Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  “Did Norman Kevic know the Sister who died? Sister Joan Esther?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Sister Mary Celestine said. “Joan Esther lived in Alaska, and before that she lived in California, at the Provincial House. I don’t think she’s been out East since her formation.”

  “What about Mother Mary Bellarmine? Would Norman Kevic have known her?”

  “Well, they certainly would have met Norman has been very involved in our field house project, and Mother Mary Bellarmine was a consultant on that. That’s because she’s built similar things for our Order in other places. They must have been at meetings together off and on all last week.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to be involved in this case,” Bennis said.

  “Involved or not involved, I like my world to make sense,” Gregor told her.

  Bennis raised an eyebrow. Sister Mary Celestine was still standing patiently before them, her hands clasped next to her waist and her face expectant. Gregor tried to concentrate on her.

  “Well, Sister,” he said, “I’m glad you told me all this. I hope you understand that you also have to tell the police.”

  “I’ll tell the police,” Sister Mary Celestine said, “and when I do I’ll give him a piece of my mind.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Well. My point here is that this is very significant information, even if it comes to nothing, and you shouldn’t think you don’t have to say anything to Lieutenant Androcetti because you talked to me—”

  “I don’t think that,” Sister Mary Celestine said, “but I tried to talk to three different police officers and none of them would listen to me. I suppose they were the wrong police officers, but what was I to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Did you notice the young black officer giving orders in the reception room?”

  “Oh, of course. The smart one.”

  “Try him. His name is Collins. Sergeant Collins. You’ll still have to talk to Lieutenant Androcetti, but at least you’ll have given your story to one officer who will listen to you.”

  “Listen to me,” Bennis said suddenly. “Here comes the fuss you were talking about.”

  Gregor turned in the direction in which Bennis was pointing—toward the gate to the back garden, through the gate and into the lawn beyond—and saw a swirling mass of movement that looked like a black ocean in the middle of a storm. The black ocean resolved itself into nuns’ black veils and the storm into the white veil of a novice. Under the novice’s veil Gregor recognized Sister Mary Angelus.

  “Let me through,” she was shouting, “let me through! I’ve got to find Mr. Demarkian.”

  Gregor climbed up on the low stone wall where Bennis was still sitting. It made him more visible, although it also made him look ridiculous.

  “I’m over here,” he called out to Sister Angelus. “Come this way.”

  She must have heard him. She pushed two older nuns out of her way—Gregor could hear her “excuse me” ’s because they were loud in spite of being distracted—and barreled through the gate into the field. Once on open land, she stopped, looked around, and trained her sight on Gregor. Then she took off again at a full run. Her veil flapped in the breeze. Her calf-length black habit flapped up to expose her knees. Her long rosary slapped against her side. She got to Sister Mary Celestine out of breath and panting wildly.

  “Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian, you have to come quick. Reverend Mother General said to get you and tell you to come right away.”

  “But why?” Gregor asked. “What’s happened?”

  “What happened is that they’ve taken Sister Agnes Bernadette away in handcuffs.” Sister Angelus wheezed, still breathless. “And there are cameras out there from all three networks watching them do it.”

  Sister Agnes Bernadette.

  Cameras from all three networks.

  Gregor Demarkian groaned.

  How bad was all this going to get?

  Chapter 3

  1

  THERE WAS A BOTTLE of Johnnie Walker Black behind the copy of Anna Karenina on Henry Hare’s bedroom bookshelf, and when Nancy Hare decided she wanted to go to bed that evening, she went right to it. Nancy didn’t sleep in Henry’s bedroom, and hadn’t for years, but she still treated it as her own turf. She borrowed his shirts to sleep in and his bathrobes to lie around the house in and his ties to try out various things she read about in The Joy of Sex. She never tried out anything from The Joy of Sex on Henry, because Henry didn’t think sex was a joy. He thought it was more of a responsibility. He thought it was like working at the office or paying his taxes, something he didn’t like to do much but was much too honorable to try to get out of. Of course, Nancy didn’t like to do it much, either, but there was something about Henry not wanting to do it that she found insulting. It was as if she lacked something fundamental that would make him behave like a normal human being.

