by Jane Haddam
“Of course we are,” Reverend Mother General said. “I wish we weren’t.”
“I’m glad we are,” Gregor said. “My point here is this. In order for Nancy Hare to have torn Mother Mary Bellarmine’s scapular without also tearing the collar, she would have had to reach up under the collar to get at the scapular’s neck hole. I didn’t see her do anything remotely like that. Did any of you?”
“She didn’t go near the collar,” Sister Scholastica said suddenly. “She dumped the roses from up high—I saw her—and then she dropped the vase and stepped away.”
“Why should I have gone near the collar?” Nancy Hare demanded. “I wanted to get her wet, not rip her up.”
“I don’t think it would have mattered if you had gone near the collar,” Gregor said. “I don’t think you could have torn the scapular. Sister?”
“I’m ready,” Sister Scholastica said.
Gregor put his hand up under Sister Scholastica’s collar and hooked his fingers over the tight neck of the scapular. Then he pulled as hard and as violently as he could. Nothing happened.
Gregor flipped the collar up and showed the assembled company the neck of the scapular.
“Not a rip or a tear,” he said with satisfaction, “and I’m far stronger than Mrs. Hare. I’m far stronger than Mother Mary Bellarmine, too.”
“I don’t understand what all this is supposed to mean,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said stiffly. “Obviously, my scapular was torn. Therefore, Mrs. Hare must have torn it. Unless you’re trying to say I tore it before Mrs. Hare attacked me—”
“I didn’t attack you,” Nancy Hare said weakly.
“You couldn’t have torn it before Mrs. Hare doused you with roses, because if you had I would have noticed and so would everyone else. That was a long, dramatic tear. It went right down your chest. What happened to the scapular after you changed out of it?”
“I threw it away,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “It wasn’t of any use to anybody anymore.”
“We recycle cloth,” one of the Sisters in the crowd said. “If one of the groundsmen found cloth in the trash he’d put it in one of the recycling bins.”
“Maybe we should send somebody out to look for it,” Gregor said. “We’d find two things, I think. One is that that tear was not a tear at all, but a cut—”
“With the X-Acto knife,” Sister Domenica said suddenly.
“And the other is that there’s a big green stain all across the front of the habit. I don’t know how that would show up against black—”
“It did show up,” Reverend Mother said. “I remember seeing it I remember thinking that someone had put too much plant food in with the flowers.”
“Someone had,” Gregor said.
Mother Mary Bellarmine was still not having any. She was a proud woman, Gregor thought, proud and furious, like the ancient queens and duchesses who had once run their husbands’ estates when their men had spent too much of their lives drinking. Catherine de Medici. Berenice. Medusa. Her spirit was too mean for the best of those, but she was crazy enough.
“Exactly what was it I was supposed to be after,” she demanded, “in all this nonsense and subterfuge? Why would I want to tear my habit to shreds?”
“So that you could go change it.”
“I did go change it,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said.
“I know you did. You took a long time doing it, too. The little ceremony with the ice sculptures was held up for half an hour. Nobody thought it was particularly odd, however, because everybody knew you had to clean up after Nancy Hare’s attack.”
“And I did.”
“I’m not denying that you did,” Gregor said. “I’m saying you gave yourself time. To get hold of the fugu—”
“Are you trying to tell me I ground up a fugu fish right there on the very afternoon—”
“You did it the day before, I’d guess. You know, this isn’t going to be that hard to put together. Once we know what we’re looking for, we will be able to find people who saw you—near the kitchen downstairs, near the ice sculptures, handing a cracker with chicken liver pâté smeared all over it to Sister Joan Esther—”
The corners of Mother Mary Bellarmine’s mouth twitched upward. Try it,” she said.
“I will,” Gregor told her.
“Try it,” she said again. “Try it all you like, Mr. Demarkian. You’ll never find a single thing.”
At that moment, the front door opened and a little phalanx of nuns came bustling in. One carried a doctor’s big black bag. That one looked at Nancy Hare on the floor and sighed out loud.
