy Hare stirred, and moaned, and fluttered open her eyes. It was something of a shock. They had been talking about her for so long as if she weren’t there, it took an adjustment to understand that she was. Henry Hare had gotten to his feet to argue with Jack Androcetti. Now he dropped to his knees to look into his wife’s eyes. Gregor couldn’t decide if the expression in Henry Hare’s own eyes was concern or contempt. Maybe, for Henry Hare, the two emotions were one.

  Nancy groaned again and tried to move. A spasm of pain crossed her face and Gregor heard a muttered “Oh, shit.” The nuns must have heard it, too, but they gave no indication that they had. Maybe they felt about it the way Gregor did—that at this point Nancy had earned a little profanity. Nancy moved again, winced again, swore again. She looked at the faces staring down at her in astonishment.

  “What the Hell is going on here?” she demanded.

  Henry leaned closer to her. “Nancy,” he said, “you’ve been badly hurt—”

  “I can tell I’ve been badly hurt,” Nancy pronounced with withering scorn. “Would you get out of my face?”

  “You’re not yourself,” Henry said.

  “Now that she’s awake, we ought to do something about that wound,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “I know Sister Mary Joseph is supposed to be on her way, but for simple hygienic purposes—”

  At the sound of Mother Mary Bellarmine’s voice, Nancy Hare’s head had swiveled around. Her eyes grew wide. Her lips pressed down into a thin line. She tried to get up and couldn’t. The wound in her side was small, but it was painful enough to make sitting up impossible. Nancy settled for lying back and turning her face in Mother Mary Bellarmine’s direction.

  “You,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? You were supposed to pretend to knock me out, not go ahead and stab me.”

  2

  IT WAS ONE OF those moments Gregor always thought of as epiphanous. It wasn’t a surprise—he had known who had killed Sister Joan Esther and caused all the rest of the trouble yesterday—but it made motives clear in a way he wouldn’t have been able to do for himself. He didn’t think he had ever seen a woman with less respect for her husband than Nancy had for Henry Hare. It went beyond disrespect to a kind of visceral hatred that had no starting point and no end. As for Mother Mary Bellarmine, she was what Gregor had always thought she was, one of those people it isn’t good to cross, one of those people with no sense of proportion. She also had a great deal more to lose than Nancy Hare.

  “I do not,” she said carefully, drawing herself up to that height only nuns in habit can reach, “know what you’re talking about. I most certainly did not stab you.”

  “You most certainly did,” Nancy Hare said. Then she made a face. “Don’t give me this shit. You know perfectly well—”

  “I know you’re a woman who wants to be rid of your husband,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said sharply. That’s all I know.”

  “You could have had the knife,” one of the nuns said suddenly. As always when a nun spoke unexpectedly, all the others turned in her direction. This nun was older and more sophisticated than the last one, though. She didn’t blush. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m Sister Domenica Anne.”

  “And I’m Sister Martha Mary,” a younger nun said.

  “Are you the Sister Domenica Anne who’s in charge of the field house project?” Gregor asked her.

  Domenica Anne nodded. “Yes, I am. I came over—I came over because I heard you were working on an explanation that depended on—that you thought there was something wrong with the financing of my
project—some fraud or something I hadn’t caught but Mother Mary Bellarmine had—but it isn’t true, it really isn’t. There isn’t anything like that at all.”

  “I know,” Gregor said.

  Sister Domenica Anne looked bewildered. “You know?”

  “He can’t know,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “I know. I’ve been over and over those books. I’ve seen them. If he wasn’t a damn fool like all the rest of them he’d be trying to find out who tried to murder me.”

  “Nobody tried to murder you,” Gregor said patiently. “Nobody had the chance—or, at least, nobody with any known motive did. The only person who had an opportunity to put fugu in that pâté was you.”

  “Horse manure,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “You don’t even know if it was fugu in the chicken liver pâté. Just because Sister’s cousin or whatever he was—”

  “I don’t have to worry about Sister’s cousin or Lieutenant Androcetti’s favorite lab technician,” Gregor said. “I have the scapular. Your scapular. The one that was torn yesterday.”

  “It was torn,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said, “because this woman tore it.”

  “She couldn’t have.” Gregor looked around. “Sister Scholastica? Could you come here for a moment?”

  Sister Scholastica came forward. “Is this going to be an occasion of scandal?” she asked dubiously.

  “Not if I’m right.”

  Scholastica looked as if she were none too certain she wanted to trust in Gregor’s being right, but she stood still anyway. Gregor walked around her once or twice and stopped facing her.

  “This habit,” he said, “consists of a black dress topped by a black scapular topped by a black collar that’s what I would call a cape. The collar comes about midway down the upper arms and flutters. All right so far?”

  “We all know what our habits are like,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said coldly. “We’ve been wearing them for years.”

  Gregor nodded. “Right. Now yesterday, I stood in this foyer and watched Nancy Hare walk up to Mother Mary Bellarmine with a vase of flowers in her hand, dump those flowers over Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head, and generally cause a disturbance. Are we all agreed on that?”