  Was it one of the ordinary duties of a wife, to make her husband behave like a normal human being?

  The Scotch was in an unopened bottle. The bottle was unopened because Henry’s valet checked it every morning and replaced it if a drink had been taken out of it. A drink was taken out of it once or twice a month, when Henry wanted to make himself feel like James Bond. Nancy took one of the clean crystal drinking glasses out of Henry’s private bathroom—Henry had to have clean crystal drinking glasses to fill with water to clean his mouth out after he brushed his teeth, he also had to have brand new, never before used socks to wear every morning, because he’d heard that J. Paul Getty never wore a pair of socks twice—and filled it to the brim. She drank half of it down and topped it up again. Then she took a cigarette out of the gold box on Henry’s bureau and lit up with a gold Dunhill lighter. It was crazy. This bedroom was like some fantasy out of Penthouse magazine, except not so gross. The bed was the size of California and up on a platform. There was a switch in the bedside table that could make the ceiling panels turn until the ceiling had become a mirror. There were pillows the size of outboard motors tossed randomly on furniture and carpet the way the loaves of manna had been tossed from the Heavens. It was all calculated to seduce someone, but Nancy didn’t know who. Henry certainly wasn’t interested in seducing her.

  She turned on the television and sat back to watch the eleven o’clock news. She didn’t expect to hear much more than what she had heard at six. It was all over town now, that a nun had died at St. Elizabeth’s. She’d even had phone calls about it. And Henry was furious. Henry was taking it personally. Henry thought it was all her fault, because she’d thrown those flowers on that nun.

  That nun.

  Nancy took a drag—they were English cigarettes, much too strong and much too harsh—and tapped her ash into the crystal ashtray in the shape of a fish that Henry kept on top of the TV set. Since he didn’t smoke, Nancy didn’t know who it was for, either. living around Henry was eerie. It was as if he weren’t himself at all, but an alien from outer space who had occupied the body of a much gentler, much more sophisticated man.

  “A nun accused of deliberately murdering one of her Sisters at a Main Line convent is out on bail,” the woman on the TV said. “News coming up at eleven, right after these messages.”

  The bedroom door opened and Henry stood in the doorway, his shirt off and his belt unbuckled, looking blank. That was eerie, too. If Nancy did something outrageous, Henry looked annoyed. If she didn’t—if she was nice, or neutral, or just not sufficiently obnoxious to get attention—Henry looked blank. Nancy had the odd feeling that she was never really there for him.

  She had put the bottle of Scotch on the night table. She picked it up, topped her drink off again, and went back to watching the news.

  “They let Sister Agnes Bernadette out,” she said, pointing at the set. It wasn’t necessary, but it was conversation. If she didn’t start one, he never would. “I wonder what happens now. Does she go back to the convent and act like nothing ever happened? Does she still cook?”


  “How do you know she cooks?”

  “She was cook at the convent when I was at St. Elizabeth’s,” Nancy said. “She’s been there forever. And if you want to know the truth, I don’t think she’d have had the heart to deliberately kill Hitler, never mind some nun everybody says she actually liked.”

  “I thought it was some nun nobody knew,” Henry said. “Some nun from Alaska. I thought the point was that this Sister Agnes had gone off her nut.”

  “Sister Agnes Bernadette.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t drink at this time of night. When you drink, you always make a scene.”

  Nancy’s cigarette was burned almost to the filter. That was something you really didn’t want to do with these cigarettes, because the closer they got to the butt the worse they tasted. They were supposed to be the most wonderful cigarettes in the world and they made her gag. She got up, got another one, and lit up again. She almost never smoked when Henry wasn’t around. She was addicted to nicotine only in his presence. It had something to do with the fact that when he saw her smoke he always worked around to lecturing her. She wished he would work around to something else, but he wouldn’t and she wasn’t going to ask for it. There was a time in this marriage when she had asked for it a lot and been turned down too often.

