Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  The Sisters’ chapel was right next door to the Administration Building, exhibiting the kind of simile in stone that made Mother Mary Bellarmine feel pleased that the world was such a logical and well-ordered place. The Sisters’ Chapel was old, college gothic complete with battlements, as if the good Sisters of Divine Grace would someday be forced to defend themselves by pouring boiling oil on the heads of rampaging peasants. The Administration Building was made of brick and as modern as one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s nightmares. Mother Mary Bellarmine could see through the broad front windows on the first floor to a room of women working at computer stations. Unlike a lot of older nuns in the Order, Mother Mary Bellarmine knew a great deal about computers. She had made herself know. As soon as the first one arrived in her house she had seen that it would change the balance of power forever.

  Years ago, when Mother Mary Bellarmine was still a small child named Lucy Deegan growing up in Fresno, California, her mother had told her the story of Fatima, when the Virgin came down on a cloud and spoke to three small children in a field in Portugal. She had gone out into her backyard and waited there for a vision, waited and waited, for weeks while nothing came. When she finally got around to entering the convent, she told that story as anecdotal proof of the reality of her vocation, but she left out the ending, which she knew would disqualify her forever. When the Virgin had failed to appear to Lucy Deegan, Lucy Deegan had decided that there was no Virgin to appear. Religion had never been what Lucy Deegan—or Mother Mary Bellarmine—entered the convent for. In these days of short habits and women astrophysicists, she might never have joined the Order at all. But she probably would have. She’d never been much of a feminist, and career advancement had never been the point.

  Mother Mary Bellarmine stopped at the directory just inside the front door of the Administration Building and read: “Registrar’s Office, G42.” The Registrar’s Office would be on this floor, the ground floor, in room 42. Mother Mary Bellarmine looked around her and found rooms 4 and 6. She went farther down the central hall looking to her right and left at rooms 10, 12, and 14. She came to an elaborate intersection and read the directional signs, which seemed to indicate less than exemplary planning on the room numberer’s part. Rooms 24 to 66 and 91 to 95 could be reached by turning right Rooms 29 to 41 and 72 to 94 could be reached by turning left. Since there was nowhere else to go, Mother Mary Bellarmine went straight, watching the numbers on the doors she passed jump around in no discernable order.

  Room 42 turned out to be the one at the very end of this hall. It took up what had been intended as three separate rooms and, therefore, sat behind three separate doors, only the last of which was marked. Since the doors on the other side of the corridor were not numbered in the forties, Mother Mary Bellarmine had almost turned around and headed back for the directory. If she had, she would have been in a thoroughly foul mood by the time she actually found the room she was looking for. She was in a thoroughly foul mood now. She let herself in the door at the end of the hall and walked up to the gate that separated the tiny waiting area from the row after row of women typing at desks. Some of them had actual typewriters, but most of them were working at the ubiquitous IBM Workstations, tapping keyboards and peering at screens. It was the sort of scene that annoyed Mother Mary Bellarmine no end, because it all looked so space age while being so firmly grounded in the era of quill pens. Mother Mary Bellarmine had no doubt whatsoever that these women went home and peered anxiously at the astrological charts in their newspapers, thinking the predictions made sense.

  The new habits weren’t as good as the old ones for instilling fear into the hearts of silly women, but they were better than no habits at all. Mother Mary Bellarmine stood at her straightest, made her right hand into a fist and pounded on the countertop. If this had been her operation, there would have been a bell for supplicants to ring. The pounding got the attention of a youngish-looking woman at the one desk set apart from the others, and she frowned. Mother Mary Bellarmine was glad to see her. Every once in a while, Mother ran into an office manager of the old school, grey-haired, steely-eyed, single-minded, and packaged into an armored bra and a suit that had emerged into usefulness when Worth was still a boy. There was no telling how encounters with people like that would go. This woman, though, with her fussiness and her slightly desperate air of wanting to be taken for less than forty—this woman would be a piece of cake. Mother Mary Bellarmine planted the palms of her hands on the counter and waited.