“Nancy, Nancy,” she said. “What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into now?”
Nancy Hare had been fading all the while Gregor talked to Mother Mary Bellarmine. Already weak with shock, she was getting weaker with loss of blood. The nun with the black bag—whom Gregor assumed was Sister Mary Joseph—knelt down beside her and began to cut cloth away from her bloody side. Bloody but not bleeding. Sometime when Gregor wasn’t looking, somebody had stanched the flow of blood.
“Nancy went to college here,” a nun Gregor hadn’t seen before told him. “A lot of the Sisters have known her forever.”
Mother Mary Bellarmine had moved. Gregor picked her out of the crowd and saw that she was looking amused, grim and amused, as if she fully expected to lose every battle and still win the war. Gregor wondered if she was right.
She could be right.
It bothered him.
He was still enough of a policeman to hate the idea of guilty people who got away.
3
IN THE END, HE sidled over to Reverend Mother General, tapped her on the shoulder, and whispered in her ear.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said.
And she nodded.
Epilogue
1
“FOOD POISONING,” BENNIS HANNAFORD was saying, waving the Sunday Inquirer in the air like a tattered flag. “Food poisoning? Gregor, for God’s sake. What’s going on here?”
It was now Sunday, the eighteenth of May, and from what Gregor could see, what was going on here was a surprise party that wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone less physically challenged than a blind and deaf mole the way things were going. He was standing at the long windows that took up most of the Cavanaugh Street side of his living room. From there he could look across the street and down one flight into Lida Arkmanian’s party room, and what did the woman think she was doing? Gregor and Lida had been in grammar school together. Lida had been a friend of Gregor’s late wife. Gregor had been the first to warn Lida that Johnny Arkmanian was too much of a wild man to make a good husband. As it turned out, Lida liked wild men and Johnny was very, very, very good at business. Now that he was dead, Lida was bored and had a huge town house and a lot of money to make mischief with. What seemed to be going on down in that party room was a Mexican hat dance performed by four girls in Armenian peasant costumes, but that couldn’t be right.
The doorbell rang. Bennis dropped the paper, said “Just a minute,” and went to answer it. Gregor heard Donna Moradanyan’s voice in the hall saying, “Lida said to stuff these in your refrigerator but you weren’t home so either you have to go downstairs with me or we’ll have to put them in Gregor’s, but I put the honey cakes in Gregor’s for the Halloween party and he ate them so maybe—”
“He won’t eat them today,” Bennis said. “He won’t have time. I have to get him into this bow tie.”
Donna Moradanyan’s son Tommy came scooting into the living room and up to Gregor’s side. He was just a little over two years old and very serious in the way two-year-olds are. “Strychnine,” he said to Gregor, as soon as he saw him.
“Absolutely,” Gregor said. “Except in this case, it was a fugu fish.”
Tommy Moradanyan considered this and shook his head. “Strychnine,” he said again.
Gregor nodded. “I’m with you. It’s a much better word.”
Donna stuck her head through the living room door. �
��Tommy, honey, we’ve got to go. Auntie Lida has a big red party hat for you to put on. Hello, Gregor. I read all about you in the paper this morning. It’s too bad it didn’t work out.”
“Right,” Gregor said, and let it go at that. For one thing, he didn’t want to get tangled in explanations with Donna Moradanyan, which was a little like trying to play cat’s cradle with a string that had been dipped in honey. For another, he didn’t want to unravel the sentiment. What was too bad? That bodies hadn’t dropped like flies from one end of Radnor to the other? That the cause of death hadn’t been blatant enough to win him another cover story in People magazine? Gregor had been the cover story in People magazine three times now, and he had had enough. True crime was to People what the centerfold was to Playboy. Be the photographic subject of either one, and your life was ruined.
Tommy Moradanyan said “Strychnine!” one more time, nodded solemnly, and ran off to join his mother. Bennis started murmuring all the things she always murmured when she was showing people out, some of which seemed to have to do with apologizing for his “gruffness.” It was at times like these that Gregor thought Tibor and Lida and old George Tekemanian were wrong. He didn’t have to marry Bennis. On some astral plane, he had already married Bennis.