  “There,” she said as she got back to the bed, “there’s Sister Agnes Bernadette. She looks miserable.”

  “You’d look miserable, too, if you’d just been arrested for murder.” Henry had moved in from the doorway now and was standing next to his built-in wardrobe. He would leave his clothes over a chair and his valet would take them away in the morning. Someone would iron his underwear and someone would put creases in his trousers and someone else would make sure he found only the tie that went with the suit he was supposed to be wearing that morning.

  “I’m surprised they haven’t come here asking to talk to you,” Henry said, “with that stunt you pulled and then disappearing on me so I couldn’t find you for better than half an hour—”

  “I didn’t disappear on you. I just went to talk to someone.”

  “Well, you were missing and you were still at St. Teresa’s House, and we were supposed to be gone. You don’t know how that burns me. She shouldn’t have asked me to go. She should have gotten rid of you and left it at that.”

  “Why? Because you’re giving them umpteen jillion dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  “Some people don’t operate on a totally cash basis, Henry. Some people have other considerations.”

  “I don’t give a damn what she considers for herself,” Henry said, “I only care what she considers for me, and I shouldn’t have been tossed out of that reception like a gate-crasher. I’m not a gate-crasher. I’m the man who made it all possible.”

  “You didn’t have anything to do with the nuns’ convention.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I’ve donated six million dollars in goods and services to this project of theirs. That college wouldn’t survive without me.”

  “The college wouldn’t survive unless you built them a field house?”

  “You really shouldn’t talk about money, Nancy. You don’t understand the first thing about it. You’re not competent.”

  “I don’t see why anybody from the police should have wanted to talk to me,” Nancy said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever met this Sister Joan Esther. And nothing happened at all to the nun I threw the vase on.”

  “Except that she got wet. And green. And ripped.”

  “I know she got ripped, but I didn’t rip her.”

  “You must have ripped her,” Henry said. “You were the only one there. You were probably so far out of control, you didn’t know what you were doing.”

  “I am never that far out of control.”

  “You’re that far out of control all the time. It’s your life. It’s what you do instead of working for a living.”

  I couldn’t have ripped the scapular because I couldn’t have got to the scapular to rip it, Nancy thought, and it was true. The top of the scapular was concealed under the sweep of the long collar that covered the shoulder and part of the arms and all of the chest until the breast line. She couldn’t have gotten to the top of the scapular without ripping the collar off first—it ought really to be called a cape—or doing something so outrageous everybody would have remarked on it, like grabbing at Mother Mary Bellarmine in such a way that it would have looked like she was about to commit rape.

  Her cigarette was burned halfway down. That was enough. Nancy put it out and went to get another one. Across the room, Henry was standing in nothing but a pair of Christian Dior underwear, looking more like the tall, handsome boy she had married than he had in years.

  I used to be happy in this place, she thought. Then she lit the cigarette she was holding in her hand and turned away.

  It was all indicative, really it was.

  He had asked her for an explanation of what she had done to Mother Mary Bellarmine and she had given him an answer calculated to make no sense and he had not pursued it.

  He considered her such a flake that it wasn’t worth his time to unravel why she did what she did, when or to whom.

  He was so wrapped up in himself, he didn’t have time to puzzle out anyone else’s behavior or to consider it even for a moment in any light but the one that reflected on himself. To Henry, what Nancy had done to Mother Mary Bellarmine was to commit an act that got Henry Hare thrown out of a reception given by the Sisters of Divine Grace.

  It all went around and around and it never got any better, and Nancy was sure it wouldn’t get better if she told him she hadn’t had a reason at all for throwing those flowers on Mother Mary Bellarmine.