  The youngish woman stood up, hesitated, shifted back and forth on her feet, looked at the papers on her desk, looked up at Mother Mary Bellarmine, and seemed to shudder. Mother Mary Bellarmine went on staring at her, as if she were the offending statue of St. Catherine in front of the Sisters’ Chapel. The youngish woman took a deep breath and tried to compromise.

  “Yes?” she said. “Sister? Can I help you?”

  “You can come over here,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “Where I can hear you without straining my ears and talk to you without shouting. What is your name?”

  The youngish woman looked back at the papers on her desk again, seemed to sigh, and then began moving toward the counter. “I’m Mrs. Hobart,” she said, hesitating a little on the “Mrs.,” as if she’d wanted to use “Ms.” and thought better of it Mother Mary Bellarmine shot a quick look at the fourth finger of her left hand and found no ring there. Mrs. Hobart saw Mother Mary Bellarmine look and hastily shoved the hand into the pocket of her skirt.

  “I’m Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “I’ve come for the records of Elizabeth Johns. She may be listed as Sister Joan Esther. She joined the Order about twenty years ago.”

  “Twenty years ago?”

  “Eighteen. Sixteen.” Mother Mary Bellarmine waved this away. “She finished her college education and came up to Maryville. While she was here she was still Elizabeth Johns. That would have been twenty years ago. You do keep records for twenty years?”

  “Of course we do.”

  Mother Mary Bellarmine knew they did. She knew that St. Elizabeth’s kept records for longer than that. There were boxes in the basement of the college convent with paper going back to 1896. Every once in a while, the Order’s newsletter did a piece on it, as if anyone really cared what happened to a lot of silly college girls at the end of the nineteenth century. The Order’s newsletter was called Friends in Divine Grace. It drove Mother Mary Bellarmine to distraction.

  “Records,” Mother Mary Bellarmine repeated, refusing to let her mind be sidetracked by trivialities. “Academic records and social records. For Elizabeth Johns. Class of—I don’t know what she was the class of. You’ll have to run that through the computer.”

  “I don’t know if we have that on the computer,” Mrs. Hobart protested. “And even if we have it, I don’t know that we can give it to you—”

  “Of course you can give it to me. I’m Mother Superior of the entire Southwestern Province.”

  “Well, yes, Mother, but you see—”

  “And Elizabeth Johns is a Sister now, as I told you. Sister Joan Esther.”

  “Yes, Mother, I understand that, but—”

  “And I don’t really have a lot of time to waste. I’ve wasted far more of it than I should have already. I want those records and I want them immediately. I need to look over them when I go back to the convent.”

  “But Mother—”

  “You shouldn’t wear that particular shade of lavender,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “It makes you seem as if you’re trying to look young. You’re not young. You’re a middle-aged woman and you look it.”

  Mother Mary Bellarmine had made an art form of creating moments like this, moments when the sudden absoluteness of silence made it clear that people who had not been supposed to be listening had in fact been listening, moments when the psychic electricity went so high it was impossible to ignore the fact that a humiliation had just taken place in public. Mrs. Hobart’s neck went as red as frozen carrots and the redness began
to spread. It washed up over her chin and into her cheeks. Her eyes seemed to get twice as large and very wet Mother Mary Bellarmine actually thought she was going to cry.

  Mrs. Hobart did not cry. She put her hands together as if she were praying. She stood very, very still. A breeze came in through an open window somewhere and ruffled the jaunty little bow on her jaunty little lavender blouse. Mother Mary Bellarmine finally remembered what Mrs. Hobart reminded her of: the models in Seventeen magazine, circa 1964, who always came with everything matched.

  Mother Mary Bellarmine cleared her throat “Excuse me,” she said. “I came for some records.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hobart said.

  “I really have to have them right away. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Hobart said.

  “Can you get them for me now.”

  Mrs. Hobart turned around and looked at the other women in the room. The moment had passed. They were all bent over their work, concentrating too hard, to make up for their recent un-Christian curiosity about somebody else’s pain. Mrs. Hobart winced at the sight of them.