Bennis came back into the living room. “The front of the building still looks like a gift box,” she said, “and so does the front of Hannah’s, but we’ve just been saying Donna wants them that way, they took so much work she just wants to look at them a little longer. What do you think?”
“I think Hannah is over in her kitchen right this minute humming ‘I’m Going to a Surprise Party’ under her breath.”
“You’re such an optimist.”
“I’m such a realist. Not more than ten minutes ago, Mary Ohanian went marching down the middle of Cavanaugh Street carrying a pile of wrapped packages the size of the Christmas window display in Saks and holding four ribbon bows in her teeth. What do you think Hannah thinks is going on?”
“Well, Gregor, she might think there’s a party, but that’s no reason she’d think it was for her.”
“No? There’s a huge party she hasn’t been invited to but everybody else has—”
“Maybe we hurt her feelings,” Bennis said.
“Maybe you tipped your hand. What bow tie? I don’t wear bow ties.”
“Well, you have to wear some kind of tie, Gregor. Old George Tekemanian is coming in his tuxedo. It’s that kind of party.”
In the first place, Old George Tekemanian’s tuxedo had been bought to celebrate the end of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. In the second place, the way Lida threw a party, it was impossible to tell what kind of party it was without directly asking somebody, and these days she couldn’t possibly throw one on Cavanaugh Street without inviting the refugees, and the refugees didn’t have a lot of clothes. In the third place, the bow tie Bennis was holding out to him had bright red polka dots on a black background. Gregor Demarkian had never worn polka dots on anything.
“Bennis,” he said warningly.
But Bennis’s mind was on something else. She had abandoned the bow tie to the coffee table. She had picked up the paper again and was frowning at it.
“Food poisoning,” she said under her breath. “It’s impossible. Food poisoning.”
“Bennis—”
“Oh, don’t Bennis me,” she said. “Just talk.”
2
GREGOR DEMARKIAN SOMETIMES THOUGHT that doing business with the Catholic hierarchy was a little like doing business with God Himself. You were always being very careful not to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing or even think the wrong thing. Of course, in other ways it wasn’t like doing business with God at all, and might be like doing business with the other side. They had a lot more experience than he did in the way the world operated. In this case, there were three considerations: the death of Sister Joan Esther, the guilt of Mother Mary Bellarmine, and the functional impossibility of Jack Androcetti. All three had to be cleared up for the case to be resolved in a way that would allow any of them to call it successful. Gregor allowed Bennis to get him a cup of coffee—she made better coffee than he did, and it postponed the bow tie—and tried to explain.
“In some ways,” he said, “it was the simplest and most straightforward case I’ve been on since I left the Bureau. It went by the book, really. Cleared up in less than twenty-four hours. Solved on physical evidence—”
“Physical evidence?”
“That’s what I said. And the motive. Ah, the motive. You don’t know, after all the financial chicanery and convoluted political and religious nonsense I’ve been put through over the last few years, you have no idea how pleasant it was to find a good old station-house motive for a murder.”
“Which was what?”
“Fear, loathing, and revenge,” Gregor said promptly. “The woman was a murderer in the tradition of every street assassin in every midsize town in the country. The neighbor’s daughter makes the cheerleading squad and your daughter doesn’t. You take a thirty-eight and blast your neighbor right out of her living room. The guy at the station next to yours at work reports you for smoking marijuana on the job. You wait around one night when he’s working late and when he goes out to his car you blow him away—”
“Gregor, be serious. People don’t do things like that.”
“Of course people do things like that,” Gregor said. “They do them all the time. Most murder cases are either that sort of thing or drug war fatalities. The sort of murderer you and I have had to do with is actually very unusual. Of course, Mother Mary Bellarmine is also very unusual in her way—”
“I noticed,” Bennis said drily.