  “What are you staring at?” Henry demanded now.

  Nancy decided to let that one ride, too.

  If she started getting the hots for Henry Hare again, she was only going to come to grief.

  2

  IT WAS ELEVEN FIFTEEN on Mother’s Day night, and Sarabess Coltrane was worried. She was worried about where she was—which was on a dark street in downtown Philadelphia, alone, standing under a street lamp that seemed to have been dimmed down in front of a door that seemed to be lit by a spotlight—and about what she was about to do. She was afraid that when she went upstairs in this building somebody—a security guard or a secretary or somebody—would make her go away again. She was worried that when she saw Norman Kevic, he wouldn’t remember who she was. Most of all, however, she was worried about the conversation she had had with Sister Catherine Grace that afternoon, and with Norman Kevic too, when they were all working on the roses.

  Sister Joan Esther was lying dead, and it had all happened exactly the way Sarabess and Catherine Grace had imagined it would. Norman Kevic had to remember that. They had gone into it all in detail. So far he hadn’t told the police, but Sarabess was sure he was going to. He would have to. He was famous and he probably had a stake in being a good citizen. Once he told, Sarabess was sure she’d be in all sorts of trouble, and Catherine Grace, too, because that police lieutenant was a real loose cannon, as Sister Scholastica had been saying all afternoon. Actually, Sister Scholastica had been saying a few other—and stronger—things, but it embarrassed Sarabess to remember them. Nuns weren’t supposed to talk like that.

  If I don’t go in now, I’ll never go in at all, she thought.

  She forced herself away from the lamppost and into the puddle of shadow just beyond it—surely it was much too small a puddle to contain a murderer or a rapist or a mugger or anything else human—and went to the door. The door was made of glass and framed in brass with the WXVE lightning logo etched into the glass just above the brass handlebar. Sarabess pushed against the handlebar, holding her breath. The door could have been locked. She had been listening to Norman Kevic live all the way into the city from St. Elizabeth’s. She had been listening to him while she parked her car and while she walked down the street to this door. She had been listening to him through the ear
phone of her little Japanese radio right. Up until about ten minutes ago, when she had started to work up her courage to go inside. Norman Kevic had to be in this building, but that didn’t mean the building wasn’t locked.

  It wasn’t locked. Sarabess pushed her way into the foyer. She stopped at the little desk that blocked the way to the elevator and looked around. There was supposed to be a security guard or somebody. There was a clipboard on the desk with a signup sheet on it and people’s names and floors written in little squares in pencil. Sarabess looked around and saw no sign of a uniformed man or a gun-toting woman or anyone else. Whoever it is has probably gone to the bathroom, she thought. It wouldn’t be fair to just go on up. She went on up anyway. She went around the desk and to the elevators and jabbed at the buttons. The elevator doors opened immediately and she stepped inside.

  This was the point at which things might have gotten sticky. Sarabess had never been in the WXVE building before, but since it was such a large building she was sure it wouldn’t be just for WXVE. There would be other businesses with offices on these floors, architecture firms and certified public accountants, and she had absolutely no idea who was where. If there was a directory in the lobby, she hadn’t seen it. Even if she had seen it, she wouldn’t have taken the time to read it. If she had, the security guard might have come back, and then God only knew what would have happened. Now she pushed a button at random—“fourteen” because it was really “thirteen” and Sarabess liked to be counterphobic—and prayed for rain. If it wasn’t the right floor, it could at least be a neutral one. It could be one where the security guard wasn’t roaming around looking for trouble.

  The fourteenth was a floor belonging to Martin, Debraham, Carter, and Allenkoski, attorneys at law. The elevator opened onto a darkened foyer with a large oak desk in it. The desk had a rose pink felt blotter in the middle of it and a brass nameplate next to the phone that said, “Tiffany Moscowitz.” Sarabess pressed the button for twenty-two and held her breath.