  “Debbie,” she said after a while. “Debbie Gross. She can get you what you need.”

  A very young woman stood up from a Workstation in the front row, looking frightened. Mrs. Hobart motioned her forward and she came.

  “Debbie Gross,” Mrs. Hobart said again. “This is Sister—”

  “Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said.

  “Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Mrs. Hobart repeated. “Yes. Well. I think I’ll go back to my desk. I do have the midterm reports to coordinate. Mother Mary Bellarmine. Give Mother the information she needs, Debbie.”

  “Of course,” Debbie said.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hobart said again.

  Mrs. Hobart drifted back to her desk. Mother Mary Bellarmine watched her go. Then she turned her attention to Debbie Gross, who had gone from looking frightened to looking terrified. Mother Mary Bellarmine took an inventory: skirt too short, hair too long, makeup too thick. Back in the days when Mother Mary Bellarmine was teaching parish school, she’d had a hundred girls just like Debbie Gross. She knew what to do with them.

  “Miss Gross,” she said. “I need the records on a woman named Elizabeth Johns, who was a student here about twenty years ago. She might be listed under Sister Joan Esther, since she later joined the Sisters of Divine Grace. I told all that to Mrs. Hobart. Did you hear me?”

  “I heard some of it,” Debbie said faintly.

  “Now you’ve heard all of it,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “Get me what I need, please. At that point we can discuss your views on artificial birth control.”

  “What?” Debbie Gross said.

  “Artificial birth control,” Mother Mary Bellarmine repeated.

  Debbie Gross stood up a little straighter and announced, “I am a Jew.”

  A moment later, Debbie was walking away between the rows of computer stations and Mother Mary Bellarmine was contemplating her second attack, which wasn’t obvious but which she knew would come to her soon. It always did. There had been only one woman in her entire life who had been immune from her methods, and that had been Joan Esther. Which was why she was looking for Joan Esther’s records now.

  Exactly what she would do with Joan Esther’s records once she had them, she didn’t know, but she was sure that would come to her, too.

  There were Sisters in the Order who had a talent for art and others who had a talent for music. Mother Mary Bellarmine had a talent for the clandestine.

  She tried to keep it oiled and well.

  8

  FOR NORMAN KEVIC, THE only thing on earth that needed to be kept oiled and well was himself, and he worked at that, assiduously, until he sometimes thought he didn’t do anything else. It was now quarter after ten on the morning of Monday, May 5, and he was exhausted. The show was over and so was his mind, as far as he could tell, drifting out to Venus somewhere and communing with space aliens. Norm had some cocaine in his pocket—usually he was careful not to bring that stuff into the studio; carrying cocaine was a felony in Pennsylvania and he was part-owner of this station; nobody who had been convicted of a felony could own any part at all of a broadcast station—but he had been so bombed out when he came in today he had forgotten all about it. Now he wondered if he ought to find out how much he had and use it, for medicinal purposes only, just to get himself moving in the direction of home. One of the nicer things about being the hottest talk show radio host in the Philadelphia ADI and part-owner of one of the most lucrative radio stations and the man most wanted for supermarket promotions and local people profiles was that he could afford a very nice place, a big house out in Radnor with a swimming pool and three tennis courts and a maid’s room that almost never had a maid in it, because Norm couldn’t keep help. Actually, Norm didn’t blame the help for leaving. His houseboys were offended by his ethnic jokes. Even Norm himself was sometimes offended by his ethnic jokes. His maids had all been intensely Catholic and afraid for their virginity in the onslaught of propositions he unleashed whenever he’d been snorting and drinking at the same time. Norm always wanted to tell them they had nothing to worry about—when he was all hyped up he couldn’t get stiff if his life depended on it—but it was too embarrassing to mention and he preferred the reputation he had for being a lecher and a prick and a devotee of sexual harassment. That was how he had approached the Thomas/Hill hearings on the show—as an opportunity to treat sexual harassment as an art form. It had been one of his better brainstorms. By the second day of the hearings, so many people had been trying to call the show to tell him off, the phone lines were jammed and nobody could get through at all. He’d ended up doing it stream-of-consciousness and getting his third warning from the FCC about “borderline language.”