“I meant that she was a good planner,” Gregor said, “and that she held her emotions with a certain amount of stubbornness. Most of these people are not very well integrated, as the psychologists say. They get all worked up for a couple of hours, but then they calm down and they can’t remember what they were worked up about. Mother Mary Bellarmine was definitely not like that Sister Joan Esther had done her what she considered—what Mother Mary Bellarmine considered—a grave injustice, by requesting a transfer out of Mother Mary Bellarmine’s house and by making it perfectly clear to Reverend Mother General and anyone else who would listen that she was requesting this transfer because Mother Mary Bellarmine was a grade-A, number one bitch—”
“I doubt if that was the word she used,” Bennis objected.
“I’m sure it wasn’t,” Gregor agreed. “The point is that Sister Joan Esther said what she said and did what she did quite publicly, and that it was, as far as I was able to determine, the only time any such thing had ever been said publicly about Mother Mary Bellarmine. Not that it hadn’t been said, mind you. It had been said over and over again. Sisters talking among themselves. Even Sisters talking to seculars, which is unusual in a matter of criticism. But all those things were said privately.”
Bennis looked thoughtful. “You know, you’re right. I was talking to Scholastica at the reception that day and she made a couple of very pointed comments about Mother Mary Bellarmine and then we got into the background, why a woman like that would be a nun, why the Order would have kept her—honestly Gregor, you wouldn’t believe it, but once a nun gets past formation it’s practically impossible to get her out, or it used to be—anyway, we went on and on, but she never said anything about actual complaints to Reverend Mother General except for Sister Joan Esther’s.”
“There were complaints to Reverend Mother General,” Gregor said, “but they weren’t formal ones, and because they weren’t formal ones, they didn’t result in what Sister Joan Esther’s complaint did. Meaning that after Sister Joan Esther left for Alaska, Reverend Mother General told Mother Mary Bellarmine in no uncertain terms that if she didn’t get her act together, she was going to lose her position as Mother Provincial of the Southwestern House. And that got around, too, of course. In convents, everything seems to get around.”
Bennis had finish
ed her cup of coffee. She got up and got some more, pouring out from Gregor’s Revereware coffeepot as elegantly as if she’d been using her mother’s Georgian silver service. “Was she planning it all along?” she asked. “Before she got to St. Elizabeth’s for the convention, I mean. Did she come East knowing she was going to kill somebody?”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said slowly. “I’m sure she didn’t come East thinking she was going to kill somebody with fugu. I know how she got that idea. You told me.”
“I did?”
“It was Cultural Norm,” Gregor said. “The Japanese jokes. One of the ones he told over and over again went ‘Do you know how to save a Japanese from fugu poisoning? No? Good!’ ”
Bennis winced. “Well, that’s awful enough.”
“It’s awful enough, but it was an idea that couldn’t miss. All those fugu fish in the boxes in the basement of St. Teresa’s House. It was fairly easy to get one and grind it up.”
“In advance?”
“Well in advance, I’d say. On the day of the reception, the kitchen would be occupied. Sister Agnes Bernadette would be there, and she’d probably have a helper. As it turned out, the helper was Sister Joan Esther, but it didn’t have to be.”
“That’s something I don’t understand.” Bennis stopped to sip her coffee. “So much of this seems to depend on it being Joan Esther who carried Mother Mary Bellarmine’s statue into the reception room, but Mother Mary Bellarmine couldn’t know she would, could she? How did she arrange for it?”
“She didn’t.”
“She didn’t?”
“Of course she didn’t,” Gregor said. “You’re going on the assumption that there was fugu in the ball of chicken liver pâté in the statue on Mother Mary Bellarmine’s table. But there wasn’t. There couldn’t have been. Sister Agnes Bernadette made the pâté just that morning in a big bowl—and it stayed in a big bowl, to be doled out with an ice cream scoop at the very last minute. Didn’t it bother you that the scoop of chicken liver pâté from Mother Mary Bellarmine’s statue disappeared after Sister Joan Esther died?”