  Actually, Norman Kevic lived a borderline life and he knew it. He was lying here on the couch in his office because he didn’t want to go home, and the exhaustion simply gave him a good excuse. His house was too big and too empty. Because he was who and what he was, he got a lot of sex. It had been years since he had a real relationship, with a woman who would talk to him and be there when he wanted company but didn’t want a party. Nice women never liked him for long, and he didn’t blame them any more than he blamed his maids. His mouth started running and he just couldn’t make it stop. His nerves got to tingling and his body revved up and his mind shifted into high gear and it was all over, nobody could talk to him, nobody to slow him down, he was out and about and on another rampage.

  Right now, he was in the middle of another collapse. As soon as the show was over, he had come in here and laid himself out. He wouldn’t be able to get up again for hours unless he made an effort at it, which he did not intend to do. He let his hand drop to the carpet and felt around on the floor for his buzzer. It was the kind of buzzer patients are given in hospitals so they can call a nurse. Norm pressed down on it three or four times and then let it drop.

  In no time at all, there were footsteps in the hallway outside, sharp little cracks that spoke of stiletto heels on engineered parquet. Norm considered opening his fly and decided against it. Stiletto heels meant Julia Stern, and Julia Stern had no use for him at all. For a while, Norm had taken to insisting on having his buzzer answered only by the women he wanted it answered by, but it hadn’t worked out in the long run. The women he wanted hadn’t wanted him and had had a tendency to quit when they were forced to deal with him on a regular basis. There were other things he wanted from his partners and the general manager that trading this sort of favor for was an easy way to get Julia Stern didn’t like him, but she was efficient, and he could use a little efficiency for a time.

  The stiletto heels stopped just outside the door. The doorknob turned and the door opened. Julia Stern was a woman in her twenties with too much hair piled too high on her head and too much flab around the middle. Norm wondered what it was like, being a woman this homely and knowing that you were homely. He wondered that about a lot
of women, and then sat back in astonishment as they each and every one of them got married and settled down to have a passel of kids. They always married just the sort of men Norm thought would be more interested in someone who looked like Melanie Griffith.

  Julia Stern was wearing a short black leather skirt cut halfway up her thigh and a long cotton sweater that reached nearly to the skirt’s hem. Norm wondered why it was that heavy young women were always so eager to show off their legs. Julia Stern was chewing gum.

  “You buzzed,” she said. “I presume that means you want something.”

  “Breakfast,” Norm said solemnly.

  “What kind of breakfast? Ham and eggs? Pancakes and syrup? Didn’t you have breakfast before?”

  Norm couldn’t remember if he’d had breakfast before or not. The idea of ham and eggs made him ill. The idea of pancakes and syrup made him feel he was suffocating in maple.

  “I want three large glasses of orange juice and a pot of coffee,” he said. “I think I’ve got the orange juice in the refrigerator downstairs. I’m dehydrated.”

  “Right,” Julia Stern said.

  “Go get him something to eat,” the voice of Steve Harald said, booming into the room from the hall. “I’ve got to talk to him and I want him sober.”

  Julia Stern made a face and turned away, muttering something under her breath that was probably subversive. Norm paid no attention. If he paid attention to every subversive thing every member of his staff ever said, he wouldn’t have any staff. Once the doorway was clear, it was filled with the form of Steve Harald, who was tall and thin and fashionable and the station manager. Norm was almost as curious about him as he was about homely women. When Norm was in high school, it was always people like Steve Harald who were the most important ones, the ones who got elected to things, the ones whose yearbook prophecies were solemn predictions of future success instead of jokey references to adolescent embarrassments. Norm’s yearbook prophecy had read “Most likely to be eating a Hostess Twinkie when the world ends.”